It is an entirely different experience when you send soldiers far away and the worst thing that can happen is that they won't return, or when you live in a constant danger of some troops visiting your village for some looting, rape and arson. The second is probably so much more stressful that instead of war it would be more expressive to have two different nouns for this.

If we attempt to take your theory as making serious predictions, you've completely failed to explain why Germany or Poland want to operate as democratic societies but Russia doesn't care. All three of these countries have repeated invasion as their original historical experience prior to the formation of the nation-state -- especially Poland, which has been the regular victim of both of its neighbors' imperial ambitions.

And yet the Poles have a politics beyond "Fight Russia".

Russian xenophobia isn't really an argument that Russia faces fundamentally different historical-material circumstances from, say, the countries Russia regularly invades and colonizes. It's just evidence that Russians have been fed quite a lot of propaganda designed to make them fear the outside world.

They're not dealing with new and original existential challenges. They just got unlucky in which form of politics took root there. The neoliberal "shock therapy" after the fall of the Soviet Union certainly didn't help.