Slightly off course. As an Infantry soldier in BAOR in the late '80's, in an Air Mobile Battalion, we had our exercises in late autumn (after the German farmers had harvested their sugar beet) these exercises were NOT held near the Dutch, Danish, French, Czech etc borders they were held pretty close to the then East German Border, ie where the West considered the threat to be: 3 Shock Army punching its way through the Inner German Border South of the Hartz Mountains through one of the Belgian armies and trying to cut off 1 BAOR Corps and head for the Channel Ports.
I'd suggest that Putin has few borders where he considers there to be a threat and possibly the only one being Ukraine? If Russia needs to do military exercises it would seem sensible to hold them pretty near to where they consider the threat.
For my sins I did a couple of Soviet Army Study courses, one thing which comes to mind was a photo of the world as seen by the West, ie UK in the centre of the map with NATO and Warsaw Pact countries highlighted. Then we were shown another map from above the North Pole with the NATO countries highlighted, certainly from a USSR they seemed to be surrounded. With many more ex Warsaw Pact countries having joined NATO, I'd suggest that Russia now feels even more surrounded.
In the days of the USSR it would have been easy to convince the population that NATO was hell bent on destroying the Soviet Union eg: the population couldn't travel abroad, no internet, social media etc. Now that people can travel (I've seen thousands of Russians in Goa) those same people probably view us in a different way, therefore Putin has to use other ways to convince his people of the NATO threat, closing down newspapers, banning political parties etc.
Russia asked to join NATO in 1954, perhaps we should have accepted them!
