"We want me to remind you that Russia has never attacked anyone throughout her history"

"We want to remind you that Russia has never attacked anyone throughout her history." 

So Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, said recently. 

In fact Russia attacked Turkey and Persia and partitioned Poland. (Admittedly, as the great Lord Salisbury pointed out, before Poland was partitioned in the 18th century Russia was partitioned by Poland and Sweden in the 17th.) 

More recently, Russia invaded the Baltic States, including Finland, and half of Poland in alliance with Hitler, Bessarabia (now Moldova) without Hitler's agreement and later Hungary and Czechoslovakia. 

She conquered them all except for plucky little Finland. 

Russia occupied Afghanistan at the invitation of a government it replaced the same day, so a school friend told me at the time. In fact, Russia was not invited and shot the Communist head of state within a day or two of the invasion.

Interestingly, Andropov, Gromyko and Ustinov, supposedly the cleverest men in the Politburo, persuaded the senile, indecisive Brezhnev to make this mistake.

On the other hand, Russia has been attacked by foes from Charles XII to Napoleon, Hitler and (in Vladimir Putin's view) George W Bush. 

The Russian spy turned historian 'Suvarov' argued that Stalin would have attacked Hitler had the latter not got his retaliation in first. 

Two recent books by historians also argue that Stalin intended to attack Germany.