This article has a huge blind spot, one that seems very common among the foreign policy / international relations academic-media crowd - namely, there's zero discussion of the economic conflict and the failure of the 'economic integration program' that the US and Britain were pushing in Russia in the 1990s and which broke down around 2003. (Some authors have discussed the economic relationship between business and government in the context of international relations more broadly, see William Manchester's "Arms of Krupp" (1968), Daniel Yergin's "The Prize" (1990) and Steve Coll's "Private Empire" (2012)).

This economic-centric timeline looks a lot different from that in the article:

2003 Putin rejects the ExxonMobil bid for >50% ownership take in Yukos, and imprisons the Russian oligarch Khodorkovsky who was most closely affiliated with the deal. This really seems like the beginning of a major split:

https://carnegieendowment.org/2005/07/12/what-does-yukos-aff...

2008 The Russia-Georgia conflict takes off, in a kind of preview of the current Russia-Ukraine conflict, at least partially related to a pipeline dispute but also a demonstration of the continuing major rift between the US and Russia:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/aug/11/georgia.russia...

2010 The roots of the conflict in Syria seems to come from around this date, with the US trying to get Assad to cut ties with Iran and Russia and agree to gas pipelines for transporting Qatar/Saudi gas towards Europe:

https://www.news.com.au/world/middle-east/is-the-fight-over-...

This leads onto the setup for the Ukraine war, linked to the fracking boom in the USA, which has the potential to replace Russian gas in Europe (above source):

> "Last year US President Barack Obama spoke openly about the need for Europe to reduce its reliance on Russian gas following the conflict in Ukraine. The US also wants to use its own natural gas supply, recently developed through fracking, to undercut Russian supply. But it will be years before the US will be in a position to ship this overseas."

This sets the stage for the 2014 'governmental transition' in Ukraine, the split of Crimea to Russia, and the armed conflict in eastern Ukraine's Donbas region, which eventually escalates into today's war.

This economic perspective is perhaps unpopular because it does look a bit like two organized drug cartels fighting over who gets to profit from selling cocaine (natural gas) to Europe, and is pretty banal (no good guys to cheer on). However, it's a very plausible argument and the destruction of the Nordstream pipeline (probably US-orchestrated) and the implementation of (attempted) global sanctions on Russian gas exports all fit this narrative rather well.

The other part of the economic argument is that wars are profitable for the global military-industrial sector, which is closely linked to governments in both Russia and the USA, and any prolonged period of peace drastically reduces demand for their products. Again, this is not a good look for governments who claim to be defending human rights and democracy and looking out for the interests of their people.

TLDR: it's all about money, guns and oil, and it always has been, from the early 20th century onwards.