I'm also an American in Europe who speaks four languages fluently, including Russian and Esperanto. Great that you quoted Stephen Kotkin. I'll just add a few points, as succinctly as I can. Russia shares a few traits with Europe (language, religion, geographic connection), but it suffers from more differences. The rays of The Enlightenment hadn't reached Russia before the Bolsheviks hijacked the country, killed or exiled the people who were making its culture great, and established a cancerous police state. It was then doomed by the 'resource curse'. Manufacturing requires a stable, peaceful environment for investment; resource extraction can be like a drugs black market: the wealth is seized by the most violent and ruthless. Even before the Ukraine invasion, Russia's non-energy economy was minimal, though it manufactured and exported a lot of weapons. Say good by to that, and to 1M of the most productive people, who fled the country in the past year. Even before the Ukraine invasion, Russia was in demographic decline, with the world's highest gap in male-female life expectancy. Now...

Europe's other former empires reformed long ago, but Europe's last empire doesn't have reform even on the horizon. The liberal opposition is small, unpopular, and ineffectual, and its members often die untimely deaths or find themselves in prison. Russia will remain a mafia-run petro-state for the foreseeable future, very far from qualifying for EU membership.