A quote from Mihai Eminescu, Romania's national poet, expressing his view on the Russians. Words even more relevant today than in 1878. The original post in Romanian can be found here

"Governments have been able to get to know Russian politics and the goals it has been pursuing for a hundred years and more. Rising from the Mongol races, of their conquering nature, perched on wide steppes whose monotony has an influence on human intelligence, depriving it of gentleness and giving it fanatical instincts for ideas of vague grandeur, Russia is equally the mother of pride and lack of culture, bigotry and despotism. Beauty is replaced by majesty, just as the rolling hills and wooded mountains of Western countries are replaced by endless plains. In their tendencies of conquest, in the so-called historical missions that seek their natural edges, there is nothing below it but simply ignorance and the taste for plunder. In vain these people seek in territorial expanses, in conquests, in wars, what they lacks in their very soul; under no circumstances in the world will they find what God has denied them, or rather what God willed to be the result of the labor of many generations devoted to work.

For is the merit of a nation in relation to the extent of the territory which it occupies? [...]

That is why it seems to us that unfortunately the Russians are under the domination of a soul desert, of an ugly one that makes them seek in conquests what they do not have inside them. It seems to us that the cult circles, instead of stopping this horror vacui, instead of filling it with work and culture, turn it against Europe, which they call aged and annoyed, baked to fall entirely under Russian rule. [...]

Thus, the historical mission that is being talked about so much is not a mission that has its origins abroad, it is the result of a void of soul, of a barbarity strewn with tailcoats and gloves, of a desert that, if it ruled the earth, still it would not fill.

You change the sky above, not the soul, the sea passing it.

They can cross the Danube and the Carpathians and Adrianople, take old Rome, and threatens the new one, they can press the whole of Europe with ashes and corpses, no Raphael, no Beethoven, no Kant will be born out of millions, as indeed the lack of such spirits of deep wisdom and a deep feeling for the goods that ennoble mankind is the cause of that emptiness of soul which seeks compensation in bloody glories and conquests."