I don't know how people buy such uninformed BS. First, a lot of ex-USSR states are already NATO members. So, no game.
Further, USSR was a political construct. Their whole expansionism was based on that. Russia on the other hand is a nation state. They are not capable of annexing any region where there is no Russian-speaking + Russia-aligned population. Putin knows that very well.
As put by people who probably know better [1]:
One obvious difference between the Soviet Union and Russia is that the Soviet governing elite embraced Marxism-Leninism and its objective of world revolution. Today's Russia is not a messianic power.
[1] https://nationalinterest.org/feature/russia-not-soviet-union...