People have this weird tendency to equate “Europe” with Western Europe (or more accurately: EU + Switzerland + Norway (+ UK sometimes, since Brexit it depends))
It's not that weird that people shift the borders given that Europe is not a real continent but rather constructed around ideas of "Western civilization". Is using it EU + close allies model really worse than drawing a border at the point where there starts to be too much non-Christian influence to bare?
"Europe" is a name of Phoenician origin, much older than Christianity. It was already old when Classical Greece was young.
A lot of the modern confusion stems from the tendency of EU to refer to itself as "Europe" (see: European Council, European Central Bank, European Parliament etc.)
That might be the case in the 1980s, but later I believe another mindset prevailed: an ambition of the EU to actually expand to include entire Europe, or at least the non-Russian part thereof.
With Brexit, the complicated security situation east of Poland and the fact that the Swiss, the Norwegians and the Icelanders seem to be OK with staying outside, this ambition is no longer realistic to fulfill short- to mid-term, but it survives nonetheless.
Realistically, though, Russia would have to change a lot internally before joining the EU.
I am slightly more optimistic about Turkish membership, if Erdogan bites the dust and someone more Western-like (Imamoglu?) comes to power and rewrites the constitution again. Turkish industry is very much integrated into European supply chains.
"Europe from Lisbon to Vladivostok" is a much older ideal, IIRC it has roots as far as in early 90s. And if you stretch it enough you can even trace it back to Charles de Gaulle. But for it to happen not only Russia has to significantly improve internally, but also EU itself has to be different. For starters it would have to be truly independent from the US influence and Brussel's grip on the union would have to be weaker. Russian political culture historically is very firm on being able to independently decide its own fate (and no, it's not a matter of "democratization"). Take the current EU issues with the Poles and multiply it a hundredfold to get a rough approximation of what the current EU would have with Russia.
Before 2007 (see the Munich speech) Russia sincerely tried to join the EU and the collective West. But the condition "proposed" at the time and attitude towards Russia fundamentally collided with that deep culture, resulting in the situation which we see today. If you want to learn more about it from a non-Western perspective, I recommend watching https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X7Ng75e5gQ
Given the prominent role that Russia played in European history since the 17th century I find it really annoying to rule it out of Europe just because it wasn't in the American side of the cold war.
Russia is definitely part of the Western civilization by any means if you don't limit this definition to what happened during the second half of the twentieth century… What on earth would make Russia less part of “Western civilization” than Slovakia or Greece?!
I think Russia is commonly excluded from "Europe" simply because only a small part of it is in Europe and the rest is not. Bundling it in would've caused Europe overlap with Asia and that's just confusing.
The majority of the Russian population lives in Europe. It's a bit like saying that Denmark isn't really in Europe because most of its land area are actually Greenland. Yet nobody does that!
And the OP was not only excluding Russia from Europe in their post, but also Belarus which is unambiguously in Europe. It's a former part of the eastern block which is still under Moscow's influence so in must not be “Europe” because this word has been preempted by the American block.
In any history class about the history of Europe, you would have a hard time not talking about Russia…
Excluding Russia from Europe is a really recent trend actually, it appeared even after the fall of the iron curtain, during the late 90 s, early 2000s as an attempt to marginalize Russia.
Are you going to kick France out of Europe then? Because we've invaded our neighbors way more than Russians ever did. Heck, without the Russians Napoleon would probably have invaded England, achieving complete French domination over the continent!
