Putin and the wills of “Peter the Great” .. Do they represent indirect messages to Finland and Sweden?

Putin visited an exhibition dedicated to the 350th anniversary of the birth of Peter the Great (Peter the Great), and spoke about the 21-year northern wars he fought in Sweden and Finland, adding: “Yes, there are periods in our country’s history when we had to retreat, but only to regain our strength and move forward, and it seems That we have to take back and consolidate,” referring to the military operation against Ukraine.

Sweden’s defeat in the Great Northern War (1700-1721) made Russia a major power in the Baltic Sea and an important player on the European stage.

Peter the Great is considered to be the greatest ruler of Russia. He was born in the Kremlin in 1672 and ruled Russia at the age of nine from 1682, succeeding Tsar Feder III until his death in 1725. He ruled first as a tsar, and then as emperor. He founded St. Petersburg in 1703 and made it the capital of the country. He built a strong army and established a navy.

In 1700, Peter the Great launched the “Northern War” against Sweden, Finland, Estonia and Latvia, in which he won, and achieved great expansionist gains, turning Tsarist Russia into an empire. He is described as “the maker of modern Russia’s renaissance”, known for his openness to European thought and civilization.

Peter the Great’s commandments

On Putin’s statements, Russian political analyst MacLeod Shulman said that the Russian president has always expressed his admiration for the personality of Peter the Great, and describes Putin’s era as a contemporary Russian embodiment of the personality of Peter the Great.

Shulman added, to “Sky News Arabia”, that Putin, since taking power, seems to have believed in Peter the Great’s commandments and is trying to implement them, including “the necessity and permanence of the army’s readiness and for the Russian nation to be on standby.” Only 4 years of his rule was the Chechen war in 2004, the last of which was Ukraine, in addition to unofficial military activities outside the country.

He explained that Putin highly appreciates the role that Tsar Peter the Great played in Russia’s history. After Sweden’s defeat in the Great Northern War, Peter the Great made Russia a leading regional power and an important player on the European arena, a higher goal that Putin seeks and always repeats in his speeches.

He continued, “The Great Northern War between the Russian and Swedish empires raged for nearly two decades, and the Tsar succeeded in challenging Sweden’s hegemony in northern, central and eastern Europe through his alliance with Denmark, Norway and Lithuania.”

He pointed out that among the commandments of Peter the Great, “the necessity of Russian involvement in the affairs of the European continent, especially Sweden and Poland, and Russian control of the Baltic and the Black Sea, because they are within Russia’s geopolitical sphere, which explains Moscow’s warnings to Sweden and Finland against joining NATO.”

fence around finland

Amid fears of Russia’s warnings, Finland intends to build a new fence on parts of its border with Russia following the Russian operation in Ukraine, and Helsinki, on Thursday, proposed an amendment project aimed at strengthening the fence in some locations of the border with Russia, which extends for about 1,300 km, fearing that Moscow uses immigrants to exert political pressure on the neighboring country.

“The aim of the bill is to improve the ability of border guards to act in response to hybrid threats,” said Anne Ihanos, advisor to the Ministry of the Interior, stressing that “the war in Ukraine contributed to raising this issue urgently.”

Finland currently secures its borders with low wooden barriers designed to prevent livestock from crossing, while the director of legal issues at the Border Guard Service, Sanna Balu, said: “We are now seeking to build a solid fence that will serve as a real barrier. Of course, the fence will not cover the entire eastern border, but it will include sites that considered the most important.”