Ukraine is just one more front of the historical mission that Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin has imposed on himself. The most painful battle, the one that is reaping numerous human lives, but not the only one that he has in mind. When the Russian president ordered the invasion on the fateful February 24, he warned that his goal was to protect what is known as the Russki Mir (the Russian World), an ambiguous concept that goes beyond the borders of the Russian Federation and will mean an eternal beautiful case in the space that goes from Belarus to Central Asia, from the Baltic countries to the South Caucasus.
“They have not stopped until recently the attempts to use us in their own interest; of destroying our traditional values and imposing their pseudo-values on us. These could corrode our people from the inside. Attitudes that they are already aggressively implanting in their countries and that lead to degradation and degeneration because they contradict the very nature of man,” Putin said in his address to the nation as the first bombs began to fall on sister Ukraine, a bit of what was formerly known as “The sixth part of the Earth”, that is, the Russian empire in its maximum splendor.
Most people did not expect a war. It was said that it would be very bad for Russia and the president has always been a calculating person. “But Putin’s vision of the current political situation is not based on realism and dry rationalism,” explains Intigam Mamedov, deputy dean of the Faculty of Political Science at Lomonosov Moscow State University.
“These actions are the implementation by VV Putin of his personal historical mission. Putin’s personal goal is to unite the peoples of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus to counter the threat of the disappearance of the Russian language and culture,” Mamedov said in an exchange of emails. “Putin feels that Russia’s historical mission is to become a major actor in the global resistance against an unjust international order; a subject capable of counteracting the dictates of American neoliberalism and globalization,” he adds.
The Kremlin has a Hegelian view of history. Its 2020 constitutional reform included an article ensuring that the Russian Federation, “united by a thousand-year-old history, and preserving the memory of its ancestors, who passed on ideals and belief in God to us, and in continuity with the development of the Russian state, recognizes the unity of the state that was established historically”. In addition, the new Constitution emphasizes that the family is made up exclusively of a man and a woman, unlike the Western “degeneration” and its liberal currents. When the Maidan protests began over then-President Viktor Yanukovych’s refusal to sign his trade agreement with the European Union, one of the arguments put forward against this pact was that homosexuals would one day rule Kiev.
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In the summer of 2021, Putin, a lover of history but not a professional historian, published an essay “on the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, in which he stated that they are “one people, one whole”, and accused the West of “seeking to undermine our unity, the well-known ‘divide and rule’ formula.” Although the president recognized that there were “many centuries of fragmentation and different states,” he accused Poland and other countries of trying to foment nationalism, and the Soviets of “experimenting with borders.”
According to Putin’s thesis, “the borders were not perceived as state during the USSR, but suddenly, in 1991, the people who lived there found themselves abroad.” The president defends, therefore, that the Russian World should recover the territories prior to the 1922 treaty that gave rise to the Soviet Union. “In other words, go with what you came with,” was his message to the former republics.
The rearmament against Ukraine did not start in November last year, that was the second act. The first major deployment took place in the spring, when some experts believe that Putin threw in the towel with the government of Volodymyr Zelensky when he saw that he closed the pro-Russian channels of the opposition politician Viktor Medvedchuk, whose daughter the Kremlin chief is godfather to, and tried to judge him for financing the separatists, militarily supported by Russia since the war began in 2014. Another great offense was the new laws such as forcing the media in Russian, which is no longer official, to have a circulation in Ukrainian.
On February 9, in the negotiations prior to the war, Putin met with Emmanuel Macron in Moscow, and according to several Reuters sources, the Russian leader “gave him five hours of historical revisionism.” “Her passion for him influences his view of modern international relations, his view of the justice of the current world order and the balance of power,” says Intigam. “It is difficult for a person so familiar with history not to extrapolate the past to analyze the present or predict the future,” adds the expert.
Putin’s fronts
“Putin’s goal is not to revive the Soviet project, the current goals are rather limited to Russia’s relations with Ukraine and the West,” says Intigam. His opinion is shared by Dmitri Trenin, director of the Carnegie Moscow Center. The analyst, a former Russian intelligence colonel, underlines in a recent essay that he “has no basis” to think that Russia seeks to restore the USSR. “In fact, what it wants is to establish itself as the main power along its new borders,” he adds.
“Security is their main concern, but not the only one. Kiev’s western orientation means that part of the historical core of the Russian state would be lost forever. Not everyone in Moscow can accept it,” Trenin warned.
Ukraine is just one piece of the puzzle. Belarus is another, and there Aleksandr Lukashenko’s regime will hold a constitutional referendum this Sunday that will bring its integration into Russia even closer. After the Kremlin rescued him from the 2020 electoral fraud protests, both leaders have secretly negotiated the protocols of the State of the Union, a supranational entity signed in 1999 to promote their unity. Unlike Ukraine, its de facto accession is carried out without resorting to tanks, only to the police, and could allow the deployment of nuclear weapons in that territory.
Two other regions that Putin considers his sphere of influence are the South Caucasus and Central Asia. “Russia managed to limit the damage in Nagorno-Karabakh in 2020,” Trenin says of the conflict where “old and new rival” Turkey gained more influence through its ally Azerbaijan.
The conflict with Ankara also moves to Central Asia, where the Kremlin has accused its authorities of giving in to Recep Tayyip Erdogan and promoting pan-Turkism in discrimination against the Russian-speaking population. To avoid losing his presence in the region, last January Putin mobilized the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) for the first time in order to save the Kasim-Yomart Tokáyev regime.
“He has used force to stop NATO in Ukraine; has used political and economic means to promote Belarusian integration; it has exercised diplomacy in the South Caucasus and has organized a multilateral mission to stabilize Kazakhstan. Moscow has by far managed to protect its security and interests with relatively few means”, summarized Tremin, although “the task of being a great power, not an empire, will take a great effort for a long time”.
From think tanks closer to the Kremlin, the opinion is that the US and Europe have tried to enter where they should not. “By their actions, the West pushed Russia to do what it does best: fight. And this is just the beginning,” Aleksandr Borisov, a professor at the International Institute of Foreign Relations in Moscow, assures this newspaper.
“Extending sanctions on the president is already complete madness and burning all the bridges for dialogue,” says Borisov, who believes that the sanctions have paved the way here: “It is the Japanese variant, the attack on Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941 in response to US sanctions. Many Russians began to consider sanctions as an act of war, without UN approval, and therefore could legitimately respond with a declaration of war.
According to the analyst, “it is strange that the West did not take this into account.” “If Russia is cornered, she will do anything, and that may mean the end of the world if the Poseidons [drones submarinos nucleares] reach the shores of the United States. As one of our poets said, Russia cannot be understood with the mind”, warns Borisov.
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