In the more than 20 years that he has been in power, President Vladimir Putin has been involved in numerous wars: against Georgia, against Ukraine and in Syria to support a dictator. He has sent soldiers and mercenaries to Belarus, where another despot rules, to Libya, several African countries, Nagorno Karabakh and Tajikistan. Now the new field of operations with massive mobilization of troops is Kazakhstan, also in aid of a tyranny.
But its “aid” to dictatorial regimes or the hostility and belligerence towards democracies considered still imperfect such as the Georgian or the Ukrainian are not something disinterested. Analysts observe behind all this an irrepressible desire to rebuild the old Russian empire or to create at least an entity similar to what was the former Soviet Union.
And Putin does not hide such an intention. He first said that “the disintegration of the USSR was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century” and more recently he called it a “tragedy.” Also observing his expansionist gestures, many have perceived his words as a sign that there is a plan in the Kremlin aimed at expanding the territory, the borders, the sovereignty. Obviously, at the cost of foreign sovereignty.
The Russian president often repeats that, before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 made possible the emergence of the Soviet republics, which became 15 states after the disintegration of the USSR, there was the Russian Empire of the Tsars, which brought together practically all of them. those territories. He also often recalls that almost none of the current UN-recognized countries ever had a state and underlines it in relation to Ukraine, Georgia, Belarus, Azerbaijan, Moldova and some of the Central Asian republics.
Last month, during his great annual press conference, Putin stressed once again that Ukraine “had never been a state” and added that, because of Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik leader, Kiev was incorporated “territories that historically had been of Russia and did it without asking anybody, without consulting with its inhabitants ». As for Kazakhstan, Russian nationalism thinks exactly the same in relation to the northern regions, what it calls “Southern Siberia.”
Yeltsin, the first
However, the road to reunification of the “Russian territories that remained outside Russia” was not started by Putin, but by his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. It happened in Moldova and Georgia, supporting the separatists of Transnistria, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which caused wars in the three enclaves with the participation of the Russian Army.
But the current head of the Kremlin stepped up the process and went even further. It had to be released by putting itself in command of the second war in Chechnya, in 1999 and, after the experience gained, decided that it would return to use the Army in the face of any threat to the country’s security. He did not like at all, and never concealed it, that Mikhail Saakashvili, a pro-Western educated in the United States, was in command in Georgia, nor that the pro-European Victor Yushenko became president of Ukraine after a first revolt in the Maidan. There was no pretext for military intervention at the time.
It was provided by Saakashvili in August 2008, when the President of Russia was Dmitry Medvedev. The levers of power, however, remained in the hands of Putin, who held the post of prime minister. The Georgian president tried to recapture South Ossetia by force, rocket bombed Tskhinvali, its capital, and the Russian “peacekeepers” were attacked, however, unable or unwilling to avoid the constant armed provocations of the Ossetians.
Russia reacted swiftly, sending its troops against the Georgian Army, which it defeated without difficulty, deployed forces in Abkhazia and directed its military device towards Tbilisi, the Georgian capital. A sudden trip to Moscow by then French President Nicolas Sarkozy prevented Russia from moving forward to, Putin acknowledged, “capture Saakashvili and hang him by the balls.”
This is what Putin told Sarkozy to his face. As a consequence, Russia recognized the independence of South Ossetia and Abkhazia, where it deployed military bases, and turned them de facto into protectorates. The temporary approach to Moscow of the authorities that succeeded Saakashvili has not served to recover the lost provinces.
Another violated sovereignty was the Ukrainian. After the triumph of the second Maidan revolt, in February 2014, the escape of the president, Victor Yanukovych – despite the fact that an agreement was reached with the mediation of Germany, France and Poland – and his dismissal by the Verkhovna Rada (Parliament ), Moscow decided that there had been a “coup” and also “bloody”, due to the deaths in Kiev during the protests.
The other “partisans”
So, instigating the unrest of the local Crimean population, supposedly fearful that the “Nazis and fascists” of Kiev would arrive en masse to slaughter them, Moscow sent soldiers to the peninsula devoid of their identification badges. It was said that they were “partisans” raised from the “people” to defend themselves against the excesses of the new government that emerged in Ukraine.
The truth is that this contingent took the situation under control, replaced the Crimean authorities and organized a referendum for the independence and integration of Russia.This was the mechanism for the annexation of an area that is now fully militarized and from where threats are made to Ukraine.
It was then decided, in April 2014, to sever Donbass from the rest of Ukraine in much the same way. In Putin’s words, there the “miners and tractor drivers” rose up and took up arms against Kiev, who were nothing but Russian military and mercenaries with a small part of local inhabitants, many of them adequately trained criminals. Donetsk and Lugansk remain in the hands of pro-Russian units today, but the Kremlin does not, for the moment, recognize them as independent.
Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko meeting with Vladimir Putin. /
Moscow has acted differently in relation to Azerbaijan, Belarus, Tajikistan and Kazakhstan. For different reasons, these four countries asked Russia to send troops. After the war that Azerbaijan fought in the fall of 2020 to recover Nagorno-Karabakh, the Russian president promoted a peace agreement with Armenia that contemplated the deployment of Russian “peacekeeping troops” in a sector of the enclave inhabited by Armenians, including the capital. , Stepanakert. It seems unlikely that Baku will ever reclaim that strip of land.
NATO’s excuse
Belarus, however, has gladly surrendered its sovereignty in exchange for Moscow propping up its rickety regime. The contingent of Russian troops there was increased last November at the request of Minsk to face an alleged threat from NATO in the midst of the migration crisis caused by Alexander Lukashenko, head of the dictatorship. In the opinion of the political scientist Konstantín Sonin, Lukashenko “has sacrificed the sovereignty of his country and fell into the hands of Russia in order to preserve the position.”
Tajikistan also gave up its sovereignty with the calculation that Russia will take the chestnuts out of the fire, ensuring with its soldiers the defense of the border with a country as conflictive as Afghanistan, now in the hands of the Taliban. The Kremlin, however, shows the pistol loaded from Tajikistan with one hand, but the other hands it to the Taliban.
The case of Kazakhstan, according to Sonin, is “paradigmatic” in what he calls “surrender of sovereignty” after “so many years trying to build an independent nation.” The US Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, believes that the Kazakhs will find it difficult to achieve the withdrawal of the Russians. In his opinion, “a lesson from recent history is that once the Russians are in your house, it is sometimes very difficult to get them to leave.”
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