On February 10, 2007, at the Security Conference held annually in Munich, Vladimir Putin declared before Angela Merkel, Javier Solana and other heads of state and directors of international organizations, that he sought to recover the territory lost after the end of the Cold War. In addition, he introduced a dream in his parliament: from Vladivostok to Lisbon, Russia should share more than just security with Europe. Later, political scientists and Kremlinologists interpreted his words as a wish that one day the Russian empire would extend from Vladivostok to Lisbon. Throughout his presidential career, Putin has been taking steps towards fulfilling that dream: he invaded several countries and provoked wars in Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea (Ukraine) and Syria, topping it all off with the current invasion of Ukraine.
And it is that “Putin does what he says; if he declares that he has nuclear weapons, he will use them, to a greater or lesser extent, ”says Fiona Hill, one of the biographers of the Russian president. In addition, the Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev, who, like Hill, knew Putin personally, describes him as a cunning and intelligent cynic who, in the isolation of covid, lost his sense of reality and is becoming more and more fanatical. : “His speech about a Russia victim of the betrayal of the Ukrainian Nazis is so exaggerated that it is counterproductive and nobody in the West is capable of believing it. In his speech there are no Ukrainians: only Russians and anti-Russians ”.
In the Putinian narrative, as in the Italian opera, the keywords are “betrayal” and “deception.” According to its president, Russia was deceived and betrayed by the West and by the former Soviet republics, several of them now independent and some integrated into the European Union and NATO. Ukraine, according to him, is Russia’s great traitor because she is getting closer to the West, the archenemy. Putin is a man trained in the secret services where betrayal was paid for with death. Therefore, in his vision, Ukraine must pay for its crime with a well-deserved punishment. Exterminating the Ukrainians is part of his strategy.
Other code words with which Putin and his circle often crown those they consider their enemies are “Nazi” and “neo-Nazi”. In addition to Ukraine, Japan is neo-Nazi (because it does not consider the Azov Battalion, that mainstay of the Ukrainian Army, as a terrorist organization); the president of the German CDU, Friedrich Merz, is a Nazi (because he considers the crimes committed by the Russian Army in Syria as barbaric); the organization OCCRP it was compared to the Nuremberg laws of Nazi Germany (which allowed the expropriation of Jewish property) because it investigates and denounces the corruption of Putin and his people; Sweden “behaves like the Nazis” (by imposing a blockade on Russian ships); Latvia is neo-Nazi for commemorating the Ukrainian victims of Russian aggression; Estonia, which removed a Soviet monument from the center of Tallinn, “expresses Nazi ideology”; and, always according to the same source, Maria Zajárova, the spokeswoman for the Russian Foreign Ministry, the Ukrainian soccer team, exclaiming “Glory to Ukraine!” echoes the Nazi war cry.
Putin, since he came to power, repeats over and over again that the fact that the Soviet Union has collapsed does not mean that World War II is over. For him, the Cold War was the continuation of that conflict and its end represented a pause, but not its end. For Putin, the war he is waging against Ukraine is nothing more than a resumption of the open hostilities of World War II. According to this vision, he now tries to legitimize it by affirming that Russia could not do anything but defend itself from the Nazis as he did in the 40s of the last century. In his mind, the Ukrainians have taken over from Hitler’s army that the Russians defeated at Stalingrad during World War II and thus helped defeat Germany. 27 million people died in the conflict, of which 8 million were Ukrainians, but Putin does not take these into account. Perhaps he imagined that, in 2022, the Ukrainians would welcome Russian soldiers in their tanks, as did the peoples of Eastern Europe, liberated by Russia from the rule of Hitler’s Army, and he, the president, would reunite Russia with the Ukraine, just like Stalin, united several satellites of Central and Eastern Europe to his empire, just like Germany was reunited while he was in Dresden as a spy. And when the presidential elections arrive in 2024, with the incorporation of Ukraine, after two decades as president, Putin would demonstrate that he deserves to maintain the presidency for the 16 more years allowed by the Russian Constitution.
And while Russia sows destruction in Ukraine while putting its own population in check, the dream is not forgotten. A few days ago, former Russian President Dmitri Medvedev cried out again on his Telegram account, in unison with Putin: “Russia will extend from Vladivostok to Lisbon!”
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