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Restoration of empire is the endgame for Putin
Putin’s phrases converse for themselves: What he’s aiming for in Ukraine is the restoration of Russia as an imperial energy.
Many observers shortly picked up on one among Putin’s extra provocative strains, wherein he in contrast himself to Peter the Nice, Russia’s modernizing tsar and the founding father of St. Petersburg — Putin’s personal birthplace — who got here to energy within the late seventeenth century.
“Peter the Nice waged the Nice Northern Warfare for 21 years,” a relaxed and apparently self-satisfied Putin mentioned. “On the face of it, he was at warfare with Sweden taking one thing away from it… He was not taking away something, he was returning. That is the way it was.”
It did not matter that European international locations did not acknowledge Peter the Nice’s seizure of territory by pressure, Putin added.
“When he based the brand new capital, not one of the European international locations acknowledged this territory as a part of Russia; everybody acknowledged it as a part of Sweden,” Putin mentioned. “Nevertheless, from time immemorial, the Slavs lived there together with the Finno-Ugric peoples, and this territory was below Russia’s management. The identical is true of the western path, Narva and his first campaigns. Why would he go there? He was returning and reinforcing, that’s what he was doing.”
Alluding on to his personal invasion of Ukraine, Putin added: “Clearly, it fell to our lot to return and reinforce as properly.”
These remarks had been swiftly condemned by Ukrainians, who noticed them as a unadorned admission of Putin’s imperial ambitions.
“Putin’s confession of land seizures and evaluating himself with Peter the Nice show: there was no ‘battle,’ solely the nation’s bloody seizure below contrived pretexts of individuals’s genocide,” Ukrainian presidential adviser Mykhailo Podolyak mentioned on Twitter. “We should always not discuss ‘saving [Russia’s] face,’ however about its quick de-imperialization.”
These arguments could have appeared extra cheap earlier than February 24. Within the run-up to the invasion, Putin laid out a sequence of grievances to make the case for warfare, from NATO’s eastward growth to Western supply of army help to Ukraine.
However learn the transcript of Putin’s remarks on Thursday extra carefully, and the facade of rational geopolitical bargaining falls away.
“To be able to declare some type of management — I’m not even speaking about international management, I imply management in any space — any nation, any individuals, any ethnic group ought to guarantee their sovereignty,” Putin mentioned. “As a result of there isn’t any in-between, no intermediate state: both a rustic is sovereign, or it’s a colony, it doesn’t matter what the colonies are known as.”
In different phrases, there are two classes of state: The sovereign and the conquered. In Putin’s imperial view, Ukraine ought to fall into the latter class.
By summoning the reminiscence of Peter the Nice, it additionally turns into clear that Putin’s goals are pushed by some sense of historic future. And Putin’s mission of imperial restoration might — in idea — prolong to different territories that after belonged to the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union, one thing that ought to elevate alarms in all of the international locations that emerged from the collapse of the USSR.
And that doesn’t bode properly for Russia’s future. If there isn’t any reckoning with Russia’s imperial previous — whether or not in Soviet or tsarist guise — there may be much less likelihood {that a} Russia with out Putin would abandon a sample of subjugating its neighbors, or change into a extra democratic state.
Putin, nevertheless, is relying on one thing of the alternative: For Russia to outlive, he argues, it should stay an empire, whatever the human price.