Fiona Hill on Putin:
'Yes, He Would': Fiona Hill on Putin and Nukes (yahoo.com)Putin has articulated an idea of there being a "
Russky Mir" or a "Russian World." The
recent essay he published about Ukraine and Russia states the Ukrainian and Russian people are "one people," a "yedinyi narod." He's saying Ukrainians and Russians are one and the same. This idea of a Russian World means re-gathering all the Russian-speakers in different places that belonged at some point to the Russian tsardom.
I've kind of quipped about this but I also worry about it in all seriousness that Putin's been down in the archives of the Kremlin during Covid looking through old maps and treaties and all the different borders that Russia has had over the centuries. He's said, repeatedly, that Russian and European borders have changed many times. And in his speeches, he's gone after various former Russian and Soviet leaders, he's gone after Lenin and he's gone after the communists, because in his view they ruptured the Russian empire, they lost Russian lands in the revolution, and yes, Stalin brought some of them back into the fold again like the Baltic States and some of the lands of Ukraine that had been divided up during World War II, but they were lost again with the dissolution of the USSR. Putin's view is that borders change, and so the borders of the old Russian imperium are still in play for Moscow to dominate now.
Reynolds: Dominance in what way?
Hill: It doesn't mean that he's going to annex all of them and make them part of the Russian Federation like they've done with Crimea. You can establish dominance by marginalizing regional countries, by making sure that their leaders are completely dependent on Moscow, either by Moscow practically appointing them through rigged elections or ensuring they are tethered to Russian economic and political and security networks. You can see this now across the former Soviet space.
We've seen pressure being put on Kazakhstan to reorient itself back toward Russia, instead of balancing between Russia and China, and the West. And just a couple of days before the invasion of Ukraine in a little-noticed act,
Azerbaijan signed a bilateral military agreement with Russia. This is significant because Azerbaijan's leader has been resisting this for decades. And we can also see that Russia has made itself the final arbiter of the future relationship between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Georgia has also been marginalized after being a thorn in Russia's side for decades. And Belarus is now completely subjugated by Moscow.
But amid all this, Ukraine was the country that got away. And what Putin is saying now is that Ukraine doesn't belong to Ukrainians. It belongs to him and the past. He is going to wipe Ukraine off the map, literally, because it doesn't belong on his map of the "Russian world." He's basically told us that. He might leave behind some rump statelets. When we look at old maps of Europe probably the maps he's been looking at you find all kinds of strange entities, like the
Sanjak of Novi Pazar in the Balkans. I used to think, what the hell is that? These are all little places that have dependency on a bigger power and were created to prevent the formation of larger viable states in contested regions. Basically, if Vladimir Putin has his way, Ukraine is not going to exist as the modern-day Ukraine of the last 30 years.
