Behind the projection of the image of a military power recovered in recent years and a leadership wrapped in assertiveness, Vladimir Putin designs strategies haunted by typical nightmares of a country with inheritances from imperial times.
The Kremlin considers managing borders with potential enemies lurking and fears, for Russia, the world’s largest nation by territory, a scenario of collapse like the Yugoslav.
“And the tragic example of Yugoslavia demonstrates that if we were to face what happened in Yugoslavia, taking into account the mentality of the Russian people, and not just Russians, but of all the nations living in Russia, the confrontations would be much tougher and bloodier than after the collapse of Yugoslavia,” Putin declared in December, according to his country’s media.
The contemporary Kremlin carries legacies from the predecessors of the Russian Empire and the USSR. In the 15th and 16th centuries, processes of territorial expansion were set in motion, responsible for taking Tsarist power from Eastern Europe to Alaska.
As a result, one of the greatest empires in history — the result of essentially terrestrial expansion, without resorting to navigations and overseas colonies, as the British and French did.
The modus operandi of the tsars was similar to that of the Austro-Hungarians and the Ottomans, based on territorial contiguity. But a fundamental difference shaped the fate of these three imperial enterprises, victims of collapses recorded during the First World War (1914-1918).
From the rubble of the Austro-Hungarian monarchy, a tiny Austria emerged, while former partner Hungary witnessed the loss of around 70% of its historic territory. Descendants of the sultans have seen their borders, once on several continents, wiped away to demarcate post-Ottoman Turkey.
In the Russian case, months after the fall of tsarism in 1917, the Bolshevik revolution broke out and, subsequently, the civil war between Lenin’s commanders and defenders of the old regime. Victorious, the communists managed to practically recover the borders of the empire, preventing the country from suffering the fate of the significant territorial losses of the heirs of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires.
The USSR therefore maintained the territorial gigantism of the tsarist era. And, even with the Soviet disintegration of 1991, Russia remains the largest country in the world, with 11 time zones and more than 100 ethnicities, although Slavic Russians make up about 80% of a population that includes Muslim and Buddhist minorities, among others. others.
Putin, in power, tried to crush separatism, as in the Chechnya war, and expanded controls over the regions. But the preoccupation with a “Yugoslavian fate” survives.
Another factor guiding Moscow’s vision: the perception that the gigantic territory, a legacy of imperial times, would be, from a geopolitical point of view, “boxed in”, with recent or historical threats on its borders.
On the western front, the shadow of NATO, a US-led military alliance. To the south, threats from fundamentalist Muslim groups from the Caucasus, the Middle East and Central Asia. And, in the Far East, Japan, a rival in the war in 1904-5, and the current ally China, but with whom the USSR fought in 1969, over border disputes.
Russia, with its territorial and atomic weight, often seeks to intimidate the global chessboard and increase clout in negotiations. But in the corridors of the Kremlin, there is a fear of persistent domestic and international challenges.
