Roving Periscope: Is it USSR-II, or ‘Tsar’ Putin’s Russian Empire-II?
Virendra Pandit
New Delhi: Make no mistake: Russian President Vladimir Putin is not revivifying the Soviet Union (1922-1991), in a new avatar. What he may do is to go further back and revive the Russian Empire ruled for three centuries by the Romanov dynasty, ousted by the Vladimir Lenin-led Communist Revolution in 1917.
A former KGB spymaster, who witnessed the death of the Soviet Union, nuclear stalemate, and came to rule Russia with a missionary zeal in 1991, he looks unmindful of the costs his country may have to pay for this adventure that could escalate and have far-reaching consequences. His Ukraine success may encourage him to expand Russian territory further, and trigger more wars if other nations also join.
On Thursday, US President Joe Biden, while announcing fresh sanctions against Russia after it invaded Ukraine, called Putin the aggressor, who chose this war and whose country could pay the price for this folly.
Besides, Biden said Putin “has much larger ambitions in Ukraine. He wants to, in fact, re-establish the former Soviet Union. That’s what this is about.”
But President Putin has often blamed the former Soviet Union and its Bolshevik leadership for the dismemberment of the ex-Russian Empire in the early 1920s and for creating artificial constructs like Ukraine, carved out of the Russian areas, and making them autonomous republics of the USSR.
This, he believes, was the chief reason for the rise of separatist tendencies in these areas that culminated in the dismemberment of the Soviet Union in 1991. His photographs as a new ‘Tsar’ have since been carried in the media.
That may be why President Putin asked the Ukrainian forces to surrender arms and return to their families, assuring the hapless country that Moscow did not want to occupy it. Russia only sought a regime change to install a pro-Russian government in the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv.
That President Putin wanted to turn the clock back was well-known for years. In 2008, the breakaway Georgia, also a former Soviet republic and the birthplace of Josef Stalin, tried to get closer to NATO but stepped back after Moscow’s warning. So did another former Soviet republic, Belarus. Having studied the nuclear deterrent, which forces nations not to poke their nose too deeper in others’ matters, and the limited Western options against Russia, he sent his troops into Ukraine.
He is thus designing a new architecture of geopolitics: If you also have matching nuclear power, your rivals cannot stop you beyond a point. China is watching Russia’s action closely and may follow it in Taiwan, which is also not a NATO member!
After 1991, Moscow lost its superpower status and found NATO enrolling the former Soviet republics under its security umbrella, thus pushing its borders closer to Russia. Ukraine was also an aspirant to the NATO club, and Russia had warned it against this desire.
Former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko (2014-19) had carefully handled Moscow and avoided getting too close to NATO. But his successor and current incumbent, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, allegedly messed it up, as he did not grasp the sensitivity of the geopolitical location of Ukraine and what it meant to Russia.
Zelenskyy, 44, a former comedian-actor, was a novice in politics, and his allegedly irresponsible statements, bordering on bravado, further complicated the matters. He gave Russia the pretext it was waiting for to invade Ukraine.
Even after Russia’s invasion, Zelensky alienated NATO by indirectly blaming the West that Ukraine had been left alone to fend for itself. Legally, NATO forces cannot enter a non-member’s territory, and Ukraine is not a member. His other immature statements also complicated the situation.
On Thursday, after Ukraine’s appeal, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged President Putin to end the hostilities forthwith.
Ironically, Ukraine has been opposing India in the United Nations in key matters like the 1998 nuclear explosions in Rajasthan, Kashmir, etc.
