It is sad and perhaps tragic that Vladimir Putin, Russia’s paramount leader for fourteen years, has his sights fixated on past and presumed current grievances rather than a vision of the changing world and what are Russia’s best interests for the decades to come.
Rather than building closer ties with Western Europe and perhaps joining the European Union and NATO as an influential part of a Western Block, Russian President Vladimir Putin is cutting Russia adrift, an island floating between the future hegemonies of the West and of China.
When China begins to nibble away at the vulnerable Asian portions of the Russian Federation, making the same rationalization as he has over Crimea, what nations will be Russia’s allies?
Wikipedia states: “According to an official estimate for 1 January 2014, the population of Russia is 143,700,000.
“The population hit a historic peak at 148,689,000 in 1991, just before the breakup of the Soviet Union, but then began a decade-long decline, falling at a rate of about 0.5% per year due to declining birth rates, rising death rates and emigration.”
In twenty years, Russia will be an aging country with depleting or redundant resources with a population of less than 140,000 sandwiched between the two blocks, both representing a billion or more people and vastly larger economies.
To listen to Putin is to recall the claims and rhetoric of a German leader in the 1930s, also cheered on by his countrymen.
Putin’s speech celebrating Russian ‘annexation’ of Crimea is reported in the New York Times:
“ ‘Crimea has always been an integral part of Russia in the hearts and minds of people,’ Mr. Putin declared in his address, delivered in the chandeliered St. George’s Hall before hundreds of members of Parliament, governors and others. His remarks, which lasted 47 minutes, were interrupted repeatedly by thunderous applause, standing ovations and at the end chants of ‘Russia, Russia.’ Some in the audience wiped tears from their eyes.”
“He denounced what he called the global domination of one superpower and its allies that emerged. ‘They cheated us again and again, made decisions behind our back, presenting us with completed facts,’ he said. ‘That’s the way it was with the expansion of NATO in the East, with the deployment of military infrastructure at our borders. They always told us the same thing: “Well, this doesn’t involve you.” ’ ”
“He recited a list of grievances — from the Soviet Union’s transfer of Crimea to the Ukrainian republic in 1954, to NATO’s expansion to Russia’s borders, to its war in Kosovo in 1999, when he was a little-known aide to President Boris N. Yeltsin, to the conflict in Libya that toppled Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in 2011 on what he called the false pretense of a humanitarian intervention.”
“Millions of Russians went to bed in one country and woke up abroad,” he said. “Overnight, they were minorities in the former Soviet republics, and the Russian people became one of the biggest — if not the biggest — divided nations in the world.”
Someone who is mentally a prisoner of the past is hardly able to lead his nation in an enlightened manner into the future.
If we are entering a period of ultra-Russian nationalism where Russia sees itself as the protector of ethnic Russians everywhere, watch out.
There are huge Russian minorities in the Baltic States And then there is Kaliningrad, that part of former East Prussia annexed by Russia after the Second World War, currently sandwiched between Germany and Poland.