By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers
Vladimir Putin, who recently compared
himself to Peter the Great, is determined to shape the future to look
like his past version. Russia’s president invaded Ukraine not because he felt
threatened by NATO expansion or Western “provocations.” He ordered his
“special military operation” because he believed it was
Russia’s divine right to rule Ukraine, wipe out the country’s national
identity, and integrate its people into a Greater Russia.
He laid out this mission in a 5,000-word treatise published in July
2021, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.”
In it, Putin insisted that Belarusians, Russians, and
Ukrainians are all descendants of the Rus, an ancient people who
settled the lands between the Black and Baltic Seas. He asserted that they are
bound together by a familiar territory and language and the Orthodox Christian faith. In his
version of history, Ukraine has never been sovereign, except for a few
historical interludes when it tried - and failed - to become an independent
state. Putin wrote that “Russia was robbed” of core territory
when the Bolsheviks created the Soviet Union in 1922 and established a
Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. In his telling, since
the Soviet collapse, the West has used Ukraine as a platform to threaten
Russia and supported the rise of “neo-Nazis” there. Putin’s essay, which every
soldier sent to Ukraine is supposed to carry, ends by asserting that Ukraine
can only be sovereign in partnership with Russia. “We are one people,”
Putin declares.
This treatise, and similar public statements, make clear that Putin
wants a world where Russia presides over a new Slavic union composed of
Belarus, Russia, Ukraine, and perhaps the northern part of Kazakhstan (which is
heavily Slavic) – and where all the other post-Soviet states recognize Russia’s
suzerainty. He also wants the West and the global South to accept Russia’s
predominant regional role in Eurasia. This is more than a sphere of influence;
it is a sphere of control, with a mixture of outright territorial reintegration
of some places and dominance in the security, political, and economic spheres
of others.
Putin is serious about achieving these goals by military and
nonmilitary means. He has been at war in Ukraine since early 2014, when Russian
forces, wearing green combat uniforms stripped of their insignia, took control of Crimea in a
stealth operation. Covert operations swiftly followed this attack to stir up
civil disorder in Ukraine’s eastern and southern regions close to the Russian
border. Russia fomented revolt in the Donbas region and sparked an armed
conflict that resulted in 14,000 deaths over the next eight years. All these
regions have been targeted for assault and
conquest since February 2022. Similarly, in Belarus, Putin took advantage
of internal crises and large-scale protests in 2020 and 2021 to constrain its
leader’s room for maneuver. Belarus, a so-called union arrangement with Russia,
was then used as the staging ground for the “special military operation”
against Ukraine.
The Russian president has made it clear that his country is a
revisionist power. In a March 2014 speech marking Crimea’s annexation, Putin told the West that Russia was on the offensive in staking
out its regional claims. To make this task easier, Putin
later took steps that he believed would sanction-proof
the Russian economy by reducing its exposure to the United States
and Europe, including pushing for the domestic production of critical
goods. He stepped up repression, conducting targeted
assassinations and imprisoning opponents. He carried out disinformation
operations and tried to bribe and blackmail politicians abroad. Putin has
constantly adapted his tactics to mitigate Western responses - to the
point that on the eve of his invasion, as Russian troops massed on Ukraine’s
borders, he bragged to some European interlocutors that he had “bought the
West.” There was nothing, he thought, that the United States or Europe could do
to constrain him.
So far, the West’s reaction to the invasion has generally been united and robust. Russia’s aggressive attack on Ukraine was a wake-up call for the
United States and its allies. But the West must understand that it deals with a
leader who is trying to change the historical narrative of the last hundred
years – not just the period since the end of the Cold War. Vladimir Putin wants
to make Ukraine, Europe, and the world conform to his version of history.
Understanding his objectives is central to crafting the correct response.
Who controls the past?
In Vladimir Putin’s mind, history matters - that is, history as he sees
it. Putin’s conception of the past may differ from what is generally accepted,
but his narratives are a potent political weapon underpinning his legitimacy.
Well before the full invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, Putin had been
making intellectual forays into obscure periods of the past and manipulating
key events to set up the domestic and international justification for his war.
In 2010, at the annual meeting of the Kremlin-sponsored
Valdai International Discussion Club, Putin’s press spokesman told the audience
that the Russian president reads books on Russian history “all the time.” He
makes frequent pronouncements about Russian history, including his place in it.
Putin
has put Kyiv at the center of his drive to “correct” what he says is a
historical injustice: the separation of Ukraine from Russia during the 1922
formation of the Soviet Union.
The president’s obsession with Russia’s imperial past runs deep. In his
Kremlin chambers, Putin has strategically placed statues of the Russian monarch
Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, who conquered what are today Ukrainian
territories in wars with the Swedish and Ottoman empires. He has usurped
Ukraine’s history and appropriated some of its most prominent figures. In
November 2016, for example, right outside the Kremlin gates, Putin erected a
statue of Vladimir the Great, the tenth-century grand prince of the
principality of Kyiv. In Putin’s version of history, Grand Prince Vladimir
converted to Christianity on behalf of all of the
ancient Rus in 988, making him the holy saint of Orthodox Christianity and
a Russian, not a Ukrainian, Figure. The conversion means that there is no
Ukrainian nation separate from Russia. The grand prince belongs to Moscow, not
to Kyiv.
Since the war, Putin has doubled down on
his historical arguments. He deputized his former culture minister and close
Kremlin aide, Vladimir Medinsky, to lead the Russian delegation in early talks
with Ukraine. According to a well-informed Russian academic, Medinsky was one
of the ghostwriters of a series of essays by Putin on Ukraine and its supposed
fusion with Russia. As quickly became clear, Medinsky’s brief was to press
Russia’s historical claims to Ukraine and defend Putin’s distorted narratives,
not just to negotiate a diplomatic solution.
Putin’s assertions, of course, are historical miasmas infused
with a brew of temporal and factual contradictions. They ignore, for example,
that in 988, the idea of a united Russian state and empire was
centuries off in the future. Indeed, the Erst reference to Moscow as
a place of any importance was not recorded until 1147.
Blaming the Bolsheviks
On the eve of the invasion, Putin gave a speech accusing Bolshevik
leader Vladimir Lenin of destroying the Russian empire by launching a
revolution during World War I and then “separating, severing what historically
Russian land is.” As Putin put it, “Bolshevik, Communist Russia” created “a
country that had never existed before” – Ukraine – by wedging Russian
territories such as the Donbas region, a center of heavy industry, into a new
Ukrainian socialist republic. Lenin and the Bolsheviks essentially recreated
the Russian empire and called it something else. They established separate Soviet
Socialist Republics for Ukraine and other regions to contrast themselves with
the imperial tsars, who reigned over a united, Russified state and oppressed
ethnic minorities. But for Putin, the Bolsheviks’ decision was illegitimate,
robbing Russia of its patrimony and stirring “zealous nationalists” in Ukraine,
who then developed dangerous ideas of independence. Putin claims he is
reversing these century-old “strategic mistakes.”
Narratives about NATO have also played
a unique role in Putin’s version of history. Putin argues that NATO is a tool
of U.S. imperialism and a means for the United States to continue its supposed
Cold War occupation and domination of Europe. He claims that NATO compelled
eastern European member countries to join the organization and accuses it
of unilaterally expanding into Russia’s sphere of influence. In reality, those
countries, still fearful after decades of Soviet domination, clamored to become
members.
But according to Putin, these purported actions by the
United States and NATO have forced Russia
to defend itself against military encroachment; Moscow
had “no other choice,” he claims, but to invade Ukraine to forestall it from
joining NATO, even though the
organization was not going to admit the country. On July 7, 2022, Putin told
Russian parliamentary leaders that the war in Ukraine was unleashed by “the
collective West,” which was trying to contain Russia and “impose
its new world order on the rest of the world.”
But Putin also plays up Russia’s imperial role. At June 9, 2022, Moscow
conference, Putin told young Russian entrepreneurs that Ukraine is a “colony,”
not a sovereign country. He likened himself to
Peter the Great, who waged “the Great Northern War” for 21 years against
Sweden – “returning and reinforcing” control over land that was part of Russia.
This explanation also echoes what Putin told U.S. President George Bush at the April 2008
NATO summit in Bucharest: “Ukraine is not a real country.”
The United states was, of course, once a colony of Great Britain. So
were Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, and numerous other states have been
independent and sovereign for decades. That does not make them British or give
the United Kingdom a contemporary claim to exert control over their destinies,
even though many of these countries have English as their Erst or second
language. Yet Putin insists that Ukraine’s Russian speakers are all Moscow’s
subjects and that, globally, all Russian speakers are part of the “Russian
world,” with special ties to the motherland.
In Ukraine, however, his push has backfired. Since February 24, 2022,
Putin’s insistence that Ukrainians
who speak Russian are Russians has, on the
contrary, helped to forge a new national identity in Ukraine centered on the
Ukrainian language. The more that Putin tries to erase the Ukrainian national
identity with bombs and artillery shells, the stronger it becomes.
Conjuring nazis
Ukraine and Ukrainians have a complicated history. Empires have come
and gone, and borders have changed for centuries, so the people living on
modern Ukrainian territory have fluid, compound identities. But Ukraine has
been an independent state since 1991, and Putin is genuinely aggrieved that
Ukrainians insist on their statehood and civic identity.
Take Putin’s frequent references to World War II. Since 2011, Putin has
enshrined the “Great Fatherland War” as the seminal event for modern Russia. He
has strictly enforced official narratives about the conflict. He has also
portrayed his current operation as its successor; in Putin’s telling, the
invasion of Ukraine is designed to liberate the country from Nazis. But for
Putin, Ukrainians are Nazis not because they follow the precepts of Adolf
Hitler or espouse national socialism. They are Nazis because they are “zealous
nationalists” - akin to the controversial World War II-era Ukrainian partisan
Stepan Bandera, who fought with the Germans against Soviet forces. They are
Nazis because they refuse to admit they are Russians.
Putin’s conjuring of Ukrainian Nazis
has gained more traction domestically than anywhere else. Yet internationally, Putin’s assertions about
NATO and proxy wars with the United States and the collective West have won a
variety of adherents, from prominent academics to Pope Francis, who said in
June 2022 that the Ukraine war was “perhaps somehow provoked.” Western
politicians and analysts debate whether NATO is at fault for the war. These
arguments persist even though Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea came in response to
Ukraine’s efforts to associate with the European Union, not with
NATO. And the debate has gone on, even though when Finland and Sweden applied
to join the alliance in June
2022, despite months of threats from Russia, Putin told reporters that Kremlin
officials “don’t have problems with Sweden and Finland like we do with
Ukraine.” Putin’s problem, then, was not NATO in particular. Ukraine wanted to
associate with any entity or country other than Russia. Whether Ukraine
wanted to join the European Union or NATO or
have bilateral relations with the United States – any of these efforts would
have been an affront to Russia’s history and dignity.
But Putin knows it will be challenging to negotiate a settlement in Ukraine based on
his version of history and to reconcile fundamentally different past
stories. Most modern European states emerged from the ruins of empires and the
disintegration of larger multiethnic states. The war in Ukraine could lead to
more Russian interference to intensify conflicts in weak states such as Bosnia-Herzegovina and other Balkan countries,
where history and territorial claims are also disputed.
Yet no matter the potential cost, Putin wants his past to prevail in
Europe’s political present. And to make sure that happens, the Russian military
is in the field, in full force, fighting the regular Ukrainian army. Unlike the
situation in Donbas from 2014 to 2022, when Russia falsely denied that it was
involved, this war is a direct conflict between the two states. As Putin also
told his Russian parliamentarians on July 7, he is determined to fight to the
last Ukrainian, even though he purportedly sees Ukrainians as “brothers.”
At any cost
Putin abhors that the United States and European countries are
supporting Ukraine militarily. In response, he has launched an economic and
information war against the West, clearly signaling that this is not only a
military conflict and a battle over who gets to “own history.” Russia has
weaponized energy, grain, and other commodities. It has spread disinformation,
including by accusing Ukraine of committing the very atrocities that Russia has
carried out on the battlefield and by blaming Western sanctions for
exacerbating famines in Africa when it is Russia that has blocked Ukrainian
grain shipments to the continent from
the Black Sea. And Russia is winning the information war in many parts of the
world. So far, the West has not been able to be completely effective in the
informational space.
Nevertheless, Western support for Ukraine has been significant.
This support has two major elements: weapons and sanctions, including the High
Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) from the United States, which have
significantly increased Ukraine’s ability to strike back at Russian targets.
Other NATO members have also supplied weapons and humanitarian assistance. But
Ukraine’s constant neet
to replenish its arms has already begun depleting
donating countries' arsenals.
Western energy, financial, and export control sanctions have been
extensive, affecting the Russian economy. But sanctions cannot alter
Putin’s view of history or his determination to subjugate Ukraine, so they have
not changed his calculus or war
aims. Indeed, close observers say that Putin has rarely
consulted his economic advisers during this war, apart from Elvira Nabiullina, the head of the central bank. The latter has
astutely managed the value of the ruble. This is a stark break from the past
when Putin has always appeared highly interested in the Russian economy and
eager to discuss statistics and growth rates in great detail. Any concerns
about the long-term economic impact of the war have receded from his view.
Police officers walking past a monument to Peter the Great in Saint
Petersburg, Russia, February 2019
And to date, Russia’s economy has weathered the sanctions,
although growth rates are forecast to plunge this year. The real pinch from
Western export controls will be felt in 2023 when Russia will lack the
semiconductors and spare parts for its manufacturing sector, and its industrial
plants will be forced to close. The country’s oil industry will struggle as it
loses out on technology and software from the international oil industry.
Europe and the United States have imposed wide-ranging energy sanctions
on Russia, with the European Union committed to phasing out oil imports from
Russia by the end of 2022. But limiting gas imports is much more challenging, as
several countries, including Germany, have few alternatives to replace Russian
gas in the short term. Putin has weaponized energy by severely reducing gas supplies to Europe.
For 50 years, the Soviet Union and Russia cast themselves as reliable natural
gas suppliers to Western Europe in a relationship of mutual dependence: Europe
needed gas, and Moscow needed gas revenues. But that calculation is gone. Putin
believes that Russia can forgo these revenues because countries still buying
Russian oil and gas are paying higher prices for it—higher prices that he
helped provoke by cutting back on Russia’s European exports. And even if Russia
eventually loses energy revenues, Putin appears willing to pay that price. What
he ultimately cares about is undermining European support for Ukraine.
Russia’s economic and energy warfare extends to the weaponization of
nuclear power. Russia took over the Chornobyl plant in Ukraine at the beginning
of the war after recklessly sending Russian soldiers into the highly
radioactive “red zone” and forcing the Ukrainian staff at the plant
to work under dangerous conditions. Then, it abandoned the plant after
exposing the soldiers to toxic radiation. Russia subsequently shelled and took
over Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant,
Europe’s largest, and turned it into a military base. By attacking the power
plant and transforming it into a military garrison, Russia has created a safety
crisis for the thousands of workers there. Putin’s broad-based campaign does
not stop at nuclear energy.
Russia has also weaponized food supplies, blockading Ukraine and
preventing it from exporting its abundant grain and fertilizer stocks. In July
2022, Turkey and the United Nations agreed to allow Ukraine and Russia to
export grain and fertilizer. Still, the implementation of this deal faced
multiple obstacles, given the war raging in the Black Sea area. Indeed,
immediately after the official signing of the agreement, Russia shelled some of
the infrastructures at Ukraine’s critical Odesa port.
Putin has fallen back on another historical Russian military tactic -
bogging down opposing forces and waiting for winter. As his predecessors
arranged for Napoleon’s armies to be trapped in the snows near Moscow and for
Nazi soldiers to freeze outside Stalingrad, Putin plans to have French and
German citizens shivering in their homes. In his speech at the June 2022 St.
Petersburg International Economic Forum, Putin predicted that,
as Europeans face a cold winter and suffer the economic
consequences of the sanctions their governments have imposed on Russia and
Russian gas exports, populist parties will rise, and new elites will come to power.
The June 2022 parliamentary elections in France, when Marine Le Pen’s
extreme-right party increased its seats elevenfold - mainly because of voters’
unhappiness with their economic situation - reinforced Putin’s convictions. The
collapse of Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi’s government in July 2022 and
the possible return of a populist, pro-Russian prime minister in the fall were
also considered results of popular economic discontent. The Kremlin aims to
fracture Western unity against Russia under the pressure of energy shortages,
high prices, and economic hardship.
In the meantime, Putin is confident that he
can prevail. On the surface, popular support for the war inside Russia seems
reasonably robust. Polling by the independent Levada Center shows that Putin’s
approval rating went up after the invasion began. Nonetheless, there is good
reason for skepticism about his active support depth. Hundreds of thousands of
people who oppose the war have left the country. In doing so, many have
explicitly said that they want to be part of Russia’s future but not Vladimir
Putin’s version of the past. Russians who have stayed and publicly criticized the war have been
harassed or imprisoned. Others are indifferent, or they passively support the
war. Indeed, life for most people in Moscow and other big Russian cities is
normal. So far, the conscripts sent to fight and die are not the children of
Russia’s elites or urban middle class. They are from poor, rural areas, and
many are not ethnically Russian. Rumors after five months of combat that the
Moscow-linked Wagner mercenary group was recruiting prisoners to fight
suggested that Russia
faced an acute manpower shortage. But the troops are urged on by propaganda
that dehumanizes the Ukrainians and makes the fighting seem more palatable.
Divide and conquer
Despite calls by some for a negotiated settlement involving Ukrainian
territorial concessions, Putin seems uninterested in a compromise that would
leave Ukraine as a sovereign,
independent state - whatever its borders. According to multiple
former senior U.S. officials we spoke with, in April 2022, Russian
and Ukrainian negotiators appeared to have tentatively agreed on the outlines
of a negotiated interim settlement: Russia would withdraw from its
position on February 23, when it controlled part of the Donbas region and all
of Crimea, and in exchange, Ukraine would promise not to seek NATO membership
and instead receive security guarantees from several countries. But as Russian
Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov stated in a July interview with his country’s
state media, this compromise is no longer an option. Even giving Russia all of
the Donbas is not enough. “Now the geography is different,” Lavrov
asserted in describing Russia’s short-term military aims. “It’s also Kherson and the Zaporizhzhya
regions and several other territories.” The goal is not negotiation but
Ukrainian capitulation.
At any point, negotiations with Russia - if not handled carefully
and with continued western solid support for Ukraine’s defense and security -
would merely facilitate an operational pause for Moscow. After a time, Russia
would continue to try to undermine the Ukrainian government. Moscow would
likely Erst attempt to take Odesa and other Black Sea ports to leave Ukraine an
economically inviable, landlocked country. If he succeeds in that, Putin would
also launch a renewed assault on Kyiv to unseat the present government and
install a pro-Moscow puppet government. Then, Putin’s war in Ukraine will
likely grind on for a long time. The main challenge for the West will be
maintaining resolve and unity, expanding international support for Ukraine, and
preventing sanctions evasion.
This will not be easy. The longer the war lasts, the greater the impact
domestic politics will have on its course. Russia, Ukraine, and the United
States will all have presidential elections in 2024. Russia’s and Ukraine’s are
usually slated for March. Russia’s outcome is foreordained: either Putin will
return to power, or he will be followed by a successor, likely from the
security services, who supports the war and is hostile to the West. Zelensky
remains popular in Ukraine as a wartime president, but he will be less likely
to win an election if he makes territorial concessions. And if Donald Trump or a Republican with
views like his becomes president of the United States in 2025, U.S.
support for Ukraine will erode.
Domestic politics will also play a role outside these three countries -
and, in fact, outside the West altogether. The United States and its allies may
want to isolate Russia. Still, many states in the global South, led by China, regard the Russia-Ukraine war
as a localized European conflict that does not affect them.
China has
even backed Russia rhetorically, refused to impose sanctions, and supported
it in the United Nations. (One should
not underestimate the durability and significance of
Russia’s alignment with China.) Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar
summarized the attitude of many developing states when he said that Russia is a
“vital partner in several areas.” For much of the global South, concerns focus
on fuel, food, fertilizer, and arms. These countries are not concerned that
Russia has violated the UN Charter and international law by unleashing an
unprovoked attack on a
neighbor’s territory.
A fire from a gas
processing plant hit by shelling in Andriivka,
Ukraine, June 2022
There’s a reason these states have not joined the United States and Europe in
isolating Moscow. Since 2014, Putin has assiduously courted “the rest” - the developing
world - even as Russia’s ties with the West have frayed. In 2015, for example,
Russia sent its military to the Middle East to support Syrian President Bashar
al-Assad in his civil war. Since then, Russia has cultivated ties with leaders
on all sides of that region’s disputes, becoming one of the only major powers
able to talk to all parties. Russia has strong ties with Iran but also with
Iran’s enemies: particularly Egypt, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other Gulf
states. In Africa, Russian paramilitary groups provide support to several
leaders. And in Latin America, Russian influence has increased as more
left-wing governments have come to power. There and elsewhere, Russia is still
seen as a champion of the oppressed against the stereotype of U.S. imperialism.
Many people in the global South view Russia as the heir to the Soviet Union,
which supported their post-colonial national liberation movements, not a modern
variant of imperial Russia.
Not only does much of the world refuse to criticize or sanction Russia,
major countries simply do not accept the West’s view of what caused the war or
just how grave the conflict is. They instead criticize the United States and
argue that what Russia is doing in Ukraine is no different from what the United
States did in Iraq or Vietnam. They, like Moscow, justify Russia’s invasion as
a response to the threat from NATO. This is thanks partly to the
Kremlin’s propaganda, which has amplified Putin’s narratives about NATO and
proxy wars and the nefarious actions of the West.
International institutions have not been much more helpful than developing
countries. The United Nations and the Organization for Security and Cooperation
in Europe proved incapable of preventing or stopping this war. They seem
increasingly the victims of Putin’s distorted view of the past and are poorly
structured to meet the present challenges.
Delusions of grandeur
Putin’s manipulations of history suggest that his claims go beyond
Ukraine into Europe and Eurasia. The Baltic states might be on his colonial
agenda, as well as Poland, part of which was ruled by Russia from 1772 to 1918.
Much of present-day Moldova was part of the Russian empire, and Russian
officials have suggested that this state could be next in their sights. Finland
was also part of the Russian empire between 1809 and 1918. Putin may not be
able to conquer these countries, but his extravagant remarks about taking back
Russia’s colonies are designed to intimidate his neighbors and throw them off
balance. In Putin’s ideal world, he will gain leverage and control over their
politics by threatening them until they let Russia dictate their foreign and
domestic policies.
In Putin’s vision, the global South would, at a minimum, remain neutral
in Russia’s standoff with the West. Developing nations would actively support
Moscow. With the BRICS organization - Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South
Africa - set to expand to include Argentina, Iran, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and
Turkey, Russia may acquire even more partners. Such partners represent a significant percentage
of global GDP and a large percentage of the world’s population. Russia would
then emerge as a developing world leader, as was the Soviet Union during the Cold War.
All this underlines why the West (Australia, Canada, Japan, New
Zealand, Singapore, South Korea, the United States, and Europe) must redouble
its efforts to remain united in supporting Ukraine and countering
Russia. In the near term, that means working together to push back against
Russian disinformation about the war and false historical narratives, as well
as the Kremlin’s other efforts to intimidate Europe - including through
deliberate nuclear saber-rattling and
energy cutoffs. In the medium to long term, the United States, its allies,
and its partners should discuss how to restructure the international and
European security architecture to prevent Russia from attacking other neighbors
that it deems within its sphere. But for now, NATO is the only institution that
can guarantee Europe’s security. Indeed, Finland’s and Sweden’s decision to
join was partly motivated by that realization.
As he looks toward a quarter century in power, Putin seeks to build his
version of a Russian empire. He is “gathering in the lands” as did his icons -
the great Russian tsars - and overturning the legacy of Lenin, the Bolsheviks,
and the post–Cold War settlement. In this way, Putin wants Russia to be the one
exception to imperial states' inexorable rise and fall. Austria-Hungary and the
Ottoman Empire collapsed in the twentieth century after World War I. Britain
and France reluctantly gave up their empires after World War II. But Putin is
insistent on bringing tsarist Russia back. Regardless of whether he prevails in
Ukraine, Putin’s mission is already having a clear and ironic impact on Europe
and Russia’s 22 years of economic advancement.
In reasserting Russia’s imperial position by seeking to reconquer
Ukraine, Putin is reversing one of the most outstanding achievements of his
professed greatest hero. During his reign, Peter the Great opened a window to
the West by traveling to Europe, inviting Europeans to come to Russia and help
develop its economy, and adopting and adapting European artisans’ skills.
Vladimir Putin’s invasions and territorial expansions have slammed that window
shut. They have sent Europeans and their companies back home and pushed a
generation of talented Russians fleeing into exile. Peter took Russia into the
future. Putin is pushing it back to the past.
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