Back in 1999, Vladimir Putin, the then Prime Minister of the Russian Federation, took part in TV debates where he expressed his position on especially important issues of Russian-Ukrainian relations
When asked by a TV host whether Russia wanted to take Crimea away from Ukraine, Putin answered directly and unequivocally: “We do not want to take Crimea, this is absolute stupidity. If we start taking something away from someone, then we will definitely have something taken away from us, or we will lose something ourselves.” Obviously, that was an absolutely sober and rational position of the head of the Government of the Russian Federation, which took into account the realities of the time and fully complied with the norms of modern international law.
“In any case, if we start such a redistribution on the territory of the former Soviet Union, we will never be able to recover from it,” Putin said at the time.
He went on to emphasize that Russia itself had many territorial disputes that needed to be resolved. Here is another quote from that speech by Vladimir Putin: “We have 400 disputed territories on the territory of the Russian Federation alone, 400, and I want everyone to know about this!” From those words of the head of the Russian Government, we can conclude that Russia had enough problems of its own and was not going to add someone else’s to them.
Putin went on to say that he considered Russia’s imperial heritage to be the main problem: “For some reason, everyone believes that Russia is still an empire, and therefore treats it as an empire, although this is not the case at all and has not been the case for a long time.”
Did Vladimir Putin really think so, or was he just saying that in 1999? Although today, it no longer matters.
In 2014, Russia annexed Crimea and started a war in the East of Ukraine. In 2022, Putin launched a full-scale war against Ukraine, which is still ongoing and hardly anybody can tell when and how it will end.
For all the false bravado of Putin and his generals, it is obvious that over all the years of the war, Russia has not achieved any more or less significant success on the front. It has completely lost its credibility and authority in the international arena, and has significantly depleted its human, financial, and logistical resources, which will have extremely negative consequences for Russia itself in the near future.
It should be expected that centrifugal processes will soon begin in Russia and Putin’s prophetic words will come true, where he states that “If we (Russia) start taking something away from someone, then something will definitely be taken away from us, or we will lose something ourselves.”
Today, it has become obvious to many that Russia has already lost a lot as a result of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and now it won’t be long before it will lose a lot more.
Oleh Bereziuk,
Institute for Global Politics
