Thread by @Tom_deWaal

1 “The resolution of the Ukraine question.” A mistakenly published Russian article gives us a chilling insight into the neo-imperialist thinking in Russia that drives Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine. A (long) THREAD.

2. RIA Novosti news agency accidentally published an article, tagged with a publication date of 8AM on February 26, already celebrating a Russian victory and collapse of the Ukrainian state within an anticipated two days. It's still on their site.
web.archive.org/web/2022022605…

3. The main theme is that the "operation" is a defeat for the West's project to defeat Russia. That Putin seized the moment to return Ukraine to its historic Slavic union with Russia and Belarus. Potential NATO candidacy is seen as a symptom of the problem, not the main cause.

4. Some quotations first and a few comments at the end:
The author calls this a “new era.” “Russia is restoring its historic unity: the tragedy of 1991, that terrible catastrophe of our history, that unnatural aberration, has been overcome.”

5. He concedes it's "a civil war in which brothers still shoot at each other even though they were divided only by their membership of the Russian and the Ukrainian armies. But there will now no longer be a Ukraine which is anti-Russia.”
The only mention of Ukrainians as people

6. Putin, we are told, had to act now or to lose Ukraine forever.
“We can say without a drop of exaggeration, that Vladimir Putin took upon himself a historic responsibility, by deciding not to leave the resolution of the Ukrainian question to future generations.”

7. The main issue was “the complex of a divided nation and a complex of national humiliation, when the Russian House began to lose part of its foundation (the Kievan one) and then was forced to reconcile itself to the existence of two states of not one but two peoples.”

8. The answer? Kill Ukraine's sovereignty.“Now this problem no longer exists: Ukraine has returned to Russia. This doesn’t mean that its statehood will be liquidated but it will be re-structured, re-established and returned to its natural condition as part of the Russian world…

9. “…In which borders and in what form.. (through the CSTO, and the Eurasian Union or as part of the Union State between Russia and Belorussia)?—questions like this will be decided when we have placed a firm full stop to the history of a Ukraine as an anti-Russian entity.”

10. The author moves to the West. “Did anyone in.. Paris and Berlin, seriously believe that Moscow would give up Kiev?… the West as a whole, and Europe in particular, lacked the strength to keep Ukraine within its sphere of influence, let alone to take Ukraine for itself."

11. “More precisely, they had only one option: to bet on the further collapse of Russia, that is of the Russian Federation. But it should have been clear twenty years ago that this would not work. And already 15 years ago, after Putin's Munich speech [of 2007]..."

12. The big geopolitical clash will cost Russia but it will survive:
“No amount of Western pressure on Russia will have any results. There will be losses from the transformation of the confrontation on both sides, but Russia is ready for them morally and geopolitically.”

13. A big theme for the author is that France and Germany are allegedly fundamentally different from the “Anglo-Saxons,” the UK and US, who are trying to assert Western hegemony over everyone, them included.

14. “The German project of European integration makes no strategic sense as long as there is Anglo-Saxon ideological, military and geopolitical control over the Old World.”“Europeans are now completely uninterested in building a new iron curtain on their eastern borders.”

15. “[T]he construction of a new world order - and this is the third dimension of current events - is accelerating, and its contours are more and more clearly poking through the unravelling fabric of Anglo-Saxon globalization. A multipolar world has finally become a reality.”

16. "the rest of the world sees and understands perfectly well: this is a conflict between Russia and the West, this is a response to the geopolitical expansion of the Atlanticists, this is Russia's recovering its historical space and place in the world."

17. Article ends:
“China and India, Latin America and Africa, the Islamic world and Southeast Asia - no one believes that the West leads the world order, much less sets the rules of the game. Russia has not only thrown down a challenge to the West,...

18. "..it's shown the era of Western global domination can be considered fully and definitively over. The new world will be built by all civilizations and centres of power, naturally, together with the West (united or not) -but not on its terms and not according to its rules.”

19. A few final comments. This is a Russian imperialist discourse: rejected at the end of the USSR, given respectability again under Putin in 2000 but still marginal. It entered Putin’s public speeches after seizure of Crimea—and now has entirely captured Putin’s world-view.

20. Much of the Russian foreign establishment is anti-Western to various degrees but not nearly this aggressive (which is why most of them did not predict the invasion). But their views mean little when Putin makes all the decisions.

21. The author gives no agency to Ukrainians as people. He twists himself in a knot asserting that “brothers still shoot at each other, even though they have been divided only by their membership of the Russian and the Ukrainian armies.” It's regrettable fratricide, folks.

22. He magnifies differences in the West over Russia into major splits. That's now answered by Germany's historic reaction to events. Like most imperialists he fails how small countries, from the Baltic States in 1940 to Czechoslovakia in 1968, feel about big neighbours

23. The author gets it wrong anticipating Ukraine’s collapse and European disunity. Thank the Lord! But there's less to cheer elsewhere. The bet that only the West cares about Ukraine still has to be disproved, given equivocation of China, India, Turkey’s limited response.

24. The piece also reveals how far paranoia, grievance and aggression is embedded in state decision making—and is thus far immune to an alternative reality. Part of this is a willingness to endure hardship in pursuit of this Russian imperial project.

25. We can only hope Ukrainian resistance, international pressure and diplomacy will eventually force a re-think, but what will have happened to Ukraine, how many thousands of lives will have been lost before that happens? ENDS

Russian foreign policy establishment

fails to see

*26 Thank you all for the huge response! Let me add one caveat. We can’t know that the article reflects the Kremlin’s intentions, only that a big news agency commissioned it to celebrate victory—and it “rhymes” with Putin’s big speech last week. Let's hope other views prevail.