Putin Sees Ukraine Through a Lens of Grievance Over Lost Glory. Speaking after Friday’s summit, President Putin again implied that the war is all about Russia’s diminished status since the fall of the Soviet Union.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/17/world/europe/russia-ukraine-putin-alaska.html

by Barch3

11 comments

  2. Russia has lost even more glory since its brutal invasion and may not survive this crisis of its own making. Hubris of a wanna be Napoleon but with a hapless army like Mussolini, which is rapidly approaching the size of Costa Rica’s army (no such thing). The only thing RU have demonstrated is that their weapons are useless in modern war – so why buy them?

  3. Tough shit putin. Deal with it and fall out of a window if you can’t.

  4. Right. And Russia’s failure to recover from the 90s has nothing to do with Putin himself /s

  5. Well, it certainly is diminished **now**.

    Not sure anyone truly grasps the sheer scale of what has happened to Russia the past few years and how many years it’ll take to recoup, not simply as a military power, but as a cultural and financial influence on the world stage.

  6. Bullshit. This has been planned and laid out already in 1997 by “Putin’s Brain” Alexander Dugin in his book Foundation of Geopolitics. Which for example has been used as a textbook in the Academy of the General Staff of the Russian military. So it’s not “just a book”, in case someone tries to imply that. But yeah, look for yourself, copy/paste from [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics):

    “The book declares that “the battle for the world rule of Russians” has not ended and Russia remains “the staging area of a new anti-bourgeois, anti-American revolution”. The Eurasian Empire will be constructed “on the fundamental principle of the common enemy: the rejection of Atlanticism, strategic control of the U.S., and the refusal to allow liberal values to dominate us.”[2][9] Dugin seems not to rule out the possibility of Russia joining and/or even supporting the European Union and NATO instrumentally in a pragmatic way of further Western subversion against geopolitical “Americanism”.

    Outside of Ukraine and Georgia, military operations play a relatively minor role except for the military intelligence operations. The textbook advocates a sophisticated program of subversion, destabilization, and disinformation spearheaded by the Russian secret services.[16] The operations should be assisted by a tough, hard-headed utilization of Russia’s gas, oil, and natural resources to bully and pressure other countries.[9] The book states that “the maximum task [of the future] is the ‘Finlandization’ of all of Europe”.[9]

    **In Europe**

    * Germany should be offered the de facto political dominance over most Protestant and Catholic states located within Central and Eastern Europe. The Kaliningrad Oblast could be given back to Germany. The book uses the term “Moscow–Berlin axis”.[9]
    * France should be encouraged to form a bloc with Germany, as they both have a “firm anti-Atlanticist tradition”.[9]
    * The United Kingdom, merely described as an “extraterritorial floating base of the U.S.”, should be cut off from the European Union.[9]
    * Finland should be absorbed into Russia. Southern Finland will be combined with the Republic of Karelia and northern Finland will be “donated to Murmansk Oblast”.[9]
    * Estonia should be given to Germany’s sphere of influence.[9]
    * Latvia and Lithuania should be given a “special status” in the Eurasian–Russian sphere, although he later writes that they should be integrated into Russia rather than obtaining national independence.[9]
    * Georgia should be dismembered. Abkhazia and “United Ossetia” (which includes Georgia’s South Ossetia and the Republic of North Ossetia) will be incorporated into Russia. Georgia’s independent policies are unacceptable.[9]
    * Belarus and Moldova are to become part of Russia, not independent.[9]
    * Poland should be granted a “special status” in the Eurasian sphere. This may involve splitting Poland between German and Russian spheres of influence.[9]
    * Romania, North Macedonia, Serbia, “Serbian Bosnia”, and Greece – “Orthodox Christian collectivist East” – will unite with “Moscow the Third Rome” and reject the “rational-individualistic West”.[9]
    * Ukraine (except Western Ukraine) should be annexed by Russia because “Ukraine as a state has no geopolitical meaning, no particular cultural import or universal significance, no geographic uniqueness, no ethnic exclusiveness, its certain territorial ambitions represents an enormous danger for all of Eurasia and, without resolving the Ukrainian problem, it is in general senseless to speak about continental politics”. Ukraine should not be allowed to remain independent, unless it is cordon sanitaire, which would be inadmissible according to Western political standards. As mentioned, Western Ukraine (comprising the regions of Volynia, Galicia, and Transcarpathia), considering its Catholic-majority population, are permitted to form an independent federation of Western Ukraine but should not be under Atlanticist control.[9]

    **In the Middle East and Central Asia**

    * The book stresses the “continental Russian–Islamic alliance” which lies “at the foundation of anti-Atlanticist strategy”. The alliance is based on the “traditional character of Russian and Islamic civilization”.
    * Iran is a key ally. The book uses the term “Moscow–Tehran axis”.[9]
    * Armenia has a special role: It will serve as a “strategic base,” and it is necessary to create “the [subsidiary] axis Moscow-Yerevan-Teheran”. Armenians “are an Aryan people … [like] the Iranians and the Kurds”.[9]
    * Azerbaijan could be “split up” or given to Iran.[9]
    * Russia needs to create “geopolitical shocks” within Turkey. These can be achieved by employing Kurds, Armenians, and other minorities (such as Greeks) to attack the ruling Turkish regime.[9]
    * The book regards the Caucasus as a Russian territory, including “the eastern and northern shores of the Caspian (the territories of Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan)” and Central Asia (mentioning Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan).[9]

    In East and Southeast Asia

    * Dugin envisions the fall of China. The People’s Republic of China, which represents an extreme geopolitical danger as an ideological enemy to the independent Russian Federation, “must, to the maximum degree possible, be dismantled”. Dugin suggests that Russia start by taking Tibet–Xinjiang–Inner Mongolia–Manchuria as a security belt.[1] Russia should offer China help “in a southern direction – Indochina (except Vietnam, whose people is already pro-Russia), the Philippines, Indonesia, Australia” as geopolitical compensation.[9] In a 2022 article, SCMP writes, “He also expressed concern that China would act as a servant for American ‘imperialism’ but in recent years he has come to admire the country for becoming ‘so powerful, so independent, so sovereign'”. Temur Umarov, a specialist in China-Russia relations at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, a Washington-based think tank, states “Dugin says that he became fascinated with China when he saw that Beijing, unlike Moscow, does not even think about living in a Western-dominated world,” further going on to say “Dugin claims that the Chinese political regime takes from the West only those features that strengthen the regime and allows its power to grow, and that it hasn’t fallen into the Western influence, [becoming] another centre in the geopolitical arena contrary to the West”.[17]
    * Russia should manipulate Japanese politics by offering the Kuril Islands to Japan and provoking anti-Americanism, to “be a friend of Japan”.[9]
    * Mongolia should be absorbed into the Eurasian sphere.[9]

    The book emphasizes that Russia must spread geopolitical anti-Americanism everywhere: “the main ‘scapegoat’ will be precisely the U.S.”[citation needed]

  8. More “Putin can’t ever give up, what can the rest of us do except placate him?” horseshit from the New York Times. We’ve read this article before and it’s always the same. “Of course I don’t support Putin, buuuuuut….”

    Here’s a little story. It’s about a vast military power that once colonized another nation, for a bunch of reasons, economic interests and access to sea power, stuff like that. The colonizing power built a big important naval base there and it was a whole thing.

    Well time passed and one thing led to another, political upheaval gave the colonial nation some autonomy over the years, eventually leading to full independence.

    Independence…. but with that big important naval base still being leased by the (now former) colonial power.

    This was a somewhat complex situation and as more time passed, in the way of things, the former colonial nation one day decided this base thing needed to end. So they notified the former colonial power that the lease would not be renewed next year.

    This put the great military power in a bit of a difficult situation. Without this big important naval base, what would they do? They could refuse and turn the naval base into a hostile fortress. They could claim that the former colony was of dubious stature as an independent nation owing to its colonial history, and invade the entire country again as they once had long ago.

    Sound familiar?

    But in this case, instead the former colonial nation just said, “K, cool fam, we’ll be out by the end of the year,” and began negotiating a new, different naval partnership more to the liking of both peoples.

    For this was, of course, the Philippines and the United States we’re talking about, and the naval base at Subic Bay, which was closed just about exactly around the time that Russia was signing its formal recognition of Ukraine as an unequivocal free and independent state.

    Now let’s ask ourselves. What diminution of glory, or loss of naval power, did the United States suffer as the result of this easygoing, honorable, mutually respectful negotiation of a new and more suitable power relationship at the close of the Cold War?

    Spoiler alert: absolutely none at all. In fact quite the opposite. Having demonstrated a firm commitment to turning its back on the distant history of colonial relations, the United States earned an even closer ally than they had before. Subic Bay will soon reopen as a Philippines base, which they are pleased to offer the US Navy access to as a respected ally, cementing friendship and strengthening mutual security.

    Meanwhile the USN alongside the Royal Navy just gave the world a master class in the Red Sea in how un-diminished their capabilities are, keeping global shipping open and increasing the stature of those nations even more.

    *That’s* what you do when you seek glory. That’s how you behave when you are trying to achieve glory and stature and high regard and all that other stuff, if you go for that.

    And then … there’s Russia.

    Nothing Russia has done under Putin has ever achieved anything remotely close to what could be called “glory.” Domination of the weak, yes. Carnage, absolutely. Social control at home, assuredly.

    But glory? Come on. Glory would have been building a new post-Soviet geopolitical order that its membership could be proud of, instead of them all fleeing like survivors of a sinking ship. Glory would have meant becoming a beacon for immigration and global partnerships. Yet in a quarter century Putin did not do a single solitary thing to achieve those ends.

    He’s not seeking glory. He’s seeking suckers. And it looks like the New York Times is first to volunteer. Again.

  9. Yes, russians were jealous of Ukrainians for having better living standards. So they invaded and have systemically dismantled the civil infrastructure throughout the occupied territories. When they can they will target power plants, gas plants, water treatment plants, anything that makes modern life possible.

  11. Maybe if they were just a bit less corrupt, their country wouldn’t have gone to absolute shit.

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