Putin couldn't bring to reality intention of restoring empire, - ukrainian MFA
Against the background of Kremlin’s obsession with restoring Soviet hegemony, but the security of the entire Europe and the west, not only Ukraine, is at stake, Ukraine’s Foreign Minister Pavlo Klimkin wrote in his op-ed for The Guardian.
The postwar order that provided peace and stability across the continent appears to be breaking up, while “reversing the breakup of the Soviet Union and restoring the Russian empire have now become an obsession for the Kremlin,” Klimkin wrote for The Guardian. Ukrainian foreign minister highlights three things central to understanding what motivates Russia, and how Vladimir Putin’s government works.
The first is Russkiy mir – “Russian world”: a philosophy that harks back to the Soviet era. Central to it is the belief that Ukraine is part of a greater Russia. When in 2014 a popular revolution ousted Viktor Yanukovych, it was more than Russia could stomach. It subsequently illegally annexed Crimea and invaded Donbas in support of the so-called “People’s Republics of Luhansk and Donetsk”, which the Ukrainian government believes to be little more than a mixture of terrorist and criminal organizations.
Besides, Russia greedily eyes other former states and satellites of the Soviet Union, and more broadly seeks to destabilize and divide the rest of Europe and the wider transatlantic alliance. It is instructive that the Kremlin is commissioning new statues of Stalin, one of the 20th century’s worst mass murderers.
Second, hybrid warfare is a term that will be unfamiliar to most. It was developed and brought to new heights by the Kremlin, as military aggression against Ukraine was accompanied by carefully planned propaganda and the orchestration of sham elections to support the Russian version of reality.
“Like old-style propaganda it uses pernicious lies to support the Kremlin’s cause, but it is more sophisticated and insidious than the old Soviet propagandists could ever have dreamed of,” Klimkin says. This sort of warfare makes full use of modern technology, and is waged across the globe by the well-funded TV station Russia Today, or RT, with its benign call to “Question More”. “What they want questioned is the established order,” the top Ukrainian diplomat writes, adding that “they do not carry a coherent Russian narrative – they simply seek to undermine that of the west.”
Source: UNIAN