Putin has Blocked Western Attempts to Create ‘a Yugoslavia with Nukes’ in Russia, Mironov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar. 24 – Pro-Kremlin Moscow political analyst Grigory Mironov says that for 20 years, the West sought to impose a Yugoslavia-like outcome on the Russian Federation but that Vladimir Putin has successfully countered those efforts by uniting all the residents of his country.

            “The West understood that direct conflict with Russia could lead to a great tragedy for it and therefore attempted to use scenarios already tested in other countries,” Mironov says. “As a rule, these involved contradictions within the population based on nationality or religion” (riafan.ru/22364348-politolog_mironov_dolgie_godi_zapad_gotovil_dlya_rossii_yugoslavskii_stsenarii).

            What the West did in Yugoslavia was to be the model: “At the moment of the collapse of Yugoslavia, the population of the country consisted of Orthodox Serbs and Montenegrins, Catholic Croats, and Bosnian Muslims. All of these represented a single people who spoke a single language, but their religions, cultures and civilizations were absolutely different.”

            By breaking that country into more than half a dozen parts, Mironov continues, the West transformed a country which “called itself ‘the little Russia in the Balkans’” and an important player in international affairs into a marginal grouping of states with little influence and continuing conflicts.

            The Moscow commentator argues that the Americans wanted to do the same thing in Russia and sought to achieve their ends by playing up ethnic and religious differences in the population, but Putin blocked their campaign by recognizing and promoting the common language all these groups shared.

            Pro-Kremlin writers are increasingly stressing as does Putin the primacy of language over ethnic or religious differences, forgetting of course that there are many peoples around the world who speak the same language but view themselves as different nations and that some nations have emerged only when they stop speaking their own tongues and begin using imperial ones.

            But even more intriguing in Mironov’s case is his insistence that the West wanted a Yugoslav solution to the USSR and Russia, a position that completely ignores the fears Western leaders frequently expressed about the dangers of Russia becoming “a Yugoslavia with nukes” (windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2021/01/after-putin-russia-may-yet-become.html and windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2022/03/putin-thinks-he-is-restoring-soviet.html).

            Apparently, there are now some in Moscow who fear exactly that and who want to remind the West of what Western leaders feared 30 years ago.