Putin Wants to Create a New Slavic Empire with Himself as Its Leader, Vilk Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 27 – If Putin is to be defeated, it is important to recognize that he does not want to restore the Soviet Union but rather to create a new Slavic empire with himself as its fuhrer, “a new center of the world which would then push the former Western centers far away” from its borders, Yevgeny Vilk says.

            The Munich-based Russian blogger says that is the lesson of Putin’s behavior in Kazakhstan and in Ukraine. In Kazakhstan, he acted to keep in place someone who would not open the way to greater Western influence; but in Ukraine, he wants to conquer the entire country (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=62906B4CB3F5C).

            That is because Putin’s goal is not to recreate the USSR. Were it, he would have wanted to occupy and then annex Kazakhstan. Instead, he aspires to create a new Slavic empire with what he sees as the triune unity of Russians, Belarusians and Ukrainians and himself as its fuhrer.

            And because this is his goal, everyone must recognize that Putin is “not a politician in Russia but rather a politician and Fuhrer of a future Slavic empire that he has not yet constructed.” This is another way in which Putin is like Hitler who was “not a politician of Germany but of a fantastic Aryan empire” he tried but failed to create.

            The response of the civilized world to Putin must be like its response to Hitler, Vilk says. No agreement with them is possible until “the bearers of such fantastic, aggressive and inhuman attitudes” are forced to give them up.

            If Vilk is correct, that suggests that Putin views the former Soviet space as consisting of two different regions, an inner one of the three Slavic republics he wants to form as a single empire and an outer one consisting of everyone else that he does not want to include within the borders of his country but rather to prevent anyone else from having influence there.

            The problem with such a vision, of course, is that Putin sees his own weapon against the influence of others as being brute force and so even beyond his dream of a Slavic empire, he will if not stopped act in ways that will likely force him to try to absorb the others as well, an approach that will lead to disaster whether he succeeds or fails.

            If he succeeds, he will recreate the conditions that led to the demise of the former Soviet Union but this time in a more violent way and comprehensive way, including the disintegration of the Russian Federation. And if he fails, he will nonetheless push the region into a state of war that will end in equally tragic ways for his country and himself.