Those in Moscow who Say that ‘Without a Victory over Ukraine, Russia will Cease to Exist’ are Living in a Past that No Longer Exists, Savvin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Nov. 2 --  As Putin’s war in Ukraine drags on, some of his ideologists are insisting that “without a victory over Ukraine, Russia will cease to exist” are living in a past that no longer exists and one, that if it is pursued for much longer, will condemn Russia to an unprecedented defeat, Dimitry Savvin says.

            The editor of the Riga-based Russian conservative Harbin portal says that in the 19^th century, there was some basis for this economically and demographically. At that time, Russia lived by the export of grain, and the ethnic Russians would have been under 50 percent of the population without Ukrainians (harbin.lv/est-li-u-rossii-budushchee-bez-ukrainy).

            Avoiding the loss of its main export earner and finding its ethnic core so small were thus legitimate concerns of Russian thinkers given the challenges they faced at that time. But today, Savvin suggests, the world has changed; but those who make this argument have not taken those changes into account.

            Russia no longer depends on grain exports. It relies on the export of oil and gas and those come from what is now the Russian Federation not Ukraine. And demographically, ethnic Russians form slightly more than 70 percent of the population of the state ruled from Moscow, and not the 44 percent they did over a century ago.

            Indeed, he continues, “for the preservation of the Russian ethnonational core as the basis of the Russian society and state, the war in Ukraine was not just unnecessary but has become a genuine catastrophe,” with mounting losses on the battlefield, a declining birthrate, and the influx of more culturally different immigrants from abroad.

            Loose talk suggesting that “’without the defeat of Ukraine, Russia will not survive’ is an out of date ideological scheme of the time of our great grandfathers and is not connected with the contemporary world. More than that,” Savvin concludes, “today is it openly absurd and thus deadly” for Russia.

            The only people who are prepared to talk this way and use such out-of-date thinking to justify this “bestial and insane war,” Savvin says, are the very same people who have been “the most odious enemies of the Russian peoples, those who since 1917 and continuing to this day sit in the Kremlin.”

            A loss to Ukraine will not destroy Russia, he suggests; indeed, it likely is the only way for Russia to begin the process of escaping out from under a regime that for more than a century has been the worst enemy of the Russian people.