Putin Continues to Call Russia a Federation to Make It Easier for Him to Annex Former Soviet Republics, Shtepa Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Feb. 23 – Russia did not become a federation in the 1990s: It remained a unitary state, Vadim Shtepa says. But Putin continues to call the country “the Russian Federation” and is using that term as part of his ongoing effort to reconquer Ukraine and other former Soviet republics.
    “Had Russia declared itself a unitary empire – and Putin clearly sympathizes with such a regime as when he criticizes Lenin for ‘dividing the country into republics,’” the editor of the Tallinn-based Region.Expert portal says, “it would be more difficult for Moscow to annex the territories of other countries” (moscowtimes.ru/2025/02/23/postfederalizm-ili-federatsiya-naiznanku-a156038 reposted at region.expert/postfederation/).
    That “would have been seen by many as the continuation of imperial aggression of the past,” Shtepa says, and would have been resisted more widely. But by organizing “referenda” on joining the Russian Federation in “the republics” Moscow created within occupied portions of Ukraine, Putin achieves the same ends but convinces many that he isn’t being an imperialist.
    That is perhaps the most immediately policy relevant insight the specialist on Russian regionalists makes in his programmatic article, itself a summary of his new book, Post-Russia (in Russian; Riga, 2025, 168 pp. ISBN: 978-9934-298-1-6). But it is far from the only one that those seeking to understand Putin’s Russia should take into account.
    Among the others:
•    Because Russia did not become a federation in the 1990s, there is little to revive. Instead, there is an entirely different system which must be created.
•    Since 1991, Russia has moved from a system in which the republics had more rights than the regions to one in which the republics and the regions are equally powerless relative to Moscow.
•    That happened because Moscow was more frightened of the predominantly Russian regions becoming republics or like the republics than by anything the republics might do.
•    That fear has led Moscow to take actions that have made the Russian regions the core of the Russian world Putin continues to promote.
•    The current arrangements won’t last but will instead generate countervailing powers and efforts by the regions and the republics.