Putin hints at further invasions in ominous comments
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Suspicions that Vladimir Putin does not intend to stop at Ukraine in his efforts to expand Russia’s territory have formed a backdrop to the war since he ordered his forces to cross the border in February.
Televised comments made by the Russian president in a Q&A yesterday will only have fuelled such fears.
“Peter the Great waged the Great Northern War for 21 years. It would seem that he was at war with Sweden, he took something from them. He did not take anything from them, he returned (what was Russia’s),” he said after a visiting an exhibition dedicated to the tsar.
When Peter founded the new capital, “no European country recognised it as Russia. Everybody recognised it as Sweden,” Mr Putin said.
“What was (Peter) doing? Taking back and reinforcing. That’s what he did.
He then compared Peter’s campaign with the task facing Russia today.
“Apparently, it also fell to us to return (what is Russia’s) and strengthen (the country). And if we proceed from the fact that these basic values form the basis of our existence, we will certainly succeed in solving the tasks that we face.”
And in perhaps his most ominous remarks at the event, the Russian appeared to leave the door open for further Russian territorial expansion.
“It’s impossible – do you understand? – impossible to build a fence around a country like Russia. And we do not intend to build that fence,” he said.
Mr Putin, now in his 23rd year in power, has repeatedly sought to justify Russia’s actions in Ukraine, where his forces have devastated cities, killed thousands and put millions of people to flight, by propounding a view of history that asserts Ukraine has no real national identity or tradition of statehood.
Peter the Great, an autocratic moderniser admired by liberal and conservative Russians alike, ruled for 43 years and gave his name to a new capital, St Petersburg – Putin’s hometown – that he ordered built on land he conquered from Sweden.
It was a project that cost the lives of tens of thousands of serfs, conscripted as forced labourers to build Peter’s “window to Europe” in the swamps of the Baltic Sea coast.
Prior to Putin’s visit to the exhibition, state television aired a documentary praising Peter the Great as a tough military leader, greatly expanding Russian territory at the expense of Sweden and the Ottoman Empire with the modernised army and navy he built.
Photo- Russian President Vladimir Putin . EPA-EFE/ALEXEI DRUZHININ / SPUTNIK / KREMLIN POOL CREDIT
