Three months into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Putin drew parallels between Peter the Great’s founding of St Petersburg and his own modern-day ambitions.
In a speech made three months after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine began, President Vladimir Putin appeared to leave the door open for further Russian territorial expansion.
When Peter founded the new capital, “no European country recognised it as Russia. Everybody recognised it as Sweden,” Putin said. He added: “What was doing? Taking back and reinforcing. That’s what he did. And it looks like it fell on us to take back and reinforce as well.” The Baltic nations of Estonia, Lithuania and Latvia were invaded and annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, following Nazi Germany’s betrayal of an agreement with Moscow to divide up the territory between Berlin and Moscow, known as the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.
As Russian forces continued to pound the eastern Ukrainian city of Sievierodonetsk in fierce, Putin, in televised comments, compared Peter’s campaign with the task facing Russia today.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.
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