Putin’s plans for Ukraine, on a map: a small country with Kiev as its capital

The Russian president Vladimir Putin Two years ago he justified the military attack on his country Ukraine saying that its neighbors were preparing armed aggression against Russia and At the beginning of the war he denied that Moscow had expansionist temptations. He simply said, at the beginning of the attack, that his country was calling for such things as a supposed “denazification” of Ukraine, a country with a Jewish president and the grandson of Jews who fought against the Nazis in World War II and whose presence is a far-right parliamentarian minors in Europe.

Western diplomacy and especially the governments of Eastern Europe have always corrected Putin by telling him that what the Kremlin autocrat is looking for is expand Russia to occupy parts of Eastern Europe which one day occupied Tsarist Russia or the Soviet Union. They thus accuse Moscow of look for the disappearance of Ukraine and further changes in borders, which would give way years of instability and warsIncluded a conflict with NATO.

The most concrete plans now presented by the Russian government They draw a map of Europe without Ukraine, reduced to a city-state with limited powers. It would be Ukraine that would remain independent when Moscow managed to win the war, second Dimitri Medvedev explained on television: the former president and close ally of Putin who is now his man on the National Security Council.

On the map of the Russian president your country eats eastern and central Ukraine, grants much of the west to Poland, Transnitria (a Russian-controlled area of ​​Moldova) would join Russia, and regions of Ukraine such as Transcarpathia, where there are Hungarian- and Romanian-speaking minorities, remnants of the former, would be ceded to Hungary and Romania. The Austro-Hungarian Empire and the population movements that caused the world wars of the first half of the 20th century.

Medvedev’s speech in front of the map, televised on Monday and proclaimed in front of a group of young students in the city of Sochi, he was belligerent and hinted that Russia and Ukraine’s objectives go far beyond those announced so far.

“Ukraine is definitely Russia”

The former president said so your country will not stop the war until the capitulation of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyj. Russia does not accept, according to Medvedev, any negotiation other than the one that will be concluded after the unconditional capitulation of Ukraine. President Putin’s faithful ally said this the concept that “Ukraine is not Russia must disappear forever. Ukraine is definitely Russia. The historic parts of the country need to come home.”

Medvedev was seen during his years of government (2008-2012, when he held the presidency because Putin, with the Constitution then in force, could not aspire to a third consecutive mandate) as a liberal, as someone closer to the West or at least someone to negotiate with in the face of a Putin they considered more stubborn.

Now Medvedev claims that Russia has the right to a “strategic space”, which must be indivisible from Ukraine. “Our adversaries must understand (he says in the speech) once and for all the simple fact that the territories on both banks of the Dnipro (the great river that divides Ukraine in two) They are an integral part of Russia’s strategic and historical borders”. And he denies any kind of negotiations with Zelenskyj. They would only negotiate with a post-Zelenskiy government that recognizes that much of Ukraine is actually Russian territory.

The former Russian president also stressed that relations between Russia and the United States They are even worse than in 1962. It was the year of the so-called “missile crisis”, when Moscow placed medium-sized missiles in Cuba, capable of carrying nuclear bombs and which could reach a large part of US territory.

That crisis, which historians see as one of the hottest and most dangerous moments of the 20th century (the powers already had nuclear weapons), is less serious than the current one, according to the former Russian president. Because this, he told the audience, “is a full-scale war against Russia with American weapons and with the participation of American special forces and advisors.”