Lost in Russified Whataboutistan
The Reality of Language and National Identity vs Russia’s Version
Things That Can’t Go On, Don’t
Economist Herbert Stein’s aphorism finds geopolitical application in Russia: if Russia without empire isn’t Russia, then Russia won’t be.
The Russia-Ukraine war is fought between Russia’s constrained geopolitical reality and Russia’s self-conception as a great power empire. Russia is as much at war with itself and its own grievance-driven inferiority complex as with Ukraine and, indirectly, the West. Russia refuses to abandon its post-Soviet ethno-nationalist imperial identity, which is perfectly in character with the empire’s self-deceiving founder:
Putin likes to compare himself to Peter the Great. Russia was a viable empire when Peter the Great told the Swedes before his 1709 victory at Poltava, “we’re thirty millions and you’re only two.” But that victory set the pattern: Russia wins wars with technologically more advanced and wealthier western opponents only in coalition with one or more other western powers.
