America’s paranoid war game fantasies about Putin’s Russia
This map of Europe, appearing in the March/April 2015 issue of Modern War magazine (a publisher of military strategy games), purports to show “Putin’s vision of Europe for 2015.” Based on the compiled speeches, papers and offhand remarks of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his advisers, it’s the ultimate war gamer fantasy of how dangerous an aggressive an expansionist and imperialist Russian might become for Europe.
On the map, parts of Ukraine have been lopped off to create Donbas, Crimea and Novorossiya (“New Russia”). The Baltic states have been partitioned to make room for ethnic Russian states in Narva and Dvinsk. Transnistria appears as a separate nation-state. Georgia has been partitioned into Western Georgia and Kakheti, bookended on either side by “Russian Abkhazia” and the “Caucasus Emirates.” To make that possible, there’s a “heavily-patrolled autobahn-type highway” giving Russia a narrow corridor of access to the South Caucasus.
And consider all the other audacious changes on this map of Europe — Germany appears to have expanded significantly both eastward and westward; there’s a new “ghetto-like mini-state” called “Arab Piedmont” for Western Europe’s restive Muslim population; and England and Spain have been partitioned due to separatist movements in Scotland and Catalonia, respectively. Turkey has carved out part of Bulgaria to form “Turkish Burgas.” (Perhaps as compensation for partnering with Russia on a huge new gas deal?) Eastern Europe has become a mess of small states — Chelm, Galicia, Carpathian Rus, Bukovina and Bessarabia.
According to Gilberto Villahermosa, the author of the “Putin as Warlord” piece that accompanies the map in Modern War magazine, “The resurgence of Germany to its prewar 1939 borders in the east, and those of 1914 in the west, would be engineered as payoff to Berlin for letting all the other changes take place.” It’s another Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, this time engineered between Putin and Merkel! And we thought they didn’t like each other!
Despite the war gamer fantasy component of a new Russian-German conspiracy to divide up Europe, the contours of this map may not be as crazy as they first appear. Russia continues to play its political and energy sector cards, playing off one European state against another in search of strategic advantage. And there is a historical precedent for many of these moves. Back in September 2014, Robert Coalson wrote in The Atlantic of how legendary dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn in 1990 predicted many of the moves Putin is making today in the post-Soviet space. Last June, Frank Jacobs used an eerily similar type of scenario in Foreign Policy explaining “What Russia Could Look Like in 2035, if Putin Gets His Wish.”
That being said, the “Putin as Warlord” thesis trades too much on war gamer fantasies. In the piece, there’s extended analysis of Russia’s need for steel and wheat, of the imperative to boost population in order to field bigger and better armies. Putin is described as a modern-day warlord who is using Russian military power to restore Russian greatness, the same way that Hitler used German military power to bring back German greatness. And, to top it all off, there’s a hilarious Photoshopped image of Putin as an aging Brezhnev-type figure in Soviet military regalia. Because there’s nothing scarier than the return of the mighty USSR.
