“Peter the Great waged the Great Northern War for 21 years. He seems to have been at war with Sweden, he took something from them. He took nothing from them, he returned (what belonged to Russia),” Putin said after visiting an exhibition dedicated to tsar. In television comments on the 106th day of his war in Ukraine, he compared Peter’s campaign to the work facing Russia today. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register “Obviously, it was up to us to return (what belongs to Russia) and strengthen (the country). And if we proceed from the fact that these core values are the basis of our existence, we will certainly be able to solve the tasks we face. “ In response, a senior adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy dismissed what he called any attempt to legalize land theft. “The West needs to draw a clear red line for the Kremlin to pay the price for every next bloody step … we will brutally liberate our territories,” Mykhailo Podolyak said in an online post. Putin has repeatedly tried to justify Russia’s actions in Ukraine, where its forces destroyed cities, killed thousands and displaced millions, proposing a view of history that claims that Ukraine has no real national identity or state tradition. Peter the Great, an authoritarian modernist admired by both liberals and conservative Russians, named a new capital, St. Petersburg – Putin’s hometown – which he ordered to be built on land he had conquered from Sweden. Prior to Putin’s visit to the show, state television aired a documentary praising Peter the Great as a tough military leader, greatly expanding the territory to the detriment of Sweden and the Ottoman Empire.
INTERESTING IN HISTORY
In recent years, Putin’s interest in Russian history has grown exponentially in public. In April 2020, as Russia entered its first coronavirus lockdown, it compared the pandemic to the 9th-century Turkish nomadic invasions of medieval Russia. In July 2021, the Kremlin published a large essay by Putin in which he argued that Russia and Ukraine were one nation, artificially divided. He laid the foundations for the deployment of his troops in Ukraine. Moscow says it has acted to disarm and “defuse” its neighbor. Ukraine and its allies say Putin has launched an unprovoked offensive war. In the wake of what Russia calls its “special military operation,” Putin has accused Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Soviet Union, of creating Ukraine on what Putin said was historically Russian territory. Instead, he carefully praised Joseph Stalin for creating “a tightly centralized and fully united state,” although he acknowledged the history of “total” repression of the Soviet dictator. Putin has a history of praising leaders who share his own conservative views. Meanwhile, leaders seen as opposed to a strong, united Russian state, including Lenin and Nikita Khrushchev, have seen their contribution diminish. “Putin likes leaders he sees as tough, strong managers,” said Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “He wants to be seen as Peter [the Great]”Modernist style, although he will go down in history as a tough ruler more like Ivan the Terrible,” he added. Sign up now for FREE unlimited access to Reuters.com Register Report by Reuters. Editing by Alex Richardson and Alistair Bell Our role models: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
