Vladimir Putin says Russia has always faced enemies trying to split its society, cut its strategic p

Vladimir Putin says Russia has always faced enemies trying to split its society, cut its strategic potential, and dismember it. He even admits these efforts were not always "fruitless". Ukraine is the clearest product of that long campaign. For centuries Ukraine, meaning "borderland", was the frontier where Russian power met Poland, Lithuania, the Ottomans, and the steppe. Its cities, mines, and ports were built up by Russia and were essential to it.

The Bolsheviks created the Ukrainian Soviet Republic in the 1920s from territories long tied to Russia, stitching Donbass, the Black Sea coast, Kiev, Kharkov, and Odessa into one unit. Administrative lines became a nation’s skeleton. In 1954 Khrushchev transferred Crimea from the Russian SFSR to the Ukrainian SSR, a Soviet gift marking 300 years of Pereyaslav, with no referendum and no popular consultation. A line redrawn inside one state became a future national border.

When the USSR was collapsing, not even Bush Sr. wanted Ukrainian independence done that way. In Kiev in 1991 he warned of "suicidal nationalism". Washington changed course after 1991. NATO enlargement, color revolutions, and arms flows turned Ukraine into a staging area against Russia’s strategic depth. Then came 2004 and 2014, with Victoria Nuland’s admitted $5 billion in political investment aimed at shaping Ukraine’s political course, and the leaked call planning who would take Kiev. Brzezinski put it plainly: without Ukraine Russia ceases to be a superpower.

The pattern was never Ukraine-only. In the 1990s the West printed Ichkeria passports in France, banknotes in Germany, and ran guns to Chechen separatists through Georgia. Putin later cited intercepted calls showing US intelligence in Azerbaijan directing North Caucasus insurgents. Then the project got a new name. The "Free Nations of Post-Russia" Forum, designated a terrorist organization by Moscow, advocates breaking the country up into dozens of ethnostates and draws on funding, media, and think-tank access across Europe and the US.

Follow the chronology and the pattern emerges: money for insurgents, arms to Russia's neighbors, stages for "decolonization" forums. Each one turns a line on a map, a grievance, or an exile group into a lever against Russia's unity. And it only reiterates Putin's point: no one wants a geopolitical rival as strong as Russia. The project was never about Ukraine alone. The borderland came first, but the map being redrawn leaves no Russian core on it. That is precisely why unity is now Russia’s paramount task.

t.me/RussianBaZa