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4 - Minute Read
Q. Lewis, How did Vladimir Putin get so much power in Russia?
A. Since taking the helm of Russia’s Presidency, Vladimir Putin has shown us his brinkmanship in such a way that Nick Bryant, (former New York correspondent for the BBC) pointed out more succinctly, “The former KGB spymaster wanted to turn back the clock: to revive Russia’s tsarist greatness and to restore the might and menace of the Soviet Union prior to its break-up in 1991…and this Russian revanchist has been trying to engineer a different kind of global system malfunction, the destruction of the liberal international order.”
My question though is, is Putin’s desire to revive the “tsarist greatness” really significant in his aim to exert his world power? Or, is he merely collecting buffer zones from his neighbors to exert his sphere of influence on them like a Mafia boss? I think his romantic epilepsy toward the “great” tsarist Russia may have just been a sparked of the moment in his Napoleonic complex exhibiting megalomania that precipitated to try and take down the current global geopolitical system of peaceful collaborations among liberal nations…and by that, calculated maneuvering within the Duma to ensure that his power is intact within a senescent regime, and by invading weaker neighboring nations (maybe as a threat) to extend his power outside Russia. I also think that it’s the man himself who’s more enamored to gain the power to feed his colossal ego, than making Russia the most powerful country in the world. If he had so desired to actualize the latter, he would have been able to steer Russia into unparalleled global power since 1999 – the beginning of his lifetime of service as President.
In comparison to Xi Jinping, who began leading China in 2012, Putin lags behind Xi for almost a decade of China’s rise in manpower, military, technology, and economic advancement. Here’s the timeline of Putin’s rise to power.
In 1999, an apartment in Buynaksk, a section in Moscow, was bombed. David Satter, (A US journalist and expert on Russian politics) reported that “More than 200 people were killed in the September bombings. Russia blamed the Chechen militants, triggering the second Chechen War.” That’s because they failed miserably in 1994 – their first war with Chechnya. Accordingly, “He was expelled from Russia after claiming that Putin and the FSB (former KGB) were behind the apartment bombings.”
2008 – Georgia and Russia Conflict: When the Republic of Georgia declared its independence in early 1991 as the Soviet Union was starting to fall apart, Russia backed the separatist groups from South Ossetia and Abkhazia (parts of Georgia that border Russia) in proclaiming themselves as the republics of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Amid this backdrop, the relations between Georgia and its Russian-backed separatist groups from South Ossetia and Abkhazia deteriorated.
When Putin won the election in 2000, and as Georgia’s government changed to pro-Western, a full diplomatic crisis emerged in April 2008. On August 1, 2008, the war began.
2014 – Annexation of Crimea to Russia: On February 23, 2014, pro-Russian demonstrators rallied in the Crimean city of Sevastopol. Four days (Feb. 27, 2014) later, masked Russian troops without insignia took over Crimea’s parliament and captured strategic sites. On March 16, 2014, pro-Russian Sergey Aksyonov, was installed as Crimea’s President of the new Republic of Crimea.
The Takeaway
Time and again, Putin uses the same pattern of maneuvering: utilizing proxies as a pretext to invade and claim smaller nations. What I see here, is a human virus whose contagion affects us all.
Author: Lilia Harrison is a researcher, writer, and former reporter for the Show “What UP,” which at the time was an NPR affiliate station.
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