Does 30 years, the 25 from December to 1991, Mikhail Gorbachev, the leader of the then Soviet Union, resigned his post and handed over his presidential powers to Boris Yeltsin, the newly appointed president of the Russian Federation.
That night, the red Soviet flag with the hammer and sickle symbols was lowered from the Kremlin and replaced by the Russian tricolor.
The following day the Supreme Soviet recognized the independence of the Soviet republics and formally dissolved the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
The sudden collapse of the USSR, a giant empire that it had controlled during 70 years a varie it was a seismic event that changed the world.
And left the newly created Russian Federation mired in an identity crisis .
“Russia had never been a nation-state in the sense that we give this concept in the West. Russia had been an empire but it had never been a nation state, “Mira Milosevich, analyst for Russia and Eurasia at the Royal Elcano Institute of Spain, tells BBC Mundo.
” So, with the disintegration of the Soviet Union, Russia tried to create a Russian national identity, but it is a very complex process because Russia is a multiethnic, multinational country, with great traditions and very marked by its imperial past ”, he adds.
During the decade of the 90, Russia sought to define not only that national identity but its relationship with The West.
But after the fall of the USSR, in the post-Cold War period, the United States and its Western allies stopped treating Russia as a “great power”, as the USSR.
And the most important manifestation of this degradation was the expansion of NATO in Eastern Europe , the region considered Moscow’s raba of influence.
This, observers say, is what Russian President Vladimir Putin was referring to when He said that the collapse of the Soviet Union had been “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century.”
“It was the disintegration of historical Russia under the name of the Soviet Union,” Putin said.
“We became a completely different country. And what had been built in more than 1. 000 years, much of it was lost. ”
Thus, since he came to power in 2000, Putin has made no secret of his determination to restore Russia’s status as a global power after years of alleged humiliation by the United States and its NATO allies.
And as Mira Milosevich points out, Putin managed to return Russia to its strategic role as a world power.
“Putin considers himself the savior of Russia,” says the analyst . “Because Russia’s attempt to make the democratic transition in the 1990 failed and there was a collapse and absolute bankruptcy of the country. ”
“ Putin has saved Russia and has returned Russia (its role) as a strategic actor on the international scene “, adds the expert.
Indeed, after what was considered the “lost decade” of the 1990 in Russia, Putin made sure the country was heard again on the international stage .
Meteoric rise
Putin worked as a KGB spy during 16 years before resigning in 1991 to begin a political career.
After the resignation of Yeltsin in 1999, Putin became interim president, and less than four months later he was roundly elected in his first term as president of Russia.
After that meteoric rise, he became the president with longest service in the Kremlin since Soviet leader Joseph Stalin , who died in 1953.
A controversial national vote on constitutional reforms in April this year has given him the opportunity to remain in power beyond his current fourth term. , which ends in 2021.
So Putin, from 69 years, could stay in the Kremlin until 2036.
- Putin signs the law that EU will allow you to be in power until 2036
Those who criticize him assure that the president acquired during the Soviet era the features that have shaped his vision of the world.
“It is clear that Russia has returned to the international agenda, but not for positive reasons,” Natasha Kuhrt, a professor in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London, and an expert in security and safety issues, tells BBC Mundo. Foreign policy of Russia and Eurasia.
“It is interesting to note that ten years ago (in the Kremlin) they talked about how Russia needed to make itself more attractive. That I needed to use ‘soft power’. ”
“Well, now they have totally changed. Nobody (in Moscow) is interested in making himself more attractive. All they want is to turn Russia into an actor, for Russia to achieve a place at the table, for the world to recognize Russia. ”
“If that was what Putin wanted, I think he has achieved it, if you only think about a matter of strategic calculations ,” says the expert.
Russia’s global power
- It is the largest country in the world with more than 16 million km2 of territory.
- It is the second largest oil producer in the world (after the US) with 10, 27 million barrels per day.
- Has the second The world’s largest nuclear arsenal (after the US), with 6. 375 warheads.
- Its defense spending is the fourth largest in the world, with Sustained increases in recent years: in 2020 reached US $ 66. 840 millions.
- He is a permanent member of the UN Security Council (one of five) with veto power.
Source: BP World Energy Statistics, SIPRI
Priority
As the experts point out , Putin’s top priority in reversing the Russia’s post-Soviet decline was halting the advance of foreign powers into the former Soviet region.
In 2008, a Russian army invaded Georgia to prevent pro-Western President Mikheil Saakashvili from carrying out a military reconquest of the Georgian separatist territory of South Ossetia, a Russian protectorate .
Had Saakashvili succeeded in reuniting his fractured country, he could have come much closer to his stated goal of making Georgia a viable candidate to join NATO.
Equally f orma, in 2014 in Ukraine, after pro-Western protests toppled Moscow ally President Viktor Yanukovych, Russia intervened militarily, first to annex the Crimean peninsula and later to back anti-rebels. Kiev in Donbas, the Russian-speaking region in eastern Ukraine.
- The new deployment of Russian troops on the border with Ukraine that worries the European Union and the United States
As Mira Milosevich explains, these raids were not part of Putin’s push to reinstate the Soviet Union. It was, he says, a “historical principle of Russian national security.”
influence comes from the concept of Russia’s national security, from protecting what it considers to be its national interest and is highly marked by its historical experience of having been invaded ”, he points out.
“ What Russia wants are spaces between Russia and the potential enemy. And Russia perceives NATO as the greatest threat to its national security and does not want to have NATO on its own borders, ”says the analyst.
Armed power
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia inherited the vast majority of the Soviet nuclear arsenal.
Although the country has substantially reduced its reserves, it still controls the second nuclear force largest in the world.
In 2018, in his annual State of the Nation Address, Putin boasted of powerful new nuclear weapons.
In front of hundreds of senior officials and lawmakers days before an election that granted him a new six-year term, Putin set ambitious domestic goals and issued defiant warnings to the West, to who accused of “trying to repress Russia.”
Putin said that Russia had tested a new heavy ICBM, called Sarmat, and argued that Russia was forced to upgrade its nuclear arsenal after the United States withdrew from the anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaty in 2002.
Putin said that in 2004 had warned the West that it was going to take that measure, but that the West “had not wanted talk to Russia. ”
“ Nobody really wanted to talk to us then. No one listened to us then. So listen to us now, ”Putin declared to thunderous applause in the speech that was televised live across the country.
Since then, Russia has continued to modernize its nuclear arsenal.
According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), in 2021 Russia has some 50 nuclear warheads more in operational deployment than a year earlier.
Russia has also increased its overall military nuclear arsenal by about 180 warheads, mainly due to the deployment of more ballistic missiles intercontinental land with multiple warheads and ballistic missiles launched from the sea.
Thus, today the world not only listens to Russia, but also fears it.
International links
In In his race to restore Russia’s global power, Putin has also been in charge of strengthening ties in regions that had already been strategic for the USSR, such as Latin America.
“All the rep Representations at the diplomatic level and in the international institutions that the Soviet Union used to exercise, are now exercised by Russia “, says Mira Milosevich.
” And without a doubt, Russia has taken advantage of and continued with the traditional historical relations of the Soviet Union that it has had, for example, in Latin America. ”
As the expert points out, Russia’s presence in Latin America is part of a broader international strategy whose main objective is to “undermine US leadership in the region” and “compete with the other emerging great power, China.”
“ Putin is a fantastic strategist, as he has shown,” says the analyst at the Elcano Royal Institute.
“He has been able, for example, to put Russia on the board of the Middle East with much less economic, military or political power than the United States. ”
“ Today Russia is an indispensable actor, the only strategic actor that in M The Middle East talks to everyone, from Hezbollah to the king of Saudi Arabia, ”adds Mira Milosevich.
In addition, Russia is one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council – a place it also inherited from the Soviet Union-, which gives it veto power.
Weaknesses
But diplomatic, military and strategic successes of Putin have failed to disguise Russia’s fundamental internal weaknesses: an economy excessively dependent on energy export earnings (Russia is the 11th largest economy in the world by GDP), extensive corruption, poor infrastructure and social provision, and growing political and social discontent.
As Natasha Kuhrt points out, Putin has largely defined his foreign policy. above with his opposition to the US and the European Union, backing “atypical” regimes and selling arms to whoever asks for them.
“Like the Soviet Union, which sold planes and weapons to African countries with plans to pay in five years, that does not necessarily mean having influence,” says Kuhrt. “That does not mean that those countries are going to be your loyal allies.”
“Russia sells a large number of weapons and that in itself does not make you influential. You can build a country a nuclear power plant but that does not mean that it will be loyal to you. So you have to be careful when we talk about influence and global power. ”
“ Because in terms of influence, (Russia) is not doing what China is doing, for example, in Africa, where is reaping huge long-term rewards in terms of investment. ”
More tensions
Today tensions with the West are at one of their most hot flashes.
The West has accused Russia of concentrating tens of thousands of troops near Ukraine in preparation for a possible attack.
The Group of Seven warned Moscow of “massive consequences” if it attacks Ukraine.
The The Kremlin has said that Russia has no plans to launch a new attack on Ukraine and that the West appears to have convinced itself of Moscow’s aggressive intentions based on what it calls false stories from the Western media.
For now it is unlikely that the divisions between Russia and the West will be resolved soon.
Putin may have already achieved his goal of making Russia a respected – and feared – actor in the world, but as Kuhrt points out, it is unlikely that the president will find a sustainable place for Russia in the world. new world order, a place where it is treated as an equal partner.
“I think that Russia continues to try to position itself in the world. And now with the rise of China that will not be so easy, “says the King’s College expert.
“Perhaps Putin thinks he knows how to do it, but that does not mean that he will be able to do it.”
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