As US officials talk up the prospects of a compromise peace with the Kremlin, Russian President Vladimir Putin has once again signaled that his expansionist appetite is far from sated. In a bellicose address delivered to Russian Defense Ministry officials in Moscow on December 17, Putin declared that the maximalist goals of his Ukraine invasion will be met “unconditionally” and framed the war as a crusade to reverse Russia’s post-Soviet retreat. “If the opposing side and their foreign patrons refuse to engage in substantive discussions, Russia will achieve the liberation of its historical lands by military means,” he declared.
None of this is entirely new, of course. Putin has long been notorious for delivering rambling history lectures to justify Russia’s war against Ukraine, and has directly compared the current invasion to Russian Czar Peter the Great’s eighteenth-century wars of imperial conquest. Nevertheless, at a time when European leaders are already looking to the eastern horizon with trepidation, it makes sense to explore what Putin means by “historically Russian lands” and examine just how far his imperial ambitions may actually stretch.
The most straightforward interpretation of Putin’s latest comments would suggest that he was referring to the portion of eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region that remains under Ukrainian control. After all, this small but heavily fortified and strategically important territory is currently at the heart of negotiations and has been named by Moscow as its price for a ceasefire. However, Kremlin officials are well known for sending contradictory signals regarding their territorial objectives in Ukraine, with Putin himself speaking this month about the “inevitable liberation of the Donbas and Novorossiya.”
Putin’s reference to “Novorossiya” (“New Russia”) raised eyebrows and was widely seen as a signal that Russia may be preparing to increase its territorial demands. The Czarist era term “Novorossiya” was first employed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries by imperial administrators to describe large swathes of southern and eastern Ukraine then under Russian rule. It fell into disuse during the Soviet period, only to be resurrected by the Kremlin following the onset of Russia’s Ukraine invasion in 2014.
Voice of Ukraine 