Russian historian Serguei Medvedev opined on Wednesday that Ukraine is “just one step” for Vladimir Putin to unleash “World War III”, warning that the future of the world is at stake.
“It is necessary for the world, the countries of NATO and the European Union to realize that we are dealing with World War III and that (Ukraine) is not a regional conflict on the edge of Europe, because what is at stake is the future of Europe… and the future of the world,” said Medvedev, 57, a Russian historian and academic who has been in exile since 2020, author of “The Return of the Russian Leviathan.”
“Make no mistake. This (war in Ukraine) is not a war to supplement the imperial age, it is not a post-colonial war or a geopolitical intervention, like many around the world. For Russia, this is – in fact – a world war. It may be difficult to understand in 2023, but we must realize that in Putin’s eyes it is the ‘Third World War’,” said the historian and university professor in Prague and Riga.
According to the historian, Vladimir Putin has been preparing for this conflict for at least 15 years: since the speech at the Munich conference in which he declared that Russia had been “betrayed by the West” because of the expansion of the Atlantic Alliance.
The campaign that Russia launched in Ukraine in February 2022 is the pretext or a “preparation zone” because, he claims, Russia’s target for Russia is the West.
“It is about the will to establish a new world order. Russia feels that it belongs to the group of the great powers of the modern world and that after 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, after the fall of Berlin and the end of the Warsaw Pact,” he said.
According to the historian, Russia – in Putin’s thinking – should be a power along with the European bloc, the United States and the People’s Republic of China and “must be one of the key countries in the construction of the modern world”.
Speaking at the conference that took place at the Concordia Club, the historian said that Putin knows that Russia has no economic strength or a strong social and economic model or military power, yet Russia has “the power of fear, the power of chaos and the power of destruction”.
“Russia does not have the capabilities to build the world, but it does have the capabilities to destroy the world, sow the seeds of chaos, destroy pipelines, use chemical weapons, destroy communications, ‘proxy wars’ of the affected markets and the global economy and inflation,’ he said.
Thus, according to the Russian academic, the challenges of 1945 can be “compared” because the “world” has not completely solved the problems of the end of World War II.
“We have to finish the job because ‘1945’ is an unfinished job. At that time there were two totalitarian dictatorships (Nazi and Soviet) and only one was defeated (Nazi Germany) and the other survived, carried on and is now resurrected in on the traditional way,” he said, emphasizing that the “world” must defeat the second dictatorship, referring to Russia.
“Only then can we have confidence in the future,” he stressed.
At the conference “Can the history of Russia explain the context for understanding the invasion of Ukraine or does the war represent another phenomenon?” organized by the Concordia Press Club of Vienna, which accompanied Lusa with remote resources, the academic also said that the post-Soviet era ended with the final invasion of Ukrainian territory and that one of Russia’s “evils” was the maintenance of the capital is in Moscow.
“If we think about the future, we should think of a post-Moscow Russia, that is, the capital should no longer be Moscow. This is one of the roots of evil. Moscow is the capital of Eurasia, it is not a European capital. It is the capital of Europe, Northern Eurasia,” Medvedev said.
Regarding the Russian capital, the historian added that Russia is the only modern country – with industrial capabilities and nuclear forces and a member of the United Nations Security Council – that is governed from a medieval castle.
“Power is exercised from the Kremlin. You sit in a 15th century castle and watch the world from the battlements of the castle built for defense purposes. So power must leave the Kremlin to be placed elsewhere, in central Russia (.. .) Not even China is governed from the Forbidden City anymore,” he stated.
Serguei Medvedev is preparing the study “A War Made in Russia”, which should be published by Polity Press in Europe in the coming months.
Source: DN
