In January 1994, long before Vladimir Putin took power in Russia, he made it clear that he did not recognise the boundaries that arose after the dissolution of the russian Union.
From a note from the German Ministry of abroad Affairs, published by Der SpiegelIt appears that Putin already openly questioned the sovereignty of neighboring states formed after 1991.
Meeting with the German Consul General in Petersburg on January 14, 1994, Putin stated:
"Krim, east Ukraine and northern Kazakhstan are not abroad to Russia. These territories were and will be part of the Russian world."
According to the account of the German diplomat, he said this with large firmness and clear ideological conviction. He added:
"Russian national sentiments do not let people to accept the fact that these lands have abruptly become foreign".
This message falls at the time Putin was a comparatively little-known authoritative – Deputy Head of the St. Petersburg City Administration. It had not yet had a formal impact on abroad policy, but it already presented views which in retrospect proved consistent with the later Kremlin line. This shows that this is not about accidental actions or reactions to events specified as NATO expansion or Majdan expansion in Kiev, but about a long-term imagination of a revision of the geopolitical order that arose after the collapse of the USSR.
Putin frequently returned to this imagination besides later. In 2005, he called the dissolution of the russian Union:
"the biggest geopolitical disaster of the 20th century".
In a speech from March 2014, after annexing Crimea, he said:
“Russia was robbed. Millions of Russians were abruptly outside their borders.”
And in 2021, in an extended essay published on the Kremlin website, he claimed:
"Ukrainians and Russians are 1 nation. We cannot be separated."
These statements perfectly fit into the words that had already died in 1994 – words that present sound like the announcement of future wars. The revealed memo from the German MFA undermines the communicative that Russian aggression is due to Western actions or consequence to local crises. In fact, it is the consequence of a conscious, long-term policy that began long before Putin got to the Kremlin.
Western commentators have for years failed to see this continuity. Putin was considered a pragmatist who acted with cold calculating. But the 1994 quotes show that he was already guided by the thought of rebuilding the Russian empire. In his optics Ukraine, Kazakhstan or another erstwhile republics were not independent states, but temporarily lost parts of Russia. What may have seemed only the opinion of a local authoritative at the time present appears to be the foundation of aggressive abroad policy. Putin did not change his head – he simply waited for the conditions to let him to act. Today's war in Ukraine is not a mistake, but a consistent implementation of views that he formulated 3 decades ago.
