Paris: Russian President Vladimir Putin has recently tried his best to embody the personality of a wicked madman bordering on the genre of a movie villain, as his military situation in Ukraine becomes more and more dire.

It was hard for me to ignore the thoughts of the outrageously tense bad guys in the Austin Powers movies following their outrageous performance on Friday, when they raised their voices against Western imperialism, the United States' nuclear weapons war against Japan in World War I. regarding use. II, and accused the United States of practicing "Satanism".

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Putin's recent threats to use nuclear weapons are apparently not meant to make people laugh, but to make them tremble with fear. And while there are many reasons to be concerned about the prospect of him turning to WMDs, it's challenging to think clearly about whether Putin's threats are actually true given the widespread concern surrounding the Russian leader's growing rhetoric. represent a novel.

Last week's news coverage of Russia's disaster in Ukraine focused on two points: that Putin was making very vague remarks about the use of nuclear weapons, and that he was insisting that he killed his neighbors after a referendum. An area roughly the size of Portugal was legitimately occupied. Practice in areas that were considered so unstable that the word "so-called" was added to most of its mentions in the international media.

The results of the 1991 referendum on Ukrainian independence, in which every single region of the country, including major Russian-speaking regions, voted in favor of independence, most of them flying in the face of a fake referendum, as tweeted by Karl went. Bildt, Co-Chair of the European Council on Foreign Relations.

However, what Putin did last week was not novel, showing how illogical the thinking of a man once considered a master strategist has become. Putin has made frequent nuclear threats throughout this war, both explicitly and indirectly. He foresaw the consequences of any attempt to attack his forces on Russian soil at the beginning of the conflict for Ukraine and NATO, for example, even as his forces hit the Russian frontier. The areas were used for logistical support and for staging missile attacks against Ukraine.

Washington was initially hesitant to publicly admit that it was sharing intelligence and arming Ukraine, not least fearing that doing so would lead to a direct, escalating relationship between the US and Russia. There may be conflict. Russia's intentional targeting of nuclear power plants in Ukraine also appears to have been done with the clear intention of fueling nuclear fears in Europe and elsewhere.

Merger attempts are also nothing new. Indeed, Russia's audacious and direct attempt to capture Kyiv, the capital of Ukraine, marked the beginning of this war. Naturally, Russia already has experience in occupying Ukrainian territory; Most notably, Crimea, which he formally annexed in 2014 after a covert special operations infiltration in which Russian soldiers donned anonymous uniforms.

Since then, Russia's ambitions have always been extremist: to either swallow Ukraine whole or reduce it to a state of highly subservient slavery, which would be the first step towards re-absorption of its neighbour.

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Putin's most recent claim that he had captured Ukraine's Far East was not only made during a messy and embarrassing withdrawal from the battlefield, but it was also an admission of unintentional futility. Moscow is attempting to achieve through hypothetical legitimacy what it could not achieve through military force, and is hoping - I believe in vain - that it will demoralize Ukrainians and for Ukraine That would weaken European support enough to force it to the negotiating table, where it would give Putin enough territory to declare victory in front of a home audience and allow him to save face.

Putin's tense allusions to Western imperialism are the most intriguing of all his recent statements, but not because they should be interpreted the way he intended.

In his speech on Friday, Putin denounced a long list of crimes committed by Western imperialism, including "the global slave trade, the genocide of American Indian tribes, the exploitation of India and Africa, and the wars of England and France against China." which forced that country to open its ports for the opium trade."

It cannot be denied that the Empire has played an important role in shaping modern Western history and wealth; The legend begins with the use of slave labor in the Caribbean to produce valuable goods such as sugar.

Africa, Africans, and the Making of the Modern World, 1471 to the Second World War, I detail this history. It is also true that the United States has very much been an empire, despite the fact that most Americans tend to have a huge blind spot toward their nation's imperial history. This history started as soon as lands west of the Allegheny Mountains were conquered, at the expense of native populations who were the targets of settler violence and numerous military operations.

The United States' push for imperium accelerated in the late 19th century with the defeat of Spain and the acquisition of colonies in the Philippines and the Caribbean, as well as the annexation of Hawaii, as Daniel Immerwahr explains in his excellent book How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. Since then, even if more subtly, America's influence has increased to the point where the U.S. military now has a large number of bases, both large and small, in nations and territories all over the world.

However, there are a number of issues with Putin's criticism, starting with the fact that Russia is unmistakably one of the world's most aspirational imperial powers. In fact, Russia pursued its own empire-building over a number of centuries, but accelerated this campaign in the 19th century, very much with America envy in mind, as Dominic Ziegler points out in his 2015 book Black Dragon River: A Journey Down the Amur River at the Borderlands of Empire.

As ethnic Russians pushed farther and farther into the country's vast eastern hinterlands, this meant subduing, displacing, and assimilating its own native populations. There, the American bison played the role of the sable, a small weasel-like mammal hunted for its fur; both were almost driven to extinction in the pursuit of profits. 

The fact that Russians, like Americans, were motivated by a gold rush in their recently conquered territories only serves to strengthen the comparison. And just like the United States, the story of the Russian empire persisted well into the 20th century, with the creation of the Soviet Union—a model of an imperial construct—as well as a bloc of dependent nations in Eastern Europe that frequently had no choice but to comply with Moscow's orders.

Isn't this, in the end, what caused Ukraine so much trouble? Even though the Soviet Union is a distant memory that is hardly remembered by young people today, Putin, a spymaster in the final years of the Soviet era, has never forgotten how that empire crumbled.

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The current crisis doesn’t just take us back to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the demise of the Soviet Union two years later, though. It also brings to mind a much more obscure date but one that everyone concerned by events in Ukraine should be thinking about: 1648. That year, a pact among European nations called the Treaty of Westphalia ended a seemingly endless period of continental conflict that encompassed both the Eighty Years’ War and the Thirty Years’ War. Most importantly, this was also the beginning of the end of old-fashioned empire via territorial aggrandizement.

In a sense, this was a historical before-and-after moment. Before the Treaty of Westphalia, empires were largely thought to be without borders, with the extent of their dominion only being constrained by the rulers' own territorial ambitions. Since Westphalia, the concept of sovereignty has undergone a radical change. It displays a common understanding among nations regarding their respective borders and right to occupy them.

The 1991 referendum on Ukrainian independence, which was unchallenged by Russia at the time, spoke powerfully of the Ukrainian people's desire to be in charge of their own destiny. Since then, the international community has confirmed this wish in the most Westphalian of ways by recognising Ukraine, forging alliances with it, and most recently, even lending a hand in its self-defense.

Despite his recent anti-imperial rhetoric, Putin wants to return the world to a period when countries were more like amoebas, with borders that changed according to the whims and power of their rulers. Who could want to go back to the conflict and suffering that this would cause, regardless of how difficult the situation in Ukraine might appear to be right now?