Vladimir Putin would like you to believe he’s a saviour sent by God to rescue humanity.
That was the image projected by Professor Sergei Karaganov, a former advisor to President Putin, who spoke at the Kremlin-organised ‘Russian Davos’ on Friday.
He’s hawkish, even next to Putin, having previously urged the president to launch tactical nuclear strikes against the West to warn them off supporting Ukraine.
Karaganov echoed that again at the St Petersburg International Economic Forum on Friday, where he suggested holding a ‘nuclear pistol’ to the head of the West.
But it was his description of Putin that was perhaps most revealing of the 71-year-old Russian president’s worldview.
Addressing Putin onstage, Karaganov, 71, said: ‘I clearly remember 1998-99 when our country was on the edge… of falling apart. The situation was dire.
‘I remember me and my comrades fighting without any hope left. And at some point, God Almighty took pity on us [and Putin arrived].
’Now Vladimir Vladimirovich [Putin] you have a difficult task. Not only to win but also to save the world which is sliding and being pushed into a World War.’
An accompanying propaganda video showed images of British soldiers fighting under the Union Jack, trunks overflowing with treasure and slaves in chains.
It blamed ‘the colonial march of the West’ for the world’s ills and framed Russia as the only country in history capable of resisting it.
The narrator said: ‘European civilisations plundered Africa and China, India, the Middle East and the Americas.
‘Ancient cultures were destroyed, indigenous peoples driven into reservations. Tens of millions of people were sold into slavery.
‘In the modern world, the colonial march of the West has not stopped. The plunder has taken an even more hypocritical form of dollar dependency.
‘Centuries of living at the expense of others has shaped the Western world into a coloniser’s psychology and mindset.
‘We made up the rules, [says the West], you must obey them.
‘But a new time has come, a time of justice, honesty, law and order.
‘Russia is a civilised state, the only one in the history of mankind that was able to resist Western colonisation.
‘For more than 1,000 years of history, Russia has repeatedly repelled invasion attempts.
‘Russia refused to fulfil someone’s invented rules to obediently play along with the coloniser.’
But there is a reason Russia is the largest country in the world, with its capital located in Europe despite 77% of its landmass sitting in Asia.
Other European countries have lost most of their empires, but Russia hasn’t.
Russia has invaded, conquered and colonised vast swathes of the world over the centuries, with many of those countries only gaining independence when the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s.
Crimea, the Ukrainian territory occupied by Russia, used to have a predominantly ethnic Tatar population until they were deported to Siberia and replaced with ethnic Russians.
Just under 90% of Crimea was Tatar in 1800. By 2001, they accounted for just 10% of the population, while Russians accounted for 60%.
Similar population transfers occurred in other parts of Ukraine, along with the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, and central Asian countries like Kazakhstan.
Russia’s cultural domination has, until recently, been so dominant that Putin and his officials were flustered when Kazakhstan’s president spoke Kazakh instead of Russian.
Flustered by Kassym-Jomart Tokayev’s decision to speak his native language at a meeting of the two leaders last November, the Russian delegation was seen scrambling to put on headphones linking them with interpreters.
Ethnic minorities native to regions still occupied by Russia have also borne the brunt of conscription in Putin’s war effort in Ukraine.
Six of the 10 Russian regions with the highest mortality rates in the war are in Siberia and Russia’s Far East, home to many of its often-impoverished minorities, the BBC reported.
Buryatia, a region bordering Mongolia, are 75 times more likely to die than men from Moscow.
One of the speculated reasons for this is that their remoteness from the capital Moscow, where battlefield deaths have been a fraction of this, insulates the Kremlin from visible criticism and hides the true toll from its population.
That hasn’t stopped Putin’s regime from adopting the language of anti-imperialism to defend his own imperial ambitions.
But imperial ambitions are still influential, not just at the conference or in Russia’s domestic policy, but also in its foreign policy.
In 2005, Putin referred to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and subsequent independence movements, as ‘the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century’, NBC reported.
Nearly 20 years later in 2021, three months before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, he lamented what he called ‘a disintegration of historical Russia under the name of the Soviet Union’, Reuters reported.
Today Russia is smaller than it was at the Russian Empire’s peak in the late 1800s.
Imperial nostalgia was evident at the ‘Russian Davos’, when Karaganov invited Putin to compare himself with Peter the Great, the Tsar who made Russia an empire.
‘Would you like to repeat the success of Peter the Great’, Karaganov asked Putin.
‘He was successful.’
Putin responded: ‘Peter was a historical figure, a tsar of all Russia, and then the Emperor.
‘It was a different environment, conditions and goals.’
Last year, Karaganov told Putin to use nuclear weapons to smash ‘the will of the West’ and, in the process, halt World War Three, which some fear is fast approaching.
Putin ‘will have to hit a group of targets in a number of countries in order to bring those who have lost their minds to their senses’, he advocated.
’This is a morally terrible choice – we use the weapons of God, dooming ourselves to severe spiritual losses.
’But if this is not done, not only Russia may perish, but, most likely, the entire human civilisation will end.
’We will have to make this choice.’
Karaganov was later exposed as owning a secret luxury apartment in the heart of Venice.
In other addresses to the forum, Putin denied he poses a threat to the West, denying he wants to invade any NATO territory.
He also said he could unleash nuclear missiles if Russian sovereignty is threatened.
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
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