The End Of The Last Empire: Will It Succeed On The Third Attempt?

The October Revolution of 1917 saved the Russian Empire from total collapse. Within five years, the "Red Empire" had regained almost all the colonies of the former "White Empire." Only Finland managed to break free, along with Poland and the Baltic states, albeit temporarily. But there was another October coup in 1993, which for the second time since 1917 saved Russia from disintegration. This fact remains largely unnoticed, despite the events being broadcast live on CNN, in front of hundreds of millions of viewers.

For thirty years, this story has been completely marginalised because it holds the key to the third collapse of the "Russian Empire"—now the last one. Essentially, it serves as an instruction manual for the disintegration of the Russian Federation. And while the West still fears reading it, Ukraine is already taking valuable notes.

Kazan – The Capital Where The Needle Of Koschei Lies

Ask any history enthusiast when the USSR collapsed and who hammered the final nail into its coffin, and the answer will be obvious. On Christmas Day, 25 December, the Soviet flag was lowered from the Senate Palace of the Kremlin, and the USSR's first and last president, Mikhail Gorbachev, bid farewell to the "Soviet people" in a televised address.

He did this at the request of Russian President Boris Yeltsin, who had been practically terrorising the general secretary in the final weeks, even moving into the other half of the Kremlin to cause domestic discomfort and finally force Gorbachev to leave.

But the truth is different: Boris Yeltsin wanted to get rid of Mikhail Gorbachev, but not the Soviet Union. His advisers and the Ministry of Defence had been preparing invasion scenarios for Ukraine since the autumn of 1991, in case then-president Leonid Kravchuk did not back down and halt the Act of Independence. Their plans were foiled by the all-Ukrainian referendum on 1 December 1991. Yeltsin hoped that Crimea would vote entirely against independence and that Donbas would reject it at least halfway. Instead, 90% supported the Ukrainian state. Even in Crimea, more than half voted in favour. A week later, the Belovezha Accords were signed, postponing the war against Ukraine for twenty years.

Meanwhile, the Russian Federation itself was falling apart, and it seemed that at any moment, the "tricolour empire" would share the fate of the "red empire." The catalyst for its disintegration was not the small Chechnya, as commonly believed, but the resource- and infrastructure-rich Tatarstan. For Russia, Kazan is what Kyiv was for the USSR—a point of disintegration.

"Take as much sovereignty as you can swallow," Yeltsin famously said in Kazan on 6 August 1990. But there was a second part to this phrase, often omitted: "Just don't forget that you're in the centre of Russia, and you should think about that." 

It was both a concession under pressure and a veiled threat.

On 16 July 1990, the Ukrainian SSR adopted the Declaration of State Sovereignty, and Tatarstan followed just a month and a half later, on 30 August 1990. The autonomous republic elected its first president even six months earlier than Ukraine—on 12 June 1991. It declared independence on 18 October 1991, ahead of union republics like Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan.

It seemed nothing could stop Tatarstan on its path to independence. Moreover, other republics beyond the Volga, primarily Bashkortostan, which had already ordered its national currency printed in London, and the republics of Mari El and Udmurtia, where national humiliation by ethnic Russians was particularly severe and provoked resistance, might follow suit.

In the March 1992 referendum, 61% of Tatarstan’s population, with an 80% turnout, supported the sovereignty of the autonomous republic.

That same month, only Tatarstan and Chechen-Ingushetia refused to sign the Federation Treaty with Moscow. But by 1994, official Kazan abandoned independence and agreed to broad but still limited autonomy.

What happened? How did they manage to halt the "parade of sovereignties" within the Russian Federation itself? And why was the "Ukrainian scenario" of 1991 not repeated?

4 October 1993: An Hour Before The Collapse Of The Russian Federation

Source: GettyImages

"We had 93 subjects of the Russian Federation at the time. Eighty-two of them gathered, and we proclaimed that the Russian Federation is not limited to the Sadovoye Ring or even the Moscow Ring Road. Russia stretches from Kaliningrad to the Far East, and therefore, the regions must have a voice. We proposed suspending the President's Decree and the Resolution of the Supreme Council of the Russian Federation and called for early presidential and parliamentary elections. This 'zero option' was supported by Patriarch Alexy II."

This is how Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, the first and last president of Kalmykia, recalls the proposals made by the republics to resolve the crisis between Yeltsin, Khasbulatov, and Rutskoy, which reached its peak in the autumn of 1993. At the time, he proposed a new federal structure for the Russian Federation: 22 union republics, each with equal rights.

Such ideas threatened the renewed "Russian Empire," now called the Russian Federation. After all, it was precisely because of the status of a union republic, which the Ukrainian SSR received in 1922 despite resistance from a still-weak Joseph Stalin, that it was able to legitimately leave the USSR in 1991. Autonomous republics, like Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, and others, did not have the constitutional right to secede from the Russian Federation.

Kirsan Ilyumzhinov's dangerous ideas were not forgotten, and when Vladimir Putin became head of the FSB in 1998, the politician was accused of separatism. His statements were investigated by the prosecutor's office. He lost power, and the position of president of Kalmykia was abolished altogether. But back in 1993, Ilyumzhinov was one of the key players in Kalmykia in resolving a conflict that could have ended in civil war and the collapse of Russia. Like other republic leaders who had already tasted independence, he felt confident. They all saw Moscow's weakness.

It seemed that Yeltsin had almost agreed to the "zero option," but he was merely buying time—until 4 October 1993. Why this particular date? The answer comes from one of the leaders of the later-executed Russian opposition, Supreme Soviet deputy Sergey Baburin:

"Why was 4 October the deadline? Many have forgotten: on 4 October, the ultimatum from the regions of the 'Siberian Agreement' expired. The leaders of all the Siberian regions said: if by 4 October you don’t unblock the Congress of People's Deputies, restore the functioning of the president and the Supreme Soviet, we will shut down the Trans-Siberian Railway."

Dudaev And Shaimiev: How Moscow Was Resurrected Instead Of Being Buried

The Trans-Siberian Railway and the Baikal-Amur Mainline (BAM) were the two infrastructural backbones holding up the massive carcass of the Russian bear. Cutting these two thin railway lines would have paralysed all of Russia. More importantly, Moscow would no longer receive oil, gas, gold, diamonds, uranium, and nickel—the resources that were the lifeblood of its anaemic body.

This would have shattered not only the unified transport system but also the economic and, eventually, political structure. The Russian Federation as a "geopolitical reality" would have ceased to exist.

Yeltsin understood all the risks, so he executed a brilliant two-step move. On the morning of 4 October, he broke his previous promises about the "zero option" and shelled the White House. The entire world witnessed this in real-time on CNN. But at the same time, it was a warning to the rebellious regions: the same would be done to them. The brief period of democracy, an unnatural model for Russian society, was over. The Tsar had returned to Russia.

Boris Yeltsin could not prevent the partial collapse of the empire in 1991 when the union republics left, but thanks to the second "October coup" in 1993, he averted its complete disintegration, when the autonomous republics could have seceded from the Russian Federation. How did this happen?

During the second October coup, the president of the most rebellious republic, Tatarstan, arrived at the Kremlin. It is unclear what Boris Yeltsin and Mintimer Shaimiev discussed. However, the long-time opponent of Yeltsin became his ally from that moment on. The following year, Tatarstan renounced the results of its sovereignty referendum and signed a federal treaty with Russia.

There were other, less obvious results of this mysterious meeting in the Kremlin in October 1993: Mintimer Shaimiev and his family, who owned the TAIF group of companies, initially gained control of the oil and petrochemical industries and later the entire economy of Tatarstan.

Dzhokhar Dudayev did not fly to the Kremlin in October 1993, did not save the empire, and continued on his path to the independence of Ichkeria. Therefore, in 1994, he received not oil and gas, but a Russian army invasion.

Russian Federation: A New Empire, an Old Ethnocide

Mintimer Shaimiev could not become what Leonid Kravchuk became: the president of an independent state that would forever bury the empire. Thus, Tatarstan, like the other weaker republics, only briefly enjoyed the illusion of freedom that their leaders had bargained for by supporting a weakened Yeltsin. After Putin came to power, they began to lose even the formal signs of autonomy.

The positions of presidents were abolished because there could only be one president in the Russian Federation—Putin. There was no longer any talk of a separate foreign policy, as was allowed for Tatarstan in 1994. A total purge of all national elements began—schools, clubs, societies, and the media space. National wealth was ruthlessly exploited, with all the profits settling in Moscow, which was growing richer by the hour. Meanwhile, the Urals and Siberia turned into disaster zones. All of this could have been avoided if, in 1993, they had followed the path Ukraine took in 1991.

The culmination of Russian neo-colonialism was the self-immolation of one of the most prominent activists of the subjugated peoples, Albert Razin. A candidate of philosophical sciences, he was born into a family repressed by the Russian authorities. He was an active participant in the national revival of the early 1990s, when Udmurtia had a real chance to gain independence. 

In 1992, in the village of Kuzebaevo, Razin revived the Gerber festival—with real priests in sacred places. Around 20,000 people attended. This was also a powerful political gesture, comparable to the celebration of the 500th anniversary of Cossackdom on Khortytsia in 1990, after which calls for Ukraine's independence began to emerge. The authorities obstructed the revival of this festival, but despite everything, Gerber is now celebrated throughout Udmurtia. After Putin came to power, this was the only festival that reminded people of the ethnic distinctiveness of the Udmurts. Razin accused Moscow of reviving Stalin's policies of "Russification and great-power chauvinism."

The scholar demanded that Udmurt schools be staffed with Udmurt teachers, that the study of the Udmurt language be made mandatory—currently, only half a million people speak it—and that advertisements and signs in cities be displayed in Udmurt. He also called for the creation of an ethnopark dedicated to Udmurt culture. He achieved none of these goals, receiving dismissive responses from Russian officials for years.

On 10 September 2019, protesting against the Russification of Udmurtia, Albert Razin doused himself with petrol and set himself on fire outside the State Duma. In his hands, he held a poster by the poet of another oppressed people—the Avar, Rasul Gamzatov: 

"If my language disappears tomorrow, I am ready to die today." 

Albert Razin suffered 100% burns and died within a few hours. 

Currently, of the 136 languages that exist in the Russian Federation, 135 have been included in the Atlas of the World’s Endangered Languages (a sort of UNESCO linguistic red book). This means that all languages represented in the Russian Federation are endangered, except Russian.

Kremlin propaganda ridiculed Razin’s act, portraying him as marginal, insane, and inadequate. However, such acts of desperation, as a last attempt to draw the world's attention to the Kremlin's genocidal practices, are far from unprecedented. In 1968, protesting against the Russification of Ukraine and the occupation of Czechoslovakia, the Ukrainian Vasyl Makukh set himself on fire on Khreshchatyk in Kyiv. In 1969, the Czech Jan Palach immolated himself in Prague; and in 1972, the 19-year-old Lithuanian Romas Kalanta set himself on fire in Kaunas, shouting "Freedom to Lithuania."

Albert Razin's act was not just in defence of the Udmurt language but also the identity of all the peoples of Idel-Ural, believes Sires Bolyaen, who represents the interests of the Erzya people abroad.

"He saw that the Russification processes sanctioned by the Kremlin were gaining momentum, unimaginable even during Soviet times. Increasingly, members of these peoples try to avoid the stigma of inferiority and even aspire to appear more Russian than the Russians themselves. The Udmurt people, along with our other peoples, are on the verge of extinction—or rather, extermination."

Sires Bolyaen is referring to the peoples of Idel-Ural, a term used to describe the Finno-Ugric and Turkic nations of the Volga region. Today, this is the territory of six republics of the Russian Federation: Mordovia, Chuvashia, Mari El, Tatarstan, Udmurtia, and Bashkortostan. The total area of the Idel-Ural republics is 320,708 km², roughly half the size of Ukraine. Seven titular nations inhabit these territories: four Finno-Ugric peoples (Erzya, Moksha, Mari, and Udmurts) and two Turkic peoples (Tatars and Bashkirs).

These peoples were occupied by Moscow centuries before the Ukrainians: the capital of present-day Tatarstan, Kazan, fell in 1552, while Ukraine began to lose its independence after 1654.

Just like Ukraine, the peoples of Idel-Ural rose up against the Russian Empire at the beginning of the 20th century. On 1 March 1918, autonomy was even proclaimed in Kazan as part of Bolshevik Russia, under the name the Idel-Ural State. However, after just three weeks, this autonomy—not independence, but simply autonomy—was crushed by the Red Army.

Ukrainian Scenario For The Russian Federation: Where To Find Kravchuk And Chornovil?

Syres Bolyaen believes that only full independence of Idel-Ural can stop the killing of these peoples.

The generation that still remembers the language and traditions is passing away forever. Bolyaen himself, born to an Erzyan father and a Russian mother, received his Erzyan identity from his grandmother, Matrona Butyaikina, who told him fairy tales, legends, and myths of a people already vanishing. The Soviet military school was supposed to destroy his sense of identity, but everything changed with a chance encounter.

In the early 1990s, Syres Bolyaen, who had moved to Ukraine and called himself Oleksandr Bolkin, went to guard the Lenin monument in Kyiv from "Ukrainian radicals." There, former prisoner of the Mordovian camps, Vyacheslav Chornovil, approached him and noticed Bolkin's accent. A conversation started, during which Chornovil knew more about the Erzyans than his new acquaintance. Bolkin, who later embarked on his difficult journey to becoming Bolyaen, remembered his grandmother Matrona and her stories about the many-headed dragon defeated by Erzyan men.

After 2014, Bolyaen, like the heroes of the Erzyan epic, took up the fight against the Russian imperial dragon. During the Revolution of Dignity, he brought firewood to the Maidan and was beaten by Berkut. After the annexation of Crimea and the occupation of parts of Donbas, he fought in the ranks of the 10th Mountain Assault Brigade. After demobilisation, he was elected Inyazor of the Erzyan people, the highest elective position among the Erzyans. Syres became the first Inyazor in history to be sworn in abroad, in Ukraine, due to Russian government repression. In 2021, the Inyazor delivered a speech at the UN General Assembly for the first time in the Erzyan language, calling on the world to pressure the Russian Federation for its policy of destroying indigenous peoples.

It is clear that such calls went unheard then, but everything changed after Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Kyiv has become the intellectual centre for many national emigrant movements. It is here that the "Free Idel-Ural" movement was created, with active participants also involved in organising the Forum of Free Nations of Russia. This civic platform is often confused with the Forum of Free Russia due to the similarity in names. However, they are actually ideological opposites.

The Forum of Free Nations of Russia is an umbrella for those advocating the fragmentation of the Russian Federation and the proclamation of independent states. They believe this is a necessary precondition for the elimination of the world's last empire in all its forms: territorial, ideological, and cultural.

The Forum of Free Russia, on the other hand, seeks to preserve the empire, denies nations the right to self-determination, and rejects Moscow’s colonialism, though they are not against giving subjugated peoples a little more rights. These figures are often labelled as "good Russians."

The Forum of Free Nations of Russia is supported by the governmental and public sectors of Ukraine, the Baltic states, Poland, and the Czech Republic.
In contrast, the Forum of Free Russia is the collective symbol of the Moscow opposition that ended up in the West and enjoys support at the highest levels in the US and Germany. Not long ago, President Biden received the wife and children of Alexei Navalny, who was then in a Russian prison, in the Oval Office. After the death of Russia’s number one political prisoner, Chancellor Olaf Scholz held a meeting with former political prisoner Vladimir Kara-Murza.

Notably, in the largest political prisoner exchange since the Cold War, the West did not request the release of a single prisoner defending the identity of subjugated peoples. Instead, the entire "Russian part" of the exchange list comprised supporters of the "beautiful Russia of the future."

In the similar yet fundamentally different names of these two Russian emigration platforms lie two trajectories along which the Russian Federation may move in the coming years and decades.
Either through the third and final collapse of the empire, which will never again threaten its neighbours and the world, or through the creation of another democratic façade, as in the Yeltsin era, which will inevitably end with the desire for revenge by aggrieved Russians.

For the option of Eurasia's decolonisation to prevail, Western elites must finally stop fearing the collapse of the Russian Federation. Disintegration can be peaceful and calm, but only if we prepare for it and start working on a "Ukrainian scenario" for the Russian Federation now.

What is its essence? The bloodless proclamation of Ukraine's independence in 1991 and the end of the USSR was made possible by the tactical alliance between part of the Communist Party nomenklatura in Kyiv, led by Kravchuk, and politicians demanding independence, who had emerged from Soviet labour camps under the leadership of Chornovil.

The subjugated peoples of Moscow already have their own "Chornovils" — they are engaged in reviving their languages and traditions, protecting the environment. What remains is for the "Kravchuks" to mature, those who currently serve the empire faithfully. But as soon as the Russian Federation weakens enough, they will try to retain their power, and to do so, they will need legitimacy in the eyes of their own people, which they can obtain by uniting with the radical "humanitarian" wing, currently in forced emigration.

However, there is one problem: will Western elites agree to such a scenario? In 1991, they did not. The US and the UK categorically opposed Ukrainian independence. What happened then in Moscow and Kyiv, and could it be repeated in Moscow and Kazan?

Saving The Empire: Another Western Mistake?

One fact the West is reluctant to admit: over the past hundred years, the United States has saved the Russian Empire three times.

Without American technology and engineers in the 1930s, the USSR would have remained a pre-industrial state and would not have been able to form an alliance with the Reich or occupy Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and part of Romania.
Without Lend-Lease during World War II, the communists and Stalin would have lost power, and the Ukrainian nationalist partisan movement might have found support in the West (as it did after 1945), preventing the communist occupation of half of Europe.
And without "Bush's legs" and the massive financial aid, Yeltsin and the newly minted democrats would have ended up in exile before the "October coup" of 1993, and the Russian Federation itself would have met the same fate as the USSR.

In his unique history of post-war Europe, Postwar, Tony Judt stresses that none of the former Eastern Bloc countries received significant support from the West after the collapse of the USSR to stand on their feet. Except for one.

"There was no Marshall Plan or anything remotely like it—except for Russia, where significant sums in grants and loans were directed from Washington to support Yeltsin's regime."

It reached the point of the absurd: the Americans directly financed pensions and salaries to save Russia from collapse. This is evidenced by declassified transcripts of conversations between Yeltsin and then US President Bill Clinton:

Yeltsin: You know, when Michel Camdessus was here, I spoke with him. But he mentioned $300 million for the first half of the year and $1 billion for the second half. But the problem is that I need money to pay pensions and salaries. Without resolving this issue, it will be very difficult to start the election campaign.

Clinton: I'll check with the IMF and some of our friends, and we'll see what can be done.

The US cannot envision Eurasia without Russia: this is why they held back the collapse of the USSR until the very end, just as they are now holding back the disintegration of the Russian Federation. Their strategy is to ensure that Ukraine does not lose, but not that Ukraine wins. Because a Ukrainian victory would trigger the collapse of Putin's empire—just as Ukraine's exit from the USSR was the final blow to Lenin and Stalin's dying empire.

And just three weeks before this, on August 1, 1991, President George H. W. Bush delivered a shameful speech in Kyiv about the dangers of "nationalism," which became known as the infamous "Chicken Kyiv" speech.

Even earlier, Margaret Thatcher made an insulting statement to Ukrainians, saying that the UK would not have an embassy in Ukraine because it doesn’t have one in California.

The current special treatment of Russian "White Guard" émigrés in the West stems from that misunderstanding of Russia by Western elites, experts, and even intelligence services. In the early 1990s, Ukrainians were similarly denied the right to their own state, just as Bashkirs, Mari, Erzya, Tuvans, and Tatars are now.
However, even then, the most far-sighted statesmen in the US and Europe understood: Russia must be dismantled down to the last piece.

"Defence Secretary Dick Cheney wanted to see not only the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Russian Empire but also Russia itself, so that it would never again be a threat to the rest of the world," 

recalls US National Security Adviser Robert Gates.

And investigative journalist Casey Michel from the Atlantic Council think tank is convinced: 

"The West must complete the project it started in 1991. It should strive for the full decolonisation of Russia. Dozens of states—or in Russian style, 'autonomous republics'—have not escaped the Kremlin's control. For many, the process of decolonisation is stuck halfway. The Kremlin must lose the empire it still holds."

Other analysts warn Western elites: the final collapse of the Russian Federation is inevitable, the only question is when and under what circumstances it will happen. The catastrophe that could follow Russia's collapse, which the West fears so much, is indeed possible—but only if they continue to act on the principle of "don’t look up." At its end: broken global ties, nuclear weapons proliferation, increasing violence and civil wars, famine, tens of millions of refugees, and the colonisation of Siberia by China.

"The more the country slides into internal turmoil, the more likely fragmentation will be, ending in the loss of central government control in several regions," believes Janusz Bugajski from the Jamestown Foundation. Julian Spencer-Churchill from Concordia University adds: "It’s time for Western strategists to think about the geopolitical reorganisation of Eurasia that they prefer, before Russia begins its spontaneous collapse."

To prevent Russia from collapsing from its own weight and crushing all of Europe, it must be carefully brought down without sudden movements. And for this, the best fit is the "Ukrainian scenario" of 1991.

Leonid Kravchuk in the late 1980s certainly did not seek Ukraine's independence but tried to protect his republic from Moscow’s turbulent waves.
When Vyacheslav Chornovil, along with Vasyl Stus, the Horyn brothers, Ivan Svitlychny, and a handful of other activists, publicly challenged tyranny at the Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors premiere in the Ukraine cinema in 1965, the USSR was at the zenith of its glory. Yuri Gagarin had just flown into space, and Nikita Khrushchev had recently pushed nuclear missiles right up to Kennedy’s nose.

However, the moment came when independence became advantageous for Kravchuk and the party nomenklatura, and for its legitimacy, "national radicals" were needed. In the end, this strange ideological alliance defeated both Gorbachev and Yeltsin.

For a similar scenario to repeat in Bashkortostan or Chuvashia, massive propaganda is needed; the education of a young elite in Ukrainian universities; active support for cultural and environmental initiatives, which at some point can easily be politicised; the recruitment of Putin’s officials in the conquered regions; the transformation of Kyiv into a centre for destabilising the Russian Federation.

All of this combined will be the geopolitical and ideological "Kursk Operation" that can finally alleviate Western fears about the disintegration of the Russian Federation and shift the historical "red lines" in the minds of Western elites.
Moscow is not a guarantor of peace in Eurasia but a source of global danger. To prevent vast territories from becoming a zone of Chinese influence, they must become a zone of Western interests. And the operator of the post-Russian world should be Kyiv, which instinctively understands the essence and logic of empire, has intellectual resources and agents of influence, and can build the infrastructure for the peaceful dissolution of the third incarnation of the Russian Empire—the Russian Federation.

BLITZ

Oleh Dunda, MP, Chairman of the Inter-Factional Association of the Verkhovna Rada ‘For Decolonisation and Dismantling of the Russian Empire’

How does Ukraine interact with the national organisations of the republics that seek secession from the Russian Federation?

Each national republic of the ‘Russian Empire’ has a lot of representatives, a lot of associations, a lot of diasporas that claim to be leaders. We must maintain contact with all of them in order to have more opportunities to increase the chances of these states gaining independence from Russia. The efforts of virtually all state authorities, from MPs and the relevant provisional investigatory commission to the President's Office, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the special services, are aimed at this.

To what extent should the goals and objectives of the Ukrainian government in this matter coincide with the governments of the national clusters?

Ukraine is definitely a leader in this matter, because it is we who largely determine the chances of sovereignty for Russia's colonies. The vision and prospects for independence of the enslaved peoples must coincide. The rest can be sorted out after the collapse of the Russian Federation.

How important is it to explain to Western partners the need for the Russian Federation to disintegrate into nation states?

We constantly explain to our Western partners that the 30 years of comfort and stability that the EU and Western democracies in general have enjoyed since 1991 are primarily the result of the collapse of the previous version of the Russian Empire, the USSR. This gave the West several undeniable advantages. First of all, it eased tensions on the eastern borders. In turn, the absence of a threat from a weak Russia contributed to the redistribution of resources from the military to the economic and social spheres. In addition, the West gained access to Russian resources. Quite cheap resources. Without the collapse of the USSR, the European Union we see today would not have happened.

Accordingly, the collapse of the current ‘Russian Empire’ will also contribute to the further flourishing of the European project. Moreover, the disappearance of Putin's fascist Russia will remove not only the threat of invasion, but also the danger of nuclear conflict for Europe. Today, after the Kremlin's outright nuclear blackmail, everyone should understand that there should be no nuclear bombs on the territory of the Russian Federation.

And competition for buyers among the newly formed ex-Russian states will greatly reduce the cost of raw materials on world markets. In addition, the political component of energy supplies will finally be a thing of the past. No more ‘oil and gas blackmail’ for Europe.

By and large, the view of Moscow as the only possible entity for building interstate relations and the perception of national republics as incapable is a relic of the imperial nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

And the main argument that we make to our Western partners is that the course of history cannot be stopped. Empires always fall apart. And Russia is no exception.

Direct Speech

Ruslan Gabasov, Head of the Bashkir National Movement Committee Abroad

“A unified Russia, even after defeat, even after the liberals come to power, will still remain a dangerous monster that will, sooner or later, unleash war against its neighbours again. Therefore, in Ukraine, there is a clear understanding that the disintegration of Russia into dozens of independent states, not only along national but also regional borders, is a blessing for all for generations to come. This means that the descendants of Ukrainians will live in peace, without fearing aggression from the 'Russian world.' Ukraine must set itself the strategic goal of Russia's disintegration, with a primary focus on Tatarstan and Bashkortostan. I am confident that following Ukraine, such an initiative will be supported by Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Poland, the United Kingdom, and others.”

Kyrylo Budanov, Head of the Main Directorate of Intelligence of the Ministry of Defence of Ukraine

“Of course, our maximum programme is not only to return to our constitutional borders but also to see the complete collapse of the occupying country, which, due to the vastness of the enemy's territory, can only occur from within. However, we must do everything we can to facilitate this process with our thoughts, our weapons, our diplomacy, and our intelligence. Otherwise, the morning of February 24, 2022, will repeat itself with regularity for Ukraine. After all, the very existence of the Ukrainian nation and the Ukrainian state has for almost 400 years stood in the throat of the Russian dictator and his sycophants.”

Janusz Bugajski, Expert at the Washington-based Jamestown Foundation

“The disintegration of the Russian Federation is almost inevitable. This disintegration does not have to happen suddenly; it can occur in parts. It does not have to lead to complete collapse—nor can we predict exactly which entities will emerge as a result of the federation's dissolution. However, given the fragile Russian identity and the weakness of the state, along with its economic, social, and political foundations, Russia indeed faces a threat of state disintegration. Western policy towards Russia has for decades been based on perceiving the desired as reality and has not looked far ahead. It is time for change and for long-term analysis. Empires rise and fall. Some argue that this will be the third series of Russia's collapse—first, Poland broke away along with others, then the Soviet bloc disintegrated, then the USSR fell apart, and the Baltic and Central Asian countries emerged; now it is time for the collapse of what remains—that is, the Russian Federation.”