Rebuilding a ‘Greater Russia’ and the Russian Invasion of Ukraine
Authors: Kanet Roger E. 
Published: June 2023

Putin has made clear, as he stated more than a decade and a half ago, that “the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” and that he is committed to reestablishing Russia’s greatness and dominant role in world politics. Thus, Russian policy toward its near neighbors under Putin is committed to _de facto _reestablishing the former Soviet Union – or Greater Russia. Russian wars or virtual wars with Moldova, Georgia, Ukraine – since 2014, but especially now since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 – have all had at least one objective – extending Moscow’s political and economic control over former Soviet territory. In the following pages we shall track this process, which is the attempted reconstruction of “Greater Russia,” or Russian expansion and has led to the brutal Russian invasion of Ukraine.

Russia’s murderous, and unprovoked invasion and systematic destruction of Ukraine beginning in late February 2022 is part of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s attempt to fulfill his commitment to recreate the former Soviet Union or, to put it differently, to push forward the construction of “Greater Russia.” Putin has made clear, as he stated more than a decade and a half ago, that “the collapse of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”2 and that he is committed to reestablishing Russia’s greatness and dominant role in world politics. He termed the end of the USSR as the demise of “historical Russia” and source of the major economic crisis that followed. “It was a disintegration of historical Russia under the name of the Soviet Union,” Putin said of the 1991 breakup. “We turned into a completely different country. And what had been built up over 1,000 years was largely lost,” he asserted, noting that 25 million Russian people now found themselves in newly independent countries cut off from Russia, part of “a major humanitarian tragedy (Osborn [https://www.reuters.com/authors/andrew-osborn/] and Ostroukh [https://www.reuters.com/authors/andrey-ostroukh/] (2021”3

In many respects Putin was referring to a “Greater Russia” (Sakwa, 2021) – a Russia including areas outside the state of Russia populated by ethnic Russians, as well even as regions of the state of Russia largely populated by non-Russians who have been part of the Russian state in the near or distant past. Russia has had a centuries-old tradition – both as Russia and the Soviet Union – of expansion and domination of other national groups. It is, since the dissolution of the USSR into fifteen independent states, that substantial numbers of ethnic Russians found themselves living outside Russia.4 As Putin notes, he finds this situation “a major humanitarian disaster.”5 Associated with this view of Greater Russia has been the idea of Moscow as the “Third Rome” or the center of an alternative international civilization which has justified an assertive and often unilateralist approach to the rest of the world. While other European states have modified their views of sovereignty and pursued policies that _de facto_ have resulted in a form of pooled sovereignty over the course of the past half century, the Russians have continued to view the international system in stark Westphalian terms (Kanet, 2022). The Soviet Union and its major successor state, the Russia Federation, have been seen as more than simply the current nation state of the Russian Federation. In all these cases Moscow and Russia are the center of a potentially single expanding political system, regardless of the ethnicity of the population.