“A collapsed empire buries half the world under its wreckage”
The former president of Russia, deputy head of the Security Council, Dmitry Medvedev, who has been making harsh and bellicose statements against Kiev and Western countries since the beginning of the invasion of Ukraine, in an article published in the newspaper “Izvestia”, once again threatened a nuclear apocalypse – in the event that Russia fails in the current war.
At the same time, most of the article is devoted to substantiating the idea of the inevitability of this war, the origins of which Medvedev sees in the collapse of the USSR. “After all, what we are observing now happened more than once – at the moment when another world empire was coming to the end of its existence,” – writes the former president.
Accusing the leaders of the USSR of a short-sighted policy, and the countries of the West of hostility and arrogance, Medvedev, in fact, recognizes the regularity of its collapse, comparing it with the empires of the past, each of which ended in collapse. In his opinion, whatever we leaders of post-Soviet Russia would do, the path would still lead to war: “History is inexorable. Rome and Constantinople. Arab caliphs and Genghis Khan. The rise and inglorious death of Napoleon… On which of these pages will we open the volume of the world chronicle , you will find the same thing. After the flowering of the empire and its golden age, there is a long way to one and the same finale: to disintegration and war or war and disintegration. This is the law of the world. That is what happened to us, to the USSR, only in the postponed variant”. At the same time, “the strongest catalyst of the war after the death of the empire”, according to Medvedev, are “the countries around it, who wish to further divide the collapsed state”. He blames the West for the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February last year.
The former president, again appealing to history, writes that “any collapsed empire buries half the world under its debris, or even more.” At the same time, Medvedev believes that “it will not work out with Russia as it did with the USSR”, and “if the question of the existence of Russia itself seriously arises, it will not be decided on the Ukrainian front. And together with the question of the further existence of the entire human civilization.” At the end of the article, Medvedev optimistically concludes that “Russia will not allow such a thing”, referring to the “authority of its partners”, in which he writes the entire population of non-Western countries.
Medvedev does not explain how today’s Russia differs from the USSR, whether it is an “empire” and why, if all empires have collapsed, it cannot collapse as well.
For the second day in a row, top Russian leaders are raising the topic of the possible disintegration of Russia. The day before, an interview with President Vladimir Putin was shown, who accused the West of trying to “cash in” on it. According to Putin, the collapse threatens that some Urals and Muscovites will appear instead of Russians.
Leaders of Western countries emphasize that their support for Ukraine does not aim at the disintegration of Russia. At the same time, accusations of imperial policy towards Ukraine and other neighboring countries are indeed being made against Moscow.
