Putin: “There will be Muscovites, Uralians and so on”

In an interview with the Rossiya-1 TV channel, Russian President Vladimir Putin accused the West of trying to destroy Russia.

In an interview that he gave, as follows from the context, after his message to the Federal Assembly on February 21, Putin stated that the West has “one goal – to liquidate the former Soviet Union and its main part – the Russian Federation.” “And then, maybe, they will accept us into the so-called family of civilized nations, but only separately, each part separately,” Putin said.

He expressed the opinion that in this case the Russian people would cease to exist “in the form in which it is today. Well, there will be some Muscovites, the Urals and so on,” Putin said, also stating that such plans were “laid out on paper.” . “It’s all written, it’s all written on paper,” the Russian president said.

He accused NATO countries of participating in the war in Ukraine due to the supply of weapons to this country.

Not for the first time, Putin accuses the Western countries of trying not only to subjugate Russia, but also to destroy it. Earlier, in particular, he repeatedly used a fictional quote from former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, who allegedly said: “It is unfair that the wealth of Siberia belongs to only one country.” These words have been attributed to an American politician in Runet since the beginning of the 2000s, but she never uttered them.

Not just about the collapse of Russia, but also about the transformation of the Russian people into “Muscovites” and “Urals” Putin publicly stated for the first time.

It is not clear what exactly the president means by the plans that were “laid out on paper”. The most famous conspiracy theory associated with such plans is the so-called Dulles plan. According to this theory, this is the plan of action of the USA against the USSR, which allegedly consisted in the hidden moral decay of the population of the USSR: “Episode after episode, the tragedy of the death of the most disobedient people, the final, irreversible extinction of its self-consciousness, will be played out on a grandiose scale.” No evidence that such a plan actually existed was presented.

• The leaders of Western countries, supporting Ukraine, emphasize that they do not strive for the collapse of Russia or for some reformation of it. US President Joe Biden, speaking recently in Warsaw, addressed Russian citizens and assured them that the United States does not seek to destroy or control Russia.
• The topic of the disintegration of Russia is sometimes raised in journalism and academic circles as one of the possible, if not the most likely, scenarios in the event of Moscow’s defeat in the war with Ukraine. The political goal of the disintegration of Russia is declared by a number of organizations, mainly emigrants, who advocate self-determination of the peoples living in Russia; Western countries did not express support for this goal.