as empire after empire tried to rule them and found that particular patch a little too thorny. Even Lithuania hada go when they had their empire. Russia seems particularly obsessed and has alternately tried to legislate, starve, and bludgeon them out of existence and gotten nowhere.
I hadn't realized Alexander ((( was such a great influence on him (meet the new Czar just like the old Czar). I did know about the quasi mystical horseshit generated by Oleksandr Dugin that Putin seemingly laps up like cream. Dugin's stuff seems to be a rather tired retelling of the pan Germanism of the 18th and 19th centuries, but with a new protagonist country needing all the people it claims as relatives united under one flag, coincidentally the one Dugin salutes.
No, Putin doesn't have any real appreciation for history, Russia's history or anyone else's. If he did, he'd have understood that pan Slavism under Mother Russia is just as much a non starter as pan Germanism was, but all he can see is himself wearing a toga and gold laurel leaves. I told the few Russians I still knew online that Russia was walking into a buzz saw. I don't know what they did about that, if anything beyond leaving the country.
Putin has always loved to cosplay for the cameras as a Cossack warrior. Had he any real appreciation for history, he'd have known the original spelling was "Kazak," old Turkish for "free men," and that their descendants are Ukrainian. And that's another reason he can never hold that territory.
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