![In this pool photograph distributed by Russian state owned agency Sputnik, Russia's President Vladimir Putin chairs a meeting regarding the situation in the Kursk region, in his residence in Novo-Ogaryovo outside Moscow, on August 12, 2024. The governor of Russia's Kursk region where Ukraine has launched an incursion told Russian President Vladimir Putin that 28 settlements with a population of around 2,000 people are controlled by Ukrainian troops on August 12, 2024. (Photo by Gavriil GRIGOROV / POOL / AFP) / Editor's note : this image is distributed by Russian state owned agency Sputnik (Photo by GAVRIIL GRIGOROV/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)](https://wp.inews.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/SEI_217826907.jpg?crop=0px%2C59px%2C2500px%2C1411px&resize=640%2C360)
In September 2021, as Russian military forces built up on Ukraine’s border before their full-scale invasion, Vladimir Putin spoke to students in Vladivostok to mark the start of the school year. After a weak joke, he began talking about his hero Peter the Great, asking why the giant tsar started the Seven Years War against Sweden that led to the battle of Poltava in 1709. But one fearless pupil intervened to point out that this decisive battle – marking the start of their nation’s imperial expansion – really took place during the Great Northern War, which lasted 21 years. “We lost four times and on the fifth we won. That’s it,” he said. “Yes, of course, thank you for the correction,” responded the clearly-annoyed dictator.
The irony of Putin being given such a lesson while lecturing school kids on the importance of history in understanding the present was not lost on critics. He is famously obsessed with the subject, even publishing his own rambling essay a few months earlier that denied Ukraine’s right to exist based on his distorted view of the past and his paranoia of the present (the latter seemed to grow worse as he hid during the pandemic). Now Putin is being given another lesson on Peter the Great – although this time it is being delivered by that nation he sought to eliminate, and revolves around his efforts to place himself on the same pedestal as his giant predecessor.
Putin loves to project himself as the modern-day successor to the iron-willed character who created his home city, a man of towering height and intellect who created St Petersburg on the bones of thousands of slaves who died building the Baltic port on marshes taken from Sweden. He has a huge bronze bust over his presidential desk to underline the parallels. And he has compared his efforts to crush Ukraine with Peter’s expansionist wars three centuries earlier, saying the tsar did not seize anything from the Swedes but simply returned land to Russia. “It seems it has fallen to us, too, to reclaim and strengthen,” he said.
But look at the shattered reality of Putin’s humiliating misadventures. Instead of showing Russia’s strength as a great imperial power, his failure to seize Ukraine and install a puppet regime only exposed weakness. The Kremlin, after uniting its Western foes, kowtows to China and begs for weapons from impoverished North Korea. In place of the planned three-day blitzkrieg and victory parades in Kyiv, its stumbling forces have suffered half a million casualties and after 30 grim months, are still slugging it out to make small gains of devastated terrain and little strategic significance in the Donbas region.
Now Russia is enduring the embarrassment of its first invasion by enemy forces since the Second World War. Regardless of how Ukraine’s daring Kursk incursion ends, it is a hammer blow for the Kremlin, the most serious of several setbacks since the launch of this stupid war. Putin looked feeble and unsettled in response, his carefully constructed pose as the modern-day tsar protecting his people and reasserting national greatness ruined by the sight of all those citizens displaced by Kyiv’s surprise attack. Meanwhile Moscow’s bumbling response has exposed again the failings of their top-down command system led by a brutal dictator.
Instead of “reclaiming” land to rebuild the collapsed Soviet empire and flexing Russia’s military muscle to revive imperial ambitions, Putin let his enemies grab a chunk of their country. German tanks have crossed their border again. Airfields are being attacked, bridges blown up and conscripts captured, despite the Kremlin’s pledge they would not join the conflict. Criticism has appeared in the patsy media and from infuriated military bloggers, confirming Kyiv’s advances even as the inept defence ministry pushed propaganda of a supposed fightback that turned out to be faked by using footage filmed earlier this year in Ukraine.
Only a fool would predict the conclusion of this incursion, let alone of the war itself. Yet the Ukrainians deserve admiration for again demonstrating their skills on the battlefield when equipped with sufficient modern arms to defend their nation. This, in turn, makes it all the more shameful how the West, pathetically intimidated by Putin’s sabre-rattling, still restricts the supply of weapons and their use on Russian targets. Note also how Kyiv defeated Russia’s Black Sea naval fleet through smart use of drones and missiles to sink or damage one-third of the ships. This forced the rest to retreat from Crimea, reducing their ability to bomb Ukrainian cities from warships.
Peter the Great, who founded Russia’s modern navy after visiting England to study shipbuilding, would not have been impressed by this dismal ruler who has done so much to diminish their nation while claiming to have inherited his mantle. The tsar was also a ruthless despot. His victory in Poltava over Sweden and its Cossack allies paved the way for the assimilation of Ukraine under Russia’s cruel rule. Yet he was also an admirer of European culture and ideas, an energetic moderniser who hired foreign scientists to help drag his country forward and famously saw St Petersburg as his “window on the West”.
Putin has slammed shut that window to protect his evil regime after Ukraine sought democracy and freedom. The cost is paid in the blood of his people and prosperity of his nation as it cuts itself off from the rest of the continent that his supposed icon was so desperate to emulate by dragging Russia kicking and screaming into the modern age.
Peter earned that sobriquet of greatness through reform at home as well as those battles abroad. Now his Kremlin successor seeks reflected glory from this colossus of his country’s past. Yet as the arrival of Ukrainian troops in Kursk shows, we witness a diminutive president with a record of reactionary failure who shrinks further day by day in comparison with his proclaimed hero.