New Russia dates back to the time of Catherine the Great. The historical region returned to the fore in 2014 today inspires revisionisms, inflames nationalist circles and the route to invasion
on February 21, 2022, Vladimir Putin on TV addresses his citizen friends, in the darkness of the evening ghosts awaken. The situation in Donbass has become critical, says the president, Ukraine is not just a neighboring country but an inalienable part of our history, our culture, our spiritual space. The long speech exalts the tsarist empire, the peak of homeland history never equaled – not even by the regretted Soviet Union -, blames the removal of Kiev from Moscow, condemns the western maneuvers on the doorstep. Among the many, a name: Ochakov, a strategic port of the Black Sea overlooking the Dnieper estuary which with the siege of 1788 was snatched from the Ottomans by the Russians by Prince Potmkin and General Suvorov and which today houses a naval base expanded by the Americans for joint NATO-Ukraine activities. In the iron rhetorical chain a flash of lightning: the Russo-Turkish wars, the courage of the soldiers of the undefeated hero Suvorov and that crucial 18th century in Putin’s vision, when the territories on the Black Sea coast were incorporated and called Novorossiya. The same name given in 2014 to the failed federation between the breakaway republics of Luhansk and Donetsk in Donbass. New Russia, the ancient idea that gives way to the special military operation of 2022. On February 24, the Russians enter Ukraine, one of the main targets of the southern front, fifty kilometers from Mykolav and eighty as the crow flies from Kherson , there is the Ochakov base.
If we superimpose the map of ancient Novorossiya on the geography of the ongoing war, we find the exact direction of the invasion. Between borders that advance and retreat over the centuries, the historical region covers the wide belt close to the Tatar Crimea, cut by the Dnieper River and lapped by the Black Sea and the Azov Sea, which stretches from the lands of the Cossacks in the east to Bessarabia in the west. Catherine II, who takes up the modernizing work of Peter the Great, to choose the name of the imperial governorate established in 1764 to unify these areas destined for an ambitious and aggressive colonization and Russification project. In 1775 the areas of the Southern Cossacks were also incorporated which together with the Sič of Zaporizhzhia constituted one of the first state nuclei at the origin of the Ukrainian entity, indomitable populations that ended up in the Russian orbit to escape Polish-Lithuanian domination. The Russian army follows the same trajectories, which in 2022 makes its way under a rain of fire from the north of Kharkiv via the Donbass to the south of the strategic port of Odessa without ceasing to look even further to the west., to ancient Bessarabia between southern Ukraine and present-day Moldova. on April 22, when Russian General Rustav Minnekayev, Deputy Commander of the Central Military District, explains to a meeting of defense industrialists that once again, as in the Great Patriotic War, the whole world against us and that control over southern Ukraine will procure a Moscow a new gateway to Transnistria where we have evidence of repression against the Russian-speaking population. In 1990, little Transnistria proclaimed unilateral independence from Moldova, following the war that led to the ceasefire of ’92 and the deployment on the territory of Russian troops still guarding the largest Soviet arms and ammunition depot in Europe today. , in Cobasna.
From Vladimir II of Kiev to the tsars, Putin searches history for signs of the predestination of a people and its leader. Ideological forces that feed the myth of the perennial siege and humiliation inflicted on the encircled power. The president also talks about Novorossiya in the intervention that on 12 July 2021 welds the epic of Russians and Ukrainians into a mystical-identity union and challenges the borders of modern Ukraine as an artificial product of the Soviet era, a betrayal of historical Russia. Aleksandr Dugin, the theoretical philosopher of the new Eurasianism, considered a matrix of Putinism, speaks of Novorossiya. At the time of the USSR the term generically recalled the glories of the imperial past, from the Soviet implosion it remained a nostalgic reference to the lost greatness, increasingly popular among conservative and nationalist circles that use revisionism as the theoretical basis for new geopolitical structures. A project revitalized and brought to the fore by the conflict in Donbass and the annexation of Crimea to the Federation in 2014. In this context, the concept crosses the rhetoric of denazification and implies the liberation of the Russian-speaking lands from the grip of the Ukrainian oligarchs. For example, one of the most assertive pressure groups, Isborsk-Klub, points to Rinat Akhmetov, an entrepreneur among the richest in Ukraine, president of the Šachtar Donetsk football club and main shareholder of the group that controls the Azovstal steel plant, as the enemy. the last bastion of resistance destroyed by Russian raids in the battle of Mariupol.
Kharkiv, Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Mykolav, Dnipropetrovsk, Odessa. In the vision outlined by Dugin, Novorossiya is the minimum target, the maximum the whole of Ukraine.
June 24, 2022 (change June 24, 2022 | 19:07)
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