In 2004, Russia’s President Putin said the collapse of the Soviet Union “was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.” This was picked up by our hawks as a Moscow wish for more Cold War.
They should have waited for the rest of the sentence: ’Tens of millions of our fellow citizens and countrymen found themselves beyond the fringes of Russian territory.”
Putin had a point, epitomised by the fate of the pro-Russian South Ossetian people stranded in Georgia versus that of the Russian-speaking minority stranded in Ukraine.
Borders arbitrary
In Soviet days, borders between republics were often decided more by politics or geography rather than language or culture. So the Ossetian people straddling the Caucuses Mountains were split into two, with the part in the north remaining in Russia and the part in the south arbitrarily placed in the Soviet Republic of Georgia.
The Russian-speakers in Ukraine were simply told they were no longer part of Russia, that henceforth they had to think........