Announcing the annexation of Crimea in March, Putin emphasised that a historical wrong had been righted and that Moscow had the prerogative to defend Russians around the globe wherever they felt threatened. He subsequently referred to the contested territory in southeastern Ukraine, largely occupied by well-armed, pro-Russian separatist militias, as 'Novorossiya' (New Russia), a term used to describe lands taken from the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century. Is the Ukraine crisis the first step in a plan to restore control over the territory of imperial Russia, if not the Soviet Union?
展开▼
