alt Hacker News> Putin has stated his intention to "recapture" most of the former USSR.
I keep hearing this but I struggle to find any sources, beyond articles like [1] which are... not particularly good sources, even a reddit comment would be a better primary source than that.
I'm not trying to be combative, I just genuinely struggle to find primary sources, probably because I'm using the wrong keywords or something.
I understand the reasoning, but I would love to actually see/read/hear/whatever where Putin "states" this desire explicitly!
[1] https://gppreview.com/2015/02/12/putins-dream-reborn-ussr-un...
Replies
Here[0] you have it directly from Putin; Ukraine is not a real country and Ukrainian is a fake ethnicity and they are actually Russian.
You have to remember how political communication works in Russia. They rarely state goals outright, and always juggle several narratives at the same time. To make it hard to pin them down to any position and achieve exactly what is happening here.
[0] https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/On_the_Historical_Unity_of_Ru...
See here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundations_of_Geopolitics#In_...