Simple symbolic markers or, on the contrary, often too real barriers, borders delimit the perimeter of exercise of sovereignty. “They are time inscribed in space”writes the geographer and diplomat Michel Foucher in his book The obsession with borders (Perrin, 2007), pointing out that“they remain mounds-witnesses of the past or lively fronts depending on local conditions, always places of memory and sometimes of resentment”. A mental representation, the map proceeds from the territory as much as it precedes it.
Thus, to justify the annexation of Crimea proclaimed a month earlier and his military support for the pro-Russian rebels of Donbass, Vladimir Putin, during a televised speech lasting more than four hours, on April 17, 2014, brought out a buried the tsarist past Novorossia – New Russia – administrative region of the Russian Empire from 1721 to 1917. This theme has been hammered out ever more insistently in the Kremlin’s propaganda since the“special operation” in Ukraine launched on February 24, 2022.
The “New Russia” mentioned in 2014 by the Russian President extends to the east and south of present-day Ukraine, including the Donbass and encompassing the entire Ukrainian coast from Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov, to the borders of Moldova, including Odessa, the very cosmopolitan large port of the Black Sea. “These areas were not part of Ukraine during the time of the tsars, they were given to kyiv by the Soviet government in the 1920s. Why did they do it? Only god knows “, was indignant, in his speech, the Russian president, posing as heir to Peter the Great (tsar then emperor of Russia from 1682 to 1725) and Catherine II (empress of Russia from 1762 to 1796). The latter snatched these lands from the Tatars and the Ottomans, before repopulating them with, in particular, Russian settlers. What justify, in the Putinian narrative, their attachment to Russia at the expense of a Ukraine which, in the eyes of the Head of State, does not exist outside of its links with the Russian big sister, as he explained in a long text from July 2021 on “the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians”.
quest for greatness
“With this intervention, and by moving from the policy of influence practiced by Moscow towards the ‘near abroad’ to a much stricter desire for control, Vladimir Putin is shifting the tectonics of the plates of international relations and upsetting the structures of the world. ‘post cold war’notes the historian Georges-Henri Soutou, author in particular of The Cold War. 1943-1990 (Pluriel, 2011) and numerous reference works on the subject. This assumed quest for greatness and power raises in radically new terms the question of borders in Europe, starting with those inherited from the collapse of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
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