The American magazine "the NewStatesMan" published a report on the view of Russian President Vladimir Putin and his country's leaders to the world, and its impact on Russia's policies, both internally and externally.
The magazine report, prepared by journalist John Lloyd and published under the title "How does Vladimir Putin view the world?"
The views of a group of media professionals specialized in Russian affairs from Russia and European countries on the subject.
The report quoted Russian writer Ivan Krastev as warning that "Putin sincerely believes that Russians and Ukrainians are one people," stressing that the Russian president is not ready to recognize the sovereignty of any of Russia's neighboring countries.
The magazine’s correspondent pointed out that the opinions included in the report were expressed by the authors at a conference organized in Vienna earlier this year by the “School of Civic Education,” a Russian non-governmental organization that Moscow recently banned. 60 participated in the conference Journalists, mostly from Russia.
"A shift in the Kremlin's thinking"
The magazine's correspondent said that in his intervention at the conference, the independent Russian historian Sergei Medvedev presented a frightening view.
He said that "the Kremlin created an illusion of post-Soviet and postmodernism, but that illusion is accompanied by the return of Russian fascism."
Medvedev stated that he and other academics and journalists did not take it seriously at the time, as the Kremlin elite had interests in the West that they would not want to harm, "but we were wrong; they were serious" about it.
The magazine's report highlighted that the Russian journalists participating in the conference are opponents of the Putin regime who lost their jobs and were forced to leave the country after the restrictions on the opposition media in Russia, and most of them are now unable to practice their journalistic work there after the regime eliminated the opposition media in the country.
"We tried to analyze Putin's moves from a rational point of view, but over time we realized that there was a shift in the Kremlin's (thinking) from reality to creating its own reality," the magazine quoted Maxim Trudolyubov, a Russian independent journalist, as saying.
It also quoted journalist Andrei Kolesnikov as saying that "the Kremlin's dictatorship has deteriorated in the past few years to become more hardline and repressive, and Putin has become more indignant and ruthless, and so has his regime built on the basis of complete suppression of the political and economic establishment with the approval and silence of the public."
Putin and the idea of the superiority of the Russian people
The magazine report indicates that Putin believes in the distinction of the Russian people from other peoples, and this idea goes back to the Russian writer and historian Alexander Dugin, who wrote books based on the Russian imperial legacy of domination and integration with Siberian tribal societies, especially the Mongols, in which he concludes that “the composition The genetics of Russians makes them distinct and fundamentally different from European peoples.”
He also sees Europe as representing only a small part of the Russian heritage, and is now threatening to invade Russia with its ideas.
To infer the belief of Russian President Putin in these ideas, the American magazine report cited a previous statement made by Putin shortly before his re-election as President of Russia in 2012, as he said to a crowd of his supporters, “We are a victorious nation. Our genetic code is passed down from generation to generation, so we will win!"
One year after the aforementioned speech, Putin, in a speech to the Valdai International Conference, attacked what he considered the "decaying West" and said, "We can see how many Euro-Atlantic countries reject their roots, including Christian values... They deny moral principles." and all traditional identities: national, cultural and religious.