Putin’s Crimea obsession started in ’90s, Spiegel report shows
Russian President Vladimir Putin (Photo: Getty Images)
Documents found in German archives reveal that Russian President Vladimir Putin harbored imperial ambitions even before coming to power, including territorial claims to Crimea, eastern Ukraine, and northern Kazakhstan, reports the German outlet Spiegel.
The archives of Germany’s Foreign Ministry contain documents indicating that as early as the mid-1990s, Vladimir Putin, then a rising Russian official, expressed territorial claims over Crimea, eastern Ukraine, and northern Kazakhstan.
It was revealed that on January 14, 1994, the then German Consul General in St. Petersburg recorded Putin’s position. At the time, Putin held the post of First Deputy Chairman of the St. Petersburg City Government.
In his statements, Putin firmly declared that Crimea, eastern Ukraine, and northern Kazakhstan have never been foreign to Russia, but have always been part of Russian territory.
The diplomat also noted that Putin appealed to the national sentiment of Russians, which he claimed Germans would probably find difficult to understand.
These archival records confirm that the expansionist views of the current Russian president were formed long before the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the war in Donbas, and the full-scale invasion in 2022.
On July 31, it became known that the government of Nicaragua recognized the Russian-occupied territories of Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson regions as part of Russia. This was confirmed by an official letter sent by Nicaragua’s president, Daniel Ortega, to Vladimir Putin.
