"Peter the Great waged the Great Northern War for 21 years," a relaxed and apparently self-satisfied Putin said. Alluding directly to his own invasion of Ukraine, Putin added: "Clearly, it fell to our lot to return and reinforce as well." Those remarks were swiftly condemned by Ukrainians, who saw them as a naked admission of Putin's imperial ambitions. Lithuania may now be a NATO member and part of the European Union, but in Putin's Russia, that kind of neo-colonial posturing is the surest display of loyalty to the president. "It cannot be stressed strongly enough that without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire," he wrote in 1994.

Source: CNN June 11, 2022 13:25 UTC