“Lavrov Warned About Trump 2.0’s Plans For Global Dominance” in late March, the essence of which was echoed by his spokeswoman Maria Zakharova a month later on 19 April, the first time that Russia commemorated the “Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Genocide of the Soviet People”. In her interview with TASS, she said that historical revisionism of World War II is driven by the unwillingness of some forces to admit that they lost and therefore abandon their goal of conquering the former USSR.
According to Zakharova, “they are unwilling to give up the idea of getting their hands on Ukrainian black soil, Russian oil and gas, at least to control them, to extend their influence over the resources of Central Asia, the Caucasus, and so on. They are unwilling to do this, they are unwilling to give it up.” These goals are being pursued in the present and justified by revisionist narratives about the last world war. The most popular one equates the USSR with Nazi Germany and in some cases misportrays it as even worse.
The purpose of NATO’s eastward expansion after the end of the Old Cold War was to ultimately enter into a position whereby the bloc could blackmail Russia into a series of incessant concessions culminating first in the de facto cession of its resource development rights and later in “Balkanization”. This contextualizes NATO’s rush to admit the Baltic States, the foreign-backed oligarchs who Putin crushed in the 2000s, and NATO’s clandestine expansion into Ukraine that led to the special operation.
Zakharova’s mention of how these same historically revisionist forces want “to extend their influence over the resources of Central Asia, the Caucasus, and so on” is illuminating. Last August’s “Trump Route for International Peace and Prosperity” (TRIPP) replaced Putin’s envisaged corridor through southern Armenia and the role that his country’s forces would have played in securing it. With the US’ support, fellow NATO member Turkiye can now inject Western influence along Russia’s entire southern periphery.
This has serious security implications too since TRIPP de facto functions as a dual military-logistics corridor for strengthening Azerbaijan’s shadow membership in NATO after its forces completed their conformation with the bloc’s standards last November and encouraging Kazakhstan to follow suit. Unlike the EU, which Russia’s top UN diplomat accused of becoming “a new Third Reich” in implied part due to the historical revisionism that Zakharova touched upon, Turkiye has no such grievances against Russia.
It does, however, implement what’s been described by some as a so-called “Neo-Ottoman” policy that presumably led to its practitioners harboring deep resentment against Russia for their predecessor state’s many defeats at the hands of the erstwhile Russian Empire. This contextualizes why Turkiye, which has mutually beneficial energy and other economic ties with Russia despite political disputes over Ukraine and Libya, opened up a “southern front” against Russia to aid the US-backed “new Third Reich”.
The historical axes that the “new Third Reich” and the “Neo-Ottoman Empire” have to grind with Russia, not to mention non-Axis-member Poland’s millennium-long rivalry with it, have been masterfully exploited by the US to pit them and their smaller partners against Russia. Instead of looking to the future, these states remain stuck in the past, some of which is revisionist like in the case of Germany and its former Axis allies. It’s through these means that history has been tangibly weaponized against Russia.
