Putin compares himself to Czar, says ‘regaining’ Russia’s big power

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Thursday drew a comparison between himself and 18th-century czar Peter the Great by drawing a parallel between his predecessor’s struggles with the Kremlin’s ongoing ambitions to expand its influence by force.

Putin visited an exhibit in St Petersburg marking the 350th anniversary of Peter’s birth. Putin, a noted enthusiast of the czar who he labelled a national hero, had earlier this week described Peter the Great as “an outstanding statesman and military figure.” He said so while meeting young entrepreneurs shortly after leaving the exhibit.

Russian state news has been recently talking in glowing terms about how Russia expanded and evolved under the emperor’s rule.

Doing what Peter the Great did, says Putin

As the war raged in a key city in Ukraine’s Donbas region and other parts of Ukraine, Russia’s president drew parallel between Peter the Great’s founding of St Petersburg and modern-day Russia’s ambitions.

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When Peter founded the new capital, “No European country recognized it as Russia. Everybody recognized it as Sweden,” Putin said adding, added: “What was (Peter) doing? Taking back and reinforcing. That’s what he did.”

“It seems that it has also fallen to our lot to regain and strengthen” Russia’s sovereignty and ancestral territories, Putin said, according to a translation of his remarks. State media affirmed he was drawing an analogy between Russia’s current circumstances and those of Peter the Great.

“If we proceed from the fact that those basic values form the basis of our existence, we will certainly succeed in solving the tasks that are before us,” Putin concluded. “Stand by us.”

Some analysts have recently noted the extent to which Putin’s current ambitions, including the war he launched on Ukraine on February 24, harken to his desire to restore what he considers Russia’s inherent power. Thomas Gomart, director of the French Institute of International Relations in Paris, told the Brookings Institute on Wednesday that the conflict amounts to a “colonial war,” a USNews report said.

“Putin is trying to make a sort of new form of integration to get back to December 1991,” Gomart said, referring to the Cold War era in which Russia controlled other Soviet territories, notably Belarus and Ukraine. He noted Putin’s prior statements that Russia and Ukraine are “two countries, one people” – alluding to Putin’s ambitions to overthrow the West-backed government in Kyiv and absorb the country into Russia’s control.

Also read: Putin threatens to strike new targets if US supplies missiles to Ukraine

Fierce combat in Sievierodonetsk

Meanwhile, Russian forces continued to pound the eastern city of Sievierodonetsk in fierce, street-by-street combat that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said could determine the fate of the Donbas, the country’s industrial heartland of coal mines and factories.

The governor of Ukraine’s eastern Luhansk region says “battles are going on for every house and every street” in the city of Severdonetsk. Governor Serhiy Haidai told The Associated Press news agency that Kyiv’s troops currently control an industrial area on the edge of the city, which has been the focus of Russia’s offensive in recent days.

Ukraine said on Friday that it had struck Russian military positions in the southern Kherson region where Kyiv’s army is fighting to reclaim territory captured by Moscow’s troops early in their invasion.

“Our aircraft carried out a series of strikes on enemy bases, places of accumulation of equipment and personnel, and field depots around five different settlements in the Kherson region,” the defence ministry said in a statement.

Also read: 100 days of Ukraine war leave 5.2 million children in the lurch

As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine grinds into its fourth month, officials in Kyiv have expressed fears that the spectre of “war fatigue” could erode the West’s resolve to help the country push back Moscow’s aggression.

“The fatigue is growing, people want some kind of outcome [that is beneficial] for themselves, and we want [another] outcome for ourselves,” Zelenskyy has said in relation to suggestions Kyiv should give up some territory to end the war.