As long as there are those in the West who would like to keep the Russian Empire from collapsing, Putin and his henchmen regularly make it clear that they are wary of the collapse of the Russian Federation. It constantly sounds in their speeches and is visible in their actions.
Instead of thinking that global security should preserve the Russian Federation, Western partners should work on how to act when the Russian Empire falls.
The mission of Ukrainian politicians, experts and activists is to prove to the free world that the Russian Empire must cease to exist, cannot and will not be able to exist.
The Russian Empire must cease to exist because the indigenous enslaved nations on the territory of the Russian Federation are under double discrimination: from Moscow and the international community. On the part of the international community, because the world, which in the second half of the 20th century recognized the right of dozens of former European colonies to independence, does not recognize the same right to freedom for the indigenous and still enslaved nations of the Russian Empire. These nations deserve the same chance and international support for this process for equal rights.
The Russian Empire cannot continue to exist, because if it comes out of this war intact, it will certainly lead to both the strengthening of the internal repressive regime and the growth of its aggressiveness abroad. The ideologues of the Moscow empire do not hide the fact that for its preservation it must mobilize internally at the expense of a constant aggressive foreign policy. That means the Russian Empire will remain the biggest generator of international tension, pushing the world to new conflicts and wars.
The Russian Empire will not be able to exist for long, because it will repeat the fate of the same artificially assembled predecessor – the USSR. The Union fell unexpectedly for many in the West, although it had a much larger resource base than today’s Russia. This is the first point. Second, globalization works against an extremely dependent empire and in favor of the indigenous nations enslaved by it. The Soviet Union and its population could exist in isolation from others and depend minimally on contact with them. Modern Russia will not be able to afford this, due to the huge number of dependencies. In the times of the USSR, there were no such means of mass communication as there are now. Information is transmitted faster and more smoothly. All this means greater vulnerability of the empire. Third, the state machinery of the Union was much more disciplined and much less corrupt. To support the regime, Moscow today is forced to share its monopoly on violence with local elites much more than it did under the Union. Otherwise, it will not be able to work in a super-corrupt state. Such powers of local princes lay the foundation for disintegration in the future.
This is a general outline of why the Russian Empire will fall apart. There are hundreds of ethnic, religious, social, economic, infrastructural, and regional contradictions in its construction, which are still deactivated only thanks to the violence and arbitrariness of the ruling regime. Everything that is based on hard coercion is doomed to collapse.
Mykhailo Basarab, political scientist, officer of the Armed Forces
