JRL NEWSWATCH: “The West Is Preparing for Russia’s Disintegration” – Foreign Policy/ Anchal Vohra
“Amid war in Ukraine, some strategists are setting their eyes on the ‘decolonization’ of Russia itself.”
“Russia’s poor performance on the Ukrainian battlefield, and the growing belief that … Putin’s nuclear threat shouldn’t be taken at face value, has emboldened Western analysts and Russian dissidents to publicly call for [the] ‘decolonization’ of … the vast Russian Federation, the successor of the Soviet Union that consists of 83 federal entities, including 21 non-Slavic republics. … Western analysts are increasingly pushing the theory that Russian disintegration is coming and that the West must not only prepare to manage any possible spillover of any ensuing civil wars but also to benefit … by luring resource-rich successor nations into its ambit. They argue that when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 the West was blindsided and failed to fully capitalize …. It must now strategize to end the Russian threat once and for all, instead of providing an off-ramp to Putin. But many others see a rump Russia as a more severe threat to global peace and security and warn against emasculating an enemy that, even when weaker than the West militarily and economically, still possesses almost 6,000 nuclear warheads, armed militias, and vast resources trapped in a sparsely populated landscape bordering China. …”