Russian Empire

Anyone who believes Putin would hold the line at Donbas, leave Kyiv’s government in place, or refrain from threatening other former Soviet republics hasn’t been paying attention to what Putin himself has been saying about his goals the past year—e.g., that Ukraine is a fiction, its people don’t exist as a separate culture, and that Russia has a legitimate interest in not only carving out a sphere of influence but re-creating the old Russian empire in the space of what was once the Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact.

They said that for two decades the Russian leader had been "seeking to recreate the Russian empire and suffocate the countries around its borders".

However, Lammy and his defence colleague John Healey said that Putin had for two decades sought "to recreate the Russian empire and suffocate the countries around its borders".

"I am out in the street together with my whole family trying somehow to tear out this small country out of the claws of the Russian empire," one protester told the Associated Press.

It’s unclear how much this weighs against his dream of restoring the old Russian empire, the first step of which is to regain control of all of Ukraine.