Russia’s defeat of Ukraine in the Kremlin’s one-sided war will not de-escalate relations between NATO and Moscow, even if Putin is gone, but will leave the Russian Federation “brutal” and “vindictive,” says Air Force Chief Mike Wigston. , that’s right Guardian. In addition, Russia would pose a threat to NATO countries.

Mike Wigston told The Telegraph that Russia’s air force, surface fleet and submarines pose a threat to Britain and NATO. He warned that the threat could even increase if Russian President Vladimir Putin is ousted.

• “When the conflict in Ukraine is over and Ukraine restores its borders as it should, we will have a damaged, vengeful and brutal Russia harming us through air, missile and submarine attacks,” he said. of the British Air Force, Mike Wigston, who is due to step down next month after four years at the helm of the RAF.

• “But it also proves that he’s more than just one person. There is a whole structure and hierarchy behind Putin. So even if Putin disappears from the scene, there are many others who could replace him and who could be just as cruel and cruel to their own people and neighboring states,” he added.

Militant statements of people from Putin’s entourage

Putin is surrounded by many famous pro-war figures, and their speeches are even more militant than the current Kremlin leader.

The Secretary of the Security Council in Moscow, Mykola Patrushev, recently stated that in the event of a threat to existence, Russia is capable of destroying any adversary, including the United States.

Some analysts warn that the normalization in Russia of the kind of rhetoric repeatedly used by propagandist Volodymyr Solovyov in his broadcasts or politicians such as Dmitry Medvedev could increase the risk of nuclear war.

Former Russian President Dmytro Medvedev said the war in Ukraine could last decades, with long periods of fighting interspersed with cease-fires.

“This conflict will continue for a very long time, most likely decades,” said Medvedev, quoted by RIA.

“As long as there is such a government, there will be, say, three years of truce, two years of conflict, and everything will happen again,” he continued, repeating Moscow’s statement that Ukraine is a Nazi state.

Russia and European power

Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security adviser to President Jimmy Carter, said in the book “The Great Chessboard” that after the collapse of the USSR, the biggest loss for Russia was Ukraine, because otherwise it could claim the leadership of an “arrogant Eurasian empire” in which Moscow could to rule over the non-Slavs in the south and southeast of the former USSR. In other words, without Ukraine, Russia can no longer be a Eurasian empire, but only an Asian empire, “which, most likely, will be involved in conflicts – which will weaken it – with the states of Central Asia.”

“The emergence of an independent Ukrainian state not only forced all Russians to reconsider the nature of their own ethnic and political identity, but also became a major geopolitical obstacle for the Russian state.

Abandoning more than three hundred years of Russian imperial history meant the loss of a potentially rich industrial and agricultural economy and 52 million people ethnically and religiously close enough to Russians to make Russia a truly great and self-confident imperial state.”

Thus, it is important for Russia to regain control over Ukraine in order to become a powerful imperial power again.

A sense of collective exceptionalism and an external enemy

Political scientist Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, a professor at King’s College London, told the independent news portal Meduza that Soviet identity had two fundamental foundations: a sense of Soviet exceptionalism, which allowed every Soviet citizen to feel a sense of belonging to a single state, and the constant threat of an external enemy.

“The sense that the Soviet Union was always surrounded by enemies was basically one of the permanent mechanisms that worked to consolidate society.

A sense of collective exceptionalism was also deeply fundamental to Soviet society. It is not surprising that the same mechanisms that worked in the Soviet era are still working today,” she said.

Foreign hostile discourse, as well as Russian exceptionalism, is now being actively implemented by the state media.

Examples of this are propagandists Volodymyr Solovyov and Margarita Simonyan, as well as Olga Skabeeva.

They say that the West is attacking Russia and that Russia must defend itself.

“(The West) declared war on us. What are we waiting for? We will have to conduct a special NATO demilitarization operation,” said one of the most famous hosts of the Rossiya-1 TV channel, Olga Skabeeva.

A month later, she raised the topic of “NATO demilitarization” again, declaring this time in the show she hosts on “Russia-1” that “we are forced to demilitarize not only Ukraine, but also all of NATO.”

Margarita Simonyan, who lived and studied in the US when she was 15, criticized America’s “horribly poor” education, instead saying how “tolerant” Russians have historically been.

• VIDEO Head of Russia Today Margarita Simonyan: Famine will begin and they will want to be friends with us

Who could replace Putin if something happens to him

While there have been all kinds of reports about how the Russian elite – like those who have been plotting since last year – to replace Putin, this does not mean that the vision is changing.

At the beginning of March last year, Meduza wrote that most Kremlin officials do not know what to do and are afraid of how the sanctions will affect their careers and lives. A little later, a “patriotic upsurge” began – in April, many of those in power publicly called for a “victorious end” to the war.

A Meduza source said in May 2022 that “Putin is not happy with almost anyone”, “the president started the war without thinking about the scale of the sanctions”.

According to this source, last year among the popular figures to replace Putin were Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin, Security Council Vice President Dmitry Medvedev and First Deputy Head of the Presidential Administration Serhii Kirienko.

But we remind you that Medvedev is one of the loudest people who put forward the idea of ​​a global nuclear catastrophe every time Ukraine gets weapons.