Vladimir Putin marked the 350th anniversary of Peter the Great's birth this week in a rather lofty way: He compared himself to the czar to seemingly justify his own invasion of Ukraine. "Peter the Great waged the Great Northern War for 21 years," the Russian leader said Thursday after a visit to an exhibit dedicated to Peter, per Reuters. "It would seem that he was at war with Sweden, he took something from them. He did not take anything from them—he returned [what was Russia's]." The news agency notes that Putin has tried to defend his war in Ukraine by scoffing at Ukraine's claims at being its own nation, instead insisting that Russia and Ukraine are one nation that's been temporarily divided. Instead of acknowledging that what's going on in Ukraine is a war, Putin has claimed it's a "special military operation" that's meant to "denazify" Ukraine for its own good.
The Washington Post notes that Peter deemed himself an emperor and launched that aforementioned 20-year-plus war with the Swedish Empire at the turn of the 18th century, claiming much of that land for Russia. Peter even announced a new capital on the conquered land, named after himself: St. Petersburg, which later ended up becoming Putin's hometown. "What was [Peter] doing? Taking back and reinforcing," Putin said Thursday, per the AP. "And it looks like it fell on us to take back and reinforce as well." Indeed, Putin seems to want to follow in those past footsteps and "[relive] the Russian imperial dream," Kyle Wilson, a former Australian diplomat in the Soviet Union, tells the Post. "And the man who made Russia into an imperial empire was Peter the Great."
Ukraine, for its part, isn't buying Putin's line. "The West must draw a clear red line so the Kremlin understands the price of each next bloody step," Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, tells Reuters. "We will brutally liberate our territories." Meanwhile, others aren't so sure Peter the Great is the most apt analogy for Putin to be drawing for himself. "He wants to be seen as a Peter [the Great]-style modernizer," says Andrei Kolesnikov, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Instead, "he will go down in history as a cruel ruler more like Ivan the Terrible." (More Vladimir Putin stories.)
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