> Peter the Great waged the Great Northern War for 21 years. On the face of it, he was at war with Sweden taking something away from it… He was not taking away anything, he was returning. This is how it was. The areas around Lake Ladoga, where St Petersburg was founded. When he founded the new capital, none of the European countries recognised this territory as part of Russia; everyone recognised it as part of Sweden. However, from time immemorial, the Slavs lived there along with the Finno-Ugric peoples, and this territory was under Russia’s control. The same is true of the western direction, Narva and his first campaigns. Why would he go there? He was returning and reinforcing, that is what he was doing.

> Clearly, it fell to our lot to return and reinforce as well. And if we operate on the premise that these basic values constitute the basis of our existence, we will certainly succeed in achieving our goals.

Returning and reinforcing means restoring the USSR or Russian Empire's territory to Russia.

There's a key difference: Russia does not have freedom of the press nor freedom of speech. TV channels and newspapers get talking points from their coordinator in the presidential administration in the Kremlin and then do their best to hit the desired notes, or face takeover or closure. No independent mass media exists in Russia anymore. The Kremlin serves as the editorial board for every major outlet. This is the Russian government speaking.

Russian Media Monitor channel on Youtube maintains a collection of that speech. One of the most recent examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hULOZDqxv1Q In this clip from a prime-time TV show, propagandists keep repeating how they need to nuclear blackmail Trump into handing Europe over to Russia, with "Russian troops in Berlin, Paris and Lisbon" (02:12). Russian outlets hammer garbage like this into their population every single day, such rhetoric is everywhere. And words certainly lead to actions: when Russian POWs captured in Ukraine are asked what the hell they are doing in Ukraine, they can't come up with anything and fall back to repeating the same things word for word as if the were robots.

Comrad, I would expect you on this forum to not make it so obvious that you are the source of misinformation. Please, make it less obvious

Definition of imperialism:

> Imperialism is the maintaining and extending of power over foreign nations, particularly through expansionism, employing both hard power (military and economic power) and soft power (diplomatic power and cultural imperialism). Imperialism focuses on establishing or maintaining hegemony and a more or less formal empire.

Russia fits the bill very well.

That Russia is an empire is obvious when you look at the list of languages spoken on its territory, and why it has all those languages.

Yes. Yes they are. They absolutely want to test how much they can get away with to undermine Article 5.

https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/estonia-says-russia-rem...

> > invading and annexing its former-USSR neighbors

> Is Russia invading Poland and the Baltic states?

What goalpost-moving nonsense is this!? Why narrow it to those other areas while pretending the ongoing invasion of Ukraine doesn't exist, or forgetting the 2008 invasion of Georgia?

Must Russia attempt to attack or puppet every discrete former-USSR holding including Takijistan before you'll finally admit that Putin has revanchist dreams?

You did miss this Rossiya 1 broadcast:

https://www.thesun.ie/news/8513264/russian-state-tv-discusse...

Nitpick: The Baltics were part of USSR, Poland was not.