President Vladimir Putin on Monday approved the new foreign policy doctrine based on the concept of “Russian World”, an idea used by conservative ideologies to justify intervention abroad to support Russian speakers.
“Humanitarian Policy” 31 Pages, published for more than six months into the war in Ukraine, said Russia must “protect, protect and advance the traditions and ideals of the Russian world”.
While presented as a kind of soft power strategy, he captured the official policy ideas around Russian politics and religion which were used by several hardliners to justify the occupation of Moscow for the parts of Ukraine and support for pro-Russian entities that separated themselves in the eastern country.
“The Russian Federation provides support to his compatriots who live abroad in fulfilling their rights, to ensure the protection of their interests and preservation of their Russian cultural identity,” the policy said.
It is said that Russian relations with his colleagues abroad allow him to “strengthen the international stage of his image as a democratic country that struggles to create a multi-polar world.”
Putin for many years has highlighted what he sees as a tragic fate of around 25 million Russian ethnic groups who found themselves living outside Russia in new independent countries when the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, an event he called a geopolitical disaster.
Russia continues to consider the former Soviet room, from Baltic to Central Asia, as a legal scope of influence – its ideas strongly opposed by many countries and also by the West.
The new policy says Russia must increase cooperation with Slavia, China and India countries, and further strengthen its ties with the Middle East, Latin America and Africa.
Moscow said that he had to deepen his relationship with Abkhazia and Ossetia, the two georgia regions recognized as independent by Moscow after the war against Georgia in 2008, as well as two entities that separated the People’s Republic.