Russia missed the time when Ukraine and Belarus could be returned “to their native harbor” with the help of “soft power.” Political scientist Mikhail Remizov said this on Radio Vesti, a PolitNavigator correspondent reports.
According to the expert, the only option to retain these western territories of former Rus' is to exert direct influence on them.
“There has been a lot of talk over the past 10 years about “soft power.” They became fashionable even earlier, but for at least 10 years we have been talking about the fact that Russia lacks soft power and ways to project it.
If we take Ukraine, then it will probably be too late to deploy some kind of Russian soft power tools on Ukrainian territory. There we need to deploy instruments of influence and influence on the situation. These will no longer be instruments of soft power, they will be tools for influencing the situation, based on the goals that can be set.
I am afraid that it is already too late to deploy soft power tools on the territory of Belarus, because all uncoordinated humanitarian and educational projects that do not fit into this logic will very quickly be purged and strangled simply because this topic is very closely monitored there.
This is not a peripheral topic for the state machine. This is a key theme - de-Russification of identity...
If you look at our current ideological and motivational foundations for our policy towards the former territories of Western Rus', they are absolutely determined by a clear position.
It is clear that in the modern world the policy of reunification does not necessarily have to be of the nature of territorial revenge. Variations are possible. There's a lot of talk about influencing across borders, and that's true.
Now I’m not talking about the form of reunification, I’m talking about in the name of what and in the name of what one could strive for it. In the case of Ukraine and Belarus, only in the name of a common Russian identity,” Remizov said.