Putin says he will 'smash the teeth' of anyone who tries to bite off a bit of Siberia

The development of the Armed Forces will guarantee the integrity of the Russian territory.  The Russian president's usual pattern: flaunt the external threat to deflect from great internal problems of the country.  USA and China current targets.  Difficult to "scratch" the incisors of Xi Jinping.  Putin channels Ivan the Terrible.

Moscow (AsiaNews) - On May 20, President Vladimir Putin held one of his classic "direct" meetings with the press and the public.  The occasion was the meeting of the "Victory" organizing committee , an agency for the protection of the memory of glorious Russian history.

Using colorful "street" jargon as often happens, Putin threatened "those who dare to say, even in public, that it would not be right for regions like Siberia to belong to one state only".  He added that everyone tries to "bite" or "nibble" something off Russia: "These people must know, however, that we will smash all of their  teeth, so that they will not be able to bite anything anymore, and the guarantee of this lies in the development of our  Armed forces".

Putin explained that in all past history pretexts have always been sought to reduce the territory of Russia, as soon as it began to become stronger: "Abroad they think that our country is too big, despite the fact that it has lost many territories due to  of the collapse of the Soviet Union ".

Putin's threats have no specific opponent, although they seem to echo the claims of former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, invented in 2005 by the Russian president's entourage during an interview with director Nikita Mikhalkov.  Albright has repeatedly denied having said that "there is no justice in the fact that a land like Siberia belongs to one state".

Since then, the "words of Albright" have been one of the classic topics of Putin's direct meetings with the public, such as when a mechanic from Novosibirsk asked the president in 2007 to comment on them.  He replied that he did not know Albright: “But I know that these ideas roam the minds of many Western politicians.  It is a kind of political eroticism, which perhaps gives someone pleasure, but does not lead to any result ”.  On other occasions, Putin allegedly attributed to Albright "a pathological hatred of all Slavs".

The excitement in this case is all on the Russian side.  Putin has used this "fake news" rhetoric on at least four other occassions, and several other Russian politicians have reprized it.  The Russian authorities use it against enemies to cover up their flaws.  Foreign policy and the siege of the enemy are now necessary for the Kremlin to divert attention from the dramatic health and economic emergency, the resurgence of the pandemic and the production catastrophe of Russian industry, which will have problems recovering for several months.  Not to mention the tensions linked to the upcoming parliamentary elections, which despite the repression against the navalnists do not look like a triumph for Putinism.

According to many observers, it is difficult for Russian voters to be frightened by presidential threats, also because everyone knows that Siberia is largely in Chinese hands: it will be difficult to scratch Xi Jinping's incisors.  Almost all the comments on social media go in this direction, attributing anti-Chinese hostility to Putin's words;  in reality it is a usual attitude in the last twenty years: the recitation of "Putin the Terrible" no longer enchants the Russian public, especially when the average standard of living for the population has been getting lower and lower for 10 years.

For some, the "Putinian terror" of recent times, directed against internal and external enemies, would be due to a project of transition of power, with Putin who would like to resign due to his poor health.  Many, on the other hand, do not believe in this scenario, and instead think of Putin's passage to the image of the sixteenth-century Tsar Ivan the Terrible, who after the first twenty years of "reforming" reign passed to the police regime of the opričnina, the imperial guard who was "mother ” of all Russian totalitarian regimes.