“Whoever remembers old things, out with their eye,” goes a Russian proverb. Russian President Vladimir Putin knows that one by heart, and he should have heeded the ancient advice when, on July 26, 2026, in St. Petersburg, in the remarks he delivered during a meeting marking the Navy Day, he indulged himself and the audience, as he loves to do, in an excursion into the dark corners of Russia’s history.
In that historical detour, Putin claimed, with a classic Leninist conviction, Ukraine’s western regions, incorporated into Ukraine under Joseph Stalin after World War II, would inevitably return to their former owners: “I am convinced that sooner or later Ukraine will lose its western territories, lands that once belonged to Poland, Hungary, and Romania.
Maybe it won’t happen tomorrow or the day after. It could take a year, two years, 10, or 15 years, but history will ultimately put everything in its place.”
This is not the first time Putin has brought up the subject of Ukraine’s western borders. In 2023, he stated that Poland never really gave up on its western Ukrainian lands, such as Galicia and its capital city of Lviv.
As recently as February of 2024, during Tucker Carlson’s visit to Moscow, Putin handed his guest a folder containing documents and argued that western Ukrainian regions were historically Polish, Romanian, and Hungarian, and were nothing more than a gift from Stalin.
Yet Putin’s recent statement was the most public call to open the healing wounds of the last big war. Surprisingly, Putin is not a good student of Marxism-Leninism. If he were, he would be careful with the logic of his argument, as the argument is only as good as its ultimate logical conclusion. And herein lies the problem.
Why Putin is no great student of Marxism-Leninism
In Europe, the end of World War II marked the defeat of Nazism. That victory also brought about the last great redrawing of the borders inside the continent. Almost all of them were demanded by Stalin and benefited the Soviet Union.
The summits at Tehran and Yalta cemented those caprices either as the price for the immense human sacrifices by the Soviet people or as part of a new Soviet-centered security architecture in Eastern Europe that required extending the Soviet borders further west, at the expense of the neighboring states, to ostensibly prevent another surprise attack similar to the one in 1941.
Finland was forced to cede about 10% of its total territory. It lost the Karelian Isthmus, its economic and cultural heartland, containing Viipuri (Vyborg), Finland’s second-largest city and a major economic center at the time.
Not least significantly, the territorial losses included the area of Petsamo, with its rich nickel deposits in Kolosjoki, which contained Finland’s sole warm, ice-free port on the Arctic Ocean.
A few other areas were handed over to the Soviet Union, but Petsamo had significant strategic significance beyond territory. Some 400,000 Finns, about 12% of the country’s entire population, had to be resettled within Finland’s remaining borders.
Even tiny Estonia lost some of its territory. After the annexation, Moscow redrew the internal borders of the USSR and transferred roughly 5% of Estonia’s land area to the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic.
Yet Stalin’s most precious gift from Tehran and Yalta was East Prussia. East Prussia was the cradle of the modern German state. Its capital, Konigsberg, the birthplace of Emanuel Kant, was one of the most important cultural centers of the German-speaking world.
East Prussia had never been part of Russia, neither territorially nor culturally, though starting with Peter the Great, all Russia’s rulers dreamed of capturing it. It was the warm-water port on the Baltic Sea, the real “window to Europe.” More than two million Germans were forcibly expelled from East Prussia to vacate the space before the settlers from Russia arrived.
The territory, after the breakup of the Soviet Union, is now wedged between Lithuania and Poland, making the enclave territorially disjoined from the rest of Russia.
All of these territorial grabs come well under the rubric of “history will ultimately put everything in its place” – though it is highly unlikely that any of the offended parties will ever try, by force or otherwise, to take the territories back from Russia. Germany, for example, does not need to absorb one million Russians.
Russia’s greatest threat emanates from the East, not the West
Herein lies Putin’s biggest failure to read Lenin correctly: one needs to respect “objective reality.” Russia’s biggest threat is no longer in the West. It is in the East.
Russia’s expansion in the 19th century in the Far East was not a foray into no man’s land. Under immense pressure from a much stronger neighbor, the Qing dynasty was forced to hand over a huge territory to the tsarist Russian Empire through the 1858 Treaty of Aigun and the 1860 Convention of Peking.
In China, these agreements are still remembered as “Unequal Treaties” and refer to the ceded lands as Outer Manchuria. The region covers over 1 million sq.km., and includes the following Russian regions: Vladivostok, Primorsky region, Khabarovsk region, Amur region, and Sakhalin Island.
Unlike Russia’s European neighbors, China did not forget and did not forgive, leading to border clashes along the Ussuri River in 1969, when the relationship between the countries deteriorated. And as late as 2023, China’s Ministry of Natural
Resources issued a directive requiring all official Chinese maps to include the historic Chinese names alongside their Russian counterparts for key Far East locations.
In the past decades, thousands, if not millions, of Chinese have relocated over the border and settled in Russia’s Far East regions. Some of those areas are already majority Chinese.
There is no logic in Ukraine giving back its territories to Poland, Hungary, and Romania. And Finland, Estonia, Germany, and China are not taking back from Russia what was taken by aggression, even though that same force was originally responsible for those injustices.
Indeed, Putin believes that modern Russia is the reincarnation of the old imperial state and the Soviet Union altogether. If that is the case, then Russia may end up with both of its “eyes out.” The outcome of this process will be brutal and unforgiving to Russia.
The writer lives and works in Silicon Valley, California. He is a founding member of San Francisco Voice for Israel.