The Last Bastion

Marius has drawn my attention to an excerpt from an article in yesterday's Le Monde:

ANALYSE
L'avenir de la Russie se joue aussi à Kiev
LE MONDE | 29.11.04 | 15h01

The future of Russia is also played in Kiev

[passage omitted]

Since 1990-1991, the collapse of communism, and the dismantling of the Soviet Union, the Russian Empire has been in retreat. In the west, the old people's democracies have completed their emancipation while adhering to the EU and NATO, just as the Baltic republics, which had been integrated into the tsarist empire for centuries. have done. Apart from Belarus and the Kaliningrad enclave, Ukraine remains the only vestige of this "étranger proche" [near abroad] to which the Kremlin asserts to have particular rights.

Whereas Russia itself is threatened in its territorial integrity by the Chechen secession, the leaders of Moscow know that a supervision of Ukraine represents the last chances for the Russian empire to survive.
[passage omitted]