President likens himself to Peter the Great as he ‘reclaims’ land for Russia

VLADIMIR PUTIN has offered the clearest summation yet of his war goals as he compared himself to Peter the Great “reclaiming” territory for Russia.

At a meeting with young entrepreneurs and scientists, the Russian president drew a comparison between himself and the tsar who founded St Petersburg and ruled in the late 17th and early 18th centuries.

“Peter the Great waged the Northern War for 21 years. You might think: he was fighting with Sweden, seizing their lands... he wasn’t capturing them, he was reclaiming them,” Mr Putin said.

He went on to imply that he believed that swathes of Ukrainian land would soon be annexed in a similar fashion.

“When Peter the Great laid the foundation of a new capital in St Petersburg, none of the European countries recognised this territory as Russian, everyone recognised it as Swedish,” he said.

“But along with Finno-ugric peoples, Slavs lived there from ancient times. Why did he invade it? To reclaim [our lands] and strengthen [the state]. That’s what he did. It’s our turn now to return [the land] and strengthen [the state].”

He was speaking at an exhibition dedicated to Peter the Great, named “Peter I: The Birth of an Empire.”

While Mr Putin has used false claims about Nazism and dubious security concerns about Nato to justify what he has called a “special operation”, critics feel it is motivated by nostalgia for the Russian empire. The remarks suggest that he is unlikely to end the invasion until he has claimed substantial territory.

Western officials suspect that the Russian leader is not being given the full picture about the chaotic, incompetent performance of the Russian army in Ukraine as they are afraid of reprisals.

Last night a report in the French magazine Paris Match claimed that Mr Putin’s aides collect his urine and stool samples during trips abroad so that they can’t be analysed to reveal potential illness. Citing “Middle East” sources, the magazine said that during a trip to Saudi Arabia in 2019, Mr Putin’s faeces were collected in special containers, packed in a suitcase and sent back to Moscow.

Of the multiple Russian monarchs to earn the epithet “the Great”, Peter I did perhaps the most to shape modern Russia. Initially, he continued the policies of his predecessors, pushing Moscow’s control further south and east, into the then-ottoman oriented lands around Crimea and the Sea of Azov.

But he was obsessed with turning Russia into a maritime and European power and turned his eyes to the Baltic, and during the 21-year Northern War captured lands that Sweden had annexed from the Polish-lithuanian Commonwealth.

He was left in control of most of the Gulf of Finland, including modern-day Estonia and the future site of St Petersburg. Russia was also declared officially an empire and elevated to the status of a European great power.

Peter travelled extensively in Europe, often in disguise, and saw Europeanisation as the only path out of backwardness for Russia.

Culturally, he forced his nobility to become European. Russian-style clothing was banned from his court, while men were ordered to cut off their long, Asiatic beards or face a hefty tax. He also insisted they were educated, especially in science and maths.