Geopolitics, nation, and empire: Construction of Russian identity through Putin's narrative on Ukraine and the world

Putin took revisionist foreign policy decisions by launching an offensive against Georgia, annexing Crimea, and after attempts of destabilization in Donbas, finally invading Ukraine. While these could be regarded as mainly strategic moves to increase power, Putin took pains to claim other less material reasons for action and made moralizing speeches and indeed wrote a historical article that he pleaded scientific without referring to historians. While Putin's moves were characterized as neo-colonialism in academia and media, he invoked concepts of Russianness, ethnic, national, and historical symbols and utilized a nationalist rhetoric. Analyzing Putin's political framing during key moments of foreign policy making, we would like to understand how he defines Russia and Russianness, to place his narrative of Russian identity, Russia's relations with Ukraine and Russia's place in the world in a historical framework, and critically evaluate his assumptions and propositions. We argue that Putin aims to reconstruct Russian "imperial-national identity" as encompassing concepts of nation, empire, and state. This type of identity enables him aims to re-assert (i) an ethnic national identity among the three Slavic nations of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians and the Russian diaspora, (ii) a non-ethnic national bond non-Slavic nation of Russia and even with former Soviet peoples, thereby simultaneously constructing Russia as a nation-state and a regional hegemon.