Putin ‘is hell-bent on subjugating all of Eastern Europe behind a new Iron Curtain – including Poland and East Germany’

• Professor Grigory Yudin says Putin’s ambitions go beyond a new Soviet Union
• He also wants a new Iron Curtain with multiple free countries – including states in NATO and the EU – brought back under Moscow’s hegemony, Yudin says

Vladimir Putin is hell-bent on restoring the old Warsaw Pact after subjugating all of Eastern Europe including Poland, Hungary and the former East Germany, says a Russian expert.

Professor Grigory Yudin says the dictator’s imperialistic ambitions go even beyond recreating the Soviet Union as a single country, amid Putin’s on-going invasion of Ukraine – a former Soviet state.

He also wants a new Iron Curtain with multiple free countries – including states in NATO and the EU – brought back under Moscow’s hegemony.

The Warsaw Pact was a defence and security agreement that helped Moscow keep countries in Eastern Europe under its iron fist in the Soviet era.

In Putin’s logic ‘We cannot have the USSR and not have the Warsaw Pact’, said Yudin. ‘This kind of ideology [is what Putin thinks].’

Vladimir Putin is hell-bent on restoring the old Warsaw Pact after subjugating all of Eastern Europe including Poland, Hungary and the former East Germany, a Russian expert has said

He thinks of Poland, Hungary and others as ‘toy countries – let them think they have sovereignty. But in reality they are, of course, our zone of control.’

Political scientist Yudin has warned previously that Putin is set on a ‘big war’ against NATO, in which swallowing Ukraine and Moldova are only the appetiser.

This is despite Russian forces so far being unable to take the town of Bakhmut despite losing tens of thousands of troops in bloody battles over many weeks.

READ MORE: Hell rains down on Ukraine: Putin unleashes largest missile strike for weeks, hitting numerous cities 

His aim includes the restoration of the former Germany Democratic Republic, the former communist state that existed from 1949 until 1990, said the professor.

Asked on YouTube channel Bild in Russian if such an ‘unthinkable’ and ‘comedy’ outcome was Putin’s aim, he said: ‘Why do you take this as a joke?

‘There is nothing funny about it.

‘Of course Putin – as a [KGB] officer who served in East Germany – thinks that it is as stupid to give this territory away, and it should be taken back. 

‘He has a certain plan on how to do it. I am not saying this plan would work. But look at Germany and that unhealed divide between east and west.

‘In very few years you will see a serious question in East Germany, asking who do we want to be with? With the Americans, or is Putin better?’ he speculated.

Yudin said that ‘it became crystal clear that this is where Putin aimed by the end of 2021, when he bluntly said NATO should get out of Eastern Europe or else face war.

‘He is doing exactly what he promised. Of course, he doesn’t think these countries have any kind of sovereignty. He has a paranoid anger towards some of them – like Poland,’ Yudin claimed.

The Iron Curtain was a boundary that divided Europe into two separate regions after the defeat of Nazi Germany and the Axis allies at end of the Second World War, until the end of the Cold War between the US and its western Allies and the Soviet Union.

The Warsaw Pact – signed in May 1955 during the Cold War – was a treaty to counter NATO, comprising of the Soviet Union plus the then satellite states of Bulgaria, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania. 

Berlin was also split in two by the Berlin Wall, which divided the city into West and East Berlin, with the western half being a political enclave controlled by the Western allies, and the eastern half being controlled by East Germany.

Czechoslovakia was later invaded by four Warsaw Pact countries – the Soviet Union, the Polish People’s Republic, the People’s Republic of Bulgaria and the Hungarian People’s Republic – in order to quell an uprising. 

Pictured: Russian military vehicles and tanks drive on a road towards Kyiv in Ukraine, March 7, 2022, in the early days of Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine

Pictured: A map showing the Iron Curtain and which countries fell under the USSR’s Iron Fist

Albania was a member but withdrew in 1968 after the invasion of Czechoslovakia.

The Russian president his publicly shared his long-held claim that Russians and Ukrainians are part of a single people, and has denigrated Ukraine as an ‘artificial state,’ which received historic Russian lands during the Soviet times.

Kyiv argues the Russian invasion is a genocidal mission to both rewrite history – including the fall of the Soviet Union, which Putin views as a ‘catastrophe’ and a tragedy – and to ensure Ukraine cannot draw closer to the West.

Dr Yudin is a professor at the Moscow School of Social and Economic Sciences.

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