Putin ‘is hell-bent on subjugating all of Eastern Europe behind a new Iron Curtain’

Vladimir Putin is determined to restore the old Warsaw Pact after subjugating all of Eastern Europe, including Poland, Hungary and the former East Germany, a Russian expert says.

Professor Grigory Yudin says the dictator’s imperialist ambitions go even further than recreating the Soviet Union as a single country amid Putin’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine – a former Soviet state.

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

The Warsaw Pact was a defense and security agreement that helped Moscow hold countries in Soviet-era Eastern Europe with an iron fist.

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

He sees Poland, Hungary and others as “toy countries – make them think they have sovereignty.” But in reality, of course, they are our control zone.’

Political scientist Yudin previously warned that Putin is out for a “great war” against NATO, in which the engulfment of Ukraine and Moldova is just the appetizer.

This is despite the fact that the Russian troops have not yet been able to take the city of Bakhmut, despite the loss of tens of thousands of troops in bloody battles over many weeks.

His goals include restoring the former German Democratic Republic, the former communist state that existed from 1949 to 1990, the professor said.

Asked on the YouTube channel Bild in Russian whether such an “unthinkable” and “comic” result was Putin’s goal, he said: “Why do you take this as a joke?

‘There’s nothing funny about it.

“Of course Putin – as one [KGB] officer who served in East Germany – thinks it’s just as stupid to give this area away and take it back.

“He has a definite plan to do it. I’m not saying this plan would work. But look at Germany and that unhealed gap between East and West.

“In a 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 what Putin was aiming for towards the end of 2021, when he flatly said NATO had to leave Eastern Europe or there would be war.

He does exactly what he promised. Of course, he doesn’t think these countries have any kind of sovereignty. He has a paranoid rage towards some of them, like Poland,” Yudin claimed.

The Iron Curtain was a border that divided Europe into two separate regions after the defeat of Nazi Germany and the Axis allies at the end of World War II, 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 consisting 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 controlled by East Germany.

Czechoslovakia was later invaded by four Warsaw Pact countries – the Soviet Union, the Polish People’s Republic, the Bulgarian People’s Republic and the Hungarian People’s Republic – to put down a rebellion.

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

Pictured: A map showing the Iron Curtain and the countries that fell under the Iron Fist of the USSR

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

The Russian president has publicly shared his long-held claim that Russians and Ukrainians are part of one people, and has decried Ukraine as an “artificial state,” which was given historic Russian lands during Soviet times.

Kiev argues that the Russian invasion is a genocidal mission to both rewrite history – including the fall of the Soviet Union, which Putin considers a “catastrophe” and a tragedy – and to ensure that Ukraine does not move closer to the West can come.

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