克里姆林宫原顾问接受美国《新政治家》杂志采访

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BM On 25 February Putin called on the Ukrainian army to overthrow President Volodymyr Zelensky. More recently, however, the Kremlin seems to be suggesting that it is interested in negotiating with Zelensky. Has the Kremlin changed its mind? Does it accept that Zelensky is the president of Ukraine and will remain the president of Ukraine?

SK It is a war, and we’re in the fog of war, so opinions change, aims change. At the start, maybe some thought that the Ukrainian military would arrange some kind of a coup so we would have a real power in Kyiv with whom we could negotiate – recent presidents, and especially Zelensky, are considered puppets.

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Bruno Maçães Why did Russia invade Ukraine?

Sergey Karaganov For 25 years, people like myself have been saying that if Nato and Western alliances expand beyond certain red lines, especially into Ukraine, there will be a war. I envisioned that scenario as far back as 1997. In 2008 President Putin said that if Ukraine’s membership of the alliance became a possibility then there will be no Ukraine. He was not listened to. So the first objective is to end Nato’s expansion. Two other objectives have been added: one is the demilitarisation of Ukraine; the other is denazification, because there are people in the Russian government concerned with the rise of ultra-nationalism in Ukraine to the extent that they think it is beginning to resemble Germany in the 1930s. There is also an aim to free the Donbas republics of eight years of constant bombardment.

There was also a strong belief that war with Ukraine was inevitable – maybe three or four years from now – which could well have taken place on Russian territory itself. So probably the Kremlin decided that if you have to fight, let’s fight on somebody else’s territory, the territory of a neighbour and a brother country, once a part of the Russian Empire. But the real war is against the Western expansion.

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Aformer presidential adviser to both Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin, Sergey Karaganov is honorary chair of the Moscow think tank the Council for Foreign and Defence Policy. He is associated with a number of key ideas in Russian foreign policy, from the so-called Karaganov doctrine on the rights of ethnic Russians living abroad to the principle of “constructive destruction”, also known as the “Putin doctrine”. Karaganov is close to both Putin and his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, and he formulated many of the ideas that led to the war in Ukraine – though he has also expressed disagreement with the idea of a long-term occupation of the country.


Karaganov has promoted the concept of “Greater Eurasia” and has defended a closer partnership with China. He is known as a foreign-policy hawk, and has argued that the long reign of the West in world politics is now at an end. On 28 March the New Statesman columnist Bruno Maçães interviewed Karaganov about his views on the war – including controversial statements on Ukrainian nationhood and denazification that would be disputed by those outside Russia – and the future of the liberal international order.