Lie of the Century: “Russia has never in its history attacked anyone.”

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“Look, Russia has never attacked anyone first. Look at history; they wanted to make us a victim, but, fortunately, nobody was able to,” said Putin’s spokesman Dmitry Peskov on the TV channel Rossiya 1. 

It is enough to look at the political map to ask the question: how come that this country, which “has never attacked anyone,” increase its territory more than 7 times during 350 years: from 3 million sq. km in 1547 to 21.8 sq. km in 1914?

Strange…

• In fact, Russia has started at least 53 wars. Here are just a few of them and only from recent history:

• Soviet army campaign to Baltic countries and Belarus in 1918-1919. Purpose: to establish Soviet rule on their territory

• The aggression of the Soviet Russia against the Ukrainian People’s Republic and termination of independent Ukraine (1918-1920) 

• The Polish-Soviet war of 1919-1920. An attempt by the Soviet army to break through the Polish Republic to Germany 

• Occupation of part of Poland (partition of Poland together with the Nazis, annexation of Western Ukraine and Western Belarus) in 1939 

• Annexation of Baltic countries which was not recognized globally until the collapse of the USSR (1939, 1941-1944)

• the Soviet-Finnish war, annexation of Karelia and Southern Finland (1939-1940)
• Soviet occupation of Eastern European countries and East Germany (creation of puppet pro-Soviet governments), annexation of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad) in 1945 

• Military suppression of the uprising in Hungary by USSR troops in 1956

• Intervention of Soviet troops in Czechoslovakia, military suppression of the Prague Spring in 1968 

• the Afghan war started with the overthrow of the legitimate government by Soviet special forces and the assassination of the President of Afghanistan, followed by subsequent full-scale military intervention (1979-1989)

• First Chechen War (1994)

• Second Chechen War (1999)

• War against Georgia, creation of illegitimate puppet enclaves of South Ossetia and Abkhazia (2008)

• Illegal and globally unrecognized annexation of Crimea using the Russian Black Sea Fleet and special forces of the GRU General Stuff of the Russian Armed Forces (2014)

• “Hybrid” war in Ukraine, formation of unrecognized puppet enclaves of “DPR” and “LPR” (since 2014) in the Donbas

• Military operation in Syria (Russian intervention on the side of dictator Bashar al-Assad) since 2015

The list goes on.  In the 20th century alone, Russia participated in a number of other “hybrid” wars across the world.