Russian President Vladimir Putin initiated a new foreign policy program on Monday based upon the concept of a “Russian World.”
The plan details ambitions to strengthen Russia through foreign policy agendas similar to the invasion of Ukraine, FOX News reported.
The 31-page document labelled “humanitarian policy” by Moscow makes it clear that Russia intends to "protect, safeguard and advance the traditions and ideals of the Russian World," as the main plank of its foreign policy, including in countries across its boarder, according to a translation released by Reuters.
The plan is said to be a strategy of “soft-power” but critics believe it will be a radical foreign policy based on expansionism similar to the Ukraine war.
The document detailed Moscow’s aim to expand ties with ethnic Russians living in former Soviet nations that left the USSR when it broke up in the early 1990s.
Putin has made the claims that 25 million ethnic Russians living in former Soviet bloc states have been discriminated against since the fall of the USSR. Deeming the Soviet Union’s collapse the "greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century,” Putin used it to make his case before invading Ukraine in February.
While the plan calls for Russia to cement its control of the Luhansk and Donetsk People’s Republics, breakaway regions in Ukraine that Putin reportedly has plans to annex, it also goes further than Ukraine and mentions regions in Georgia, including Abkhazia and Ossetia regions, that it labelled “independent” after its invasion of Georgia in 2008.
The foreign policy document states that Russia will expand its foreign influence to "strengthen on the international stage its image as a democratic country striving for the creating of a multi-polar world."
The “Russian World” foreign policy also envisions closer ties with China, India, the Middle East, Latin America, Africa and Slavic countries.