What is the Russian Federation, why did Yeltsin want the CIS,tolerate all the independences, never to give up the idea that one could be a Russia, but still wanted to be a Russian Federation, with Chechnya, and all the Dagestan states? So, already a smaller empire and Reich, or remnant of the Soviet Union, who want to stay in a Russian empire or circle. The first people who didn’t want it anymore were the Chechens. Now one may still do and believe an initially national-secular-thinking independence movement, but the first Chechen president was an Islamist with contacts to the Muslim Brotherhood. But Yeltsin was not yet concerned with the question of secular or Islamist Chechnya, but rather with the fact that a part of the federation wanted to become independent like the post-Soviet states. Yeltsin was already waging a war in Chechnya, but not very successfully, and he didn’t want to become a butcher. At least the Islamist bombing wave in Russian cities at the time meant that Putin was able to determine the electoral laws in such a way that no opposition grew out of it, then jump on it as a new strong man, waging the Chechen war with brutality ala Wagner and the „Butcher of Syria“, sees Kadyrov as his bloodhound, yes, in view of the series of bombs, with which many suspected that Putin had the bombs stored himself, which the former FSB employee in Great Britain also testified before he was poisoned in London and did not survive. But be that as it is or may be. The Ukraine war is only a result of the conflict between the three major powers, USA, China and Russia. The USA sees the entire globe as a sphere of interest and a world power, while Russia and China want to cut out ever larger enclaves, which then push the USA further and further out of Europe and the Indo-Pacific. But as I said: under Yeltsin, they didn’t want Russia, but an empire, a Russian Federation, which allowed all other post-Soviet states to become independent. What did the Russian Federation mean? Yes, the old idea of ​​an small and little empire, not a nation state, but even its birth could be an ugly event. Yeltsin never wanted to get away from the Russian-imperial idea, never a Russia, but a mini-empire, be it a federation, be it CSTO, be it EAEU, be it value conservatism like  Orban, etc., but Putin has now adopted this mini-imperial posturing logical form of great power politics, with Eurasia and Novorussja in the Ukraine and the Russian world and new world order as the core along the SCO-BRI. Every semi-educated person interested in geopolitics knows what the acronyms and allusions mean, but let’s come to the conclusion. Unless Russia lets go of its empire ideas, it will never be Russia. Because if it has become Russia, one should not repeat Putin’s mistakes again. And even if Russia manages the transition from empire to a nation-state, then that doesn’t mean anything will be good under certain reductions. Russia will also be remembered as a post-Putin weak nation-state that we need to shore up to avoid seeing the Eastern collapse – demographic, economic, political and nuclear.