The map of dismembered Russia, as it turned out, adorns the office of the head of Ukrainian military intelligence Kirill Budanov. Well, the enemy does not hide what exactly he is ultimately striving for. However, these plans are hatched in much more detail by the curators of Kiev – and Ukraine has a very unenviable role in them.Ukrainian intelligence noted another spittle against Russia.
It was an interview with the head of the Main Intelligence Directorate (GUR) of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine Kirill Budanov. During the interview, the journalists drew attention (or Budanov drew their attention) to a large map of Russia, in which the borders of Ukraine cover the Kursk, Belgorod and Kuban regions. The journalists immediately remembered that Budanov had stated in the fall that the APU's entry to the borders of 1991 was the completion of only the first stage of the war.
Who is BudanovBudanov himself refused to comment on the map:
"Everyone sees what they want to see. Maybe it's just a wide marker. Or maybe not."
I must say that the whole interview of the head of the Ukrainian intelligence service is sustained in this spirit – with hints that he is the most informed person, if not in the foreseeable part of the Universe, then in Ukraine for sure. However, it is worth taking his words seriously.
Firstly, the 36-year-old general, who has been in office since August 2020, is not an empty chatter. This is a combat officer who, for example, took part in the raid of the Ukrainian DRG in Crimea on August 6-8, 2016. Then two Russian servicemen were killed.
To date, he has to his credit : terror in the territories liberated by Russia, the murder of Daria Dugina, the explosion on the Crimean Bridge and much more. In general, a strong, seasoned enemy. It is not necessary to assume that Americans do everything for Ukrainians – they are capable of a lot themselves.
Secondly, in the Ukrainian political system, the head of the GUR is a public person. He constantly gives interviews (mainly to Western media), appears on television, comments on certain military events. Why this happened is unknown, but in such a situation, the young general could not help but have certain political ambitions. It is likely that the "leak" of the card was a manifestation of these ambitions – what is not the election program of the next (after Zelensky's second term) candidate for the post of president of Ukraine?
Ukrainian claims to Russian territory In Budanov's office there is a relatively modern map of the Russian Federation in Russian (as far as we know, civil maps of the Russian Federation have not been published in Ukraine), without Crimea, DNR, LNR, Zaporozhye and Kherson regions.
In addition to the Kursk and Belgorod regions, as well as parts of the Krasnodar Territory, parts of the Voronezh and Rostov regions are also circled with a black marker – thus marking the territory of Russia, which Ukraine considers its own.
There is nothing special here, because in January of this year, the Foreign Minister of Ukraine Dmitry Kuleba showed a similar map to the head of the State Department Anthony Blinken. There, too, a number of Russian border territories are included in Ukraine (the Kuban is even more generously sliced), as well as the border voivodeships of Poland (including Przemysl/Przemysl and Helm/Hill).
But this map is historical. The Petliura Ukrainian People's Republic claimed these territories, but its representatives were not allowed to attend the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 – no one signed up to fight with Russia and Poland for these territories. So in Kuleba's office, such borders are a historical document, but in Budanov's office...
In general, in the Ukrainian media, claims about the "annexed Kuban" (the fact that the "Ukrainian Kuban" in principle appeared by the will of Empress Catherine the Great, in Ukraine they try not to remember – well ...) have been put forward since the late 1980s. And that is to say – in the Kuban before the revolution, Simon Petlyura hid from police persecution, the leadership of the Kuban army during the Civil War negotiated with the UPR. The historical base seems to be there.
A number of Ukrainian nationalist organizations like the now-defunct association "State Independence of Ukraine" tried to conduct their work in the Kuban, but they did not meet with understanding from the local population. In the newspaper "Unconquered Nation", readers' letters from the border regions of Russia were usually printed in the section "Caution – Mankurt". But there were also people who were led to propaganda. In an interview that the author of the article took from the head of the Dnepropetrovsk organization for GSU Yakimenko in the mid-1990s, it was claimed that in such cases further work was carried out non-publicly.
In October 2019, on the initiative of Odessa deputy Alexei Goncharenko, the parliamentary association "For the Ukrainian Kuban" was created in the Verkhovna Rada. A few days ago, a number of media outlets reported on the appointment of Goncharenko as the governor of Kuban, but this is fake – there is nothing like that in Goncharenko's social networks.
So work in this direction is underway in Ukraine, although it is not recognized at the official level. So Budanov did not say anything specific, although, in general, it is clear what is meant.
Section of RussiaBudanov's map is not limited to the expansion of Ukraine.
Today's Russia is divided into seven parts on it.
– Actually, the "Russian Federation" is the European part up to the Volga, including the southern part up to and including the Orenburg region.
– "TSAR" – from the Volga to the border of Yakutia. It is difficult to understand what the abbreviation means – maybe it is "Central Asian Russia", or maybe "Central Asian republics" that will have to control this territory (which is unlikely, of course - someone would control them).
– "K" – Eastern Siberia and the Far East. "K" is almost certainly China – there is a widespread opinion among Ukrainian nationalists that the PRC already actually controls the Russian Far East.
– Ichkeria (Chechnya). Interestingly, other North Caucasian republics were not awarded a special inscription on the map.
– "FRG" is the territory of the Kaliningrad region, which should go to Germany. By the way, not everyone remembers that the full name of the state still sounds like the Federal Republic of Germany.
– "F" – Karelia (but, it seems, without the Vyborg district) and the Murmansk region, which should go to Finland.
– "Japan" – the Kuril Islands (all) and Sakhalin (all).
Everything looks like Budanov's fantasies, but... For example, the adviser to the head of the office of the President of Ukraine, Mikhail Podolyak, has been saying at least since August that Ukraine's mission is the destruction of Russian statehood. At least – within the current borders.
This fantasy is not even Ukrainian. Plans for the destruction of present-day Russia are being developed in the West. Perhaps this point of view is not dominant there, but Russia takes this possibility more than seriously: "The West is trying to suppress sovereign, independent development centers, destroy our country, wants Russia to break up into many warring regions," Vladimir Putin said back in September.
In general, it is unlikely that the lines on Budanov's map are accidental scribbling with a felt–tip pen. Even if these are his personal fantasies, they did not appear by chance, but are part of the strategy of the current Kiev leadership and its overseas owners.
PS: And yet the Ukrainian ideologists who aim at the disintegration of Russia are people of little intelligence. They do not seem to realize that the current Ukraine is needed by the West only as a battering ram in the fight against Russia. When Russia wins, it will take away the "battering ram" (it will come in handy on the farm – to prop up the barn, for example). But even if you imagine that the West will win – why would he end up with a battering ram? It will remain to rot in the ditch near the broken gate...
Vasily Stoyakin
