An Honest Deal. How Peter I Bought the Baltic Territories from Sweden. With a bonus about an earlier purchase of Kiev.

Seeing how the Baltic states (and Ukraine) jumped on the anti-Russian bandwagon, it is worth taking a historical detour into the not so distant past and take a look at a certain fact that those states are trying to erase…

First is a translation of an article from a St.Petersburg edition of “Argumenty i Fakty”, followed by fragment of a related historical article, and concluding with an even deeper dive to the time of the purchase of Kiev from Poland. What is common for these two cases is the fact, that Russia chose to buy the territories at a fair price, despite it having a position of a war winner, enabling it to “just take” those lands. Another aspect of that history is, well, a historical parallel that no one among the Western leadership wants to learn from, maybe because they have not studied history at school.

A fair deal. How Peter I bought the Baltic States from Sweden

Weekly magazine “Arguments and Facts” No. 35. Arguments and facts – Petersburg 31/08/2022


Peter the Great announces the Peace of Nystad (Nishtadt) on Trinity Square in St. Petersburg

The destruction of the monuments to the Soviet soldiers in the Baltic states drew the attention of the Russian society, and at the same time reminded of how these territories came to be a part of the Russian state.

The Northern Russian-Swedish War was concluded on September 10, 1721 with the signing of the Peace of Nystad (Nishtadt), as a result of which Peter the Great actually bought Livonia and Estlandia (modern Latvia and Estonia) from the Swedish Kingdom. Why did the tsar still decide to pay for the territories that were by that time already under the control of the Russian army?

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Lithuanian Blockade of Kaliningrad – the suicidal move by a limitrophe to please its master

Lithuania has newly stopped the transit of the Russian trains and trucks to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, thus playing a dangerous game on the behest of its master, the USA. The thing is, the ratification of Lithuania’s eastern border and it ascension into EU is directly couple with a written guarantee of unimpeded transit of the goods to the Russian territory from the mainland Russia. This is just one of several jabs that the US-NATO are trying to make to distract Russia from the denazification of Ukraine and trying to stoke the flames of a regional conflict that bears the characteristics of a civil war into a pan-European or even global war. the other prods come from Finland with it militaristic rhetoric and the militarisation of the Finnish-Russian border; the blockade of good transport to the Russian settlement on Svalbard/Spitsbergen by Norway; the threat of Poland annexing Western Ukraine; and the threat of Romania annexing Moldavia and re-igniting the Pridnestrovie/Transnistria conflict. In any case, Russia will not be distracted, as reacting to those jabs would mean accepting the agenda of the enemy and losing the initiative. As the old military and strategic game adage goes: never do what you opponent wants and expects you to do.

But back to the little Lithuania, one of the three self-proclaimed “Baltic tigers”. Below I want to present translations of two articles that look at the issue from slightly different angles – a historical and a geopolitical one.

The first article appeared on Yandex Zen on May the 12th and is called “The last drop of patience and… de-pugification of Lithuania”. It refers to the famous fable by Krylov of “Mos’ka” (a pug or a mongrel) and an elefant, where the tiny dog barks loudly as the elephant is walking along the streets, and people around are saying, look, that tiny dog must be incredibly powerful that it dares to bark at an elephant. The Russian transliteration of “Demos’kofikazia” is also a play on words alluding to the ongoing denazification of Ukraine, yet denying Lithuania event that pleasure. The article has a historical and an opinion parts.


The last drop of patience and… de-pugification of Lithuania


(The Scrat-like creature over Lithuania holds a banner “We’ll stop Russian aggression!”, while the perplexed Russian Bear is reading a book with the title “Curing acute mental illnesses”)

The stunning news of the holidays is that the Lithuanian Seimas unanimously recognized Russia as a terrorist state. From the rhetoric of Russophobia, which no one is paying attention to… the Lithuanians have moved on to the first official document, according to all the canons of diplomacy, which is an act of direct aggression against Russia. You can justify yourself as much as you like, they say… this is just a parliament, the case will not get a legal move in the European Union and the Lithuanian government.

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