The first visit by a Russian leader to the then capital, Karakorum, took place in 1247, when all of Russia and all of Asia were subject to the Great Khan Baty, the heir of Genghis Khan. Putin needs to show off on the international stage, and Ulaanbaatar is a much more convenient place than China, where the Russian inevitably looks like a subject. As the complicated history of the Siberian Power 2 gas pipeline shows.
Vladimir Putin’s trip to Ulaanbaatar has provoked many reactions due to his arrogance in ignoring the arrest warrant of the international court, the obvious attempt to force China to sign trade agreements in the energy sector, and various other reasons. In fact, Putin wanted to show the true meaning of his entire policy of aggression and destabilization of the international geopolitical landscape, which lies in the deepest roots of the resentment of the Russians against the entire world, not only because of the loss of the Soviet empire, but also dating back to the greatest humiliation in the millennia-old history of Russia caused by the invasion and two-century-long yoke of the Tatar-Mongol Horde.
The first visit of a Russian leader to Mongolia took place in 1247, when all of Russia and all of Asia were under the rule of the Great Khan Baty, the heir of Genghis Khan, with whom Prince Alexander Nevsky – one of the figures most acclaimed by Putin and Patriarch Kirill – met in Karakorum, the capital of the Horde, where he stayed for two years. Qara Qorum is the Classical Mongolian name for the “Black Mountains” situated in the westernmost part of the country, and the city was founded shortly after the death of the “Khan of the Oceans” – who had united the Turkic and Mongol peoples and conquered the largest empire in all of history – by his third son and first successor Ögödei. It was the capital of the Mongol Empire for thirty years until 1264, when Kublai Khan moved the headquarters to Khanbalig, present-day Beijing, which was finally destroyed by the Ming a century later.
At that time the importance of Karakorum was such that even Pope Innocent IV had sent as ambassador one of his best missionaries, Giovanni da Pian del Carpine, one of the first disciples of St. Francis of Assisi. History of Mongalorum He described the greatness of the empire and the devastation it had caused, above all the total destruction of kyiv, the capital of Rus’, which disappeared from history for almost four hundred years. The friar also met Prince Aleksandr in the kingdom of Baty, who, thanks to the agreement with the Mongols, laid the foundations for the rise of Moscow, which flourished during that empire thanks to the commercial advantages, which also extended to the Orthodox Church.
Now Putin can triumphantly land at the airport of the Mongolian capital and show himself as the true Khan of the new “world order”, that of the Horde of Russian invaders, together with President Ukhnaagiin Khürelsükh in the Yurtthe tent decorated as the royal residence of Karakorum inside the presidential palace in Ulaanbaatar. The new Russian tsar is the true sovereign, and the ruler of small, peaceful modern Mongolia appears as his devoted subject: it is the great revenge of all Russian history.
That is why Putin wanted to celebrate the anniversary of another symbolic victory, the one won by the united Soviet and Mongolian troops against the Japanese army 85 years ago during the conflict on the Khalkhin-gol River, before the start of World War II. It is one of the constants of the rewriting of Russian history that is most often repeated in the mind of the Khan of the Kremlin: the connection of the victories of the 20th century with the oldest wars, from Alexander Nevsky to Stalin, from Kievan Rus’ to the Soviet Union. Of course, the slap in the face of international conventions, which exposed the inconsistency of the arrest warrant of the Hague Tribunal to which Mongolia was bound, and which had previously prevented Putin from travelling to Armenia and South Africa, two allies much less reliable than the Mongols, also carried a lot of weight.
On top of all this, Putin chose a particularly delicate moment to travel to Ulaanbaatar, the height of the war with Ukraine, between the Ukrainian counteroffensive in Kursk and the Russian counter-offensive in the Donbass, with countless casualties on both sides and among the civilian population. Moreover, precisely during the days of the trip to the East – which continued from Mongolia to the Russian capital in the Pacific, Vladivostok, on the occasion of the Eastern Economic Forum – the 20th anniversary of the massacre perpetrated by terrorists (and Russian special forces) in the school in Beslan was being commemorated in North Ossetia, in the Caucasus. Putin was there a few days earlier and had to face the angry mothers of the 186 murdered children who are still waiting for justice, and had to leave with his tail between his legs. With all these excuses, the purpose of the trip was to underline the “normality” of the situation from the Kremlin’s point of view, as if the conquest of the thousand square kilometers of the Kursk region had not affected the plans for war and victory.
Putin’s refrain since the war began has been that “everything is going according to plan,” when it is clear that everything is going the other way around, and instead of reconquering Berlin he has to go to the Mongolian Yurt, although the recent electoral successes of the neo-Nazi right in Thuringia and Saxony have aroused great enthusiasm in Moscow, especially because of the demand that Ukrainian flags be removed from German buildings. Any victory counts, from those of Nevsky in 1240 against the Swedes and the Teutonic Knights to that of 1938 against Japan, today an ally of the “Western Nazis” against whom Russia has unleashed a universal war, although the capture of Bakhmut and Avdeevka certainly cannot be compared with that of Königsberg and Vienna. All the more so since the victory at Khalkhin-gol was achieved together with the faithful Mongolian ally, because today’s Russia cannot count on many true allies, neither in the West nor in Asia, and not even among the ex-Soviet countries.
Some commentators believe that Putin’s trip should have served to boost his approval ratings among the population, which have fallen well below 70% even in official polls following the Ukrainian advance at Kursk. But popular approval in Russia is now a very secondary and easily manoeuvrable factor, especially after the re-consecration of the throne last March, and the only concerns could come from an economic crisis, which he has so far been able to contain thanks to the revenues from the same war. Obviously, the “return to Karakorum” also has a propaganda component, but it is more for the outside than for the inside, especially thanks to the condescension of Ulan-Bator which ignored the arrest order.
Putin needs to show himself on the international stage anyway, and Mongolia is one of them. location much more convenient than China, where the Russian inevitably seems a subject of the great eastern power, and even of the Central Asian states, which are taking advantage of the war in Ukraine to find their own greatness independent of Moscow, beyond smiles and circumstantial agreements. And in addition, the visit to Ulan Bator would serve precisely to push the Chinese to show more availability with the “Siberian Power 2” gas pipeline project, a crucial aspect of the “economic turn towards the East” that Beijing looks at with a certain complacency, given that they have many alternatives in the energy sector. The Mongols had blocked the plan, which includes a section in their territory, and Putin put everything on the table in the talks with Khürelsükh, offering whatever was necessary to resume the planning of this work crucial to the future of Russia, which sells oil and gas to anyone and at any price in order to maintain control of a crazed economy.
Mongolia has obviously been invited to the BRICS Summit, which will take place in Kazan, Tatarstan, from 22 to 24 October and will celebrate Russia’s role in the new “multipolar” world order, the contemporary variant of Putin Khan’s empire. The BRICS is the anti-West in which any partner is trying to be drawn, making it a “bricolage” of countries in search of identity and opportunities to take advantage of, rather than a true power of the new world geopolitics. On Mongolian territory, the “Siberian Force” takes on an even more high-sounding name, the Soyuz Vostokan “Eastern Union” stretching for thousands of kilometres to link Moscow and Beijing, putting the two powers of the new world Horde on the same level, at least in the Russian intentions. After Mongolia, Putin travelled to Vladivostok to explain to everyone how important it is to invest in the development of the Russian East in order to counteract the claims of dominance of the West which “does not allow Ukraine to open negotiations with Russia” and he pointed out as possible mediators precisely the BRICS countries, India and Brazil, and at most even Turkey, which has also agreed to participate in the Kazan summit.
Putin’s only concern at the Vladivostok conference was about demographics, and he promised to make multiple births a “new fashion” among Russia’s younger generations. To this end, school curricula are being reworked for the new year that has just begun, trying to convince even children to get involved in this matter from the classroom and to consider pregnancy as the true “traditional value”, to which the family of any kind must be added in some way. Perhaps it is no coincidence that only now are rumours being spread about Putin’s two “secret” children with his “unofficial” wife Alina Kabaeva, Ivan and Vladimir, aged 6 and 9, to set a good example beyond the requirements of security and the more or less “traditional” officiality of emotional ties. For now, Russians do not seem very convinced to follow this model, and in any case they hope that the “Putin yoke” will end within a couple of centuries.
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