Will the Putin-doctrine be the next?

    Russia's attack on Ukraine is looming, and the world with good reason asks itself if it will witness the return of the Brezsnyev doctrine? The speech of the secretary-general of the USSR, Leonid Brezhnev, at the Congress of the Polish Communist Party on 13th of November 1968, emphasised that in case of antisocialist forces would push towards capitalism a country belonging to the Sovjet block, this would be a problem for the block as a whole, not only an issue of the respective country. This doctrine was the ideological basis of putting out the Prague Spring in august 1968 or the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. The socialist camp around the USSR functioned as a buffer zone.

   Seeing his efforts in the past years, it looks like Wladimir Putin of Russia returned to this demand of having a buffer zone around his country. His actions in Belarus, Armenia, Azerbaijan and recently in Kazakhstan, not to mention the 2014 annexation of Crimea, prove this.

   With the start of the collapse of the USSR under Mikhail Gorbachev, the Brezhnev doctrine was substituted by the ironically-called Sinatra-doctrine, hinting at the singers well-known "My way" hit, meaning that the countries of the socialist block could sovereignly choose their political path on their own.

   The case of a Russian invasion of Ukraine seems to reverse this. How we should call the new Russian strategy? What about the Putin-doctrine?

(Original: Martos Péter: Következik a Putyin-doktrína?)