Projection as Strategy: Latynina, Imperial Imagination, and the Intellectual Justification of War

This is not merely an expression of chauvinistic imperialism. It is a structural mechanism of justification: the construction of imaginary threats to rationalize real aggression. What Latynina offers is not a policy position but an epistemological assault — a deliberate invention of a fantasy enemy, followed by a call to defeat it.

What makes her statement particularly significant is that the “Galicia project” she describes does not exist. No Ukrainian political or cultural discourse has ever advanced such an idea. The construct is entirely of her own making, yet she uses it to legitimize Russia’s hostility toward Ukraine. This rhetorical device is nothing new in Russian history. The logic is simple and consistent: first, invent an enemy; second, define it as existential; third, claim the right to preemptive violence. Fiction becomes a predicate for destruction. In this case, the very existence of Ukraine is rendered illegitimate by a fabricated threat attributed to it.

This strategy is not unique to Latynina. It is part of a long lineage of Russian intellectual imperialism. Fyodor Dostoevsky in the 1870s called for the "return of Constantinople" as Russia’s sacred duty, grounded in the metaphysical superiority of the Russian spirit. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in the late 1980s, dismissed Ukraine’s independence as a historical anomaly — a “severed limb” of one undivided Russian body. Alexei Navalny, hailed by many as a democratic reformer, famously remarked in 2014 that “Crimea is not a sandwich to be passed back and forth,” effectively validating the annexation as an irreversible reality. Even Albert Azikher, writing in the early 2000s, lamented the fall of the Soviet Union not because it was oppressive, but because the KGB had failed to preserve the imperial structure through sufficient brutality. In his view, the West might have been “brought under control” had Soviet intelligence acted more decisively.

These figures differ in tone, genre, and medium, but not in structural worldview. Their common denominator is the inability — or refusal — to accept the political selfhood of others. They imagine the world as a metaphysical orbit, where Moscow is not simply one actor among others, but the axis around which meaning itself is defined. In this worldview, Ukraine is either a “mistake” or a “misguided sibling.” It cannot simply be.

Latynina’s rhetoric exemplifies the most dangerous feature of Russian imperial thought: its war is not fought against armies, but against the very notion of otherness. When she invokes the specter of “Galicia from river to sea,” she is not describing reality — she is creating a justification to erase it. And in doing so, she mirrors the exact logic of Putin: invent the enemy, assign it maximal threat, and frame its defeat as a sacred duty. This is why there is no meaningful distinction between the Russian opposition and the Kremlin on this issue. They may disagree on tactics, but not on teleology. They may criticize Putin’s war, but not the civilizational mission that animates it.

This has profound implications for the international response. When global leaders urge Ukraine to “compromise,” they are, whether knowingly or not, urging it to negotiate not with Russia as a state, but with Russia’s hallucination of Ukraine. But one cannot negotiate with a delusion. There is no peace treaty to be signed with an imaginary Galicia. There is no border to be drawn with an ideology that considers your existence a cartographic error.

Latynina’s fantasy is not an analytical mistake — it is a method. It is a cognitive weapon dressed as commentary. Her projection of an enemy serves the same function as all imperial mythologies: to justify domination where no danger exists. And in that sense, it is not only Putin who wages war. The war is sustained — intellectually, culturally, and morally — by a whole tradition that would rather destroy the real than surrender the imagined.