While Xi Jinping was visiting his bosom friend Vladimir Putin in Moscow, French television LCI experts discussed a map showing the disintegration and distribution of Russia’s landmass to her neighbors. They uttered suspicions that the map has been shown on Chinese TV.
Of course, China takes the part of the dragon, including Haishenwai, that was annexed by Tsar Alexander II in 1860. There is situated the ice-free port city of Vladivostok. A big chunk of Siberia from Lake Baikal northward along the mighty Lena River up to its mouth reaches the Arctic Ocean. Xi Jinping’s dream of making China an arctic nation has eventually come true.
In the east China borders the United States reaching from the Bering Strait up to the Verkhoyansk Mountains. The Kamtschatka Peninsula and the Novosibirskiye Ostrova Islands are part of U.S.
In the west, China borders Norway which possesses a large strip of northern Siberia including the estuaries of Yenisey, Ob, Pechora and Dvina rivers. Murmansk on Kola Peninsula also goes to Norway.
Kazakhstan gets an equally big chunk as China, extending to the mining city of Norilsk. All the 12 big towns from Volgograd in the west to Tomsk in the east belong to Kazakhstan.
Between China and Kazakhstan lies Mongolia that includes Lake Baikal and cities like Irkutsk, Ulan Ude, and Chita. Georgia includes Krasnodar and Ukraine extends to Rostov-on-Don which is indeed Ukraine’s historic land.
Moscow becomes the capital of Belarus, so more than doubling its landmass. Estonia gets St. Petersburg. Kaliningrad is split between Poland and Lithuania. Latvia also doubles its landmass at the expense of Russia.
Japan owns all the Kuril Islands and the southern part of Sakhalin with the Russian city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk.
Consequently nothing is left of the Russian Federation. It has disappeared from the map as once Poland-Lithuania disappeared as a nation after the Third Partition in 1795.
The map first turned up in 2020, consequently it has nothing to do with the war in Ukraine. It was published by the social media channel Redite, which is a discussion forum of the Last Generation, where anybody can contribute anything for discussion. A group named r/MapPorn playfully created the map under the principle of allotting all Russia’s neighbors an adjacent chunk of land. It is like a jigsaw puzzle.
But then on April 30, 2022 the map was allegedly broadcast on Chinese TV. We see the broadcaster Tao Ye in the midst of Chinese hieroglyphs with the map in the background. That original video of course was censored and removed the same day. But Turk, Kazakh and French netizens had archived it already. That way it turned up again this week. French fact-checker Samira El Gadir says: The video is a montage, a fake. Tao Ye, a market analyst was presenting a chart about business development, but that chart was replaced by the map. Who did it?
The traces lead to a pro-Ukrainian or Ukrainian account. Anyway, Ukrainians use it now as anti-Russian propaganda. It puts doubt on the Russians’ capacity and on their relations with the Chinese who would bet on a Russian defeat in the Ukrainian war.
For me, it is clear that none of the receiving states except for China would accept such a donation. None of them wants to aggrandize their territory. They all respect the Charter of the United Nations article 2;4 which reads: All Members shall refrain from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.
The partition of Russia according to that map would violate the principle of self-determination of peoples.
We all want empires to become a feature of the past. Now all the accepting countries would become empires.
Anyway China keeps its imperial ambitions and an insatiable greed for territorial expansion. Xi Jinping will gladly junk his boundless friendship with Putin and thrust his armies forward into Siberia.
Erich Wannemacher
Lapu-Lapu City