Russia’s stony-faced foreign minister is getting paranoid. Sergei Lavrov believes that “at present, about 50 countries are trying to break up Russia.”

But, Lavrov told the assembled professors and students of the elite Moscow State Institute for International Relations, this is nothing new. Western countries have always aspired to break up Russia so as to produce a “dependent” and “dying space” with which they would be able to do what they desired. “Dismembering” Russia is the ultimate goal.

Lavrov purposely used two words — "razvalit'" and "razchlenit’" — that focus not on Russia’s diminution as a power player or even its destruction as a state, but on its composition of disparate territories, economic regions and nations.

As veteran Russia-watcher Paul Goble notes, “the paranoia Lavrov manifests in making such a statement is noteworthy because of what it says about the thinking in the Kremlin concerning the fragility of the world’s last remaining empire.”

Clearly, Lavrov and his Kremlin comrades are worried both about supposed Western efforts to break up Russia and about the genuine centrifugal tendencies within the Russian Federation.

The first concern is unfounded. I can think of no country, in the West or elsewhere, that actively aspires to Russia’s break up. They may want a weaker, kinder or more........

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