Russian Institute for Strategic Studies and the invasion of Ukraine

Another "Eurasian" in civilian clothes was Leonid Petrovich Reshetnikov (born February 6, 1947, into a military family in Potsdam, Germany). In 1970, he graduated from the Faculty of History of Kharkov State University, and studied in the graduate school of Sofia University (1971–1974). In 1974–1976, he worked at the Institute of Economics of the World Socialist System of the Academy of Sciences of the USSR. From April 1976 to April 2009, he served in foreign intelligence.

At the end of his service, he held the position of head of the information and analytical directorate of the SVR of Russia with the rank of lieutenant general. In April 2009, he was dismissed to the reserve due to reaching the age limit for military service. On April 29, 2009, by decree of the President of the Russian Federation, Reshetnikov was appointed director of the federal state scientific budgetary institution "Russian Institute for Strategic Studies."

The Russian Institute for Strategic Studies, which Reshetnikov headed, was nothing other than the former classified institute of the Foreign Intelligence Service. It was located on the northern outskirts of Moscow, hidden deep in a residential area between Flotskaya, Festivalnaya and Onezhskaya streets, under the reliable protection of internal troops soldiers. Today, golden letters adorn the pediment of the canopy: Russian Institute for Strategic Studies. More than two hundred SVR employees work in it.

"We were indeed a closed institute of foreign intelligence," said the head of the institute, General Reshetnikov, "specializing in the analysis of available information on the far and near abroad. That is, on information that is needed not only by intelligence, but also by structures that determine the country's foreign policy. Strangely enough, there were no such serious analytical centers in the administration of the President of Russia... The presidential administration lacked serious specialists, and intelligence had to share."

The leading specialist of the institute headed by Reshetnikov was Doctor of Historical Sciences Alexander Nikolaevich Sytin, who left the institute due to disagreements with the management and witnessed the mechanism for making the Kremlin's foreign policy decisions. Let us give the floor to this important witness and his unique testimony, which sheds light, among other things, on the history of the Russian government's decision to invade Ukraine in 2014:

"One of the quite important expert platforms is the little-known to the general public Russian Institute for Strategic Studies (RISI), in which the author of these lines worked for more than 10 years... This institute until 2009 was part of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR RF). Its task was to study and analyze open information on issues of Russian foreign policy and international relations...

Everything changed when in the spring of 2009 RISI was removed from the SVR and reformatted into a structure whose founder and main customer of work was the presidential administration (AP RF)... The leadership of the institute changed. Retired SVR Lieutenant General Leonid Reshetnikov, who previously headed the information and analytical directorate and even earlier supervised the Balkan direction (Bulgaria, former Yugoslavia, Greece) in the service, was appointed to the post of director... [who] brought with him by no means a military-style clear organization of information and analytical work, but completely different principles.

Even during his work in the Balkans, he 'became churched.' This step, generally understandable for an aging and very unhealthy person, in his case passed almost in a clinical form. For the general of the former First Main Directorate (PGU) of the KGB of the USSR, communist L. Reshetnikov, this took extreme forms of passion for the White movement, the White Orthodox idea, the spiritual and territorial revival of the empire...

At the head of the Center for the Study of Problems of the Near Abroad Countries, in which the author of these lines worked on the problems of the Baltic countries (Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia), was placed the 'leading domestic Ukrainian scholar' Tamara Guzenkova... At that time, T. Guzenkova possessed no knowledge in this area other than proficiency in the Ukrainian language... Guzenkova entered into a similar war with Y. Tymoshenko, writing a book about her that can only be called a political lampoon. The combination of historical ignorance, Russian-Soviet great-power boorishness... played a cruel joke on the leadership of RISI. ...Reshetnikov and T. Guzenkova became the personification of the worst features of the V. Yanukovych regime in the Russian expert community.

By the beginning of V. Putin's third presidential term, the Orthodox-imperial governing block of L. Reshetnikov, T. Guzenkova and M. Smolin had finally taken shape in the institute. Information and propaganda support for the implementation of the Eurasian integration project was launched. The leadership of the institute used it as its own brand. The RISI Eurasian Forum was created with periodic expensive international conferences.

Ukrainian events were approaching. During the 'trade war' between Russia and Ukraine on the eve of the Vilnius summit, notes and reviews went to the presidential administration, which claimed that the Ukrainian people since the time of the Pereyaslav Rada have been invariably committed to Russia, that 'insignificant Western trends' are marginal in nature, provoked by a handful of pro-fascist natives of Western Ukraine – those territories that were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, possessing a socio-cultural code different from the majority.

The overwhelming majority of Ukrainians keep the memory of a common history, the Great Patriotic War, and dream of the revival of a common state existence of the empire/USSR. Everything that one way or another testified to the contrary was attributed to the activities of NGOs funded by the US State Department, Brussels, Warsaw and Vilnius. In the notes written or edited by T. Guzenkova, there were calls to put maximum pressure on V. Yanukovych through fuel, energy and trade blackmail, to achieve his refusal to sign the Vilnius preliminaries and to ensure the Eurasian integration of Ukraine.

It is difficult to say with certainty whether these notes formed the Kremlin's concept regarding Ukraine or only strengthened it, fitting into the system of a priori decisions. Only the almost complete coincidence of the content of RISI materials and the real steps of the RF leadership in the field of foreign policy is obvious. Of course, none of the institute's leadership not only did not foresee the Maidan, but also in every possible way assured themselves and their customer-addressees of the fundamental impossibility of such a scenario..."