The Baltic Sea is one of the keys to Russia's great-power self-image

At the annual meeting of the Moscow-based think tank “Valdai International Discussion Club,” founded in 2004, President Putin warned in 2025 against underestimating the international role of the great power Russia:

- But above all, the global balance cannot be built without Russia: neither the economic nor the strategic balance, nor the cultural or logistical. Absolutely not, Putin said in his speech.

Tsar Peter the Great

That Russia is geographically vast is no secret. The country covers 17.1 million square kilometers and accounts for 11 percent of the world’s total landmass. Zooming in on the part of the Russian Federation called Leningrad Oblast, one finds an important piece of Russian–Nordic history.

It was here that Russian Tsar Peter the Great founded the city of Saint Petersburg in 1703, located on the Gulf of Finland. The area where the city now stands was then called Ingria and belonged to Sweden, but after Russia’s victory over Sweden in the Great Northern War in 1721, it became part of the Russian Empire.

- It was under Tsar Peter the Great that Russia became a true great power. It was here that Russia secured access to the Baltic Sea, gaining both the opportunity to establish a new trade route to the outside world and to develop a strong navy, says Jon Reinhardt-Larsen, who is currently working on a research article mapping historians’ descriptions of Russia in the Baltic Sea region over the past 300 years.

Taking Back What Is Russian

When President Putin visited an exhibition on Peter the Great in 2022, marking the 350th anniversary of the tsar’s birth, he noted that during the Great Northern War, the tsar had merely reclaimed land that originally belonged to Russia.

- Apparently, it is also our fate to take back [what is Russia’s]. And if we continue from the fact that these fundamental values form the basis of our existence, we will certainly succeed in overcoming the challenges we face, Putin said, according to The Guardian.

Incidentally, Vladimir Putin was born in Saint Petersburg in 1952, when the city was still called Leningrad.

One of those who has closely followed Russia is the long-time Danish diplomat and ambassador in Moscow from 2018 to 2022, Carsten Søndergaard, who this year is affiliated with the Nordic Humanities Center as a so-called practice fellow. He is in no doubt that great-power narratives nourished by the past are actively used in the present — especially in the war against Ukraine.

- In Russia, the power apparatus rewrites history to legitimize the policies being pursued,” says Carsten Søndergaard. A good example of this can be found in the latest history textbook for schools, which refers to German reunification in 1990 using the term “Anschluss,” i.e., Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938.

- Russians are simply used to this,” says Carsten Søndergaard, pointing to a classic joke from the Soviet era:
"In the Soviet Union, the future is certain — it is the past that keeps changing."

Today, the Baltic Sea is surrounded by NATO countries, with Russia and the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, located between Poland and Lithuania, as the only exceptions. After Finland and Sweden joined the defense alliance in 2023 and 2024, respectively, Russia’s ability to act freely in the region has been significantly restricted.

Still a Great Power

Nevertheless, Russia remains one of the world’s nine presumed nuclear powers, and with its vast territory, it is perhaps not surprising that the country’s leaders still see themselves as a great power.

- Russia is still a major power, but after the collapse of the Soviet Union following the Cold War, the country is no longer a superpower with the global influence that comes with it. That is why Putin also needs to look to the past to show that ‘we can become great again, because we once were,’ says historian and postdoctoral researcher Jon Reinhardt-Larsen.