For two decades, the West, in the institutional forms of NATO and the European Union, had been advancing on Russia, whose borders, post-1991, closely resembled the western borders imposed on it by the Central Powers through the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk.
Notice that in his most recent audiotape he spoke of "our sons in Iraq"; meaning not Saddam and his Tikriti henchmen, whose secular Baathist regime has long been on his hit-list, but the faithful millions who live inside the artificial borders imposed on Mesopotamia by the western powers when they summoned Iraq into being.
It could also lead to other changes to the borders Britain and France imposed on the Middle East a century ago, starting with the break-up of Iraq on sectarian lines.
Like Syria, the country is already effectively partitioned – and Islamist groups are very far from being alone in rejecting the artificial "Sykes-Picot" borders imposed by Britain and France on the Arab world at the end of the first world war.
I grew up hearing my parents and their generation, blame the woes and wars of the Middle East on the arbitrary borders imposed by the colonial powers on the region after World War One.
A range of carbon prices (US$25/ton to US$200/ton) was imposed on the model to predict the impact of border adjustments.
This question, and to some extent the conflict itself, goes back to European colonialism and the artificial borders it imposed on Africans.
This study applies an accessibility approach to investigate for most municipalities in ten countries in mainland West Europe if foreign transport supply is lagging behind, and if population growth in these municipalities has been affected by the limits that national borders have imposed on market access.
It too appeared to mark a shift, China having usually avoided punishing countries for behaviour within their borders (sanctions imposed on North Korea for its testing of nuclear devices being a notable recent exception).
They consistently demand that any ceasefire deal must include a release of prisoners from Israeli jails and an easing of the border restrictions imposed on Gaza by both Israel and Egypt.
