SIRIUS /Federal Territory/, March 4. /TASS/. Strategic borders of a country depend on how widely its foreign policy is spread, Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev said.

"Strategic borders of any country directly hinge on how far its foreign policy power lies, how strong and sovereign this state remains, as well as, of course, its authorities," Medvedev said in a lecture at the Knowledge. First educational marathon.

Talking about strategic borders, he noted that people "try not to talk about them, because it is a sort of bad manners." "As usual, these issues are the most important," Medvedev emphasized. According to him, these borders are not determined by country’s size, airspace or territorial waters, as well as are not tied to the sovereignty directly.

"The more powerful a nation is, the further its strategic frontiers extend beyond its state borders, and the larger is the strategic space on which such a country exerts economic, political, social and cultural influence. This is the zone of the nations' national interests," Medvedev pointed out.

According to him, "strategic borders and national interests are not synonymic, but they are close to each other."

Medvedev said that it is "how it has always been," and the countries that were able to do so wanted to control the situation near their own borders by projecting their influence further. Medvedev cited the Roman empire as an example, noting that its strategic borders lied more far away than the remotest provinces.

"In return, the strong powers, which played the first fiddle in world international relations, offered their followers military and political protection and simultaneously tried to prevent the growth of influence of their rivals. Weak nations, or those that had come to the end of their glory and power, often fit into such regional schemes and became puppet or vassal countries for their patrons or suzerains, sovereigns. Or, as they later began to say, friendly nations, which is actually the same thing, but less offensive," Medvedev noted.

Historical examples

As an example, the deputy chairman cited the Polish issue in the 18th century. "It was not favorable for Russia to include the decrepit Rzeczpospolita in its composition, nor to divide it in parts," he said. According to Medvedev, back in the years of the Great Northern War, Prussian kings offered Peter the Great the division of Poland three times, but each time they were refused.

"For quite a long time, it was assumed that events in this matter develop according to a quite obvious logic. If any country's potential increases over a long period of time - its state sovereignty grows stronger, its strategic borders expand, and geographical ones can then be pulled up ex post facto," he said.

Thus, said Medvedev, since the time of Ivan the Terrible, the geographical border of Russia has been along the Great Abatis Border, and the strategic borders "de facto already included the Northern Black Sea coast and Crimea." "Without doing so, it was impossible to eliminate tangible threat to the Russian state. In fact, these territories finally entered Russia in the 18th century under Catherine the Great as a result of the Russo-Turkish wars," he concluded.