Kremlin propagandist Vladimir Solovyov looked back to centuries past in claiming that Moscow's European neighbors wish to "rejoin the Russian empire."
On his evening show on the Russia 1 channel, Solovyov first said the "main Russophobes" are Poland and the Baltic nations.
"They have formed an alliance of the resentful former provinces liberated in vain by the Russian empire and say that they now have an alliance, they are now all together, Poland, the Baltics, the Finns. And Romania has been dragged into it," he said.
The Russian empire, which came to an end in 1917, at times included territory comprising the present-day Baltic countries, Poland and Finland.
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Demonstrators take part in the protest in front of the Russian embassy in Warsaw, Poland on the first anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2023. Kremlin propogandist Vladimir Solovyov has said that Poland, Finland and the Baltic states want to "rejoin the Russian empire."WOJTEK RADWANSKI/GETTY IMAGES
Last week, Finland became the 31st member of NATO and its 830-mile border is now the longest between Russia and any country in the military alliance.
Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, also members of the alliance, have vehemently opposed Moscow's full-scale invasion of Ukraine and have provided military and economic support for Kyiv against Russian aggression.
Solovyov harked back to this era of the Russian monarchy in asking whether the countries' real hope was for "Mother Russia to bring us back home?" as he cited comments from one of his panelists, RT editor-in-chief Margarita Simonyan, who has regularly railed against the West.
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"So they want to rejoin the Russian empire in a complicated way," he said, adding that Finland and Poland "were developing fine when they were part of the Russian empire."
"They emerged as a more or less cultured nations, the culture as such had developed," he said. "Well Poland is a much more complicated case, but Finland for sure."
As of Thursday morning, a clip of Solovyov's comments tweeted by Ukrainian internal affairs adviser Anton Geraschchenko had gone viral, having received more than 125,000 views.
"Russian propagandist [Solovyov] believes that Finland and Poland dream of rejoining the 'Russian empire' and are trying to be taken back into it," he wrote.
Solovyov has repeatedly used his evening show to pitch the Kremlin's invasion of Ukraine as a war between Moscow and NATO and has regularly called for nuclear strikes on Western countries that support Kyiv.
However last week, his comments calling for the use of thermobaric weapons on Ukrainian cities were too much for one of his guests.
Political analyst Vasyl Vakarov shook his head after hearing Solovyov suggest using the weapons that use oxygen to create a high-temperature explosion before igniting a second charge.
"I think there has to be another way, this is wrong," Vakarov said.