Putin’s approach closely resembles the vision set out by Russian Nobel laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his 1990 essay “Rebuilding Russia.” Referring to the former Soviet satellite states, he suggested letting those “ungrateful peoples” go, but keeping Russia’s rightful territories, such as eastern and southern Ukraine, northern Kazakhstan, and eastern Estonia, with their ethnic Russian populations, and Georgia’s Abkhazia and South Ossetia, which are cultural extensions of Russia’s North Caucasus.