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Russian irredentism refers historically to the irredentist movement of the Russian Empire from the 16th century up to the 1900s. It included territorial expansion eastwards, towards Siberia, which led to its Russian conquest, but also towards south, in the Caucasus area and central Asia, which led to Russian conquest of the Caucasus, Russian conquest of Turkestan and Russian conquest of Uzbekistan. The Caucasian War of 1817–1864 was an invasion of the Caucasus by the Russian Empire which resulted in Russia's annexation of the areas of the North Caucasus, and the ethnic cleansing of Circassians. It consisted of a series of military actions waged by Russia against territories and tribal groups in Caucasia including: Chechnya, Dagestan, the Circassians (Adyghe, Kabarday), Abkhaz, Abazins, and also led to the extinction of the Ubykh, as Russia sought to expand southward. In Dagestan, resistance to the Russians has been described as jihad. This led to the Chechen-Russian conflict which lasted for centuries. In Europe, Russian expansion led to Partitions of Poland as early as 1772.
After the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, it was thought that Russian Federation gave up on plans of territorial expansion or kin-state nationalism, despite some 25 million Russians living in neighboring countries outside Russia. However, in modern times, it has been proposed that the annexation of Crimea in 2014 proves Russia's adherence to irredentism even today. This led to a new wave of Russian nationalism, with large parts of Russian far right movement aspiring to annex even more land from Ukraine, including the unrecognized Novorossiya. Vladimir Socor proposed that Vladimir Putin's speech after the annexation of Crimea was a de facto "manifesto of Greater-Russia Irredentism". In November 2016, Putin said that Russia's borders "do not end anywhere". Some Russian nationalists seek to annex parts of the "Near abroad", such as the Baltic states, while there are fears of potential escalation due to Russian irredentist aspirations in northern Kazakhstan, as well.
In April 2014, the Croatian Helsinki Committee issued a statement condemning the "Greater-Russian aggression against Ukraine", comparing it to Slobodan Milosevic's plan to create Greater Serbia in the Yugoslav Wars in the 1990s.