The governor of western Russia’s Kaliningrad region blamed the 18th-century German enlightenment philosopher Immanuel Kant for the outbreak of war in Ukraine.
“He is directly related to the military conflict in Ukraine,” Anton Alikhanov, who governs the western exclave of Kaliningrad, said Friday at a local political science forum.
According to the regional news outlet FederalPress, Alikhanov attributed “the global chaos, the global realignment that we are now facing” to the influential thinker.
Alikhanov claimed that Kant’s works have contributed to a “social and cultural situation” in which “the West has violated all agreements that had been reached.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin, who ordered troops to invade Ukraine nearly two years ago, often frames the war as part of a larger conflict with the West.
Kant lived in the East Prussian city of Koenigsberg between 1724 and 1804.
Koenigsberg became the Russian city of Kaliningrad after the Soviet army captured it during World War II, and this philosopher’s tomb is located there to this day.
Kant is a central figure of modern philosophy and is still widely well-regarded in modern-day Kaliningrad.