“The People’s Republic of Texas”?

The feud between President Biden and Governor Abbott over the placement of razor wire on the southern border to halt migrant crossings is reviving calls for Texas to secede. While the unlikely movement for Texas’s independence is gaining new steam at home, prominent voices in Russia appear to be using the moment to sow discord by voicing support for a “Civil War 2.0.” 

This is not the first time that allies of President Putin have endorsed the breakup of global rivals. Russian intelligence agents have helped fund a leading advocate for California’s secession, according to a federal indictment disclosed in 2022. Moscow has also supported independence movements in Catalan, Scotland, and the Republika Srpska, which seeks to secede from Bosnia. 

Regarding Texas, Russian leaders have showed renewed interest in secession following Mr. Abbott’s declaration to keep in place razor wire barriers at his state’s southern border that the Supreme Court ruled in January the border patrol could remove. President Trump took his side in the dispute, along with 25 Republican governors who signed a statement “Supporting Texas’ Constitutional Right to Self-Defense.”

Governor Stitt of Oklahoma, for one, stands with Texas’s “right to defend themselves.” Amid concerns over Mr. Biden federalizing the national guard, he discussed a potential “force-on-force” conflict between southern states and the Biden administration.

Congressman Clay Higgins, a prosecutor in the upcoming Senate trial of the homeland security secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas, who was impeached this week for his handling of the border crisis, asserted on X that “the feds are staging a civil war, and Texas should stand their ground.”

Russia has pushed calls for a so-called Texit one step further by offering to help the second-largest state in the nation declare its independence. The Biden administration’s “total inability to cope with the migration crisis” could lead America to “an unsolvable constitutional crisis,” Russia’s former president and deputy chairman of the country’s security council, Dmitry Medvedev, said in a post on X last month. He warned of a “possibly even more destructive civil confrontation.”

Mr. Medvedev pointed his finger at “the White House and its senile old man Biden” and wrote in another post that “if necessary, we are ready to help with the independence referendum, and we will recognize the People’s Republic of Texas if there is one.”

Although Mr. Medvedev’s claims were dismissed by the Department of State as “standard Kremlin nonsense,” they appear to be part of a broader mission by Moscow to diminish Western unity. A Russian state television host, Sergey Mardan, also suggested during a broadcast that America’s border dispute could lead to “Civil War 2.0.” He noted that GOP infighting would complicate future aid to Ukraine, and asserted that “if your enemy is facing a problem, you need to help turn it into a catastrophe.”

The people of Russia appear to be having some fun with this anti-American narrative. “Texas People’s Republic” flags and jokes about Mr. Putin signing a decree to recognize the state’s independence have been flooding X and a popular social media platform in Russia, Telegram, a research fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, Ivana Stradner, reported in the Kyiv Post.

Some critics are turning these separatist demands against Moscow, envisioning a new composition of Northern Eurasia. An Austrian economist, Gunther Fehlinger, has a plan to break up “ExRussia” into 41 new states “through the complete Decolonization of the so-called ‘Russian Federation’ and the reconstruction of independent and free states of the post-Russia space.”

Mr. Putin has long worried that ethnic minorities within his country’s borders could form secessionist movements in a challenge to the dominance of the Russian Federation, which consists of 160 ethnic groups who speak 100 languages across 46 regions, 21 republics, and 9 territories. Concerns over threats to his authority at home is likely what led to the death of his primary political opposition, Aleksei Navalny, which was announced on Friday.