Igor Girkin likes his saltire. The notorious Russian nationalist – a terrorist and saboteur, say Ukrainians – delivers his regular YouTube rants in front of a St Andrew’s cross.

His banner, though, is not Scottish.

Essentially the flag of the defeated American Confederacy without the stars, this is the symbol of Novorossiya, the pro-Kremlin statelet Mr Girkin tried and failed to create in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region.

The nationalist, sometimes better known by his nom-de-guerre Igor Strelkov, sees himself as a key figure in Russia’s annexation of Crimea and the seizure, by pro-Kremlin forces, of parts of Donbas in 2014.

Mr Girkin is a former colonel in Russia’s secret services and a zealous champion of his country reclaiming what he sees as its historic territories in Ukraine. You might think he would be a cheerleader for Vladimir Putin’s war. He is not: he does not think the Kremlin hardman is doing enough.

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In his most recent broadcast, Mr Girkin declared Russia’s “special operation”, the latest and most bloody phase of its undeclared war on Ukraine, to be a failure. He wants a fight to the finish, a full-scale conflict in which Russia mobilises completely. If this does not happen, he warned, Ukrainian soldiers may cross in to Russia itself, seizing Rostov and the rich farmland north of the Caucasus, the Kuban.

Mr Girkin, of course, is a fanatic. His scalding hot takes do not tell us very much about what those in Russia with real power think. But his words do echo, I feel, a peculiar but important element of pro-war sentiment in his country. And that is this: Russia’s strutting imperialism is more brittle than it looks and conceals sometimes irrational angst about whether the current state can survive.

There have long been those who fear the Russian Federation or RF might fall apart. Now there are also those in the West who hope that it will; and believe that it should.

Last week, for example, the influential liberal America magazine The Atlantic carried an article by a youngish Kremlin watcher called Casey Michel calling for Russia to be “decolonised”. He means that America and its allies should help minority nations inside the current federation escape Moscow rule.

Thirty years ago, when the Soviet Union collapsed, there were those who made a similar argument. These included Dick Cheney, the first George Bush’s defence secretary (and the second’s vice president). But America and its Nato allies decided not to do anything to help Chechnya as its bid for independence ended with its capital being flattened, much in the way the cities of eastern Ukraine have been this year.

Mr Michel wrote: “When Chechen leadership turned to the West for aid, US officials looked the other way.

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“Many across the West remained blinded by the ‘saltwater fallacy’. which posits that colonies can be held only in distant, overseas territories. Instead of viewing places such as Chechnya as nations colonised by a dictatorship in Moscow, Western officials simply saw them as extensions of Russia proper.”

For people like Mr Girkin and Mr Putin – though I doubt they read The Atlantic – this will sound like a call to dismember their “country”. So any attempt by what pro-regime Russians sarcastically call “our Western partners” to support independence movements inside the RF would only stiffen Kremlin resolve.

But there is a bigger question here: is Russia really an empire? Because you can’t ‘decolonise” a state that is not. The answer is not clear; it is a ‘yeah, kinda’ but also a ‘no, not really’. Views on this differ, inside Russia and out.

The current RF has 22 theoretically autonomous republics, regions or districts for minority nationalities. Some are pretty big and pretty distinctive; such as muslim Chechnya or Tatarstan or buddhist Kalmykia and Buryatia (the latter contributing a disproportionate numbers of troops fighting in Ukraine right now).

Some people, including a lot of Scottish independence supporters, therefore think of Russia as a “prison of nations”.

Many of these countries within a country have been part of one Russian state or another for a long time. Kazan, capital of Tatarstan, was taken in 1552 by one Ivan the Terrible (or Awesome, if you prefer).

So the RF has its minority nations. Some of these have shown appetite for independence or more autonomy before, most obviously Chechnya. Tatarstan and a few other RF republics and regions in the 1990s declared themselves to be “sovereign”.

Yet at the same time the current Federation is still overwhelmingly ethnically Russian. That is no minor detail.

Four out of five RF citizens say they are ethnic Russians, roughly the same proportion as UK residents who are English. Even in some “ethnic” republics and regions Russians form a majority or large minorities. Tatars are a majority in their republic. But only just.

So could Russia fall apart? Well, not completely. Should it? Or rather, should some of its minority nations splinter off? That, surely, is up to the people who live there.

There are, after all, examples of functioning multi-national states, multi-national “nations” even. How do we know? Because the UK is one. Is the RF? Not right now.

There is also evidence of oppression of minority nationalities within Russia. Let us not forget (as Alex Salmond did when taking Kremlin cash) that advocating separatism in the RF is a criminal offence.

There are good democratic precedents for how to deal with national questions of the kind presented by a state such as the RF. Our 2014 referendum is one. So, indeed, is the 1991 plebiscite in Ukraine on whether to leave the Soviet Union. That last vote is worth remembering. Yes won everywhere, including, by hefty margins, in what Mr Girkin calls Novorossiya.