Russo-Ukrainian Conflict: Notes on Russia

Ideology, ideology, ideology.

Russia: Geopolitical Context

Russia spans a massive territory. In terms of landmass, it’s double the size of the continental United States. However, it has less than half the US population, with significant swaths being concentrated in the West.

Federal Subjects of Russia by Population Density

Moreover, the country is economically underdeveloped. While seen as the geopolitical opponent to the West, its economy is smaller than Italy’s.¹ Per day, the country loses around 700 residents. This decline is attributable to its regime and its policy structure. Aging demographics, falling immigration rates, sanctions on foreign medicines, failing medical institutions, and lax health regulations contribute to the shrinking of its population.²

The Russian military is a paper tiger: poor supply, poor equipment, and poor training compared to its Western opponents. This reality is precisely why the threat of nuclear war is so urgent: Russia’s primary leverage (and cudgel for international negotiation) is its nuclear capacity.

The application of nuclear threat provides Russia with leverage in a liberal world order it can not keep up with. If Russian military capacity is limited by its economic circumstance, then the primary tool of negotiation (and defense) it has is its nuclear arsenal. Russia makes clear its willingness to use nuclear arms should NATO actors intervene — it is deterrence theory in action.³ Russia’s nuclear arsenal is its trump card.

Any take denying the potentiality of nuclear onslaught should be discarded as flippant; it likely fails to consider how fragile the fabric of the multilateral, “post-nuclear” geopolitical system is. The US and its NATO allies are resolute in their refusal to escalate, but Russia’s deterrent advantage is its willingness to do so. If Russia chooses to escalate, one can only imagine the cascade of Western nuclear response that would follow.

Putin’s Rationality

Many news outlets are choosing to uncritically portray Putin as “psychopathic” or “irrational”.⁴⁵⁶ US officials seem content in enabling this, despite there being a well-defined ideological undercurrent to Russian state action.⁷

To many Americans any rejection of liberalism is untenable. As a cause, there is a mainstream misunderstanding of what Russian aggression towards Ukraine means and intends to achieve. The status quo assumption of Western liberals is that Ukraine is independent and sovereign, and that the pursuit of NATO membership is their choice and their choice alone. To that end, Russia ought not to have any influence over the matter.

This is not how the Russian state views Ukraine. Ukraine is historically situated as an extension of the Russian state. The Russian government views the relationship between Ukrainian independence and Nazism as inextricably entrenched. The claim to Ukrainian land is similar to China’s claim to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, etc. One ought to recall the claims made against Tibet, where China used the abolition of slavery to justify its occupation. Ukraine is Russia, much in the same way Tibet is China.⁸

Russia’s connection to Ukraine is not just physical, but historical, spiritual, and an aspect of modern Russian nationalism — a seeking out of national rebirth. Attempting to debate the national mythos pushed by Putin is fruitless, not unlike the mythos that justifies China’s right to Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, etc.

The real geopolitical problem is the exertion of Western influence through a NATO-backed Ukraine. The tensions between Russia, the US, Europe, and NATO have been an issue since the mid to late 90s. The Bush administration facilitated NATO’s expansion eastward despite its clear antagonism towards Russia. Back then, Putin made clear his opposition towards further Eastern membership to NATO: the invasion of Georgia in August 2008 framed his position clearly.⁹

Current reporting on the crisis in Ukraine frames the aggression as stemming from pure irrationality, despite over a decade of international political developments that have foreshadowed Russian strategy against Western expansion. Ukraine is a strategic buffer between Russia and the West. The existence of a pro-West Ukraine poses a significant security threat to Russia.

To believe that Putin would sit idly while Western powers integrated with Ukraine, and by extension broader Eurasia, is naïve. Whether Russia has the military or economic capacity to take Ukraine in its entirety is another story: they more than likely don’t (especially against its Western support). Yet this disbelief is common from mainstream publications that struggle to understand why Russia so rejects the open arms of Western liberal internationalism.

Read Dugin to Understand Putin

Putin has been in power for over two decades. The belief that he is an irrational, reactive actor does not take into account the decades of work under his purview. It is more accurate to claim that this is all part of a larger project.

A major influence over Putin’s strategy vis a vis foreign policy is academic Aleksander Gelyevich Dugin. His body of work focuses on returning Russia to the global primacy it once had before the collapse of the USSR. His advisory influence was a principal contributor to the invasion of Georgia.

If one is at all familiar with Francis Fukuyama, then the notion of an all-prevailing liberalist orthodoxy is known, wherein Western liberal democracy is the final stage of governance for all nations. In Dugin’s theory, the 20th century was a battle between three competing ideologies: Liberalism, Communism, and Fascism (in this developmental order). By the end of the 20th century, the latter two ideologies declined. With the triumph of liberalism came, as Dugin purports, the development of ‘post-liberalism’.

At this stage, liberalism ceases to be the first political theory and becomes the only post-political practice. Fukuyama’s ‘end of history’ arrives, economics in the form of the global capitalist market, replaces politics, and states and nations are dissolved in the melting pot of world globalisation…Having triumphed, liberalism disappears and turns into a different entity — into post liberalism. It no longer has political dimensions, nor does it represent free choice, but instead becomes a kind of historically deterministic ‘destiny’…The need for the Fourth Political Theory stems from this assessment.¹⁰

The Fourth Political Theory is Dugin’s resistance to the status quo. It is his distinct ideology developed in the aftermath of the age of ideology and response to the depoliticized nature of the post-liberal hegemonic order. With the “end of history” comes the dictatorship of liberal ideals, and the death of politics. All “political” discourse occurs within the framework of liberal norms and ideals, thereby reducing what is left of the political to something monotonic.

Dugin has long been thought of as Putin’s “brain”. The basis of his framework of thought, and thus Putin’s, is the rejection of the post-liberal hegemony.¹¹ The Fourth Political Theory is Russia’s last line to exclude itself from encroaching Western expansion.

For my own country, Russia, the Fourth Political Theory, among other things has an immense practical significance. The majority of Russian people suffer their integration into global society as a loss of their own identity…in order to fill this political and ideological vacuum, Russia needs a new political idea. For Russia, liberalism does not fit, but Communism and fascism are equally unacceptable. Consequently, we need a Fourth Political Theory. And if, for some readers, this is a question of freedom of choice and a realization of political will, which can always be viewed from a positive or negative position, then for Russia, it is a matter of life or death…If Russia chooses ‘to be’, then it will automatically bring about the creation of a Fourth Political Theory…[or] ‘not to be’, which will mean to quietly leave the historical and world stage, dissolving into a global order which is not created or governed by us.

To understand Putin is to understand Dugin. One might see Putin as man against time on the furthest right: a figure utilizing violence to combat perceived historical decay. Invading Ukraine is an extension of this thought framework. The Fourth Political Theory is Dugin’s, and Putin’s, reaction against post-liberalism: its globalization, its post-modernity, and most critically, against the “end of history”.¹²

1. “Italy (ITA) and Russia (RUS) Trade | OEC.” OEC - The Observatory of Economic Complexity, 2019. https://oec.world/en/profile/bilateral-country/ita/partner/rus.

2. “Russia’s Demographic Decline Accelerates, Increasingly because of Moscow’s Own Policies,” Jamestown, October 4, 2018, .

3. Geist, Edward. “Is Putin Irrational? What Nuclear Strategic Theory Says about Deterrence of Potentially Irrational Opponents.” Rand.org, 2019. https://www.rand.org/blog/2022/03/is-putin-irrational-what-nuclear-strategic-theory-says.html.

4. “Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine Is Not Just a Crime. It’s Also Wildly Irrational.” Jacobinmag.com, 2022. https://jacobinmag.com/2022/03/russia-ukraine-putin-nato-us-war-empire.

5. Khrushcheva, Nina L. “Putin Joins a Long Line of Irrational Tyrants.” The Globe and Mail. The Globe and Mail, February 26, 2022. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-putin-joins-a-long-line-of-irrational-tyrants/.

6. Connolly, Amanda. “Putin’s ‘Deeply Irrational’ Nuclear Threat Must Not Deter West: Rae.” Global News. Global News, February 28, 2022. https://globalnews.ca/news/8650622/vladimir-putin-nuclear-threat-bob-rae/.

7. BBC Newsnight. “Aleksandr Dugin: ‘We Have Our Special Russian Truth’ - BBC Newsnight.” YouTube Video. YouTube, October 28, 2016.

8. Michael Rossi, “Vladimir Putin’s Address on NATO, Ukraine, and Recognition of Donetsk and Lugansk - ENG Subtitles,” YouTube Video, YouTube, February 23, 2022,

9. John Mearsheimer, “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault the Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin,” 2014, https://www.mearsheimer.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Why-the-Ukraine-Crisis-Is.pdf.

10. Dugin, Aleksandr, and Michael Millerman, 2017, “The Birth of the Concept: The End of Liberalism and the Arrival of Postliberalism.” The Fourth Political Theory, Arktos Media Ltd., London, p. 19.

11. Barbashin, Anton, and Hannah Thoburn. “Putin’s Brain.” Foreign Affairs, April 4, 2014. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russia-fsu/2014-03-31/putins-brain.

12. Dugin, Aleksandr, and Michael Millerman, 2017, “The Birth of the Concept: The End of Liberalism and the Arrival of Postliberalism.” The Fourth Political Theory, Arktos Media Ltd., London, p. 14.