Putinism is not the return of the Soviet Union, whatever the imagery of tanks in Red Square might suggest. It is not classical Russian nationalism either — Putin does not particularly celebrate ethnic Russians or the Orthodox Church as ends in themselves. It is something older and more specific: a doctrine that Russia is a distinct 'civilizational state' — not a nation like France or a multi-ethnic empire like the old USSR, but a millennia-old spiritual and geographic entity, fundamentally separate from 'the West', with a historic mission to lead a Eurasian sphere of influence. Once you accept this frame, the events of the last twenty years — Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea, Syria, Ukraine, the assassinations abroad, the domestic crackdowns — stop looking like a series of unrelated crises. They look like the internally consistent behaviour of a state operating on this premise. Timothy Snyder, Anne Applebaum and Fiona Hill have written extensively on this shift; understanding it is the first step to understanding 2022.
Aleksandr Dugin's 'Foundations of Geopolitics' (1997) is one of the more disturbing texts of late-twentieth-century political thought. It reads like a strategic menu: split Europe from America, absorb Ukraine, foment Scottish and Basque separatism to weaken the Anglosphere, ally with Iran and radical Islam against liberal Atlanticism, encourage Californian secession from the United States. Dugin himself is often mislabelled 'Putin's brain' — he is not, and he has no formal advisory role. But the vocabulary he helped mainstream in Russian elite discourse — 'Eurasia' as a civilizational category, 'Atlanticism' as its enemy, 'multipolarity' as the desired world order — has migrated wholesale into Kremlin speeches, into Russian military doctrine, into the intellectual output of the Higher School of Economics and the state media apparatus. The specific menu is not policy. The frame it helped establish is. And that frame treats the post-Cold War liberal international order not as a set of institutions to negotiate with but as a hostile civilization to be dismantled.
'Russkiy Mir' — 'the Russian World' — is the doctrine that anyone who speaks Russian, or belongs to Orthodox Slavic civilization, or was once part of the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union, is in some meaningful sense part of a single spiritual and political community that Moscow has a right and a duty to protect. As a piece of soft-power branding, it funds Russian-language schools, cultural centres and Orthodox parishes from Estonia to Kazakhstan. As a piece of hard-power doctrine, it provides the legal and moral cover for military intervention on behalf of Russian-speaking populations in Georgia (2008), Crimea (2014), the Donbas (2014–), and eventually all of Ukraine (2022). The concept is deliberately vague about where it stops. Does it include the Russian-speaking cities of eastern Estonia? The Russian minorities in Kazakhstan? The Orthodox believers in Serbia? Ambiguity is the point. And this is why the invasion of Ukraine cannot be understood as purely a NATO-response story. Kyiv, described by every Russian schoolchild for a century as 'the mother of Rus'', can never, within this frame, be fully foreign.
In the Kremlin's telling — repeated in almost every major Putin speech since the 2007 Munich Security Conference address — the 1990s were a national catastrophe engineered largely by the West. NATO expanded east despite what Russian leaders describe as promises to the contrary. The economy imploded under shock-therapy reforms cheered on by American advisers. Male life expectancy fell to 58. The military collapsed. Chechnya rose. Oligarchs looted state assets. Yeltsin — drunk, ill, disrespected — became the symbol of a country humiliated on the world stage. Every Putin-era foreign policy move is framed, both rhetorically and psychologically, as correcting that humiliation. This matters because grievance is a more durable political fuel than expansionism. An expansionist ideology can be satisfied. A grievance ideology can only be avenged, and the wound can always be reopened. Fiona Hill and Clifford Gaddy's 'Mr Putin' (2013) traces how this narrative was constructed and how it hardened over Putin's first two terms into a full state ideology.
Domestically, Putinism is not, and does not claim to be, liberal democracy. It calls itself 'sovereign democracy' — a phrase coined by Kremlin ideologist Vladislav Surkov in the mid-2000s — which in practice means a strong presidential vertical, managed elections in which the outcome is never in doubt, a Duma that passes what the Kremlin sends it, a tame or coerced media landscape, an Orthodox Church tightly aligned with the state, and a set of officially promoted 'traditional values' (anti-LGBT laws, pro-natalist policy, religious education in schools) framed as a moral bulwark against a decadent West. Opposition is not a legitimate political activity; it is variously treason, foreign interference, or extremism. Alexei Navalny was poisoned, imprisoned, and died in an Arctic penal colony in 2024. Independent civil society organisations are systematically designated 'foreign agents' and shut down. Journalists die at a well-documented statistical rate. This is not an accident of governance — it is the domestic face of the same civilizational doctrine that drives the foreign policy: a besieged Russia cannot afford internal division.
Where the Red Army once marched, a different set of tools now does the work. The Wagner Group — a private military company founded around 2014 and formally absorbed into the Russian state after Prigozhin's 2023 mutiny and death — has operated in Syria, Libya, Mali, the Central African Republic, Sudan, Mozambique and Ukraine, providing security services to friendly regimes in exchange for access to mines, oil, and strategic positioning. Gazprom and Rosneft use energy exports (until 2022, roughly 40% of European gas) as diplomatic leverage. RT and Sputnik run multilingual news operations designed less to persuade foreign audiences of a specific Russian view than to erode confidence that any coherent factual picture is available. The Internet Research Agency and its successors run influence operations targeting elections and social divisions in Western democracies. Frozen conflicts — Transnistria, South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh at various points — provide permanent leverage over neighbours. The empire is smaller than the Soviet one, but the toolkit is wider, cheaper, and often deniable.
Everything above helps explain why, within Putinist ideology, Ukraine is not a normal foreign policy problem. If a Russian-speaking, historically Orthodox, once-Soviet neighbour with deep economic, familial, and cultural ties to Russia can become a functioning Western-style democracy — imperfect, corrupt, but recognisably part of the European family — then 'Russkiy Mir' dies not as a slogan but as a serious idea. Ukrainians would have demonstrated, in the language every Russian elite understands, that the civilizational division is not real. This is the deepest reason for the 2022 invasion — deeper than NATO expansion, deeper than the buffer-zone geography, deeper than any specific policy grievance. The war is about killing an alternative future for people the Kremlin considers spiritually Russian, before the possibility of that future becomes contagious. This is also why the war cannot be settled by minor territorial concessions or security-architecture reforms alone: the ideological stakes are existential for the current regime.
Putin was born in 1952. He is mortal. But the ideology he has spent two decades installing may not be. His successors, whoever they are — Patrushev, Medvedev, a security-service compromise candidate, an outsider — will inherit a Russian state and a Russian elite that has taught itself, systematically and daily, that Russia is a besieged civilization surrounded by enemies who mean it harm. That premise will not vanish when Putin does. It is in the school textbooks, in the Orthodox Church liturgy, in the security-services training, in the state media output, in the political vocabulary of a generation of officials who came of age after 2000. Western governments should plan for the possibility of Putinism-without-Putin, which is arguably harder to handle than Putin himself because it will look more normal, more institutional, more permanent. The one-man regime is a specific set of choices. The civilizational-state ideology is now a structure.
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