Trying to decipher major Western reporting on Vladimir Putin

Marie Jégo reports in a new article for Le Monde English on Vladimir Putin’s wartime leadership. (1) It provides a good example of why critical reading is called for with such pieces.

Like other dictators before him, Vladimir Putin has his own television news programs. Every evening, after the 8 pm broadcast, teams from the official channel Rossiya 1 stay at their workplace and re-edit the news segments to deliver a carefully filtered version, stripped of any news likely to displease the Russian president.

This system was described by Dmitri Skorobutov, former editor-in-chief of the channel's nightly news broadcast who has been living in exile in Europe since 2020, in an interview in June to The Moscow Times, an opposition media outlet in exile. Introduced in 2011, at the time of the major Russian protests against electoral fraud, the practice intensified after the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, to the point that Putin is now said to be "completely cut off from the reality on the front lines," according to Skorobutov.

The fact that Le Monde is calling the Moscow Times “an opposition media outlet in exile” lends the latter credibility, though of course critical reading is always in order. AP News reported in 2024: “The Russian prosecutor general’s office on Wednesday declared The Moscow Times, an online newspaper popular among Russia’s expatriate community, as an ‘undesirable organization’.” (2)

But when we ask what those two paragraphs from Le Monde tell us, I would say it’s entirely likely that Putin has his own news summaries prepared. As presumably many other heads of government also do. (Trump’s practice of watching FOX News in the wee ours is not likely to the standard practice in most countries!) Are the news summaries for Putin “stripped of any news likely to displease the Russian president”? That’s entirely possible. And Dmitri Skorobutov as former editor-in-chief at Rossiya 1 presumably has better sources for such reporting than most of us do.

But it’s also worth noting that not all actual and aspiring dictators insist on hearing only opinions and factual reports that fit their preferences. The British historian in his 1991 book Hitler and Stalin: Parallel Lives argued that Joseph Stalin, not renowned for his patience with internal political opposition, actually made a practice of seeking out alternative opinions from his advisers on major decisions. He contrasted that with Hitler’s practice of much preferring advice that fitted his own self-presumed genius assessments of situations.

Is Putin "completely cut off from the reality on the front lines"? Who knows? He’s been the de facto head of the Russian government for over a quarter of a century, so it’s possible that he has an isolated bubble of his own, as Skorobutov describes. I’m not so convinced that the situation is as extreme as Jégo depicts it:

His own lies may have ended up convincing him. Stuck in the past, he is wary of the internet and new communication technologies. The president has never sent an email in his life and does not own a cell phone. His sources of information are limited to television news programs tailored to his point of view and reports from generals and advisers who are careful not to contradict him. "Those close to him tell him what he wants to hear," summarized Grantseva. "He has in fact indoctrinated those around him, who in turn indoctrinate him. It's a vicious circle that no one can escape." (3)

Putin is a former KGB officer, of course he’s wary of spying on his communications. Most government officials involved with national security issues tend to be. Although the US Secretary of “War” Peter Hegseth and his collaborators on Signal may not be. Trump himself has obviously not been as careful of operational security as one might expect of a President, e.g., classified documents stored in unsecured boxes in Mar-a-Lago bathrooms.

Putin’s government decided in May to release this obviously carefully-produced four-minute propaganda video – which in this version runs twice - to counter rumors that he was hiding in a bunker. So his government is sensitive to such claims: (3)

Le Monde also reports, “Russian forces lost ground in May, for the second month in a row, according to analysis by the Institute for the Study of War [ISW], an American think tank.”

May is a key word there. Jégo’s article was published on July 5. As I noted in a post just a few days ago, the ISW’s daily updates in June indicated that the Russian were advancing on the front lines, but very slowly. There have been massive laying of landmines on both sides of the lines of engagement, and drone attacks (especially from Ukraine’s side) are making advances to seize more territory very difficult. And I referenced the academic journal Osteuropa’s war blog and John Mearsheimer’s very recent assessments that both indicated the same thing.

This is primarily a war of attrition, despite all the publicity the drone war is generating. Ukraine at the moment has been successful in neutralizing much of the Russian fleet’s operations in the Black Sea, which depend on Russia’s use of ports in the illegally-annexed Crimea. And they may be able to isolate Russia from direct access to the Crimean peninsula. Ukrainian attacks on Crimea have been important in a strategic sense because it has impeded Russia’s access to Ukrainian oil. How much it would benefit Ukraine in the current war to completely retake control of Crimea while the provinces (oblasts) of Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson remain mostly under Russian occupation is another question.

Jégo writes, “Isolated in this curated information bubble, the Russian president continually claims that his army is advancing ‘every day in all directions’ in Ukraine.” Making inflated claims is not the same as actually being self-deceived or isolated from uncomfortable information. Putin was a well-trained KGB agent, after all, so he has ideas about the kind of public propaganda he wants to express. And, we should give him credit: even his most dubious propaganda claims are normally much better crafted than the babble that Donald Trump spits out on a daily basis.

Jégo stresses similarities between Putin’s regime and the pre-1989 Soviet system. That there are some to be found isn’t terribly surprising since, you know, Russia is the largest and most powerful of the successor states of the former Soviet Union. Today’s capitalist, plutocratic, Mafia-like state is not politically organized like the Communist government of the USSR was. And his system looks pretty good to the Peter Thiels and Elon Musks and Donald Trumps of the world.

Warning, you may experience reflexive eye-rolling at the next thing:

Could Ukraine become Putin's Afghanistan? The comparison needs to be nuanced. "In Ukraine, the consequences of the war go beyond those of Afghanistan, especially in human terms," recalled Kastouéva-Jean. "Russia is now losing more men there in a single month than the Soviet Union did in a decade of conflict in Afghanistan [1979-1989, between 15,000 and 26,000 according to Russian sources]."

It’s remarkable how many Western neocons and assorted commentators take it for granted that the Soviet war in Afghanistan was the primary cause of the fall of the Soviet Union.

While no one seems to doubt that the war was unpopular among the public, the actual evidence for such an effect is fairly slim. Particularly compared to the very consequential effects of the USSR having become a petrostate and all that entailed, and of the challenges of modernizing Soviet industry in the 1980s. But this idea became a key part of neocon dogma to justify inciting insurrections in countries they see as having unfriendly, uncooperative governments, like Saddam Hussein’s in Iraq or the long-stand clerical regime in Iran. Now it’s a zombie trope that is obviously still stalking around the minds of interventionist-minded commentators. And we still hear it being used to argue that the current Russia-Ukraine War will have the same effect in Moscow. We see that reflected in Jégo’s report, as well.

Here it’s worth noting an anonymous article from the current Moscow Times on Russian experience with hardship in recent decades:

Two things we mustn’t forget tell us a lot. First, a number of major cities have faced high-profile attacks or tragedies in recent decades: the Crocus City Hall attack, the Volgograd train station suicide bombing, the St. Petersburg metro bombing, the Kemerovo shopping mall fire, not to mention the 1999 apartment bombings shortly before then-Prime Minister Vladimir Putin became president. Since 2022, many smaller cities and regions have been hit by drones, notably in the largely forgotten Operation Spider’s Web attacks.

Second, most ordinary Russians are accustomed to chugging along through economic difficulties in modern history. A shrug at the economy and an instinct to hunker down without fuss in tough times were expected. ...

I remember waking up on the morning opposition politician Boris Nemtsov was killed and feeling how tense it was. My spouse told me to be careful with what I posted online. I remember Putin disappearing from public view for a while and all the rumors people had heard. I remember getting emails from my employer in 2019-21 urging us to avoid certain weekend protests. My salary was briefly cut during Covid. As for February 2022, I just couldn’t believe it.

But each time, the country carried on. Friends told me repeatedly that this was a small crisis. Not because they were brainwashed by state propaganda about the 1990s, but because they had actually lived through harder times and come out the other side with a decent quality of life. Colleagues took great delight in explaining something about the Russian character: we’re good in tough times. (4)

This is related to the mistaken idea that bombing civilian areas will break the war morale of population being bombed and therefore push them to demand their government give up their war against, uh, the side that’s bombing them. We see a similar phenomenon with economic sanctions, which can be strategically useful in depriving a hostile country of very specific militarily-relevant goods. But sanctions that cause hunger or deprivation of critical medications don’t successfully convey a message to the affected civilians of, “We’re not against you, only against your government.”

Jégo’s article concludes with a factual observation about other “hybrid operations” by Russia against the West. I prefer the term “hybrid operations” to the often-used term “hybrid warfare.” Because it’s important to distinguish between annoyance and provocations on the one hand, and actual warfare on the other. It’s also common for xenophobic politicians to complain that asylum seekers and other irregular migration are tantamount to a military invasion. Immigrants may be inconvenient. But unless they are coming as part of an actual military operation, they are not an invasion. And immigration is not warfare, “hybrid” or otherwise.

Jégo puts it this way:

Western intelligence agencies are warning of an intensification of hybrid operations. "They relentlessly target critical infrastructure, democratic processes, supply chains and public trust," warned Anne Keast-Butler, director of the British government's intelligence, cybersecurity, and security agency, in May. Aerial incursions, GPS signal jamming, sabotage of infrastructure in the Baltic Sea, repeated provocations at European borders: With no victory in Ukraine in sight, Moscow is relying more than ever on its capacity to cause disruption. [my emphasis]

Notes:

(1) Jégo, Marie (2026): Vladimir Putin, or the loneliness of 'Homo Sovieticus'. Le Monde English 07/06/2026. <https://www.lemonde.fr/en/international/article/2026/07/05/vladimir-putin-or-the-loneliness-of-homo-sovieticus_6755172_4.html> (Accessed: 2026-06-07).

(2) Russia declares newspaper The Moscow Times ‘undesirable’ amid crackdown on criticism. AP News 07/11/2024. <https://apnews.com/article/russia-media-newspaper-crackdown-moscow-times-9f6713ac4a880a57946ee9b7214b78f1> (Accessed: 2026-06-07).

(3) Putin Appears In Moscow As Russia Rejects Reports Of Underground War Bunker Isolation. The Financial Express [India] YouTube channel 05/13/2026. <https://youtu.be/FZHIoU0F0cw?si=syh1WSQfuDUNUiev> (Accessed: 2026-06-07). The description on YouTube notes, “The video shows Putin casually driving a Russian-made SUV through central Moscow before meeting his former school teacher, Vera Gurevich, in what many see as a direct response to growing speculation about his security situation and isolation during the Ukraine war.”

(4) The World Shouldn’t Be Confused When Russians Shrug Off a Crisis. The Moscow Times 06/29/2026. <https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2026/06/29/the-world-shouldnt-be-confused-when-russians-shrug-off-a-crisis-a93120> (Accessed: 2026-06-07).

Vladimir Putin's fear of Western-backed regime change efforts

It has become a somewhat odd standard item in New Cold Warriors’ commentary that NATO expansion had nothing whatsoever to do with Russia’s invasion(s) of Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. The fact that Russia was reacting in some to external events does not justify their invasion of Ukraine. It doesn’t even mean it was a sensible decision from Russia’s point of view in coldly practical calculations.

Full post: https://brucemillerca.substack.com/p/vladimir-putins-fear-of-western-backed

The new "Kremlinology" and the fate of Vladimir Putin

Anna Nemtsova, who has been reporting on Russia and eastern Europe for years, wrote an analysis of Vladimir Putin’s current political situation inside Russia for the Daily Beast, Russia Can Finally See That Putin's 'Days Are Numbered' 12/18/2022. <> (Accessed: 2022-17-12).

This article reminded me that we're back to the days where lots more people in the West were paying attention to what was known as "Kremlinology" during the Cold War. That meant speculation about the power struggles in Russia and the motives of the actors based on sometimes vague clues. A popular feature of the practice was closely examining who was standing next to whom on the reviewing stands at Moscow military parades.

Nemtsova quotes Russian opposition politician Yulia Galiamina: “Putin could have ruled longer, if he did not start this war but now his days are really numbered, he is falling apart and he is clearly aware of it."

A 2020 report from Human Rights Watch also identifies Galiamina as an opposition activist who has protested Putin's government in recent years and heads a dissident group called Soft Power. The scholarly journal New Eastern Europe published an article by her on Russia politics last year. (Women's face of the opposition 02/03/2021)

But for non-specialists reading news reports, it’s hard to know quite what to make of it the first time we see a report by a particular reporter, whose work we don’t recall encountering before, quoting a Russian dissident whose name may not be familiar to us. How seriously should we take reports like this one?

In this case, the Daily Beast is a legitimate news organization with a track record and Nemtsova is also a reputable author with expertise in foreign policy who has also published on such topics for years. But this article ia a reminder of why critical reading is always needed on such speculations. Especially when Our Side - NATO in this case - is involved in a high-stakes military conflict with the country that is the subject of the report.

Nemtsova also quotes other Russians, including: attorney Vera Aleksandrovna; journalist Olga Bychkova; chess chamption Garry Kasparov, a longtime critic of Putin’s government; anti-Putin oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, a “Russian oil tycoon and, at one time, the richest man in Russia,” who is currently living in London (aka, "Londongrad", because it's so popular as a haven for such oligarchs); and, Tatiana Yashina, mother of an imprisoned dissident. Oil oligarch Khodorkovsky criticized the Western oil sanctions this past summer.

So far as the Daily Beast article tells us, its judgment of Putin’s immeddiate vulnerability seems to be based on the speculation of those sources. And on old-fashioned “Krimlinology”, e.g.:

[E]very recent attempt to make Putin look like a strong and decisive leader has failed so badly-even insicle Russia-that after nine months of devastating war in Ukraine, the Kremlin is running out of ideas. They even canceled Putin's big annual press conference for the first time in years.

And: “Every Kremlin attempt to rebuild the ünage of Putin as a superman seems to provoke another avalanche of jokes online.“

Seriously? A cancelled press conference? Anecdotal evidence of jokes online, posted by Lord-knows-who?

Nemtsova also quotes the Levada think tank, which is widely regarded as conducting polls which provide some kind of meaningful measure of Russian public opinion:

Putin is still backed by around 79 percent of Russians, according to recent polls, but that faith is weakening. Studies by Levada, an independent Russian think tank, show the number of Russians who believe their country is moving in the right direction has already fallen from 64 percent in October to 61 percent in November.

So, the poll shows four-fifths of Russians supportive of Putin. Sixty-plus percent of the public, nine months into a war that is requiring a general mobilization, thinks the country is going in the right direction. And the fact that the number is three points lower than a month before is evidence that “Putin's rock-solid system is crumbling”?

There are good reasons to wonder about how secure Putin may be in his position. It seems very clear that he underestimated the difficulty of the military goals he was pursuing in Ukraine, both the level of conventional military resistance from the Ukraine and the preparedness of his own forces, and probably also how willing the NATO countries would be to support Ukraine.

But obvious signs that Putin’s control is immediately endangered, like some large-scale military mutiny or mass protests or obvious public opposition from within his authoritarian United Russia Party, are not yet in evidence. The popular resistance to conscription is significant. But there’s no real indication that it is undercutting Putin’s centralized power within the Russian government.

It’s safe to say that a lot of wheels are in motion, not least of them China’s apparent unhappiness with Putin’s threats to start a nuclear war.

But Putin also clearly hopes that the European Union’s dysfunctional politics over refugees, of which this war has created millions, and the stress from energy shortages, will seriously weaken the EU. It’s also still not clear at this point just what the Biden-Harris Administration’s actual war aims are in this conflict. And those factors are likely to be restraints on the willingness of any potential internal opposition against Putin to make serious moves to reverse his policies or unseat him.

The question of US war aims is more significant than most of the public commentary on the war acknowledges. As historian Herfried Münkler observes:

The Americans ... seem to have a very different idea [from that of the Germans and French], namely that of a long-term war against Russia with the aim of exhausting the depth of Russian logistics and, above all, reducing the breadth of its officer corps, thus ensuring that the Russians will no longer be able to wage a war of this magnitude. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin has been clear along these lines, and some statements by Secretary of State Antony Blinken suggest this assessment. [my emphasis]

One statement of Austin’s of the kind to which he refers is from April: “We want to see Russia weakened to the point where it can’t do things like invade Ukraine.“

So long as this uncertainty holds in the view of the Russian leadership, it would presumably make the risk of removing Putin look even greater in the eyes of potential Russian putchists or internal opposition figures.

Putin and "sovereign democracy": Comments on Putin's political philosophy (1)

I plan to do a series of posts on the political philosophies surrounding Putin’s in Russia. By seemingly all accounts, Putin is not much of an ideologue, much less a political philosopher. But he and his supporters do draw on some concepts and ideas that are more than just bumper-stick type slogans of the moment.

Governments and the people who run them do operate on ideas, however flexible they may be in applying them. John Maynard Keynes famously wrote:

Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.

The “realist” school of international relations stresses the centrality of geopolitical considerations of military power, economics, and geographic location in national decision about international politics. Yet it also recognizes that governments are run by human beings with their own conceptions of the world and with inevitable deficiencies in knowledge. The Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr famously cautioned decision-makers to maintain a sense of humility and to be careful of being led astray by pride and arrogance in his book The Irony of American History (1952).

The famous investigative journalist I.F. Stone also irreverently reminded us that not only do governments gives cynical reasons for their actions, but they also sometimes act on genuinely bad assumptions: “All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.”

I’m using as a starting point a book by Michel Eltchaninoff. Eltchaninoff explains the backgrounds and what he sees as their relative importance in the current situation, always recalling that the emphasis put on them changes over time.

Putin’s “Sovereign Democracy”

In his second Presidential term (2004-2008), Putin began to define the Russian political system as a “sovereign democracy.” The concept is credited to Vladislav Surkov, who served as Putin’s Presidential advisor 2013-2020. Surkov publicly defined the idea in a lecture for Putin’s United Russia Party in 2006. Ivan Krastev discussed the concept the same year, noting, “The new Kremlin's ideologues are not philosophers but public-relations specialists.” (Ivan Krastev, "Sovereign Democracy'', Russian-Style Insight Turkey 8:4 (2006) Ironically, it’s a concept with a Ukrainian origin:

By nationality the concept of sovereign democracy is Ukrainian. lt has its origin in the Kremlin's conceptualization of the orange revolution (orange technologies in [the] Kremlin's terms) of November 2004 to January 2005 in Ukraine. This lineage can be tracked in Surkov's thesis... Sovereign democracy is Moscow's response to the dangerous combination of populist pressure from below and international pressure from above that destroyed the Leonid Kuchma regime [of 1994-2005].

Boris Yeltsin had used the term “directed democracy” during his Presidency to describe the less-than-fully-robust politics of Russia in his years as President (1991-1999). On becoming President in 1999, Puting continued use of the term. But the “color revolutions” in Georgia (Rose Revolution of 2003) and Ukraine (Orange Revolution of 2004) aroused deep suspicion on Putin’s part. Whether it was a fear of Western-promoted “regime change” or a fear of popular pressure for democratization, Putin responded by seeking a more secure approach to securing the Russian government while still maintaining some features of libral democracy.

Krastev writes that the “key to the [directed democracy] system was not just to establish a monopoly of power but to monopolize the competition for it.” Krastev, a liberal theorist in his outlook, accepts a concept that New Cold Warriors find uncomfortable, which is that the post-1991 vision of democracy was to a large extent a sham that provided a polite cover for the brand of oligarchical rule that established itself in Russia and other post-Soviet spaces. And he notes that it was designed to accommodate the Western powers on which post-1991 Russia was heavily dependent:

The key element in the model of directed democracy was that the sources of ehe legitimacy of ehe regime lay in the west. The project of faking democracy assumes that the faker accepts the superiority of the model he fakes. Being lectured by the west was the price that Russian elite paid for using the resources of the west to preserve its power.

In its social origins, directed democracy reflected the strange relations between the rulers and the ruled in Yeltsin's Russia. Stephen Holmes as acutely portrayed this relationship: "Those at the top neither exploit nor oppress those at the bottom. They do not even govern them; they simply ignore them." [my emphasis]

The fact that Putin’s regime has become considerably more authoritarian than Yeltsin’s and notably more aggressive in its foreign policy does not imply that Russia in the 1990s was some kind of model liberal democracy with a social state that protected ordinary Russians from the worst effects of “shock therapy” transition. It was neither. As Krastev puts it:

In the current [2006] western discourse on Russia, Putin's authoritarianism is usually contrasted with the imperfect democracy ofYeltsin's Russia in the way that tyranny contrasts with freedom. In reality, Yeltsin's liberalism and Putin's sovereigntism [sic] represent two distinctive but related forms of managed democracy.

It’s worth noting that the kind of more social-democratic political system that Mikhail Gorbachev tried to build seems to have been based on more of the liberal-democratic system of independent parties and competitive elections than Yeltsin’s “directed democracy” system was. (Archie Brown, Did Gorbachev as General Secretary Become a Social Democrat? Europe-Asia Studies 65:2, 2013)

Krastev distinguishes the Putin/Surkov concept of “sovereign democracy” as follows:

For the Kremlin, sovereignty is a capacity. lt implies economic independence, military strength and cultural identicy.

The other key element of the sovereign state is a "nationally-minded" elite. The nature of the elite in ehe view of the Kremlin's ideologues is ehe critical component of ehe sovereign state. Tue creation of the nationally-minded elite is the primarily task of the sovereign democracy as a project.

It’s always a temptation for Western observers to assume or imply that Russian political practice after 1991 shared some of ideological practice of the Soviet regime, in which Marxism-Leninism was the official state ideology from 1917. Even that was not the static ideology that dogmatic Cold Warriors often implied.

A similar caution is also helpful in looking at post-1991 Russia ideological positions. Surkov’s 2006 speech promoting the “sovereign democracy” idea was criticized by, among others, Putin’s ally Dmitry Medvedev, who would serve as Putin’s de facto surrogate as President 2008-2012, criticized Surkov’s concept publicly at the time. (Peter Schulze, "Souveräne Demokratie: Kampfbegriff oder Hilfskonstruktion für einen eigenständigen Entwicklungsweg? – die ideologische Offensive des Vladislav Surkov" in Matthes Buhbe & Gabriele Gorzka (eds.), Russland heute.Rezentralisierung des Staates unter Putin 2007)

But the idea has since functioned as a way to distinguish Russia's current authoritarian system from the "Western" concept of democracy, emphasizing the distinctiveness of the Russian style of government and emphasizing the apprehension against regime-change operations directed by the US. A Russian-style democracy, as Putin called it at the 2006 G-8 Summit. Putin has also referred to his system as "managed democracy" and a “dictatorship of law.”

However, it's worth noting that Surkov himself in the mid-2000s was polemically redefining the Western use of a “managed democracy” (a limited democracy with authoritarian leanings) to be instead something that the West had imposed on Russia, bringing with it all the ills of corruption, chaos (like the 1998 Russian financial crisis), and drastic declines in standards of living that it experienced during the Yeltsin era. "Sovereign democracy" in this framing has the task of fixing what the Western-imposed "managed democracy" had broken. This could reasonably be taken as a populist pitch portraying Putin's government as championing the ordinary Russia against the new oligarchs. Putin was providing a "way toward normalcy," as Surkov put it then. (Schulze 2007) Though he was careful to distinguish that kind of normalcy from what the democratic movement around the Orange Revolution of 2004 in Ukraine sought.

But in the mid-2000s, the Russian government was still declaring the hope that Russia would be accepted by the West as still a great power and that there could be cooperative solutions to outstanding differences. The lack of progress on agreements over NATO and then in 2008, the official NATO declaration that Georgia and Ukraine would become NATO members at some time in the future marked a turning point toward sharper conflict.

Putin and Putinist government in Russia: Comments on Robert Misik book on Vladimir Putin

Austrian political analyst Robert Misik has published a book on Russia’s President, Putin.Ein Verhängnis [Putin: A Fate] (2022).

This year is already generally regarded as a turning point in European and world politics because of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24. So lots of people are re-evaluating their understanding of what we think we know about Russia.

Misik relies on a variety of solid secondary sources and makes good use of them. Most of those he sites are English-language ones. His analysis of Putin’s ideological/propaganda positions is particularly interesting. But he doesn’t fall into the trap of assuming that Putin is particularly driven by ideology.

Putinist ideology?

Western commentators are quick to assume a similarity between Putin and leaders of the old Soviet Union. But when it comes to ideological positions, there is an important difference. Soviet leaders from Lenin to Gorbachev were expected to offer treatises on political and philosophical questions and even literature and art. Stalin in 1950 published a book on linguistics. However one views the various brands of Marxist theory elaborated by Soviet leaders, the expectation was that they provide a theoretical framework for their views.

This is not the case for the leaders of Russia since 1991: Boris Yeltsin, Dmitry Medvedev, and Vladimir Putin. Of course, every government has to provide a narrative framework for itself and the public. Misik discusses a couple of theorists who influenced the far-right, post-1991 Russian context. Ivan Ilyin (1883–1954) is one of them. One of Misik’s cited sources, Anton Barbashin (Ivan Ilyin: A Fashionable Fascist Riddle 04/20/2018) wrote that the Russia “state has been promoting [Ilyin] for the last 15 years as a genuine Russian philosopher, exemplary statist and true Russian patriot.” Ilyin was an overt fascist, a frank admirer of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. But he also promoted a notion of a deep, somehow special Russian religious spirituality, which seems similar to the brand of Russia Orthodox Christian piety Putin has promoted.

One Viennese touch that Misik includes is that Ilyin prior to the First World War was an admirer of Sigmund Freud’s theories of psychological repression. He notes, ‘“It is highly probable that Ilyin came to Freud [in Vienna] for psychological sessions over six weeks.” in Vienna. He adds that Ilyin and his wife Natali Vokach were “pioneers of the psychoanalytic movement in Russia.” Presumably Ilyin’s admiration for the Jewish and definitely anti-fascist physician Freud diminished in his later years!

The still-living nationalist philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, who was in the news this year when his daughter Darya Dugina died in a bombing that may have been aimed at Dugin himself, is an ongoing influence in the Russian political scene. Dugin has been labeled “Putin’s brain.” (Alasdair Sandford/AP/Reuters, Aleksandr Dugin: Who is 'Putin's brain' and what is his view of Russia's war in Ukraine? Euronews 08/22/2022) And Putin does use terms similar to Dugin’s, though as Sandford notes, Dugin “has no official ties to the Kremlin” and “has no direct link to Russian foreign policy.”

Putin as plausibly depicted by Robert Misik is a ruthlessly pragmatic former KGB operative who got where he is by working closely with gangsters and Mafiosi networks and shows no special attachment to philosophical visions.

However, the Russian leader has shown particular interest in developing a historical narrative for the country and in particular for his own expansionist geopolitical visions, especially when it comes to Ukraine and Belarus. Misik writes (all translations from German here are mine):

Putin, the pragmatic realist, mixes it all together in a gigantic mixer in his Kremlin kitchen. He claws out what is useful and leaves out what seems useless. "Putin reads all the time, mostly about the history of Russia," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said in 2011. Over the years, Putin began to argue increasingly that the "universal values" promoted by the West were, by definition, "anti-Russian." Russians [in his view] should be guided by their own values. Community spirit instead of individualism, spirituality instead of consumerism and moral decadence.

Putin’s article “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” (07/12/2021) is unlikely to be regarded in the long run as a notable historical or theoretical work. But it has obvious importance for the nationalist ideological framing for the Russian public of his Ukraine policy that would wind up with a full-scale invasion this year. Peter Dickinson analyzed Putin’s piece for the Atlantic Council soon after it was published (Putin’s new Ukraine essay reveals imperial ambitions 07/15/2021), noting that it “features many of [the] talking points favored by Putin throughout the past seven years of undeclared war between Russia and Ukraine.“

Though Putin may feel obliged to justify his war of choice to the Russian people, who with Ukrainians will share the costs of a bloody and drawn-out conflict, his revisionist history is designed to appeal to no one more so than himself. By restoring Russia’s control over its former territories, Putin not only corrects what he sees as a historic wrong but also cements his place in Russian history as the leader who restored the country to its rightful status.

It seems unlikely that Putin’s ideological framing “is designed to appeal to no one more so than himself,“ although emphasizing the grandiosity of his own leadership seems very much consistent with his record. But it’s clear that Putin did want to provide a larger historical-nationalist vision in pursuit of his policy of conquest. Even cynics need marketing, especially if they are leading a war that could wind up in a full-blown nuclear conflict.

“Politics are politics, as the old, case-hardened bourgeois diplomats say.” Stalin himself observed in a famous speech in 1939 that signaled his willingness to make a deal with Germany if Britain and France couldn’t find their way to make a better offer. (Report to the 18th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union 03/10/1939)

Pretensions of scholarship may not be necessary. But a national leader, even an authoritarian one like Putin, needs to give his public a reason for going to war. In this case, a war that clearly didn’t turn out to be an cakewalk any more than the Iraq War did for the United States.

Putin and the f-word

Can Putin be called a fascist? Obviously, some people do. Misik seems ambivalent about this definition. On the one hand, he writes:

What is certain is that Putin became more and more rapidly radicalized [in the 2010s]. Eventually, he said publicly: "Every people, and especially the Russian people, will always be able to distinguish the true patriots from the scum and the traitors, to simply spit them out like a mosquito that accidentally flew into their mouth." Inner critics, rebellious oligarchs, the few thousand courageous people who take to the streets against his war, the last remaining rebellious publicists - they are compared to insects that are spat out and crushed. This is the language of pure fascism and totalitarianism.

Misik seems somewhat uncsure on whether he wants to apply the f-world to Putin’s politics. His position could be summarized: It sure looks like fascism to me, but I don’t want to have to parse through a definition of fascism here. Which is understandable, especially for a relatively short book. And, as Misik recounts, during his two-decades-plus rule over Russia, his style of governance has evolved significantly from a rickety but functioning liberal democratic system to a “guided democracy” to a clearly authoritarian system based on oligarchical networks without meaningful democratic control.

Misik writes at one point, “The ideology cobbled together by his regime in its radicalization process is no longer unlike a fascist delusional system.“ His mildly ambiguous characterization is somewhat clarified by his later comment that Putin’s regime has four characteristics he takes as fascist: “autocratic rule, patriotism, territory/empire and Orthodox spirituality.” But he also notes that there is also an absence of an “ethnic purity” emphasis, which Misik describes as “a significant different to most fascist ideologies.”

Political science isn’t natural science, and coming up with a clear-cut definition of fascism is notoriously challenging. Coming up with one that everyone can agree on is impossible. Since Mussolini’s party called itself the Fascist Party, anything that pretty obviously fits the basics of Mussolini’s movement - authoritarian government defending an oligarchic capitalist economy based on rabid nationalism and hatred of the entire liberal and democratic “Western” tradition including its socialist and communist variations and individual rights and organized labor and gender equality - looks fascist to me. Putin’s government style checks all those boxes.

Authoritarian religion can be and has been an important part of fascist movements and fascist rule. And Putin’s promotion of “Orthodox spirituality” is certainly a prominent part of his political project. But it doesn’t have to be Eastern Orthodox Christianity, or even Christianity at all. Current Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi uses a brand of Hindu fundamentalism for the same purpose. Italian fascism and its Austrian clone made much of their Catholic identity. White Christian nationalism plays that role for Trumpism in the US, though imagining a less conventionally pious man than Donald Trump would be very difficult..

I would say Misik gives Russian Putinism too easy a pass on the “ethnic purity” front. Militant rightwing nationalism always winds up there. The current wartime ideology negating the legitimate existence of Ukraine as a national entity, and the very concrete deportation of Ukrainians and unaccompanied children (labeled “orphans”) deep into Russia as part of an explicit policy to breed a bigger populartion in Russia certainly is a politico-biological move. The fact that the deported Ukrainian are meant to breed new Russians doesn’t mean its not very much a ethnonationalist project.

Misik also makes clear that the far-right in Europe and the US increasingly look to Putin as an ideological godfather. Far-right parties in Austria (FPÖ/Freedom Party), Italy (Lega [formerly Lega Nord]), and France (Marine Le Pen’s Rassenblementt National) have made formal cooperation agreements with Putin’s United Russia party in the recent past. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán provides a more respectable public model at the moment for the anti-democracy rightwing in the West, including the American Trumpistas. The Cold War triumphalist narrative in which the fall of the Soviet Union meant that the neoliberal political and economic policy had redeemed Russia from its sinful past is pretty much in shambles at the moment. But now that Putin is the West most prominent Big Bad of the moment, it’s worth remembering that the current form of governance and foreign policy didn’t emerge full-blown the moment the USSR formally ceased to exist. Some of the milestones include:

• Shelling of the Russian Duma (Parliament) building (1993) (Yeltsin Shelled Russian Parliament 25 Years Ago, U.S. Praised “Superb Handling” National Security Archive 10/04/2018)
• First Chechen War (1994-96) This involved a revolt by a predominantly Muslim part of Russia itself.
• Second Chechen War (1999-2000) Putin was then Prime Minister under Yeltsin and was directly responsible for the aggressive military suppression of the Chechen revolt. His handling of that conflict is now cited as a precedent for his actions in Ukraine.
• NATO enlargement: Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland (1999) Yeltsin’s government reluctantly accepted this action.
• Kosovo War (1999) The US and NATO intervened on behalf of Kosovo, a province of Russia’s ally Serbia. Kosovo formally declared independence from Serbia. The US and some EU countries recognize Kosovo as an independent state. (On the road to becoming a fully-functioning state German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development; accessed 10/24/2022) Russia’s insistence that NATO violated Serbia’s sovereignty in that war is not just a propaganda fantasy. That intervention’s status is international law is questionable at best. War Over Kosovo (2001), edited by Andrew Bacevich and Eliot Cohen, is an excellent source on that action.
• Putin becomes President of the Russian Federation (2000) He was Yeltsin’s favored successor. Putin was the effective leader of Russia from then until now. For constitutional reasons, he left the Presidency and served against as Prime Minister 2008-2012 under President Dmitry Medvedev, but Putin was generally recognized as the actual leader.
• Putin’s speech (in fluent German) to the German Bundestag (25.09.2001) This speech showed a seeming openness of Putin’s part to friendly cooperation with the West. Taking place as it did two weeks after Al Qaida’s attacks on New York and Washington, it seemed plausible at the time that a closer cooperation of Russia, the US, and other NATO countries in the famous War on Terror might be possible.
• NATO enlargement: Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia (2004) The three Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania had been formally part of the Soviet Union.
• Orange Revolution in Ukraine (2004) This followed the so-called Rose Revolution in Georgia (2003) and a “tulip revolution” in Kyrgyzstan (2005).
• Munich Security Conference 2007 Putin’s speech at the conference denounced the strategy of the US, officially adopted by the Bush-Cheney Administration as policy, of maintaining a clear status as the world’s unipolar hegemonic power. (Louis Charbonneau, Putin says U.S. wants to dominate world Reuters 02/10/2007) The Kremlin website provides this English-language text of the speech, Speech and the Following Discussion at the Munich Conference on Security Policy 02/10/2007. This speech of Putin’s is generally understood as Russia adopting a generally more confrontive foreign policy toward the US and its allies. To the extent there was any substance to what Misik sarcastically describes as “some Western leftists” regarding Putin as a “admirable anti-imperialist,” it is largely based on statements like this and foreign policy actions in pursuit of that approach.
• NATO’s Bucharest Declaration (2008) This official announcement included the remarkably inept combination of confirming that both Georgia and Ukraine would become members of NATO but without beginning the formal accession process.
• Russia-Georgia War (2008) Michael Kofman has argued that this five-day conflict over the separatist Georgian provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia ”heralded an important transition in international politics which “presaged the return of great-power politics and the end of the post-Cold War period.” (The August War, Ten Years On_ A Retrospective on the Russo-Georgia War War on the Rocks 08/17/2018)
• NATO enlargement: Albania, Croatia (2009)
• “Euromaidan” protests in Ukraine (2014) Russia then seized and formally annexed Crimea and occupied two separatist “republics” in the Ukrainian Donbas region.
• NATO enlargement-Montenegro (2017)
• NATO enlargement-North Macedonia (2020)
• Russian invasion of Ukraine (2022)

Misik also traces the increasing authoritarianism in Putin’s internal governance, with a long-term trend toward less tolerance of dissent and press freedom and increasingly “managed” elections.

The 1990s were a very difficult period economically during the neoliberal “shock therapy” that the Yeltsin government adopted at Western urging. Misik notes that Putin as President initially portrayed the 1990s as the main problem to which his government was responding. Rising prices for oil and gas helped to produce notable prosperity for the public generally and particularly for a growing middle class. But Russia’s status as a petrostate is both a blessing and a curse. And when the oil markets weakened then the negative effect of Russia’s economy was very evident.

So Putin’s government has for years stressed the threat he portrays as the decadent West. Misik tends to minimize the effect of the NATO expansion in itself on Putin’s changing foreign policy stance. He argues that Putin is actually more fearful of democratic contagion from the Ukraine and other neighboring countries: “As a real threat, Purin may have seen not so much NATO, but the approach of democracy - in a sense, the ‘eastward expansion of democratic citizens' movements’.”

While it would be an exaggeration to say that is a distinction without a difference, the latter concern isn’t independent of the former. It’s become an insistent New Cold War talking point that the expansion of NATO had nothing at all to do with Russian security fears. But the idea that Russia would have no reasonable or legitimate security concerns about NATO enlargement is simply not credible.

In the first round of enlargement, the Clinton Administration and NATO set up a formal consultation process with Russia and thus in practice acknowledging the legitimacy of such concerns. If Putin really had turned out to be the “flawless democrat“ (lupenreiner Demokrat) that German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder once absurdly described him to be, his government would still have regarded NATO expansion as a serious security concern. Any Russia government would have.

Putin and the oligarchs

Misik also provides an accessible description of Putin’s dealings with Russia’s network of spies, mobsters, and oligarchs. And he gives this useful summary of Putin’s basic approach to establishing his rule in a system of oligarchic capitalism:

The [oligarchical] networks are stable, but have changed their character over the years. In the wild capitalism of the nineties, the state was weak and the oligarchs clawed at what they could get and developed a life of their own vis-à-vis political power. Putin, on the other hand, has curbed the oligarchs and has either nationalized essential parts of the raw material production - oil, gas, rare metals - or entrenched them with those oligarchs who were willing to act as a sort of licensee without total control (i.e. under his direction, so to speak). It is now others who are stealing, and it works in a different way - but it remains a kleptocracy in which anyone can help themselves and in which the assets seep away in black networks.

What can we take from two recent Putin speeches?

Vladimir Putin on Friday formally announced the annexation of additional areas in Ukraine. And he made a few other ideological points and a notable threat along with it: Steve Rosenberg, Ukraine war: Putin raises stakes in speech full of anti-Western bile BBC News 09/30/2022; Extracts from Putin's speech at annexation ceremony Reuters 09/30/2022.

This is the official English text of the speech from the Kremlin website: Signing of treaties on accession of Donetsk and Lugansk people's republics and Zaporozhye and Kherson regions to Russia 09/30/2022.

It's tempting for Americans and Europeans to assume that Putin's Russia is driven by a clear ideology. Because that assumption fits easily into the general understanding of the Cold War. In fact, The USSR was guided by its ideology. But it repeatedly showed itself also very capable of making coldly pragmatic calculations based on geopolitical realities, e.g., the German-Soviet Nonagression Pact of 1939.

But while we can talk about Putinism in ideological terms, it seems to be a fairly vague mixture of reactionary Orthodox Christian theocracy, Russian nationalism, superficial and tendentious historical claims, and fairly transparent slogans to justify territorial aggression.

Here is a version of Putin's Christian ideas:

[T]he dictatorship of the Western elites targets all societies, including the citizens of Western countries themselves. This is a challenge to all. This complete renunciation of what it means to be human, the overthrow of faith and traditional values, and the suppression of freedom are coming to resemble a “religion in reverse” – pure Satanism. Exposing false messiahs, Jesus Christ said in the Sermon on the Mount: “By their fruits ye shall know them.” (my emphasis)

And one of the vague Russian nationalism: "The battlefield to which destiny and history have called us is a battlefield for our people, for the great historical Russia. For the great historical Russia, for future generations, our children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. We must protect them against enslavement and monstrous experiments that are designed to cripple their minds and souls."

And the mystical Russian nationalism applied to a particular land grab:

Behind these words stands a glorious spiritual choice, which, for more than a thousand years of Russian statehood, was followed by many generations of our ancestors. Today, we are making this choice; the citizens of the Donetsk and Lugansk people's republics and the residents of the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions have made this choice. They made the choice to be with their people, to be with their Motherland, to share in its destiny, and to be victorious together with it.

The Russian claim to the Ukrainian land it has formally annexed has no basis in international law. And Stephen Wertheim argues that it is on the basis of sovereignty, which is also a part of any democratic world order, that the US should frame its support of Ukraine, not on vaguer ideological claims (The One Key Word Biden Needs to Invoke on Ukraine The Atlantic 06/11/2022):

The assault on Ukraine strikes at the core right of states to preserve their sovereign independence. This is an axiom that countries on all continents hold dear. Many nations in the global South remember colonial rule and continue to fear great-power exploitation. Even the government of India, which has drawn criticism in the West for opposing sanctions on Moscow and buying up discounted Russian oil, has shown its disapproval of Putin’s breaches of international law.

The Biden administration also has condemned Russia for violating Ukraine’s sovereignty and territorial integrity, and for using force in breach of the UN Charter. But the United States does itself no favors when it appears to cast its cause first and foremost as a defense of democracy. The implication is that the United States places greater value on democracy than on sovereignty. This leaves potential partners to ponder whether Biden regards the sovereignty of other nations as conditional, worthy of support only if they qualify as democratic in the eyes of the West. Instead of uniting more states around universal values, Biden risks repelling them. [my emphasis]

Putin even brought up one of the current favorite demagogic themes of the global far right, anti-LBGTQ hostility including transphobia:

[D]o we want to have here, in our country, in Russia, “parent number one, parent number two and parent number three” (they have completely lost it!) instead of mother and father? Do we want our schools to impose on our children, from their earliest days in school, perversions that lead to degradation and extinction? Do we want to drum into their heads the ideas that certain other genders exist along with women and men and to offer them gender reassignment surgery? Is that what we want for our country and our children? This is all unacceptable to us. We have a different future of our own.

Annika Brockschmidt comments on Jason Stanley's reaction at a Yale conference on Christian nationalism to that comment of Putin, linking it to the far-right Italian leader (and likely next prime minister) Giorgia Meloni's position:

"Putin and Meloni say the exact same sentence", says @jasonintrator at @ISPSYale, "claiming 'they will just call you parent 1 and parent 2' which links back to Hitler's critique of democracy, that you will be just a number, that there is no individualism in democracy."

— Annika Brockschmidt (@ardenthistorian) October 1, 2022

Fred Kaplan emphasized the following key points about the speech Putin gave earlier, on September 21 (What the West Should Do About Putin’s Increasingly Dangerous Desperation Slate 09/22/2022):

He made three main points:

First, he announced a “partial mobilization” of reservists to “defend our Motherland” against “the neo-Nazi regime” in Ukraine and its NATO overlords.

Second, he called for referendums in the Donbas, Kherson, and Zaprizhzhia regions of Ukraine—where many Russian ethnics live—to see if they want to be annexed into Russia.

Finally, he warned that, in response to any attack on Russian territory, he would “certainly make use of all weapons systems available to us,” presumably including nuclear weapons, adding, “This is not a bluff.”

And he notes:

By all accounts, [Putin] is egomaniacal, in the pocket (intellectually and spiritually) of ultra-nationalist kooks, and facing the possibility of defeat in the present war — which he’d thought would spawn his legacy as the rebuilder of the Great Russian Empire.

So this is why the West needs to be a little bit cautious in its words and deeds in Ukraine. Then again, I say “a little bit cautious,” because there is no upside to shirking support for Ukraine in what could be a pivotal moment. There is absolutely no evidence that any restraint would move Putin to the negotiating tables for serious diplomacy. In fact, neither Russia nor Ukraine has any incentive at the moment to do anything but keep fighting. And so President Biden continues to send weapons (another $1 billion worth, with heavier and heavier armaments, seems to be announced every week); the other NATO nations are pulling their weight; and the European countries most heavily dependent on Russian oil and gas are taking significant steps toward finding alternative sources before the winter sets in. [my emphasis]

Kaplan also observes, "the scope of the war is nonetheless becoming the West vs. Russia." Still a proxy war. But it is in fact a proxy war between Russia and NATO, in particular the United States at the same time it is a war of self-defense for Ukraine.

Three phases of Vladimir Putin's own form of "Putinism"

Die Zeit's Moscow correspondent Michael Thumann gives his description of three stages Vladimir Putin's rule over Russia in "»Habe ich Angst?«" (Diktatoren ZEITGeschichte 04-2022).

He designates the three distinct periods as: a "hybrid"phase, 2000-2011; an "authoritarian" phase, 2012-2021; and, "the destruction of civil society," 2021-on.

I don't try to engage here with how precise Thumann's definitions of the varying states of Putin's rule may be. But in light of the sometimes cartoonish polemics we're currently seeing around the Ukraine war, it's useful to keep in mind that Putin's more than two decades of being the de facto chief leader of the Russian government has been marked by varying approaches on his part. Thanks to the decades-long use - mostly misuse, actually - of the Munich Analogy, the US always winds up making its opponent of the moment into "Hitler." It's a habit that generally produces more fog than clarity. How many times have we been in a conflict with the latest "Hitler" since 1945?

Putin was brought into Boris Yeltsin's government in 1997 as a Deputy Chief of the Presidential Administration. Putin became Director of the Federal Security Service (FSB) in 1998 and then Prime Minister in August 1999, as the early clashes of what became the Second Chechen War (1999-2000) were already underway. Though the regular military phase of that war ended in 2000, Chechen insurgent activity continued for years. Western concern over human rights violations and war crimes committed by the Russian government in Chechnya was mixed with a certain amount of sympathy for Moscow's fight against "Muslim terrorists," especially after the 9/11 attack in 2001.

Konstantin Eggert describes Putin's role in that war as follows (Russia still lives in the shadow of the Chechen war Deutsche Welle 09/30/2019):

Young and energetic, he immediately started talking tough on Chechnya, especially after a series of mysterious apartment block explosions hit Moscow and the towns of Volgodonsk and Buynaksk in September. Security at any cost and "eradicating terrorism" became top priorities for the Russians. When Russian armor started moving on the Chechen capital Grozny, people knew it was not so much the ailing Yeltsin who was behind this offensive but Putin. A year later he became president.

Officially the war was called a "counter-terrorist operation." It was supposed to be brief and victorious, not least because the main leader of the Chechen forces and the republic's grand mufti, Akhmat Kadyrov, changed sides and agreed on a deal with the Kremlin. [my emphasis]

The post-Soviet Russian government under Yeltsin was structured conceptually along the lines of European and American democratic governance. But the "shock therapy" economic program Yeltsin's government undertook to transition from widespread state ownership of industry to a privatized system was not only traumatic in its reductions of the standard of living for most Russians. It also facilitated massive corruption, which went a long way toward undermining the functions of the new governmental institutions and legal system. The system was also notoriously open to fairly blatant intervention by foreign powers, as illustrated by this Time cover of its 06/15/1998 edition celebrating US assistance to Yeltsin's Presidential re-election campaign.

Yeltsin's health problems, i.e., alcoholism, didn't help to engender confidence in his leadership, either.

Neither did this incident in 1993 during his first term: Yeltsin Shelled Russian Parliament 25 Years Ago, U.S. Praised “Superb Handling” National Security Archive 10/04/2018.

And the Russian debt default of 1998 was also a major financial event for Russia and the world.

Hybrid Phase (2000-2011)

Thumann sees the "hybrid phase" of Putin's governance beginning with Putin's Presidency in 2000. After serving two four-year terms, Putin again became Prime Minister in 2008-2012 under President Dmitry Medvedev. But even during that time, Putin was already generally considered the real leader of the country.

Without repeating Yeltsin's directing of cannon fire at the Parliament (Duma) building, Thumann argues that Putin successfully undermined the Duma's power, in particular by putting his United Russia party in control together with "free-rider" parties that were nominally oppositional. "From then on, the Duma practiced faithfulness and loyalty [to Putin], and occasional heckling from the actual opposition could no longer disturb Putin in governing." (The translations here from Thumann's German article are mine.)

In other words, Putin established de facto single-party rule in the form of a so-called illiberal democracy.

Thumann sees a second key part of this "hybrid" phase in a steady undermining of the authority of "the governors and republic presidents, who ruled like little kings in the federal system of the nineties" and who "had formed a real counterweight to the center.

The third part of this "hybrid" phase was concentration of control over television stations, which Thumann considers the most important aspect. Putin's government, he writes, took control of media properties of oligarchs by "making them an offer they couldn't refuse." And political surveillance was considerably stepped up during this time.

Thumann writes, "The political technocrats loyal to the president built a hollow façade democracy in the still unoccupied space between European values and Eurasian traditions. At that time, Putin still managed without camps and police terror. He worked in the penumbra of a hybrid system in which much was under control, while a residual pluralism flourished." He argues that Moscow in particular enjoyed a more open system, including critical media, than other parts of Russia. And, not least because of rising oil prices on which the petrostate Russia is so dependent were rising, the population also experienced a genuine improvement in living standards after the devastating "shock therapy" hyper-free-market experience of the 1990s.

(I attended a panel at the 2014 Netroots Nation convention that featured a panel of Russian journalists whose presence in the US was sponsored by the State Department. It was suggested there that media in smaller media markets was at that time allowed greater leeway than in larger cities.)

Authoritarian phase (2012-2021)

German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder once infamously described Putin at the start of his first Presidential term as a "flawless democrat." Putin apparently appreciated Schröder's attitude, because Schröder did a long and profitable post-Chancellorship stint as chairman of the board of the Russian oil company Rosneft.

But Putin himself turned out to be no more of a fan of competitive democracy, free and fair elections, or an independent justice system than Donald Trump or Viktor Orbán. When half a year of public protests broke out over justified public suspicions of a manipulated Duma election at the end of 2011, Putin began to worry. He had always been leery of the so-called "color" revolutions in places like Georgia and Ukraine and also those of the Arab Spring. As much of the recent commentary on the Ukraine war has mentioned, Puting saw such pro-democracy, anti-corruption movements in nearby countries as a potential threat that could spread to Russia. And he viewed the 2011-12 protests against his government as not only a threat but one instigated if not directed by Washington. (How much of that suspicion was political paranoia and/or cynical propaganda is not something that Thumann's article addresses.)

Thumann describes this phase:

With Putin's return to the Kremlin [i.e., as President] in 2012, the second, the authoritarian phase began, in which the regime systematically cracked down on Russian pluralism and expanded the repression of individual oligarchs to indiscriminate mass repression. An important instrument for this were the "agent laws", an extension of the regulations for non-governmental organizations: associations that were even remotely socially or politically active and received money from non-Russian sources had to call themselves "foreign agents". A stigma. This was accompanied by monitoring of these associations and harsh penalties for violations of bureaucratic requirements. [my emphasis]

He sees this as a period where political rights were continually restricted but which also provided decent incomes compared to the recent past with various consumerist benefits. "In Moscow and the other major cities of the country, restaurants, private clinics, summer cafes and amusement parks flourished. Animal welfare associations and dance clubs emerged. People had jobs, some got good salaries and went on holiday to Turkey."

Putin also shifted his politics to a more nationalist position. To what extent that focus was driven by ideological conviction, internal political opportunism, pressure from NATO expansion, or general Russian evilness has of course become an endless part of the polemics around the current Ukraine war. The actual foreign policy shifts Putin executed during this period don't overlay seamlessly with Thumann's three-phase scheme of his internal governance methods.

But the Russian government has been saying since the 1990s, and even more explicitly since the 2007 Munich Security Conference, is that they have viewed the enlargement of NATO as a security threat. Yeltsin's government had reluctantly made an agreement with the Clinton Administration and NATO to accept the expansion of NATO to Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic that included ongoing consultation procedures. The Cheney-Bush Administration with its charge-ahead unilateralist foreign policy and its sneering contempt for diplomacy just blew off Russian concerns about further NATO expansion. And Putin's government made a distinct shift in its public posture in 2007 over discussions of adding Georgia and Ukraine to NATO.

It's worth noting here that even during the current Ukraine war, Putin himself officially took the entry of Sweden and Finland into NATO in stride with the explanation that the two countries were de facto NATO members anyway. Those countries were already bound by the mutual defense clause of the European Union Treaty, a factor that seemed to be little discussed in political commentary until this year. Sergei Markov, a former official spokesperson for Putin and currently head of the very Putin-friendly Institute for Political Studies in Moscow, repeated this position just this past week. (What does Russia's naval strategy mean? Aljazeera Inside Story 08/01/2022) Which is not to say that Russia will make no foreign or military policy adjustments in response.

The Cheney-Bush Administration wanted to begin the formal accession process for Georgia and Ukraine to join NATO. Germany and France - which Bush's government treated with more-or-less open contempt - refused to go along. But at Washington's insistence, NATO make a formal statement in 2008 with its Bucharest declaration that Georgia and Ukraine would eventually become NATO members. It was a worst-of-both-worlds approach: they didn't start the formal process for accession but declared unequivocally that the two countries would eventually join.

New Cold Warriors like former US Ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul take it is an article of faith that Russian policy towards Ukraine had nothing to do with NATO expansion and everything to do with some combination of Russian religious-political messianic expansion and Putin's dictatorial tendencies.

But if you are a Russian leader looking to use nationalism to boost your political position, this sequence of events worked out nicely for that scenario.

In the 2010s, world oil prices seriously crashed. For a petrostate like Russia, heavily dependent on oil and gas exports, this is always an important factor. Just as healthy oil and gas income had facilitated the "hybrid phase," falling oil prices presented new challenges for Putin's ruling model in the "authoritarian phase."

Destruction of civil society phase (2021-on)

Thumann may be anticipating the Owl of Minerva's ruling on the current Putinist period, the "destruction of civil society." He points to the poisoning of Alexei Navalny, a genuinely dodgy Duma election in September 2021, and the banning of the human rights group Memorial. Then in 2022 came the attack on Ukraine:

With the invasion of Ukraine, the authorities set in motion their plans to destroy civil society. The last free media, Radio Echo Moscow, the TV channel Dozhd, and the newspaper Novaya Gazeta headed by Nobel Peace Prize winner Dmitry Muratov, had to cease their work. People who protested against the war were arrested. In Russia, since the introduction of military censorship in early March, there has been no public voice other than Putin's.

Thumann's own characterization of Putin's regime is as follows:

What should the Putin system be called today? Putinism is a kind of USSR without socialism, a pseudo-clerical-conservative moral dictatorship, a poisonous police state, repressive internally, aggressive on the outside. But this is not a new system in itself. Putin, divorced and in a relationship with an athlete, paints a picture of the conservative family as the ideal of society. The state propagandists strive for control over minds. They are creating a hermetic "Russian information space." They are deveöpüomg the ideal of the conservative strongman, who defends his weak wife and children, who cultivates his field in front of the city, and fights for the fatherland. They are mobilizing the masses for the isolation of the country and for attacking its neighbors. Hundreds of thousands are allowed to cheer the course of the leader in stadiums with flags. Society is atomized and has hardly any forms of organization beyond the vertical state. The Russian political scientist Andrei Kolesnikov calls it "hybrid totalitarianism". [my emphasis]

A construction like "hybrid totalitarianism" could easily be a euphemism for, "Who knows where this will go?" It's likely to be a while before the Owl of Minerva will be ready to make a pronouncement on this.

The new situation with Ukraine and Russia on Tuesday

Russia's latest move of formally recognizing the breakaway "republics" of Donetsk and Luhansk, thus abandoning its commitments under the Minsk Agreement, presumably meaning Russia will no longer take part in the "Normandy format" negotiations around the status of the two mini-republics.

Putin himself gave a long, rambling televised speech in which he strongly implied that he sees Ukraine as legitimately part of Russia.

Since the Minsk process was stalled out already and Russia already de facto controlled Donetsk and Luhansk, the formal recognition doesn't in itself change the real situation. But Russia is likely to send additional Russian troops there. And it publicly looks like Putin is rejecting indefinitely any possibility of adjusting the Russia position in the two breakaway republics, much less reversing the annexation of Crimea.

Presumably the NATO countries including the US will now start implementing an expanded set of sanctions against Russia. And there will surely be pressure from Poland, Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to reinforce the military position of NATO there. Russia is clearly implementing a policy shift that possibly does include an attempt to seize all of Ukraine. And the NATO countries will have to make an inevitably tricky calculation of how much escalation, diplomatically and militarily, they take in response.

It's safe to say that the latest developments is giving arms manufacturers new visions of dollars signs flying in front of them. And there will be an intensified debate in the US and Europe about which political sides are being "tough" enough or insufficiently so.

And that means more political barbs flying with varying degrees of conforming to reality. Like in the 1950s, mainstream Democrats and Republicans will accuse each other of being insufficiently tough on Russia, even as the Biden-Harris Administration has to come up with specific and immediate tactical responses to the unfolding developments and to propaganda hacks like Tucker Carlson gushing over Putin's manly manliness.

There's always a "blame game" in these situations. And since it's Russia that is committing obvious violations on Ukraine's sovereignty and international law in this situation, and is also positioning troops for possible a major invasion of Ukraine, mainstream commentators in the US end Europe will be grumpy about anyone insisting on critical reflections on Western policy.

But it's still important for people to try to walk and talk at the same time on this. And while reflecting on how we got here doesn't provide definitive solutions to problems of the moment, it's clear that some previous decisions weren't as carefully considered as they should have been. Both the Clinton Administration and Cheney-Bush thought NATO enlargement was essentially a freebie in terms of security risks. And a boon for the US military-industrial complex, although the latter should go without saying. But the corporate press in the US will rarely actually say so at all.

The incorporation of the former Soviet Baltic Republics Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania was especially risky, because in pure realist terms there was no way that Russia wouldn't regard that as particularly problematic. But, again, the US took that as freebie, effectively assuming that Russia would not ever push back on that in any substantive way.

Now with the Ukraine developments, the actual risk in the Baltics is more obvious. Ukraine is not part of the NATO alliance. The three Baltic countries are. And now the NATO countries have to worry about the fact that Russia has the option to create threats on the border there in the same manner as they are currently during in Ukraine. In other words, NATO is actually not prepared for a near-term invasion of one or more of the Baltic countries by Russia. Much less positioned to intervene in Ukraine to push back a Russian invasion there.

But, however much American arms manufacturers might benefit from wild threat inflation over Russia's current pressure on Ukraine, policymakers really do need to try to keep a grip on the realities of Russia's current situation. Russia has an impressive nuclear arsenal. But it's also a petrostate very dependent on oil and gas exports, many of which currently go to Europe. They have been building infrastructure to enable more exports to China, which is currently on very good terms with Russia, and definitely has the need and the renminbi to become a bigger customer. But that's definitely not an overnight substitute.

Russia has a lot of ground troops, not surprisingly for a country with the world's largest territory and longest land borders with other countries. But its currently military budget is roughly the size of those of Germany and France combined, and about a tenth of the US one. Which for media sloppiness on this. Russia's economy is about the size of that of Spain, the EU's fourth largest economy. That means to get its current size of armed forces, it has to be spend a far higher percentage of the GDP on defense that Germany and France have to spend to get a similar combined military budget. So arguments that Russia spends x% while Germany, France, or the US spends only y% of theirs are pretty meaningless comparisons if they don't include the actual comparative sizes of the military budgets.

Russia by almost any measure is taking a huge risk already, and an even bigger one if they really try to militarily take all of Ukraine. It's questionable whether even the 150,000 troops Russia has reportedly positioned near Ukraine now are anywhere near sufficient to carry out a full-blown conquest and permanent occupation of Ukraine. The grandiose, weird rambling of Putin's speech Monday could be partly ideological hot air. But there could also be a big element of arrogance and overconfidence in it, as well.

I recently re-read a 1938 essay by the psychoanalyst Earnest Jones from the period just after the 1938 Munich Agreement had been signed. ("How Can Civilization Be Saved?") He wrote there:

In more dictatorial countries than ours [Britain] the demand for omnipotence in rulers is so strong that the latter have to make constant efforts to meet it. This is the psychological reason why the position of dictators is so notoriously delicate, and why they are so sensitive to any loss in prestige, that the temptation to retrieve it by a violent coup may be overwhelming. lt is extremely difficult for a dictator to act this part for long without being captured by the belief itself and thus becoming megalomaniac. Even Napoleon lost, at the end, his usually close touch with reality. [my emphasis in bold]

Whether we use "dictator" or "authoritarian" to describe Putin's current position of power, my own non-specialized guess is that something like that is actually going on with Putin now. What the NATO countries and especially the US need right now are realistic and practical views and evaluations of what is happening and not testosterone-charged fantasies and arms-manufacturer lobbyists' hype.

Putin's 2021 public position paper on Ukraine

A text marking an important inflection point for Russia’s current Ukrainian policy is the article published under Vladimir Putin’s name in 2021, On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians (linked here at the Russian President’s website).

Andreas Kappeler analyzed Putin's text, which clearly declares a strong inclination for Ukraine to be merged into Russia, in Revisionismus und Drohungen Osteuropa 71:7 (2021). As Kappeler notes, the first part of the paper is about the history of Russia and Ukraine. And while that part makes some contentious and dubious claims, it does have "an academic character" indicating that it was "clearly prepared by one or more professional historians."

Then there is a second part, starting with the paragraph beginning, "Of course, inside the USSR" and continuing to the end, which seems to stem more directly from Putin, with a change of tone clearly notable in the English version. "He repeats well-known theses, sharpens them, and does not shy away from threats to Ukraine and the West. His reasoning here is capricious, in part contradictory and emotional." (All translations from Keppler's article are mine.)

A couple of Putin's arguments are especially important in the current situation. He repeats a previous justification for annexing Crimea, which had been part of Russia but was added to the territory of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic in 1954, "in gross violation of legal norms that were in force at the time." He argues that when Ukraine became independent in 1991, it should have been recognized only in its pre-1954 borders, i.e., with Crimea staying in Russia.

That's not what both countries approved in 1991, of course. And it wasn't what the United Nations approved when it recognized Ukraine as an independent sovereign nation. Ukraine's claim to Crimea as its legitimate territory is really not in question as a matter of international law.

While Putin uses events from the Soviet period like the Great Patriotic War (the Soviet and Russian term for the Second World War) as part of his version of Russian nationalism, he also makes an anti-Soviet argument that casts Russia as the victim while not wanting to accept any criticism of Russia relating to anything bad that might have happened during the Soviet period:

The Bolsheviks treated the Russian people as inexhaustible material for their social experiments. They dreamt of a world revolution that would wipe out national states. That is why they were so generous in drawing borders and bestowing territorial gifts. It is no longer important what exactly the idea of the Bolshevik leaders who were chopping the country into pieces was. We can disagree about minor details, background and logics behind certain decisions. One fact is crystal clear: Russia was robbed, indeed.

... The leaders of modern Ukraine and their external ”patrons“ prefer to overlook these facts. They do not miss a chance, however, both inside the country and abroad, to condemn ”the crimes of the Soviet regime,“ listing among them events with which neither the CPSU, nor the USSR, let alone modern Russia, have anything to do. At the same time, the Bolsheviks' efforts to detach from Russia its historical territories are not considered a crime. And we know why: if they brought about the weakening of Russia, our ill-wishe[r]s are happy with that. [my emphasis]

And he also uses a hair-raising ethno-nationalist argument:

But the fact is that the situation in Ukraine today is completely different because it involves a forced change of identity. And the most despicable thing is that the Russians in Ukraine are being forced not only to deny their roots, generations of their ancestors but also to believe that Russia is their enemy. It would not be an exaggeration to say that the path of forced assimilation, the formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state, aggressive towards Russia, is comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us. As a result of such a harsh and artificial division of Russians and Ukrainians, the Russian people in all may decrease by hundreds of thousands or even millions. [my emphasis]

The "forced change of identity" line is a version of the far-right Great Replacement theory also used in Europe and the US to justify xenophobia and anti-immigrant violence.

That article is an articulation of the explicitly anti-Soviet, Russian-nationalist part of Putin's ideological position at the moment. So Kappeler is obviously justified in concluding his essay, "When Putin feels himself to be surrounded and cornered, that is as dangerous as his ethno-imperial nationalism, which exploits Russians in Ukraine and the Baltic states. His threats are to be taken seriously."

But taking threats seriously is not the same as leaping to conclusions about Russia's capabilities and intentions in Ukraine at this particular moment.

A section of Putin's article talks about how much Ukraine benefitted from its economic union with the Soviet Union and a rosy picture of how things could be like that again. But that is also simultaneously a recognition that absorbing all of Ukraine into Russia would be a huge new economic and military challenge for a petrostate like Russia whose GDP has recently been comparable to that of Italy. Particularly in the face of the economic sanctions that Putin knows would follow from such a move.

It seems obvious that the US and NATO are not going to give a binding, formal promise to Russia to never, ever allow Ukraine to join NATO. And the Russians surely realize that. As we know from US experience in places like Afghanistan and Iraq, and as Russia knows from its experience in places like Afghanistan and Syria, countries can and do make arrogant and irrational decisions that can wind up hurting them more than helping them. That's why we need good intelligence and a competent and well-staffed State Department to manage situations like the current one over Ukraine is a practical way that decreases rather than escalates the risk of war.

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This 2019 paper from the Carnegie Endowment by Julia Gurganus and Eugene Rumer, Russia’s Global Ambitions in Perspective, gives a background sketch of major Russia foreign policy perspective since the early 19th century. History is important, but doesn't dictate specific decisions in a present-day context.

Joe Biden, Thomas Jefferson, and Vladimir Putin

President Joe Biden is setting a public tone for US relations with Russia under his Administration. Here is the key passage from his recent ABC News interview: TRANSCRIPT: ABC News' George Stephanopoulos interviews President Joe Biden 03/17/2021:

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Director of National Intelligence came out with a report today saying that Vladimir Putin authorized operations during the election to under -- denigrate you, support President Trump, undermine our elections, divide our society. What price must he pay?

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: He will pay a price. I, we had a long talk, he and I, when we -- I know him relatively well. And I-- the conversation started off, I said, "I know you and you know me. If I establish this occurred, then be prepared."

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: You said you know he doesn't have a soul.

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I did say that to him, yes. And -- and his response was, "We understand one another." It was-- I wasn't being a wise guy. I was alone with him in his office. And that -- that's how it came about. It was when President Bush had said, "I looked in his eyes and saw his soul."

I said, "Looked in your eyes and I don't think you have a soul." And looked back and he said, "We understand each other." Look, most important thing dealing with foreign leaders in my experience, and I've dealt with an awful lot of 'em over my career, is just know the other guy. Don't expect somethin' that you're-- that -- don't expect him to-- or her to-- voluntarily appear in the second editions of Profiles in Courage.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: So you know Vladimir Putin. You think he's a killer?

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Uh-huh. I do.

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: So what price must he pay?

PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: The price he's gonna pay we'll-- you'll see shortly. I'm not gonna-- there's-- by the way, we oughta be able that ol' -- that trite expression "walk and chew gum at the same time," there're places where it's in our mutual interest to work together.

That's why I renewed the [START nuclear arms control] agreement with him. That occurred while he's doin' this. But that's overwhelmingly in the interest of humanity, that we diminish the prospect of a nuclear exchange. But that and SolarWinds as well. He's been -- they've done some mischievous things, to say the least. And so we're gonna have -- I'm not gonna announce what I'm doing, but he's gonna understand that -- [my emphasis]

"Walking and chewing gum" over Russia in the 19th century

Russia has been around for a while. In the early decades of the United States' existence, the country's foreign policy was less worried about Russia than about Barbary Pirates, Britain, France, Spain and the challenge of dispossessing the native population in North America.

During the first part of the 19th century, republicans and democrats in Europe and the "New World" generally took a dim view of Russia because it was seen as the ultimate guarantor of the royalist regimes of the so-called Holy Alliance in Europe after the defeat of Napoleon and the 1815 Peace of Paris.

But even then, things weren't that simple. Thomas Jefferson in his mansion in Monticello kept prominently displayed busts of Napoleon and of Alexander I of Russia, the emperor who had defeated Napoleon and was the protector of the Holy Alliance. In 1813, Jefferson was a post-Presidential "elder statesman," as we used to say. But he was still an influential voice on political matters. And he understood very well that even in 1813, foreign policy was complicated. His biographer Dumas Malone wrote about Jefferson in this period in Jefferson and His Time: The Sage of Monticello (1981):

Toward the end of 1813 a Federalist paper in Philadelphia printed an extract from a private letter of his, written a couple of months earlier. In this he voiced his detestation of Napoleon, describing him as "the unprincipled tyrant who is deluging the Continent of Europe with blood." At the same time the ex-President expressed his gratification at the recent disasters of the unprincipled French Emperor in Russia and the successes of "the virtuous Alexander [I of Russia]."  From this extract alone it would seem that, at a time when his own country was at war with the British, he was siding with them against their inveterate foe [France], and his strong language was particularly disturbing to members of his own party who retained pro-French sentiments. [my emphasis]

Jefferson later explained the context of that letter, which had been published by a Federalist Party partisan. The War of 1812 was still going on in 1813, and the Federalists were in the process of fatally discrediting themselves by their pro-British partisanship. Jefferson was the founder of the Democratic-Republican Party, which evolved into today's Democratic Party but in those days was known as the Republican Party. Then-President James Madison was a Republican.

The quotation was from a letter of [Jefferson's] replying to one from Dr. George Logan, a Quaker. This former supporter of his had once gained favor in Republican circles, and reprobation in Federalist, for his efforts to prevent war with France. A doctrinaire pacifist now seeking to end the war with Great Britain, he besought Jefferson to ask Madison to "come forward with just and honorable proposals for peace." He was entirely confident that these would be accepted. Instead of brushing him off as a visionary, Jefferson wrote him a long account of Anglo-American relations, leaving no doubt of his own conviction that the object of procuring a just peace would be "best promoted by a vigorous and unanimous prosecution of the war [i.e., of the US war against Britain]"  As he explained to Leiper, the references to Napoleon, while indisputable, were incidental. They were being quoted wholly out of context by a former friend who had become a "bigoted partisan of England, and malcontent of his own government." [my emphasis]

Foreign policy with Russia was complicated even in 1813.

Since Jefferson's reputation has fallen considerably in recent decades, especially among the party he originally founded, I assume I'm not doing any favors by comparing him to Jefferson. But the party founder and third US President did know something about walking and talking at the same time in foreign policy matters. And the example above shows how Jefferson was balancing a variety of partisan and ideological considerations and his understanding of the general US interest in how he was evaluating foreign policy.

His busts of Napoleon and Alexander I could be taken as a symbol of that complexity. Napoleon was a military aggressor. But his conquests also advanced the progress of political and economic reforms of a liberal nature across Europe. Alexander became the backstop of reactionary regimes in Europe. But he was also an internal reformer in various ways, most notably in establishing a system of public education in Russia. Alexander came to the throne after cooperating with a successful plot to assassinate his father Tsar Paul I (Pavel Petrovich). Alexander was also sort of a "killer" type, it seems.

"Walking and chewing gum" today

Returning to the present, here's a English-language Deutsche Welle report on Biden's recent comments, Russia recalls US ambassador after Biden's 'killer' comment 03/18/2021:

Here's an additional Deutsche Welle report on the immediate response to Biden's comments, Russia recalls US ambassador after Biden's 'killer' comment 03/18/2021:

Patrick Revell reports on another early response from Putin, Putin challenges Biden to debate after president calls him a 'killer' ABC News 03/18/2021.

My general attitude toward Biden' foreign policy is pretty much "trust but verify," which was Reagan's famous phrase for nuclear arms control. Or maybe "be skeptical and verify" would be closer. Because I think the US spends way too much on the military and that our foreign policy is far too militarized and should be focused much more on pressing dangers to humanity like nuclear proliferation and climate change.

But I'm not alarmed by this particular turn of events. Does Putin really mind that much if Biden calls him a killer without a soul? He may take it as a compliment, although in diplomatic terms he obviously knows it's an insult. And of course Russia expects other countries to respond to attempts to interfere in their internal politics.

A lot of foreign policy is posturing, sending signals, saving face, and satisfying various internal constituencies and external actors. And when countries are negotiating with each other, just like in business or labor negotiations or a lawsuit, both sides are going to assume that the other side will try to maximize its advantages and get as much as they can. And that their opposite numbers will be hardnosed and practical in their approach to negotiations.

In the real world of US foreign policy, the military-industrial complex and its allies in think-tanks and politics are and will continue to be hardnosed in pursuing policies that lead to bigger and bigger military budgets. People who actually favor a peaceful, practical, and democratic foreign policy need to build a lot more clout than they currently have.

Part of that is paying attention to serious analysis from those who aren't exclusively devoted to the profits of armaments companies. Like this piece from Anatol Lieven (Calling Putin a ‘killer’ with ‘no soul’ is not exactly the best way to reset diplomacy Responsible Statecraft 03/18/2021), who warns:

The Biden administration has created an completely unnecessary confrontation with Russia at a time when reasonable working relations with Moscow are extremely important for achieving two immediate and key administration goals: rejoining the nuclear agreement with Iran, and a peace settlement in Afghanistan facilitating U.S. military withdrawal from that country and an end to America’s longest war.

The administration approach combines many of the errors committed by Washington officials, politicians, and the media in recent years. First, you have an intelligence report based on evidence that the public cannot see stating that it is “likely” that the Russian government ordered attempts to influence the elections. This report is then turned by the administration and much of the media into an absolute certainty. In a recent ABC News interview, Biden says Putin will “pay a price” for what the report says his government has done. As usual, the issue is personalized by attributing the decision to Putin himself, and the U.S. statement is accompanied by gratuitously insulting language which is likely to offend even many Russian opponents of Putin. Does nobody remember the advice of Teddy Roosevelt — hardly a weakling on U.S. security — to speak softly and carry a big stick? [my emphasis]

Lieven also reminds us that we can be try to be realistic about Putin's government, which is admired by rightwingers and even the most radical rightists, and still be critical-minded about simplistic "Russiagate" claims, "In essence (assuming that the allegations [about Russian election interference in 2020] are true), Russia did what thousands of Washington lobbyists are paid to spend their lives doing (perfectly legally): influence U.S. politicians, media and policies in favor of particular foreign governments." I don't take Lieven to mean that the US shouldn't distinguish between legal and illegal influence operations.

It's also worth noting that current celebration in the West of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny does not mean that if he were the leader of Russia he would pursue a fundamentally different foreign policy, since he rose to his present level of influence in Russian politics with a distinctly Russian national-chauvinist tone, although in the last decade he has put more emphasis on the fight against corruption.

Putin had obvious pragmatic power reasons to prefer Trump as President over Clinton or Biden. Trump may have been inclined to actively help him in some areas, and may have been subject to blackmail in some way. Certainly Trump weakened the credibility of the US as player in world politics and particularly within the NATO alliance, both goals of Putin's government. But Trump also continued to increase the military budget, and didn't obviously cater to Putin's foreign policy preferences in places like Syria. Russia's power-balancing interests would also be aided by increase US tension with China, a country with which Russia currently has good relations.

Whatever benefits Trump may have provided in term of basic espionage gains, Trump's main policy benefit from the standpoint of Putin's government was in being a chaos agent. Trump was spectacularly incompetent in actually running the government, including the military, intelligence, and diplomatic parts. And he was terrible at negotiating with other countries, shown particularly by his dealings with North Korea. And as we see with the bizarre clown coup attempt in Venezuela, Trump was no good at regime-change operations either, and Putin seems to be genuinely worried about the US targeting such operations at Russia and its immediate neighbors, especially nations once part of the Soviet Union.

I assume that Putin's government regards the Biden Administration as a mix of blessing and curse. He isn't going to provide Putin a lot of opportunities to look like he's slapping the US around, and Biden obviously isn't going to kowtow to Putin personally in the way Trump did. But for substantive agreements affected things like the Nord Stream 2 pipeline deal or the Iran nuclear deal, the Russians will probably be relieved to have an adversary in the White House who actually knows something about foreign affairs and who doesn't see the Presidency as a professional-wrestling promotion act. Related: Biden's February 4 foreign policy speech Contradicciones 02/06/2021