Russia's Catastrophic Geopolitics Vladimir Putin is attempting to reproduce 20th-century geopolitics in 21st-century modernity.

Maxim Trudolyubov

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Russia’s war against Ukraine can be seen as a culmination of decades of Russian society poisoning itself with stories of foreign encirclement and mistreatment by the West. For more than two decades now, politicians and the state-run media have peddled external-threat scares, the West’s containment of Russia, and national grievances related to alienated territories and economic failures.

Russia’s ultraconservatives and communists started to dust off the old concepts of “heartland,” “limitrophe states,” and “geopolitical destiny” as early as the mid-1990s. Since the late 2000s a toxic mix of early 20th-century geopolitics and historical ressentiment has effectively been Russia’s ideology; it is now coming into full bloom with Vladimir Putin’s treatise about Ukraine published last summer and in his angry casus belli address that was followed by the full-scale invasion of a neighboring country.