Last week, British, Dutch and American authorities made public a detailed expose of misdeeds around by the Russian state. Here is an extract from a recent review article on some relevant literature:

Vladimir Putin’s presidency falls in two parts. The first period could be seen as an attempt to impose some kind of order in the Russian state after the collapse of the Soviet Union. But by 2014, the man who had wanted (or so he said) to be a liberal European president had turned against Europe and “the West.”

The oligarchic economy of Putin’s early period was one of competing clans and gangs in a system that left the state with little control. Putin took on this system and by the end of his first period, the Russian oligarchy was consolidated as the kleptocratic control of the state by a single oligarchical clan under Putin.

His Russian state has essentially three resources available to it. The first one is inequality. The nation’s wealth, which is not great, is in the hands of the Putin oligarchy. The second resource is the use of cyber capacity for propagandistic and manipulative purposes. This is a weapon with two advantages: it is cheap and it is effective. And the third resource is ruthless determination.

As seen from the West, the collapse of the Soviet Union was the collapse of Communist dictatorship. As seen from Russia, it was the collapse of the Russian empire. The loss of empire, dignity and respect created fertile soil for nationalistic-fascistic ideas of an alternative Russia.

The relevant ideas draw in part on religious-historical mysticism. “Russia” has evolved from the Kyivan Rus with origins more than a thousand years back in history and from the tradition of Russian orthodox Christianity. That empire was geographical but it was even more to be understood as spiritual, an empire of virtue. Technically the empire has collapsed, but its spiritual legitimacy survives. This, for example, is why the Ukraine cannot be independent and European, because that is not what it is, because it is inescapably a part of spiritual Russia.

The long-term aim is the reconstitution of the physical empire. The short-term aim is to weaken its here-and-now enemies: the European Union, America, Western liberalism, democracy. Since the purpose is noble, noting is forbidden in action: destroying Ukrainian autonomy, undermining the credibility of the European Union, destabilizing the workings of electoral democracy in America, undertaking assassinations on British soil, brutalizing the conduct of war in Syria. Lies and denials are standard.

The Russian state has behind it a weak and unsophisticated economy and a population poor in education and health. Therefore, since Russia cannot be strong, its foreign must be make others weaker. Russia cannot be a builder – so it must be a wrecker.

Read the review article in the Taiwan Journal of Democracy here.