High-tech dehumanization and brutalization
An ideology inspired by theories prevalent in Germany after World War I and during the Third Reich has subtly shaped the trajectory of Putin's regime since its inception. This, of course, is the concept of total war. In an article for the online publication Desk Russie, historian Françoise Thom warns us of the danger: Europe is facing a conquering nation influenced by the doctrines of the Third Reich, armed with fearsome methods of political subversion perfected by the Bolsheviks.
An article published on February 11, 2019 and signed by Vladislav Surkov, one of the architects of the Putin system and an expert in orchestrating the aspirations of Kremlin leaders, is attracting particular attention. Surkov notes that the "new type of state" being built in Russia is only in its infancy. Russia "has returned to its natural state, the only possible one for it, as a large, expanding community of peoples gathering the land". This is an openly "military-police" state, which is seen as a continuation of the three previous successful models of the Russian state: those of Ivan III, Peter the Great, and Lenin. This "machine of power" has enabled the continuous rise of the Russian world for centuries. Discrediting politics and creating chaos in Western minds and societies, Putin's regime "has significant export potential" because, by its very name, it is rule by force.
A little later, Surkov reveals another aspect of the Kremlin's ambitions. In a futuristic article published on October 11, 2021, entitled "Abandoned Democracy and Other Political Miracles of 2121", he argues that parliamentary representation is already obsolete, since the wishes of the population can be communicated instantly via the Internet. In short, political representation should be consigned to oblivion and replaced by algorithms. Only IT specialists and siloviki (the IT specialists who will secretly manage the giants of artificial intelligence) will remain in power. "The digitalization and robotization of the political system will lead to the creation of a high-tech state and democracy without people, in which the hierarchy of machines and algorithms will pursue goals incomprehensible to the people who serve them." In this way, artificial intelligence seems to promise the final liquidation of freedom - a dream of the Putin regime from the very beginning.
The two faces of "total war"
These two texts summarize the paradoxical aspect of the ideology crystallizing in Kremlin circles: a mixture of archaism and futuristic technology, merging into a project of dehumanization. They also illustrate the cataclysm that is taking place around the central concept of "total war" in Putin's ideology. Dugin, referring to the theories of Carl Schmitt, once the official jurist of the Nazi regime, attributes to the "globalists" the project of a "new world order" destined to lead to "total war", and sees Russia as "a gigantic empire of resistance fighters, operating outside the law, but guided by the great intuition of the Earth, of the continent, of that "Great, Very Great Space" which is the historical territory of our people." Today, Russians no longer see themselves as resistance fighters fighting against the liberal order of the globalists. They feel that they have won the decisive battle - the overthrow of American hegemony. The concept of "total war" emerging in Putin's Russia increasingly resembles a copy of the one that Ludendorff expounded in his 1936 bestseller "Der Totale Krieg" ("Total War"). In it, the German general outlined the lessons he had learned from the defeat of 1918. The ideas developed by Ludendorff had already circulated in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1930, Ernst Jünger published the essay "Total Mobilization", in which he reflected on the consequences of World War I. Jünger believed that the "close union" between "the genius of war and the spirit of progress" would lead to the disappearance of "everything in man that is not a cog in the machine of the state", including freedom. Man was destined to be integrated into the colossal state machine working for war. And in the end, "the military order imposes its model on the social order of the peacetime state".
Ludendorff, who as early as 1916 advocated "the inclusion of the entire people in the service of the war economy", attributed the failure of November 1918 to the betrayal of politicians (the legend of "stab in the back") (in reality, the decision to declare an armistice was made by the German General Staff, ed.). Putin and the KGB attribute the defeat of the USSR in 1991 to the betrayal of some leaders of the CPSU and to political intrigues within the party under Gorbachev. The similarities between Russian ideologists such as Dugin and thinkers of the German Conservative Revolution (1918-1932) can be explained by similar conclusions drawn from shared experiences: defeat and the ensuing chaos. The German Conservative Revolution was anti-bourgeois, anti-democratic, and anti-liberal. It rejected Western humanism and despised parliamentarism. The decisive element was the human capacity for sacrifice, a concept that Russian Eurasian ideologists expressed with the term "passionarity".
The ideology, inspired by theories popular in postwar Germany and during the Third Reich, has discreetly determined the trajectory of Putin's regime since its inception. The obsession with unity embodied by the leader, the rejection of pluralism in all its forms, the aversion to individualism, and the attraction to the "total state" reveal the influence of the jurists of Nazi Germany whose ideas Dugin popularized. Ernst Forsthof, a jurist who joined National Socialism, contrasts the "total state" with the "liberal state", which he criticizes as being "minimized and destroyed by its fragmentation, due to legal guarantees defined by laws serving private interests". For him, only a state capable of controlling all elements of society can guarantee the salvation of the nation. According to Carl Schmitt, a truly total state is a strong state that "does not allow any hostile, obstructive, or divisive force to arise within it." This is precisely the understanding shared by Putin. Let us not forget that the foundry of Putin's regime is war. It was the Second Chechen War that brought Putin to power, allowing him to overturn Russian public opinion and direct it towards the great-state goals of the Chekist clique installed at the top of the state by Putin.
After this initial push, Putin's regime gradually got rid of the democratic attributes it tolerated in its early days, and its militaristic inclination became even more pronounced. Russia jumped from war to war: first Chechnya, then Georgia, then Ukraine, the "collective West" and finally Europe. From 2012 onwards, Putin broke the unspoken agreement he had made with the Russian people at the beginning of his rule: "Stay out of politics, I will improve your standard of living". After recovering from the protests of the winter of 2011-2012, he set about destroying the Russian middle class, which he considered too rebellious. He turned his attention to a serious confrontation with the West, which he has since seen as his mission. Huge sums were allocated for rearmament. Putin began to accumulate money in anticipation of a future war: investments that were cut off from the country's civilian economy. As political scientist Kirill Rogov notes: "One would look in vain for another leader capable of inflicting on his country the kind of damage that Putin managed to inflict in such a short time on the Russian economy (which was doing quite well)." The Russian president seems to be following Ludendorff's recommendations to the letter: "All politics must be ready to support this vital military struggle even in peacetime." The economy must be militarized even in peacetime. Banking, industry, and agriculture must pursue only one goal: self-sufficiency and the production of military equipment. The state must exercise absolute control to ensure that the army does not suffer from lack of anything.
Like Ludendorff, Putin considers the spiritual unity of the people (seelische Geschlossenheit, "closeness of souls" in Ludendorff) to be paramount. Like him, he fears that "military power" could be compromised by "declining birth rates." Like him, he believes in the influence of malevolent "occult forces" (the Jews and the Roman Catholic Church for Ludendorff). Steeped in social Darwinism, like Ludendorff, Putin is incapable of imagining a world based on compromise. He is convinced that war, that "earthquake that tests the foundations of all buildings" (Jünger), automatically gives victory to authoritarian regimes over liberal ones: forcing democracies to go to war is tantamount to forcing them to give up their freedoms or perish.
That is why in 2012 Putin launched a policy of systematic impoverishment of Russians (except for the oligarchs). In his opinion, a sharp decline in the living standards of his subjects could only benefit them, because it would cut them off from the harmful influence of the West. Lenin had already understood this: an alternative reality is easier to impose on a miserable population obsessed with survival than on a nation of prosperous citizens capable of holding those in power accountable. On top of that, Duma deputies argue that impoverishing the population can solve the demographic problem. After all, it is a well-known fact that "the higher the standard of living, the fewer children people have".
On March 10, 2020, the Duma announced that it was annulling Putin's previous terms, allowing him to run for re-election until 2036. This violation of the constitution foreshadows a similar violation in Ukraine. The propaganda is now trumpeting that a major clash with the West is inevitable. Putin has lost all legitimacy and his only remaining option is to become a warlord if he wants to justify his absolute power for life. Because in the event of war, "the people must be ready to follow their leader wherever he goes and do everything to wage the war to a victorious end" (Ludendorff). Putin sees himself perfectly as a Feldherr, a Ludendorff-style military leader, quite different from the chatty politicians, who is accountable to no one, accumulates absolute political and military power to ensure unity of command, has the right to sacrifice an entire army or province without having to justify himself to parliament.
Planned brutalization
Bernanos predicted it: "Modern war, total war, works for the totalitarian state; it provides it with human material. It forms a new generation of people, softened and broken by trials, resigned to incomprehension, to "not seeking to understand", outwardly rational and skeptical, but terribly uncomfortable with the freedoms of civil life, which they have unlearned once and for all and which they will never learn again." On February 24, 2022, when he launched his offensive against Ukraine, Putin certainly did not think of a long war. The unexpected resistance of the Ukrainians, their successes in 2022, are deeply humiliating for the Russian army. But, as always, Putin is recovering and heading for a war of attrition. Russia is slowly moving towards the practices of war communism. Of course, Putin has not forgotten that it was the economic collapse that led to the fall of the USSR. His support for technocrats trying to save the Russian economy, such as Elvira Nabiullina, the head of the Central Bank, shows that he has no desire to return to the inflation of the 1990s. But he allows himself to be drawn into the dynamics of total war because he sees it as a way to secure his power for life, even if it pushes Russia irresistibly back towards Bolshevik methods.
The looting and redistribution of assets have increased since 2022. Coupons have reappeared; restrictions on price freedom are multiplying. The administration of the war effort is insidiously replacing civilian structures.
Putin has understood that in the long run, war affects minds in exactly the same way as his propaganda: it instills a revulsion for democracy and parliamentarism, contempt for reason, cynicism, suspicion, a sense of powerlessness, passivity, and an obsessive concern for the immediate necessities of existence - food and sleep. It atrophies moral sense and shrinks intelligence. War is a planned operation of brutalization, both in Russia and in Ukraine. Ukrainians are fighting for human dignity. The Russian army is one of the tools by which the Russian regime eradicates this feeling in those who come into contact with it. The last vestiges of morality have been swept away, including the sense of family that the regime claims to protect from the decadent morality of the West.
Those who sign up to kill people who are otherwise portrayed by propaganda as Russians are paid handsomely. 99% of soldiers fight for money. Mothers push their sons to sign a contract with the Ministry of Defense and brag on television about the car they were able to buy thanks to generous death benefits (the families of soldiers killed in action receive compensation of 7 million rubles, approximately 75,000 euros). Some persuade their friends to sign a contract in order to receive a referral bonus of 500,000 rubles. Here and there, startups called "Black Widow" are popping up. Enterprising pimps roam areas frequented by homeless people, seduce the drunkard with a bottle of vodka, lure him to the military commissariat, where he signs a contract, and then marry him off to a woman from their network. Our hero is instantly killed in a "massacre", and the happy wife shares the millions of rubles in death compensation with her accomplice.
The soldiers of the Pokrovsky Front are left to fend for themselves, abandoned by their officers, without water, food, or warm clothing. The officers blackmail their soldiers, forcing them to pay exorbitant sums to avoid these massacres. Those who have just signed a contract are blackmailed from day one. "If you don't pay, you're dead," the officer tells them. The officers beat the soldiers, seize the dead's credit cards, and empty their accounts. They demand bribes from the wounded, threatening to send them back to the front. Those with minor injuries can obtain certificates of serious injuries for a fee. A man can do anything for money: this is the central message of Putin’s gospel.
De-Europeanization
In 1863, during the tsar’s suppression of the Polish uprising, when tensions with Europe threatened to escalate into armed conflict, the Slavophile Ivan Aksakov harbored the hope that war would make possible the return of old Russia, ridding it of the accumulated remnants of Europeanization after Peter the Great. Slavophiles saw war as a means of Russifying imperial power. In modern Russia, war plays the same role. Nationalist journalist Mikhail Demurin, echoing the fears of the Slavophiles of the past, points to the connection between the expansionist war, the autarkic ambitions that have influenced ideologists close to the Kremlin for years, and the thirst for internal cleansing: "The military operation that our country is conducting against the fascist regime that seized Kiev in 2014 is increasingly taking on the character of a political operation for internal cleansing. It is cutting out one by one the abscesses that formed on Russia's body thanks to the efforts of the West in the 1990s and remained untreated in the 2000s."
Putin and the "turbopatriots" are pleased that the war allows for a large-scale purge: "Every people, especially the Russian people, will always be able to recognize scum and traitors, to spit them out as one would spit out a fly that has entered one's mouth... I am sure that such a genuine and necessary self-purification of society will only strengthen our country, our solidarity, our cohesion and our ability to cope with all challenges," Putin said on March 15, 2022. MP Alexander Borodai shares this opinion. Ultimately, the important thing is not that we have conquered a few territories: "The important thing is that our society has shaken itself off and purified itself." The war eliminated Russia's Europeanized population through emigration and created a new elite more suited to Putin, chosen from among the veterans of the war in Ukraine - men hardened by unpunished crimes, ready for anything.
The Return of Terror
Ludendorff listed the measures that must be taken to ensure national cohesion in wartime: "The strictest censorship of the press, the harshest laws against the disclosure of military secrets, the ban on public gatherings, the arrests of at least the leaders of the "discontented" and the control of rail and radio traffic." The Kremlin leaders have tools of surveillance and control that our general can only dream of. Thanks to technological progress, the state can tighten its control over all areas of public life and build a digital Gulag. The so-called "spread of fake news" and "discrediting" the armed forces are now punishable by law. Laws against "foreign agents" have been tightened. Searching for so-called "extremist content" on the Internet is also punishable by law.
From December 2022, all companies that collect biometric data of citizens are obliged to transfer them to the Unified Biometric System (UBS) of the state. The law does not prohibit law enforcement agencies from accessing this data. This creates the technological basis for the widespread use of facial recognition systems, which are already actively used to identify and detain participants in protests and "enemies of the state". Between 2025 and 2026, the Ministry of Digital Development of the Russian Federation plans to spend 2 billion rubles (over 20 million euros) on creating a unified artificial intelligence-powered platform for processing video from surveillance cameras throughout Russia.
Another electronic system, the Register of Persons Subject to Military Service, aggregates personal data from other government databases and is enriched with information provided by employers and banks. Conscripts are automatically banned from leaving the country and are subject to other restrictions, including a driving ban until they report to the military commissariat. In August 2025, when the state-owned messaging service MAX was launched, to which law enforcement agencies have full access, Roskomnadzor (the Russian agency responsible for internet censorship) blocked the ability to make audio and video calls via Telegram and WhatsApp. Since 2024, the FSB has been carrying out numerous arrests of regime figures, and since 2025 it has even been allowed to run its own prisons, avoiding the supervision of the Ministry of Justice.
"War will erase everything" (Russian proverb)
Putin seems to believe that "impunity is ensured precisely by the accumulation of crimes". War allows experiments with social engineering that are impossible in peacetime. For example, the elimination of human ballast. Here again we note the parallel with the ideology and practices of the Third Reich. In October 1939, Adolf Hitler signed a document retroactively dated 1 September 1939, which stated: "Reichsleiter Bühler and Dr. Brandt are instructed, by virtue of their powers, to extend the powers of certain doctors whose names will be specified. These doctors may grant a merciful death to patients who are considered incurable according to the strictest possible assessment." Approximately 300,000 mentally ill and disabled people were killed under the guise of "euthanasia" in the German Reich and the occupied territories. The aim was to "purify the body of the people from those who are nothing but dead weight", to rid it of "a life unworthy of living".
Putin, on the other hand, sends "a crowd of alcoholics, drug addicts, criminals and invalids to the assault units... These people are sent to the meat grinder". He shares with the Nazi ideologists their concept, steeped in social Darwinism: this is evidenced, for example, by the astonishing remarks he makes during his meeting with the mothers of the soldiers, when he explains that without the war their sons would most likely have died of alcoholism or in a car accident, while those who fell on the battlefield in Ukraine would not have died in vain. In short, the Russian president implies that he has done them a favor by freeing them from "their life unworthy of living", as the Nazi propagandists put it. A truly wonderful concept for the Russian people from this man who constantly accuses Europeans of being "Russophobic"!
The idea of raising the retirement age by 10 years is in the same vein: fewer useless mouths to feed. Even better, propagandist Mardan proposes abolishing pensions altogether: "Those who have children will have enough to live on when they are old. The rest can simply die." In Nazi Germany, as Johann Chaputo notes, "having children became a political imperative, in the service of the Führer, encouraged by the state and propaganda." The same is true of Putin's Russia.
Putin is also concerned with what the Nazis called "racial hygiene", as the regime disproportionately targeted ethnic minorities and populations in the poorest regions. 80% of the mobilization orders distributed in Crimea in September 2022 were addressed to Tatars, who, however, represent only 20% of the region's population. "In Buryatia, one cannot speak of "partial" mobilization. We are witnessing total mobilization," notes a local activist. According to independent analyses, men belonging to minority groups in Russia are four times more likely to be killed in Ukraine than men of ethnic Russian origin, and a hundred times more likely than Muscovites.
Darwinian calculations are also evident in the war of attrition against Ukraine. The ultimate goal is to exchange the dead weight of the Russian population for control over the Ukrainian population, which is considered more enterprising, hardworking and combative than the Russians. Ukrainian prisoners of war tell of the Russians offering them the opportunity to defect to Russian forces so that they could then "occupy Europe together". But to achieve this, the national spirit in Ukraine must be eradicated.
Ludendorff notes that the First World War "was not fought solely by the military forces of the belligerent states, which sought mutual destruction; the peoples themselves were put at the service of the war, the war was also directed against them and involved them in the deepest suffering. To the fight against the enemy's armed forces was added the fight against the morale and vitality of the enemy peoples, with the aim of dividing and paralyzing them. He recommended terrorizing the civilian population with bombing so that they could beg their government to stop the war: "This is a war of annihilation. If we do not understand this, we may defeat the enemy today, but thirty years later we shall have to fight him again." This is exactly what the Russians are doing in the Ukraine. Their propagandists repeat Ludendorff: the aim is no longer to defeat the enemy army, but to break the enemy nation's will to live. The war of attrition aims to eliminate the Ukrainian national elite so that only corrupt, cowardly, and opportunistic individuals remain in the country who can be integrated into the "Russian world".
It is clear why Putin is trying to prolong the war: it is a time bomb for the young Ukrainian state. It is an incubator for collaborationists, as the cases of France, Chechnya, and Georgia show. "In France, the hatred of parliamentarism that flourished in the trenches fed extremist parties, from the far right, such as the "Action Française", to the left, which was increasingly tempted by communism." One has to read Céline's "Journey to the End of the Night" to grasp the mindset of Ukrainian soldiers deep in the icy trenches, struggling to survive day by day for weeks and months. Of course, for them the war was far from absurd, as it might have seemed to those who fought in the First World War, since it was a matter of national survival. But under the heavy fire of enemy artillery, seeing the Russian hordes closing in on them, they too could succumb to the "generally resigned nihilism" observed among the French infantry by a French military doctor. They too could despise and hate those who shirk their duty behind the front lines, politicians and their fine speeches, their venality. They too could suspect treachery. The war of attrition, reinforced by a relentless barrage of psychological warfare, is paving the way for the forced Russification of a bloodless Ukraine.
Getting used to war
While the majority of the Russian population seems increasingly tired of the "special military operation" and stubbornly refuses to engage in "total war", it seems that a part of the Russian elite can no longer imagine their national existence outside of war. They dream of drawing Russia into the war. Pyotr Tolstoy, the vice-president of the Duma, cannot hide his excitement at the rosy prospect of the impending casualties: "Everyone must realize that mobilization and a world war to the death await us. Some will lose their jobs, others will lose their businesses, many will be maimed, and even more of our compatriots will lose their lives. War is our national ideology!"
Ludendorff advocated mass support for large families to ensure the "battalions of 1950". Alexander Dugin also has a long-term vision. For him, the soldiers who will sacrifice themselves for Russia in 20 years must be born today. Complaining that Russian women are having their first child at 30, he exclaims: "It is late. Too late! I will never tire of repeating it: Russia will fight for at least 40 years, maybe 50 or 60. The soldiers who will go to fight for Russia in 20 years must be born now. This year, next year, the year after that. We must start giving birth to our heroes now..." War is no longer a phenomenon limited in time; it is becoming the normal way of functioning in Russia.
Through war, Putin's regime seems close to achieving its ultimate goal: the complete liquidation of human freedom, in line with Ernst Junger's concept of "total mobilization": a "radical requisition" that "enforces the reorganization of everything from the innermost market to the most fragile foundations of activity". This implies "increasing restrictions on individual freedom, the purpose of which is to eliminate everything that is not a cog in the state machine". Russian leaders would like to be able to say of their countrymen what Ernst Junger observed in "Total Mobilization": "Here we see the astonishing sight of millions of people who, renouncing all personal freedom, rush enthusiastically into the furnace, as if obeying a magical call." But this is useless; money remains the main motivation in Russia. Putin's propaganda kills even fanaticism.
"The war of the whole people"
The question arises: what ideological toxins did the Putin regime use to paralyze the Russian population to such an extent that it would unhesitatingly accept a massacre unprecedented since World War II? The repressive arsenal does not explain everything. The corrosion of intelligence and the erosion of morality caused by the policy of mass intimidation pursued by the Putin regime from the very beginning are bearing fruit. The call for national unity masks the intention of the Russian authorities to implicate the entire Russian people in the crimes committed in Ukraine.
This started at the top. We recall that on February 21, 2022, Vladimir Putin convened a meeting of the Security Council, which was unprecedentedly filmed and then broadcast on Russian television and online. The aim was to demonstrate the unanimity of senior Russian officials who were under pressure to support their leader's decision to recognize the self-proclaimed republics of Donetsk and Luhansk - in effect, to agree to Russia's entry into the war against Ukraine.
We recall the hesitations of Sergei Naryshkin, the head of foreign intelligence, who, visibly paralyzed, stammered at the possibility of giving Ukraine a "last chance" to follow the peace process, while Vladimir Putin scolded him as a fool caught in a mistake. Now the entire Russian people are made to understand that there is no turning back, that they must follow Putin to the very brink of catastrophe: this is the role of the Bucha massacres, similar to how in the fall of 1943 Hitler's regime passed information about the Holocaust to the Wehrmacht to signal to the military that all ties with the West were severed. "There are so many things weighing on our conscience that we must overcome, otherwise our entire people will be destroyed", Goebbels wrote in his diary (June 16, 1941).
Margarita Simonyan, one of the leading figures in Putin's propaganda machine, echoed Goebbels' argument and sought to convince her compatriots that all Russians, from the highest to the most ordinary, were in the same boat and that all would be held guilty by the West if Russia lost the war: "The Hague will prosecute even the street sweeper who sweeps the cobblestones behind the Kremlin."
From September 21, 2022, propaganda has been ordered to launch the slogan of "the war of the whole people". We return to a key idea of Ludendorff. Total war is "the struggle of the people for their lives". The survival of the entire people is at stake. "During the war, it was necessary to deploy and maintain to the maximum extent the internal and material forces of the homeland (and today I would add especially the spiritual forces)". Kiriyenko, deputy director of the presidential administration, formulated the new line: "Russia has always won its wars provided that they are fought by the whole people. It has always been so. We will win this war: the hot war, the economic war, and the psychological and information war that is being waged against us. But for this to happen, everyone must participate in the war." Russians are being instilled with the idea that their survival as a state and civilization depends on the outcome of the war: "The goal of this war, which is now quite open, is an attempt to eliminate Russia as an independent sovereign state," Kiriyenko insists. We are imperceptibly slipping into a religious war. A Justice Ministry official seriously explains that anyone who is not aware of the "spirituality" of what is happening (the war against Ukraine) has no place in Russia. Ukrainians are paving the way for the Antichrist, propagandists rattle on. Russia's role is to save humanity, and to do so, it must win, even if that means resorting to nuclear weapons, explains political scientist Sergei Karaganov. "Our mission is to fight Satan," exclaims propagandist Vladimir Solovyov. The topic of a war waged against the "collective West" is gaining momentum. And this is a centuries-old confrontation, since Europe has always sought to destroy Russia. The analogy with the propaganda of the Third Reich is striking: "The confrontation with the USSR was presented and experienced by the Nazis as the final episode of a racial gigantomachy spanning centuries of history, a clash of titans in which the Aryan race faced its Jewish enemy and his subordinates," notes Johann Schaputo.
Ludendorff's theories, so popular in Nazi Germany, ultimately contributed significantly to the defeat of the Reich. In fact, Ludendorff's contempt for politics was one of the reasons for Germany's defeat in the USSR. If Hitler, like Stalin, had played the subversive card from the very beginning of his offensive, for example by proclaiming an independent Ukrainian state and dissolving the collective farms (kolkhozes), instead of resorting to brute force, things might have turned out differently. Today we face a Russia that has adopted the methods of total war, but has been careful not to neglect the political tool thanks to which the Kremlin has managed to attract the Trump administration to its camp.
In Europe, its propaganda is strengthening the ranks of nationalist right-wing parties that have not yet realized that they are being manipulated and remotely controlled by Moscow, leading their country to self-destruction, just like Donald Trump's United States. Ultimately, the Russia they are addressing is challenging the right of nations to a real, not merely symbolic, existence, as seen in its ruthless war on Ukraine. It positions itself as a hegemonic power over the European continent, ruling in the manner of empires, through corrupt, co-opted elites that it controls.
This is the danger we face: a conquering country influenced by the doctrines of the Third Reich, armed moreover with the fearsome techniques of political subversion perfected by the Bolsheviks.