Russian foreign and defence policy

Abstract

The collapse of the USSR remains the dominant watershed for Russia’s elites in the early twenty-first century and, under their influence, for Russian society at large. The collapse is, as an event, not only a historical fact, but indeed a central element of today’s Russian politics—one that has conditioned the moods and interpretations of several generations of Russian thinkers and political actors. And it is these moods and interpretations that are the core of today’s contradictions between Russia and the West, which, three decades later, find themselves in a state of “hybrid confrontation”.