‘Russia’s defensive war against NATO expansion’ — a concept that has become almost axiomatic for many Western leftists. This concept conveniently serves both to rationalize Russia’s actions and to radicalize criticism of their own governments. But what role does Putin himself assign to the supposed NATO threat? A close reading of his key speeches reveals that Putin explicitly denies any danger of a NATO attack on Russia. Instead, all the ruler’s attention and passion are focused elsewhere — on the question of primordial ‘historical justice.’ Putin dusts off millennia-old chronicles, finding in them proof of his reactionary utopia, his imagined historical right to possess Ukraine. Let’s talk about the most underestimated cause of this war — ideological obsession. The Russian idée fixe.

1,300 kilometers. That’s how much longer Russia’s border with the NATO military bloc became in 2022 after two previously neutral countries — Sweden and Finland — joined the alliance. The Baltic Sea effectively turned into an internal sea of NATO. St. Petersburg, Russia’s northern capital, now lies just 148 kilometers from the border of a hostile bloc. What was Russia’s reaction? Did Putin issue a military ultimatum? Threaten a preemptive operation? Concentrate troops on the border? No. None of that happened.

Meanwhile, in the context of Ukraine, the NATO question keeps surfacing in Russian discourse. An even greater role is assigned to NATO in the discourse of the Western left. And this despite the fact that Ukraine was denied membership back in........

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