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Russia’s War in Ukraine

Understanding the conflict four years on.

Four and a half years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin has conquered no more than a slice of Ukrainian territory. In return, half a million Russian soldiers are dead, the economy is running on fumes, Moscow’s relationship with the West is in tatters, and the country’s reliance on China grows ever stronger. Yet there is no sign of Russian President Vladimir Putin seeking peace. His army continues its bombardment of Ukraine. The frontline voraciously consumes more Russian troops than he can recruit. What is it that drives Russia to wage this hugely costly and apparently irrational war? Could it be the individualist greed, lawless capitalism, and corruption for which the Russian elite is infamous? Or is it a collective neo-imperialism expressed in Putin’s obsession with conquest and Russia’s world-historical mission?

Ilya Budraitskis and Ilya Matveev’s new book, Russia’s New Imperialism, has a new and compelling answer. Analysts of Russia seem to have been caught on two sides of a divide. One side sees Russia as nothing more than money-making mafia racket, populated by political entrepreneurs scrambling to anticipate what the Kremlin wants and make the most money for themselves as they go. Cynical and corrupt, this Russia has no truck with grand ideas. On the other side are those who see ideology everywhere, arguing that Russia is an imperialist and nationalist country packed with ideological zealots. Driven by centuries of military culture and a deeply ingrained determination to subjugate its neighbors, Russia can behave in no other way, they say.

Russia’s New Imperialism, Ilya Budraitskis and Ilya Matveev, Stanford University Press, 240 pp., $26, September 2026

Four and a half years since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin has conquered no more than a slice of Ukrainian territory. In return, half a million Russian soldiers are dead, the economy is running on fumes, Moscow’s relationship with the West is in tatters, and the country’s reliance on China grows ever stronger. Yet there is no sign of Russian President Vladimir Putin seeking peace. His army continues its bombardment of Ukraine. The frontline voraciously consumes more Russian troops than he can recruit. What is it that drives Russia to wage this hugely costly and apparently irrational war? Could it be the individualist greed, lawless capitalism, and corruption for which the Russian elite is infamous? Or is it a collective neo-imperialism expressed in Putin’s obsession with conquest and Russia’s world-historical mission?

Ilya Budraitskis and Ilya Matveev’s new book, Russia’s New Imperialism, has a new and compelling answer. Analysts of Russia seem to have been caught on two sides of a divide. One side sees Russia as nothing more than money-making mafia racket, populated by political entrepreneurs scrambling to anticipate what the Kremlin wants and make the most money for themselves as they go. Cynical and corrupt, this Russia has no truck with grand ideas. On the other side are those who see ideology everywhere, arguing that Russia is an imperialist and nationalist country packed with ideological zealots. Driven by centuries of military culture and a deeply ingrained determination to subjugate its neighbors, Russia can behave in no other way, they say.

Budraitskis, a political theorist, and Matveev, a political economist, build an elaborate scaffold of Marxist scholarship to argue that these are two sides of the same Russia. “[I]deologization did not simply replace cynicism,” they argue; instead, the latter has grown out of the former. Russia’s “transition from its ‘rational’ economic imperialism of the 2000s to the ‘irrational’ ideologically motivated imperialism of 2014 and beyond is part of the same process.” The Kremlin’s new imperial ideology emerged by “pushing its cynical worldview to its limits,” absorbing every aspect of the state into a machine of violent state antagonism.

Budraitskis and Matveev, both of whom are staunchly anti-war Russian exiles, eloquently describe the violence of the early post-Soviet years as emanating from a loss of faith in the Soviet system and the emergence of two Russian subcultures: vory v zakone (thieves in law) and patsany (lads). The former is a parallel organized criminal caste that began to cooperate with Soviet bureaucrats in the 1980s and then fought to control the communist state’s assets after the Soviet collapse. The latter was comprised of thuggish urban street gangs. Each of these subcultures, which had its own rules for those on the inside while remaining suspicious of outsiders, offered belonging, protection, and a sense of identity amid the post-Soviet collapse. Thus Budraitskis and Matveev draw a line from the 1990s to the present in which everyone, including and especially Putin, saw post-Soviet life as a “social Darwinist” perpetual struggle, a “constant conflict and confrontation in which you can only rely on violence and the support of your closest male friend........

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