The civilization state in the war against Ukraine

Do considerations of civilization play a role in the Russian aggression against Ukraine? This study starts from the assumption that the conflict in Ukraine cannot be fully explained by the arguments of John Mearsheimer, the main representative of the so-called offensive realist school of international relations theory, who argues that the Russian invasion is driven by fear of NATO’s eastward expansion. The author challenges this dominant explanatory framework, arguing that we need to dig deeper to understand Putin’s intentions. The paper focuses on the role of the “civilizational state” created by the Putin regime and analyzes the role of its guiding ideology, Eurasianism. The author concludes that the war in Ukraine must be interpreted in the context of the confrontation between the West and Russia, and that this development cannot be understood without taking into account the specific logic and offensive nature of the Russian civilization state.