Article: Putin's philosophers: Who inspired him to invade Ukraine?

By Santiago Zabala Professor of philosophy at Pompeu Fabra University and

Claudio Gallo Former La Stampa foreign desk editor and London correspondent

Who would have imagined that news of the pandemic - which is not over - would be replaced with news of a new war in Europe? If we are to go by the shock expressed by so many in the media over Russian President Vladimir Putin's decision to launch an all-out invasion of Ukraine, the answer is not many.

Actually, there was little reason to be surprised. Just as many scientists and institutions had been warning that a new influenza pandemic was imminent years before COVID-19, many political scientists and journalists, from John Mearsheimer to Pepe Escobar, have long been warning that if NATO continues expanding towards Russia's borders, a deadly confrontation in Ukraine could be on the cards.

If the world took these warnings seriously, the horrific consequences of both events could have perhaps been limited. But over a month into the conflict, it feels counterproductive to talk about what could have been or discuss the origins of or motivations behind the war. Nevertheless, it is vital to understand why we ended up here because understanding this could be key to resolving it. So who could help us understand?

Before we start naming names, we must understand that Putin's longer-term motivations for invading Ukraine are much more important for our purposes than the acts and events that eventually led him to give the order for this "special military operation". While NATO's continued efforts to encircle Russia, despite many warnings from the Kremlin, appear to be the immediate trigger that led Putin to invade, there were also deeper philosophical and ideological motivations behind this invasion - motivations only certain Russian thinkers can help us understand. Of course, after seeing the devastation the invasion has brought upon the Ukrainian people, none of these motivations can justify Putin's actions - but they can help us understand the many dimensions of the global geopolitical struggle between Russia and the West, and help us come up with recipes for its resolution.

Vladislav Surkov, or "Putin's Rasputin" as Soviet-born British journalist Peter Pomerantsev once called him in an article for the London Review of Books, is the thinker most widely cited as the ideological mastermind behind Putin's politics and thus the Ukraine invasion. A long-term councillor to the Kremlin, Surkov was the main ideologist behind the doctrine of Russian "sovereign democracy" that has been guiding the Kremlin since at least 2006. An authoritarian brand of mild liberalism that gives a lot of control over the economy to the state, Surkov's sovereign democracy presents itself as an alternative to decadent Western liberalism. A staunch supporter of the "there is no Ukraine" narrative, Surkov is more a political consensus organiser than a philosopher, but he is undoubtedly someone who played a primary role in the development of the ideological and philosophical framework that paved the way for Putin's invasion.

In the eyes of many of Putin's critics, however, it is the ideas of Ivan Ilyin not Surkov, that guides the Kremlin's geopolitical ambitions and that paved the way for the invasion. The philosopher, who died in exile in Switzerland in 1954, was the main ideologue of the Russian anti-communist White Movement whose devotees emigrated out of Russia in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution. Ilyin opposed Bolshevism and advocated for a form of Christian authoritarianism similar to that of the Francisco Franco regime in Spain. Echoing renowned Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ilyin believed Russia had a duty to preserve its traditional autocracy and resist Western liberalism.

Over the years, Putin showed his admiration for Ilyin in several ways. In 2004, he facilitated the philosopher's posthumous repatriation by ordering his remains to be moved from Switzerland to the Donskoy Monastery in Moscow. In 2014, he recommended his regional governors read Ilyin's book, Our Side, alongside Justification of the Good by Vladimir Solovyov and Philosophy of Inequality by Nicholas Berdyaev. The thing that tied together these three authors, who all had very different visions for the future of Russia, was their adherence to the "Russian Idea" - a set of concepts expressing the historical uniqueness, special vocation and global purpose of the Russian people and, by extension, of the Russian state. And this is no coincidence - if you read through the speeches Putin gave over the years that included quotes from Ilyin, you will see that the Russian President's interest in the philosopher had always been tied to the "Russian Idea".

While it is clear that both Surkov and Ilyin influenced Putin in different ways over the years, neither thinker can be credited with building the ideological foundations of the Kremlin's current geopolitical stance and ambitions alone.

So is there a figure who in their thought marries Putin's authoritarian ideological vision with a philosophy that puts Russia at the centre of the historical stage, and can be seen as the architect of a world vision that required the invasion of Ukraine to materialise?

There certainly is, and his name is Alexandr Dugin.