The meeting of the Russian dictator with the North Korean tyrant marks a deepening of the foreign policy direction: isolation leads to the consolidation of alliances with pariah states in the international community. Along with Iran, North Korea becomes Russia’s second strategic partner. Ignoring the international sanctions it signed up to, Russia chooses to support a regime that has no other reason than to promote nuclear terrorism. The meaning of this visit is as clear as possible. Putin’s Russia no longer feels bound by any of its previous commitments. Russia’s aggression has a global stake – it is the destabilization of a system based on Western values. The Russian revisionist state is in this struggle alongside the North Korean one. Fortress Russia draws a bridge to this Stalinist territory of barbarism and paranoid weaponry.

Russia challenges the world

Inscribed in the logic of the war economy, capable of resisting sanctions with the help of its allies, Putin’s Russia has turned into a huge barracks over which the shadow of Stalinism reigns. As in the tense moments of the Cold War, confrontation with the West is the raison d’être of the Russian state. Holding back behind broad lines of defense, Russia is building its strategy of global confrontation.

Because the war in Ukraine is the last historical chance to preserve the integrity and prestige of the Russian Empire. Acceptance of peace, which would confirm the defeat, would mean not only the end of Putinism, but also the end of the entire history of the Russian state.

Composed of barbarism, seen as a machine of internal oppression and imperial expansion, the Russian state cannot imagine itself in any other position than it is today. Putin’s Russia is not the work of an isolated monomaniac, but the culmination of a historical process of returning to the sources of imperial and totalitarian aggression. That is why it is impossible to imagine another Russia at the moment. The lack of a political alternative to Putinism, the indoctrination of the Russian nation, popular passivity, the temptation of greatness – all this explains the current regime’s ability to wage a protracted war. This is the largest military operation carried out by Russia after 1945: the traces of Westernization of Russian society are being erased under the tracks of tanks fighting in Ukraine. This war is the culmination of an unprecedented autocratic regression of Russian modernity.

Therefore, internal dynamics are responsible for establishing a fortress whose mission is to challenge the world that does not accept the Russian yoke. Isolated from the West, turning its back on Europe, with which it was in symbiosis for centuries, today’s Russia is increasingly becoming a despotic state in the Eurasian sphere. In terms of language, vocation, and alliances, it no longer has anything in common with a European state. Vladimir Putin’s fortress has been knocked out of Europe, in the name of a never-forsaken imperial destiny.

Russian logic is part of the dynamics of a long-term war. Russia is counting, in advance and programmatically, on the gradual weakening of the cohesion of the alliance that supports Ukraine. The asymmetry is obvious: Russia is a war economy, and Western states cannot choose this path of general armament. Currently, liberal democracies are not allowed to mobilize the entire society.

Beyond military dynamics on the ground, Russia is looking at a future of uncertainty and unrest. His autocratic monolithicism is ready to exploit the cracks that appear in the bloc of nations opposed to him. Insidious propaganda is one of the weapons being perfected by Russia of Soviet origin. The struggle for peace is now becoming a matter that serves only Russia and its empire.

The appearance of the final division of Ukraine will not be the beginning of peace, but only the beginning of another war that will never end. As Russia sinks deeper into international aggression and domestic repression, it is becoming another North Korea: its energies are channeled into the service of a criminal cause. Any deal that would legitimize Russia’s illegal annexations would give birth to a new Korean demarcation line with dramatic long-term consequences. Illusions of peace would feed Russian imperialism. – Read the entire article and comment on Contributors.ro