With every new cycle of diplomacy between the West and Moscow, the strategy seems to rest on a common assumption; that the Kremlin wants peace if offered the right incentives.
But this transactional logic may reflect a fundamental miscalculation. By treating military aggression as a tactical bargaining chip, policymakers risk misunderstanding the inner logic of the regime.
For the Kremlin, military force can no longer be understood solely as an instrument of foreign policy. It has instead become essential to the regime’s survival.
War is, traditionally, a rational instrument of statecraft. States have used military force to conquer territory, secure borders, or protect strategic interests. War has also served to stabilise regimes internally by redirecting discontent to an external enemy.
What distinguishes Russian president Vladimir Putin’s use of military force is that the 2022 invasion of Ukraine lacked the clear political crisis that usually precedes such a campaign.
Equally striking is the repeated resort to military force despite diminishing returns. Research institutions such as the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) in the US and the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in the UK have documented that Moscow’s missile strikes against Ukraine have yielded limited military gains.
The important question becomes: If the continued conflict lacks strategic logic, where does its true function lie?
The late German-American philosopher Hannah Arendt offered a vital insight into authoritarian rule.
In her 1970 book On Violence, she argued that aggression must never be confused with genuine political power. Whereas true power rests on legitimacy and collective support, a reliance on coercion signals the erosion of political authority.
Arendt points out that when power becomes concentrated within a single ruler, politics is reduced to a monological extension of the leader’s persona —or, as she framed it in her 1963 text, On Revolution, “one interest, one will, one voice”.
The late German psychoanalyst, Erich Fromm, takes this further by examining the leader’s personal thinking.
In highly-personalised regimes, Fromm says, aggression becomes self-reinforcing: the more rule depends on coercion, the more threatening any loss of control becomes. He sees this form of aggression as a compensatory response to psychological vulnerability.
Together, Arendt and Fromm explain how the leader’s personal fears gradually turn into the strategic logic of the state.
Understanding Putin’s authoritarianism
A defining feature of Putin’s rule is that episodes of military aggression have repeatedly followed attempts by neighbouring states to orient themselves independently.
Fromm’s framework suggests why such acts of sovereignty can trigger an authoritarian leader’s sense of vulnerability. In this light, personal fears, grievances, and a loss of control are experienced as threats both to the leader and, by extension, to ‘his’ state.
Seen through this perspective, the significance of places such as Chechnya, Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova lies not merely in their geopolitical orientation, but in what their independence represents to Putin on a psychological level.
Their sovereignty is not treated in the Kremlin as a routine diplomatic disagreement, but rather perceived as a challenge to the authority and limits of Putin’s control.
Aggression alone, however, cannot sustain such a system. The regime must also protect the worldview that makes continued aggression necessary. And this is vividly reflected in Kremlin propaganda.
Russia is often portrayed as a besieged fortress facing existential threats. Putin is also elevated from a political leader to the symbolic defender of Russkiy Mir— the ‘Russian World’ —a figure destined to protect Russia from destruction.
The myth of an existentially-threatened state thus becomes a self-reinforcing logic: the perceived threat makes military aggression necessary, while aggression itself serves to confirm the existence of the threat.
Aggression as defence
This alternative worldview takes many forms. Arendt argued that the objective of authoritarian ideology is not merely to hypnotise people into thinking that something false is true, but to undermine confidence in the existence of any objective truth.
And the aftermath of the Bucha massacre in Ukraine in 2022 offers a striking demonstration of this strategy.
Rather than presenting an alternative explanation for the massacre, the Kremlin launched multiple narratives: the killings never took place; the victims were actors; Ukraine staged the events; or Western intelligence fabricated the evidence.
The deception also relies on a systematic redefinition of language. Prominent examples include the regime’s portrayal of aggression as defence, coercion as necessity, and occupation as liberation.
By creating a disorientating information environment, the regime induces domestic apathy and global uncertainty, eroding trust in democratic institutions and public debate. This, in turn, leaves populations increasingly susceptible to Russian propaganda in a self-reinforcing loop.
But having spent decades constructing such an alternative reality, the Kremlin is now a prisoner of its own creation.
Peace would fundamentally challenge the regime’s narrative of existential threat. Too much has been invested for this narrative to be put to the test.
Should this worldview begin to crack, a principal source of Putin’s legitimacy would collapse. Both Arendt and Fromm help explain how an alternative worldview becomes a sustaining mechanism.
For Putin, peace is profoundly dangerous, not because it threatens Russia’s security, but because it threatens the foundations of his rule. The challenge facing Western diplomacy is to engage in dialogue, without accepting the Kremlin’s fundamental premises.
Policymakers must reject the false notion that this war is driven by the security needs of the Russian state, rather than the political survival of its leadership.
Treating the regime’s demands as rational claims risks validating the false, underlying assumptions that perpetuate the conflict.
Only when this alternative reality loses credibility, both externally and, ultimately, internally, will the conflict lose its political and psychological usefulness.
