Aleksandr Dugin at the Civilizations of the Eurasian Area meeting on February 15, 2020 at the Faculty of World Studies, University of Tehran. Author Mehdi Bolourian
under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.”

James Verini, in a comprehensive essay in The New Yorker reveals The Imperialist Philosopher Who Demanded the Ukraine War;  For decades, Alexander Dugin argued that Russia had a messianic mission, and that destroying an independent Ukraine was necessary to fulfilling it.

Excerpt:

In August, 2022, six months after Russian troops invaded Ukraine, a cultural festival named Traditions was held outside Moscow, at the onetime summer retreat of Alexander Pushkin. The star speaker was Alexander Dugin, a scholar and a prominent proponent of the war who has been called the prophet of the new Russian Empire. In his book “Being and Empire” (2023), which runs to a Heideggerian length of seven hundred and eighty-four pages, Dugin characterizes Russia as nothing less than “the last place of the true subject of history in time and space.” His lecture at the festival, “Tradition and History,” was as sprawling as its title suggested. Sitting under a canopy, he extemporized on the seasonal labors of the Russian peasantry, finding in the pre-modern past the “secret center” of the nation’s spiritual life.

For Dugin, the greatest enemy of Russia is liberalism, which he has defined as the “false premise that a human is a separate, autonomous individual—a selfish animal seeking its own benefit. And nothing more.” He has written that “such a liberal person—completely detached from God, history, and society; from the people and culture; from the family and loved ones; from collective morality and ethnic identity—does not exist; and if they do exist, they ought not to.”

After the talk, some members of the audience gathered around Dugin. A young man asked, “This liberalism thing—is it possible that concealed within it is some link to the Lord that will take it and bring it down?”

“Perhaps,” Dugin told him. “That’s why there are people who fight against the liberal world, even within the liberal world.”

“Maybe there is simply a certain substance that has flooded everything, all the brains,” the young man went on. “Then a flame is lit inside it by its offspring, which instantly turns the game upside down?”

The crowd looked befuddled, but Dugin cottoned at once. “Ah,” he said. “That would be Donald Trump!”

Everyone laughed, including Dugin’s daughter, Daria Dugina, who’d accompanied him to the event. A writer and broadcaster, Dugina also worked as a publicist and scheduler for her father. That evening, as they drove in different cars, an explosive attached to the underside of Dugina’s S.U.V. detonated. Her father got out of his vehicle as other drivers stopped. Someone taped the scene; Dugin can be seen stepping among the flaming wreckage, holding his hands to his head. The next day, Russia’s President, Vladimir Putin, sent Dugin a telegram calling Dugina’s death “a vile, cruel crime.”

An obscure Russian paramilitary group claimed responsibility for the bombing, but Moscow insisted that the order had come from Ukraine’s intelligence services. Ukraine denied the charge, but Biden Administration officials reportedly agreed with Russia. The intended victim was presumably Dugin.

…

Putin’s decision, in 2022, to try to conquer all of Ukraine can’t be arrived at by extrapolating from those prior invasions. This was less the gambit of a master of Realpolitik than the reckless gamble of an ideologue, and the impulse to invade belongs to an antique tradition of Russian political thought—a messianic imperialism that originates not in the Soviet Union (which the former K.G.B. agent Putin has been accused, imprecisely, of wanting to revive) but in tsarist Russia.

Today, Putin talks like a Romanov-era zealot. This once terse apparatchik seems to have succumbed to the notion, as Dostoyevsky put it in “The Brothers Karamazov,” that “all true Russians are philosophers.” Putin has even taken to quoting Dostoyevsky; not too long ago, the idea that he’d ever read Dostoyevsky would have been laughable. Putin waxes on about the “civilizational identity” that underlies Russia’s claims to cultural dominance, and about the “historical and spiritual space” of Greater Russia, which, naturally, includes all of Ukraine. “The world has entered a period of fundamental, revolutionary transformation,” he declared in a speech several months after attempting to topple Kyiv. Russia, he said, was defending not only its national interests but also the oppressed of the world against the “Western élites” who exploited them. His country had made “a glorious spiritual choice.”

The speech could have been written by Dugin. In “Foundations of Geopolitics,” he writes, “The Russian people certainly belong to the messianic peoples, and, like any messianic people, it has a universal, pan-human significance.” Putin has come to sound like Dugin to such an extent that Dugin has been called Putin’s Rasputin and Putin’s philosopher.

Slava Ukraine!