Aleksandr Dugin, courtesy of wikimedia under the websites (asi.ru, atlas100.ru) of the Russian Agency for Strategic Initiatives licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0.

In The Atlantic, Simon Shuster presents the utter collapse of Putin’s narrative (and the incoherence of the Narrator-in-Chief) purportedly justifying Putin’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.

No Russian thinker has worked harder than Aleksandr Dugin to rationalize the invasion of Ukraine. Long before it started, Dugin came up with a whole philosophical system, known as “neo-Eurasianism,” to explain why Russia, the country with the largest landmass in the world, would need to steal land from its neighbors and kill many thousands of people in the process. His books and lectures on the subject earned him the nickname “Putin’s brain.” …

Judging by Dugin’s most recent pronouncements, they have run out of cogent stories to tell. When Dugin attempted to explain the war’s rationale last week to Ksenia Sobchak, a Russian social-media influencer with millions of followers, he could not make any sense of it. Even a softball question—“What is worth fighting for today?”—led the philosopher down a spiral of inanity so bizarre that Sobchak, long rumored to be the goddaughter of Vladimir Putin, could not listen with a straight face.

…

More than four years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin’s image-makers have failed at the basic task of explaining the war’s purpose to the Russian public. Putin did not come any closer to that goal during his speech at the forum yesterday. …

But the consequences of the war, at least in terms of Russia’s isolation, are impossible for Putin to hide. Before the 2022 invasion, the St. Petersburg forum often attracted the leaders of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful countries, including China, France, Germany, India, and Japan. This year, Putin shared the stage with the presidents of Uzbekistan and Tanzania, the only heads of state who’d deigned to come. It was not the image of power and influence Russia wanted to project. But in the fifth year of his forever war, it seems to be the best that Putin can do.

Slava Ukraine!