What exactly drives Putin to invade Ukraine and what else can we expect from him in this war? For many Europeans, Putin’s motives are difficult to grasp: it is often said that what he is doing is “not rational”. Historian and radicalisation expert Prof Beatrice de Graaf emphasises that Putin’s actions do have logic within his own world view: “Putin is fighting for a holy Russian nation and is acting consistently and intrinsically logically in this.” …

Many analyses have recently pointed to Putin’s propagandistic references to the Second World War and the Soviet era. De Graaf and Drost see a crucial source for his radical ideology even further back in the past: in the Russian empire of the nineteenth century, in which all Slavic peoples were incorporated and in which there was no separation between church and state. Putin’s use of the double eagle symbol also refers to this: it traditionally symbolised how church and world converged in one body, in one ruler, De Graaf explained in a podcast on Dutch radio (EO, 26 February). “Putin’s ideological goal is to reunite the Slavic peoples into the holy Russian nation, of which he sees himself as the embodiment and Kyiv as the cradle.”

…

Rational irrationality

De Graaf describes Putin’s ideology of a sacred Russian nation as an example of ‘rational irrationality’, a term she borrows from the American economist Bryan Caplan. “What Putin does is for him a logical, rational consequence of a worldview that is rather mythical, and based on beliefs rather than facts,” De Graaf told RTL News.