It has been apparent since 2014, if not before, that Russia’s current leadership views the world in terms that are very different to those familiar to us in the Euro-Atlantic more than twenty-five years after the end of the Soviet Union. Seen from the Kremlin, the post-Cold War international system is illegitimate and unfair, and has been forced on the world by the West. This view was articulated most clearly in Vladimir Putin’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, and has only been reinforced by events since then.

Dr Andrew Foxall is Senior Research Fellow in Russian Strategy at the Changing Character of War (CCW) Centre at the University of Oxford. Between 2013 and 2020, he was Director of the Russia and Eurasia Studies Centre at the Henry Jackson Society. Before that, he held academic positions at Queen’s University Belfast and the University of Oxford. He holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford.