Russia's commitment to inhumanity

Aleksandr Dugin.

It’s not often that a sphinxlike world leader commits unilateral war crimes and a philosopher shows up to explain exactly why he’s doing it—in English, on YouTube. 

But Putin’s horrifying invasion of Ukraine indeed comes with a Vox explainer. He’s Aleksandr Dugin, a Russian political philosopher, enthusiast of neopaganism and the occult, and the author of “Foundations of Geopolitics” (1997) and “The Fourth Political Theory” (2009). Conveniently, Dugin is also known as “Putin’s Brain,” at least since Russia’s 2014 invasion of Crimea. Both men seem to regard Dugin as Putin’s intellectual proxy. 

Two weeks ago, on March 5, Dugin posted to Telegram—more or less the only social media available now in Russia—a video explaining the Kremlin’s invasion of Ukraine. 

For context: Dugin’s cosmic argument about world politics, which he’s been making for decades, is fairly simple. Russia, he believes, is uniquely unassimilable into the ideological empire of the West—market capitalism and liberal democracy. It needs to fight back, and form a Eurasian empire.

But this month Russia’s refusal to join the West means the Dugin plan has taken a new turn. With the invasion of Ukraine, Dugin says, Russia expresses its final rejection of no less than “humanity, civil rights theory, human rights theory, this global world.” 

I’ve got to repeat that: humanity, civil rights theory, human rights theory, this global world.

To be clear: Russia is now on record as refusing to join humanity.