With the stroke of a pen, Russian President Vladimir Putin on March 31 approved Russia’s latest foreign policy concept, its first since 2016. While Putin called the document “a basis for our practical actions in the mid-term and more distant future,” the release did not make much news beyond dedicated Russia watchers. This is in part because its cavalcade of fabrications and grievances about the world has been marched out by Putin in speeches for years. Yet this official distillation of Kremlin-approved ideas is worth reflecting on, especially for how it describes Russia itself. Doing so reveals a concerning inflection point in Russian imperial ambitions beyond Ukraine: Putin intends for Russia to contend against the West not just in terms of military power, but also in the realm of ideology.
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