| Publication |
2014.
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| Summary/Abstract |
After Forbes magazine named Vladimir Putin the most powerful man in the world, a status he has surely consolidated by overseeing the Winter Olympics and the invasion of Crimea, one heard a great deal of media talk about the Russian leader's wily skills in playing the global geostrategic "game." What one didn't hear, what one virtually never hears, even from highly experienced Western commentators on Russian affairs, is anything about Putin acting according to principles or pursuing actions according to a coherent ideology. Not surprising, you might say, since the man obviously has no such concerns-other than a will to win, for himself and his seat of power; no vision comparable to that of the Kremlin in the old Soviet Union, which furnished it and its allies with a huge asset and a troublesome headache in the form of an armory of fully rationalized ideas that legitimized a predictable approach to international relations and even provided the regime with a perverse "morality."
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