The West may not have known it, but Putin's Russia was at war with it long before missiles rained down on Kyiv in 2022. It was not a conventional style of war. After the annexation of Crimea, Western analysts had scrambled to put a label on what seemed to be a new Russian way of war. “Hybrid war”, “grey-area war”, “full-spectrum war”, “asymmetric war”, the “Gerasimov doctrine” were just some of the terms devised. All these labels captured some of the truth, but none told the whole story. One way of thinking about the war ethos that gripped Putin's Kremlin after he returned to the presidency in 2012 is offered by seventeenth-century English political theorist, Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes described a condition of anarchy, which he called the “state of nature”, where people were forced to compete in a zero-sum struggle for survival. The result was a permanent war of all against all. This was not a state of permanent battle but rather a disposition. Each person distrusted every other; each believed the other posed a threat and presumed that increments of security could be bought only at the expense of others; and thus force was a latent possibility in every social interaction. What mattered most for Hobbes was this disposition, not the instruments used to conduct the war.

This image well describes how third-term Putin understood Russia's relationship with the West. He assumed the West was waging hybrid war against Russia, using its soft power, economic levers, clandestine force, and sometimes its military might to forcibly change regimes and extend its hegemonic reach. Since NATO could not risk direct war with Russia owing to its nuclear arsenal, it seemed to the Kremlin that the West had found a way around that by fostering “colour revolutions”, corroding and changing governments from within to pull them into its political orbit. The zero-sum mentality that characterized Soviet strategic thought during the Cold War told Russian leaders that the Western orientation of many formerly communist republics and the “colour revolutions” were the effects of Western hegemonic aggrandizement. Putin and his allies believed that as a great power with its own exceptional destiny, Russia was entitled to its “zone of privileged interest”, an imperial space it controlled. For Russian nationalists like Putin, nation and empire were not discrete entities.