This article is taken from the December-January 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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How far is Russia, bloodstained and defiant, a reactive security-seeker, pushing back against Western encroachment? Or how far is it darker than that: an imperial aggrandizer, greedily expanding less for security than for glory, prestige and the sheer rush of it? Or do these two impulses feed off one another? 

These questions matter. They inform how we interpret Putin’s disastrous lunge into Ukraine in February 2022, how that war can end and its aftermath be best handled and what our view of what this adversary “is”.

Sumantra Maitra’s study, The Sources of Russian Aggression, is a serious book. Rich, well-organised, precise and nicely contentious, it avoids the over-descriptive, lazy insider-ism and “on the other hand”-ism that characterise so much Western commentary on the subject, especially since Russia’s ill-fated invasion of Ukraine. Maitra argues that one overriding pattern applies to Russia’s power projection beyond its borders in our time. Namely, Russia is a “security maximiser”, as opposed to a “power maximiser”.

A “power maximiser” is a greedy state, bent on aggrandisement such that it wishes to overturn an existing order and pursue dominance without limit, à la Napoleon or Hitler. A “security maximiser”, by contrast, is a less ambitious, more disciplined power, wielding force to suppress threats in its vicinity, especially to protect assets — from naval ports to strategically vital terrain — the closer to home the more intense the effort, hitting hard then pulling back. 

Maitra seeks to demonstrate this claim via three test cases — NATO, Georgia and Ukraine — testing competing theories of Russian behaviour with actual Russian behaviour. Despite Moscow’s rhetoric and iconography of a restored, regnant, orthodox-imperial civilisation, in Maitra’s account, its rulers are more hard-headed and focused in their goals.

In making this unfashionable case, that Russia is moved primarily by external pressures and concerned chiefly for its share of hard power and geographic position, Maitra refutes a large body of Innenpolitik literature that attributes Vladimir Putin’s behaviour to domestic factors and the pathologies of a personalistic regime-type. The likes of Michael McFaul argue that Russia only turned to aggression abroad as a way to manage internal predicaments, to legitimate a troubled regime via diversion and deflection.

In other versions, Russia cares about the westward “pull” of East European states keen to escape Moscow’s shadow chiefly as a matter of ideological example-setting. In this account, Russia struck in Crimea in 2014, not primarily to secure its foothold in Sebastopol or forestall greater security collaboration between Ukraine and the West, but to wreck the emergence of a successful, Euro-Atlantic-leaning democratic Ukraine. 

Maitra’s account is more visceral: whilst Moscow fears external sources of regime change, its fears are primarily material and direct. Reasonably or not, it fears being vulnerable to attack. And great powers are not traditionally reasonable.

Despite calling it “aggression”, something we associate with expansionist states with extravagant aims and fantasies of world power, Maitra marshals three case studies to argue that Putin’s Russia (and also Yeltsin’s and Medvedev’s) is closer in one respect to the model of Otto von Bismarck or medieval China when it was on the back foot: it remorselessly strikes out, but only to tame threats before stopping. 

In turn, Russia inclines this way not because of the personality or madness of any one ruler or domestic politics, but because of traditional geopolitics. It may have had short-lived dalliances with pro-Western realignment and negotiated coexistence with an ascendant United States and its allies. But this was not a free-floating choice. It was a response to Russia’s temporary post-Soviet weakness.

Once Russia had recovered enough economic and military strength, and as the West continued to enlarge its sphere via NATO and the EU, Russia reacted as a realist great power. That is, it undertook “balancing”. This well covers Russia’s brief offensive, halt and follow-up meddling in Georgia in the summer of 2008 and its intervention to shore up the Assad regime in Syria from 2015. That pattern, Maitra argues, is its foreign policy essence, less because it is Russia and more because it is what most states in similar circumstances do. 

There is much to admire about this book. Stylistically it is simple and lucid. Substantively, it is scholarly and finely argued. Let me begin, though, with some criticism. Maitra’s clear-eyed view of geopolitics is hobbled by reliance on overly separated categories, particularly his distinction between Russia as status quo restorationist and Russia the ambitious revisionist. 

Reactive security-seeking is a core part of Russia’s repertoire

Maitra is a realist in the traditional sense, given his belief in the primacy of power and security in international politics and the weight he accords to material forces. Yet he holds on, unnecessarily, to a view that Russia has a defensive essence and a strong preference for limited violence married to achievable goals. Realism, properly wrought, does not assume states have essences. Rather, they have circumstances. 

By focusing so much on the period between the post-Soviet beginning and now, Maitra misses an opportunity to consider how earlier Russian rulers at times embraced more expansive aims, from Catherine the Great to Stalin — precursors who hardly appear in the book. 

Having successfully seen off threats, they grabbed for far more and were less easily satiated. Hence Stalin’s ominous words after the battle of Berlin in 1945: “Tsar Alexander made it all the way to Paris.” Does Maitra think something in the post-Soviet period killed off that kind of temptation? This is important, because we might soon be witnessing Russia making such decisions regarding Ukraine, if its forces continue to weaken and/or if international support dwindles. It’s not clear that Putin or his heirs will settle for the pre-2022 borders and a guarantee of Ukrainian neutrality. 

There is an artificial quality to Maitra’s overdrawn distinction between offensive/defensive, revisionist/status quo power. Rulers anywhere can form and grow the instinct that empire is the best form of defence, perhaps the only one, and that domination is the only path to security, survival and keeping what they have. Thus, a defensive concern under the right conditions can morph into a warrant for brutal expansionism. 

Having suppressed threats more intense than Georgia or Ukraine, Stalin’s instinct was not to pull back and restore equilibrium. Whilst making some concessions beyond, he sought to occupy and lock down a large swathe of Europe. 

That was not just a matter of aggrandisement or achieving historical fame. It was a security concern, born of the hard school of war and near-annihilation. Whilst Russia is hardly primed to water its horses in the Rhine or the Thames, it’s not clear that, if presented with a vacuum, Putin or his ilk will remain disciplined. 

This also raises a counterfactual problem. Maitra does a fine job demonstrating, as far as we reasonably can, that reactive security-seeking is a core part of Russia’s repertoire. Russian governments really were reacting to external stimuli, and had genuine security fears, when they lashed back. 

We know, thanks to Owen Matthews’ book Overreach, based on discussions with regime intimates, that NATO exercises and growing NATO-EU-Ukraine links really did help precipitate Russia’s decision for invasion, given a fear of encroachment in its self-styled “sphere”, a reflex common to most major powers.

Yet it does not follow that, absent Western enlargement in the post-Soviet period, Russia would have sat back passively as a more-or-less contented power, not reviving its traditional view of its regional prerogatives or asserting itself in its “near abroad”. 

The US historically had expansionist instincts in quiet neighbouring areas, indirectly or directly, pressing to exclude other powers and insisting on its prerogatives. So why not Russia? That isn’t an endorsement of bringing Western bases, arms and partnerships ever closer to Moscow’s borders. Less enlargement may well have generated less conflict. 

Rather, it is to observe, in line with realist pessimism, that in some form a rendezvous with Russian imperial assertion was ultimately hard to avoid. Like other large states in Eurasia that share vulnerable borders and have long memories, Russia may well have returned to its playbook of what the Chinese officials once called “barbarian management”.

A realist account of Russian behaviour could surely regard security-seeking and imperial ambition — impulses too often treated as mutually exclusive — instead to be causally linked. In the period leading up to the second invasion of Ukraine, the more Russia sensed that it must neutralise Ukraine as a potential base for Western threat via more radical and direct aggression, the more it grew its entitled view of Ukraine as rightfully Russian real estate. 

Whilst Russia’s war aims in Ukraine thus far have proven opaque, Putin’s lengthy pre-war essays and speeches are surely dispositive of a real and imperial world view and seem too intense and laboured to be put on entirely for show.

It treats Russia as a real country

Maitra’s argument works better for Russian behaviour between Putin’s angry Munich speech of 2007, denouncing US unipolarity and calling for counter-balancing, and the twelve months before February 2022, probably the window where Moscow decided to shift its posture from partial and limited aggression to something more expansive in Ukraine — to neutralise it via regime change (assassination attempts) and denials of Ukraine’s nationhood. That cannot be reduced to status quo-restoring behaviour.

The great merit of Maitra’s work is that it treats Russia as a real country and a force to be taken seriously. It is more than one regime. Its foreign policy impulses are shared not just by oligarchic empire-nostalgists, but by a broad spectrum of Russians, including liberals. Earlier, dismissive treatments of Russia as merely a shallow and defunct construct — “a gas station masquerading as a country” in the late Senator John McCain’s words — do not fit what we have learned about it since. It is provenly too resilient to be written off so glibly. 

And if the day comes when Russia realigns against China and becomes a partner of sorts again, we will rediscover our admiration for Russian spiritual depth, just as we did in the mid-twentieth century. Just as there are no permanent friends or adversaries, there are no permanent pariahs.