Russian Geopolitics and the Russian-Ukrainian War: Lessons for the EU

Kratochvíl and Doležal analyse critically the role of geopolitics in current EU-Russia relations. The chapter helps to understand the multiple causes of the Russian aggression and by doing so also provides lessons for EU (geo)politics. EU’s geopolitical thought is represented by four competing narratives about Russia’s place in European (geo)politics. The triple transformation of Russian geopolitical identity is discussed at the levels of the Russian geopolitical worldview, the Russian geopolitical self-other imaginary, and the Russian geopolitical actions derived from these. The authors show in detail how Putin´s war strategy links his regime´s inner circle interests with specific “identitarian geopolitics” while exploiting and reproducing (ontological, epistemic, economic, and human) insecurity crisis in Russian society and even exporting the ontological and epistemic insecurity to the EU.