What’s Eating ‘Putin’s Brain’?

No Russian thinker has worked harder than Aleksandr Dugin to rationalize the invasion of Ukraine. Long before it started, Dugin came up with a whole philosophical system, known as “neo-Eurasianism,” to explain why Russia, the country with the largest landmass in the world, would need to steal land from its neighbors and kill many thousands of people in the process. His books and lectures on the subject earned him the nickname “Putin’s brain.” That overstates his closeness to the Russian president. But his views reflect the mood among the war’s cheerleaders in Moscow, how firmly they support the conflict, and how they try to justify it to themselves (and everyone else).

Judging by Dugin’s most recent pronouncements, they have run out of cogent stories to tell. When Dugin attempted to explain the war’s rationale last week to Ksenia Sobchak, a Russian social-media influencer with millions of followers, he could not make any sense of it. Even a softball question, “What is worth fighting for today?”, led the philosopher down a spiral of inanity so bizarre that Sobchak, long rumored to be the goddaughter of Vladimir Putin, could not listen with a straight face.

Dugin’s description of Russia after the war sounded postapocalyptic. “First of all, it’s an image of life on the land,” he said. “It is an enormous exodus from the cities, an almost religious exodus, like the Jews from Egypt.” The cities of Russia, he continued, would turn into “neo-ancient ruins,” and the people would return to living in the countryside, communicating with one another through “an internet of Russian villages, closed off and guarded from the toxic incursions of the enemy.”

The Russian state has often forced its people into strange contortions of the mind. By law, Russians are prohibited from publicly calling the war a war rather than a “special military operation,” and Putin has urged them to believe that Ukraine started it. Still, the national capacity for self-deception has its limits, and recent developments suggest that Putin has found them.

Ukrainian drones now pummel industrial targets across Russia nightly, shutting down oil refineries, snarling logistics, and forcing airports to close for days at a time. More than 1 million Russians have been killed or badly wounded in the war, a toll too great to hide, almost every family has been affected. The gap between what Russians know to be true about the war and what the Kremlin says about it has grown so wide that even warmongers like Dugin struggle to bridge it. Instead, the ideologues of Russian imperialism have turned to random musings and belligerent hate speech, which seems intended to confuse rather than convince.

At various points during his interview with Sobchak, Dugin called the sport of surfing evil and said that its practitioners should be purged. He did not provide a coherent reason. He expressed similar hatred toward Russia’s favorite cartoon character, the jug-eared Cheburashka, who has repeatedly served as the mascot for the Russian Olympic Team. No political constituency exists for such views in Russia or elsewhere. They only allow Dugin to distract from the fact that he has nothing else to say, no way to spin the war he has championed for much of his career.

“It shows that everyone is beyond exhausted,” Mikhail Zygar, the author of several books about the Russian elite, most recently The Dark Side of the Earth, told me. “There is no one left who wants the war to continue, with the possible exception of Putin and Dugin.” A year or two ago, wealthy and powerful Russians tended to support the war, even in their private conversations, because they knew the dangers of losing it. “They would say things like: Yes, maybe it’s bad we started all this, but now we have no choice but to win,” Zygar said. “Nobody says that anymore. Now they just say the war has reached a dead end, and it needs to stop.”

The cracks in the Kremlin’s consensus became apparent this spring, as Russian advances in eastern Ukraine stalled. Commanders sacrificed tens of thousands of soldiers a month, dead and wounded, without gaining any significant territory. Along the southern front, Ukrainian drones began to blow up military convoys on the main road from Russia to Crimea. Control of that highway had been one of Russia’s main achievements in the war, and now it stood littered with the wreckage of trucks full of weapons and supplies for Russian troops. Authorities in Crimea began to ration fuel as shipments from Russia ran dry.

Putin’s next humiliation came early last month, when he hosted the annual Victory Day parade. The threat of Ukrainian drone strikes forced organizers to scale back the parade’s size and cut a lot of military equipment from the program. With support from President Trump, the Kremlin called for a brief cease-fire to allow the festivities to proceed. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky then issued a decree “allowing” Russia to hold its parade on Red Square.

[Read: Building tanks while the Ukrainians master drones]

The truce lasted only a few days. In the second half of May, Russia intensified its attacks against Kyiv, launching dozens of ballistic missiles and hundreds of drones in a matter of hours on some nights. Ukraine retaliated with strikes against Russia’s energy infrastructure, a strategy Zelensky took to calling “long-range sanctions.” All the while, Russian state TV continued to air the Kremlin’s talking points about the valor of its troops, the evils of Ukraine and its Western allies, and the approaching victory of Russia.

But social-media platforms showed a far gloomier picture, and their reach now exceeds that of television news. Some influencers began to call the war a dead end. Others demanded a cease-fire to allow the Russian military to prepare a new strategy. One video complaint to Putin about corruption and censorship attracted tens of millions of viewers, briefly turning its creator, the lifestyle blogger Viktoria Bonya, who lives in Monaco, into an unlikely face of opposition to the Kremlin. The state’s attempts to restrict internet access only deepened public anger, driving Putin’s popularity ratings to their lowest point since he ordered the invasion of Ukraine, in 2022.

“They have no coherent message left,” Nina Khrushcheva, who studies propaganda at the New School, in New York, told me. Her grandfather Nikita Khrushchev served as the leader of the Soviet Union for more than a decade after Stalin’s death, in 1953. In those years, the Kremlin used ideology to justify its crimes. “Everyone knew the Gulag was terrible,” Khrushcheva said. “But the regime could explain it through the logic of internal enemies, traitors, and the rest of it. Now there is no explanation. No logic. No justification. The war simply does not stand up to any scrutiny at all.”

Even Dugin, who spent decades fetishizing the idea of a “civilizational war” between Russia and the West, seems to be having second thoughts. At the end of last month, he concluded a solemn post on social media with a warning that Russia could lose the war. “With the present elites,” he wrote, “our chances not only of achieving victory but simply holding the country together are critically low.”

Those elites arrived a few days later in St. Petersburg for an annual economic forum, a gathering of senior officials and business executives that Putin has hosted in his hometown for the past two decades. On its opening day, a fleet of Ukrainian drones attacked the city, damaging a warship in the nearby port of Kronstadt and setting an oil terminal on fire. Thick columns of smoke hung in the air on Wednesday morning as delegates arrived to pick up their badges.

The next evening, Zelensky published an open letter to Putin, announcing that the drones had traveled more than 600 miles to pay “a visit” to the forum. He promised more attacks on Russian cities unless Putin agrees to a cease-fire and begins negotiations to end the war. “We can all see that Russians are finally becoming less comfortable with this reality,” Zelensky wrote. “They do not like the fact that there is no end in sight to your war.” The letter ended with a subtle warning: “It is a fact of Russian history that you know well: when Russia grows tired, change comes.”

Putin and Dugin did their best to obscure that fatigue. The forum’s opening panel featured Dugin and several other hard-liners, one of whom enthusiastically predicted that Russia would remain at war for the next two generations. The “positive scenario” for Russia’s future, according to another panelist, would require the use of nuclear weapons to break the stalemate in Ukraine. Dugin, taking the microphone, had this to say: “We need an ideology, otherwise Russia is finished!” He recalled presenting his ideas for winning the war to a group of Russian generals recently, who told him, “No! We need an image! An image of victory, an image of the war, an image of the world we want to build.”

[Photos: Farming in Ukraine’s war zone]

More than four years since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin’s image-makers have failed at the basic task of explaining the war’s purpose to the Russian public. Putin did not come any closer to that goal during his speech at the forum yesterday. When a moderator asked him about Zelensky’s letter, Putin said that it contained “elements of rudeness.” He turned down the offer to negotiate a deal to end the war, appealing to Russia’s soldiers to continue fighting because, as he put it, “the whole country is watching you.”

But the consequences of the war, at least in terms of Russia’s isolation, are impossible for Putin to hide. Before the 2022 invasion, the St. Petersburg forum often attracted the leaders of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful countries, including China, France, Germany, India, and Japan. This year, Putin shared the stage with the presidents of Uzbekistan and Tanzania, the only heads of state who’d deigned to come. It was not the image of power and influence Russia wanted to project. But in the fifth year of his forever war, it seems to be the best that Putin can do.