Russian Political, Economic, and Security Issues

This book is an introduction to the events in Russia after the fall of the Berlin Wall up to the large-scale invasion of Ukraine, which began on February 24, 2022. Between the lines you will notice that the Russian intelligence apparatuses, most often and for ease, are called “Russian intelligence services,” but this is not the exact diction. Without wishing to be overly punctilious, a clarification is in order. According to the British school, the Russians speak of “special services” to refer to their community of spy agencies; an all-encompassing expression of acronyms, functions and jurisdictions. Western intelligence predominantly hunts for objective facts and information, to monitor threats and prevent consequences; Russian espionage, on the other hand, hunts for narratives; it seeks out and monitors people’s psychological and mental aspects, moods, social issues, sentiment. As experts in London have made very clear, the special services of the Russian Federation sift through information, but this function is ancillary to their primary responsibility, which is political warfare, involving the use of data, manipulation, and influence to shape the perceptions and choices of adversaries. This short essay shows how Russia over the past three decades has managed to remain at the center of Western interests, even after losing the Cold War; just think of the depth and ubiquity of Russian espionage in many countries around the world. In the essay, Xi Jinping’s China recurs with great frequency: it is shaping the new Cold War together with the United States as it deploys information warfare with a very powerful narrative, only hinted at here but directly connected to Putin’s foreign policy. One cannot understand Russia apart from the age-old fear of encirclement that grips it, and that need to project its power from within to without in a turbulent form. A kind of geopolitical claustrophobia, which has been shaped for centuries up to the current war in Ukraine and the many crises that are repeated and again announced, from Europe to the Middle East to Taiwan.