Since 2022, the Western policy toward Russia has been based on a promising and not naive assumption—that the Kremlin, facing enormous economic and military losses, would ultimately reconsider its geopolitical strategy and genuinely soften its stance. However, the Kremlin perceives and publicly reinterprets current Western countermeasures as a validation of its own strength. Russian leaders publicly call the record number of sanctions a trophy, while state propaganda explains battlefield failures by claiming that Russia is at war with all of NATO.

This memo explains Moscow’s behavior as being driven not by irrationality, nor by a desire to strengthen Russia’s position toward achieving a mutually beneficial peace with the West, but by Ressentiment. This mindset reflects a deeply rooted logic with its own internal consistency and a perspective on rationality that differs from the Western cost-benefit approach.

To prove its main argument, this memo, covering up to July 15, 2026, inclusive, first provides a clear definition of Ressentiment and describes its features, Russian context of this phenomenon, and how it differs from other concepts in the field of international relations. Then the analysis examines Russian Ressentiment through the prism of the Russian war economy (including the “deathonomics”), Western sanctions regime against Russia, U.S. efforts to promote rapprochement with Russia, the “Reverse Kissinger” strategy, and Russia’s relations with China.

This research results in identifying the actionable weak spots of Russian Ressentiment, as well as the means to counter it. It also builds these weak spots into a model of the Kremlin’s behavior.

This article considers how higher education in Russia was influenced by the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The article stems from an understanding of the institutional independence of universities as the main condition for the quality of higher education. In turn, this quality results in international mobility available for students as a source of the universities' future institutional renewal. Consequently, the full-scale war causing the subsequent international isolation of Russia, inner repressions against civil society, and transformations in social and economic spheres, leads to systemic degradation of higher education in this country. This article shows that this systemic degradation consists in the fact that different consequences of the war in the field of higher education (such as forced emigration of scholars and ideologically motivated quotas for entering universities) mutually increase the international isolation of Russian students.

This memo examines securitization within the public political discussion of both Russia and the United States. We have selected keywords pertaining to the country itself in general and to the country’s intelligence services in order to identify whether the overall sentiment towards the country is similar to the sentiment given to one of the most securitized topics. For the dataset, we selected recent content from the 10 most-cited political bloggers, with the platforms being Substack for the US and Telegram for Russia. Further on, we analyzed some of the relevant post texts qualitatively. Policy recommendations are provided based on the results. 

This paper examines the evolution of Vladimir Putin’s social contract and its transformation from a performance-based arrangement into an identity- and mobilization-based model that supports Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The paper brings together several dimensions of the social contract — economic performance, political passivity, elite interests, and ideological legitimacy — to demonstrate how they evolved alongside one another rather than independently. It argues that the origins of this arrangement can be traced to the crises of the 1990s, when economic collapse and political instability left many Russians looking for stability more than political participation. Against this backdrop, the Kremlin gradually built an informal understanding with society: the state would provide order, improving living standards and relative freedom in private life, while citizens would largely stay out of politics. As this model became established, tighter control over the media, increasingly managed elections, pressure on independent political actors, and the growing acceptance of political disengagement all helped reinforce it. As economic growth slowed and the regime’s performance-based legitimacy weakened, the contract adapted by increasingly relying on militarized identity, patriotic mobilization, and narratives of external threat. The annexation of Crimea and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine are interpreted as key moments in this transformation, enabling the regime to replace material incentives with identity-based legitimacy and the “rally-around-the-flag” effect. The article concludes that Putin’s social contract is not a static agreement but a flexible, state-imposed mechanism capable of adapting to changing political conditions. However, this flexibility also creates new vulnerabilities, as the regime becomes increasingly dependent on continuous ideological mobilization and public acceptance of militarized governance to sustain its legitimacy.