Russia's decision to invade Ukraine emerged from a strategic culture built on a fundamental contradiction - an elite conviction that the country deserves great power status paired with an economy that cannot sustain it, Michael Kofman has argued.
Kofman laid out this analysis in a conversation with Kennan Institute director Michael Kimmage on the deep roots of Russia's war, as "Hvylya" reports.
At the heart of Russian strategic culture, Kofman identified "a persistent frustration" driven by the gap between elite ambitions and material reality. "The status that they see cannot be underwritten by Russian economic performance," he said. Russia's "historical technological backwardness and weak economic foundations of power stand in contrast to elite culture of exceptionalism and perception of Russia as some kind of providential country with a special role to play in international politics."
This culture treats great power status as something inherited rather than earned. Because the Soviet Union achieved parity with the United States during the Cold War, Russian elites believe they "to some extent deserve this" and that Russia holds "a sort of natural place rather than something that has to be earned and achieved." Kofman called this a form of "hereditary status" - a conviction that prior standing automatically carries forward.
The strategic behavior flowing from this culture is predictable, Kofman argued. Russian elites pursue geopolitical space beyond Russia's borders, impose limited sovereignty on neighboring states, and attempt to turn them into buffer zones. They view Russia's borders not as fixed lines but as something "negotiated with other actors" - defined by how much pushback Russia encounters rather than by any settled principle. When smaller states resist, Russia's response has historically been force.
Kofman cautioned against reducing this to Putin alone. Strategic culture "doesn't change very often - if it did, it wouldn't be strategic culture," he said. Leaders emerge from an elite culture and shape it over time, but they do not create it from nothing. The continuity in Russian elite consensus, Kofman argued, stretches from the late Soviet period through the present, with the offensive turn under Putin between 1999 and 2004 representing a shift within that culture rather than a break from it.
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