Russia today is presented as out to subvert the West The chosen means are meddling in elections and sowing discord in Western societies Russia in this imaginary looms over an unsuspecting West, undermining democracy and supporting disrup-tive forces No longer couched in terms of the Cold War struggle between capitalism and communism, this is a reversion to great power politics of the rawest sort However, is this analysis correct? Is Vladimir Putin out to undermine the West to achieve his alleged goal of re-establishing some sort of post-Soviet 'greater Rus-sia' imperial union in Russia's neighbourhood, to weaken the Atlantic power system and to undermine the liberal international order? The paper challenges the view that Russia is trying to reconstitute a Soviet-type challenge to the West, and provides an analytical framework to examine the dynamics of Russian foreign policy and on that basis assesses Russia's real rather than imaginary aspirations Keywords Russia · Subversion · Neo-revisionism · Putin · The West · Russiagate It has become orthodoxy that Russia under an embittered and alienated Vladimir Putin is out to subvert the West The chosen means are taken to be meddling in elections and sowing discord in Western societies The various special operations include propelling Donald J Trump to the White House and fixing the Brexit vote in 2016 (Snyder 2018) Putin's Russia in this imaginary looms over an unsuspecting West, undermining democracy and supporting disruptive forces (Shekhovtsov 2017;Umland 2017) From this perspective, post-communist Russia is up to its old tricks, with the image of the Russian bear threatening the honour of a defenceless Europe dusted off from the Crimean War and the era of the great game in the late nineteenth century No longer couched in terms of the Cold War struggle between capitalism and communism, this is a reversion to great power politics of the imperial sort It also represents the application of the weapons of the weak, since Russia by any
Greater Russia: Is Moscow out to subvert the West?