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.

This memo examines how pro-war Russian-language Telegram channels framed the war in Ukraine and Western actors during peace negotiations over six months after the Anchorage summit of August 2025. Drawing on a corpus of over 500,000 posts from 117 channels, the study moves beyond treating pro-war Telegram as a single propagandistic bloc and instead examines how framing varies across distinct categories of channels. We find that the Telegram ecosystem is stratified along multiple dimensions that do not always align. The channels that produced the strongest political framing of Western actors were not the channels that reached the largest audiences, and different categories favored different rhetoric. Mass-audience news outlets frequently engaged in consistent delegitimization of the West, while independent commentators advanced moral and conspiratorial framing, and military bloggers often used enemy-based language. Across the corpus, the United States and President Trump emerged as central objects of attention, invoked more frequently than either Russian or Ukrainian leadership. The study adds an account of how pro-Western hostility is distributed across forms and categories of propagandistic Telegram messages. We argue that this internal structure has direct implications for how Western governments might contest the Russian information space.

This paper asks whether the United States and the European Union, despite divergent economic exposure and institutional design, can sustain a coherent sanctions strategy toward Russia, and how that divergence shapes the regime's effectiveness. It proceeds through a structured comparison across three policy domains — energy, finance, and immobilized sovereign assets — drawing on the literatures on economic statecraft, energy security, and financial-network theory, and on transaction-level, macroeconomic, and legal evidence from 2022 to early 2026. The analysis finds, first, that the United States' position as a net energy exporter enabled rapid embargoes, whereas the EU's import dependence produced a slower, phased decoupling. Second, US financial measures operated extraterritorially through dollar centrality and centralized OFAC enforcement, while the EU relied on regulatory jurisdiction over SWIFT but enforced through fragmented national authorities; a Gazprombank carve-out preserved the energy-export inflows that offset the intended balance-of-payments shock. Third, in the dispute over frozen assets, EU custodial institutions bear the legal and retaliatory exposure that the United States advocates from a position of relative insulation. The findings indicate that the regime's effectiveness is constrained less by the design of individual measures than by uneven enforcement and an asymmetric distribution of risk; absent institutionalized burden-sharing, its durability and credibility are likely to weaken.