"While the sagas about the breaking of American elections by Russian hackers and the collusion of Trump's staff with Russia are being absorbed by Washington's elite and the media, an even more important question remains unanswered:" Why did Vladimir Putin take these measures and what to expect for the Americans? "- says the director of the research of Russia American Enterprise Institute Leon Aron in The Wall Street Journal. - By temperament and due to the training in the KGB, Putin is not such a person who is easy to read. Secrecy is an integral part of the regime forged by him, as in all authoritarian states. However, we must speculate on his motives and goals, because the alternative to this is to be unpleasantly surprised every time he acts ". The expert recalls that the "refrain of the early 2000s" was the question "Who is Mr. Putin? "(" Who is Mr Putin? "), And in the search for clues to his behavior he was called an authoritarian modernizer, an intelligence operative, a bureaucrat and a Russian nationalist. "And yet it seems that the most stable of his policy was due to another gradually manifested identity: the identity of the ardent patriot of the Soviet Union. In my opinion, Putin's speech and unprepared remarks show that, unlike the Western and Russian democrats, he never believed in the narrative that there were no winners in the Cold War. Apparently, he perceives the modern world order as unfair and immoral, hacked by America. This belief was strengthened when the US invaded Iraq in 2003. Then in 2011, the West helped Libya overthrow Muammar Gaddafi. Putin compared this interference with the crusades, "reads the article. "The Russian president acts as if he undertook a historic mission to restore the former world" alignment of forces, "as Soviet people expressed in Brezhnev's time. Resistance and restoration - it seems, its twin mottos.

Leaving the door open for cooperation with the US in the areas of fighting terrorism, arms control and nuclear non-proliferation, Putin began to consider the rest of geopolitics, by and large, a game in which there can only be one winner. If the West wins, Russia loses - and vice versa, "believes Aron. "So, what happened during the presidential election in 2016 was not just a one-off anti-American action, but part of a permanent policy, a link of a huge geopolitical mosaic of Russia's return to its previous positions, which Putin began to put together," reads the article.