Now the Soviets were more terrified of the idea of convergence with the West than they were of nuclear war. And I think Putin is exactly the same. There’s all this stuff that he goes on about—how he’s acting in self-defense; how [annexing] Crimea and [intervening in] Ukraine were in self-defense; that [the] hybrid warfare that he is conducting is self-defense and he is just mirroring what the West is doing. But the reality of it is that the West is a threat to Putin—not in the ways in which he portrays it—but, a Western system, based on the rule of law, based on open access, based on competition, is a threat to the system he has built, which is based on the power of security services, on the distribution of rent.

And therefore I think convergence on Western terms is actually quite scary to him. To protect his own system Putin needs to do two things: prevent neighboring countries drifting towards the Western model and make the West less of a magnet. He needs to make the U.S. model look less attractive. And this election is helping him a great deal. If the U.S. loses its appeal, if it becomes isolationist and nationalistic, it will boost his own hold on power and his popularity both inside and outside the country.

I think he’s escalating things at the moment to then be able to trade it for some sort of a detente. He would be very happy if the West accepted him the way he is, with all the thuggery and abuse of human rights, etc. But he certainly cannot afford for Russia to start experiencing the same kind of feelings that the Ukrainians [were] experiencing in the winter of 2013-2014 [when mass protests led to the removal of the Russian-backed President Viktor Yanukovych]. So I think he’s trying to achieve a bipolar world where the U.S. recognizes Russia as a different system, doesn’t touch it, recognizes its sphere of influence, doesn’t meddle in Russian politics—for which he blames Hillary; he said that she was the one who started spurring the protests in Moscow in 2011 and 2012. But I think it’s now gotten to the stage where he just can’t help himself; he needs an outside enemy because it’s the only form of legitimacy for him now.

Pomerantsev: So going back to Hillary and the West, how should they respond?

Ostrovsky: I think first of all you need to keep calm and assess accurately what is driving Russia’s system and why it is acting this way. The key point is that Russia is acting like this out of weakness and insecurity, rather than strength and confidence, and that’s very important. I think Putin is acting out of a sense of insecurity, inferiority, and because his archaic form of state doesn’t really match the economic and social stage which Russia is at [currently]. In the same way as [the American diplomat] George Kennan was describing Stalin’s Soviet Union in 1946—mind you, Stalin’s Soviet Union was a hell of a lot stronger than Putin is today—he saw that Stalin was acting out of weakness, out of worry because he felt he couldn’t really compete with a Western system. I think what drives Putin is exactly the same sense of insecurity, weakness, and illegitimacy. As Kennan writes, and historians write, Russia uses aggressiveness as a form of defense.