How should the U.S. deal with Putin? Facing hackers and poisonings, Western analysts have focused on the motivations of Russia’s inscrutable president. And it’s easy to confuse Russia’s foreign policy with Putin’s foreign policy, given how much influence he exercises over it.

But the Putin-centric approach obscures an essential and timeless element of Russia’s foreign policy, in which Putin is only the latest chapter—the pursuit of derzhavnost. A word that’s difficult to render into English precisely, derzhavnost essentially means both being a great power and being recognized as such by others. In Russia’s immediate neighborhood, this means an unquestioned sphere of influence, similar to America’s Monroe Doctrine. In dealing with other powerful states like the U.S., it implies respect, prestige, and peer recognition rolled into one—in other words, a seat at the table managing global affairs.

Even if Putin has achieved some tactical successes in rebuilding regional primacy, his larger quest to re-establish Russia as a responsible and respected great power has been a complete failure. As a result, Russia is more insecure and paranoid than at any point since the Soviet collapse.

How did we get here? Part of the problem stems from the collapse itself, which the West saw as an unalloyed good and a breakthrough for global peace. The geopolitical and ideological dimensions of the conflict become intertwined, even inseparable—democracy had defeated communism, and as a result the international system shifted from bipolarity to unipolarity.

For Russia, however, the end of the Cold War signaled the end of two very different struggles—an ideological struggle of communism against democracy, but also the end of Russian derzhavnost. The ideological defeat was understandable and even welcome; today, few people in Russia seek a return to communism. Yet the quest to restore Russia’s traditional sphere of influence remains the key geopolitical imperative.