The psychology and evolution of the Kremlin’s regime mean it’s no longer about whether there will be the escalation of Ukrainian conflict. The question is how soon.

Will Russia move into southeastern Ukraine? While President Vladimir Putin has taken a pause waiting for the west to respond to Crimea, one has time to analyze his thinking and whether, in fact, there is any. On closer examination, three elements of Putin’s regime— ideology, social base, and economic motivation— might push him into continuing his Ukrainian adventure.

First, the ideological underpinnings of Putin’s actions is a KGB-style Cold War mentality mixed with a so-called “conservatism” (or whatever Putin believes “conservatism” to be) of early twentieth century religious Russian thinkers (Nikolai Berdyaev, Vladimir Solovyov, and Ivan Ilyin). While Ilyin serves to emphasize the enmity of the West against Russia, Berdyaev is instrumental in synthesizing the orthodox mindset with socialist legacy. Berdyaev, who himself at some (short) point converted into communism, is the author of an awkward and seemingly contradictory mixture of mysticism, orthodoxy, and socialism. Such mixture is exactly what a religious former KGB officer with messianic calling needs to unite the legacies of both the Russian and Soviet Empires into a solid path-dependent ideology. This ideology roughly assumes that Western countries (or NATO) spread some liberal and deleterious values fundamentally hostile to Russia’s tradition, and intentionally aim to ruin Russia’s historically unique culture that combines autocracy, Orthodoxy, and Slavic brotherhood. Hence, it’s a must for any self-respecting patriotic leader to protect the (very loosely understood) historical Russian borders from such civilizational challenge.

Kremlin adviser Sergey Markov recently reconfirmed the same idea by picturing Ukraine’s integration into the European Union as a competing political project alien to the Kremlin’s interests. His essay shows that the Kremlin is deeply scared that “Russia's opposition movement will surely want to … carry out their own revolution in Moscow” in order to “install a puppet leadership that will sell Russia's strategic interests out to the West.” The Kremlin does its best to destroy successful democratic undertakings in the post-Soviet space, like when it attacked Georgia in 2008. But contrary to Georgia, Ukraine’s ethnic and cultural similarity to Russia is much stronger. And as Markov openly acknowledges, the success of newly democratized Ukraine may teach Russians some unwanted lessons. As Akos Lada shows in his recent Monkey Cage post, for exactly the same reason “both hostile acts and wars are more frequent between two countries which share identities but have different political institutions.”

Is Crimea enough to secure “a buffer zone” between Russia and the hostile West? To Putin, it’s absolutely not. Russia has a long “unprotected” 2,000 km land border with Ukraine. Plus, according to Putin’s 2008 speech in Bucharest (which drafted the currently implemented plan), the south of Ukraine consists of “Russians alone” whose interests need to be protected. It hence makes sense for Putin to continue restoring the “Russian world” by linking together the currently isolated “enclaves” of Pridnestrovie and Crimea through a mainland channel along the south of Ukraine. So there is little doubt that the Kremlin’s attempts to “secure the border” and protect the “brotherly” east and south will continue.