1) In 2013, it was clear and obvious that the best way forward economically for Ukraine was greater EU integration.
2) Russophone Ukrainians supported greater EU integration because 1 was so clear and obvious.
3) Because of 2, Euromaidan had popular support across Ukraine.
4) Euromaidan destroyed the "cleft" nature of Ukraine.
Are all completely false.
1) In 2013 Belarus had a similar PPP-adjusted per capita GDP to Romania, so even comparing full EU integration to full Russia integration the choice wasn't that clear cut. Furthermore, joining Russia's economic bloc would have almost certainly been easier than joining the EU due to laxer requirements on things like corruption. And when you look at the actual deals that were on the table, the deal that Putin was offering was arguably better economically than what the EU was offering in 2013.
2) As late as February 2014, polls found that 41% of Ukrainians favored EU membership over a Customs Union with Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, but 36% favoring the opposite, not a hgue difference. The results were heavily polarized by region, with the parts of the country that voted for Tymoshenko in 2010 heavily favoring the EU and the parts that voted for Yanukovych heavily favoring the Russian Customs Union.
4) Yanukovych's overthrow sparked Pro-Russian "Anti-Maidan" protests throughout the South and East of the country in response. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_pro-Russian_unrest_in_Ukraine In Crimea, Russian troops used these protests as cover to take over the peninsula with by all accounts approval from a majority of the local population. In Donetsk and Luhansk the protests succeeded in overthrowing their local governments. In Kharkiv protestors succeeded in taking over the RSA building and declared a "Kharkov People's Republic", only for that attempt to be crushed by Ukrainian special forces a day later. There were active protests throughout the South of the country as well, with protests in Odessa only being suppressed in May after a particularly grisly act of violence by "Pro-Maidan" street fighters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Odesa_clashes#Trade_Unions_House_fire
So rather than the events of 2013-14 in Ukraine being evidence against the "Clash of Civilization" theory and for the "End of History" theory as you claim, they are actually strong evidence pointing in the opposite direction. A huge part of Ukraine actively and violently rejected a pro-Western and pro-European integration "revolution," going directly against the End Of History thesis. Huntington put too much weight on religion (though election maps clearly show that Catholic Galicia is especially pro-West even for Western Ukraine, so there is still a significant effect there even if it is not the whole story) and as a result drew the dividing line in Ukraine too far West, but his predictions are still a lot closer to the mark than Fukuyama's were. Though I agree with you that Huntington's predictions with regards to China and its neighbors seem to be pretty clearly wrong.
At the time your blog post was written, the claim that Russia's invasion greatly reduced pro-Russian sentiment in Ukraine, and with it the country's "cleft" nature seemed very plausible. But since then, Russia has pretty much de facto annexed large swaths of Southern Ukraine, with everything from replacing the currency to handing out Russian passports, local occupation leaders are increasingly talking about referendums for de jure annexation, and in great contrast to the tremendous resistance Russian forces faced in the areas around Kyiv a serious insurgency has yet to appear. Reports about the "resistance" in Kherson, historically the most pro-Western city in Southeast Ukraine, talk about it spray painting graffiti and distributing leaflets warning people against obtaining Russian passports or voting in referendums, pretty weak considering the circumstances. There are a few bombings per month, but it's not clear whether those are coming from local rebels or Ukrainian special forces infiltrators.
In hindsight reactions to the initial invasion may not have been a good test because when Putin announced the invasion he said that he did not intend to occupy Ukrainian territory (after recognizing Crimea and Donbas as Not Ukraine), and for the first 40 days or so of the invasion Russian officials continued to make various statements indicating that they did not want to keep territory outside of Crimea and Donbas. This meant that any Ukrainians outside of Donbas who wanted to welcome or help Russian troops would have been afraid to do so, because they might get punished as "collaborators" after the Russians left.
So it seems like "Cleft Ukraine" might not be quite dead after all.
"Putin annexing Crimea ... had the unintended effect of weakening pro-Russian groups’ electoral strength in Ukraine." [Includes footnote 2.]
Some analysts have said that Khrushchev's intended effect of moving Crimea from Soviet Russia to Soviet Ukraine was to make Ukraine more Russian and less Ukrainian. Putin moving it back undid that.
The takes on China's positioning in this post seem to take their outward statements at face value ("no limits" to their support of Russia) but most economic / China watchers have observed that their banks have seemingly mostly enforced sanctions compliance on the DL, if only for selfish "gee, it could be a hassle to skirt them..." reasons.
That sort of squares with a more measured view of Chinese foreign policy that is painfully aware of just how entangled it is with the West (whether they like to flaunt it or not), and also squares with recent history (ie. Paulson's anecdote about how, in 2008 the Russians tried to convince the Chinese to sell off US securities to cause a global run and the Chinese came to us, narced on the Russians, and told us they wanted no part of it).
Clearly, China is trying to have it both ways and talking ott of both sides of it's mouth...but they stilo recognize just how much they stand to lose in any global crisis where the US decides to toss it's economic weight around...or both China and the US engaged in economically mutual destruction beyons tits and tats of trade wars.
Matt - I'm surprised you didn't bring this up, but there was a third major post-Cold War view of history that became popular in the 90s, on par with "The Clash of Civilizations" and "The End of History" (which I agree is a much better thesis than people give credit to).
The view was that the Cold War represented a temporary departure from the long-run logic of international relations, which is power competition between states. With the demise of the bipolar world, the thesis went, great power competition would reassert itself -- and given that the first thing that happened after the end of the Cold War was the 1991 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, I think there's quite a lot to be said for this point of view.
Anyway, the article that best articulated this view was called "Back To The Future", published in International Security in 1990 and written by John Mearsheimer.
Seems like a good opportunity to put in a plug for libertarianism...
Libertarians look at the world from the perspective of the individual, not the group. And what does the "selfish" individual want? He wants to be left alone to engage in the "pursuit of happiness"- career, recreation, family, friends. Only when the individual is drawn into some kind of collective is he energized to march across town or around the world to try to dominate others and tell them how they should live.
I asked my wife, a member of the protestant clergy, if she knew about this filioque and autocephaly business. She looked at me like I’m the idiot I am and launched into a learned disquisition on the two concepts, adding that I’m finally getting something useful from my subscription.
1. On Ukraine. In 2013, the economic deal Russia offered Yanukovych was, arguably, better than what the EU offered. And while the Visegrad states have been doing economically well in the EU, the results are more mixed for Bulgaria/Romania, and it's not even like the EU was all that eager to add Ukraine if it asked, in 2013. The 2014 protests weren't because people wanted to be rich rather than poor, they were because people wanted to be middle-class in a democracy rather than middle-class in a dictatorship; liberalism turned out to be something people actually do still care about, and Putinism something they didn't want. Now, this all gradually went sour, militarily and then economically, and led to Zelensky's election in 2019 as a moderate candidate. But - Zelensky failed to deliver on his campaign promises. His government didn't even really try to negotiate with Russia, economic problems continued, he made various erratic statements, and eventually he had something like a 25% approval rating. In January 2022, *Ukraine was still a cleft country*. It was only Putin's invasion, and especially the fact that it specifically targeted the formerly pro-Russian parts of Ukraine, that ended this. Mariupol used to be the most pro-Russian city in Ukraine.... More generally, Ukrainians were pro-Russian not because they were all paid by the FSB, but because they thought a pro-Russian policy was best for Ukraine, and now that's been firmly disproven in bloody fashion (see: https://eventsinukraine.substack.com/p/why-there-is-little-support-for-russia?s=w ).
2. On narratives. Fukuyama's framing of the Cold War as a clash of narratives, "democracy" vs "communism", does resonate. But the thing is, neoliberalism abandoned said utopian ideal. The answer to "we won, what now?" wound up being "maximize GDP". Now, there's the question of whether that's actually the same thing as increasing well-being - I view GDP as still being subject to Goodhart's law, but I know economists disagree. But even apart from that, it turns out dictatorships do just fine at increasing GDP. If the Western narrative is only about money, China has money to spare. Now, in practice, as Ukraine's 2014 showed - as indeed Ukraine's 2022 is showing - liberalism has an appeal that does go beyond money. And it does feel like there's narratives for the future that are forming, including here. Some of them will be contradictory, and hopefully they can keep their disagreements peaceful.... But I think that this was a major wrong turn in the West. (And notably, Putinism is - or at least was, before Putin went crazy - very much opposed to utopian ideals of any sort, instead embracing a soul-deep cynicism and oppressing *especially* strongly anything resembling genuine optimism.)
I'd never looked into Huntington's work in detail, but learning that he put Latin America in a different "civilization" than "the West" has managed to lower my opinion of him even below what it was before.
You might want to update a few of the side remarks about Serbia - they've actually voted against Russia and with the EU in several recent UN votes, rather than abstaining like India and Pakistan, or voting with Russia like Belarus, Eritrea, North Korea, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
I suspect we don’t need to do anything about China, honestly. They don’t seem particularly interested in international relations aside from their build-up to the ever imminent war with Taiwan.
Russian decline helps here, I think, since it relieves the major pressure they feel: security for their supply of food and minerals.
I think this is right but also there's more to the story than simply an endgame where it's "good government vs bad government". Branco Milanovic has a book Capitalism, Alone which outlines a new ideological struggle between two flavors of capitalism: Western style "liberal capitalism" and China style "political capitalism". And China appears to be making a big effort to export its version of governance to leaders of other countries, for example by giving them access to surveillance and internet censoring technologies while at the same time bringing them closer into their sphere of economic influence.
In general I think something that's absent from this sort of grand political science discourse is the idea that ideological possibility space supervenes on, is constrained by, and lags behind paradigmatic shifts in technology and industrial organization. You don't get the Enlightenment without the printing press, or Communism without the industrial revolution, or Fascism without radio and TV, or Chinese-style political capitalism without the internet. But since paradigmatic shifts are inherently impossible predict, it's therefore also impossible to predict what future ideological possibilities there will be in the future. Which I think poses real difficulties for "End of History" type arguments.
I think you’re making a common mistake in critiques of Huntington, where people focus way too much on the specific contours of the map rather than his larger points. Sure, a larger “Orthodox civilization” may not be super coherent, but it’s clear that Russia currently sees itself as a distinct civilization undergirded *by* Orthodoxy, and Ukraine is somehow part of that project. See Putin’s rhetoric about Kiev being the Mother of Russian cities and such. The idea of so-called civilizational states, which has become popular in counties from Turkey to China to India, is very much Huntingtonian, as this great article elaborates on: https://www.noemamag.com/the-attack-of-the-civilization-state/
It’s also not really true that all the non-sanctioning countries are poor. See Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Chile is richer than Romania, yet only the latter is sanctioning Russia. So there’s more going on here than capacity.
Russia is a strategic component of the European supply chain. It’s part of the European civilization as much as Poland or Ukraine.
And there is no ideological dispute with Putin. He’s just a greedy bastard.
Ukraine is just a shitburger from past decisions, internal disputes, Germany being a bag of dicks, Europe needing cheap labor and America having a president that is stuck in the Cold War. Its just a bunch of separate entities vying selfishly for their own ends. Got to go with end of history I guess.
I wonder how much Samuel Huntington was playing the computer game Civilisation when he came out with his theory? Has anybody else actually wondered this? Forty years ago, nobody thought Russia and Ukraine were Orthodox at all, but communist atheists. His whole theory strikes me as rubbish. "Sure, Korea and China have had major disputes over the centuries, but they all look alike and write a funny alphabet, so they are the same."
Also missing is recognition of the significance of the discovery of major petrochemical resources in eastern Ukraine and the Black Sea. They were large enough to allow the Ukraine to compete with Russia to supply Europe
I agree that Putin can probably be considered as an extra-large thug (a cartel but more so) --- especially given his connection to organized crime in the 90s. However, it's possible that there is an exportable ideology there. Say what you will about the neo-reactionary movement, but it is an ideology. Maybe Putin believes something along those lines. We can't read his mind.
Agreed. That said, even many of his detractors think (or at least thought) that he’s playing n-dimensional chess, so I think many give him more credit than he deserves. I’m really curious if he thinks that he has an exportable ideology (and if so, if it lines up with his fanboys’ expectations).
An interesting question. I don't think so but I'm not sure. His foreign clients don't have much obvious commonality. Trump and Farage do with each other but not with Assad. And I'm not aware that he's supported, even rhetorically, rightist authoritarians like Duterte and Bolsonaro outside what he perceives as his sphere of influence (I could be wrong here), which suggests he's practicing realpolitik, albeit clumsily.
The arguments that:
1) In 2013, it was clear and obvious that the best way forward economically for Ukraine was greater EU integration.
2) Russophone Ukrainians supported greater EU integration because 1 was so clear and obvious.
3) Because of 2, Euromaidan had popular support across Ukraine.
4) Euromaidan destroyed the "cleft" nature of Ukraine.
Are all completely false.
1) In 2013 Belarus had a similar PPP-adjusted per capita GDP to Romania, so even comparing full EU integration to full Russia integration the choice wasn't that clear cut. Furthermore, joining Russia's economic bloc would have almost certainly been easier than joining the EU due to laxer requirements on things like corruption. And when you look at the actual deals that were on the table, the deal that Putin was offering was arguably better economically than what the EU was offering in 2013.
2) As late as February 2014, polls found that 41% of Ukrainians favored EU membership over a Customs Union with Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, but 36% favoring the opposite, not a hgue difference. The results were heavily polarized by region, with the parts of the country that voted for Tymoshenko in 2010 heavily favoring the EU and the parts that voted for Yanukovych heavily favoring the Russian Customs Union.
3) Euromaidan protests were far more active in the West and Center of the country than in the South and East, as shown by this map of Euromaidan RSA building occupations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Euromaidan_regional_state_administration_occupations#/media/File:Euromaidan_RSA_occupations.png Polls found that the Ukrainian public was around 50/50 for and against the protests with heavy regional polarization, West and Center being far more supportive and South and East being far more opposed.
4) Yanukovych's overthrow sparked Pro-Russian "Anti-Maidan" protests throughout the South and East of the country in response. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_pro-Russian_unrest_in_Ukraine In Crimea, Russian troops used these protests as cover to take over the peninsula with by all accounts approval from a majority of the local population. In Donetsk and Luhansk the protests succeeded in overthrowing their local governments. In Kharkiv protestors succeeded in taking over the RSA building and declared a "Kharkov People's Republic", only for that attempt to be crushed by Ukrainian special forces a day later. There were active protests throughout the South of the country as well, with protests in Odessa only being suppressed in May after a particularly grisly act of violence by "Pro-Maidan" street fighters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Odesa_clashes#Trade_Unions_House_fire
So rather than the events of 2013-14 in Ukraine being evidence against the "Clash of Civilization" theory and for the "End of History" theory as you claim, they are actually strong evidence pointing in the opposite direction. A huge part of Ukraine actively and violently rejected a pro-Western and pro-European integration "revolution," going directly against the End Of History thesis. Huntington put too much weight on religion (though election maps clearly show that Catholic Galicia is especially pro-West even for Western Ukraine, so there is still a significant effect there even if it is not the whole story) and as a result drew the dividing line in Ukraine too far West, but his predictions are still a lot closer to the mark than Fukuyama's were. Though I agree with you that Huntington's predictions with regards to China and its neighbors seem to be pretty clearly wrong.
At the time your blog post was written, the claim that Russia's invasion greatly reduced pro-Russian sentiment in Ukraine, and with it the country's "cleft" nature seemed very plausible. But since then, Russia has pretty much de facto annexed large swaths of Southern Ukraine, with everything from replacing the currency to handing out Russian passports, local occupation leaders are increasingly talking about referendums for de jure annexation, and in great contrast to the tremendous resistance Russian forces faced in the areas around Kyiv a serious insurgency has yet to appear. Reports about the "resistance" in Kherson, historically the most pro-Western city in Southeast Ukraine, talk about it spray painting graffiti and distributing leaflets warning people against obtaining Russian passports or voting in referendums, pretty weak considering the circumstances. There are a few bombings per month, but it's not clear whether those are coming from local rebels or Ukrainian special forces infiltrators.
In hindsight reactions to the initial invasion may not have been a good test because when Putin announced the invasion he said that he did not intend to occupy Ukrainian territory (after recognizing Crimea and Donbas as Not Ukraine), and for the first 40 days or so of the invasion Russian officials continued to make various statements indicating that they did not want to keep territory outside of Crimea and Donbas. This meant that any Ukrainians outside of Donbas who wanted to welcome or help Russian troops would have been afraid to do so, because they might get punished as "collaborators" after the Russians left.
So it seems like "Cleft Ukraine" might not be quite dead after all.
"Putin annexing Crimea ... had the unintended effect of weakening pro-Russian groups’ electoral strength in Ukraine." [Includes footnote 2.]
Some analysts have said that Khrushchev's intended effect of moving Crimea from Soviet Russia to Soviet Ukraine was to make Ukraine more Russian and less Ukrainian. Putin moving it back undid that.
The takes on China's positioning in this post seem to take their outward statements at face value ("no limits" to their support of Russia) but most economic / China watchers have observed that their banks have seemingly mostly enforced sanctions compliance on the DL, if only for selfish "gee, it could be a hassle to skirt them..." reasons.
That sort of squares with a more measured view of Chinese foreign policy that is painfully aware of just how entangled it is with the West (whether they like to flaunt it or not), and also squares with recent history (ie. Paulson's anecdote about how, in 2008 the Russians tried to convince the Chinese to sell off US securities to cause a global run and the Chinese came to us, narced on the Russians, and told us they wanted no part of it).
Clearly, China is trying to have it both ways and talking ott of both sides of it's mouth...but they stilo recognize just how much they stand to lose in any global crisis where the US decides to toss it's economic weight around...or both China and the US engaged in economically mutual destruction beyons tits and tats of trade wars.
Matt - I'm surprised you didn't bring this up, but there was a third major post-Cold War view of history that became popular in the 90s, on par with "The Clash of Civilizations" and "The End of History" (which I agree is a much better thesis than people give credit to).
The view was that the Cold War represented a temporary departure from the long-run logic of international relations, which is power competition between states. With the demise of the bipolar world, the thesis went, great power competition would reassert itself -- and given that the first thing that happened after the end of the Cold War was the 1991 Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, I think there's quite a lot to be said for this point of view.
Anyway, the article that best articulated this view was called "Back To The Future", published in International Security in 1990 and written by John Mearsheimer.
Seems like a good opportunity to put in a plug for libertarianism...
Libertarians look at the world from the perspective of the individual, not the group. And what does the "selfish" individual want? He wants to be left alone to engage in the "pursuit of happiness"- career, recreation, family, friends. Only when the individual is drawn into some kind of collective is he energized to march across town or around the world to try to dominate others and tell them how they should live.
I asked my wife, a member of the protestant clergy, if she knew about this filioque and autocephaly business. She looked at me like I’m the idiot I am and launched into a learned disquisition on the two concepts, adding that I’m finally getting something useful from my subscription.
Two things.
1. On Ukraine. In 2013, the economic deal Russia offered Yanukovych was, arguably, better than what the EU offered. And while the Visegrad states have been doing economically well in the EU, the results are more mixed for Bulgaria/Romania, and it's not even like the EU was all that eager to add Ukraine if it asked, in 2013. The 2014 protests weren't because people wanted to be rich rather than poor, they were because people wanted to be middle-class in a democracy rather than middle-class in a dictatorship; liberalism turned out to be something people actually do still care about, and Putinism something they didn't want. Now, this all gradually went sour, militarily and then economically, and led to Zelensky's election in 2019 as a moderate candidate. But - Zelensky failed to deliver on his campaign promises. His government didn't even really try to negotiate with Russia, economic problems continued, he made various erratic statements, and eventually he had something like a 25% approval rating. In January 2022, *Ukraine was still a cleft country*. It was only Putin's invasion, and especially the fact that it specifically targeted the formerly pro-Russian parts of Ukraine, that ended this. Mariupol used to be the most pro-Russian city in Ukraine.... More generally, Ukrainians were pro-Russian not because they were all paid by the FSB, but because they thought a pro-Russian policy was best for Ukraine, and now that's been firmly disproven in bloody fashion (see: https://eventsinukraine.substack.com/p/why-there-is-little-support-for-russia?s=w ).
2. On narratives. Fukuyama's framing of the Cold War as a clash of narratives, "democracy" vs "communism", does resonate. But the thing is, neoliberalism abandoned said utopian ideal. The answer to "we won, what now?" wound up being "maximize GDP". Now, there's the question of whether that's actually the same thing as increasing well-being - I view GDP as still being subject to Goodhart's law, but I know economists disagree. But even apart from that, it turns out dictatorships do just fine at increasing GDP. If the Western narrative is only about money, China has money to spare. Now, in practice, as Ukraine's 2014 showed - as indeed Ukraine's 2022 is showing - liberalism has an appeal that does go beyond money. And it does feel like there's narratives for the future that are forming, including here. Some of them will be contradictory, and hopefully they can keep their disagreements peaceful.... But I think that this was a major wrong turn in the West. (And notably, Putinism is - or at least was, before Putin went crazy - very much opposed to utopian ideals of any sort, instead embracing a soul-deep cynicism and oppressing *especially* strongly anything resembling genuine optimism.)
I'd never looked into Huntington's work in detail, but learning that he put Latin America in a different "civilization" than "the West" has managed to lower my opinion of him even below what it was before.
You might want to update a few of the side remarks about Serbia - they've actually voted against Russia and with the EU in several recent UN votes, rather than abstaining like India and Pakistan, or voting with Russia like Belarus, Eritrea, North Korea, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
I suspect we don’t need to do anything about China, honestly. They don’t seem particularly interested in international relations aside from their build-up to the ever imminent war with Taiwan.
Russian decline helps here, I think, since it relieves the major pressure they feel: security for their supply of food and minerals.
Anyone who invades Vietnam is nuts. The Chinese even tried it once before, you'd think they'd learn!
I think this is right but also there's more to the story than simply an endgame where it's "good government vs bad government". Branco Milanovic has a book Capitalism, Alone which outlines a new ideological struggle between two flavors of capitalism: Western style "liberal capitalism" and China style "political capitalism". And China appears to be making a big effort to export its version of governance to leaders of other countries, for example by giving them access to surveillance and internet censoring technologies while at the same time bringing them closer into their sphere of economic influence.
In general I think something that's absent from this sort of grand political science discourse is the idea that ideological possibility space supervenes on, is constrained by, and lags behind paradigmatic shifts in technology and industrial organization. You don't get the Enlightenment without the printing press, or Communism without the industrial revolution, or Fascism without radio and TV, or Chinese-style political capitalism without the internet. But since paradigmatic shifts are inherently impossible predict, it's therefore also impossible to predict what future ideological possibilities there will be in the future. Which I think poses real difficulties for "End of History" type arguments.
I think you’re making a common mistake in critiques of Huntington, where people focus way too much on the specific contours of the map rather than his larger points. Sure, a larger “Orthodox civilization” may not be super coherent, but it’s clear that Russia currently sees itself as a distinct civilization undergirded *by* Orthodoxy, and Ukraine is somehow part of that project. See Putin’s rhetoric about Kiev being the Mother of Russian cities and such. The idea of so-called civilizational states, which has become popular in counties from Turkey to China to India, is very much Huntingtonian, as this great article elaborates on: https://www.noemamag.com/the-attack-of-the-civilization-state/
It’s also not really true that all the non-sanctioning countries are poor. See Israel, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE. Chile is richer than Romania, yet only the latter is sanctioning Russia. So there’s more going on here than capacity.
Russia is a strategic component of the European supply chain. It’s part of the European civilization as much as Poland or Ukraine.
And there is no ideological dispute with Putin. He’s just a greedy bastard.
Ukraine is just a shitburger from past decisions, internal disputes, Germany being a bag of dicks, Europe needing cheap labor and America having a president that is stuck in the Cold War. Its just a bunch of separate entities vying selfishly for their own ends. Got to go with end of history I guess.
I wonder how much Samuel Huntington was playing the computer game Civilisation when he came out with his theory? Has anybody else actually wondered this? Forty years ago, nobody thought Russia and Ukraine were Orthodox at all, but communist atheists. His whole theory strikes me as rubbish. "Sure, Korea and China have had major disputes over the centuries, but they all look alike and write a funny alphabet, so they are the same."
Huntington struck me as more of a cribbage guy.
Also missing is recognition of the significance of the discovery of major petrochemical resources in eastern Ukraine and the Black Sea. They were large enough to allow the Ukraine to compete with Russia to supply Europe
I agree that Putin can probably be considered as an extra-large thug (a cartel but more so) --- especially given his connection to organized crime in the 90s. However, it's possible that there is an exportable ideology there. Say what you will about the neo-reactionary movement, but it is an ideology. Maybe Putin believes something along those lines. We can't read his mind.
Certainly his many far-right fanboys in the West think so. An ideology doesn't have to be highly developed or even coherent to be influential.
Agreed. That said, even many of his detractors think (or at least thought) that he’s playing n-dimensional chess, so I think many give him more credit than he deserves. I’m really curious if he thinks that he has an exportable ideology (and if so, if it lines up with his fanboys’ expectations).
An interesting question. I don't think so but I'm not sure. His foreign clients don't have much obvious commonality. Trump and Farage do with each other but not with Assad. And I'm not aware that he's supported, even rhetorically, rightist authoritarians like Duterte and Bolsonaro outside what he perceives as his sphere of influence (I could be wrong here), which suggests he's practicing realpolitik, albeit clumsily.