The Return of the Russian Leviathan

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On 23 February 2014, President Vladimir Putin stood on the podium of the Fisht Olympic Stadium in Sochi and presided over the closing ceremony of the Winter Olympic Games. For the first time in many years, Russia had won, coming top of the unofficial medal table. The world had yet to learn of the doping scam that was behind the triumph in Sochi; at that moment it was Putin’s personal victory. He had shown the world the Russia that he had built, with its pretence at global leadership, its vertical of power, its skyscrapers in the Moscow City business area, its victories on both the sporting and the gas fronts, and its fabulously expensive Winter Olympiad, which had been put on in a subtropical region.

That very same morning, 23 February, the decision was taken in the Kremlin to annex Crimea from Ukraine. Russian special forces, spetsnaz, wearing unmarked uniforms, began to land in Crimea and seize strategic points. They were referred to as ‘little green men’. Within a month, on 17 March, Crimea declared its independence, and the next day it was incorporated into Russia. Russia fell into a spectacular downward spiral from its Olympic heights. It went from being a triumphant country and member of the G8, to being an outcast, a country that flew in the face of international law and the world order, one by one ripping out the threads that had tied it to the outside world, destroying all the structures of normality and globalization which Russia had built up in the quarter of a century since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

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