War has always been a rational instrument of statecraft. Nations have deployed military force to acquire territory, secure borders, protect strategic interests, expand influence, or alter the balance of power. It has also functioned as a mechanism of domestic stabilization, redirecting internal discontent toward a common enemy.
What distinguishes Vladimir Putin’s behavior is that the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine was not preceded by the kind of domestic crisis that has historically triggered diversionary wars. Russia has also continued to escalate even as the strategic returns are increasingly marginal.
Leading military research institutions, including the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) and the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), say many of Moscow’s long-range missile strikes against Ukrainian cities have yielded only limited military returns despite their considerable cost.
What, then, is the point of perpetual conflict for the Russian leadership?
For the Kremlin, military escalation has ceased to be merely an instrument of foreign policy and has become a structural and psychological necessity.
The writing of German philosopher Hannah Arendt offers an important bridge between political and psychological explanations. In her 1970 book On Violence, which drew on her personal experience of the Nazis, she wrote that violence should not be confused with genuine political power.
Whereas power rests on legitimacy and collective support, violence becomes increasingly necessary when legitimacy recedes. Rather than demonstrating the strength of a regime, escalating coercion may therefore signal an erosion of the political conditions on which genuine authority rests.
From this perspective, social psychologist Erich Fromm’s analysis of the authoritarian personality helps explain why Putin finds violence compelling. In Escape from Freedom and The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness, Fromm argued that malignant aggression doesn’t emerge from genuine strength, but as a compensatory response to vulnerability.
When authoritarian leaders experience an erosion of their authority, they seek to dominate what threatens them, using coercion as a means of restoring internal psychological equilibrium.
A feature of Putin’s rule is that several major episodes of military escalation have followed periods of perceived vulnerability. From Chechnya and Georgia to Crimea and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, external confrontation has functioned as a way to compensate for a perceived lack of control by transforming domestic or geopolitical insecurity into demonstrations of strength.
Yet aggression alone cannot sustain such a system. If conflict functions as a psychological defense against insecurity, reality itself becomes dangerous. Military failures, economic decline, and the human costs of war all threaten to expose the gap between the regime’s self-image and the world that actually exists. The towers of smoke from burning refineries struck by Ukrainian drones in St Petersburg and Moscow in recent weeks illustrate precisely this contradiction.
To shield itself, the regime constructs an alternative reality, and as personalized power concentrates in the Kremlin, the leader’s perceived vulnerabilities come to be treated as threats to the state. Personal fears, grievances, and ambitions gradually become institutionalized, blurring the boundaries between individual psychology and statecraft.
This fusion of leader and state is vividly reflected in Putin’s rhetoric. In his speeches, Russia is consistently depicted as a besieged victim confronting existential threats imposed by hostile external forces. The leader’s personal worldview has become state ideology.
The Kremlin has created a heavily controlled information environment to protect itself from the psychological and moral consequences of its own violence. Once the leader’s worldview is embedded in state institutions, it must be protected from contradictory evidence.
Arendt argues that the objective of authoritarian propaganda is not only to persuade people of a particular falsehood, but to erode confidence in the very possibility of objective truth.
The aftermath of the 2022 Bucha massacre near Kyiv offers a stark demonstration of this strategy. Rather than offering a single counter-narrative, the Kremlin deployed dozens of contradictory explanations simultaneously: the killings never happened; the victims were actors; Ukraine staged the atrocity; Western intelligence fabricated the digital evidence.
By creating a disorienting information environment, the regime induces a state of apathy among domestic audiences and exports uncertainty around the world, eroding trust in institutions and fragmenting public discourse. Citizens and external audiences then become increasingly susceptible to Russian propaganda
From Fromm’s perspective, this ideological fortress functions as a psychological defense against destabilizing realities. Seeing the regime’s narrative simply as conscious lies misreads the phenomenon. Over time, the distinction between strategic manipulation and genuine conviction begins to dissolve.
This political deception also relies on the systemic inversion of language. Prominent examples include the Kremlin’s reframing of aggression as defense, coercion as necessity, and occupation as liberation.
This ideological inversion also shapes Putin’s public role. He is elevated from a political leader into the symbolic defender of the Russkiy Mir, or Russian World — a figure destined to protect against existential destruction.
Having spent decades constructing this alternative reality, the Kremlin is now constrained by it. Retreat from Ukraine would require dismantling the narratives on which its authority depends.
The challenge facing Western policymakers is therefore far deeper than constructing a diplomatic settlement. They must confront a political system that has become structurally dependent on conflict, psychologically invested in aggression, and linguistically insulated from reality.
At this point, escalation is no longer simply a strategic choice. It has become part of the regime’s political structure; it is embedded within the psychological defenses of its ruling elite. Such systems do not merely fear military defeat; they fear the return of reality itself. For Putin, peace is profoundly dangerous not because it threatens Russia’s national security, but because it threatens the fragile psychological and institutional foundations on which his regime relies.
John Christer Tønnessen is a lecturer at the University of Bergen, Norway, where he works on the clinical and research aspects of severe personality pathology. His work focuses on how these psychological dynamics become institutionalized within authoritarian state structures. He has also contributed to the Norwegian security debate through articles and commentary in major national newspapers.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
