Russia as an Existential Challenge: Moral Machinery, Strategic Logic, and What the Free World Must Do

Working paper (Version 1, 2025). This paper is a public working draft and has not been peer reviewed. Comments welcome. Abstract: This essay argues that Putin’s Russia constitutes an existential challenge to the post-1945 security and moral order: not simply a revisionist state pursuing limited bargains, but a regime whose internal reproduction is tied to external coercion. In such systems, war is not an episodic instrument; it becomes a governance mode, a moral permission structure, and an administrative technology for dissolving responsibility. The paper connects three levels of analysis: (1) the historical arc from post-Soviet illusion to serial aggression (Chechnya, Georgia, Crimea/Donbas, and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine); (2) regime typology, including the problem of “fascization” as described by comparative researchers; and (3) the ethical mechanics by which societies can retain moral language while losing moral agency—a condition I have elsewhere called “moral sterilization”. Against this background, the paper tests competing prescriptions: restraint and negotiated settlement versus deterrence and containment with sustained support for Ukraine. It concludes that appeasement fails not only tactically but structurally: it teaches the regime that coercion works and the defender—that escalation is more frightening than defeat. The strategic task, therefore, is to restore the ethics of responsibility to politics: to ensure, in practice, that aggression does not pay; to build institutional resilience against hybrid coercion; and to prepare for the long moral work of post-war reconstruction and accountability without collapsing into collective hatred or nihilism. Keywords: Russia; Ukraine; Russia–Ukraine war; deterrence; containment; coercion; hybrid warfare; fascization; ethics of war; moral sterilization; responsibility ethics; appeasement; institutional resilience; accountability. Suggested citation: Kolesnikov, R. (2025). Russia as an Existential Challenge: Moral Machinery, Strategic Logic, and What the Free World Must Do [Working paper]. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18047221 Contact: [email protected]