Russian president Vladimir Putin wants you to believe that NATO is responsible for his February 24 invasion of Ukraine—that rounds of NATO enlargement made Russia insecure, forcing Putin to lash out. This argument has two key flaws. First, NATO has been a variable and not a constant source of tension between Russia and the West. Moscow has in the past acknowledged Ukraine’s right to join NATO; the Kremlin’s complaints about the alliance spike in a clear pattern after democratic breakthroughs in the post-Soviet space. This highlights a second flaw: Since Putin fears democracy and the threat that it poses to his regime, and not expanded NATO membership, taking the latter off the table will not quell his insecurity. His declared goal of the invasion, the “denazification” of Ukraine, is a code for his real aim: antidemocratic regime change.
Food has been crucial to the survival of regimes since the emergence of early states. Yet despite its significance, until recently food availability was rarely discussed as a principal political issue outside the global South. This essay centers on the political role of food in Putin’s Russia and the Kremlin’s longstanding goal of establishing nutritional autarky that would insulate the regime from dependence on food imports. We present the origins of Putin’s food policies, their ideological basis and the forms that they have taken since early 2000s. We also discuss Russia’s use of food as a weapon during the 2022 war in Ukraine.
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