I have now a research project focused on ideological inspirations of Russia’s foreign policy and today I would like to present in an extremely shortened way the link between Neo-Eurasianism, Alexander Dugin, who is its nowadays prophet and brain, and Russian intervention in Ukraine.

I will start with a little bit of history to connect the topics. Here is a statement made by former Russian president Boris Yeltsin in a press-conference after the disintegration of the Soviet Union. In order to fill this gap he lunched the so called operation “Russian Idea” – a public appeal to intellectuals to create a new Russian Idea capable of providing a coherent ideological foundation for Russian’s internal and especially external policy. In the following years, a former marginal and extremist intellectual became the one of the main intellectuals figures in Russian’s establishment.

Alexander Dugin, the Russian philosopher and political activist, has attracted sporadic coverage in English-language publications over the past year. He is an engaging figure—prolific, radical, bearded, equally at home in university seminars and posing with tanks in South Ossetia and eastern Ukraine. He comes from a family of Soviet Military Intelligence officers. An anticommunist in the 1980s, he worked closely with the remnants of the Communist Party after the fall of the Soviet Union. In the mid-1990s, he became involved with National Bolshevism. His works became main textbooks in Russian military academies and many IR departments in Russian Universities integrated his thought in their programs. He was adviser to many officials from the military and political elite, including Putin. Foreign Affairs Magazine described him as Putin’s Brain. By the end of the 1990s he organized his views into a geostrategic ideology and a complex political metaphysics known respectively as Neo-Eurasianism and Fourth Political Theory. Further I will focus just on Neo-Eurasianism.

• Neo-Eurasianism is … a particular tradition of theorising Russia’s identity and place in the world

• … a historical account which present Russia as the heartland of a hypothetically Eurasian civilization antagonized by the Western bloc

• … at a more instrumental level it is an ideology which seeks to re-establish Soviet borders and Russian influence in Europe by replacing communism with the idea of a common Eurasian identity which former soviet republics share.

• Eurasia is a special geographical space and civilizational zone – which incorporates the legacy of the former Russian Empire and then Soviet Union.

• “The most important historical task of Eurasianism,”Dugin states, “is to provide the world with a common platform for the struggle against Atlanticism.

In the context of the supposed incompatibility between Western and Russian Idea in global politics, in the same work (by the way, the book was co-authored by General Nikolai Klokotov of the General Staff Academy, Dugin writes about Ukraine. Remember, it was written in 1996:

“Ukraine's further existence of the unit is inadmissible. Thisterritory should be divided into several areas corresponding range of realitiesgeopolitical and ethnic minorities. Direct annexation of Crimea to Russia will stir extremely negative reaction and will createproblems integrating the peninsula in the Russian system. However, to leave Crimea to a "sovereign Ukraine" is impossible because this will create a direct threat to Russia's security.”