Vladimir Putin. Press Association/Dmitri Lovetsky. All rights reserved.Though often misquoted, Vladimir Putin has said that the disintegration of the Soviet Union was “a great geo-political disaster of the twentieth century.” In late 2016, he insisted that the Soviet Union did not need to disintegrate but could have been “reformed”.
Rebuilding this vital power has been a long game for Putin and one with real ideological resonance.
To be clear, his strategy does not involve putting the USSR back together in the old sense. He is creating something stronger: capable of excelling at the guerrilla warfare of the rogue digital network (outside the jurisdictions of individual nation states).
