Russia as an Existential Challenge: Moral Machinery, Strategic Logic, and What the Free World Must Do
Journal: Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Year: 2025

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 This paper is a public working draft and has not been peer reviewed.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 admi