The desire for order, adds Ruble, is not so unusual and is one that is shared by millions of ordinary Russians. However, Ruble says Putin's leadership style is much more centralized than that of his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin. An important area of concern for U.S. policy planners, says Ruble, is emergent anti-Americanism. Ruble says that sometimes these anti-American pronouncements have been explicit. At other times, he says the sentiment has been cloaked in ambiguous statements about combating what Ruble says the Moscow elites call unipolarity.
Ruble says unipolarity is a code word for American hegemony.
The U.S. expert says Russian statements about Russia's neighbors should also elicit concern. I think there is a sense that emerges from Putin's pronouncements, from the debate in general that Russian domination of the region is a normal state of affairs, one that's driven by history and by economics, and it's really the last ten years when neighboring states had more autonomy that are the aberration. We need to recognize these trends but we also need to recognize that the foreign policy environment and the political environment within Russia has really been transformed over the last decade. However, Blank contends this effort is being carried out by a state that cannot support itself by its own means or cannot defend itself by its own means. This predicament, he says, has led Russia to try and affect regional balances in major strategic areas of the world.