NO EXIT: How Stone-Cold Vladimir Putin’s Backstory Predicts His Destiny in Ukraine and Moscow

As usual, Bill has a thoroughly considered view on this subject, especially given his long interest in and knowledge of Russian/Soviet history, and now also because of the insights of his wife. Bill makes the case that Putin is and always was someone who wants to be at or near the power and control positions so historically Russian in nature, and that in becoming one he has become isolated, unable to listen to critics who wouldn’t dare question him. But in the article I refer to below, Putin HAS listened to others, including one Alexander Dugin. 
I’m including excerpts (in quotes) from “The warped mind behind Russia’s war”: ( https://www.spiked-online.com/2022/04/22/the-warped-mind-behind-russias-war/ ). I’m doing so in the interest of suggesting there may be more, perhaps a lot more, than Putin trying to reconstitute the Soviet empire, or acting like a tyrant holding on to the last vestiges of communism. I do not see Russia as communism because it is enabling the reconstitution of traditional religion, something communism obviously did or does not. So in this I differ from Bill’s conclusion. 
Alexander Dugin, is a current Russian philosopher who Putin has apparently followed and listened to from time to time. But unlike the title of the article, it actually makes the case that the real force behind Putin’s Russia as a reaction to the West’s anti-traditionalism, hedonism, and wokeism. and, I would add, anti-religionism. See if you might think the same.  
I’m also very inclined to consider deeper Russian motives above because I am so opposed to the West’s deep state globalists pushing their anti-Russan narrative in so similar a fashion as they have pushed so many of their false narratives the past decades. Such as climate change that isn’t, a pandemic that wasn’t, a vaccine that wasn’t, racism that wasn’t and isn’t etc. So why are we so willing to endorse this globalist/Biden narrative hook, line and sinker? Perhaps the globalists et al can be right like a broken clock twice a day, but they have lied to and deceived the world so fully, I remain justifiably skeptical.  
Anyway, here’s some additional quotes from the article that bear some investigation, in my opinion. 
“In 2014, a Foreign Affairs article described Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin as ‘Putin’s brain’.
“At the time, it seemed a fitting epithet. The then 52-year-old Dugin was championing Russia’s annexation of Crimea and urging on the further conquest of the Donbas in eastern Ukraine. Superficially, at least, he seemed to be uncannily in tune with the Kremlin.”
“There were countless other parallels emerging during the mid-2010s between Dugin’s thought and Russia’s political trajectory. He had long championed Russia as the leader of a Eurasian bloc, not dissimilar to the actual Eurasian Economic Union which came into being in 2014. He had consistently attacked the moral hegemony of the West, much as Putin started to do from his famous 2007 Munich Security Conference speech onwards.”
”Since 2014, Dugin’s influence over the Russian president seems only to have grown. Today he is conjured up as the ideological driving force behind Russia’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine, the dark Rasputin-like power behind Putin’s de facto throne. He’s ‘the Russian fascist who helped to convince Putin to invade’, ‘the man behind Putin’, the thinker who, in the words of the Washington Post, ‘has brought us here, to the brink of another world war’.”
“It’s wrong to say he’s “Putin’s brain”, that he’s sitting at the end of these gigantic tables, whispering [in his ear]’, he tells me. ‘But neither is it true that Dugin’s a blowhard who managed to beguile academic and journalistic commentators into thinking he’s significant when he’s really not.”
“Alexander Dugin is significant then. Not because he exerts any direct influence on Putin. And not because well-thumbed Dugin tomes sit on Russian generals’ bookshelves. But because he has helped forge, as a leading part of an increasingly active nationalist intellectual milieu, something that Russia’s ruling elite has lacked since the fall of Communism: namely, a sense of national mission, of near spiritual purpose. To use Teitelbaum’s words, Dugin has ‘narrativised’ and ‘characterised’ Russia. Through his books, lectures and media appearances, he has told Russia’s leaders over and over again what Russia supposedly once was and what it should become again – not just a great power, but a spiritual power, a bulwark of tradition against the nihilistic, everything-goes liberalism of the West.[my emphasis]
“And this reveals something important about not just Dugin’s thought, but also about the nature of the Russian nationalism he has played such a key role in promoting. In Dugin’s telling, Russia is fighting on behalf of the East against the West. In Dugin’s telling, Russia embodies tradition, spiritual truth and order against the soulless materialism, individualism and moral decay of the West.”
“Russian nationalism, Dugin-style, draws not on Russian strength, but on the longstanding turn among Western cultural elites against Enlightenment and modernity, from Nietzsche’s assault on Western nihilism to its latest iteration among the woke.”