I believed this at the beginning of the Ukraine war and went to read Dugin's philosophy to get a sense of where this was all headed. I believe that the Dugin-centric view of Russian _realpolitik_ is an intellectual meme moreso than an accurate view of reality.
Dugin's thought is being used as a rosetta stone in Kremlinology, but I believe that _Foundations of Geopolitics_ has been coöpted as an intellectual veil for a bare Russian imperialism. There is not a lot of evidence that Russia is trying to enact actual Duginist political thinking (which is a specific kind of ethnocentrism highly influenced by Heidegger; he outlines it in _The Fourth Political Theory_). It's being used in a way not dissimilar to Marx being co-opted as a means to domination in Leninism.
We are looking for a more complex answer to a simple problem, which is that an authoritarian leader obsessed with dominance wants to expand that sphere of power where he feels wronged. It doesn't have to be intellectual.
Marx isn’t being co-opted by Leninism. It builds on Marxism. Have you read The State and Revolution or Imperialism or What is to be Done? Unless you mean dominating the bourgeoisie which is what Marxism is about too.
Dugin's thought is being used as a rosetta stone in Kremlinology, but I believe that _Foundations of Geopolitics_ has been coöpted as an intellectual veil for a bare Russian imperialism. There is not a lot of evidence that Russia is trying to enact actual Duginist political thinking (which is a specific kind of ethnocentrism highly influenced by Heidegger; he outlines it in _The Fourth Political Theory_). It's being used in a way not dissimilar to Marx being co-opted as a means to domination in Leninism.
We are looking for a more complex answer to a simple problem, which is that an authoritarian leader obsessed with dominance wants to expand that sphere of power where he feels wronged. It doesn't have to be intellectual.