ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the nature of Vladimir Putin's regime and argues that, since the end of Putin's first presidential term, he started to feel that his authority incurred a deficit of international and domestic legitimacy. The resulting feeling of unsustainability eventually locked Moscow in a spiral of self-fulfilling prophecies: the more repressive Putin's corrupt regime became against the largely imaginary threats, the less legitimacy it enjoyed internationally, the more threatened Putin felt. The chapter also shows that, since Putin's second term, Moscow increasingly positioned itself as a power whose legitimacy derived from alternative, illiberal political ideas, some of which clearly originate from the far right. Putin's Russia is intrinsically an authoritarian kleptocracy that nevertheless seeks to be considered a peculiarly Russian form of democracy in order to gain internal and external legitimacy. Importantly, Putin's regime had sufficient financial resources to indulge anti-Westernism.
