History and culture can help us understand influences on behavior but they can easily be overstated; nothing accurately predicts complex human behavior in war. This historico-cultural context is a necessary starting point to help identify the point at which the Russians are more or less likely to quit. A great deal of scholarship about Russian history and culture focuses on several key factors that shape the country’s approach to conflict: trauma, nationalism, spirituality, and fatalism. All four of these factors are closely interwoven and effectively inseparable: Trauma feeds fatalism, fatalism and spirituality feed nationalism, nationalism reinforces fatalism, and so on. All these compelling factors emerge repeatedly in modern Russian propaganda, literature, video, and, perhaps most importantly, in the fleeting but often forthright insights from Russian civilians and soldiers. They culminate in what may best be described by the late scholar Evgeny Yasin as a “tragic passivity” that has thus far rendered many Russians vulnerable to Putin’s finely tuned and omnipresent manipulations.

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