In the post-Cold War era, Western policymakers misread Russia and projected their own hopes onto a state that never intended to follow a rules-based democratic system.
That’s what Brian Whitmore, a nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center and founder of The Power Vertical podcast, argues in a new report, “How the West Lost the Post-Cold War Era.”
Whitmore tells Independence Avenue Media that the aggressive and expansionist Russia of today is not the result of a sudden change of course by Russian President Vladimir Putin, but one that has always existed beneath a thin veneer of Western denial.
“Russian imperialism was, is and I believe always will be the ideology of Russia,” says Whitmore.
Three decades after the Cold War’s triumphant end, Western misjudgments have culminated in an emboldened Russia and a war in Europe that many believed history had rendered impossible, says Whitmore.
In conversation with Independence Avenue Media, Whitmore traces how these miscalculations took root, why they persisted despite repeated warning signs — from Chechnya to the full-scale invasion of Ukraine — and what it will take to avoid repeating them.
The following interview, recorded on April 3, 2026, has been edited for length and clarity.
Mariia Ulianovska, Independence Avenue Media: I want to begin with how you start your report. You write that “the West was fooled by the illusion of Russian politics and missed its essence. For the past three decades, many Western assumptions about Russia have been flawed.” What were the assumptions? What was wrong about them? And how did we end up here?
Brian Whitmore, senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center: Largely the West was fooled that Russia could be enticed into being a status quo power. It could be enticed into buying into the rules-based international order that came at the end of the Cold War when Russia never had any intention of doing that. The West looked at the theater of Russian politics.
I explain this to my students: “When you look at Russia, it could be confusing because they have all the stuff we have, right? They have a president, and they have a legislature, and they have courts, and they have elections. But none of these things are like the stuff we have. Their elections aren’t really elections. Their parliament’s not really a parliament. Their president’s really an emperor. And their courts operate according to how they’re instructed to by the executive branch.”
So we were fooled by this theater. And we missed the essence.
IAM: You also say that communism wasn’t the problem. Could you elaborate a little bit about it?
Whitmore: For more than a generation, communism was the enemy. And the Soviet Union was the communist threat. And when communism fell, there was this feeling that the problem has been solved. Now Russia’s just going to turn into a democracy like us.
What I meant there is that communism is just simply the 20th century manifestation of centuries-old Russian imperialism. And Russian imperialism was, is and I believe always will be the ideology of Russia. I have a very difficult time seeing how they break out of this imperialist mindset. You know the old saying: “Russian liberalism stops at the Ukrainian border,” right? And so we discovered this.
But we were slow to pick up on this. There were signs very very very early in the game. I start that chapter with the crisis in Narva in Estonia in 1993 when Russia was trying to stir up trouble with the Russophone and ethnic Russian population of eastern Estonia.
And this is early in the game. This is the early ‘90s when we were still kind of celebrating the triumph of democracy in Russia. They were doing this. They were playing games in Ukraine, not as overtly as they were in Estonia at that time, but they were playing games in Ukraine, laying the groundwork for things that would come later. And we just missed this. We kind of excused it. We all saw this as part of a bumpy transition to democracy and that Russia would get over this eventually. And no, they didn’t get over it and they’re not going to get over it. And that’s where I think we were slow to understand that Russia is in essence imperial.
IAM: So why do you think the West kept ignoring Chechnya, Moldova, Georgia, the annexation of Crimea, and the first occupation of Ukraine? Why did people in the West keep so persistently forgiving Russia?
Whitmore: Policymakers kind of see what they expect to see, they see what they want to see. And I believe that Western policymakers, not just in the U.S., but across the West, were deeply invested in the success of post-Soviet Russia, because it affirmed their deepest values. And so there was a lot of confirmation bias, there was a lot of looking the other way.
And let’s face it, Russia’s big and we have to deal with them. So there was a reluctance to antagonize Russia, a fear that if we pushed Russia too hard, maybe they would elect an authoritarian government. Well, we didn’t push them hard and they elected an authoritarian government.
And again, a lot of the mistakes I point out were errors in analysis that I made throughout my career. This report is as much about my own intellectual journey as it is about the mistakes that Western policymakers made.
IAM: That’s actually quite interesting, because you yourself were a Russia optimist and you even say that you had to re-educate yourself. Can you walk us through this process? How did you come to realize that there was something wrong?
Whitmore: Ukraine had a lot to do with this.
I was actually in Moscow right before the Soviet flag came down. But I was educated in what used to be called Soviet studies, which had in Western universities, particularly American universities, a heavy kind of Russocentric bias.
The reason for this is that after 1917, a lot of White Russian [those who fled the former Russian Empire after the revolution and civil war] historians embedded themselves in Western universities, and were considered the experts on that part of the world, and they brought with them a very imperial version of Russian history that denied Ukrainian nationhood and statehood. This is why generations of Americans, North Americans, and Western Europeans were taught in university that these are Russian lands.
I took a job with a Western nonprofit and was stationed in Odesa, Ukraine. It was a nonprofit that sent young academics to Eastern European universities to help with educational reform. I was assigned to Mechnikov National University in Odesa. It was probably the happiest year in my life. And I had a very good friend who was teaching at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy — a historian by the name of Marta Diachok. She’s a Canadian of Ukrainian origin. And Marta and I got to be pretty good friends and I had this very Russocentric view and she moved me.
I’m going to be moved by the facts and it forced me to re-evaluate everything I had been taught up to that point. I was like wow, OK, I’m in my 30s now and I have to re-educate myself, I have to teach myself the history of Ukraine. I have to read Serhii Plokhy. I have to understand that all these countries have their independent histories and they are not appendages of Russia.
And that was really the big intellectual turn for me.
IAM: In your report you analyze the consequences of the mistake of thinking that Russia wants to be a democratic state. The current administration has a perception that Russia wants peace despite Russia continuing its war of aggression against Ukraine. How do you think this perception influences the peace process that the U.S. leads?
Whitmore: You kind of have to bracket out the current administration because it is so unique in so many ways. But even the traditional administrations — the Biden administration did a lot after Feb. 24, 2022, but they were still reluctant — I called it “fear of victory,” because there was a fear that if Ukraine had an unambiguous victory, Russia might do something crazy like use a nuclear weapon. And Russia plays into this. This is part of this old KGB tactic of reflexive control to kind of shape the information environment in a way that forces your interlocutor to behave the way you want them to behave.
We saw this with even more traditional administrations and we certainly saw it with the Obama administration back in 2014. I think both parties made mistakes. And both parties did move in positive directions — Bill Clinton did enlarge NATO and got that ball rolling. George W. Bush pushed for its enlargement into the former Soviet space and tried to get Ukraine and Georgia membership action plans at the Bucharest Summit. So it wasn’t all bad.
[British historian and diplomat] E.H. Carr argued that the policymakers in the beginning of the 20th century didn’t understand how the world was changing. The world was changing beneath their feet. And the same was happening at the moment of our supreme victory in the Cold War, which led to what I call the loss of the post-Cold War.
IAM: But you also argue that Russia has a lot to do with the decline of Western liberal values.
Whitmore: There was an explicit policy to do this.
What got my attention was a Kremlin white paper that came out in 2013 called “Vladimir Putin — World Conservatism’s Leader.” This report was from the Center for Strategic Communications, a Kremlin-connected think tank, which is often used to float policy ideas. It argued that Russia should intervene in the domestic politics of the West, exacerbating fissures in society, whether these are over race, ethnicity, language, gender, sexual orientation, sexual identity, or anything that splits the West — that Russia should do this.
And we saw an active measures campaign following that, which was doing just that, as well as interfering in not just our elections, but Germany’s elections, and France’s elections, and the Brexit referendum.
The idea was to divide the trans-Atlantic alliance, divide Americans, divide Europeans. Because Russia’s no match for the collective West. But if you divide the West, you can pick off each country individually.
Now I don’t want to put all of this on Russia. A lot of this was Russia pushing on an open door. What happened to our politics after the Cold War was that in the absence of the gravity of the Cold War, our politics became trivialized, tabloidized, gamified. And Russia learned how to hack that game.
The other thing I argue is that at the end of the Cold War, in contrast to the end of the Second World War, there was a social contract that was inclusive. That was designed to raise the working class up to make them part of the middle class, so there wouldn’t be this underclass and this inequality that opened the door in the ‘30s to communism and to fascism. And this was very consciously done in the post-World War II period.
In the post-Cold War period, it was a winner-take-all economy. It was a hyper-liberalized, hyper-privatized, deregulated economy which created a lot of economic growth, but it also created a lot of inequality and an underclass that was susceptible to demagogues.
But Russia understood that and they were pushing on it. Putin was kind of tapping into global skepticism about institutions, declining public trust across the world, rising polarization.
IAM: A lot of people in the West say that Vladimir Putin is the problem, that it’s “Putin’s war.” Do you agree?
Whitmore: No, it’s a systemic problem. I mean Putin didn’t come out of thin air. He emerged out of a society.
This is where I have arguments with my friends in the Russian opposition community and emigre community, because I don’t think the problem is Putin. What did Gleb Pavlovsky [Russian political consultant and former Kremlin advisor] say years ago? He said, “When Putin falls, he’ll fall in one day and will be replaced by somebody exactly like him.” And it might not be exactly like him. It could be somebody that kind of plays the role of a liberal and fools the West. But that imperial instinct isn’t going anywhere, I don’t think.
The one thing that could do it is an absolute decisive win by Ukraine in this war that causes a catharsis inside of Russia. And this is the reason I always say in Washington like a mantra: “the best Russia policy for America is a good Ukraine policy.”
I believe Russia’s already lost Ukraine. I don’t believe Ukraine was ever its to lose, but they have to understand that they’ve lost Ukraine and that it’s gone forever. And Ukraine is embedded in Europe — certainly in the EU, and I would favor in NATO as well. But there has to be that shock to Russia, that catharsis.
IAM: So, if we take this theory and put it into practical terms of the U.S. current approach towards Ukraine, Russia and the war — we see that Russian energy sanctions have been temporarily lifted, Russian frozen assets are currently out of the picture as well as the question of accountability for Russian war crimes in Ukraine. Do you think the current administration’s strategy towards ending this war is successful? And do you think U.S. policy should change?
Whitmore: Well, that’s presuming the U.S. has a strategy right now because I don’t see a strategy. I just don’t see one.
If a more traditional administration comes in in 2028, there is a path to victory and accountability here. This means resuming the support that Ukraine was getting in the previous administration and even increasing it.
Despite the loss of support from the U.S. right now, despite the hopefully temporary lifting of sanctions by the U.S. — not by the Europeans or the Canadians — Ukraine’s actually doing quite well on the battlefield at the moment. In February, they gained territory for the first time in a while. There’s not going to be a Russian breakthrough at the front at all. This is a false narrative that the Kremlin successfully whispered in the ears of naive people that it’s inevitable that they’re going to win. They’re not. That much is very clear to me.
The worst-case scenario is that the conflict freezes where it is now, which is not acceptable to me, but that’s the worst-case scenario. No, I see a path to victory, but it’s going to have to entail the West — The Europeans stepping up — and they are stepping up right now — and it’s going to entail the cutting-edge warfare technology that Ukraine’s developing now in terms of drones that are quite a bit in demand in the world given President Zelenskyy’s recent visit to the Gulf. The West can step in and help Ukraine do that at scale, at a massive scale, in addition to providing more traditional weapons. I am more optimistic about the outcome of the war than a lot of people. I do not buy into this defeatist narrative. We’re certainly not helping matters right now.
IAM: Do I understand correctly that you only believe in it if Ukraine holds up till the next presidential election and you’re not optimistic with the current administration?
Whitmore: I’ve learned not to count the Ukrainians out, time and time again. So even under this administration, I think they can do well.
I think they are very deftly handling an extremely difficult diplomatic situation and whatever one thinks of President Zelenskyy, he deserves a lot of credit for handling this in a very, very skillful manner.
