Russian Aggression Against Ukraine: Petro-dictatorship vs Emerging Democracy?

• In Event: Understanding Authoritarianism - II

Abstract

For many observers the Russian-Ukrainian war appears to be a conflict between two post-communist countries over disputable border territories. Although most people understand that Russia evidently is a brutal aggressor, it remains largely unrecognized how radically different the sides are both politically and economically.

This study reveals deep differences between Russia and Ukraine illustrated in 10 comparative graphs on their development indicators. Moreover, the first tested hypothesis proposes that in recent decades the two nations in many ways have moved in opposite directions. In Russia, the level of democracy, freedom of speech, parliamentarism, and market competition consistently decreased, while autocracy, imperial sentiments, state ownership, and rental economy grew. On the contrary, free media, civil society, and the market strengthened in Ukraine, whereas authoritarianism, government interventionism, and ethnic group identification reduced. The study analyzes major economic and political variables, which show that the Russian-Ukrainian conflict in many aspects could be defined as a war between rental imperialist dictatorship and emerging market democracy.

The second tested hypothesis suggests that the increase of the political gap between two nations became one of the key reasons for the Russian aggression against Ukraine. The study investigates data on the dynamics of hostility of Russians towards Ukraine and the growing gap in the political and economic indicators of the two countries. Using OLS regressions and PCA tools, substantial and statistically significant correlations were found between the growth of aggression in Russian society and the increasing differences between the two nations.

Author

• Alexander Strakhov, Doctorate Graduate, IE University