Democracy or dictatorship? The moral call to defend Ukraine by Hans-Herbert Kögler

Abstract

Ko¨gler has written a scathing critique of the attempt by the Russian ultra-nationalist philosopher Aleksandr Dugin to legitimize the Russian attack on Ukraine (Ko¨gler, 2023). Ko¨gler asserts that both Dugin’s theory and President Putin’s action are ‘embedded in and inconceivable without a nationalistic cultural essentialism analysis, which ideologically supports the geopolitical claims of territorial domination via the symbolic ideal of the uniquely Russian national character’. In consequence, says Ko¨gler, this led to politics seeking the total elimination of Ukrainian culture and identity. He says Putin’s ‘imperial Eurasian ideology includes Dugin’s cultural essentialism’. I am sceptical as to Dugin’s influence on Putin, for which Ko¨gler gives no evidence. But his obsession with a philosophy that borders on the metaphysical reveals a cultural essenti-alism of his own, neglecting the more material specifics of the invasion and the dynamics of war itself. I would add more down to earth historical, geopolitical and political aspects of this invasion.