Understanding Russia’s war against Ukraine: Political, eschatological and cataclysmic dimensions

We apply Anatol Rapoport's typology of war to reconstruct how Russian research communities explain war against Ukraine. We argue that the initial three-dimensional framework can be divided into two explanatory models: military-political and eschatological-cataclysmic. The first model explains the war with reference to classical calculus about military threats and national interests. The second model interprets war as an act of creating a new world order and as a struggle existential for Russia. These two models are not mutually exclusive, yet they illuminate evolution of meanings given for the war during the first two years of Russia's large-scale invasion against Ukraine.