Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Sacker.

My guest today has been one of Russia's most influential foreign policy analysts and strategists for more than four decades.

Sergei Karaghanov began his academic and think tank career in the Soviet era.

He became a key advisor to Boris Yeltsin and maintained an inside track to the Kremlin when the

Putin era began at the beginning of this century. He's always been a nationalist and a security

hawk. The so-called Karaganov doctrine formulated in 1992 highlighted the need for Russia to

nurture and defend the Russian populations living beyond Russia's

post-Soviet borders, in the Baltic states, for example, and most particularly in Ukraine.

To that extent, his ideas have had a role to play in the conflict now seen in Ukraine.

Vladimir Putin used the need to protect Russian speakers

in eastern and southern Ukraine from what he claimed to be genocidal oppression by a Nazi regime

in Kiev as a key justification of his all-out invasion last February. Now that claim was unfounded and today almost one year into the

war it has largely been superseded by another Russian claim that theirs is a defensive war against

a NATO plan to weaken and destroy Russia by way of relentless militarization of the former

Soviet space in Eastern Europe.

Whatever the justification Putin has, his fateful decision to invade has clearly not gone

according to plan. Ukraine's resistance has been fierce and effective. NATO and other allies

are sending ever more powerful weapons to aid Ukraine's war effort.

Both sides now portray this to be an existential fight which they simply have to win.

That would appear to be self-evidently true for Ukraine on whose soil the war is being fought.

Is it really true for Russia?

Well, I'm joined from Moscow by Sergei Karaganov.

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