‘Putin’s Philosopher’ Aleksandr Dugin, self-styled deep thinker and ideological architect of current Russian expansionism, has claimed there are two distinct version of the president. There is a ‘Lunar Putin’ – practical, cautious, a supporter of the capitalist economy and free trade, alert to international opinion. And a ‘Solar Putin’, a messiah, fully embracing his mission to restore the great Eurasian Empire and confront the collective West.

This split-personality may well be at the heart of recent inconsistencies in Russian policy. Having warned via former president Dmitri Medvedev of a ‘judgment day’ should Ukraine attack Crimea, the Kremlin, following the devastating raid on Crimea’s Saky airbase, instead sought to minimise it as a ‘fire-safety incident’. So too with the repeated Russian threats to hit Ukrainian decision-making centres: the defence ministry, general staff and so on, none of which are followed through. It seems the Russian state is still undecided as to what level of escalation, whatever the bluster, is really open to it.

Likewise, this might spring from opposing factions – lunar and solar – in the Kremlin itself. In one corner is the pro-war contingent, the siloviki (security, defence and law enforcement) headed unofficially by their long-term leader Nikolai Patrushev, former FSB head and now secretary of the security council. This group’s overwhelming wish is for the special military operation to be turned into a full-blown war with all the customary trimmings: martial law, national mobilisation (at least partial), and complete sealing of the country’s borders.

In the other corner are the war-sceptics, barely noticeable but very much there, made up largely of figures in economics and finance. Their abiding aim – a conflicting one – is to keep the Russian economy afloat. The two agendas, like Putin’s two selves, are almost impossible to reconcile.

Among the second group is head of the audit chamber Aleksei Kudrin – former minister of finance, a close associate of Putin’s since the 90s and said to have access to the president whenever he wishes. Kudrin, a known opponent of the invasion of Ukraine, sensibly steers clear of the subject, reduced to muttering that ‘we don’t have a plan to prevent the economy going into decline’or warning that ‘the next couple of years will be a very tough situation for all of us’.

In fact, the only critics of Putin who seem able to express their dissatisfaction in tweets or on other media belong to the hawkish element, who support the invasion of Ukraine but feel its prosecution to be spineless, hesitant or half-baked. One prominent YouTuber escaping censure is Igor Girkin – aka Ivan Ivanovich Strelkov – a retired FSB colonel. Though there are recent reports of his former FSB bosses trying to distance themselves, he has been allowed to call minister of defence Sergei Shoygu a ‘plywood Marshal’ in a YouTube interview, adding in another that Shoygu and Medvedev were ‘two fools who talk complete nonsense’.

It’s clearly far safer to attack the Russian government from the right than from the left, whether the authorities fear to strike Igor Girkin – a character with considerable public support – or regard him as a permitted opposition not without his uses. Indeed, they may well have just found another use for the ex-colonel: to boost the declining morale of the troops in Kherson. Girkin was reportedly apprehended on Saturday night crossing from Crimea to that region.

A look at the past actions and statements of both Dugin and Girkin is revealing. Dugin, author of titles such as Eurasian Mission: An Introduction to Neo-Eurasianism, declared of Ukrainian nationalists in a 2014 YouTube clip that ‘they have to be killed, killed and killed again. I’m telling you this as a professor.’

Girkin seems to have been no less zealous or committed to violence. By his own admission the man who ‘pulled the trigger’ in the Donbass conflict, he was founder two years later of the Russian National Movement, to unite ‘the Russian Federation, Ukraine, Belarus, and other Russian lands in a single all-Russian state and…an unconditional zone of Russian influence.’ It was an empire-building narrative that the Kremlin firmly adopted.

Girkin has been accused by the Ukrainian security services of being a main player of the ‘terror’ in Ukraine’s Sloviansk region, of ordering the torture and murder of Ukrainian city councillor Volodomyr Rybak, and been described by former Ukrainian interior minister Arsen Avakov as ‘a monster and a killer.’ Yet both Dugin and Girkin, in their recent outbursts, have proved instrumental to the Kremlin’s pro-war lobby, able to express a dissatisfaction they themselves as subordinates cannot.

This doesn’t mean the love is necessarily returned. In a 2019 interview, playing along with the narrative of the good Tsar and bad boyars, Dugin declared that: ‘Everyone in power in Russia is scum. Except for Putin’. Girkin likewise said in June this year that he would refrain from criticising Putin until the ‘special military operation’ is over – he, after all, is the commander-in-chief’. But he argued for the urgent replacement of people in the government’s security services and defence, explaining that they were ‘not only thieves but also failed each and every task given to them’. As for the war’s opponents, Girkin has demanded a much harsher attitude towards public figures ‘throwing mud’ in Russia. Otherwise, he said, ‘at best Putin will end like Milosevic, at worst like Gaddafi.’

Putin has always been a deft political animal, sensing what people want to hear and playing it back to them. He realises that Russians are not in favour en masse of drastic measures that will immediately affect their living standards. He’s also concerned (and always has been) with the danger of mass-street protests, which might even lead to a Libya-style scenario. As far as realising Dugin’s and Girkin’s dreams of Eurasian conquest, his reportedly shaking hands are tied. As Dugin put it: ‘He has been trying to combine incompatible things’ – to bridge the gap between long-term historical ambitions of glory, and short-term survival. World chess ex-champion and opposition politician Garry Kasparov said it more succinctly:

‘He wants to rule like Stalin but live like Abramovich.’

Right now, there seems to be a fragile balance between the solar and lunar elements in Russian society, between economic sanity and the Eurasian-Empire-at-all-costs. The hawks may amount to no more than 12-15 per cent (according to a recent poll by Kommersant, only 12 per cent of Russians are ready to contribute their money for the special military operation, and would go no further than 1,000 rubles a month (about £13)). The same poll put public support for the war among Russians at 52 per cent. Demanding 100 per cent commitment under such circumstances would require extreme, aggressive coercion. Civil unrest in some form would surely follow. So would economic collapse.

This, of course, does not bother the likes of Dugin and Girkin. Those who don’t submit themselves to the Greater Russia project – whatever their reasons – are either traitors or enemy-agents and need to be dealt with accordingly. They, meanwhile, outside the Kremlin game or the pressures of economic decision-making, can be what they seem to have always wanted: Russia’s Ayatollahs, tuned in to the edicts of their own pan-Slavic god, willing to cut off tongues for blasphemy and heads for apostasy.

Which side of Putin, lunar or solar, wins out in the end will depend greatly on his instinct for recent events. Is a glorious new sun rising for Mother Russia and its soon-to-be Eurasian satellites? Or is the current tortuous impasse in Ukraine actually the twilight of his most heartfelt dreams?