The Soviet Machiavelli: Putin's 4D Chess Whisperer and the Ukraine War Trojan Horse

By Michael Kelman Portney

Introduction: The Chaos Was the Point

Most Western pundits still don’t get it. They think the Russian invasion of Ukraine was a miscalculation, a hubristic blunder, or a desperate gamble by a fading autocrat. They see the botched push for Kyiv, the sanctions, the body count, and they scoff: "Putin overplayed his hand."

But what if that was the plan? What if the chaos, the fatigue, and the fractures in the West were the real objective? What if the entire war was a psy-op dressed in camouflage?

Enter: Alexander Dugin. The Russian philosopher, ultra-nationalist, and ideological arsonist known as "Putin's brain" or, more fittingly, the Soviet Machiavelli. His fingerprints are all over Russia’s long-game strategy—not just on the battlefield, but in the algorithms, the discourse, and the cognitive plumbing of the West.

This is a dive into how Dugin's geopolitical blueprint—a manifesto of disruption, civilizational warfare, and narrative manipulation—transformed what looked like a failed invasion into a Trojan Horse for Western destabilization. It's not about territory. It's about tearing the American empire apart from the inside.

And here's the part they really don't want to admit: Putin won. The war is over. The West didn’t just lose—it surrendered while calling it a stalemate.

Dugin 101: The Geopolitical Cult Leader

Before we decode the Ukraine psy-op, we need to understand the oracle behind it. Alexander Dugin isn’t your average Kremlin lapdog. He’s a metaphysical nihilist with a Rasputin beard and a bookshelf full of esoteric fascism, blending Heidegger, Evola, and Carl Schmitt into a venom cocktail for modern geopolitics.

His 1997 book, Foundations of Geopolitics, became the unofficial Bible of Russian military and intelligence elites. It doesn’t talk about tanks and bombs. It talks about culture war, memetic warfare, psychological sabotage, and ideological virus-spreading. Think of it as Sun Tzu meets QAnon.

Dugin calls for the destruction of the Western liberal world order. Not through direct confrontation, but through multipolar chaos—a concept where the world is fractured into civilizational blocs, each rejecting the Enlightenment consensus of individual liberty and universal human rights.

His game isn’t conquest. It’s collapse.

The Blueprint: Foundations of Geopolitics

Foundations lays out a multi-phase strategy:

1. Destabilize Western democracies through narrative warfare.

2. Sow internal discord by funding extremists and fringe ideologies.

3. Exploit liberalism’s contradictions—free speech, diversity, and tolerance—to amplify cultural nihilism.

4. Forge alliances with populist right-wing movements in Europe and the U.S.

5. Use controlled chaos to reassert Russian influence over its periphery while turning the U.S. inward.

Sound familiar?

Dugin called for the support of American isolationism decades before Trump rode down the escalator. He demanded propaganda operations to inflame racial and regional tensions before Russian bots flooded Facebook. He wanted a Europe divided, a NATO paralyzed, and a U.S. electorate too drunk on its own culture war to notice its empire was burning.

He doesn’t just play chess. He flips the board and sets it on fire.

Ukraine: The Trojan Horse Invasion

Now let’s fast-forward to February 2022. Russia invades Ukraine. Western analysts scoff. "They’ll take Kyiv in three days," some warn. "Russia will collapse under sanctions," others counter.

But neither of those outcomes were the point. Instead, the war became a chaos engine:

Energy crisis in Europe → economic strain → rise of far-right populists.

Massive U.S. aid to Ukraine → partisan backlash → MAGA resurgence.

Refugee influx and war fatigue → EU divisions and growing apathy.

Sanctions boomerang → inflation in the West → rage against "globalist elites."

And as all this unfolded, Kremlin-backed media and troll farms amplified every fracture: “Ukraine is corrupt.” “Zelensky is a puppet.” “This is NATO’s fault.”

Now here we are, years later. There’s no victory parade, no treaty, no clear headline. But the war is over. It fizzled not with fanfare, but with fatigue. Ukraine is fractured. NATO is fatigued. The West is bored. Putin doesn’t need Kyiv—he has everything he came for: leverage, division, distraction, and demoralization.

The invasion wasn’t a military campaign. It was a pressure campaign. And it worked.

The West didn’t just lose control of Ukraine. It lost the script, the stamina, and the will.

The Real Victory: Narrative Domination

In Dugin’s playbook, reality is just an interpretive battlefield. Control the narrative, and you control the future.

That’s where Elon Musk and Donald Trump come in.

Musk’s Twitter antics—suggesting Ukraine cede Crimea, spreading skepticism about Western aid—mirror Kremlin talking points. Whether he’s a useful idiot or a chaos entrepreneur is irrelevant. He’s disrupting the Western consensus. He’s weakening the signal.

Trump? He was the Duginist wet dream. America First. NATO-bashing. A disdain for liberalism masked as populism. Even if he doesn’t know who Dugin is, he plays his part perfectly.

Together, these figures amplify a nihilist undercurrent: the West is corrupt, the media lies, institutions can’t be trusted. That’s not just apathy—that’s pre-revolutionary energy. And Dugin wants to ride it straight into the heart of Western collapse.

Strategic Chaos: A Psy-Op in Motion

The "failure" to take Kyiv becomes the alibi for a forever war of perception. Russia plays the long game:

Bleed the West economically and politically.

Force divisions in the U.S. about where our money and values go.

Empower populists who will abandon Ukraine and weaken NATO.

But now the game is over. The West’s momentum is gone. The media coverage has evaporated. Ukraine is no longer a cause—it’s a cautionary tale. It’s the war that slipped through the cracks.

And behind the scenes, Putin locked in every objective. The battlefield was never Kyiv. It was Berlin, Brussels, DC, Twitter, the price of gas, and the cracks in Western attention spans.

He didn’t just win a war. He ended one. On his terms.

The Final Move: Collapse from Within

If you believe Dugin, liberalism contains the seeds of its own destruction. By weaponizing its tolerance, openness, and pluralism, you can inject ideological malware that turns the system against itself.

Free speech becomes disinfo.

Diversity becomes tribalism.

Truth becomes optional.

Meanwhile, the authoritarian bloc—Russia, China, Iran—stands back, gleefully watching the West drown in its contradictions.

That’s the Trojan Horse: a war that looks like a failure, but delivers division, chaos, and decay straight into the heart of the Western project.

Conclusion: Dugin’s Shadow Over the West

The war in Ukraine isn’t a blunder. It’s a trap. A slow-drip acid bath for the West’s morale, cohesion, and legitimacy. It’s not just Putin’s war—it’s Dugin’s masterpiece.

The Soviet Machiavelli didn’t need to win in Kyiv. He just needed to infect the operating system of liberal democracy.

And by the time we realize it, the virus is already in the bloodstream.

The war is already over. Ukraine’s future is frozen. Russia’s goals are met. The West is back to eating itself alive over culture wars while the smoke clears behind them.

So the question isn’t: Can Ukraine win? It’s: Why is the West pretending it didn’t lose?

Because in the game of 4D chess, checkmate isn’t capture. It’s collapse.