Description
This paper examines how Russian international relations and political science scholarship has constructed NATO’s role and legitimacy in relation to Ukraine, the Baltic States, and the Nordic countries (Finland and Sweden). While Russian officials have long framed NATO’s eastward expansion as an existential security threat, the intensity of such narratives varies sharply across neighboring regions. Why, for instance, was Ukraine’s NATO aspiration presented as a casus belli, whereas NATO membership in the Baltics or Nordics provoked little comparable alarm?
Drawing on a systematic review of Russian-language academic publications from 1991 to 2025, the paper analyzes how scholars have narrated NATO’s presence, characterized each region’s relationship with the alliance, and recommended Russia’s appropriate response. Using discourse analysis, it identifies meta-narratives of encirclement, betrayal, and civilizational hierarchy.
The analysis shows that Russian academia produces a selective logic of threat rooted not in consistent security concerns, but in the imperial reimagining of identity and space. Ukraine is discursively constructed as an “improper self” whose Western alignment violates Russia’s imagined boundaries; the Baltics as a “lost frontier”; and the Nordics as “disappointing neutrals.” These narratives expose not security dilemmas or material threats, but the persistence of an imperial epistemology that reimagines power and hierarchy as constructed features of Russia’s neighborhood. The paper contributes to debates on Russian strategic culture, critical security studies, and the epistemic foundations of empire in international relations.
