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" For once, it was the American president who was looking backward, describing the state of the world—and of Putin in it—as it had been a couple of years or even a couple of months earlier, before Putin had discovered and put forth his ideology. It was the Russian president who was looking forward, to unleashing an all-out culture war against the West and its values. He will score many victories in this war, and cause many more casualties, before the full gravity and danger of Putin’s transformation becomes clear to Western politicians. But the ultimate casualty will be Russia itself, a country in which the 1990s flirtation with progress and democracy will be remembered as an anomaly, if it is remembered at all, and which is once again staking its future on fighting the Western world and isolating itself from it. "
― Masha Gessen , The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin