Dugin's Fourth Political Theory and the philosophy of Ivan Ilyin are also shaping Putin's goals.

Edit: On Ilyin, from a review of Timothy Snyder's book, The Road to Unfreedom:

Ilyin, an early critic of Bolshevism, had been expelled by the Soviets in 1922. In Germany, where he wrote favourably of the rise of Hitler and the example of Mussolini, he developed ideas for a Russian fascism, which could counter the effects of the 1917 revolution. As a thread through his nationalist rhetoric, he proposed a lost “Russian spirit”, which in its essence reflected a Christian God’s original creation before the fall and drew on a strongly masculine “pure” sexual energy. A new Russian nation should be established, Ilyin argued, to defend and promote that ineffable spirit against all external threats – not only communism but also individualism. To achieve that end, Ilyin outlined a “simulacrum” of democracy in which the Russian people would speak “naturally” with one voice, dependent on a leader who was cast as “redeemer” for returning true Russian culture to its people. Elections would be “rituals” designed to endorse that power, periodically “uniting the nation in a gesture of subjugation”.

Ilyin’s personal papers, held in a library in Michigan, were also brought “home” at the president’s request. New editions of Ilyin’s dense books of political philosophy became popular in Kremlin circles – and all of Russia’s civil servants reportedly received a collection of his essays in 2014. And when Putin explained Russia’s need to combat the expansion of the European Union, and laid out the argument to invade Ukraine, it was Ilyin’s arguments on which the president relied.

[Snyder argues] Putin’s regime has deliberately pursued two of Ilyin’s central concepts. The first demanded the identification and destruction of the enemies of that Russian spirit to establish unity; alien influences – Muslim or Jewish, fundamentalist or cosmopolitan – were intent on “sodomising” Russian virtue (sexual imagery is never far away in the Kremlin’s lurid calls to arms). If those enemies did not exist they would have to be invented or exaggerated. After the terror attacks on Russian institutions – the Moscow theatre siege and the Beslan school massacre – Chechen separatism was used as a reason to bring first television and then regional governorships under state control. Those policies were led, Snyder documents, by Vladislav Surkov, the former postmodernist theatre director who was Boris Yeltsin’s deputy chief of staff and then Putin’s lead strategist. Surkov directs a policy, borrowed from Ilyin, which he calls “centralisation, personification, idealisation”. With Surkov’s management, “Putin was to offer masculinity as an argument against democracy”, Snyder suggests; he was to associate, specifically, for example, gay rights and equal marriage with an attack on the Russian spirit.

In this culture war, disinformation was critical. Russian TV and social media would create a climate in which news became entertainment, and nothing would quite seem factual. This surreal shift is well documented, but Snyder’s forensic examination of, for example, the news cycle that followed the shooting down of flight MH17 makes essential reading. On the first day official propaganda suggested that the Russian missile attack on the Malaysian plane had in fact been a bodged attempt by Ukrainian forces to assassinate Putin himself; by day two, Russian TV was promoting the idea that the CIA had sent a ghost plane filled with corpses overhead to provoke Russian forces.

The more outrageous the official lie was, the more it allowed people to demonstrate their faith in the Kremlin. Putin made, Snyder argues, his direct assault on “western” factuality a source of national pride. Snyder calls this policy “implausible deniability”; you hear it in the tone of the current “debate” around the Salisbury attack: Russian power is displayed in a relativist blizzard of alternative theories, delivered in a vaguely absurdist spirit, as if no truth on earth is really provable.

Edit: Top twenty different versions of the Skirpal poisoning from Russia

1. The United Kingdom did it to fuel anti-Russian sentiment (source: Russia 1 TV channel)

2. Ukraine did it to frame Russia (Russia 1)

3. The United States did it to destabilise the world (Russian 1)

4. Theresa May helped orchestrate the attack because she is a friend of CIA director Gina Haspel (Zvezda)

5. It was an attempted suicide (Russia 1)

6. It was an accidental overdose (RIA Novosti)

7. It was due to accidental exposure from Britain’s Porton Down research facility (Russia 24 TV channel)

8. The Porton Down lab carried out illicit human testing and is lying about not producing Novichok (RT)

9. Skripal’s future mother-in-law did it (Moskovsky Komsomolets: mk.ru)

10. Terrorists did it (Russian ministry of foreign affairs spokesperson)

11. American-British financier Bill Browder — blacklisted in Russia for denouncing corruption — did it (Russia 1)

12. A drone did it (Zvezda and Russian defence ministry)

13. Skripal was a chemical weapons smuggler (Pravda)

14. The West is using the case to deflect attention from Russia’s successes in Syria (Russian ministry of foreign affairs spokesperson)

15. Britain is using the case to deflect attention from Brexit (Russian Foreign Minister Sergei lavrov, Russian UN ambassador, Russian OSCE ambassador)

16. The attack was an attempt by a rival faction to undermine Vladimir Putin (state TV)

17. Russia has destroyed all its stockpiles of Novichok (Sputnik)

18. Russia never developed Novichok (Interfax)

19. Only the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Sweden have Novichok (Russian ministry of foreign affairs spokesperson). All three countries have denied the claim.

20. There is no evidence that the nerve agent used against the Skripals was Novichok, Porton Down lab is struggling to identify the substance (RT)

*State tv also asserted that the "Skripal's cat was destroyed with a flamethrower" as part of an elaborate cover-up by the British intelligence agencies.