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In 2019, Russian President Vladimir Putin declared that liberalism, the dominant Western ideology for eight decades, was dead, as people turned against uncontrolled migration, multiculturalism and wokeness.
"The liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population," he told the Financial Times, taking a swipe at Germany's decision to take in a million Syrian migrants, while praising President Donald Trump's efforts in his first term to build a wall at the U.S. southern border. He also criticized liberal governments' embrace of "excessive" sexual and gender diversity.
The Russian leader's bold declarations were perceived at the time as fringe, regressive remarks from an authoritarian leader mired in Soviet nostalgia who was seeking to subvert the pillars of American society.
Western politicians such as Donald Tusk of Poland, then head of the European Council, dismissed the comments, arguing that "authoritarianism and personality cults" are the ideologies of the past.
Then six years later, at last week's Munich Security Conference, Europe's elites listened in shock as America's second-ranking leader, Vice President JD Vance, made many of the same points - a sign of how Putin's views and the "anti-woke agenda" he champions have gone mainstream in conservative parts of the U.S. establishment.
Since embracing this agenda, Putin has attempted to reset the post-Cold War order by tapping into the West's societal divisions and driving a wedge in the transatlantic alliance.
He has promoted Russia as a role model for other countries, portraying it as a unique civilization based on traditional values that appeals to socially conservative leaders already wary of Western liberalism.
It was on the same stage where Vance chided European leaders this year for fearing populist forces that Putin in 2007 laid out his vision of a "multipolar" world where global power would be determined by spheres of influence rather than a liberal world order led by Washington.
Vance's "speech was probably even more shocking for the Europeans than Putin's in 2007," said Vladimir Pastukhov, a Russian political scientist and researcher at University College London.
Vance ticked many of the boxes in the overlapping agendas of Moscow power elites and right-leaning movements in Europe: anti-migrant rhetoric, curbs on abortion, the equation of "cancel culture" with infringement of free speech, and an embrace of Christian values.
The shared disdain of globalism and European leaders was cheered in Moscow. Konstantin Malofeev, a conservative tycoon with Kremlin ties, said it marked "the beginning of the end for the globalists in Davos and the Eurocrats in Brussels."
The vice president also snubbed German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, who is headed into a heated election Sunday, by meeting instead with Alice Weidel, head of the hard-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party.
Russia has been building ties with the AfD since at least 2015, when party board member Alexander Gauland traveled to St. Petersburg to meet with Alexander Dugin, the right-wing ideologue who helped craft Russia's current ideology.
In his speech, Vance dismissed very real European concerns about Russian election meddling and instead suggested that leaders on the continent were not listening to their people.
"It looks more and more like old entrenched interests hiding behind ugly Soviet-era words like ‘misinformation' and ‘disinformation' who simply don't like the idea that somebody with an alternative viewpoint might express a different opinion or, God forbid, vote a different way or, even worse, win an election," he said.
Vance urged European leaders to "embrace what your people tell you," and suggested that Europe was censoring and jailing the opposition.
Many of Vance's accusations against European leaders were applied to Putin by the previous U.S. administration, especially as the Russian state methodically dismantled pro-democracy groups, jailed opposition figures and persecuted journalists who reported on the war in Ukraine.
Long before Trump and his supporters came to power, Putin had planted his flag as the savior of traditional values and religious freedoms in opposition to the "decadent" West, especially with his return to the Russian presidency in 2012.
An early sign of Putin's emerging core ideology was the case against the band Pussy Riot in 2012, when three members were sent to jail for performing in a cathedral a "punk prayer" criticizing Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church.
The case sparked global outrage, with critics calling the jailings a violation of free speech, while Russian authorities framed the band's performance as an attack on religious values - a narrative that has been vastly expanded on in the years since.
Russia has since severely limited LGBT rights, launched an antiabortion campaign and outlawed what it calls the "the child-free movement" - all garnering criticism from the West. Putin has countered that the West has no moral authority to police the ideologies of other countries.
Putin, however, has been quick to chime in amid heated Western debates, including on transgender issues. He backed "Harry Potter" author J.K. Rowling when she was criticized for her views on gender-identity policies.
"They canceled Joan Rowling recently, the children's author," Putin said, because she wouldn't "appease the fans of so-called gender freedoms." In the same way, he said after Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, "they are trying to cancel our thousand-year-old country, our people."
Rowling, however, quickly rejected Putin's comparison, posting that criticism of cancel culture should not come from those who "slaughter civilians," and that she stood with Ukraine.
Over time, people in Trump's MAGA movement have grown to see Putin as a standard-bearer for the anti-woke crusade now spearheaded by Trump and adviser Elon Musk.
A few hours before Russia launched its Ukraine invasion, former Trump aide Stephen K. Bannon said during a podcast with private military contractor Erik Prince that Americans should support Putin because he is "anti-woke."
"The Russian people still know which bathroom to use," Prince replied approvingly.
In Moscow, this convergence of views is seen as a chance to bridge at least some of the ideological gaps between Russia and the United States as Putin and Trump prepare for a possible summit to discuss the war in Ukraine.
"Trump has changed ideology to the exact opposite in the U.S., and this ideology surprisingly coincides with ours, which is why completely new ideological conditions have been created for the meeting between Putin and Trump," Russian ideologue Dugin said Monday on Sputnik state radio. "Before, such a contact was impossible because everything Putin and Russia believe in was radically rejected by the U.S."
Putin's quest to accelerate Russia's turn toward a militaristic, Orthodox Christian society appears to have been vindicated by the change in attitude of Moscow's longtime adversary and the possibility of a split in the transatlantic alliance.
"Europe finds itself squeezed between Trump and Putin, but while Putin is chipping away at the edges, Trump has struck right in the middle," Pastukhov said.
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Mary Ilyushina, a reporter on the Foreign Desk of The Washington Post, covers Russia and the region. She began her career in independent Russian media before joining CNN’s Moscow bureau as a field producer in 2017. She has been with The Post since 2021. She speaks Russian, English, Ukrainian and Arabic.