Lo (2015:40-41): Sees Russian policymakers as adopting a Hobbesian appreach to the world: they view its as “an alien and often hostile place, in which the strong prosper and the weak get beaten”; hard power rules supreme, meaning Russia requires military strength and soft power more often than not means “soft-coercion”; and major powers dominate the international system, so that smaller states and multilateral institutions are subordinate to great power interests.
Lo (2015:93): Russia resists efforts to implement universal norms on a moral basis, often criticising double standards or the potential for interventions to cause harm. “But these objections - sometimes well-founded, sometimes less so - are secondary to Moscow’s main point, which is that it is up to individual governments to decide how they rule their peoples and interpret international norms within their own countries. It is not for outsiders, least of all a discredited West, to determine what is and is not moral.”