Whether in the form of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union or the Russian Federation today, the occupants of the Kremlin have been driven by a desire to be recognised as a “Great Power”.

These ambitions are explored by Russian-British historian Sergey Radchenko in his book To Run the World: The Kremlin’s Cold War Bid for Global Power.

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Radchenko spoke to Al Jazeera about Moscow’s need for legitimacy on the world stage and the role it played in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Al Jazeera: Given the hostility between Moscow and the West, could we be living in another Cold War?

Sergey Radchenko: The Cold War had two powers that were opposed to one another. One was the Soviet Union, one was the United States. In today’s environment, we have something that resembles that competition, but it is between the United States and China, ie, peer competitors, not Russia.

As much as Putin would like to argue that it is, Russia is not really in the same league as China and the United States.

And during the Cold War, there was a clear juxtaposition between these two rival camps – the capitalist world and the socialist world. Today, it seems that in some ways, the United States, certainly under President [Donald] Trump, and Russia have more of an alignment than a contradiction of values. We no longer hear about democracy versus autocracy.

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But there are also continuities, and the key continuity seems to be the presence of nuclear weapons. They inevitably remain as a… major part of the picture.

Al Jazeera: To what extent does desire for recognition drive the Kremlin’s politics?

Radchenko: This is the biggest continuity, I think, between the Cold War and the post-Cold War. I argue that foreign policies of the Soviet Union, China and Russia today are driven above all by the desire to be recognised as legitimate Great Powers. You could see that throughout the Soviet Cold War – they wanted recognition of their status as a co-equal superpower with similar rights as those of the United States. What they derived from such recognition is legitimacy, and sometimes they were willing to make compromises.

This was even true of [Soviet leader Josef] Stalin. People have said all sorts of things about Stalin, many of which are true, about him being a hideous dictator and somebody who was deeply cynical, manipulative… [But] even for Stalin, smaller gains, but with American recognition, were better than bigger gains without American recognition. He withheld support from the communists in the Greek civil war until 1947 because there was an agreement with the British that Greece was in the British sphere of influence.

So that principle of external recognition, especially American recognition of Soviet gains, I think that continued over and spilled over to Russian foreign policy. If you look at Putin’s foreign policy today, what does he want above all? He wants American recognition of Russian gains in Ukraine as legitimate. He’s obsessed with this idea. He feels like he can decide the fate of Ukraine over the heads of the Ukrainians and the Europeans precisely because he doesn’t care about them. He cares about America granting him the status of a co-equal Great Power.

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Al Jazeera: What does this Great Power worldview look like?

Radchenko: It’s very much a 19th-century vision of Russia as a Great Power at the centre of its own sphere of influence where it can project its power onto its neighbours. Soviet leaders also thought of countries immediately next to the Soviet Union as lying within their sphere of influence – Stalin was a 19th century imperialist.

What made them think that they’re so entitled? In 1963, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev met with [Cuban leader] Fidel Castro in the context of the Sino-Soviet split. Castro asked him, ‘Why are you quarrelling with the Chinese?’

‘They want to play the first fiddle’, Khruschev replied.

In a company of friends, someone is recognised as a leader and it happens naturally, by virtue of superior qualities… That’s how Khrushchev felt the Soviet Union deserved to be a Great Power and the leader of the socialist camp, because it was just better than anybody else and deserved it. It makes almost no sense to ask why – they just do, right?

Putin, in many ways, continues this tradition. When they feel others deny it to them, they have then the responsibility to assert this claim to greatness through violence. And this is what we have with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. Countries that fall into that sphere of influence must defer to the Kremlin’s wishes, and if somebody doesn’t, like Ukraine, that provides a reason to punish them in order to show the others their place.

Thinking more globally, obviously if Russia is entitled to its sphere of influence, you’d think that other Great Powers also are allowed theirs. And it’s here that Putin has some parallel thinking with Trump. You can see that immediately in Trump’s rhetoric about the Panama Canal, Canada as the 51st state, the way that he’s talked about Greenland – all of that implies that he thinks of the Western Hemisphere as basically America’s playground.

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During the Cold War, any challenge to America’s global interests was seen as potentially significant. Whether they happened in Vietnam, in Afghanistan [or] Africa, all of that mattered for the United States because they were engaged in this global struggle for influence with the Soviet Union. Even in West Berlin, far away from America, surrounded by Soviet-controlled East Germany, the Americans were willing to go to the brink of a nuclear war to defend their right to remain there.

Today, it seems like Trump’s vision is something else. America’s interests are no longer global.

Al Jazeera: How does one distinguish between Great Powers and “lesser” nations?

Radchenko: America was mainly the Great Power that it naturally wanted to be recognised by. But gradually and reluctantly, they also came to recognise China as having an almost natural right to be a Great Power.

But at the same time, they formed a very negative view of many European countries, a feeling that their age has already passed. They concluded during and after the Second World War that Europe was a spent force. For a time, they thought that maybe Great Britain could also somehow be a Great Power in Europe, but that impression faded away once it became clear that Britain was just an island out there and not an empire that is able to assert its imperial greatness, for example, during the Suez Crisis.

Although even today you have a bit of an obsession in Russia with “Anglo-Saxons”, like there’s some kind of a devious plot to return the UK to a Great Power status.

Al Jazeera: Russia has numerous social problems. Why not spend this energy improving Russians’ lives?

Radchenko: A country that has been historically conditioned to think of itself as a Great Power, precisely by virtue of being dominant over its weaker neighbours, defines greatness through that lens. In other words, they only feel great when they’re able to dominate others – that then highlights Russia’s greatness in the eyes of many Russians. And I think they will prioritise that over almost anything else.

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One of the things that happened in the Soviet Union was that, ultimately, that bargain did not hold. The Soviets claimed that they were a Great Power but they were absolutely unable to deliver for their own people.

Today, Russia is trying to strike a balance: on the one hand, projecting this imperial greatness and selling it to its own people; on the other hand, there’s still toilet paper. And yes, the quality of life is not as high as it could have been if Russia focused on its own internal problems and did not wage wars against neighbours. But it’s not a dire situation like in the USSR. So that allows for greater resilience than the Soviet model.

Editor’s note: This interview was lightly edited for clarity and brevity.