Among those who believe that this is happening, and that Europe will be facing down a more menacing Russia for a long time to come, is Radek Sikorski, who was Poland’s foreign minister from 2007 until September.

“I think psychologically the regime has been transformed by the annexation of Crimea,” Sikorski told Politico Magazine. “This was the moment that finally convinced all doubters and turned all heads. This was Napoleon after Austerlitz. This was Hitler after the fall of Paris. This was the moment that finally centralized everything into the hands of Vladimir Putin.”

Sikorski is formerly a glamorous figure in Brussels who played a leading role in shaping the European Union strategy toward both Russia and Ukraine. European leaders, intimidated by his charisma and outspoken views on Russia, chose not to appoint him as Europe’s high representative for foreign affairs earlier this year. Today Sikorski is the hawkish speaker of the Polish parliament, and he says that the West has been so distracted by the crisis in Ukraine it has missed the more important developments further east.

“What is happening now is the full embrace of neo-imperialism,” Sikorski says. “They have exploited every post-Soviet and neo-Soviet atavism and made it real because an alarming proportion of the population believes it. This is how they have refueled their regime.”

Sikorski is outspoken but not alone. Powerful officials inside Russia also see a darker cast to the regime, with the influence of the free-market economists and loyal oligarchs whom Putin once surrounded himself with significantly diminished. The liberals, relatively speaking, are out; the Russian president is reportedly now only working closely with security officials and the Defense Ministry. Some European diplomats even question whether Putin is still fully in charge, so beholden is he to the siloviki – the military and security establishment. “Every year the ruling circle shrinks smaller and smaller,” said one Kremlin source. “The only people that Putin is listening to are the military and the intelligence.”

Fear has returned to Moscow. Paranoia has gripped Russian officials and business elites. Those privy to sensitive information no longer carry smartphones. Instead they carry simple old cell phones and now remove the battery – to make sure the phone is dead – when they talk about Kremlin politics among themselves. This is because they assume the security services are now recording what is being said and this can disable the recording device. There is real fear that the next dramatic event in Russian politics could trigger a wave of sackings, arrests or even purges.

“This is the new ruling elite – the GRU military intelligence, which was the spearhead on the ground in Ukraine and the defense ministry,” says Sikorski, referring to Russia’s largest foreign intelligence agency, which commands its own special forces. “The removal of old elites has not started yet, but that’s the next logical step. … They have unleashed patriotic euphoria. They made this happen by exploiting the psychological and sociological resentment of the all the new and the old intelligence and security services toward the hated class of billionaires with their yachts and their mansions in London. That’s why they are so committed and loyal.”

Carl Bildt, who was Sweden’s hawkish foreign minister until this month, also believes Putin’s revanchist team is using the nationalistic fury whipped up by the Ukraine war to consolidate its power. But Bildt suggests the new, hard-line Russian regime might also be brittle beneath the surface. “The mood from my Russian contacts is one of extreme pessimism and fear,” Bildt told Politico Magazine. “They have no idea where the future leads. They fear that Putin may rule forever or collapse very suddenly because the regime has such weak foundations. From what I am hearing, the military are overjoyed right now. This is because they are receiving what militaries want, which is prestige and vast new transfusions of money. But the oligarchs are frightened and the regional governors are angry. This is because they are the ones losing out on that big fat Moscow check.”

Putin has instilled fear of stepping out of line with talk from his propagandists about the “sixth column.” The regime has long smeared the opposition with textbook accusations of them being Russia’s “fifth column.” But the Orwellian new invention of a “sixth column” refers to those inside the regime opposing expansionism due to their ties to the West. Alexander Dugin, the Kremlin-controlled ideologue now promoted across official airwaves as the champion of this new conservatism, has even called these insiders the main existential enemies of Russia. “The oligarchs with property in London know they are the outdated remnants of a previous era,” said one Kremlin adviser.

Within the establishment there have been sudden sackings of intelligence officials and generals believed to be disloyal. Meanwhile, beyond the Kremlin walls, the security services have moved to finish the job on the Russian opposition. Through repression and infiltration, there is no meaningful opposition activism left. The main opposition leaders have all been forced to flee the country, isolated or placed under house arrest. The protest movement is dead. “We believe most of the people who took to the streets of Moscow back in 2011 have emigrated,” one Russian official familiar with the matter says. “And we believe the rest will soon follow.”

There is growing fear among professionals in Moscow that the regime is contemplating requiring exit visas, a restrictive practice that vanished for most part with the Soviet Union. This appears for the most part to be a rumor spread by the Kremlin to encourage the remaining liberal activists to flee. However, there is a reality here as well: More than four million officials tied to the military and security services are now effectively banned from leaving the country. “They are closing the border slowly,” explains one Russian government adviser.