| Summary: | This contribution to the debate on Russia, Europe and the colonial present brings together several closely linked events which – alongside the people participating in them – have unleashed enough kinetic energy to kill and maim hundreds of thousands of people in just 12 months. Being inspired and challenged, in equal measure, by Stefan Bouzarovski's intervention on the lasting power of energy colonialism, my aim here is to expose the key features of contemporary Russian imperialism as a concept and the Kremlin's professed lust for territorial expansion and colonial domination as a practice. The empirical vignettes described below are assembled to uncover this exemplar of imperialism and colonialism as a theory-to-practice dyad. They involve (a) a 2021 sketch of pseudoscientific “thermodynamic” theory of imperial geopolitics pencilled by the Kremlin's chief adviser on Ukrainian affairs, (b) a 2016 televised geography lesson from the chairperson of the Russian Geographical Society's board and (c) an original operational plan for achieving control over Ukraine drawn by Moscow in the run-up to its full-scale invasion on 24 February 2022.
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