The devastating invasion of Ukraine in 2022 is part of a broader pattern - that of post-Soviet Russian imperialism. What defines this phenomenon? What are its driving forces? The discussion will be structured around the book "Russia's New Imperialism: Capital and Ideology," to be published by Stanford University Press in September 2026. One of its authors, Ilya Matveev, will present the key arguments of the book. He will focus on the three explanations of Russia's expansionist tendencies - economic, geopolitical and ideological. He will also discuss the attitudes towards imperialism in Russian society, described in one of the chapters. In this, he will be joined by Oleg Zhuravlev, a sociologist who has devoted his time to understanding Russian society through qualitative methods, such as interviews, focus groups and ethnographic observation. In his academic work, Zhuravlev has highlighted the complexity and multiple tendencies present in Russian popular political imagination.