It's a full spectrum of monopolies that collectively represent a colonial apparatus...I'm not talking naval and nuclear projection or occupying a foreign country...
Putin has clearly mastered a new type of war that specifically weakens America's monopoly on violence both domestically and internationally.
You can already see the symptoms of an institution slowly coming to gripes to a major espionage campaign that did not stop after the USSR fell but evolved into a criminal state, one that explicitly seeks to include criminal elements to distance the Kremlin.
Americans rely on a network of multi-national corporations to do their bidding, Russians rely on the mob.