Two years ago, a group of Moscow restaurateurs made what on paper looked like a sound business decision. They chose a trendy location — Moscow’s Gorky Park, an oasis for hipsters — and opened a gleaming new restaurant called Oyster Bar, which planned to purvey molluscs and other imported delicacies to the city’s cosmopolitan elite.

One year later, in the wake of western sanctions, Vladimir Putin announced Russia would ban an array of American and European food products, including cheese, beef and seafood. Oyster Bar tried to rebrand — boldly renaming itself No Oyster Bar and relying on a menu of local ingredients — but the gamble didn’t pay off. The restaurant closed a few months later.

The fate of Oyster Bar seems to fit a familiar narrative. Threatened by increasing western influence in Ukraine and the rise of Nato, Putin is hitting back against the west both in Ukraine and through a culture war at home, where a propaganda campaign has made Moscow’s pro-western, oyster-eating minority the enemy.