Someone should make a long, lurid documentary about the misfortunes of Russia’s ruling class — a multi-season soap opera in the manner of those endless imported melodramas, with each episode a fresh ministerial collapse, a fresh body in a parked car, a fresh general blown up days after his promotion. The bosses, it turns out, cry too. And lately they have a great deal to cry about. Over the past few years, and increasingly over the past months and even days, an extraordinary mortality has settled over the people who run the Russian state and feed off it. It is varied, it is relentless, and it is — let me be honest about my own reaction — not entirely unwelcome. What I want to argue here is that these are not random accidents. They are the visible symptoms of a real fracture inside the regime, and they tell us something true about what this regime is for. ...

There is a phrase that circulates in émigré chats and comment sections with the smooth confidence of a proverb: scratch any Russian, and underneath you will find an imperialist. It is offered as hard-won wisdom, the kind of thing only the war taught us to see clearly. I want to argue that it is wrong — not sentimentally wrong, not impolitely wrong, but wrong in a way that matters, because the mistake it makes is the same mistake the Nuremberg Laws made. I say this as someone who holds Russia fully responsible for this war, who wants Russia to lose it, and who feels the same instinctive recoil you feel when a Russian liberal starts explaining himself. The recoil is honest. The conclusion drawn from it is not. Russians are indeed an imperial people. But imperialism is a disease, and diseases can be cured. What it is not, and has never been, is a gene. ...

There is a date that ought to be carved into the memory of anyone who cares about how nations come to terms with their own crimes: the twenty-fifth of February, 1956. On that day, at the close of the Twentieth Party Congress, a leader of the Soviet Union stood up and told the assembled delegates the truth — or at least a usable fraction of it — about the man whose portrait they had all worshipped. The hall listened in a silence that has been described, again and again, as deafening. When he finished, the session chair proposed that no discussion be opened and no questions be permitted. The reason was obvious: a discussion would have detonated. The report was approved, then quietly buried — distributed only inside party organizations, kept out of the open press. Even the act of telling the truth was conducted as a half-secret. ...

There is a particular kind of comment that surfaces the moment any war begins, and it always arrives dressed as wisdom. It says: both sides are killing, both sides are spilling blood, so a curse on both their houses. It presents itself as the view of the calm, unbiased observer who refuses to be dragged into partisanship. In the case of Iran and Israel, this reflex has been everywhere, and I want to say plainly that it is not wisdom at all. It is a refusal to think. The instinct to flatten the two warring sides into mirror images is false, and beneath its pose of fairness it is a quiet form of moral cowardice. To equate the aggressor and the one defending himself is not neutrality. It is a failure to look at the facts. ...

There are moments in history when evil stops being an abstraction and acquires a face, a pulse, a fixed address. Most of the time the malice that drives a war is genuinely distributed — across institutions, ideologies, bureaucracies, the cold inertia of millions of people doing their small assigned part. You cannot point at it. You cannot, in any literal sense, end it. But occasionally the architecture of a regime tightens around one man so completely that the distinction between the man and the machine collapses. When that happens, a question arises that polite society prefers not to ask aloud: if the war flows from a single living person, is killing that person a legitimate way to stop the war? I want to take that question seriously, because I think the honest answer is yes — and because the reasons we treat one such man as a candidate and another as untouchable have nothing to do with morality and everything to do with fear. ...

There is a peculiar instruction I receive almost daily, and it always arrives in the same imperative tone. Do not interfere in American affairs. Do not interfere in European affairs. And, since I no longer live there, do not interfere in Russian affairs either. The logic, such as it is, runs like this: a person who lives abroad has forfeited the right to an opinion about the countries he watches from a distance, and any judgment he offers is an impertinence at best and a hostile intrusion at worst. I want to take this demand seriously, because beneath its surface lies a genuine question about who is entitled to speak, and about what honesty requires of anyone who does. My answer comes in two parts that may at first seem to pull against each other. The first is that the demand for silence is not modesty but censorship. The second is that the freedom to speak does not license one to say anything at all; it comes attached to duties that are easy to evade and important to honor. ...

There is a sentence that a certain kind of decent Russian likes to say, and that I have come to regard as a small masterpiece of self-deception. “I am against Putin,” the sentence goes, “but I am for Russia.” It sounds balanced. It sounds like the position of a grown-up who refuses to be swept into hatred of an entire nation. And in peacetime it would have been a perfectly serviceable thing to believe. The trouble is that we are not in peacetime, and the sentence, transposed into the year a country is bombing its neighbor’s maternity wards, becomes something else entirely. It becomes the exact structural equivalent of saying, in 1943, “I am against Hitler, but I am for the Third Reich.” Once you hear it that way you cannot un-hear it, and you begin to understand why I no longer accept the formula, however gently it is offered. ...

A dictator cannot shoot lasers from his eyes. He cannot personally pull every trigger, sign every death warrant, or stand over every soldier as the order is carried out. He is one aging man in one body, and yet at his word entire armies march, entire populations fall silent, and people who fear nothing in battle suddenly lose the will to resist. This is the puzzle that sits underneath every tyranny, and it deserves a serious answer rather than a lazy one. The lazy answer is that some nations are simply born servile, that obedience is written into their blood. I want to argue the opposite. Obedience is not a national trait. It is manufactured, deliberately and methodically, by a machine that any sufficiently ruthless regime can build — and that almost any nation, however cultured, can be made to feed. ...

There is a phrase I keep hearing, and every time I hear it I feel a chill, because I know exactly where it leads. The phrase goes: if Russians don’t pour into the streets to stop this war, then they are all accomplices — every last one of them. It is meant to sound morally uncompromising. In fact it is the opposite. It is a slogan that hands an enormous, undeserved gift to the very people who started the killing. And I want to explain, as carefully as I can, why I believe collective responsibility is real and inescapable — and why collective guilt is a poison that has only ever produced fascism and Bolshevism. ...

There is a particular kind of theater that unfolds whenever the people who call themselves the leaders of the Russian opposition are handed a microphone in a European institution. They are well dressed, they speak fluently about human rights and political prisoners, they have suffered real imprisonment, and yet, the moment a sharp question is put to them, something gives way. They cannot answer it. Not because they lack the words, but because answering honestly would force them to stand on one side of a line they have spent years refusing to acknowledge exists. I want to describe that line, and why the inability to step across it tells us almost everything we need to know about the state of the Russian emigration today. ...

People keep trying to catch me in a contradiction. They say: you call yourself an agnostic, but you talk like a militant atheist, so which is it? Pick one. And I keep refusing to pick, because the demand rests on a confusion — the quiet substitution of one question for another. There are two questions hiding inside the single word “God,” and my honest answer to the first is genuinely different from my honest answer to the second. On the first I say: I don’t know, and neither do you. On the second I say: no, this is a myth, and everything I know about the world tells me so. The whole argument that I am secretly a “fierce” atheist dressed up as an agnostic is built on smearing these two questions together until they look like one. They are not one. Keeping them apart is, I think, the beginning of thinking clearly about belief at all. ...

We are used to a tidy taxonomy of regimes. There are democracies, where power changes hands by election and is restrained by law, and there are dictatorships, where a single man or clique rules without restraint and the population has been stripped of any means of resistance. Most of the world fits somewhere on that line. But the United States has slipped into a condition for which the taxonomy has no ready word — a condition that, to my knowledge, has no real historical precedent. Here is a country that remains, at its core, a functioning democracy: it has independent courts, a parliament that can say no, a press nobody can silence by decree, fifty states with real sovereignty, and a citizenry that is armed. And this democratic country is led by a man and a faction whose views and methods can only be described as fascist — supported, it should be said plainly, by something close to half the population. The result is not a coup and not yet a dictatorship. It is a live, ongoing battle between a still-free nation and a clique that would very much like to make it unfree. And the most honest thing one can say is that the outcome of that battle is genuinely undecided. ...

Every few weeks a fresh wave of optimism washes over the commentary class. Sanctions are about to bite. The oil price is about to crack. The defence budget is about to run dry. Soon, we are told, the Kremlin simply will not be able to keep fighting, and the war will grind to a halt of its own accord, like a machine that has run out of fuel. I understand the appeal of this hope. I do not share it. The whole prediction rests on a hidden assumption: that the war is draining some finite resource which must, sooner or later, be exhausted. But the resource that actually sustains this war is not finite, and the men who run Russia have, by now, far stronger reasons to continue the slaughter than to end it. The uncomfortable truth is that peace has become more dangerous to the regime than war. Until we grasp that, we will keep mistaking our own wishes for forecasts. ...

When people search the map for the force that will ultimately stop Vladimir Putin, their eyes drift to the obvious places. To Washington, where the most powerful military on earth could in theory end the war with a stroke of the pen. To Beijing, the rising giant some imagine might one day inherit America’s role. To the negotiating tables in Istanbul and the choreographed summits where diplomats perform the rituals of peace. I want to argue that all of these are the wrong places to look. The real growth-point of resistance — the place where the future is actually being decided, quietly and unglamorously — is Europe. Not the flashy Europe of communiqués and photo opportunities, but the Europe that is, brick by brick, building an iron hedgehog against which the Putin regime will eventually break itself. ...

There is a particular reproach I hear again and again, and it always arrives dressed as common sense. If you analysts live in a “probabilistic world,” the reader asks, then what is the point of your analysis at all? What can you actually predict? Or is probability just a convenient hiding place — a way of saying, after the fact, that the world is fifty-fifty, the forecast didn’t pan out, and nobody is to blame? It sounds devastating, and it is meant to. But underneath the sarcasm lies a misunderstanding so deep that untangling it tells us almost everything worth knowing about how to think about the future, the war, and our own helplessness before events. ...

There is a word that historians reach for whenever a great power decides it would rather feed an aggressor than fight one, and the word is Munich. In 1938 the leaders of Britain and France handed a slice of a sovereign country to a dictator in exchange for a promise of peace that was worthless before the ink had dried, and they came home waving paper and calling it triumph. We learned, supposedly, what that paper cost. And yet I find myself watching the present moment and reaching for the same word, with one unsettling difference. What is happening to Ukraine is not a single conference, not one signature on one afternoon. It is a betrayal in slow motion. It arrives not as an event but as a fact, accumulating quietly while everyone insists that nothing of the kind is taking place. This is a creeping Munich, and the most important thing to understand about it is that it cannot be finished. ...

Every few weeks a reader writes to me with some version of the same hopeful question. Tell us, they say, what does the ideal electoral system look like? Which country has solved the problem of government? Sketch us the perfect constitution and we will fight for it. I understand the impulse completely. After living under a regime that is lawless to its marrow, you crave a blueprint — a finished design you could lift off the shelf and bolt onto your own ruined country once the tyrant is gone. But I have come to believe this craving rests on a mistake, and a dangerous one, because the search for a universally perfect system is structurally identical to the search for a perpetual-motion machine. Both promise something the world does not permit. There is no ideal electoral system, no ideal state structure, no ideal model of government, for one stubborn reason: none of these things can be separated from the society it is supposed to serve. ...

There is a question that recurs in every honest conversation about this war, and it is almost never answered honestly: how many Russians actually support it? The number matters, because so much else hangs from it — questions of guilt, of resistance, of what kind of country will remain when the killing stops. But the number is also a trap, and the way people reach for it usually says more about what they want to believe than about what is true. Some want the figure to be near zero, so that the war can be blamed on one man and his clique, and the rest of the population absolved. Others want it to be the whole hundred and forty million, so that an entire people can be condemned and the bookkeeping of conscience closed for good. Neither of these is the truth, and the truth, when you look at it squarely, is more uncomfortable than either, because it refuses to let anyone off the hook and it refuses to let everyone be hanged together. ...

Whenever I am asked what should be done with Russia after this war, I notice that the question itself contains a hidden assumption I no longer share. The question assumes there will still be a Russia to do something with — a single, intact state, stretching across eleven time zones, that we will somehow steer toward decency once the present regime is gone. Replace the leader, hold honest elections, draft a good constitution, and the country will at last take the European path it missed in the 1990s. I have come to believe this is a comforting illusion, and a dangerous one. The hard truth is simpler and far less reassuring: an intact Russia will keep reproducing the empire, because empire is not a policy this state pursues but the form this state takes. You cannot reform your way out of a shape. You can only break it. ...

Here is a question I keep returning to, because I cannot make it stop being strange. How does a man who rules a country responsible for roughly one and a half percent of the world’s economy keep bending to his will a coalition of states that outweigh him, militarily and economically, by dozens of times? Right now we are watching it happen again. A war criminal wanted by the International Criminal Court refuses an ultimatum, sends a delegation of clerks to a meeting designed to talk peace to death, and somehow it is the rest of the world — Europe, the United States, even the country he is bombing — that ends up rearranging itself around his calendar. You can call this many things. Strategy is not one of them. The honest word, the word that has followed this man across three decades, is luck. ...