There is a particular sadness in watching two friends turn on each other, and a particular obscenity in watching a third party — the one who wishes them both dead — smile at the sight. That is what has come to pass, in the summer of 2026, between Poland and Ukraine. Not the familiar drama of Russia against the West, but something stranger and more disheartening: two allies, one of them fighting for its very existence, reaching back eighty years to open a grave. Poland’s deputy prime minister and defense minister, Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz — the leader of its peasant party — announced that Ukraine will have serious trouble entering the European Union so long as the Ukrainian Insurgent Army and its nationalists remain on its banners. One cannot, he said, raise onto a European pedestal those who destroy European cooperation; with Bandera, Ukraine will not enter the Union. And in almost the same breath — this is the detail that gives the game away — he added that Poland would not be handing over its MiG-29 fighter jets after all. History and weapons, fused in a single sentence. ...

There is a sentence that ends arguments before they begin: “war is hell, both sides do terrible things, so there is nothing to choose between them.” It sounds like maturity. It is in fact the opposite of looking, a refusal disguised as worldliness, and it collapses the moment you actually examine what is being fought over Ukraine. Because what is happening there is not one war fought by two morally comparable armies. It is two different things at once, occurring on the same map and called by the same name. One is a deliberate, years-long campaign to exterminate a civilian population. The other is a disciplined defense that strikes only military and economic targets. To see them as a single phenomenon — “the war,” with its regrettable excesses on both sides — is already to have lost the thread that connects the facts to any honest judgment. ...

When a regime has finished with the newspapers and the television studios, there is always one frontier left, and for the Russian state that frontier is now the internet itself. The old press was strangled long ago; the last registered liberal outlets were blocked in the first week of the full-scale war, and the editors were given the standard choice between prison and silence. But none of that reached the place where most people had quietly gone to find out what was actually happening — the open net, with the handful of platforms that still carried information and opinion diverging from Kremlin propaganda. Two of them mattered above the rest: Wikipedia, and, towering over everything, YouTube. The campaign against these is not a continuation of the old censorship by other means. It is a qualitatively new project: not to bend the platforms but to wall the country off from them, to sever an entire population from the global information space and seal it inside a managed enclosure. This is the digital iron curtain, and it is being lowered in plain sight. ...

For a century, the way to measure a military was to count. Count the tanks, the hulls, the airframes, the warheads; add up the budgets; weigh the tonnage; and from that arithmetic of mass deduce who would win. The bigger arsenal beat the smaller one. The richer state, able to buy more and heavier machines, dictated terms to the poorer. It was a comfortable assumption, because it was simple, and because for a long time it was roughly true. It is now false. A revolution in the character of war has already happened — not on a drawing board, but in the field, in front of everyone — and most of the world’s arsenals have not yet understood that they are obsolete. The cheap, mass-produced drone has quietly dethroned the expensive legacy platform. A machine that costs a few hundred dollars now routinely destroys a machine that costs millions, and the side that can out-produce and out-think its enemy in cheap precision is the side that wins. War has stopped being a contest of brute mass. It has become a contest of technologies and of production arithmetic — and a great many generals, ministries and states are still preparing, at enormous expense, for the last war. ...

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 that observers of foreign affairs hear constantly, and it always arrives in the same imperative tone. Do not interfere in American affairs. Do not interfere in European affairs. And if you no longer live in the country you came from, do not interfere in its affairs either. The logic, such as it is, runs like this: a person who watches a country from a distance has forfeited the right to an opinion about it, and any judgment he offers is an impertinence at best and a hostile intrusion at worst. The demand deserves to be taken seriously, because beneath its surface lies a genuine question — about who is entitled to speak, and about what honesty requires of anyone who does. The 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. ...