Notice what is never on the table. Every Western discussion of how this war ends circles the same small set of options — arm Ukraine a little more, tighten sanctions a little further, wait for the front to shift, or, in the worst version, lean on Kyiv to trade away land for a pause. What is never proposed, never even uttered as a thought experiment in the serious rooms, is the most obvious thing of all: that the war could be ended from inside Russia, by Russians, with Western help. The assumption that arming Russians against their own regime is unthinkable has hardened into a reflex so deep that no one notices it is a choice. It is a choice. And it is the wrong one.
I want to state the case plainly, because it is usually buried under hedges. The West has no plan to actually end this war — only a plan to manage it, to keep Ukraine standing without ever defining what victory would look like or how it would arrive. Meanwhile a treacherous “plan” of the other kind circulates freely: the dealmaker’s fantasy of a settlement that rewards the aggressor and calls it peace. The honest alternative is not a third diplomatic scheme. It is a two-part strategy. Arm Ukraine fully, without the drip-feed and the self-deterrence. And, alongside that, build a serious Russian Volunteer Liberation Army capable of toppling the regime from within. The raw material for the second half already exists. It is being wasted.
The units already exist — as toys
This is not a proposal to conjure a force out of nothing. The force is already in the field. Russian citizens are fighting against the regime right now, in formations attached to Ukraine’s armed forces: the Russian Volunteer Corps, the Freedom of Russia Legion, the Siberian Battalion. They have raided across the border into the Belgorod region. They are armed, organized, and battle-hardened, and they have demonstrated that the imperial frontier is not the wall it is made out to be.
And yet they are kept small. They function as what can only be called play regiments — poteshnye polki, in the old phrase for the toy soldiers a young tsar drilled for amusement before they grew into a real army. They are tolerated as a symbol, a propaganda asset, a way of saying “look, there are good Russians too.” They are not scaled. Nobody treats them as the nucleus of a strategic instrument, which is exactly what they are. The gap between what these units demonstrably are and what they are permitted to become is the whole subject of this essay.
Think about the arithmetic for a moment, soberly. The pool of potential recruits is not small. Millions of Russians oppose this regime; many have left, many remain inside the country, and to them you can add Belarusians, Georgians, and others with their own scores to settle against the same imperial center. From that pool, a force of even twenty to fifty thousand armed volunteers is not a fantasy. A force of that size, properly equipped and led, is not a raiding party. It is an army capable of seizing and holding a region — Belgorod is the obvious candidate, given what the existing units have already shown there — and turning it into a self-reinforcing center of resistance: a piece of Russian soil where the regime does not rule, around which more defections, more recruits, more momentum can gather. That is how regimes actually fall from within. Not through a manifesto. Through a hole in the wall that keeps getting wider.
The history is unambiguous: even Hitler understood this
If the idea of a foreign-backed army of a nation’s own citizens, turned against that nation’s government in wartime, sounds outlandish, that is only because the West has refused to think about it. History has not refused. The instrument is old and well understood. In the last European war of this scale, the Vlasov army was raised from Soviet citizens to fight against Stalin’s regime — and it was Hitler’s side, of all the unspeakable parties, that grasped the strategic logic of mobilizing a captive nation against its own rulers. Set aside every revulsion that name properly evokes; the point is narrow and damning. Even the most monstrous actor of that century had the wit to see that a war can be carried inside the enemy by the enemy’s own people. Today’s Western leaders, with incomparably cleaner hands and a vastly stronger moral position, cannot bring themselves to scale up two existing units of willing volunteers. The failure is not one of capacity. It is one of imagination and nerve.
The three wills that are missing
So why does the obvious not happen? Not because it cannot. Because it requires the convergence of three political wills, and at present all three are absent. Naming them precisely matters, because each is a different kind of failure and each has a different cure.
The first missing will is that of the Russian opposition itself. Here is where I part company hardest with the émigré commentariat. The energy of the opposition-in-exile goes overwhelmingly into symbolic actions — declarations, congresses, open letters, the choreography of conscience. What it does not do is the unglamorous organizational work that an actual liberation army requires: recruitment, and above all the building of a vetting infrastructure, a machinery for finding willing fighters, screening them, and channeling them to the front. This is real work, professional work — the kind that demands logisticians and, frankly, professional Russian officers willing to lead. It produces no applause at a conference. It is also the only thing that would convert the abstract millions of regime opponents into an actual force. An opposition that prefers the gesture to the apparatus has chosen its own irrelevance.
The second missing will is Ukraine’s. This is the most understandable hesitation, and it must be named honestly rather than waved away. Ukraine is asked to trust and to arm Russians — citizens of the state that is destroying its cities — and to fold them into its own military and political plans. The instinctive caution is not irrational; it is the caution of a nation that has every reason to distrust anyone holding a Russian passport. But strategy is not therapy. The Russian volunteers in the ZSU have already earned that trust in the only currency that counts, which is blood spilled on Ukraine’s side. To keep them as a curiosity rather than to arm them as a strike force is to leave a weapon on the ground out of an understandable but ultimately self-defeating wariness.
The third missing will is the West’s, and it is the deepest, because it is a fear dressed up as prudence. The West does not actually want Russia to be defeated so thoroughly that the regime collapses, because it is terrified of what collapse would mean — chaos, fragmentation, loose nuclear weapons, an uncontrolled void where a managed adversary used to be. This is the unspoken premise beneath the whole architecture of restraint, beneath every withheld weapons system and every plea for “stability.” And it is precisely the fear that has to be overcome, because as long as it governs Western policy, the West will keep choosing a manageable forever-war over a decisive end. A serious Russian Liberation Army is exactly the kind of instrument that frightens this mentality, because it points not at a frozen line but at the fall of the regime itself. That is its merit, not its defect.
“But these people are not the opposition”
A specific objection recurs whenever these units are mentioned, and it deserves a direct answer because it goes to the heart of who the real opposition is. The respectable line — argued, for instance, by Kirill Martynov — holds that Russians fighting in Ukraine’s armed forces cannot call themselves the Russian opposition at all. They have, on this view, disqualified themselves by taking up arms against their own country alongside a foreign army.
I find this incoherent. The genuine Russian opposition to this regime is not the émigré commentariat, however articulate. It is the Russian citizens who kept their citizenship and took up arms against the regime inside Ukraine’s forces. These men did not exit into a safe analysis of the situation; they stayed Russian and they fight Putin. To insist that the people physically fighting the dictator are somehow not the opposition, while reserving that title for those who issue statements about him, is to empty the word of meaning. The RDK and the Siberian battalions are the opposition in the only sense that survives contact with a war: they are the ones doing the fighting. The point made elsewhere — that the armed volunteer units, not the rally and the manifesto, are where the real opposition lives — is by now familiar, and I will not relitigate it. What follows from it is not familiar at all: if these are the real opposition, then the strategic conclusion is to grow them into a real army, not to keep admiring them as a moral consolation.
A liberation war has never existed without nationalists
Here the argument reaches its hardest terrain, and I want to walk it carefully, because it is the terrain on which squeamishness usually wins and clear thinking loses.
A standard objection to any such force — and to Ukraine’s own fight, for that matter — is that it will contain unsavory people. Nationalists. Men whose politics are ugly, whose conduct in the past or the future will not survive moral inspection. And the implicit demand is that a liberation movement first purify itself of such elements before it deserves support.
This demand is ahistorical, and it is worth saying so without apology. A national-liberation struggle has never existed anywhere, at any time, without nationalists. This is not an accident or a flaw to be engineered away; it is something closer to a sociological law. Every liberation movement, without a single exception, generates nationalists, and with them comes a measure of violence and cruelty — because the passions that drive people to risk death to throw off an occupier are not the temperate passions of a seminar. To be precise about the gradations: patriotism, nationalism, and the murderous extreme are three distinct, escalating steps, and they exist in every nation, not as an aberration but as a structural feature of national feeling itself. To demand a liberation war staffed only by the first step and innocent of the others is to demand something that has never been seen on earth.
The history bears this out in every direction one looks. Consider Salavat Yulaev, the sacralized hero of the Bashkir struggle, venerated as a liberation figure to this day — and remember that his fighters, during the great revolt, massacred women and children at the Ural factories. The hero and the atrocity coexist in the same movement, the same banner, often the same man. An honest reckoning does not erase one to keep the other; it recognizes the pattern as universal. And there is a discipline that comes with this recognition, especially for an outsider: someone who has never lived the condition of occupation, who has never been thrown into that fate, is in no position to either feel those liberation sentiments from the inside or to issue easy moral grades to those who do. The outsider’s task is to reconstruct and understand the pattern, not to perform a purity inspection and withhold support until the heroes turn out to be saints. They never do. That is not a reason to abandon liberation movements. It is the price of every one that has ever succeeded.
I should add a clarification that matters for honesty’s sake. None of this is a glorification of cruelty or a license for atrocity, and the recognition that liberation movements contain nationalists is not the same as cheering whatever any nationalist does. There is also an asymmetry worth marking: the nationalism that arises inside a nation fighting to detach itself from imperial occupation is a natural feature of that fight, whereas the nationalism of the occupying power — a power under no attack, waging no war of liberation — has no such excuse and is a different and uglier thing. The structural fact is descriptive, not a blank check. But a descriptive fact you refuse to face will defeat you all the same.
The Churchill principle
The deepest form of the squeamishness objection is the demand for a kind of entrance exam — a liberalism test, a face-control at the door of resistance, by which any actor who wants to weaken the regime must first prove ideological respectability before earning support. I think this instinct, however refined, is a serious error, and the cleanest way to see why is to recall the principle Churchill stated when the previous fascism had to be beaten.
When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Churchill — who despised everything Stalin stood for — pledged his support to Stalin without hesitation, and explained the logic with brutal clarity: if Hitler invaded Hell, he would find a favorable word for the Devil. That is the principle. In a war against a fascist regime, weakening the regime is the overriding aim, and supporting even unsavory actors who shake it is correct, because nothing is worse than the thing being fought. We saw a smaller, sharper instance of this when Wagner — Prigozhin’s men, by any measure an unsavory force — turned and marched against the Kremlin. There was a revealing split at that moment: Khodorkovsky grasped the logic and backed the convulsion against Putin, while Milov and a chorus of European politicians recoiled, applying their liberalism exam to a column that was, for one astonishing day, doing more to shake the regime than a decade of declarations. The exam was the error. The march was the opportunity.
This is also, incidentally, why the existing Russian units in Ukraine’s army are the most realistic instrument of all. The fantasy alternative — scattered regional uprisings inside Russia — is suicidal against a Rosgvardia hundreds of thousands strong, built precisely to crush exactly that. The realistic path runs the other way: battle-hardened Russian volunteers, grown in number and armed for the purpose, positioned so that in a moment of turmoil they can strike toward the imperial center. Prigozhin’s column showed that such a march is not unthinkable; it nearly happened by accident, led by gangsters. Imagine it attempted on purpose, by a force built for it.
The passport and the rifle
So let us be done with the comforting belief that there is no way to end this war from within, and with the reflex that arming Russians against their own regime is unthinkable. The instrument exists. The recruits exist. The historical precedent exists. The only things missing are three political wills — an opposition that builds an apparatus instead of staging a conscience, a Ukraine that arms the men who have already bled for it, and a West that masters its fear of the void it imagines on the far side of victory.
And in the end the argument resolves into a single image. The real Russian opposition is not the figure at the European lectern, eloquent and safe, explaining why the situation is complicated. It is the figure who kept his Russian passport and took up a rifle against the regime that issued it. Between the man who analyzes the war from a comfortable distance and the man who carries it back across the border, the difference is not a matter of degree. It is the whole difference. The West keeps refusing to build an army out of the second kind of man. It is the only army that could actually finish this — and the refusal is not realism. It is the failure to see what is already standing in the field.