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.
War does something that peace never does: it strips good and evil of their masks. In ordinary times morality is a fog of nuance, mitigating circumstances, and on-the-other-hands. You can be a complicated person with complicated loyalties and never be forced to resolve them. Then the missiles start falling on schools and kindergartens and apartment blocks—not a single military target among them, just a fitness center and four wounded children—and the fog burns off. What is left is a single question, blunt and unembarrassed, that anyone who wants to do politics must answer. Whose side are you on?
The litmus test has moved
For years the standard test of where a Russian stood was the Crimea question. “Whose is Crimea?” If you could say “Ukraine’s” without flinching, you passed. That test has now been superseded by a harder one, and the new question is this: do you want Russia to lose? Notice how much more is being asked. The Crimea question was about a fact and a border. The new question is about a wish, about which outcome of an ongoing slaughter you are actually rooting for. And here is the thing many otherwise sympathetic people cannot bring themselves to do: they cannot say yes. They want Putin gone, they want the killing stopped, they want, vaguely, “peace”—but they will not say the words “I want Russia to be defeated.” That hesitation is not a small thing. It is, in fact, the whole answer. Not wanting Russia to lose means you have not made up your mind, and in this war not making up your mind is itself a position. It places you, objectively, somewhere on the aggressor’s half of the field.
I want to be precise about what “objectively” means here, because the word is doing real work. I am not measuring people’s hearts. I assume that most of the figures I have in mind sincerely loathe the war and would be horrified to be told they are helping it. The point is that intentions are not the unit of account. What matters is the direction in which one’s actions and arguments point. And there is a famous, revealing tell: when prominent voices explain that they cannot bring themselves to support arming Ukraine because Ukrainian weapons kill Russians. They never say “our boys.” They are far too cultured for that. But “our boys” is precisely what the sentence means. Once you have decided that the relevant tragedy is dead Russian soldiers rather than the country those soldiers were sent to destroy, you have chosen. You have put yourself on the side of the Reich, and the refinement of your phrasing changes nothing.
Fighting corruption for the war machine
The same logic explains something that confuses a lot of well-meaning people: why I am unenthusiastic about anti-corruption investigations inside wartime Russia. Surely, the objection runs, exposing stolen billions and palaces and patriotic deputies who send their children to Switzerland can only weaken the regime. Surely every revelation chips away at it. Let them investigate—every bit helps. I understand the appeal of this, and in a different decade I would have applauded without reservation. But look at what such work actually accomplishes now. Corruption in today’s Russia is not the regime’s enemy; it is Ukraine’s ally. A general who steals from the military budget is, functionally, on Kyiv’s side. Every ruble embezzled is a ruble that does not buy a shell. So an organization that devotes itself to reducing corruption is devoting itself to closing the gap in the budget—and a smaller gap means more money available for the actual purpose of that budget, which is killing Ukrainians.
This is the uncomfortable arithmetic. The Anti-Corruption Foundation and the Prosecutor’s Office are not working together; there is no conspiracy. But they are working in the same direction. The Prosecutor’s Office jails corrupt officials—it has dismissed and prosecuted deputy ministers and a growing list of generals—and the investigators publish their exposés, and both are, in effect, auditing the war machine for inefficiency and helping it run a little leaner. The regime, far from being threatened, finds this convenient. The investigations function as a hint—here are your weak points, here is where money leaks. Worse, they assume an electoral reality that does not exist, urging people toward “smart voting” in a country where there are no elections to be smart about. They are calling on people to dive into a pool that was drained long ago. The war changed everything, and an opposition that goes on campaigning as if the water were still there has not understood the most basic fact of the era it is living in.
A faith no one really holds
Behind all of this stands a phantom, and the phantom has a name: the beautiful Russia of the future. It was once a genuine political project—a hope you could organize around, a destination. I want to say plainly that it no longer exists, not even as a project. What remains is the word, recited the way Soviet officials in the regime’s last years went on invoking communism: with the particular hollowness of people who have stopped believing but have not stopped professing. Everyone in those late-Soviet meeting halls knew the future they were toasting would never arrive; the toasts continued anyway, out of habit and fear and the absence of anything to put in their place. That is exactly the timbre I now hear when people invoke the beautiful Russia of the future. It is a liturgy for a god no one in the room expects to show up.
And if the regime collapses, as I think defeat in war will eventually make it collapse, the people needed afterward will not be the marchers and the manifesto-writers and the ideologists of that beautiful future. A massive influx of returning war criminals and broken men is not something any regime survives; empires do not tolerate defeat. But what emerges from that wreckage will need different architects entirely—people thinking not about a restored, beautiful, unified Russia but about what comes after the empire, about normal and ordinary futures for the very real regions and peoples currently held inside it. The dreamers of the beautiful Russia are, almost by definition, unsuited to that work, because their entire imagination is bent toward preserving the thing whose collapse is the precondition for anything decent.
Where the real opposition is
So if the émigré rally is not the opposition, where is it? The honest answer is that the genuine opposition is not marching through European capitals or testifying before parliaments. It is fighting—literally, with weapons, inside the Ukrainian army. The Freedom of Russia Legion, the Siberian Battalion, the Russian Volunteer Corps: these are Russian citizens who answered the question whose side are you on with their bodies. They are not demanding rights or visas or a seat at any table. They are risking and giving their lives for the freedom of the country their state invaded. When someone tells me to hate all Russians, I think of them and ask: all of them? These too? The pronoun collapses on contact with the facts, because the line that matters in this war does not run between nations. It runs between those who chose to resist the Reich and those who, in one elegant formulation or another, chose not to.
This is why I cannot extend even a partial pass to what might be called the native-blood party—the people who oppose the war, who are sincere in opposing it, who have suffered for opposing it, and who nonetheless refuse to recognize Ukraine as the victim. They reason that there is still a Russian voter not to be alienated, a constituency to be nursed for the day they return and run for office. So they demand peace—immediately, at any cost, on terms that would amount to Ukraine’s capitulation—while refusing to say that the country being invaded is in the right and the invader in the wrong. I will defend such a person’s freedom absolutely; when the regime threatens one of them with prison merely for uttering the word “peace,” that persecution is monstrous and I will say so without qualification. Their freedom and mine are indistinguishable. But on the substance there is no rescuing the position. To oppose the war and still refuse to take the victim’s side is, in the end, to have taken the aggressor’s. The native-blood party has chosen Russia, and in this war choosing Russia means choosing the side that is doing the killing.
I take no pleasure in drawing these lines, and I am aware of how harsh they sound against people who are, in their private lives, decent and even brave. But the harshness is not mine; it belongs to the war, which abolished the middle ground the moment the first column crossed the border. You can be against Hitler and for the Third Reich only in a sentence, never in reality. There is no other, beautiful Russia waiting in reserve to be for. There is the country that is doing this, and there is everyone resisting it, and the comfortable space that used to exist between them has been bombed flat along with everything else. The only question left is the one I keep returning to, because it is the only one that now matters. Whose side are you on?