Europe

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. ...

The most flattering thing the Russian state now says about itself is that it is a civilization — a “state-civilization,” a separate pole standing between East and West, beholden to neither. It is meant to sound proud. It is in fact a confession, and once you follow it to its logical end, it becomes one of the bleakest self-descriptions a state has ever issued. Because if Russia really is a distinct civilization, set apart from the European order of human rights, the rule of law, and the separation of powers, then the next question is unavoidable: what is the content of this civilization once those things are taken out? Subtract Europe from Russia and look at what remains. The honest name for that residue is not “a third pole.” It is a monster. ...

Every war needs a founding lie, and this one has a particularly seductive one: that Ukrainians and Russians are “one people,” torn apart by malice and propaganda, who would fall back into a single embrace if only the troublemakers were removed. It is an attractive story because it dresses an invasion as a family reunion. It is also false, and not in a vague or sentimental way. History refutes it precisely. Ukraine and Russia did not drift apart in the twentieth century over politics; they forked in the Middle Ages, from two different roots, into two different civilizations. The man pulling the trigger believes he is correcting an accident. He is, in fact, fighting the conclusion of a process that was settled long before he was born — and, as I will argue at the end, he is now completing it against his own will. ...

Two opposite illusions have grown up around the sanctions imposed on Russia, and the strange thing is that the same people often hold both at once. The first illusion is that sanctions are useless theatre — a way for Western governments to look busy, a press release that hurts no one, a gesture that the Kremlin shrugs off while the oil keeps flowing and the missiles keep falling. The second illusion is the mirror image: that sanctions are a kind of secret weapon, that if only they were tightened enough they would strangle the dictatorship into collapse, turn the population against the war, and bring peace without anyone having to fight for it. Both of these are wrong, and they are wrong in instructive ways. The truth lies in the uncomfortable middle, where most true things live. Sanctions cannot end this war by themselves. But they are very far from nothing. Understanding exactly what they can and cannot do is not an academic exercise; it is the difference between spending Western leverage where it bites and squandering it on fantasies. ...

The comfortable way to talk about the Russian state’s antisemitism is to treat it as a series of accidents. A foreign minister blurts out something monstrous on Italian television; a spokeswoman invents Israeli mercenaries on a battlefield; a ministry moves to expel a Jewish charity. Each episode is filed under embarrassment — a slip, a gaffe, an isolated lapse of a regime otherwise busy with other crimes. I want to argue that this reading is not merely too kind but diagnostically wrong. These are not accidents. They are the surfacing of a single structural attribute, and that attribute is one of the most reliable signs we possess that a fascism has fully crystallized. As Russian power hardens into one of the most obscurantist forms the century has seen, it acquires antisemitism the way the most rabid regimes of the last century acquired it — not as a flaw but as a working part. The once-isolated moves are merging into a coordinated whole. To see it clearly is to stop asking why does this keep happening and start reading it as a symptom that tells you exactly how far the disease has progressed. ...

When the migrants began to mass in the forests of the Belarus-Poland border in the autumn of 2021, the world reached almost automatically for the only category it had ready: a migration crisis, a humanitarian problem, a question of how a wealthy Europe ought to treat the desperate people arriving at its edge. That framing felt natural, and it was a trap. What was happening on that border was not a flow of refugees that a generous policy might have absorbed. It was an attack — a deliberate, engineered assault on a sovereign state — and the migrants freezing in the forest were not its authors but its ammunition. A cornered dictator had discovered something genuinely new: a weapon no air-defence system can intercept, no sanctions list can ground, no radar can see coming, because the weapon is made of human beings. To read that November as a migration problem is to mistake the projectile for the conflict. The projectile, in this case, was alive, deceived, and dying, and that was the entire point. ...