Putin

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 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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

There is a recurring question that comes up whenever people try to take the measure of the men who currently dominate the headlines: can a figure like Putin, or like Trump, actually change the course of history the way a Lenin or a Genghis Khan once did? The instinct is to answer by ranking personalities — to argue that these two are smaller men than the world-shakers of the past, or that the historical conditions simply aren’t ripe. I think that instinct, while not entirely wrong, misses the decisive point. The scale of a personality matters, yes. But what truly separates the man who reshapes the world from the man who merely disrupts it is not raw force of character. It is whether he carries an idea in his head — a developed picture of a future he intends to build. And it is precisely here that both Putin and Trump are empty. ...

Watch any single round of the so-called peace talks and you will recognize it as the next showing of a film you have already seen. The same delegations file into the same hall. The same demands are read from the same pages. The same word, “negotiations,” is pronounced with the same gravity, and at the end nothing has moved an inch closer to peace. It is Groundhog Day staged with cameras and translators. The Turkish hosts pronounce a meeting “not negative,” which seems to mean only that there was no fistfight, and the world is invited to take this as progress. I want to argue something blunter than the diplomatic vocabulary allows: these talks are not a road to peace that keeps hitting potholes. They are a fraud by design. You cannot negotiate an end to a war while you are busy waging it, and you cannot find a compromise with a party whose only real demand is that the other party cease to exist. ...

When the naturalist Georges Buffon accepted his honors, he offered a sentence that has outlived almost everything else he ever wrote: the style is the man. He meant that the way a mind arranges the world is more native to it than any single thing it happens to believe. Two centuries later, a dissident sentenced to exile in the Soviet camps refined the thought into something colder and more useful. He said that his quarrel with Soviet power was not political but stylistic — and that this made it deeper and more irreconcilable than any disagreement over programs could ever be. I have come to think those two remarks, taken together, are the sharpest diagnostic instrument we possess for the present moment. They tell us to stop reading the platforms and start reading the style. And when you do that with the two men who currently hold the levers of global politics in their hands, something uncomfortable comes into focus: beneath their genuine frictions, Trump and Putin are stylistic brothers, and that shared style is the living substance of neo-fascism. ...

Every administration leaves behind a signature product. Some leave laws, some leave wars, some leave a reshaped economy or a redrawn map. The current American administration leaves something stranger and harder to name, because it is not a policy at all. Its product is chaos. The tariffs that appear at fifty percent on Monday and thirty on Tuesday, the ceasefire demanded one day and abandoned the next, the deadlines that never arrive, the loyal allies turned overnight into traitors and back again into friends: these are not the debris of a plan that has not yet matured. They are the plan, if a thing this incoherent can be called one. The man stirs up the turbulence and then goes off to play golf, and within that turbulence everything else of consequence quietly proceeds. To understand the present moment, you have to stop looking for the strategy hidden behind the chaos and accept that the chaos is the strategy’s stand-in. There is nothing behind the curtain except the curtain. ...

There is a story that has become almost an article of faith among people who watch this war closely. It goes by a code name now, a colonel’s pseudonym, and it holds that the President of the United States is a recruited asset of Russian intelligence, that somewhere in a Moscow archive sits a folder with his operational alias, and that this folder explains everything he does. The appeal of the theory is obvious. It is tidy. It converts a maddening, inexplicable man into a known quantity. If he is an agent, then his every move against Ukraine, every gutted alliance, every gift handed to the Kremlin, snaps into a single line of cause and effect. I understand the temptation completely. And I want to argue, carefully, that we should resist it — not because the truth about this man is reassuring, but because the recruitment theory is the weakest available explanation for behavior that a much simpler idea explains in full. ...

A regime that can offer its people no future does the next available thing: it seizes the past. This is not a metaphor. On his inauguration day in May 2024, Vladimir Putin signed a decree on the “Foundations of State Policy in the Sphere of Historical Enlightenment,” which quietly accomplished something no free country would attempt — it defined history as a state-regulated activity. A presidential commission was created. Disputed historical questions — the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, the Katyn massacre — could now be referred upward, to bodies like the Security Council or the State Council, for adjudication. Read that sentence again, because it contains the whole disease in miniature: in Russia, what happened in the past is now, in principle, a matter to be decided by the same organ that runs the secret police. ...

There is a sentence that gets repeated in Western capitals as if it were a law of physics: if we give Ukraine too much, Russia will use nuclear weapons. It is spoken gravely, by serious people, and it is meant to end the conversation. I want to begin by pointing out what that sentence actually commits you to. If “too much aid” triggers annihilation, then somewhere below “too much” there is a safe amount — and you can never know where the line is, because the man drawing it has every incentive to keep moving it toward zero. The only point on that scale that is guaranteed not to provoke the apocalypse is the point where you give nothing at all. Take the premise seriously and it does not counsel caution; it counsels surrender, today and every day after. A senior American official is reported to have warned that excessive support for Ukraine could prompt a Russian nuclear strike. The honest name for a policy built on that fear is not prudence. It is suicide — the slow kind, where you talk yourself out of defending what you believe in because someone has told you the alternative is the end of the world. ...

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. ...

There is a comfortable way to talk about the FSB, and almost everyone uses it. In this telling the agency is Vladimir Putin’s instrument — his sword and shield, the loyal apparatus through which a single man projects his will across eleven time zones. He commands; it obeys. Frighten the dictator and you frighten the service; remove the dictator and the service goes slack. I want to argue that this picture is not merely incomplete but inverted. The FSB is not Putin’s tool. It is a mafia operating at the scale of a country and reaching across the world, and Putin is one of its assets rather than its owner — the most valuable asset it holds, but an asset all the same. The relationship is not master and servant. It is a partnership between a frightened man and the organization that profits from his fear, and the organization is the senior partner. ...

There is a comfortable way to talk about Yevgeny Prigozhin, and it has the great advantage of making him small. In this telling he was a caterer who got lucky, a thug with good connections, a useful brute whom the Kremlin pointed at Ukraine and Africa and who then, in a fit of pique, briefly lost his mind and drove a column toward the capital before thinking better of it. File him that way and the whole episode shrinks to an anecdote: a colorful henchman, an embarrassing weekend, a tidy aerial death. I want to argue that this is exactly the wrong frame, and that the smallness is the point — because the comfortable reading is a way of not looking at what Prigozhin actually represented. He was not an aberration of the system. He was its purest product, and its plainest warning. ...

There is a story the Kremlin tells about its own defeat, and the remarkable thing is how many people outside the Kremlin have come to believe it. The story goes like this: cut off from a hostile and decadent West, Russia has executed a grand strategic turn to the East, finding in China a co-equal partner, a civilizational ally, a second pole around which a new and fairer world will organize itself. The sanctions, in this telling, were a gift. They freed Russia from dependence on a dying Europe and delivered it into the embrace of the rising power of the century. The pivot to China is presented not as a retreat but as a triumph — the proof that the war was worth fighting, that the multipolar world Putin promised has in fact been born. ...

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. ...

There is a comfortable way to talk about the Russian Orthodox Church and the war, and it goes like this: the Church is an ancient faith, a reservoir of belief and consolation, and the regime — cynical as ever — has simply co-opted it, draping its tanks in incense the way it drapes everything else it touches. On this view the institution is a victim of the state, a sacred thing put to profane use. I want to argue that this picture is not just incomplete but backwards. The Moscow Patriarchate is not a faith that the regime co-opts. In its present form it is a creation of the state’s security organs, and in this war it has made itself something more specific and more terrible than a propaganda asset. It is the metaphysical engine of the aggression — the apparatus that takes the killing of one nation by another and returns it to the killers as holiness. ...

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. ...

We are used to reading repression as a display of power. The arrests, the prison terms, the raided institutes, the criminal cases against people who have already fled the country — all of this looks, at first glance, like a strong state flexing its muscles, reminding everyone who is in charge. I want to argue almost the opposite. The repression now grinding through Russia is not the regime demonstrating its strength; it is the regime wounding itself. It destroys the very minds and talents a country needs in order to live. It manufactures, with its own hands, the people who will one day come to settle accounts. And it always intensifies at a particular, telling moment — not when the regime is winning, but when it is failing abroad and has nowhere else to put its rage. Seen this way, the machinery of fear is not armor. It is a slow poison the state keeps administering to itself. ...

We are used to thinking of trust and empathy as private virtues — qualities a person either possesses or lacks, scattered unevenly across a population the way height or temperament is scattered. On this view, some peoples are warm and some are cold, and there is not much to be done about it. I want to argue something less comforting and more useful: that trust and empathy are not moods but variables, quantities a society can be measured by, and that the measurement decides everything. There is a number that governs whether people will cooperate to save their own lives, whether a state can be believed when it matters most, and whether a ruler treats his population as fellow citizens or as a hostile crowd to be managed. The number is the radius — how far beyond the self and the immediate family a person is willing to extend trust and fellow-feeling. Stretch it wide and a society can do almost anything together. Let it contract to the size of a household, or a single skull, and the same society becomes ungovernable except by force, incapable of collective action, and indifferent to mass death happening in plain sight. ...