Ukraine

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. ...

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 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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

There is a question that recurs in every honest conversation about this war, and it is almost never answered honestly: how many Russians actually support it? The number matters, because so much else hangs from it — questions of guilt, of resistance, of what kind of country will remain when the killing stops. But the number is also a trap, and the way people reach for it usually says more about what they want to believe than about what is true. Some want the figure to be near zero, so that the war can be blamed on one man and his clique, and the rest of the population absolved. Others want it to be the whole hundred and forty million, so that an entire people can be condemned and the bookkeeping of conscience closed for good. Neither of these is the truth, and the truth, when you look at it squarely, is more uncomfortable than either, because it refuses to let anyone off the hook and it refuses to let everyone be hanged together. ...

Whenever I am asked what should be done with Russia after this war, I notice that the question itself contains a hidden assumption I no longer share. The question assumes there will still be a Russia to do something with — a single, intact state, stretching across eleven time zones, that we will somehow steer toward decency once the present regime is gone. Replace the leader, hold honest elections, draft a good constitution, and the country will at last take the European path it missed in the 1990s. I have come to believe this is a comforting illusion, and a dangerous one. The hard truth is simpler and far less reassuring: an intact Russia will keep reproducing the empire, because empire is not a policy this state pursues but the form this state takes. You cannot reform your way out of a shape. You can only break it. ...

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. ...

There is a small irony buried in the Russian calendar that almost nobody notices. The country keeps a generous collection of press holidays. One marks the appearance, three centuries ago, of the first issue of a state gazette under Peter the Great. Another, inherited from Soviet times, commemorates the day in 1912 when the first issue of Pravda rolled off the press. And somewhere in between sits the imported World Press Freedom Day, observed with a kind of polite confusion, as if it were a foreign saint nobody in the house actually prays to. The accumulation is telling. A culture that has to multiply its festivals of the press is usually a culture compensating for something it never had. ...

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. ...

There is a kind of test in grammar that students of Russian learn early: when you cannot remember how to spell an unstressed vowel, you find a related word in which that vowel falls under stress, and the doubt dissolves. The right answer was always there; you simply needed to put the word into a position where it could no longer hide. I have come to believe that wars have control questions too, and that the war against Ukraine has one so clean, so decisive, that anyone who keeps it in mind can never again be confused about what is happening or about where the pressure must be applied. The control question is this: which side can end the war by itself, today, without asking permission from anyone? Pose it, and the whole fog of “complexity” that diplomats and dealmakers love to summon burns off in an instant. ...

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. ...