Ukraine

There are years that the textbooks compress into a single date because everything that mattered happened at once. Nineteen forty-five, when the unconditional surrender of Germany was signed in a Berlin suburb and a bipolar order settled over the world for the next four decades. Nineteen ninety-one, when the Soviet Union dissolved and an interim, improvised order took its place. I have come to believe we are living through a third such date right now, in real time, without the comfort of hindsight. The transatlantic order assembled after the Second World War — built largely by the United States, with the United States at its center — is coming apart in front of us. This is not a crisis within the order. It is the dissolution of the order itself, a tectonic shift on the scale of the two that preceded it. And the most important thing to understand about it is that despair is the wrong response. What is ending was always going to end someday; what matters now is what we choose to build in its place. ...

There is a comforting fiction that animates almost every round of diplomacy over this war: the idea that peace is something one assembles at a table, by leaning on both sides until they meet somewhere in the middle. Pressure Kyiv to give a little, pressure Moscow to give a little, and the killing stops. It is a tidy theory. It is also, I am convinced, a delusion — one that has cost a great many lives and will cost more before it is finally abandoned. This war does not have a diplomatic solution that anyone in Kyiv could accept and survive. It has a military solution, and the sooner that truth is spoken plainly, the sooner the war can actually end — on the battlefield, in Ukraine’s favor. ...

A comprehensive review of Shura Burtin’s body of journalistic work, focusing on recurring themes, political framing, and his portrayals of Ukraine and Russia. Background on Shura Burtin and His Work Shura (Aleksandr) Burtin is a Russian journalist known for extensive, narrative-driven reportage. Born in 1972, Burtin has a background in biology but built a career in journalism at outlets like Moscow News, Russkiy Reporter, and Colta.ru1. He has received multiple awards for investigative reporting – notably winning the 2019 True Story Award for a Meduza article profiling Chechen human rights activist Oyub Titiyev2. Burtin’s work often appears in independent outlets. In recent years, he has been a contributor to Meduza (a Latvia-based Russian independent news site) and the Swiss magazine Reportagen3. Notably, Meduza is openly opposed to Vladimir Putin’s regime and has been labeled a “foreign agent” by Moscow. This context makes Burtin’s reporting particularly intriguing – his journalism is published by avowedly anti-Kremlin platforms, yet some critics allege it echoes Kremlin talking points. ...

There is a piece of advice that has become so common it now passes for sophistication. You hear it from supporters and critics alike, from people who agree with me on almost everything and from people who agree with me on nothing: “Don’t listen to what he says. Pay attention to what he does.” It is offered as the worldly counsel of someone who has seen through the noise, who refuses to be fooled by speeches and knows that only actions count. And every time I hear it, I object — not mildly, but flatly. The advice is not wisdom. It is a mistake, and a harmful one, because it asks us to disarm ourselves in precisely the domain where the most powerful people on earth do their most consequential work. We live in a world of words and of information. Ignoring what leaders say is not realism. It is a refusal to look at half of reality, and the more powerful the speaker, the larger that half becomes. ...

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. ...

Ending Russia’s war against Ukraine requires collective action on multiple fronts. We can categorize possible actions into three levels of impact: First-Order Measures, which are the most direct and high-impact steps; Second-Order Measures, which work indirectly or on a larger scale to weaken the war effort; and Third-Order Measures, which provide crucial support and humanitarian aid. First-Order Measures (Most Effective) These are the most immediate and powerful ways individuals and allies can help Ukraine defeat the invasion. They directly weaken Russia’s ability to wage war or strengthen Ukraine’s ability to fight. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

When I was little, it was in Ukraine that I first learned what nationalism is. It was there that people started calling me “moskal” and “katsap,” words whose meaning I didn’t fully understand until I asked my parents. Nationalism was foreign to me, but I saw it in the dull, hardened eyes of the little girls who taunted me. For some reason it was always the girls… There it was, right in front of me — this strange, incomprehensible, baseless, embittered nationalism. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

We have a habit, and it is a comfortable one, of keeping the world’s wars in separate folders. Ukraine goes in one. The Middle East goes in another. North Korea’s perpetual menace gets a folder of its own, filed somewhere at the back where we hope it will stay quiet. Each folder has its own experts, its own history, its own list of grievances and borders and broken treaties. And because each looks so distinct on the surface, we treat them as distinct in their nature: this war is about territory, that one is about religion, that other one is about a paranoid dynasty and its missiles. We reach for a local explanation every time, and the local explanation is always available, because every war does have a local cause. ...

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. ...