As the fighting grinds on, the backlash against the pro-war nuns has continued. At a Christmas fair in the Polish city of Szczecin, Belarusian pro-democracy activists protested in front of the nuns’ stall, accusing shoppers of “supporting torture in Belarusian prisons and Russian aggression against Ukraine”. Ukrainians in Belfast warned of the nuns’ ties to the Kremlin and urged the city council not to host them again. Last Christmas, in the parish of Täby, a suburb of Stockholm, the rector allowed the nuns to flog their wares in the church corridor. But the Church of Sweden later warned that the nuns “use their income to support Russian nationalism” and “have close ties with GRU”, referring to Russia’s military intelligence service. It advised its believers “against supporting their activities in any way”.

The Saint Elisabeth Convent in Minsk refutes such claims. On its website, it says money from the sales helps orphans and funds “humanitarian aid” for residents of Russian occupied Donbas. Yet Archpriest Andrey Lemeshonok, the convent’s spiritual father, has made no secret of his backing of the invasion. He once boasted that his nuns were part of “a combat unit”, fighting for Russia’s future. Saint Elisabeth nuns, with flak jackets over their habits, have been photographed in occupied Ukraine and posing with Russian flags decorated with the pro-war Z symbol.

Four and a half years ago, when Russia launched its full-scale invasion, Kirill did not call for peace. Instead he called Russia’s opponents in Ukraine “evil forces”, casting the war as a metaphysical battle against what he labeled the corrupting values of the West. Since then, his rhetoric has only hardened, sanctifying the bloodshed in Ukraine. But his hawkishness is nothing new: a poisonous co-dependency between church and state has existed for centuries. Many of the patriarch’s predecessors were under the Kremlin’s thumb and in hock to the secret police. In Soviet times, not a single bishop was appointed without the blessing of the KGB. But today, more than ever before, the church acts as an instrument of Moscow’s geopolitical power projecting influence, and posing a growing threat, across Europe.

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European security agencies increasingly view Russian church networks with suspicion. An open-source investigation by the Kyiv-based Molfar Intelligence Institute in late 2024 concluded that the ROC “constructs churches near strategic facilities, government institutions, and military bases across various European countries” in a systematic effort to use religious outposts for espionage. In Bulgaria, Czechia, North Macedonia and elsewhere, “spies in cassocks” have been used as an alternative to diplomatic cover after the expulsion of Russian embassy staff following the invasion of Ukraine. In 2024, a priest from a Russian church in the Czech resort town of Karlovy Vary was expelled over suspicions of hostile activities. “We would be particularly foolish,” said one Czech MEP,  “if we did not recognize that Russia is undeniably using the Orthodox Church to carry out its hybrid warfare.”

Russia’s church has even tried to sway elections. Ahead of Moldova’s 2024 presidential poll and EU integration referendum, Russian state officials funded all-expenses-paid “pilgrimages” to Moscow for dozens of Moldovan Orthodox priests and gave them debit cards loaded with hundreds of dollars as going-home presents. In exchange, the clerics were instructed to create channels on the Telegram messaging app warning against joining the EU.

Moscow has also been quietly hoovering up strategic real estate. In Vardø, a remote Arctic town close to Norway’s GLOBUS radar station, the Moscow Patriarchate secured local approval, and even Norwegian state funding, to build a chapel. Clergy from the nearby Russian diocese of Plesetsk and Kargopol, including its bishop, made frequent visits to Vardø to unveil monuments to Norwegian partisans and consecrate Orthodox crosses. They said the chapel would serve Orthodox sailors and be a reminder of the cultural ties between Russia and Norway. But when the proposal was eventually submitted, the chapel had grown to 17 meters in height and, according to Vardø’s current mayor, the Russian bishop insisted the exact location under Nato radars had been “dictated” to him “by God himself”. Following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and growing scrutiny of Moscow-linked institutions, the plans were shelved.

But many Russian churches have been built in sensitive spots, including in neighboring Sweden. The Church of the Holy Mother of God of Kazan in the town of Västerås, west of Stockholm, built and consecrated in 2024, is near a major airport, a water treatment works and a network of energy companies. Markus Göransson, a researcher at the Swedish Defense University, felt it was too close for comfort. “When Sweden’s defense forces undertake exercises on or near the airport… they do so under possible surveillance from the church,” he complained. Moreover, locals discovered that the plot of land for the church had been bought by Rosatom, Russia’s state-owned nuclear corporation which also, through an intermediary, funded the construction. Last August, the agency overseeing non-state religion funding in Sweden cut off state subsidies to the Västerås parish citing security concerns.

Finland, meanwhile, knows Russian pressure only too well. It shares an 833-mile border with its eastern neighbor, the longest in the EU. Decades of conflict and more recent hybrid tactics have fueled deep distrust. After the invasion, officials in the Finnish city of Turku moved quickly to close a Moscow-linked Orthodox church near a naval base, the port, government offices and Russia’s consulate. Governments in other countries have also wised up. Following the open-source intelligence findings of the Molfar report, governments across Europe are responding with sanctions, security investigations and pressure on Moscow-linked churches to cut ties with the Kremlin.

The issue is especially acute in the three Baltic states, where the Orthodox Church has become a flashpoint between a Soviet past and a European future. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania are firmly anchored in the West through Nato and the EU, but all have sizable Russian-speaking populations, many descended from the Soviet era. Few attend church regularly, yet for many, Orthodoxy remains closely tied to Russian identity. In Estonia, where more than a quarter of the 1.4 million population are native Russian speakers, that makes the issue particularly sensitive. Parliament has now ordered Orthodox churches to sever ties with Moscow or face closure by the end of the year.

The sharpest confrontation to date in Estonia has been with the Pühtitsa Convent, which is a stavropegic monastery, meaning it comes under the direct authority of Patriarch Kirill rather than the local diocese. Pühtitsa’s abbess, Filareta Kalatšova, argues that the convent cannot unilaterally drop its subordination to the Moscow Patriarchate without breaking Church law. In an open letter to Parliament, she accused Estonian MPs of forcing her to commit a canonical crime. Though Martin Tulit, the Estonian official in charge of religious affairs, pointed out that the 134-year-old convent has changed its canonical affiliation before — including during the nation’s period of independence between the two world wars.

Outside Russia and occupied Ukraine, some Orthodox clerics who refused to follow Moscow orders eventually found they had other options. In January 2023,  in Vilnius, Lithuania’s capital, I met five unemployed priests who had been serving in a diocese linked to the Moscow Patriarchate but were defrocked for opposing the war. One had become a taxi driver to feed his family. The clerics were in limbo until the following year when Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople agreed to reinstate them under his jurisdiction. Not all the parishioners reacted well to the swap. Father Vladimiras Seliavko said many cold shouldered him and even relatives viewed him as a traitor but he “could not remain with a patriarch who blessed war criminals”. Although the Orthodox have no Pope, the Constantinople Patriarch, based in today’s Istanbul, is the closest equivalent. He is also known as the Ecumenical Patriarch and — much to Moscow’s annoyance — is seen as primus inter pares: first among equals and senior among all Orthodox bishops. Some Russian priests defrocked and forced into exile for refusing to read Kirill’s mandatory Victory Prayer have also been transferred to Bartholomew’s jurisdiction.

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In northern Europe, Poland and the Baltics, where Catholicism and Protestantism dominate, Russia’s church is widely seen as an arm of the Kremlin rather than a religious institution. The picture is very different in Orthodox eastern Europe, particularly in Serbia, Bulgaria and Georgia, where Moscow retains far deeper religious and cultural ties. Indeed, one of the challenges in countering the Russian Orthodox Church’s political influence is the hold it still has over its believers and its propensity to treat any criticism as tantamount to religious persecution. Last month, Bulgaria successfully blocked the European Union’s attempt to sanction Kirill. “The era of the Crusades is over,” said the country’s prime minister, Rumen Radev. He said he was wary of alienating millions of Eastern Orthodox believers. The Bulgarian Orthodox Church is administratively self-governing but its patriarch, Daniel, has aligned himself with Kirill’s position on the war. He warned his clergy against “inciting hatred” by labeling Russia as the “sole and unprovoked aggressor”.

Then there is the fraught question of the church in Ukraine. The establishment of the self-governing Orthodox Church of Ukraine in 2018, with the blessing of Bartholomew, was a slap in the face to Putin and his vision of the Russian World. But it was also a humiliation for Kirill. His Church, the biggest and the richest in the Orthodox world, stood to lose at least a fifth of its 150 million members, thousands of parishes and several hundred churches and monasteries. Nato encroachment aside, Ukraine’s desire to cut ties with the mother church in Moscow, to which it has been linked for three centuries, became a casus belli.

Disagreements over which Orthodox church in Ukraine is the most legitimate have not gone away. Even today, as bombs rain down on Ukrainian cities, many parishioners are reluctant to change jurisdictions to the autonomous Orthodox Church of Ukraine. They believe that it is uncanonical and that joining it means that they will be deprived of divine grace. This agenda is relentlessly pushed by the Kremlin. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, hardly an authority on matters ecclesiastical, routinely invokes “canon law” to condemn Ukrainian and Western action against the branch of the church historically linked to Moscow.

Such talk leaves parishioners particularly open to manipulation. “The church is very convenient for dictatorships”, says Father Vladimiras, one of the five Lithuanian priests defrocked by Moscow, “because any propaganda can be spread through its channels. Believers are accustomed to trusting their clergy and rarely doubt the statements of their patriarch, bishops or priests.” Recent reports in the Ukrainian media suggest Orthodox parishes in Western Europe are being used to recruit Ukrainian refugees. It is not clear how these refugees would be deployed, but it’s not unimaginable they could become Russian intelligence assets.

Throughout the Cold War, Soviet propaganda relentlessly targeted Uncle Sam. Now, Europe has morphed into Russia’s main enemy. And the Russian Church is key to Putin’s plan to destroy European liberal democracy and the institutions underpinning it. According to Kirill, the continent is mired in moral decay thanks to its acceptance of LGBTQ+ rights; Orthodox politicians and talk show hosts often use the pejorative term “Gayropa” instead of Evropa.

The war has given the Patriarch a chance to reassert his authority in a post-Soviet world as he championed the twin causes of Orthodox unity and Russian imperialism. Since the Western world “has fallen into Satanism”, in Kirill’s view, Russia functions as the Katechon — the biblical force that restrains the Antichrist. In a recent sermon he praised Russia’s atomic bomb for thwarting its enemies plans to “to destroy and enslave the Motherland”. In other words, massive military destruction is justified as an act of cosmic purification.

Europe may now have to confront this increasingly aggressive alliance of “the missile and the incense burner”, as one French theologian put it, with little help from across the Atlantic. If previous US administrations made equality for sexual minorities a pillar of American diplomacy, Donald Trump’s National Security Strategy, published last November, puts “traditional values” at its heart instead. On a trip to Texas last year for the BBC, I was struck by how some ultra-conservative Americans now see Russia as a Christian bulwark — even a model to emulate. The strategy contains little criticism of Moscow despite the mounting death toll, while voicing support for “patriotic parties”, several of which enjoy the Kremlin’s favor and, in some cases, the backing of its pliant church. For a continent already facing a resurgent Russia, Europe’s isolation on this issue is an uncomfortable prospect and one it can no longer afford to ignore.

Now, the queue is back, and this time the commodity is gas. In some regions, fuel for ambulances is running out; elsewhere the garbage trucks have stopped running; and, across the grain belt, farmers are heading into harvest without enough diesel for their combine harvesters. Russia now being a land of capitalism, a small-service economy has sprung up around the queues, with professional paid place-holders and crowdsourced maps showing which stations still have fuel. Yandex searches for “how to siphon fuel” are up more than tenfold. In one viral video, a man slowly pours gasoline into his lawnmower from a jerry can and deadpans: “What riches. Who can afford this now?”

Everyone knows the immediate cause: Ukrainian drones have spent months methodically pummeling Russian refineries.  The 10 largest have been hit this year, the latest attack coming only this week. Perhaps 40% of the country’s refining capacity is offline.

So the debate is not about the causes of the shortage but its consequences. What does this mean for the Russian regime? The optimistic reading is that this is the worst energy crisis of Vladimir Putin’s reign — and thus the beginning of the end. More cautious commentators point out that Russia has had similar gas shortages before, and that the whole thing remains, in macroeconomic terms, manageable.

Still, more revealing than the shortage itself is how the Kremlin has chosen to respond. Russian fuel prices are kept down by an elaborate subsidy apparatus, which pays refineries to sell domestically below market value. This costs the government a lot: two-and-half-trillion rubles last year (approximately £23 billion), roughly half the federal deficit.

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When you keep gasoline artificially cheap in the middle of a fuel shortage, obviously you will get huge lines at the pump. So why not loosen the prices, let them float upwards a bit to dampen demand?

The answer, until recently, is that while fuel shortages can be blamed on Ukrainian drones, higher gas prices will only be blamed on the regime itself. The Kremlin had faced a choice between higher prices or long lines — and has chosen the latter. Prices have generally crept up, but by less than cumulative inflation.

But that’s no longer a feasible choice. You learn a regime’s real priorities by what it clings to when it can no longer afford to — and the government held the price cap well past the point where it made sense. But over recent months, the strategy has begun to come apart: Russian retail petrol prices have jumped 20% in a year. In Crimean Sevastopol at the start of July, prices rose 30% in a week. Wholesale gasoline in European Russia is selling for roughly 1.5 times the official retail price.

So the regime did not, in the end, get long lines instead of higher prices. It got both. This was likely unavoidable, since past a certain point no subsidy conjures back a missing chunk of your fuel. But it highlights the difficult spot the regime has found itself in, with rising prices on top of the queue.

Neither higher prices nor long lines are popular. But of the two, the long line is the one that should keep Putin up at night, because of its dreaded public aesthetics. The Kremlin has spent years constructing a war that’s real but distant. Moscow life has proceeded as normal, and nearly all information about the war arrives pre-filtered. But this carefully managed veneer cracks a little more with every intrusion of the war into everyday life, whether it’s a refinery burning in Moscow’s outskirts or a long line of frustrated drivers on its roads.

Unpopular autocratic regimes survive by preference falsification; private doubts stay that way because every skeptic has to assume they’re alone, so they keep quiet. But the gas line is the opposite: a very public assembly of everyone privately doubting their government’s capacity to provide basic necessities. When RFE/RL reports that the shortage is “the only thing they’re talking about”, that should worry the Kremlin more than any capacity statistic, and surely explains why a ban on fuel exports has now been extended into 2027.

In a poll conducted this spring, even before the worst of the shortage, 60% of Russians said economic conditions were worsening. That’s a 20-year record. Trust in the military, in the government, and in election integrity all saw the largest annual declines ever recorded. The fuel crisis has arrived in a country already more anxious than at any point since the three-day “special military operation” began.

The US had its own fuel shocks in the Seventies, and it saw similar line-ups of frustrated drivers. Those too were a policy choice: President Nixon’s price caps turned the embargo shock into a shortage, following the same electoral logic. But an American waiting for gas in 1974 was suffering something new. A Russian in 2026 is watching a rerun of the bad old days, with all the visual markers of shortages and hoarding that Putin promised would never return. This was the deal he offered to Russians exhausted by the Yeltsin years: “stay out of politics, and I will keep the shelves stocked and your savings intact”. But the promise of predictability in exchange for a free hand, already damaged by the invasion, is now dissolving.

Even beyond the Soviet Union, Russia has been here before, with local gasoline crises made worse by peak summer driving seasons. Each faded by autumn. But this is different. The drones are getting through because Russia’s air defenses are being hollowed out by a methodical Ukrainian campaign against the radars and interceptors that once protected Russian refineries. The numbers are hard to confirm from the outside, but a careful look suggests Russia has been using up its interceptors faster than it can replace them, partly because it’s repurposing them into offensive missiles aimed at Ukrainian cities.

The American oil shocks of the Seventies had political consequences, sinking Jimmy Carter and helping give Ronald Reagan his victory in 1980. That queue’s political frustration had somewhere to go. But in Russia, Putin has spent a quarter of a century welding the release valves shut. That’s why the regime appears so worried about the September Duma elections. Senior officials floated postponing the elections due to the drone campaign, and one Duma deputy has warned that the fuel crisis will cost the ruling party seats.

“No remote e-voting or three days voting periods will save certain people,” she concluded gloomily. Despite all the carefully stage-managed results, there is only so much you can do to cover up spreading public dissatisfaction. You can falsify a ballot. But you cannot falsify the queue.

The process is brutally simple. Draft officers, often accompanied by police, snatch military-age men off the streets, before delivering them to recruitment centers. There, many are pressured through threats, intimidation, and physical abuse to pass military medical examinations and sign draft papers. Men with serious conditions — including HIV, tuberculosis and even cancer — are routinely declared fit for service. Whether they like it or not, the recruitment officers must meet quotas; the only question is who fills them. Yet with Ukraine’s wealthy elite reluctant to heed the call, Kyiv’s recruitment crisis is becoming a class crisis too, one that could cause chaos long after the guns fall silent.

Ukraine currently mobilizes around 30,000 men each month — yet many never make it to the front. Some flee training centers at the first opportunity, while others are later discharged as medically unfit. By autumn 2025, according to official figures, roughly 300,000 servicemen had gone AWOL or deserted. The numbers have become so politically sensitive that the authorities now keep the data secret. But the direction of travel is clear: Ukraine’s pool of willing fighters is shrinking. As a result, coercion has moved from the margins to the very center of national life.

Straightforward coercion, however, is only part of the story, as mobilization becomes a social scourge too. Today’s Ukrainian army is, increasingly, an army of the poor. Members of the upper-middle class — and especially the political and economic establishment — possess the resources, connections, and influence necessary to shield themselves from military service. Through a combination of legal work-arounds and bribes, they can avoid donning uniforms for a range of reasons, from illness, to having several children, to caring for disabled relatives. Others are exempt because they’re university students or academics, or work at strategic companies, particularly those linked to the defense sector.

A significant portion of Ukraine’s cultural and academic intelligentsia belongs to this privileged group. Many have received exemptions from military service while continuing their professional activities uninterrupted. In return, the state expects ideological loyalty and intellectual labor in support of the war effort. This includes promoting “decolonization” narratives that often amount to anti-Russian ethnonationalism. It also means deliberately ignoring the deep penetration of far-Right groups into the military, and remaining silent about the normalization of Nazi symbols within parts of the armed forces. But, most importantly, it means justifying coercive mobilization as a necessary instrument of national survival in what is routinely described as an “existential war”.

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A substantial number of Ukrainian intellectuals have willingly embraced this arrangement, placing themselves in the service of state interests while convincing themselves that they’re fighting on the “information front” in a war for independence from Russia. Others are motivated by more pragmatic considerations: preserving the privileges that come with exemption from military service. Still others remain loyal out of fear.

Fear, after all, is not an abstract concern. The costs of dissent have become increasingly visible. A recent example is the Ukrainian-Canadian political scientist Ivan Katchanovski, who became the target of a public campaign of denunciation by Ukrainian and Western scholars over his interpretation of the war. Katchanovski has argued for a more nuanced explanation of the conflict — one that looks beyond Russian imperialism and Putin’s ambitions to include the role of the Ukrainian far-Right, Nato, and a post-Cold War security architecture that excluded Moscow. Rather than confronting these arguments on their scholarly merits, many of his critics simply accused the scholar of spreading “Kremlin propaganda”. Whatever one thinks of Katchanovski’s views, the episode sent a clear message: questioning dominant wartime narratives can carry serious professional and reputational consequences.

Meanwhile, justifying mobilization, regardless of how coercive, violent, or degrading it may be, has become a central task of Ukraine’s liberal intelligentsia. In May 2026, for instance, the prominent historian and public intellectual Yaroslav Hrytsak argued that patriotic appeals and financial incentives alone are insufficient to sustain effective mobilization in the country. In his view, society must also rely on fear and moral condemnation. As an example, Hrytsak invoked Britain’s experience during the First World War, when women handed white feathers to men who didn’t enlist, publicly shaming them as cowards.

What is striking is that Hrytsak offered no criticism of this practice, despite its deeply controversial legacy. The white-feather campaign stigmatized not only those unwilling to fight, but also veterans, disabled men, the seriously ill, and countless others who were unfit for military service. Yet in contemporary Ukraine, this history is increasingly presented not as a cautionary tale but as a model worthy of emulation.

In reality, of course, the public shaming of men who avoid military service is already deeply embedded in Ukrainian public discourse. For example, the popular singer Alyona Alyona, who represented the country at the 2024 Eurovision, mockingly referred to such men as “Mama’s little boys” and publicly defended the harsh measures employed against draft evaders. Oleksandra Ustinova, an MP, has similarly attacked men who leave Ukraine to avoid service, arguing that the current civil penalties should be replaced by criminal prosecutions. Yet there’s an irony here. Ustinova’s own draft-age husband left Ukraine for the US after Russia’s invasion in March 2022, bought a house and a car there, and has shown little intention of returning.

There are other ironies too. In September 2024, Yaroslava Kravchenko, a celebrity TV host, published a report on male artists who had left Ukraine under the telling title “Those Who Escaped from Ukraine”. Like many women who publicly denounce supposed draft dodgers, Kravchenko herself enjoys unrestricted international travel for both work and leisure. Many other female celebrities are in the same boat. Women, after all, remain exempt from the travel restrictions imposed under martial law — restrictions that prevent millions of Ukrainian men from leaving the country regardless of their personal circumstances, political views, or willingness to fight.

This asymmetry lies at the heart of growing social tensions. Those who champion moral condemnation often do so from positions of relative safety and freedom. They can cross borders, pursue careers abroad, and retain control over their own lives. The men they shame cannot. From the very first days of the war, Ukraine has cultivated the image of the ideal man: self-sacrificing, strong, courageous, and unfailingly committed to defending his family, his home, his nation. He is prepared, if necessary, to give his life for this cause.

His opposite is the ukhyliant — the draft evader. In the dominant narrative, he is portrayed as a coward who’ll resort to any means necessary to evade what is presented as his “natural” masculine duty. Public shaming of such men has become normalized, routine, and Ukrainian media has played a significant role in this process. Flippant headlines like “Draft Dodger Stopped by a Bear at the Romanian Border” or “Grandma Draft Dodger: Odesa Man Dressed as an Elderly Woman to Cross the Border” have now become commonplace. And though Article 35 of Ukraine’s constitution theoretically guarantees the right to alternative service for conscientious objectors, that right has effectively ceased to exist. A recent investigation into the “Skala” regiment alleged that some men who refused to serve were beaten into compliance.

All the while, some Ukrainian feminists have directed their criticism at draft evaders while largely overlooking a wartime system that casts men as protectors and women as those in need of protection — precisely the gender hierarchy feminism claims to oppose. This flirtation with militaristic nationalism has left many feminists blind to the women whose lives are shattered by busification. Behind every man dragged into a recruitment van, then tortured or beaten to death by draft officers, let alone killed at the front, stands a mother, a daughter, a wife, bearing the fear, grief, and trauma that follow. But because their suffering complicates the dominant wartime narrative, this reality is largely met with silence.

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A similar silence greets another group of inconvenient women — those who have become active in the grassroots struggle against forced mobilization. Gender in Detail, Ukraine’s leading gender website, has had remarkably little to say about the women standing in the way of busification. These women are threatened, attacked, prosecuted, and publicly shamed for defending relatives — or complete strangers — from recruitment vans. The courage of these women, from teenage girls to pensioners, can be seen in countless videos confronting recruitment officers and the police. Their courage is visible, their suffering documented. Yet their invisibility, in the end, is political.

That, of course, raises a broader question. With the frontlines mostly stagnant, and with the meatgrinder war annihilating Ukraine’s demographics, why is the government so intent on continuing with busification at all costs? Ukraine no longer appears to have the final say over its own future. That decision is increasingly shared with — or subordinated to — its Western sponsors, who view Ukrainian men less as citizens than as expendable military assets. The EU’s plan to refuse protection to Ukrainian men of draft age exposes this logic. By denying them refuge, Europe is effectively forcing them back to the front. Their bodies have become instruments in a larger geopolitical project: bleeding Russia. That’s further suggests that the war has become a Western proxy war against Putin. In return, Ukraine’s venal political elite, led by Volodymyr Zelensky, enjoys Western political protection — whatever the moral and legal problems with busification.

There’s another question here too. If Ukraine is being bled dry for Brussels, why not end militarization altogether? Unfortunately, those who suggest this path, advocating diplomacy or negotiations, are marginalized. When Yuliia Mendel, Zelensky’s former press secretary, told Tucker Carlson that the Ukrainian president had sabotaged peace talks with Russia, much of Ukraine’s mainstream media and a number of prominent liberal commentators responded not with debate but with a coordinated effort to discredit her, branding her a purveyor of “Russian narratives”.

Liberal intellectuals share responsibility for silencing these unwanted voices. Yet neither the state nor its intellectual allies can suppress these realities forever. Beneath the surface, they are fueling growing resentment and social anger. Every attempt to silence grievances only deepens the sense of injustice, and if the pressure continues to build, it may eventually spark a political and social explosion.

There are signs of this already. In the village of Ozero, for instance, locals blocked a military recruitment vehicle, smashed its windows, and freed a mobilized man. Elsewhere, confrontations between recruitment officers and civilians have involved dozens of people, often escalating into verbal abuse and physical violence. Attacks on recruitment officers with knives, shovels, and clubs have become increasingly common too. As the military’s manpower crisis deepens, mobilization grows more coercive — and public resistance more intense. The way things are going, no amount of “intellectual mobilization” will be enough to contain public fury.

We have been here before. At regular intervals since Putin’s invasion, the Western political-media complex has worked to convince the public that victory for Ukraine was just around the corner, and that Russia itself was on the verge of collapse. In 2023, for instance, Western journalists and agenda-setters spent months hyping Ukraine’s counteroffensive, which was going to “turn the tide” in Kyiv’s favor. The campaign was a catastrophic failure, producing mass casualties and negligible territorial gains.

The latest alleged game-changer is Ukraine’s drone-strike campaign inside Russia — reaching as far as Saint Petersburg and Moscow — targeting logistics, fuel depots, refineries and supply lines. Several civilian targets have also been hit, causing numerous casualties. On Monday, Moscow suffered the largest drone attack so far. President Zelensky has now announced a 40-day operation against Russian targets to “influence the aggressor state in order to press for an end to the war”, which is likely to mean many more such attacks. These measures coincide with the EU’s disbursement of the first €3.2 billion installment of its €90 billion loan to Ukraine.

The timing is not coincidental. On Tuesday, a crucial Nato summit began in Ankara, where the pro-war lobby — both in Europe and in Washington — is desperate to make the case that Ukraine is winning. It’s a narrative that Trump himself appears happy to indulge, probably to compensate for the Iran fiasco: he even signed the G7 leaders’ recent statement committing to “increase the delivery of air defense capacities, additional systems and interceptors, and long-range capabilities”; to consider extending production licenses to Ukraine; and to “strengthen our sanctions, including those on the oil and gas sectors”.

It is also, in all likelihood, a response to mounting war fatigue in the West, confirmed by the refusal of the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary to finance the aforementioned loan — an opt-out that Hungary’s new pro-EU government has strikingly not reversed so far — followed by the new Bulgarian government’s decision to prohibit arms supplies to Ukraine.

Kyiv’s drone campaign is certainly having an impact. Russian oil production has been affected; there have been serious fuel shortages across the country, as even Putin has admitted. Ukraine has also disrupted Russian supply routes north of the Sea of Azov, causing power outages in Crimea and in the Russian-held part of Ukraine’s Kherson region nearby. But these attacks are unlikely to change the course of the war. The Russian economy is faltering, yet it remains in a better position than much of the EU. Indeed, citing higher oil prices, largely a consequence of the Iran war, the International Monetary Fund in April raised its forecast for Russia’s 2026 GDP growth by 0.3 points, to 1.1%. Meanwhile, it revised the forecast downward for the EU’s top three economies — Germany, France and Italy — to 0.8%, 0.9% and 0.2% respectively.

More crucially, though, the Russian army continues to advance on the battlefield. It is steadily closing in on its goal of conquering the entire Donbass. Just the other day, Moscow announced the capture of Kostiantynivka — a town in Donetsk and the largest settlement it’s taken since Mariupol. The city was one of the last strongholds on the road to important Ukrainian-controlled cities, Kramatorsk and Sloviansk, whose capture is the Kremlin’s ultimate objective in the Donbass. Russian troops are also advancing around Chasiv Yar and Toretsk, making gains in urban fighting and on elevated positions, and continue to advance around Lyman and Rai-Oleksandrivka. All this flatly contradicts the prevailing “Ukraine has turned the tide” narrative.

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If further proof were needed that things are going badly for Ukraine, one need only look at the increasingly widespread “busification” policy — the kidnapping of conscription-age men off the streets to be sent to the front, which is fueling growing domestic opposition to the war — or at the EU’s proposal to exclude military-age Ukrainian men, in practice all men aged 23 to 60, from the bloc’s temporary protection scheme.

In this light, the drone campaign looks less like a game-changer than a sign of desperation: given Ukraine’s inability to turn the tide on the battlefield, Kyiv and Nato have decided to “bring the war to Russia”. Yet there is no evidence that Ukraine’s drone campaign will turn the war around — much less force Putin to capitulate. Indeed, over the past few days, Russian forces launched some of the largest drone and missile strikes on Kyiv so far, killing dozens of people.

How much Ukraine’s campaign is affecting public support for Putin is hard to say. It is true that it is having an effect on Russian morale, but as Leonid Ragozin has written, the situation in the country remains relatively stable: for all the dramatic visuals of burning refineries and queues at petrol stations, most Russians have seen worse in their lifetimes, and the vast majority still enjoy a standard of living comparable to that of the poorer EU countries — a far cry from what they endured throughout the bad old days in the Nineties.

The most reliable “poll” will come on 20 September, when Russia holds elections to the State Duma; some analysts predict that the ruling United Russia Party will suffer a humiliating result at the hands of the Communists to its Left and the (confusingly named) Liberal Democratic Party to its Right. But anyone hoping this might pressure Putin into ending the war will be disappointed: both parties have taken an even more hardline stance on the conflict than Putin’s United Russia party. The Ukrainian attacks are, if anything, emboldening the more hawkish voices in the Kremlin, who accuse Putin of mismanaging the conflict and are demanding a far more forceful response. After all, history suggests that when Russians feel pinned against the wall, they do not capitulate; they harden. Thus, the greater the pressure on Russia becomes, the more likely it is that Putin will find himself compelled to escalate the war.

Regardless of the short-term effects, Ukraine’s drone campaign is a textbook example of how drones are rewriting the rules of warfare in real time. Strategic deep strikes — the ability to reach the enemy’s cities, industries and leadership far behind the front — were until recently the privilege of countries with powerful air forces and missile arsenals. But low-cost, mass-produced drones have democratized it. A country losing the attritional contest on the ground — as Ukraine, on paper vastly inferior to Russia in material and manpower terms, plainly is — can now inflict vast damage deep inside the stronger power’s territory. And once the weaker side exercises that option, whatever incentive the stronger side may have had to exercise restraint collapses.

It is, after all, a matter of historical record that so far Russia has refrained from inflicting mass destruction on Kyiv and other major cities far from the front line, and throughout most of the war has conspicuously spared government decision-making centers — despite having the means to do so. For the first eight months of the conflict, Moscow also left Ukraine’s energy grid untouched; strikes began only after the Kerch Bridge attack of October 2022. In this sense, drone warfare does level the playing field, but it also invites escalation, by stripping the weaker side of the indirect protection that asymmetry itself — its inability to inflict mass damage on the enemy — once afforded it.

This is what makes the current moment so dangerous. A nuclear superpower is being subjected to a sustained campaign of strikes against its principal cities, its strategic infrastructure and, by extension, its leadership — supported by Western intelligence, executed with Western weapons and now backed by an explicit G7 commitment to “accelerate” the delivery of long-range capabilities.

As Matthew Blackburn of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs recently has warned, if Moscow decides its restraint within Ukraine is being exploited to impose humiliating damage on the Russian heartland, it may abandon strikes on Ukrainian infrastructure in favor of the European supply hubs and manufacturing sites that make Kyiv’s deep-strike campaign possible in the first place, thereby correcting the asymmetry and restoring deterrence on its own terms. Indeed, Moscow has repeatedly signaled that its patience is not unlimited; voices within the Russian establishment increasingly speak of restoring deterrence by striking targets in Europe itself. The reason Russia has so far refused to do so is obvious: such an attack could easily spiral into an all-out war that Russia has no interest in fighting — as even General Alexus Grynkewich, Nato’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe and the alliance’s top military commander, recently noted. Simply put, the cost of retaliation has thus far exceeded the cost of tolerance. But if the latter keeps increasing, Russia’s calculus could very well change.

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The essential fact is that nobody in the West knows where Russia’s red lines lie — and indeed Western policy seems to proceed on the assumption that they do not exist at all. Meanwhile, the Europeans keep arguing that there is no alternative to continuing to support Ukraine indefinitely because “Russia refuses to negotiate”. But as Anatol Lieven of the Quincy Institute recently wrote, it is the EU — not Russia — that has so far refused to negotiate. While Moscow has spent the past year in sustained talks with Washington and progressively abandoned several of its core demands, the Europeans have made negotiations conditional on an unconditional ceasefire that Russia cannot accept without surrendering its only leverage, and have wrapped this precondition in “principles” that amount to a demand for Russian capitulation.

The main victim of this posture has been Ukraine itself, condemned to a grinding war of attrition it cannot win militarily. Should exhaustion eventually produce a ceasefire without a settlement, meanwhile, it could lead to a Kashmir-style condition of permanent insecurity. It is in Ukraine’s interest — and in Europe’s interest as a whole — to negotiate a comprehensive peace settlement instead. We know in broad terms what any realistic settlement would entail: territorial concessions from Ukraine in exchange for security guarantees (short of Nato membership and Western troop deployments). Whether such an offer would suffice for Putin to claim his measure of victory and end the war, nobody can yet know. But what we do know is the cost of the status quo.

Yet despite these homages to the long arm of the Russian world’s spiritual and cultural influence, Moscow’s representatives here in Bulgaria are not as comfortable as they might seem. “For me, it was not easy to come here,” admits Father Vladimir Tyshchuk, the church’s archpriest, his stone-walled office surrounded by books and Orthodox icons. He came to Sofia from Vienna a few years ago, replacing a predecessor expelled from the country on national security grounds, much to Moscow’s chagrin.

Tyshchuk has had to live in the shadow of that event ever since. Just last month, an article in the Bulgarian press accused him of secretly meeting the ousted priest in Jerusalem: to receive instructions from Russian intelligence. The claims came without evidence, yet whenever Tyshchuk has crossed back into Bulgaria, he says he’s been held by the security services for extended passport checks. To him, these experiences stand in stark contrast to the treatment he’s received from many regular Bulgarians, for whom Russia is not an enemy — but something close to kin.

Bulgaria’s relationship with Russia is hardly straightforward. A member of the European Union and Nato for nearly two decades, its leaders have often taken an anti-Moscow line. Yet Bulgaria’s historical and economic ties to Russia run deep, arguably much deeper than any other EU state. Indeed, after seven parliamentary elections and several popular protest movements since 2021, Bulgaria’s electorate is now turning to yet another populist champion for Moscow: ex-president Rumen Radev, whose political alliance looks set to win the largest share of seats in snap elections this weekend, along the way making Radev himself Bulgaria’s prime minister.

While Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungary has been heralded as a sign of the decline of Russian power in Central and Eastern Europe, Radev’s probable victory presents another, more nuanced challenge to the Brussels establishment. Radev is hardly a Kremlin stooge like Orbán, and Bulgarian society, despite its connections to Russia, is growing increasingly hostile to Putin’s influence. All the same, Bulgaria’s experience offers valuable lessons about how Russia can still exploit popular sentiments to fill gaps left by the waning West.

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In practice, these attitudes ensure a kind of political schizophrenia. Over the past 20 years, after all, Bulgarian governments have pursued strong ties with Brussels and Washington while signing energy deals with Russia. More recently, they’ve sent weapons to Ukraine since 2022 while allowing Moscow to maintain several high-profile properties in Bulgaria — in violation of EU sanctions and despite security risks to Nato operations. As recently as this year, Sofia adopted the euro, even as its oligarch-dominated economic and political system continues to be based on the post-Soviet Russian model, with connections to Kremlin money everywhere.

While openly pro-Russian parties are restricted to the far-Right, Russophilia in the Bulgarian mainstream is much less overt — exactly where Radev has learned to shine. Having been elected to the presidency in 2016, allegedly with the help of a former Russian intelligence officer, Radev took a number of Moscow-friendly positions on Ukraine, opposing sanctions and defending his country’s dependence on Russian energy. But after resigning from his largely ceremonial post in January, following a spate of anti-government protests, Radev read the room keenly, de-emphasizing his pro-Russian credentials to settle instead on a broad, anti-corruption platform opposed to Bulgaria’s oligarchic elite.

“It’s really a candy bag,” says Professor Emilia Zankina, from Temple University Rome, of the coalition of voters Radev’s alliance has gathered together. “He gets nationalists, socialists, progressives, urban elite, rural disappointed people, and that’s because he’s seen as the new savior.” That alone is a notable achievement given Bulgaria’s notoriously fractured and chaotic politics, with Radev himself becoming something of an empty vessel for anti-establishment Bulgarians. His own background presumably helps too: as a former major general in the Bulgarian Air Force, who speaks calmly yet decisively, he enjoys a statesmanlike reputation.

That’s especially true now that Radev’s trenchant stance on Ukraine has been replaced by platitudes about reaching a “just and lasting peace”. Given that Putin’s invasion remains a polarizing issue, that may be intentional — but unlike elsewhere in Europe, the dominant historical narratives that underpin Bulgarian identity mean people here don’t always equate Putin with the Russian nation as a whole.

“I never had anything against Russia, because a long time ago Bulgarian people were together with Russians,” says Viktor Toshev on a dreary night on Vitosha Boulevard, a pedestrian street that stretches out toward the mountains past Sofia. Toshev works at a car wash, but gesturing toward the sky with frustration, he tells me he’d had to leave work early because the rain had robbed him of customers. “Russian people are innocent people, good people,” he adds, his voice husky, his hair mottled. “Only this war is no good.”

Toshev’s sentiments cut to the heart of the popular narrative Bulgarians have been sold about Russia: that the two countries have been bound by language, religion, and history since the dawn of Slavic Christendom. This logic served as part of the justification for Russia’s intervention in the Balkans following the Ottoman Empire’s violent suppression of a Bulgarian revolt in 1876. Following the Sultan’s subsequent defeat in the Russo-Turkish War two years later, the Treaty of San Stefano granted Bulgaria its independence for the first time in nearly half a millennium — under Russian auspices of course. An alternate plan for the new state ultimately divided it between the Moscow-aligned Principality of Bulgaria and the autonomous Ottoman province of Eastern Rumelia, with the two eventually merging to form the modern Bulgarian state in 1908.

In the popular mythos of the fight for Bulgarian independence, Russia is an altruistic savior, an “older stepbrother” to quote one Russian journalist, to whom Bulgaria owes its very existence. And despite the fact that Bulgarians themselves also played a large role in securing their freedom from the Ottomans — and that Bulgaria far predated Russia as an independent entity during the Middle Ages, even introducing the Cyrillic alphabet to Moscow — many Bulgarians’ affinity for Russia as its guardian angel was solidified during the communist period following the Second World War.

“On the one hand it was a repressive regime, one party rule, no private property,” Zankina explains, describing Bulgaria’s experience as a Soviet satellite state during the Cold War. “But at the same time, the country was agrarian and rural before communism and during that period the country industrialized, so many people and families saw their lives change dramatically for the better.”

It’s no surprise, then, that the shock of the Nineties brought with it a heavy dose of Soviet nostalgia. According to Stoyan, a longtime activist-turned-techie, there was never even any desire for the communist years to end among regular Bulgarians. “When the wall fell, nobody gave a fuck,” Stoyan explains in his typically incisive fashion, adding a dash of the self-deprecation characteristic of so many Bulgarians. “The communist party here was never protested away, it was never taken down. Actually they won the first democratic elections.”

Perhaps for that reason, Russia’s influence continued uninterrupted as Bulgaria’s system transitioned from one regime to another. For years after the collapse of the Warsaw Pact, the dominant party remained the Bulgarian Socialist Party, a rebrand of the communist party that had governed the country throughout the Cold War, and which continued to serve as a vehicle for Russian interests into the 2000s. As late as 2016, indeed, the party supported Radev’s initial run for the presidency. Nor was this influence merely political. As Stoyan explains, many of Bulgaria’s bureaucrats and economic heavyweights gained power with Russia’s backing; even today, adds Zankina, many members of Bulgaria’s security services received their training in Moscow.

Stoyan, who says he’s been active in protest movements since he was a teenager, leads me to a public fountain next to the Bulgarian Parliament. It was here, aged 13, that he was first arrested for arranging an unauthorized protest against a far-Right, pro-Russian party. (A far-Right, anti-Russian party also exists.) Unlike some of his countrymen, Stoyan, who asks me to only use his first name for his safety, says he saw early on that the prosperity provided by Russia and the Soviet Union was nothing more than an illusion. Despite the relative growth Bulgaria experienced during communist period, it came at a heavy cost — up to 10,000 people perished as a result of forced collectivization and persecution at the hands of the Soviet-backed regime between 1944 and 1989.

Such blunt displays of power are history, yet Russia’s reach has adapted to Bulgaria’s own changing fortunes, becoming less direct with each passing decade. Near the Bulgarian city of Burgas, Russian oil giant Lukoil today operates Bulgaria’s only oil refinery, providing the Sofia government with up to 80% of its fuel. If it weren’t for sanctions waivers from the Trump administration, which were renewed this past week, Bulgaria’s energy landscape would likely face catastrophe if forced to pivot away from Russian energy.

Bulgaria boasts more physical manifestations of Russian influence too. Perhaps most notable here is the Kamchia complex. Ostensibly a wellness resort, owned by the EU-sanctioned Moscow municipal administration, it was once envisioned by Putin’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov as a hub for spreading Russian soft power. Even Tyshchuk, the priest, admits that diplomats at the Russian Embassy, which he occasionally visits, have expressed a desire for the Church to play more of a political role in Bulgaria.

The Russian Cultural and Information Center in Sofia, also owned by the Russian state, is another brick-and-mortar example of the Kremlin’s footprint in Bulgaria. After several unsuccessful attempts to get in touch by email and phone, I visit the building one overcast afternoon in the hope of interviewing its director. As I walk up the stairs toward the center’s glassy façade, I’m immediately approached by a security guard who asked me what my business was. After a brief conversation in broken Russian, I’m allowed through a metal detector into the cavernous main hall. I’m ultimately unable to secure the interview — but, before leaving, I take the opportunity to have a look around. In the main entrance hall, next to a life-size replica of a Soviet space probe and a mural of two cosmonauts, one Russian and one Bulgarian, I find a propaganda exhibition about Crimea, organized for “the year of unity of the peoples of Russia”. The security guard initially gives me the go-ahead to take photos — only to change his mind and beckon me to leave.

Such heavy security is hardly a mystery. Less than two years ago, it was in front of this cultural center that Bulgarian activist Lexi Fleurs burned a Russian flag, writing “murderers” in large letters on the sidewalk. She was confronted by security guards and eventually detained for over 24 hours by police who attempted to charge her with petty hooliganism even though Bulgaria has no laws prohibiting the burning of foreign flags.

In the aftermath, her arrest inspired similar acts by other Bulgarians, who burned Russian flags and held signs in solidarity with Fleurs, though this time without triggering any confrontations. Just another example of Bulgaria’s muddled relationship with its giant stepbrother, something Fleurs herself says makes concerted activism that much harder. “We don’t officially have a pro-Russian government,” she tells me, sitting in a park as evening falls. “It’s so much easier to go against an enemy that clearly states ‘I am the enemy’ than to go against an enemy that you need to dig and prove and spend even months to understand how deep the problem actually is.”

Even so, Bulgarians opposed to Russia are beginning to take matters into their own hands, connecting the dots between the corrupt status quo and the Kremlin’s influence. In the lead-up to the anti-government protests in December, Fleurs attended a demonstration that, while ostensibly directed at Bulgaria’s then-general prosecutor, quickly turned into a chorus of chants like “this is not Moscow” — or else the cruder “Putin khuylo” (something like “Putin is a cock”).

Though support for Russia, Putin, or both continues to be found across Bulgarian society, the clearest dividing line, if any exists, is unsurprisingly age. Younger Bulgarians, who grew up in the post-communist period and didn’t learn Russian in school, find it harder to relate to the tales of Russo-Bulgarian brotherhood, whatever the continued pull of Bulgaria’s national mythologies.

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In a cozy high-rise apartment in western Sofia, decorated among other things with a taxidermized bird of prey, artist Antoaneta Quick epitomizes these complexities. “Bulgaria, and generally the Balkans, are always the victims, the fucked up ones, and it feels like Russia is equally fucked up,” she says, who despite her ex-husband’s Swedish surname is the great-granddaughter of a Russian officer close to King Boris III of Bulgaria. “This is the east. It’s almost like a feeling of safety in the already existing chaos, mafia, distrust, and alcoholism.” For Quick, this is the real reason for Bulgaria’s long, toxic relationship with Moscow — a familiarity that, despite being regressive, feels safer than change, especially at a time when stability always seems just out of reach.

According to Krasimir Angelov, a Bulgarian software engineer who works in Britain, the appeal of this familiar safety is only amplified when it feels like the only satisfying choice available. “We do need strong leaders in times of crisis, and the West has generally struggled to produce them,” Angelov tells me by phone. “It has become a rather soft, politically correct society to its own detriment. That is seen in Eastern Europe as weakness.”

Radev has always existed in both worlds — Russia’s and the West’s — and his Bulgaria will doubtlessly exist in both too. Stoyan, the activist, suggests that Radev’s days as a Russian lackey are over, if nothing else because Kremlin cash has stopped flowing his way. Whatever the truth, his government, if he is able to form one, will likely try to recast the EU and Nato in its own image, much like other European populists. Learning the lesson of Orbán’s defeat, though, he’s also likely to be more subtle in his methods, adding amendments to EU proposals instead of rejecting them outright.

Despite hosting more corruption and Russian influence networks than perhaps even Hungary, Bulgaria has largely escaped the EU’s attention so far. If, however, the twin problems of graft and Kremlin influence are to be tackled, that’ll have to change, regardless of who rules in Sofia. Bulgaria’s integration into the eurozone and other European structures will surely help here, but for such a push to truly succeed, it’ll have to be led first and foremost by Bulgaria’s own civic society. Citizens have shown themselves disgusted by their rapacious establishment — and if figures like Radev have the capacity to challenge long-running political dynasties, other, less Kremlin-aligned leaders may one day do so too.

Yet even if the tide continues to turn, and future generations of Bulgarians find themselves increasingly alienated from Russia, the question remains whether they will actually be able to sever centuries of dysfunctional co-dependence without shocking Bulgarian political life to its core — even with the EU’s help. Much will, of course, depend on what happens in Bulgaria’s immediate neighborhood; on the outcome of the war in Ukraine; and on how well the country weathers the energy shocks that lie on Europe’s horizon. Yet it will also depend on what alternative vision the West is able to offer. Bulgaria has already shown that it doesn’t need to stay stuck in the past — even if its future direction remains in the balance.

But all the intelligence suggests that, even with an extended military campaign, the US cannot force one of its suggested aims: regime change in Iran. The Washington Post cited a classified report suggesting as much and I am hearing exactly the same thing from governments across Europe.

A long war would be disastrous for the global economy, with oil prices jumping to well over $100 a barrel, followed by higher inflation, higher interest rates and lower growth. Some European countries, including Germany, the Netherlands and now the UK, are already suffering low gas storage volumes. A short war would be just as bad: Trump loses his nerve, abandons the operation and leaves the antagonism in the Middle East to escalate. Even in this scenario it is far from clear that the flows of oil and gas would return to normal quickly.

The high oil price has already led the US to drop its oil sanctions against Russia. That would be headline news most days, but not today. Vladimir Putin has resumed oil deliveries to India, but this time not at a discount, but a premium. The Russians are back in business. Putin threatened last week that he is considering cutting all the remaining supplies to Europe. So a week into the US war against Iran and we are already looking at very different endgame scenarios for the Ukraine war. Wasn’t Russia supposed to go bankrupt?

Meanwhile, the West’s scenarios get progressively worse; the battlefield question has become an industrial one.

The West is currently facing a supply-chain crisis for military procurement. Even the world’s most powerful army cannot assume victory if the war lasts more than a few weeks. It may simply run out of key materiel. And the US is already running into bottlenecks. Contrary to Trump’s recent claims that the US has “a virtually unlimited supply” of munitions, Foreign Policy magazine reports that the war is already burning through the US/Israeli arsenal at such an alarming rate that the retaliatory destruction caused by Iran could take years to fix — and only then if the defense-critical minerals can be sourced. Tracing the military supply chains all the way back to their original sources, the journalists discovered that it is all but impossible to “instantly reverse decades of consolidated construction lines and atrophied mineral processing capacity”.

The decline set in decades ago. Back at the turn of this millennium, outsourcing was the cool thing to do, especially in the US. The service economy was the future then. And during this golden age of globalization, all the metal bashers wandered off to China, leaving the economies of the West to focus on higher value-added services such as finance. Coming from Germany, a country with a strong industrial tradition, I noted a good deal of contempt for industry among the elites of London or New York. I have argued myself that Germany overspecialized in some of the old-tech industries, such as cars. But getting rid of base industrial services, such as steel and chemical plants, is not smart for purely strategic reasons.

Metals, minerals and chemicals sit at the top of every supply chain, and most have to be extracted. These raw materials are then processed to produce those essential base materials like steel, aluminum, or magnets. The material goes through a number of further processing stages and if the final product is complex, like a military radar, or even a car, there will be many additional nodes in your supply chains. Small wonder the German car industry regularly breaks into sweat whenever China restricts the supply of any single piece of equipment — such as an essential mid-range semiconductor. Without it, their engines are useless.

But the specific advantage that both Russia and China have over the West is not simply their wealth of metals and minerals — it’s the fact that they can also process them. China’s expertise in processing its raw material is unparalleled: there is a lot of know-how in producing rare earth magnets from neodymium. And we are currently paying a heavy price for a service industry fetish. I blame the macroeconomists. There are no supply chains in standard macroeconomic models. The stuff just arrived at our door. These models worked in the fair-weather environment of a globalized, multilateral trading system, but not in our world today.

Were the Prussian military historian Carl von Clausewitz alive today, he would be taking an interest in supply chains. Back when he was in action, the key powers had plenty of blacksmiths and sweatshops to produce weapons, cannons and ammunition. Their bottleneck was money and soldiers. But he did understand that strategy was dependent on the “hard math of supply”. Today, you cannot claim to have a military strategy without a clear idea of your supply chains.

And if Putin and Xi Jinping understand one thing, it is industrial supply chains. Putin wrote his thesis on Russia’s mineral resources with a call for them to be nationalized. Western commentators obsessed over whether he plagiarized the thesis. But a far more important question is why he chose that particular sector as a theme to hone his plagiarizing skills, rather than finance.

Xi formed his economic views as a young man when he observed the decline of the Soviet Union, a country known for its smokestack industries. Xi became a champion of modern industry. He disproved the lazy thesis that governments can’t pick industrial winners. China is doing this all the time. The difference is that they are picking industries, not companies. They picked rare earths, magnets, car batteries, electric cars, solar panels, robotics, among others.

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Can any of us name any western leader with an interest in mining? Or a knowledge of downstream industrial processes? That’s for people in anoraks, isn’t it? Trump was a developer of prime property before he entered politics. Emmanuel Macron was an investment banker. Keir Starmer and Friedrich Merz were lawyers. Meanwhile, successive governments in America have chosen to transform industrial heartlands into a rust belt which has ultimately constrained its military-strategic options. It can choose to become protectionist, as it has done under Trump. Or it can pursue regime change in distant lands as it did under George W. Bush. But it cannot pursue both at the same time.

Imagine, then, the nightmare scenario for the West: the simultaneous invasion by China of Taiwan, by Russia of the Baltic Republics, and by North Korea of South Korea. I don’t think this is particularly likely because each has its own tactical and strategic timelines. For as long as Russia fights in Ukraine, it is not in a position to fight another land war.

But the West would not even be prepared for one of them. If China were to go for Taiwan now, the US might try to stop it — especially if China were to restrict supplies of semiconductors. But it is far from clear that Trump would be ready for a long fight with another nuclear superpower. If you are running out of missiles after a week of fighting against Iran, then how could you possibly take on another enemy?

I have to admit that I found Trump’s pacifism during the election campaign one of his more appealing characteristics. He appeared to have broken with the failed policies of some of his predecessors. The US war record is dismal. The country hasn’t had a successful conflict since Korea. They totally messed up the Middle East. I don’t want to speculate what, or who, got him into this one — he certainly doesn’t seem to know. But it will become the defining moment of his entire presidency.

Perhaps some of these scenarios can be mitigated. Certainly, the oil price could come down, as shipping in the Strait of Hormuz returns to normal. But what I cannot see is a scenario that brings peace and stability to the Middle East and which preserves economic stability in the rest of the world at the same time.

I can, however, see a scenario that delivers neither.

On the surface, the explanation appears straightforward: Russia and Ukraine remain deadlocked over territory. Moscow insists on full control of the eastern Donbas region — of which it holds only a portion — as well as of the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. On both counts, Zelensky has refused to budge, despite Russia’s relentless attacks on Ukraine’s dwindling power grid.

But framing the impasse as a territorial dispute between Ukraine and Russia obscures a deeper reality: this has always been, at its core, a proxy war between Russia and the United States — one which can only be resolved through an agreement between the two powers. The Ukrainian military, after all, is effectively kept on life support by Washington, particularly through the satellite intelligence that has become indispensable to modern drone warfare. Both Moscow and Washington are aware of this, which is why over the past year they have repeatedly privileged bilateral talks from which Ukraine and Nato allies were excluded.

Last August’s summit between Putin and Trump in Anchorage marked the high point of the new US-Russia détente. It was the first face-to-face meeting between the US and Russian presidents since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, and the first such encounter on American soil in nearly two decades. The substance of the talks was never officially disclosed, but the symbolism was unmistakable. From the red-carpet welcome, to Trump calling Putin warmly by his first name, everything was choreographed to signal a turning point in relations, which, since 2022, had sunk to levels of hostility not seen since the Cold War.

Since then, Russian officials have frequently invoked the “spirit of Anchorage” to describe the framework of understanding purportedly reached between the two leaders. In practice, we can surmise that this sought to reconcile Trump’s transactional instincts, in the form of economic arrangements beneficial to US companies and Trump’s own prestige, with Putin’s insistence on the need to address the “primary roots of the conflict”: namely the need for a new security arrangement in Europe. This agreement, however, always rested on very shaky grounds, precisely because the two parties invested Anchorage with two very different meanings. From Moscow’s standpoint, what is at stake is nothing less than a fundamental renegotiation of the rules underpinning European and global security; Washington, by contrast, sees the matter in narrower terms: a specific conflict to be managed and contained, without disturbing the broader structure of international power that suits Washington just fine.

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Russia has sought to manage this tension through what might be called a double-track approach. On the one hand, it has tasked Kirill Dmitriev — the Harvard-educated financier who heads Russia’s sovereign wealth fund — with negotiating a large-scale economic deal with the US. Meanwhile, senior diplomats, above all the veteran foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, have worked in parallel on the broader geopolitical settlement. This approach has so far failed to yield concrete results, prompting the diplomatic track to ratchet up its rhetorical pressure on Washington. The clearest sign of this came in a recent interview in which Lavrov spoke of the Trump administration in unprecedentedly harsh terms.

Lavrov openly challenged the idea that the US is working towards the cooperative framework meant to emerge from the Anchorage talks. He claimed that Russia had accepted Washington’s proposals on resolving the war in Ukraine, only to find the US backing away from them in practice. “They made an offer, we agreed — the problem should have been resolved. Having accepted their proposals, we believed we had fulfilled the task of resolving the Ukrainian issue and could move on to full-scale, broad, mutually beneficial cooperation. But in practice everything looks the opposite”.

Lavrov accused the US of not only failing to take concrete steps to rein in Kyiv — most likely an implicit reference to Ukraine’s continued drone strikes on Russian territory, which could not be carried out without US intelligence and satellite support — but, more fundamentally, of actively intensifying its economic war on Moscow. He cited new sanctions, Washington’s campaign against Russian tankers in international waters, and efforts to pressure India and other partners into abandoning Russian oil. “This is pure ‘Bidenism’”, Lavrov remarked, offering it as proof that the US’s true objective remains that of “achieving economic domination”.

At the same time, Lavrov framed all this as part of a broader “neo-imperial” strategy on Washington’s part that extends well beyond Russia. “The West,” he said, “is reluctant to relinquish its formerly dominant positions… With the arrival of the Trump administration, this struggle to constrain competitors has become particularly obvious and explicit” — a reference to the White House’s hyper-bellicose posture over recent months, including the capture of Nicolás Maduro, the escalation of US pressure on Cuba, and the growing threats against Iran.

It remains unclear whether Lavrov’s remarks signal a genuine rift — within the Kremlin’s corridors of power and more broadly between Moscow and Washington — or whether they are simply a manifestation of the double-track approach: pairing backroom diplomacy with calculated public pressure. What is clear, though, is that the current deadlock is emboldening the more hawkish elements within the Russian security establishment.

In a recent article, Sergey Karaganov, who heads the influential Council for Foreign and Defense Policy think tank, openly criticized the Kremlin’s “muffled responses to open aggression” by the West: especially the Europeans. Karaganov argues that Russia’s excessive restraint to date — its refusal to retaliate against Nato for Western-backed attacks on Russian territory, or to launch decapitation strikes against Kyiv’s political and military command centers — has in fact increased the risk of all-out war between Russia and Nato, by emboldening the West to keep escalating, in both practical and rhetorical terms.

Karaganov’s prescription is stark. Europe, he argues, is preparing for a future confrontation with Russia, and will likely deploy the reconstituted remnants of the Ukrainian army to prosecute it. The only way to stop this, in his view, is for Russia to demonstrate a genuine willingness to strike the command centers, infrastructure and military bases of those European countries most actively involved in operations against Russia. Should conventional strikes prove insufficient, he argues, Russia must be prepared to escalate to strategic nuclear weapons. His conclusion pulls no punches: “At present, [the Europeans] only give the appearance of fearing us, so as to build up their military strength. But they should actually fear us. They should be in terror of us. They should understand that escalating or even continuing the conflict risks their immediate physical destruction, and that a military buildup is pointless, as it will entail an obliterating nuclear response”.

One might dismiss this as mere sabre-rattling — and it is quite possible that such options would never be seriously entertained by the Kremlin — but the mere fact that these scenarios are being openly debated in Russia ought to send a shiver down the spine of every European. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the Ukraine war, fringe ideas have a way of becoming mainstream when conflicts drag on and frustration mounts; the longer this one continues without end, the louder and more influential radical voices are likely to become.

There is, moreover, a deeper danger that operates independently of any deliberate choice Russia might make. By allowing tensions with Moscow to keep rising, we are constructing a situation whereby a single miscalculation — an errant strike, a misread signal, an escalatory move that spirals beyond anyone’s intentions — could set off a chain of events that no single actor would be able to arrest. How long, for instance, before the Russian Navy starts providing armed escorts to its oil fleets, and treating any seizure of its tankers as an act of war? Or taking similar action against Western tankers? The gravest wars in history have not always begun with conscious decisions; they have begun with incidents that spun out of control. That possibility grows more real with every week the conflict remains unresolved.

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Yet if that’s partly true of Russia itself — what with the hawkish language of its outriders, and its continued assaults on Ukrainian soil — European leaders appear reckless themselves. At the recent Munich Security Conference, the assembled Brussels elites and their attendant apparatchiks took turns stoking the drumbeat of war, ramping up their own hawkish rhetoric while offering little in the way of serious strategic reflection. Politico captured the prevailing mood with uncomfortable precision. “Western countries see World War III coming”, it said, a headline that glossed over the inconvenient fact that many of those sounding the alarm are themselves among the most vigorous advocates for continued escalation. As Nato’s Secretary General Mark Rutte recently put it, Europeans “must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents and great-grandparents endured”. There is something deeply troubling about a European political class that cultivates war hysteria while remaining seemingly indifferent to where that hysteria might lead.

The situation is particularly disconcerting when set against the backdrop of Europe’s ongoing industrial decline. One might expect a weakening continent to seek accommodation and de-escalation; instead, European leaders continue to think in rigidly unipolar terms, dismissing Russia’s security concerns as illegitimate while remaining blind to the material reality of a world that is rapidly becoming multipolar — a shift that is already translating into Europe’s own economic and geopolitical marginalization. In this, however, they are simply mirroring Washington’s broader posture.

As the Indian strategist C. Raja Mohan recently argued in Foreign Affairs, we are living through a hybrid and deeply unstable geopolitical moment: one marked by growing multipolarity in economic terms, yet remaining largely unipolar in military terms, with the United States still uniquely capable of projecting force across the globe with impunity. The consequences of this asymmetry, Mohan suggests, have been paradoxical. Rather than ushering in a more balanced international order, the rise of economic multipolarity has, if anything, emboldened Washington to shed the constraints that once tempered its behavior and to project its power ever more aggressively — a dynamic that the Trump administration has made more explicit than ever.

This raises difficult questions. Can a world in which the US remains free to engage in repeated acts of military and economic aggression — unchecked by other powers — truly be called multipolar in any meaningful sense? And can a transition to a genuine multipolar order, one in which unrestrained US military primacy gives way to a world based on sovereign equality for all, occur without the world first passing through a period of acute and potentially catastrophic confrontation? These are not abstract theoretical puzzles. Given the trajectory of events in Ukraine and beyond, they are among the most urgent questions of our time.

But Belarus’s eager acceptance of Donald Trump’s invitation to be a founder member of his Board of Peace — “one of the most consequential bodies ever created in the history of the world,” apparently — tells a different story. Lukashenko has always been deft at playing Russia and Europe against each other for his own benefit and these skills ought to serve him well in any new Trumpian world order. Not only is America newly receptive to authoritarian leaders like him; the prospect of now playing America off against its former European allies and meanwhile assuming a key role within the new Russian world will play to the strengths of a leader who is a far cannier political operator than is commonly assumed.

It is, after all, no accident that Lukashenko, now 71, is the most enduring political survivor in the Russian sphere — no small feat in a landscape full of car bombs, plane accidents, and defenestrations. Indeed, in February 1997, while Boris Yeltsin was recovering from heart surgery, Lukashenko almost became leader of Russia itself.

Six years on from the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russia had bid farewell to one political order, but had yet to give birth to the next. Yeltsin’s popularity was floundering. In a bid to exploit the wave of lingering Soviet nostalgia among the Russian masses — and to show strength as several former Warsaw Pact states joined Nato — Yeltsin made a play to pull Belarus even closer into Russia’s orbit. He set in motion the creation of the “Union State”, a confederation between Russia and Belarus that was supposed to inspire the likes of Kazakhstan and Ukraine to deepen their reliance on Moscow too.

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Lukashenko, who had quickly consolidated power in Belarus after winning the first (and thus far only) free and fair election in the country’s history in 1994, had other plans. He and his deputies drafted up a treaty that effectively gave Lukashenko perpetual control of the Supreme Council of the future Union State — a kind of reverse takeover that meant he would succeed Yeltsin at the head of Russia’s political hierarchy.

“What the drafters came up with essentially meant one thing: Russia was losing its sovereignty,” Yeltsin later wrote in his memoir. In a diplomatic flurry of existential proportions, the Russian leader dispatched his officials to Minsk to intercept the document and talk Lukashenko out of his plan. It took an entire night of negotiations — and according to Yeltsin, lots of liquor — to get the job done.

Lukashenko only truly gave up his designs on the Kremlin once Putin rose to power in 2000 — and the Union State treaty that he ultimately signed has mostly been used by Russia as a means to absorb Belarus rather than the other way around. However, Lukashenko’s ambitions of power and influence have persisted in other, more subtle forms. And as Trump has laid the groundwork for an American rapprochement with Moscow over Ukraine, the Belarusian strongman has found himself on the precipice of yet another generational inflection point. American interests are reorienting away from Europe; and the rise of a new transactional, Trumpian logic in international affairs is reshaping not only America’s role in the world, but Russia’s as well.

Naturally, Lukashenko has jumped at the chance to get in on the action. Belarus’s place on the so-called Board of Peace is the clearest evidence yet of a thaw with Washington — the first since 2020, when Europe and the US ousted him from their good graces following his brutal crackdown on anti-government protests in Belarus. Last year, through several deals with the US, Lukashenko traded 175 political prisoners for sanctions relief, most recently releasing 123 people including several high-profile activists and politicians in exchange for the elimination of American sanctions on the critical Belarusian potash sector.

The immediate benefits to his regime are obvious — an opening for renewed trade with the US and diplomatic legitimization on the world stage, with Lukashenko positioning himself a one-of-a-kind liaison to the Kremlin during any peace process between Russia and Ukraine. But despite his frequent chest-thumping, Lukashenko is no Trump, and his designs go far beyond short-term dealmaking. As a new world order is born out of the tragedy of Ukraine, Lukashenko understands that not only that Trump might end his ostracism from the West, but that this is his best shot to transform himself from Putin’s underling into his right-hand man.

And a Russo-American grand bargain would do more than allow Lukashanko to ride to freedom on Putin’s coattails — it would allow him to make deals with the Americans on his own terms. At the same time, by engaging with Trump and continuing to harass the EU, Lukashenko can drive an even deeper wedge between the US and its former European allies — thus creating the foundation for a new order. The EU, with its lofty goals of democratization and justice in Belarus, will be left out in the cold. An agnostic US will meanwhile build new ties with Lukashenko and a newly victorious, post-war Russian sphere.

Despite being a pariah on the continent for the better part of 25 years even before 2020, Lukashenko had been surprisingly effective at maintaining ties to liberal Europe — while doing comparatively little to reform his dictatorship in return. Time and time again, the EU allowed itself to be deceived by Lukashenko into thinking he could change — a naïveté that he exploited to keep his masters in the Kremlin far enough at bay to keep them from swallowing him whole. In 2008, having watched Putin’s tanks roll into Georgia, Lukashenko secured a window to the West for himself by freeing several political prisoners, leading the EU to lift a travel ban against him — only to spark Brussels’ ire anew by violently suppressing post-election protests in Minsk two years later. In 2015 the story repeated itself. Lukashenko came under pressure from Putin to establish a Russian military base on Belarusian territory, leading him to release more prisoners in exchange for the EU unfreezing his assets and eliminating other sanctions. While Belarus and Russia were in the midst of an oil and gas dispute in 2019, Lukashenko visited Vienna, marking his first visit to the EU in years.

The house of cards came crashing down in 2020 when Lukashenko’s crackdown on post-election protests transformed both Belarusian society and his regime. Feeling more threatened than ever by his own people, Lukashenko pursued his enemies with relentless fury, infamously forcing a Ryanair passenger plane to land in Minsk to arrest Belarusian activist Roman Protasevich who was on board.

For Europe, this was the final straw, and Lukashenko has found himself permanently locked out of the West ever since — more at Putin’s mercy than ever before. And while his 2020 crackdown allowed him to hold onto power in Belarus, he paid for it by watching his worst nightmares about Russian power in Belarus manifest before his eyes. Despite having broken with the Kremlin line on Crimea in 2014, calling it a “bad precedent,” Lukashenko now had no choice but to allow his country to be used as a staging ground for Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and thus a co-aggressor. Although he resisted pressure to conscript Belarusians themselves to join the war, in a major move, he allowed Russia to station nuclear-capable Oreshnik ballistic missiles in Belarus late last month.

Of course, Lukashenko is hardly interested in the welfare of Belarus as a country — and only cares about the instruments of its state insofar as they allow him to achieve his personal goals. As a product of the Soviet bureaucratic machine, he has always ultimately seen Moscow as his center of gravity — and despite his distrust of Putin, he has played the part of his enforcer well.

Now that the Trump administration has arrived on the scene with offers that Europe is no longer willing to make, Lukashenko has bifurcated his policy toward a divided West. Washington, rather than Brussels, is now his insurance policy against Putin. Even while drawing closer to Trump, Lukashenko has continued to antagonize the EU, triggering a state of emergency in Lithuania last month after sending smuggler balloons over the border. In effect then, by courting the Americans, Lukashenko has been helping Putin articulate an ultimatum to the EU. Sanctions on Belarus and Russia and support for Ukraine will be met with gray-zone warfare and instability along Nato’s frontier. Legitimization, sanctions relief, and negotiation with the Kremlin via Minsk will be met with business opportunities, humanitarian releases of Belarus’s oppressed — and peace along Europe’s frontiers.

Meanwhile, like two lovers stuck in a bad marriage, Putin is nearly as dependent on Lukashenko as he is on him. The Belarusian leader has done everything in his power to underscore this fact since the start of the war in Ukraine — in 2023 after all, Lukashenko negotiated a deal between the Kremlin and Yevgeny Prigozhin during the latter’s march on Moscow, casting himself as Putin’s savior.

And within Trump’s imagined new order, Lukashenko sees a place for himself as an equal to the Russian leader. Moscow is hoping to reestablish its influence on its “near-abroad” after the dust settles in Ukraine — and as Putin’s most important international ally, Lukashenko already forms the lynchpin of the Russkiy Mir (that is, the Russian world). He has already done his best to support loyal regimes like Georgia’s and to corral wayward allies like Armenia and Kazakhstan back into the flock.

And despite thumbing their nose at him a few years ago — Kazakhstan’s President Qasym-Zhomart Toqaev called Lukashenko’s suggestion that his country join the Union State a “joke” in 2023 — these states seem to have reluctantly come around to the notion that they will have to continue appeasing the Russian bully one way or another. Kazakhstan and Belarus strengthened their military ties in 2025 less than a year after Lukashenko chided his Kazakh counterpart for not being more involved in Russia’s war in Ukraine. The Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan once said he would never visit Belarus as long as Lukashenko reigns; nevertheless the pair met and shook hands in Moscow last year.

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Of course, all of this is only made possible by Lukashenko’s Orwellian oppression of the Belarusian populace — which goes beyond even Putin’s authoritarian chokehold on the Russian masses. The prisoner deals with the EU and now Trump have taught Lukashenko that imprisoning his own people not only helps him stay in power, but gives him a bargaining chip. “We are basically goods for sale,” said the Nobel Peace laureate Ales Bialiatski who was freed as part of the most recent prisoner release in December. Moreover, with over 1,100 political prisoners (and counting) still behind bars in the country, Lukashenko still has plenty of human “goods” to sell the West. Once he runs out, he will surely arrest more to keep the train rolling.

Naturally, given its borders with three EU countries, Belarus still needs Europe. Trump’s recent removal of sanctions on potash means little if Belarus has no means to export them. And however desperate Putin may be, sharing power is not something he has ever been keen on — especially with a fair-weather friend like Lukashenko. But the world is changing and the Russkiy Mir is changing too. Putin is tightening his belt. The war in Ukraine has now stretched on for longer than the USSR’s Great Patriotic War against the Nazis. He will need a stable bulwark as he reconstitutes his forces and his political capital — and Lukashenko will doubtlessly be there to save him once again. Indeed, the Belarusian dictator will have secured the very balance he has always desired: power beyond his own borders, plus his own fiefdom, army, and intelligence services within them.

Whether this dream ever manifests is anyone’s guess — and it will depend enormously on what the world looks like once the guns fall silent in Ukraine. Moreover, it is hard to imagine Lukashenko could achieve this without further sacrificing Belarus’s independence. But Lukashenko changed his calculus after 2020 and he may be happy to do the same again, so long as he finds himself where he has always wanted to be — in the halls of power of the former Soviet world that molded him. Yeltsin may have stopped Lukashenko from taking over Russia back in 1997. But he was never able to stop him from trying to restore his place at the heart of the Russian world.

Such was the fate of Viktor Yanukovych, the former Ukrainian leader who fled to Russia following his ousting in the 2014 Maidan Revolution, and who would likely have succeeded Zelensky if Putin’s forces had captured Kyiv in 2022. More recently, a comfy retirement was also the fate of Bashar al-Assad, who traded running one of the world’s most brutal regimes for playing online video games and brushing up on his ophthalmology.

Of course, Maduro, Yanukovych and Assad all led very different countries. But in comparing the fate of the Venezuelan strongman with his fellow ex-despots we can learn much about US power in the Americas — and the Kremlin’s willingness to cede it. Just last May, after all, Maduro visited Moscow for the annual Victory Day parade, with Vladimir Putin waxing lyrical about strengthening economic ties with socialist Venezuela. Yet in the end, Putin did nothing to save Maduro, and has remained tellingly quiet on his arrest by US commandos. The comparison with other erstwhile Russian allies couldn’t be starker.

This matters, for it shows how America’s foreign policy revolution dovetails with Russia’s own geopolitical recalibration. Just as Trump has signaled that he’s ready to wash his hands of Ukraine as quickly as possible — for mutual Russian and American enrichment — so too has Putin decided that Venezuela isn’t worth Moscow’s time. And while there may not have been any explicit deal between the White House and the Kremlin, when the dust settles, a Putin corollary to the Monroe Doctrine may likely emerge, with vast consequences across Eurasia.

Russian dominance over Ukraine is far from guaranteed, and Trump has lately been openly frustrated with his counterpart in Moscow. But with the Russians remaining steadfast as ever in their maximalist aims in their invasion, thumbing their noses at any Ukrainian proposal and driving a wedge between an increasingly Ukraine-skeptical Trump and Kyiv’s European allies, the mercurial Trump is unlikely to resist Russia’s ultimatums forever. And whatever form the Ukraine peace deal eventually takes, Putin is sure to come away with the understanding that Trump has taken from Venezuela — that military action in his corner of the world is not only an effective, but indeed a necessary, method of maintaining his sphere of influence in the so-called Russkiy mir, or Russian world.

Reacting to Trump’s attack, former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev was strikingly effusive. “He and his team are very staunchly defending their country’s national interests,” Medvedev said of Trump, adding that as a result of the operation, the US has “nothing to reproach our country for”. For Russian leaders, then, Trump’s actions mirror their invasion of Ukraine not just in form but also in strategic logic — that maintaining a regional sphere of obedient client states through force, and punishing those that step out of line, isn’t aggressive imperialism, but merely guarding a superpower’s legitimate national security priorities.

This logic has lain behind Russia’s geopolitical behavior ever since the fall of the Soviet Union, especially since Putin’s rise to power, and indeed has animated its opposition to Nato expansion and efforts by countries as varied as Ukraine, Georgia and Kazakhstan to break free from Russia’s orbit. As far as Putin is concerned, the biggest problem with the Soviet collapse was not necessarily the end of communism, but the disintegration of Russia’s imperial sphere, and the subsequent lack of clarity over where Russia’s sphere ended and America’s began.

For Russia, the existence of such spheres of influence is as natural as the existence of national boundaries themselves — before the Soviet Union, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Tsarist Russia held sway over Eastern European countries such as Bulgaria and Serbia, while also enjoying authority in Iran and China. Putin has long seen Trump and his Ukraine peace process as a vehicle to formalize a new division of the world, and regards Trump’s move in Venezuela to be a decisive step in that direction.

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He’s right to see it that way. For Trump, Venezuela is not a culmination of his policy in Latin America, but a new geopolitical beginning. While he has never shied away from coercive diplomacy in the region, his pressure campaigns had thus far been primarily economic — bolstering allies like Javier Milei in Argentina, while punishing critics like Colombian President Gustavo Petro with sanctions. Now, though, not only has he deployed the military to advance his interests, he’s unified his agenda under the banner of wholesale American domination of the New World, hinting at military action in Cuba, Colombia, and even Mexico, not to mention ramping up threats against Greenland.

Combined with the US troop drawdown that is quietly but meaningfully underway along Nato’s eastern flank, all this looks like a fundamental recalibration of American priorities, and one that is duly being emulated by Russia. Putin has failed to match his words of support for Maduro with concrete actions — Venezuela’s pleas for military aid in the lead-up to the American operation were apparently met with shrugs by the Kremlin. Not that Maduro should have expected anything else. He may have invited Assad to Moscow, but Putin was nonetheless happy to abandon the Syrian regime as rebels conquered Damascus in December 2024. Why, then, would Moscow stick its neck out for a more distant, even less important partner halfway around the world? As in Syria, Putin is likely counting on the fact that regime change in Caracas will be much less transformative than hinted at by Washington, and that Russia will manage to salvage the bulk of its investments in the country’s oil sector without stepping on America’s toes.

It’s hardly lost on Putin that Trump was able to achieve in Venezuela in a matter of hours what his forces have failed to achieve over four years of war in Ukraine, and at the cost of over a million casualties. More than that, America’s victory in Caracas is likely to have sent a clear signal to Russia: what matters is less US power, but where Trump is willing to deploy it. Zelensky reacted to news of Maduro’s capture by hinting that the US should do the same against Putin. But though it’s entirely possible that the US could carry out such a mission, the new rules Trump and Putin are laying out mean that it never will, and nor will it intervene against lower-level Russian proxies in Moscow’s near-abroad either.

Of course, 19th-century-style spheres of influence are not created overnight, and despite Trump’s desire to dictate terms to his neighbors in the Western Hemisphere, a leader cannot steer the course of other nations through shock-and-awe alone. While Trump has clearly set the groundwork for an American counterpart to the Russian world, it’s likely it will fall to a more disciplined and strategically minded successor to finalize this new American empire. Though self-proclaimed isolationists like Tulsi Gabbard may well object to this seeming bastardization of America First, there are plenty others in the MAGA camp who’d be happy to take this mantle up. Despite their origins outside the movement, JD Vance and Marco Rubio are now both loyal Trumpists, and would have no qualms about cementing American dominance in the Western Hemisphere.

But in opening the door for such a foundational reorientation of US priorities, Trump has given Putin the signal that a thoroughgoing division of the world is right around the corner. This remains true despite the cyclical back-and-forth over Ukraine — Trump’s on-and-off annoyance with Putin is based not on fundamental differences in outlook, but on the Russian leader’s unwillingness to meet Trump halfway, even though both of them understand, broadly speaking, how the conflict’s end will impact geopolitics. Regardless of who ultimately controls the northwestern part of Donetsk Oblast, Russia will carve out its own version of victory in one way or another, and will go on to force the Colombias and Greenlands of its own neighborhood to its will.

As in Iran a century ago, Russia may establish a partial sphere of influence in Ukraine while wielding less direct, coercive influence over Kyiv. That’s likely to be echoed by increasingly kinetic threats against the eastern Nato states, newly exposed to Russian pressure by the great American reorientation. While Russia has lately saved its most dramatic hybrid attacks for Poland, it’s unlikely to try to occupy the country as it seeks to rebuild its old sphere of influence. Estonia and the Baltic states are a different story — with the US retreating from Europe, and threatening to unravel the entire Nato alliance by considering military action against Greenland, a Russian assault on these countries, especially a hybrid one, is no longer the stuff of fantasy. Recent US intelligence findings have confirmed that Russia has never abandoned its dreams of reclaiming Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania after losing them in 1991, and with the resurgence of multipolar spheres of influence where might is right, reestablishing some sort of control over them will naturally be high on Putin’s to-do list after Ukraine.

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Elsewhere in Europe, Bosnia and Serbia will be as ripe as ever for Russian retrenchment. Despite already being friendly toward Moscow, Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić has long sought to balance Putin against the EU, but with his political future looking shakier than ever, as the country’s youth turn against him, Russia may offer him a much-needed lifeline — albeit at the cost of Serbia’s European ambitions. Bosnia’s Serbs likewise have long relied on Moscow for support, and the twin earthquakes of declining American power in the Old World and Russia’s ascendancy in Eastern Europe may give them the opportunity to finally unite with Serbia proper.

Further afield, countries like Armenia, which have previously drifted away from Moscow toward Washington, could find themselves handed back to Putin on a silver platter. Yerevan has recently been warming up to Russia, after years of diplomatic backsliding, and in a tell-tale sign of things to come, Russia has been investing in disinformation campaigns in the country. With neighboring Georgia already firmly in Russia’s grasp, Armenian Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan shouldn’t be terribly surprised if he found himself Maduro’ed in future. In Central Asia, too, another corner of Russia’s traditional backyard, Moscow may have incentives to rein in nominal allies that have started to split from the herd — though with Chinese influence on the rise, Putin may have to establish the limits of his sphere of influence there not with Trump, but with Xi Jinping.

Outside of this near-abroad, much less is clear. Russia, for instance, has been able to weather the loss of Assad in Syria. That’s largely because the political transition there, under Ahmad al-Sharaa, like the one seemingly on the horizon in Venezuela, proved to be much more pragmatic than initially advertised. For one thing, Russia has managed to hold onto its bases in the country in 2025. Yet the question is: to what end? Russia’s Syria bases at this point serve mainly as logistical resupply points for warships and aircraft headed to Africa, where Russia continues to exert influence through mercenary groups like the Africa Corps, a rebranded version of Wagner. Even so, it remains unclear if Moscow will be able to have its cake and eat it too, as it rebuilds its sphere of influence in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia while deepening its influence elsewhere. The answer is probably not, but with a caveat — like Trump, Putin will concentrate his attention much closer to his own borders, all while continuing to project economic and soft power into Africa and the Global South.

At the same time, something else will happen: the emergence of Russia as a wholesale diplomatic sponsor, offering its services as the anti-Western strongman of the world and providing political cover for dictators like it did for Assad until 2024. Already, amid growing protests in Iran, the Ayatollah has made plans to hightail it to Moscow if things get dire, and it’s likely Russia will provide the same service to other state and non-state leaders too. The reason Maduro didn’t get the same treatment wasn’t because Russia was too incompetent to provide it to him — rather, amid the geopolitical realignment underway, the Venezuelan leader was the sacrificial lamb Putin needed to bring his preferred international order into being.

In the days since the Venezuela raid, Eastern European opponents of Russia have sneered at the ousting of Maduro, viewing his downfall as a reflection of Moscow’s weakness. But while Russia may be happy to stay passive in some corners of the world, the country’s neighbors may soon see it toppling Maduros of its own much closer to home — and this time, it will have Trump’s precedent to back it up.

During the Cold War of my youth, there was always potential for accidental conflict. But America and the Soviet Union were both run by people who were working hard to prevent that from happening. Even in the tensest of crises, diplomacy prevailed.

Things are totally different now. On both sides of the Atlantic, in Russia and across Western Europe, I see a rhetorical readiness for armed conflict on a never before seen scale. “Russia has brought war back to Europe,” said Mark Rutte, the Nato secretary general recently, adding that “ we must be prepared for the scale of war our grandparents and great-grandparents endured.” Meanwhile, the UK’s Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton said the situation was more dangerous than at any time during his career: “Sons and daughters. Colleagues. Veterans… will all have a role to play, to build, to serve, and if necessary, to fight,” he said. For his part, the head of Germany’s Federal Intelligence Agency has warned that Russia could attack Europe before the end of the decade.

If this war with Russia were to happen, it won’t only be because Trump has motivated Putin, it will also be because we have allowed the situation in Ukraine to spiral out of control. Our support has been a catalog of misjudgments. When everybody draped themselves in the Ukrainian flag in 2022, so-called experts were spectacularly gung-ho about Kyiv’s eventual victory. Retired generals competed with predictions of how fast Ukraine would get the job done — two weeks, speculated one. Well, we are now nearly four years into the conflict and as members of the so-called “coalition of the willing”, we Europeans encouraged Ukraine to fight to the bitter end — without a chance of victory.

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It is perfectly plausible now that Russia will end up occupying more than the four oblasts it seeks, and that Ukraine loses its independence. Encouraged by victory, Russia might eventually seek more. Exacerbating matters on the other side, some Europeans now seek regime change in Russia. To quote Kaja Kallas, the EU’s High Representative for foreign and security policy: “it is not a bad thing if the big power is actually made much smaller.”

We’ve been here before. Ahead of the First World War, young Germans and Austrians were also hungry for battle, as many Europeans seem today. The Germans envied their grandparents who fought the glorious battles of the Franco-Prussian War 44 years earlier. Then, as now, the political and military establishment underestimated how difficult war would be.

Yet there is one big difference. Back in 1914, Europe’s armies were in a position to fight. A victory by the Germans and Austrians was at the very least a plausible outcome. Today, it is no longer possible that Ukraine can win the war, nor that Western Europe, without US help, could defeat Russia.

This broader European conflict won’t necessarily be a classic land war. I don’t think Putin has plans to invade Western Europe, as security officials claim. My main fear, rather, is hybrid warfare: airplanes blowing up over Heathrow airport, say; an explosion in a busy German railway station; or perhaps even an underwater nuclear explosion that sparks a tsunami. Brussels, as the home of Nato and the EU, would be particularly vulnerable. And any counter to such a provocation would swiftly escalate.

This is the type of warfare for which we Europeans are least prepared. Western security experts see hybrid warfare as a lower genre for lesser people, like Russians. But it is lethal, and we Europeans are ideal victims. We live in tight spaces. We are dependent on critical infrastructure and technology. And, from the Russian perspective, such attacks would helpfully not trigger Nato’s mutual defense clause. Why invade Estonia if you can create utter chaos in European capitals, all while maintaining plausible deniability?

The UK isn’t unaware of this. In November, the Defence Select Committee warned that the UK Government was moving “at glacial pace” to adopt the “Home Defence Programme”, a new national resilience and security strategy to secure the country against serious risks: including unconventional attacks. But the programme has been delayed for over a year, even as Britain’s leaders are desperate to ramp up the war rhetoric.

It is clearer than ever, though, that our political systems are far from ready for a fight. The UK, Germany and France are all unwilling to pay for the support of Ukraine from their own budget, or indeed raise taxes. This is why they were so keen to use the Russian assets that lie frozen in European banks. Now that Belgium, the country where most of the assets are held, has blocked the heist, European politicians will have to put their money where their mouth is.

The trouble is, their electorates won’t let them. European voters won’t give up their welfare payments to fund a war and polls consistently show a marked lack of support for further financial aid for Ukraine. And please don’t ask them to put on their boots and actually fight for their country.

The irony here is that, whatever their problems, Europe’s leaders see war as a way of distracting from even deeper crises. If peace broke out, for instance, the EU would have to reform its absurd Common Agricultural Policy, redirecting funds away from French farmers towards Ukraine. Continued profligacy would become tougher to defend in other ways. The EU ditched its fiscal rules to make room for more defense spending. Without a war, deficit spending is hard to justify. War is the ultimate excuse for failing policies, keeping dysfunctional governments in power and delaying the moment of reckoning.

Like so many of my generation, I always thought that Europeans had learned from the mistakes of the past — including the oldest mistake of all. As Sun Tzu, the legendary Chinese strategist of war, warned some 2,500 years ago: if you “know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” Unfortunately, we keep on overestimating ourselves and underestimating our enemies. Putin initially underestimated his enemy with an amateurish attack on Kyiv. But he recovered and the Russians are now fighting a well-organized, fully-funded, focused war. And perhaps his strategists would conclude that now is the right time to launch an extended hybrid war against Europe. What has Putin to lose?

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Meanwhile, our misjudgments continue. Just as Napoleon and Hitler underestimated the sheer scale of Russia and its freezing winter temperatures, contemporary European politicians continue to discount the economic resilience of modern Russia. The first mistake happened right at the beginning of the war, when we thought we could exhaust Russia economically through sanctions. We fooled ourselves with deeply misleading statistics, according to which Russia’s GDP was approximately the size of Spain’s. But what matters in a war is purchasing power — literally bang for buck. On that metric, Moscow spends more than twice as much as Germany on defense, and far more efficiently. While experts insist that the Russian economy is on the verge of collapsing. there’s no sign of that happening. Similarly, certain international lawyers continue to claim that the sequestration of Russian assets is risk-free. There is a pattern here — one that could yet prove catastrophic in both treasure and blood.

In contrast, the geopolitical realists of earlier generations, such as Henry Kissinger or George Kennan, the legendary US diplomat of the post-war era, had a much deeper understanding of superpower politics. Nobody would have accused Kissinger of being soft on the Soviet Union. But nor was he a trigger-happy war monger.

Back then, the Americans maintained diplomatic channels with Russia. And they didn’t indulge in ritualized virtue-signaling about the rule of law. Their job was risk-management — and they performed it admirably. What is becoming increasingly clear is that the Trump Administration is not in the business of managing risk, but of pursuing short-term commercial advantage.

Greenland may well be next. Its vast, largely unexplored deposits of rare earth elements, combined with its strategic position make it an obvious target. Indeed, Trump has already laid the groundwork both with the National Security Strategy and with the appointment of an envoy tasked with its acquisition. Ownership would dramatically strengthen the US position in the Arctic Sea, a region of growing strategic importance that Europe has largely ignored.

Nor is Canada immune: Trump has already identified it as a security threat. It also happens to sit on 163 billion barrels of proven oil reserves, ranking 4th globally according to the US Energy Information Administration, after Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. As the US becomes more dependent on oil for its energy needs, the acquisition of Venezuela and Canada would certainly follow a commercial logic, if not strategic reason.

It’s completely mad, I know. But it reflects a geopolitical reality in which risk is no longer managed and diplomacy discounted. The Cold War world was a safer one, not because the situation was safe, but because adults were in charge.

This time, however, there was only silence until the full 28-point plan appeared. The effect was compounded by the extremely tight deadline. Volodymyr Zelensky and his government were allowed a mere seven days — until 27 November — to accept or refuse the proposal: just one of whose requirements, Ukraine’s withdrawal from active battlefields where its troops are even now fighting the Russian advance, would justify prolonged deliberations to say the least.

The very first official European reaction to Trump’s plan only made matters worse. Taking time out of a pointless G20 summit in failing South Africa — without American, Chinese, or Russian leaders present — Ursula von der Leyen reminded the US that since the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, now 1,000 days ago, Europe had donated a total of €181 billion, including grossly over-priced weapons, to help Ukraine. That happens to amount to less than 1% of the €19.99 trillion that makes up the combined annual GDP of the European Union.

As against that, the US has spent a combined total of $175 billion on Ukraine since the start of the war, while concurrently devoting a great deal to defend China’s Asian neighbors — from Japan and Taiwan, to scattered island republics in the Pacific — from non-stop provocations. These include everything from the 500-boat intrusions of Chinese “fishing militias” to outright aggressions by Beijing’s rapidly expanding armed forces.

The Europeans constantly forget, just as the Americans constantly remember, that the world does not start or end in Europe, and that China not only presents a direct military threat to US allies — recall those frequent naval intrusions — but is also the opportunistic hotel burglar of our age. It does not smash its way into countries, but tries to open every door as it goes down the corridors of the world, with promises, gifts, loans, or bribes, before suddenly presenting the geopolitical bill. Consider what happened in Sri Lanka, where Beijing tried to convert a harbor-construction loan into a Chinese naval base, sited to threaten both Indian coasts.

To understand Trump’s abrupt 20 November announcement, alongside that shockingly sudden 27 November ultimatum, it is also necessary to invoke yet another date: 6 May, 2025. This was the day when the President, returning from the Persian Gulf, received a full US Navy briefing about the fight with the Shi’a Houthi rebels in Yemen, which he promptly called off, once he heard the essential facts.

Funded by Iran and armed with many anti-ship drones — as well as anti-ship and ballistic missiles sent by Iran — the Houthis quickly joined Hamas’s October 7 attack against Israel: attacking ships in the Red Sea, coming or going to the Suez Canal.

In theory, the Houthis were supposed to attack Israeli ships, or ships sailing to Israel, but in practice Israel receives very little sea freight via the Red Sea, and sends even less: almost all its exports consist of high-end electronics, pharmaceuticals and polished diamonds, all much too valuable to be sent by anything slower than air freight. Israel’s only bulk import — oil from its ally Azerbaijan — comes via the Mediterranean. So the Houthis used their Iranian drones and missiles to attack other ships, damaging many and sinking some.

Because the world’s shipping insurance companies promptly raised their rates, shipping via the Red Sea and Suez Canal fell steeply, as more and more ships to and from Asia avoided the danger by going all the way round the Cape of Good Hope and the great bulge of West Africa. Thus the most important of commercial routes, from Shanghai to Rotterdam, was extended by some 4,900 nautical miles, adding roughly 12 extra days to the average journey.

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For some trades, the extra costs were easily absorbed, and for others they were fatal. But the losses to Europe’s Mediterranean ports and the cities that depend on them — Barcelona, Marseille, Genoa and Gioia Tauro among others — caused by the loss of traffic was absolute: Europe’s freight now arrived in Rotterdam or Antwerp and continued to French, Italian and Spanish cities by rail, leaving the Mediterranean ports bereft of Asian traffic.

By then, Trump had heard that the fight with the Houthis was extremely expensive for the US Navy. Its destroyers, built to defend its multi-billion aircraft carriers from Russian and Chinese anti-ship missiles, only had $2.5-million “standard missiles” to attack Iran’s cheap drones and crude anti-ship missiles, themselves copied from older Chinese designs.

It was at that point in the US Navy briefing that Trump asked about European navies and their role in fighting the Houthis.  When he heard that just the Mediterranean navies of France, Italy and Spain — had some 200 combat vessels including aircraft carriers, he naturally asked how many of their ships were fighting the Houthis. And he was genuinely shocked by the answer: almost none.

All three countries had refused to join the suggestively named Anglo-American “Prosperity Guardian” mission because it involved some air attacks against Houthi weapon depots. This reticence disregarded the fact that the Houthis were not Yemen’s government but merely rebels. Either way, after doing nothing, the EU navies stationed two small ships in the upper Red Sea under the hugely over-publicized “Aspides” mission, which intercepted a total of four Houthi ballistic missiles, alongside 18 drones. Compare this to the 400 drones and missiles intercepted by the US Navy, all at 100 times the cost.

Upon receiving this information, Trump did not ask his National Security Advisor Marco Rubio, who is also the Secretary of State, to convene a meeting to discuss US options: he simply ordered the US Navy to immediately abandon the Prosperity Guardian fight against the Houthis, supposedly employing some choice language about the idiocy of exhausting US naval missile stocks to safeguard the commercial freight of Nato Mediterranean countries: whose own warships lolled idly by instead of defending their commerce.

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All this set the stage for Trump’s new approach to the Ukraine war. America had just helped Israel defeat Iran — as well as its proxies, the Assad regime of Syria, Hezbollah and Hamas — with a total military aid budget of $3.8 billion: or less than 0.5% of total US military spending. The Israelis, for their part, had immediately mobilized 700,000 active-duty troops and reservists after the war started on October 7, out of a total of  7.7 million Israeli Jews and Druze subject to military service.

As for Ukraine, its population still exceeds 36 million. Yet its army has never exceeded a million soldiers. Millions of Ukrainians of military age have not served a day in uniform, with some having bought exemptions and others having fled to Poland, Germany or as far afield as Thailand. Yet all this pales in comparison with Ukraine’s EU allies. Despite including 450 million inhabitants, or 5.5% of the world’s population, it has just 1.5 million men in uniform. That number reaches 1.9 million counting paramilitary forces, every one of whom eats three meals a day in their camps, barracks, bases and ships at sea — but none of whom are available to fight.

And the number of EU troops sent to Ukraine? Zero. That is ultimately why the Trump plan has made its concessions to Putin. It is not a pretty spectacle to see Washington replacing unconditional support for Ukraine with an ultimatum to end the war or else. But it really must focus on the global Chinese threat, especially when the Europeans have proved such unreliable partners.

Besides the EU, or more likely a compact of major European countries, could easily take full control of the situation if they wished: by simply sending troops to help Ukraine, if only for logistical support and equipment repair well behind the front. This would pose very little risk to themselves, while releasing Ukrainians for combat roles and immediately changing attitudes to the EU — or at least to the contributing nations — in the White House and in the US Congress.

If even that is too much, the EU’s entire machinery of pretended military strength will be exposed as a fraud, and so will its claim to challenge White House priorities, shaped by global rather than just European realities.

“I thought it was so absurd that no one would take it seriously,” Perring recalls. Then he received notification from HSBC that his bank account was being suspended — and so too was that of his 13-year-old daughter.

Over the days that followed the allegations, Perring learned just how serious an accusation of espionage can be. He was sacked from companies he worked with, ostracized by friends, and ended up £8 million worse off.

Perring’s case isn’t unique, with other prominent people finding themselves suddenly accused of conniving with the Kremlin. Yet if the specifics of each case are different, they’re all united by a single man: Christopher Steele. A former spook himself, he has form when it comes to claims involving Russian spies, with consequences that lead all the way to the White House.

***

The broad narrative of Perring’s debanking didn’t take long to untangle. He was first denounced by the Labour MP Liam Byrne, who rose to his feet in the House of Commons to demand a debate on “the activities of short-selling attack group Viceroy Research and its leader Fraser Perring”. Byrne said that Perring — whom he had never met, and twice referred to as “Pelling” — was “a not infrequent visitor to Moscow”, while his firm was a “weapon in Putin’s arsenal” whose links to the Kremlin must be exposed.

Byrne claimed that Perring had worked “hand-in-glove” with a firm named Boatman Capital to “attack” the British defense firm, Babcock International, at a moment that it was attempting to overhaul Britain’s nuclear submarine fleet. As such, he represented a threat to national security.

Not one of Byrne’s damning claims was true. Perring had never been to Russia, and had all his old passports to prove it. He was not working with Boatman Capital, nor short-selling shares in Babcock. Perring’s firm, Viceroy Capital, did specialize in short-selling, a species of money making that is not universally admired. But the activity is perfectly legal and a long way from espionage. Perring had no idea why Byrne named him, at least until he discovered his links with Christopher Steele.

That may not quite be a household name — but if the words “Donald Trump” and “Russian hotel room” and “golden shower” set any bells ringing, you will be familiar with his greatest hit.

Steele, who did not respond to requests for comment on this article, is the former head of MI6’s Russia desk. Later, he set up his own boutique intelligence firm, Orbis Business Intelligence, and in 2016 came up with one of the most consequential political documents of the century: the dossier that was supposed to derail Trump’s initial presidential bid.

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Steele’s 35-page compendium of what he called “raw intelligence” was the original source of the claim that Trump had actively conspired with Russia in order to win the election. It was also where the idea that the Russians held kompromat on Trump emerged: namely a video purporting to show Moscow prostitutes, hired by Trump, urinating on a hotel bed that Barack and Michelle Obama had once slept in.

The document, which was later seized on by Democrats and eventually published on Buzzfeed in 2017, turned out to be a work of fiction. Steele himself later admitted that the dossier’s contents may only be “70% accurate”. While subsequent investigations showed that Russia did indeed want Trump to win, no evidence has come to light that he colluded with them. Its main source, Igor Danchenko, had been suspected by the FBI of being a Russian spy for years and was later charged with lying about his own sources (he was found not guilty in 2022).

But none of this stopped his fictions from having an enormous real-world impact. Trump has said the dossier continues “to cause me significant damage and distress” and has attempted, unsuccessfully, to harass Orbis through the British courts. The consequences for former FBI director James Comey could be far worse. He used the dossier while he was investigating Trump’s campaign, claiming he thought Steele was a “credible source”. Comey was indicted last month for lying to Congress at a 2020 hearing related to the dossier, and may yet face further charges.

Somehow, against the backdrop of this chaos, Steele has positioned himself as a free speech champion — even a victim. In 2024, when a British judge threw out Trump’s libel case against him on a technicality (it had not been bought within the limitation period), Steele presented it as a victory for free speech: “Orbis stands by its sources and work and will not be deflected by such ‘lawfare’ practices”, read an official statement.

However, Steele’s argument that this was a private document, never intended for publication, is somewhat undermined by his own admission last year that he tried hard to get the news media to publish its contents — at one stage, even renting a room at a Washington, DC hotel to arrange a series of meetings with journalists, staggering their entrances to ensure rival reporters didn’t bump into each other. He was, of course, also briefing the Democrats, who were paying him.

Moreover, the Trump dossier was not the last time Steele would compile and distribute damaging allegations about individuals he claimed were working for Russia. I have now seen two secret dossiers drawn up by Orbis since the Trump files. Both rely on barely credible sources, including an author of spy novels. Both contain overblown and inaccurate information, including outright lies. One, codenamed “Project Fish”, claims to rely on sources with access to a KGB file on Boris Johnson, opened while he was still a student at Oxford, when a clandestine Russian agent supposedly wrote that he “might be useful to us”.

The Fish dossier, which was drawn up in October 2022, also ludicrously claims that Peter Mandelson has had dealings with the KGB since 1990, and as a “privileged contact for Russian intelligence” has guided British and European Union policy to benefit Russia ever since. Apparently this long career in espionage was missed by MI5 and MI6 when he was chosen to become UK ambassador to Washington — though not by Steele.

What Steele offers is not only his imagination but his contacts book. In the Perring case, the bogus allegations were originally supplied not by Steele but another private intelligence firm, Audere, whose client was a now-defunct healthcare firm whose financial shortcomings Perring had exposed. Audere’s CEO, Charles Blackmore, was heard boasting about the damage he had inflicted on Perring in a secret recording, first published by the Organised Crime and Corruption Reporting Project: “We have done the best offensive false flag operation you could ever want to do… he is so offensively false-flagged that he’s fucked.” (Blackmore has not responded to requests for comment.)

However, Steele’s role was critical — thanks to his link to Byrne. I’ve seen text messages in which Steele ran his draft of Byrne’s parliamentary question falsely accusing Perring past Blackmore, suggesting that the “most interesting angle” was how Perring had supposedly served to “weaken our capabilities” against the Russians. Steele was also in touch with Byrne after he asked the question too. Byrne passed him on a letter from Penny Mordaunt, then the Leader of the House, in which she asked the then security minister, Tom Tugendhat, to investigate Perring.

Steele then shared this proof of his effectiveness with Blackmore who responded: “From client: Great letter from Penny Mordant [sic]… Thanks and great work.” Other texts refer to Steele’s fee, £30,000, and contain the banking details of a firm where he is a director, Walsingham Partners Ltd, into which it was paid — though listed as a “donation”. The texts also show Audere offered Steele a bonus for getting Byrne to expedite his question, with the money ultimately coming from its client, the defunct healthcare firm.

There is no suggestion that either Mordaunt or Byrne was paid for their actions, nor that any of these individuals has done anything illegal. In July, however, Perring submitted a complaint to the Commissioner for Parliamentary Standards, saying that Byrne had breached MPs’ rules which require them to act with openness and accountability. To date, the commissioner has not taken action.

***

Another figure who was surprised to learn that Steele had identified them as a Russian operative — more specifically, a Russian arms dealer — was Mohamed Amersi, the multi-millionaire entrepreneur and Conservative Party donor. In 2021, Amersi was the subject of “Project Delta”, a document produced by Orbis, which I have seen, and which purports to set out his Russian business links. Amersi was also falsely accused in the Project Fish dossier too.

Back in 2020, Amersi became involved in a bitter dispute with the former Tory MP Charlotte Leslie, then director of the Conservative Middle East Council, which aims to promote trade between Britain and countries in the Middle East. Leslie claimed that Amersi was attempting to use his wealth and influence to take over the council, and wrote to Tory MPs and others in an attempt to stymie his political influence. Amersi later attempted to sue Leslie for defamation over these letters. He lost the case in 2023 because the judge ruled he had not proved the letters caused him “serious harm”.

What the judge did not see was the Project Delta dossier prepared by Steele, who met with Leslie numerous times during this period, say sources who were then close to him. (Leslie has not responded to my requests for comment.)

The dossier names several individuals whom Amersi insists he has never met, claiming they too worked for Russian intelligence, including one who had been on “special training courses” to enable him to operate in the Middle East. That led to the most serious false allegations of all: that Amersi had for years been in business with this individual to supply Russian-made weapons to Syria and Iran, a trade in which he was “still involved”.

The result, says the dossier, was that the Kremlin itself had “forbidden” any mention of Amersi’s role in the Conservative Party and his dispute with Leslie in the Russian media, in order to protect his espionage contacts.

No shred of evidence to support these claims has ever been produced. The dossier claims to have benefited from unrestricted access to files held by the FSB and SVR (Russia’s heirs to the KGB), as well as to some of their current operatives. Intelligence veterans who have seen the dossier have called these assertions “sheer fantasy”. I have also seen leaked text messages from Steele which suggest he often spoke to Guardian reporter Tom Burgis when he was researching his book Cuckooland, an investigation into the influence of extremely wealthy individuals like Amersi on British politics. Burgis told me he could not discuss the sources he used for his book, but it is notable that it does not contain the merest hint that Amersi had ever been an arms dealer. It is reasonable to assume that if Steele claimed he was, Burgis could find no corroboration.

This lack of evidence did not appear to bother Byrne. On 17 January 2022, he repeated all of Project Delta’s most scurrilous claims in the Commons, using wording almost identical to that in the dossier. As with Perring, he refused to retract his allegations, and declined to answer questions from UnHerd. Amersi says everything Byrne said was “an absolute lie”. But the protection provided by parliamentary privilege means that unless Byrne repeats these allegations outside the House, he has no means of redress.

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So who was Steele’s well-connected source with such good access to Kremlin archives? Last year, the specialist subscription service Intelligence Online identified him as Simon Bell, a former partner of the TV presenter Anneka Rice and friend of the screenwriter Richard Curtis, who writes spy thrillers set in Russia under the pseudonym Alex Dryden.

Two sources who were close to Steele confirmed this to me, saying Steele refers to him by the codename “Douglas” and that much of his vaunted “information” is “neither true nor reliable”. (Bell’s literary agent initially agreed to pass on my questions to him, but the following day said his client did not wish to comment.)

It seems, then, that Steele was following the playbook he developed with the Trump dossier. Compile damaging allegations via dubious sources; disseminate them via the media and his political contacts; use the shield provided by parliamentary privilege to evade scrutiny; watch others bear the consequences.

For now, at least. Perring is consulting lawyers and plans to sue Steele. The leading criminal barrister Anthony Metzer KC told me this may be possible under the Fraud Act, on the basis that he was allegedly paid to put false information into the public domain. “As always, the available evidence, in particular relating to any payments, will be key,” Metzer explained.

Meanwhile, international legal experts say Steele is likely to be drawn into the case against Comey, and may be subpoenaed as a witness. If so, the details of his post-Trump dossier career will come to assume a new and dangerous relevance.

It’s tempting to blame these disruptions on Trump’s famously capricious style — but that would be a mistake. For the real shift of recent times came not from the Commander in Chief himself, but from a phone call between US Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, which finally led White House officials to realize that Russia’s position on Ukraine remains as unyielding and uncompromising as ever. First in Alaska, and now ahead of Budapest, Trump has twice learned a truth that Ukrainians have always known — that Putin is not interested in concessions so long as the price of continuing the war is lower than the cost of ending it.

As a result, the Trump administration duly announced sanctions against Russian oil firms Lukoil and Rosneft, the first against Russia during his second term in office. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to see this face-saving move as the end of his efforts to force a solution to the conflict that he can put his name on. After all, the energy giants have already been under American sanctions since 2014, and though some key buyers have started to back off from Russian oil and gas, the long-term efficacy of such sanctions largely depends on how aggressively the Trump administration enforces them.

That’s especially true when it comes to taking robust measures against secondary countries. And certainly, Trump’s record of upholding Biden-era sanctions against Russia leaves a lot to be desired. What all this means is that Trump’s latest moves won’t be nearly enough to sway Putin — and unless he is willing to go all-in on support for Ukraine, which is unlikely, the White House will eventually join forces with Putin to end the war on his terms, leaving Ukraine with only the hapless Europeans for solace.

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Despite his on-off embrace of Ukraine, what is easily and repeatedly observable is that, sooner or later, Trump always comes crawling back to Putin’s kennel, and after years of habit, you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Though he understands that he has once again been played by his Russian counterpart, Trump also knows that he may be reaching the end of his window to bag his long-coveted peace deal — his ninth, apparently — which would open the door to the trade deals and investments he has discussed with Putin almost since his inauguration.

He may levy sanctions today, in short, but as his bile-filled meeting with Zelensky implies, Trump is ultimately likely to return to his default approach and force the Ukrainians to abandon the last battlefield advantages they have. Jaded by his own peace process, yet still driven by his ego, Trump’s move against Russia is best understood as a façade, a reaction that belies a much deeper, more cynical awareness: that only by forcing Ukraine to capitulate will Trump get what he wants.

What exactly is that? Beyond the prospect of a long-term economic bargain with Moscow, Trump stressed after his meeting with Zelensky that the best-case scenario would be a quick deal to end the fighting. That would allow him to parade a personal triumph, while leaving it to Putin, Zelensky, and the Europeans to figure out the details of a proper lasting peace. “Let it be cut the way it is,” he said aboard Air Force One, referring to Donetsk Oblast and other parts of Ukraine that Russia currently occupies. “They can negotiate something later on down the line.” Now that Putin has made it clear this isn’t an option, Trump has found himself trapped — unable to secure a quick ceasefire, but still determined to secure Russian wealth.

In hindsight, Trump’s entire Russia-Ukraine saga has been leading up to this moment. Following the dud that was the Alaska summit in August, Trump tried on an all-in-for-Ukraine approach for size, offering Kyiv perhaps the most valuable asset in his toolkit — American intelligence support for long-range drone strikes against Russian energy sites. Though Trump’s threats to send Tomahawk missiles to Ukraine garnered much of the headlines, it was these strikes, which reduced Russia’s oil refining capabilities by 20% by September and slashed its oil export revenues, that ultimately played a larger role in pushing Putin to indulge the Budapest summit. For all its bluster, Russia would have likely weathered the limited Tomahawk strikes that Ukraine could have sent its way — but another few months of near-daily drone strikes might have been economically fatal.

Trump’s pro-Ukraine gambit was enough to bring Putin back to the negotiating table, but not enough to get him to actually negotiate. For that reason alone, the Commander-in-Chief is unlikely to “waste” more time on trying to meaningfully change Putin’s calculus in the long run. It may take another cycle of fruitlessly trying to get Putin to negotiate, but Trump will eventually return to what was always in his eyes a much more effective method for securing his goals: strong-arming Ukraine. Zelensky already got a taste of this during his meeting with Trump on Friday, when the US President told him that he should give in to Putin’s demands or get “destroyed”.

While Trump settled on advocating for a ceasefire along the current frontlines, there’s no guarantee he still sees this as a viable position, especially following the collapse of the Budapest summit. If he truly believes he can get Zelensky to surrender the Donbas, which could well be the case with Steve Witkoff constantly in his ear, the President may let his impulses get the better of him and embrace it as the fastest path to victory. Once he does, he will almost certainly cut off the intelligence support that has been so instrumental in Ukraine’s success against Russia’s energy sector, and possibly cancel Ukraine-destined arms shipments to Nato allies, leaving the country fully at the mercy of Putin’s war machine.

With a shaken Europe at his back, Nato chief Mark Rutte jetted off to Washington to meet with Trump this week, and though he downplayed concerns about the US President’s position on Ukraine, it’s clear the trip was an attempt at damage control. Europe, Kyiv, and Nato are now trying their best to band together and leverage the Trump-whispering techniques they’ve honed over the last eight months. Moving forward, they may try to sway Trump with economic and trade incentives of their own. Yet having already handed much of their bargaining power over to America during previous charm offensives, in the form of mineral deals, trade agreements, and security investment kickbacks, they will have few bones left for him to gnaw on.

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Moreover, European Nato leaders are aware that they must pick their battles carefully — and with a new era of gray-zone Russian drone incursions, provocations, and acts of sabotage already upon them, they may well choose to cut their losses and place their bets on American support for Europe rather than continuing to stick their necks out for Ukraine. And with Russia increasingly casting Europe as the spoilers of Trump’s grand plans, including the Budapest summit, they may soon find their influence in an increasingly pro-Russian White House dropping precipitously.

What of the future? The prospect of bilateral trade with Russia in rare earths and oil would certainly make Trump happy. But the price of such a deal would involve more than dollars: what Putin wants most from America is not just a free hand to impose his will on Ukraine, but an opportunity to halt and even roll back Nato’s expansion in Eastern Europe, refashion Russia’s old neo-imperial sphere of influence, and reach a new compact with the US on what our looming multipolar world might look like.

Whether Trump goes along with this plan remains to be seen, but imposing a dubious peace now opens the door for a whole range of geopolitical scenarios that at present seem unthinkable. As for Europe, which has spent an enormous amount of energy flattering Trump to get him onside, the President’s eventual turn to the Kremlin will force them into their own generational reckoning. And while they may initially redouble their efforts to support Ukraine, and win Trump back once more, it’s likely that, caught between Russia and the US, Europe may just cast Ukraine aside, as they scramble to find a place in this new, Machiavellian world order.

In the meantime, Zelensky is hoping that Trump’s ego won’t let him fall back into Putin’s lap. Ukraine has just conducted several successful strikes against a Russian gas processing plant, likely with American support, and he and the Europeans are doing their best to project calm, buoyed by the sanctions announcement. But as this chaotic week draws to a close, he and the Europeans will be dreading what comes next. Trumpology is an art, not a science, and a move in one direction is hardly ever a sure-fire bet for what comes next. Though the President may feel his self-worth bruised by Putin today, it is only a matter of time before his deeper self-interest wins out once more. Despite the wishful thinking of Europe and Ukraine’s supporters, The Art of the Deal has no chapter on righteous empathy.

Dutch F-35 fighters bagged four of the drones, and the others went down by themselves: they were not bombardment drones, just plastic decoys without explosive warheads. Debris aside, in fact, the only damage was the destruction of a house near Lublin, caused not by the Russians, but by a sophisticated $1.9 million US air-to-air missile. It had been launched by a Polish F-16 fighter at a drone — and missed.

Poland’s prime minister, Donald Tusk, was quick to use the Russian incursion to call for more defense spending, urging Nato members to spend 5% of their GDPs on defense. This week’s latest apparent drone incursion, this time over Denmark, has raised the pressure even further: especially now that Scott Bessant, the US Secretary of the Treasury, is warning that Trump has no plans to send more troops to help out his European allies.

But simply raising defense spending will not turn Europe’s states into genuinely effective military powers. For one thing, the GDP criterion is much too vague to mean much. Finland, for instance, spends only 2.4% of its GDP on defense and yet can mobilize some 250,000 determined soldiers. Other Nato members, which spend much more than the Finns, obtain far less for their money.

Moreover, focusing on GDP instead of force requirements — so many battalions, artillery regiments, fighter squadrons — is nothing but an invitation to cheat, an opportunity lustily taken up across the continent. The latest Spanish submarine, for instance, is not imported for €1 billion or so from Thyssen-Krupp, which supplies navies around the world with competent, well-proven submarines. Instead, it was proudly designed and built at the Navantia state-owned Spanish shipyard: for €3.8 billion, roughly the cost of a much bigger French nuclear-powered submarine. As a feeble justification for that absurdly high cost, Spain’s defense minister cited a supposedly advanced air-recirculation system — so greatly advanced, in fact, that it is not actually ready, and will not be installed even in the submarine’s next iteration.

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Soon, though, Italy will outdo Spain’s platinum submarine: by including a new bridge to Sicily, set to cost some €13.5 billion, into its 2% of GDP Nato spending quota. The government’s excuse is that some 3,000 Italian troops may need to cross the Strait of Messina were the Italian army ever to be fully mobilized. But it would be much cheaper to fly them individually, each trooper in his own luxurious private jet. Even without the bridge, meanwhile, Italy’s cheating on the 2% target is bad enough. Most notably, much of the Italian Navy’s spending goes towards warships made by Italy’s state-owned Fincantieri shipyard. But there is not enough money for the fuel and maintenance expenses to operate more than half of them, meaning another industrial subsidy is camouflaged as defense spending. All the while, Italy refuses to increase its defense budget beyond the very modest target of 2% — which it has yet to meet.

As for Germany, three and half years since the start of the Ukraine war, with ever more ambitious rearmament plans loudly promised, the total number of personnel in uniform has actually slightly decreased. And, aside from beginning a multi-billion euro purchase on an Israeli missile-defense system, nothing much has happened. Despite its high demand in Ukraine, even the battle tank, that German specialty, is being produced in very, very small numbers: so low that the annual output could be lost in a morning of combat. In May 2023, indeed, a meager 18 Leopard tanks were ordered to replace older models lost in Ukraine. The expected delivery date? Between 2025 and 2026! Then, in July, Germany purchased a further 105 advanced Leopard 2A8s. That is the number needed to equip a single brigade, the German force stationed in Lithuania — and they are expected to arrive in 2030!

The sad truth, then, is that Germany has yet to start working in earnest to correct the extreme neglect inflicted on its armed forces during the long Merkel premiership, when she kept saying that “even if we had the money we would not know how to spend it”. All the while, German helicopters lacked rotors and tanks lacked engines. The exceedingly slow recovery of the German army is especially frustrating because Nato is not actually short of air or naval forces. What it lacks are ground forces, soldiers more simply, or rather soldiers actually willing to fight. Having added Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania to the alliance, tiny countries with outsized defense needs, the alliance faces a severe troop deficit across the entire Baltic sector. The troops so far sent by Nato allies, such as visiting Alpini battalions from Italy, cannot improve the maths.

With its 38 million inhabitants, Poland could certainly raise an adequate army to defend its two borders with Russian Kaliningrad and Russian-dominated Belarus. But its governments have persistently chosen not to do so, rejecting conscription followed by reserve service along Finnish or Israeli lines. In November 2021, just four months before Ukraine’s invasion but with every sign that Russia was on the move, Poland had just 42,000 combat-ready soldiers. That is more or less the right number for a country of 38 million — if, that is, Poland were located somewhere between Fiji and Tonga.

And now, even after the drone attack, Prime Minister Tusk still refuses conscription, the only way to generate the large forces Poland needs to defend two fronts. The official explanation is that conscription under communism subjected 18-year-old recruits to humiliation rituals, which all too often slid into torture and even rape. Those are practices which the Poles like to explain are caused by the infiltration of the Red Army’s notorious “dedovshchina” (“reign of old-timers”) system of abuse by older soldiers. But the reputation of Poland’s pre-communist army was no better here, and indeed for Belorussian, Jewish and Ukrainian conscripts things could be much worse.

The truth, then, is simpler: Polish youth are just as post-heroic as their peers across Europe. Unlike their predecessors, they do not feel the urge to prove themselves in combat, let alone to serve as long as it takes to defend their countries. The many young Ukrainians in Poland, who fled their own country to avoid being conscripted to defend it, do nothing to induce patriotic attitudes. Nor does it help that Warsaw constantly talks up the few thousand US combat soldiers foolishly deployed in Poland. As Bessant’s latest comments imply, this is a force that will be evacuated rather than reinforced if there is a major Russian offensive, but which now induces young Poles to say that if “Nato” wants more troops, let them send more Americans.

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In Britain, for its part, the post-heroic refusal is irrelevant. His Majesty has only 73,847 full-time soldiers at his disposal, most of whom are recruited from the small subset of British families with strong military traditions. Foreign recruits with similar backgrounds make up the remainder, most notably the 4,127 Gurkhas, but also some from Fiji. The French Foreign Legion has fewer than 9,000 soldiers — self-selected aspiring warriors from everywhere, and whose French officers are just as atypical. But the rest of the French Army is so far gone that even among the 11,000 supposedly elite Troupes de Marine, less than half are willing and able to fight.

As for the other European armies, the less said the better. The Danes and Swedes announced with great fanfare that they were joining Finland in introducing conscription: only to accommodate so many demands for exemptions that in 2024 they enrolled some 10,000 troops between them, as compared to 77,000 Finns 18 year olds drawn from a far smaller population. The Belgians and Dutch, who used to provide three armored divisions to Nato, might now field a tenth of that: a mere three battalions. The Italian, Spanish, Portuguese armies do not even train in earnest anymore. Their exercises are bored drills, their maneuvers theatrical displays scripted to look good, instead of being deliberately disrupted by supervisors to test the mental and physical agility of officers and men as in real maneuvers. As total numbers shrink, moreover, those armies did not reduce the number of officers anywhere near proportionately, meaning many Nato armies have plenty of generals but very few combat-ready troops for them to lead.

All of the above explains why Putin’s motley army — home-grown mercenaries from Russia’s poorest backwaters, convicted criminals and North Korean slave soldiers — can nevertheless frighten European governments into rearming at great expense. As for Donald Tusk and his Poles — they would do well to learn the lessons of another Russian incursion in September. Not in 2025, but in 1939, when the French army did not move, and the Royal Air Force did not bomb. The difference now, of course, is that Poland really could defend itself, if it emulated the Finns across the Baltic and conscripted 18-year-olds, while continuing to add trained soldiers to its reserve units. Fail, however, and Putin will only keep pushing.

A repeat of 1939, this time between Nato and Russia, is far from imminent. But the battleground for their undeclared shadow conflict has now dramatically shifted westward to eastern Poland and the Baltic states — very likely to Ukraine’s detriment. While Ukraine remains Nato’s forward beachhead against Russian expansionism, the alliance’s eastern flank is now its frontline, and not only figuratively: Putin’s incursion was clearly a test of the alliance’s ability to respond to a breach of its frontiers, and an effort to determine the upper threshold of its tolerance for such actions.

Now that Nato has held Article IV consultations, and declared that the incident does not meet the formal definition of an “armed attack” under Article V, Moscow has established a new set of clear contours for what it can get away with. That, in turn, sets the stage for a new phase in the Nato-Russia shadow war, one where on-and-off, aerial confrontations between the West and Moscow are not only possible, but may well become the norm.

While Western leaders were quick to promise additional support for Ukraine following Putin’s drone wave — with no less than Nato Secretary General Mark Rutte himself entering the fray — frontline Nato states are likely to hunker down and protect their own territories, just as they’ve been signaling for the better part of a year.

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“We are absolutely unprepared for this conflict. Our contemporary military is not prepared for the war that is actively taking place beyond our eastern border, a war where right now millions of drones are now being produced yearly.” These are not the words of a pro-Ukraine Polish politician, like Prime Minister Donald Tusk, but rather an exasperated Sławomir Mentzen, the Right-wing, Ukraine-skeptic presidential candidate who came in third in June’s election, and who’s emerged as the country’s kingmaker.

Mentzen was speaking on national TV following the drone attack, and for a nationalist like him to make such a statement underscores just how much the conversation around Polish national defense has shifted over the last year — especially when it comes to decoupling from Ukraine. To be sure, at first glance the opposite seems true. On Wednesday, after all, Volodymyr Zelensky himself offered to help Poland build robust early-warning and air-defense systems, similar to those that Ukraine uses to counter such incursions.

That’s unsurprising: Poland’s success rate in shooting down its own Russian interlopers was shockingly low compared to Ukraine’s. For a country that has cultivated a reputation as Europe’s most promising military power, this is not only disappointing, but also geopolitically dangerous. While Poland has invested heavily in heavy weaponry like tanks, helicopters, aircraft, and missiles, the Russian assault has exposed a strategic blind spot in a piece of Warsaw’s defense architecture that, given the drone-heavy nature of the combat in Ukraine, could yet prove its Achilles Heel. For Russia, probing this space may have been exactly the point.

Nor are drones the only instance where Warsaw may soon need to learn from Kyiv. Teams of Moscow-backed assassins; covert bombings of strategic infrastructure; and maritime attacks originating offshore are all threats Ukraine has had to deal with, and which Poland must now be prepared to face too.

The timelines, too, will need to be expedited. Learning from Kyiv’s experience will no longer be a luxury that Nato states can push back for years — now that Russia has established new rules of engagement with the alliance, incursions of this sort may well occur with increasing regularity. Indeed, the timeline is likely much shorter than most observers in the West realize: Russia and Belarus are set to hold their first joint military exercises, called Zapad-2025, on Belarusian territory since the start of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in a few days’ time.

With the boots on the ground have come provocations: the last time the exercises took place in 2021 coincided with the start of the migrant crisis along the Polish-Belarusian border, a geopolitical headache that persists until today. In fact, and contrary to the claims of Kremlin apologists that some of Russia’s drones were meant for Ukrainian targets and merely veered off course, Tusk has warned that several arrived from Belarusian airspace, indicating that this wave may have been a prelude of things to come.

Yet if lessons from Ukraine will be instrumental in the ability of its western neighbors to adapt to this new reality, Kyiv may ironically find itself sidelined. For if Poland needs Ukraine’s help today — not least in countering drone incursions sustainably, either via its own drone forces or tactical teams on the ground — tomorrow it will likely turn its attention to its own skies. Poland, of course, has never directly played a role in defending Ukrainian airspace, but it has given Ukraine €4.5 billion in military aid since the war began, much of it coming from its own weapons stocks. Yet increasingly facing its own equipment shortfalls, future generosity may be harder. Last month, for instance, Ukraine asked Warsaw for a loan to purchase Polish-made weapons, and it remains unclear if the deal will go through.

Supporting Ukraine in its fight continues to make sense for countries like Poland in the long-term — after all, they are fighting the same enemy, and it benefits them both if their approaches are interoperable. Nevertheless, given the cold realities of the region’s security politics, decoupling its doctrines from Kyiv’s probably does make a brutal kind of strategic sense. But there’s more to it than that. Moscow has unsurprisingly already denied the drones in Poland were even of Russian origin and, according to an analysis by a Polish NGO, has fired up its online disinformation machine to blame Ukraine for the incursion. So long as future provocations continue to fall short of Nato’s Article V threshold, and the Kremlin can publicly deny responsibility for them, harassing the alliance directly will serve Russia in several clear ways.

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The most obvious is that it’ll pile additional pressure on the alliance to give in to Putin’s maximalist demands for an end to the war, which include surrendering the Donbas to Russia without any post-war security guarantees for Kyiv. Yet there is a more insidious motivation at play here too, and it’s one that many Poles, including politicians like Mentzen, are already embracing. By increasing the material, diplomatic, and psychological costs of supporting Kyiv, Putin is hoping to drive home the idea that supporting Ukraine’s defense is unsustainable in the face of more pressing security demands closer to home. New polls out last week show that for the first time since 2022, a slim majority of Poles oppose Ukraine joining Nato, a sharp increase from just 14% at the start of Russia’s invasion. That’s even as fewer than one-in-10 Poles think that their country is ready for a war with Russia.

Yet even if Poland moves towards self-reliance, it is unlikely that Russia will stop flexing its muscles in Nato border states. Indeed, what Ukraine-skeptics continually fail to understand is that even if Putin isn’t interested in conquering the territory of Nato states outright, despite his frequent suggestions to the contrary, what he seeks, at best, is their pliability. Seen from this perspective, disengaging Poland from Ukraine would only be the start from the Kremlin, which would use its successes in Eastern Europe as an invitation to press further. One demand might involve the removal of Nato military equipment and American forces from frontline states, whatever the wishes of the countries themselves. That could potentially even be part of an eventual peace deal in Ukraine. If history has taught Eastern Europe anything, it’s that when given an inch, Russia will take a mile.

Whether it continues to treat Ukraine as a part of its own defense or not, then, Poland’s fate after this dramatic escalation seems tragically clear — it and its neighbors will be the targets of “grey-zone” military actions by Russia for years to come. Despite their militarization, societies in Poland, Estonia, and beyond have largely been insulated from the direct impacts of their frontline position in Nato, but now that is changing. Residents of several eastern Polish regions, including Warsaw itself, received ominous text message alerts on Wednesday to watch out for drone activity overhead. That’s depressingly normal for Ukrainians, but a shock for their western neighbors.

And while this first drone incursion didn’t cause any casualties, it will only be a matter of time before actions like it lead to fatalities, and then, perhaps, to unwanted escalations — up to and including open war. Either way, a Rubicon has been crossed.

Ukraine’s political leaders and population remain, understandably, far more cautious. Zelensky cannot easily accept a settlement that might cement the loss of vast swathes of his country in exchange for little more than a temporary reprieve from Russian attack. Europe’s leaders are likewise treading carefully. But the greatest hold-out remains Putin. If anyone thought that the spectacle of Putin’s welcome in Alaska, which brought the leader out from several years in the political cold, would persuade the Russian President to agree to peace, they may be in for disappointment. Putin appears set on pursuing the war against Ukraine and playing diplomatic hardball.

Compared to the excitable commentary that has resounded across the West, the Kremlin’s public response to the weekend’s events has been remarkably muted. Scoring an invitation to Alaska was certainly a coup, and pictures of American soldiers rolling out the red carpet for Putin were received with delight on pro-Kremlin social media channels. However, a bland statement released by the Kremlin on 19 August mentioned only that Russia was “continuing to make progress on a peaceful resolution to the Ukraine crisis”. While Trump seems to think one grand photo-op with the leaders of Kyiv and Moscow will conjure peace, Putin is committing, as ever, to almost nothing at all.

Meanwhile, Putin’s mouthpieces are working hard to dampen expectations at home of a quick and easy deal. Where the White House speaks of a trilateral summit, Yuri Ushakov, one of Putin’s most senior foreign policy advisers, mentioned only the possibility of “raising the level of representatives of the parties”. This would mean that more rounds of lower-level talks, akin to earlier gatherings in Istanbul or Saudi Arabia that saw few concrete changes, would have to precede any grand summit.

Sergey Lavrov, Putin’s veteran foreign minister, who always chooses his words carefully, used a television appearance yesterday to remind viewers that: “the Ukrainian Constitution retains the obligation of the state to fully ensure the rights of Russians.” An official Kremlin statement said much the same: “without respect for the security of Russia and the full rights of Russians in Ukraine, there can be no talk of any long-term agreements.” These comments, which are being repeated across dozens of television channels and hundreds of social media feeds, echo the justifications Putin offered when he launched the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. By repeating them now, Lavrov and his diplomatic peers are making clear that the Kremlin is not on the verge of compromise. Russia will not be hurried by Trump, Zelensky, or anyone else.

These noises are being echoed in the massive, state-controlled Russian media landscape, where unlike on Trump’s feeds, the emphasis is on complexity. On Tuesday, Izvestiya, Russia’s newspaper of record, ran a lengthy explainer that twisted Trump’s statement that the remaining issues aren’t “overly complex” to suggest that the issues are “complex” — a way of shifting attention away from the excitement in Washington and back towards the grinding reality of diplomacy.

These complex issues — questions of language, minority rights, Nato, and EU membership — will not, Russians are told, be resolved in multilateral forums with Zelensky and European leaders. The Russians remember all too well the failed Minsk agreements, which aimed to halt fighting in the east of Ukraine in 2014-15. Laboriously negotiated by Ukraine, Russia, France, and Germany over months, two separate agreements failed to stop the fighting. The Minsk process became — in Moscow’s eyes — a cause of the current invasion: the West, goes the Russian narrative, was only ever interested in helping Ukraine continue to attack “Russians” on its own territory.

The Russian media has a lowly opinion of Europe’s leaders, who are seen to be obsessing over irrelevant details and making impossible demands. Aleksandr Kots, one of Russia’s leading war correspondents, described Monday’s Washington DC meeting bluntly: “The Europeans have proven their absolute uselessness.” Zelensky fares no better. He remains, in Russian state media, the illegitimate head of a “Kiev regime” who has put off elections in Ukraine and only holds power due to what is portrayed as the illegal Maidan “coup”. Dmitry Medvedev, ever one for a fiery turn of phrase, dismisses him on social media as a “buffoon”; others declare that he is trapped in a diplomatic “dead end”. These comments rocket between social and traditional media and vice versa, filling Russians’ minds with the same idea.

The only dealmaker Russian commentators are interested in is Trump. He has been cast as a decisive leader who can talk straight with Putin and put Europe in its place. State outlets reveled in reports that the American President had “harshly rebuffed” European leaders’ ceasefire proposals during their meetings in Washington. For Russia’s commentators, Monday’s meeting was a distraction from the real action: negotiations between Trump and Putin.

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Yet any admiration for Trump is tempered by the widespread belief that he will easily be outwitted by Putin. Pro-Kremlin journalist Aleksandr Yunashev warned on Telegram that a Putin-Zelensky summit “on any terms does not correspond to our interests, but we do not plan to close this window of opportunity”. Trump, he reminded readers, still wants to sell weapons to Ukraine and has a record of flip-flops and about-turns. Yunashev thus suggests that Moscow is wary of Trump, but will string him along — because, unlike Europe’s divided, ineffectual, and indecisive leaders, Trump can supposedly deliver what Putin wants.

Scroll through Russian Telegram channels and the message is clear: Putin is masterminding the entire negotiation process. He is outfoxing Trump, running circles around the hapless Europeans, and reducing Zelensky to an illegitimate spectator. Little surprise that some Russian social media users believe that Putin is “laughing at the plans of all the people who might try to make a fool of him”.

The propagandists insist that Russia is making great gains in its offensive in Eastern Ukraine. Breakthroughs, whether real or exaggerated, are trumpeted as proof that Moscow has the upper hand, even as the Russian economy stutters and army recruitment barely keeps pace with casualties. The more land Putin holds when a summit with Zelensky eventually happens, the more he can claim in any territorial deal. In fact, he’s used this tactic before, back in 2015, when Russian forces pushed to seize the Ukrainian settlement of Debaltseve even as the Minsk II ceasefire was being finalized — and briefly continued that push even after the deal was struck. In recent weeks, Russian officials have repeatedly reiterated their maximalist war goals, which would leave Ukraine not controlled by Moscow but in a quasi-dismembered state ripe for the economic and political taking. There is no sign of a sea change after the weekend’s public diplomacy.

The Kremlin, in short, is telling two stories to two different audiences. Putin tells Trump that the peace negotiations are serious, that the Kremlin is ready to make progress, and that Russia may even agree to Trump’s grand peacemaking summit with Zelensky. Meanwhile, Russian media is telling citizens to trust the President’s plan: if the Russian people endure further conflict, then the Kremlin will deliver them territory, protection, self-respect, and a seat at the global top table. Most of all, though, the Kremlin is promising that Zelensky will be brought to a summit with Putin not to negotiate but to submit to a humiliating peace deal.

The timing of the summit was as important as its outcome. In recent days, Russian forces have advanced near Pokrovsk, forcing Ukrainian defenders from several fortified positions and threatening key industrial and logistical sites. While far from a decisive breakthrough, these gains have given Moscow a measure of battlefield momentum and reinforced the perception that time, for now, is on the Kremlin’s side. Against that backdrop, any willingness to discuss a settlement is notable. Putin was unlikely to agree to any form of ceasefire without reciprocal concessions from Zelensky. This will, as Trump noted, require more coordination between both Russia and Ukraine to ensure that any ceasefire is mutually agreeable and, therefore, sustainable.

Trump has taken a central role in the peace process, meeting with Zelensky in late February and now meeting with Putin for the first time in Trump’s second term. While consistently eager to draw down US commitments abroad, Trump’s attitude toward the Russia-Ukraine conflict has seemingly pivoted, with the American president cracking down on states avoiding the sanctions regime against Moscow and dispatching nuclear submarines to the “appropriate regions” in response to a trollish tweet from former Russian President and notable poaster Dmitry Medvedev. That said, Trump’s legacy as a peacemaker is clearly important to him, and he has consistently advocated for an end to the bloodshed in Ukraine.

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With Ukraine, Trump’s most potent tool is the ability to curtail or cut off American aid. While his recent approach has involved compelling European governments shoulder the cost of purchasing US-made weapons for Ukraine, the underlying reality is that Washington remains the indispensable supplier of advanced arms, intelligence, and logistical support. A complete withdrawal of American assistance, whether immediate or phased, would place enormous strain on Ukraine’s military capacity, especially given Europe’s limited ability to fill the gap.

With Russia, Trump’s leverage is different. He can offer to ease or lift US sanctions in return for concrete steps toward a settlement. For Moscow, even partial relief from restrictions on finance, technology, and energy exports could provide meaningful economic breathing room. Conversely, Trump could boost aid to Ukraine if Russia resists, turning additional Western support into a penalty for obstruction. This dual ability to reward compliance or punish defiance gives him a flexible negotiating position, though one that must be calibrated carefully to avoid alienating either party.

What, then, is on the table for negotiation? It is likely that at the top of Russia’s list of demands is assurance that Ukraine will not join Nato. Since the Soviet collapse, the Western Alliance’s expansion into former Soviet republics has fueled Moscow’s suspicion that Nato’s purpose extends beyond the defense of its members. Putin has repeatedly described Ukrainian accession as a red line, viewing it as a direct threat to Russian security. Trump appears to recognize the delicacy of this issue, saying before the summit that a US security guarantee for Ukraine might be possible “but not in the form of NATO.”

Meanwhile, Zelensky’s best chance at salvaging a diplomatic win may lie in securing Ukraine’s path to EU membership. Closer integration with Western Europe has long been at the heart of Ukraine’s foreign-policy ambitions. While Russian accounts of the conflict often trace its origins to Mikhail Gorbachev’s mishandling of the Soviet collapse or to Lenin’s creation of Ukraine’s borders after the October Revolution and collapse of the Russian Empire, Ukrainians point instead to the Kremlin’s reaction to the 2014 Euromaidan uprising as the true starting point. In Kiev’s view, Russia’s aggression in 2014 was a direct attempt to block Ukraine’s turn toward Europe. If Moscow accepts the EU expansion that Kiev sought more than a decade ago, it would mark a genuine Ukrainian achievement — one rooted in the very struggle that, in both Ukrainian and Western narratives, set this war in motion.

A settlement would give Ukraine the breathing room to focus on the internal reforms required to meet the European Union’s standards of democracy, corruption, and minority rights that all aspiring members must satisfy. Ukraine holds official “candidate” status, but former European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker has warned that the country’s notorious graft problem will require “massive internal reform processes” before meeting Kiev can meet codified EU requirements. Recent protests over Zelensky’s suspension of certain anti-corruption measures have compounded these concerns.

If EU accession is indeed central to Ukraine’s future, ending the war through a negotiated settlement would allow Kiev to restore the democratic and anti-corruption institutions that were suspended as a wartime necessity and to concentrate fully on meeting the requirements for EU membership.

That said, more work must be done to provide a sufficient security guarantee to Ukraine to assuage concerns that Russia will invade again in the near future. Putin seems to agree, stating that the “security of Ukraine should be ensured as well.” The Kiev government often evokes the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, in which Ukraine agreed to give up its Soviet-era nuclear arsenal in return for Russian, American, and British promises to “respect the independence and sovereignty and the existing borders of Ukraine.” As Russia’s actions in the past decade have demonstrated, that agreement had little binding power. While NATO accession likely remains a red line for Putin, a more limited European or American guarantee of Ukrainian security may be necessary to get the Ukrainians on board.

Territorial transfers are also likely up for negotiation. Despite concerns that Trump and Putin had plans to carve up Ukrainian territory without Zelensky at the table, Trump has repeatedly stated that he has no such intentions. “I’m not here to negotiate for Ukraine,” the president stated aboard Air Force One while traveling to Alaska, adding “I’ve got to let Ukraine make that decision.” No territorial concessions were mentioned by the leaders following their discussion, but a redrawing of national borders seems inevitable, given the state of the conflict.

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While Zelensky has repeatedly stated that Ukrainian territory is not on the negotiating table, such statements are likely posturing as to drive a better bargain for his country. Russia has held Crimea since 2014, and is steadily consolidating control in significant portions of southeastern Ukraine. Although Putin is likely to make significant territorial demands, Zelensky may be able to meet him halfway by accepting new effective boundaries without formally recognizing Russian sovereignty over those Ukrainian regions.

Should the Ukrainians agree to ceding Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhia to Russian control, Moscow should likewise agree to withdrawing its forces from Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, and Sumy oblasts in central and northern Ukraine. While this is not the most desirable outcome for Zelensky, it does offer a way for him to stop the slaughter of the Ukrainian people outside of those territories which Ukraine is unlikely to reclaim by force. When all is said and done, this is a World War II-style industrial war that Ukraine is structurally incapable of winning.

As Trump continues to coordinate Ukraine and Western governments, the first step toward a settlement must be a ceasefire. As the president stated to the press, his main priority is to “stop thousands of people a week from being killed.” Given the high spirits of both leaders following their conversation, this step seems to be on the horizon, if Trump is able to convince the Ukrainians to give negotiations a chance. Had Trump found Putin’s demands to be unreasonable, it seems unlikely that the two men would be in such good humor shortly after speaking.

This bilateral US-Russia exchange, then, marks a step toward a broader negotiation. Whether it leads to a sustainable peace will depend on the willingness of all parties to turn Alaska’s cautious opening into a lasting settlement.

Today, Putin and Trump are expected to meet and, if Trump is to be taken at his word, hammer out the terms of a peace deal over Ukraine. The stakes could hardly be higher. Trump, ever the showman, hails the Alaska meeting as a decisive moment to “end the war”. Across the table, two men whose own political fortunes have been bound up with nationalist spectacle may soon decide Ukraine’s future. Regardless of what they agree, one thing is missing: Ukrainian representation. And without that representation, any deal may fuel Ukrainian veterans’ disappointment, damning its society to years of political turmoil.

The phrase doing the rounds around the proposed deal is “land swap” — a euphemism that, in practice, means no swap at all. In reality, it would involve Ukraine ceding a vast swathe of territory now under Russian occupation. Should that happen, and should Zelensky be bludgeoned into selling the deal to his own people, Ukraine’s near future could be defined less by recovery than by a smoldering, violent response to perceived defeat.

Unsurprisingly, Ukrainians across the political spectrum are furious with the outline of the deal. Zelensky himself, who is under immense pressure from the country’s political class and civil society not to hand Putin a victory, would find it all but impossible to sell any deal to the public, even if he wanted to. As he has made this clear: “Ukraine won’t cede land that could be used as a springboard for war.” He has been similarly bullish about being frozen out of the Alaska summit, warning that “they cannot decide anything about Ukraine without us”.

Ukrainians remember the failures of the Minsk I and II agreements made with Putin a decade ago, and Russia riding roughshod over the Budapest Memorandum that promised them safety in return for giving up their nuclear arms in the Nineties. Above all, they remember the images of murdered civilians in Bucha and Irpin that shocked the world in early 2022. Soldiers on the front, where the death and casualty rate soars ever higher, and where at least 50,000 Ukrainians have died, bristle at the idea of giving in to Russia. As one frontline soldier put it, fighting will continue “until Russia suffers big enough losses”. 

A deal that therefore fails to grapple either with the causes or the effects of the war — which have never been limited to Nato expansion — will only ever result in backlash from the Ukrainian population. Indeed, it is important to stress that the war against Ukraine stems from the Kremlin’s increasingly paranoid, imperialist messianism, a worldview in which Ukraine’s independent existence is an existential affront. Ever since the humiliation of seeing his favored candidate, Viktor Yanukovych, lose Ukraine’s 2004 presidential election to the Western Ukrainian Viktor Yushchenko, Putin’s state media has peddled myths about Ukrainian “nationalists” and “Nazis” plotting against Russian-speakers in Ukraine. After the Maidan Revolution of 2014, Russia’s dictator acted on those fictions, invading Crimea and parts of Donbas under the pretext of stopping an imagined “genocide” against Russian speakers.

By 2022, Putin’s language had become even more wild. After all, Ukraine’s far-Right held only a sliver of the electoral vote, and no seats in parliament. It had little following on social media and no discernible cultural sway. Indeed, the country’s president was a Russian-speaking Jewish entertainer popular on both sides of the border, elected not to build a nationalist utopia but on a promise to ease the war in the east. Putin’s war against “fascists” has always been Quixotic — a tilting at windmills in service of an imagined imperial conquest by a man who increasingly sees himself as a new Peter the Great, or even a new Stalin.

However dim the prospects of regaining territory currently occupied by Russian forces, agreeing to formally surrender it would be a deep psychic wound. Russian forces have committed war crimes on an industrial scale. They have flattened cities like Mariupol, where 85% of the housing stock was destroyed and tens of thousands of civilians killed. In place of a functioning if corrupt democracy, Russia has established a system of totalitarian torture and control that sees objectors beaten, jailed, and murdered. All the while, children are torn from their parents and sent to Russia, to be adopted and “Russified”.

Moscow taunts Ukrainians online with glossy footage of rebuilt apartment blocks and new public facilities — much of it in fact shoddy — and grotesque images of sites where Ukrainian children are put up for adoption. Toss resentment against an unjust peace into the mix and the response could be severe.

A “stab in the back” myth — built around the belief that Washington and Europe have always been slow to back Ukraine, before abandoning Kyiv when the fight became inconvenient — is already simmering in Ukrainian discourse. Trump is certainly unpopular in this regard, but his predecessor Joe Biden was the target of much ire for slow-pedaling on first providing, then giving permission to use, the ATACMS missile system.

The roots of this narrative go back to 2014, when Germany’s business-as-usual policy with Moscow brushed over the seizure of Crimea. From there, the “betrayal” of Ukraine seems set to dominate every nook and cranny of Ukrainian society over years to come, should the Trump-Putin deal become a reality. Nor is this really surprising: what was the sacrifice of tens of thousands of Ukrainian lives worth if the outcome is not merely lost land but a diminished sense of nationhood — and thousands more Ukrainians abandoned to their fates under Moscow’s thumb?

Some Ukrainians might still look to Europe for answers. The pro-Nato, pro-EU bloc, which sees them as bulwarks against Putin’s war on individual freedom, remains the largest and most powerful force in Ukrainian politics. For its part, Zelensky’s Servant of the People party still leads the polls by some distance. Yet Europe looks to many like a house divided: Keir Starmer and Emmanuel Macron’s “coalition of the willing” has talked up its willingness to help, but in practice has done little to prepare for a defense of either Ukraine or the European continent. Instead, leaders have gazed on as Trump’s Ukraine policy has oscillated, even as the Kremlin has conducted a hybrid war against Europe. An extraordinary 90% of Ukrainians favored EU membership last summer. Surely that number will not hold if the stab-in-the-back narrative spreads. 

The darkest scenario here is an ultra-nationalist turn, and a politics dominated by embittered, violent veterans in a demographically and economically decimated country hungry for scapegoats. And scapegoats there will be. In some corners of Ukrainian society — including pro-European and liberal factions, but especially among the armed forces — names are already circling: Western leaders are first among the villains, blamed for choosing short-term and commercial interests over saving Ukraine. But Ukrainian military leaders and politicians are not without blame. That means above all military commanders such as Oleksandr Syrskyi, the commander-in-chief blamed by ordinary soldiers for the worsening frontline situation in recent months. Should Zelensky be seen to sell his forces down the river, the reaction will be extreme, regardless of how little choice he actually had.

The optics of the Alaska summit will not help here. A camera-friendly meeting between Putin and Trump — two strongmen casually hashing out Ukraine’s future without a single Ukrainian in the room — has justifiably enraged Ukrainians across the political spectrum. If the deal is rammed through over Kyiv’s objections, nationalists will mine the “betrayal” for decades: it’ll be another Munich, when Hitler was allowed to annex the Sudetenland, with today’s Ukraine betrayed by a West that simply didn’t care. Ukrainians could thus prime themselves for another war, choosing leaders whose reputation and politics rests on war — or find themselves watching as those leaders, from among a corps of embittered veterans, force their way to power.

Support for nationalist factions today is still limited. The far-Right remains a minority in politics. In a June poll, the ultranationalist National Corps reached 6%, its highest ever rating. But Servant of the People did not even exist a decade ago, and Ukraine’s political scene is not dominated by entrenched parties. Especially in the wake of a devastating war, it is deeply susceptible to whirlwind forces transforming nations everywhere: online mobilization, norm-shattering rhetoric, the rise of new parties from nowhere, and the demolition of old political truths. Not long ago, most Ukrainians opposed Nato membership. Indeed, not long ago, Zelensky was a TV comedian. There is nothing to prevent an ultra-nationalist rise in Ukraine. 

The question, then, is not where public opinion stands today but where it might go in the next few years, turbocharged by disappointment, social collapse, economic devastation, and a Europe increasingly inclined to slam the door shut on a fragile and unstable Ukraine. The Ukraine that could emerge would be defined by military paranoia. Veterans alone would have “earned” the right to set the national agenda. Indeed, rumors now abound that figures like Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the popular former commander-in-chief now serving as Ukraine’s ambassador in the United Kingdom, might enter politics. Zaluzhnyi is no extremist, but others with more hardline views might explode from the ranks of the army into the public consciousness should widespread resentment take hold. 

Indeed, Zelensky’s decision to welcome and thus implicitly endorse nationalist soldiers in the military, desperate for anyone willing to fight, may turn out to be a major strategic error. This Ukraine would look neither to Brussels nor to Washington but inward — rebuilding its forces, militarizing society, and, as some voices around the country are already advocating for, seeking nuclear weapons to reverse the “mistake” of giving up its arsenal in the Nineties. 

Putin claimed he was forced to invade Ukraine to destroy the threat of Ukrainian “fascism”. Yet in February 2022, the far-Right in Ukraine was a negligible force: indeed Russia’s neo-Nazi problem far exceeded Ukraine’s. But do a deal with Trump over his enemy’s head, and Putin could soon find that his fantasy of a fascist Ukraine becomes reality. 

I am not arguing that this is the most likely scenario. Ukraine’s democracy has repeatedly resisted the pull of extremes — from Russian interference and invasion to internal politicking and corruption — since independence from Moscow in 1991. Its commitment to reinforcing democratic norms, bolstered by the EU, other nations, and a large, vocal civic block willing to take to the streets, most recently against Zelensky’s targeting of anti-corruption laws, suggests that liberal democracy may yet prevail.

But nationalists will not hesitate to use force if they see an opening. Complacent Western leaders, and Trump most of all, seem uninterested in this risk. Ironically, this was the very mistake made in Russia in the Nineties, when the West adopted a shock economic policy to “repair” post-Soviet Russia while ignoring worrying trends in the country’s culture and identity. Putin, for his part, knows all about the psychologically scarred veterans of the Afghan and Chechen wars. After all, in the early 2000s, he channeled their trauma and propensity for violence into support for his own nationalist myth. Today, his government and security services are full of these men, still willing to use any means to secure and hold power.

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The new Cold War will divide the West

By Philip Cunliffe

Reining in such forces in a post-conflict Ukraine will be a vital task. Peace can be salvaged even from the most brutal and bitter conflicts, but only with hard work, serious negotiation, mutual compromise, and above all, a focus on what comes after the ink dries. The Dayton Accords, which ended the Yugoslav wars in 1995, were the product of three months of intense talks built on years of groundwork, strong-arming from Europe and the Americans — and input from all sides. And even then, the Accords left the roots of nationalism and factionalism intact.

The mooted Alaska plan is long on promises and short on detail. A made-for-social-media deal is unlikely to last. Even those Ukrainians most inclined to peace are unlikely to be placated by a “land surrender” agreement while Russia remains unbowed. At any moment, Moscow could return to the battlefield, retooled and remanned, this time without the blunders of February 2022. Putin shows no signs of making real concessions. His propagandists continue their maximalist talk, and his army continues its scorched-earth advances. 

Indeed, the further Ukraine moves towards ultranationalism to hedge against this continued threat — or in response to the disappointment of a peace deal forced down the population’s throats — the more Putin will claim he is justified in launching new aggression against his western neighbor. The peace deal, far from ending the fight, might only encourage Russia to assault the fragile remainder of a free Ukraine in a few years’ time.

Nonetheless, nobody in the White House, publicly at least, seems to be thinking beyond the next move. Signing a peace deal will not make the problem of Russian aggression disappear; it may even exacerbate the problem. As heart-rending images of burned-out Ukrainian cities and murdered Ukrainian families fade from our screens, we may be tempted to believe the problem is gone. But Moscow will still be fighting — and a resentful, traumatized Ukraine will still remember.

Moscow can feel encouraged by the beginning of discussions. By agreeing to a summit with Trump, Putin has avoided punishing new energy sanctions. Meanwhile, the Russian leader’s exact offer has been shrouded in confusion. US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff has reportedly been the source of misunderstandings, while European officials have requested multiple calls with the American side in a bid to understand the exact nature of Putin’s offer. Still, one aspect is clear: on Friday, Trump announced that “we’re going to get some back, we’re going to get some switched. There’ll be some swapping of territories to the betterment of both.”

It seems highly unlikely that this will be to the betterment of the Ukrainian side. While Russia had previously demanded full control along the entire frontline, Putin reportedly told Witkoff that he would offer a complete ceasefire if Ukraine agreed to withdraw forces from the Donetsk and Luhansk regions, along with Crimea, leaving them to Moscow. European officials received mixed signals from US counterparts as to whether Putin would pull out of the other contested regions of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, or merely freeze the frontlines. One US official indicated that Russian forces would remain at the current lines, negotiating land swaps with Ukraine until Moscow possessed all of Zaporizhzhia and Kherson. The prospect of a land swap is puzzling: since Ukraine no longer holds any Russian territory, it would mean offering Kyiv-controlled land in return for the territory that Moscow currently occupies. Trump clearly finds the land swap proposal reasonable, while Zelensky has understandably rejected it, saying that “Ukrainians will not gift their land to the occupier”.

This is the scenario that Kyiv has long dreaded: that the mercurial US President, even after months of painstaking, behind-the-scenes diplomacy to repair relations between Washington and Kyiv, would strike a deal with Putin over the Ukrainian leader’s head before trying to foist it on Kyiv. What motivates Trump in all this is obvious — after successfully calming conflicts between India and Pakistan, and Armenia and Azerbaijan, he sees Ukraine as the ultimate entry on his Nobel Peace Prize nomination form. Besides, the Russians are still dangling a broader reset of relations between the US and Russia, which Trump sees as an opportunity to make highly lucrative economic deals.

As things stand, Alaska looks set to go down in history as another Yalta, as the two superpowers sit in a room and divide up Eastern Europe as though the Cold War never ended. Or, more precisely, two men. The risks of Trump and Putin meeting privately are stark: beneath the recent bluster, the US President still harbors a deep admiration for the Russian leader’s authoritarian grip on power. Putin, a former KGB officer, brings a spy’s talent for deception and manipulation, not to mention an instinct for flattering Trump and echoing even his most outlandish convictions. This is Putin’s dream scenario.

There is, of course, the possibility that this is all merely a ploy on Putin’s part. He may have felt some pressure from the US secondary sanctions being placed on Russian trade partners, including India, and decided this was the moment to blindside Trump with an offer — with little intention of following through with it. Kremlin messaging has been especially maximalist of late, with the Russian leader claiming back in June that “all of Ukraine” belongs to Russia. And indeed, Putin’s plan to mass-produce Oreshnik missiles and place them on Belarusian territory does not suggest a man eager for peace. A source told Reuters that the Russian General Staff believes the Ukrainian front will “crumble” within two or three months. The Russian military often provides excessively optimistic projections to the leadership, but these are also the views being whispered in the corridors of the Kremlin. From Putin’s perspective, therefore, there is no military impetus for him to make a deal other than the fact that Ukrainian forces withdrawing would be easier for him than fighting further battles.

If Russia’s offer is legitimate, where does Ukraine stand? There is talk of Trump hosting a trilateral meeting with Putin and Zelensky, but Putin would never agree to it. He has spent years casting doubt on Zelensky’s legitimacy as a leader and falsely claiming that the Ukrainian government is a “Nazi” regime. To meet Zelensky as an equal would be to confer upon Ukraine a sovereign status that Putin does not want to accord it.

In terms of timing, European officials have indicated that Trump and Putin’s proposal would have two phases — first, Ukraine would withdraw from Donetsk and the frontline would be frozen; second, Trump and Putin would agree on a peace plan to negotiate with Zelensky. Yet this plan is clearly flawed, setting Kyiv up for a scenario whereby Trump would be persuaded by Putin to back a deal that is disadvantageous to Ukraine, and then try to bully Zelensky into it. To lay the foundations for any lasting peace, the timings must be altered. If Trump is serious about earning his Nobel Peace Prize, he and his team should be going to and fro between Zelensky and Putin. After his meeting with Putin, Trump should announce a summit with Zelensky as soon as possible to make clear that the desires of Ukraine, as the injured party, are foremost in any discussions.

In the meantime, Zelensky has been wise to turn to Europe to shore up support and develop a counterproposal, one that stresses the need for a ceasefire before any other steps taken, for territory to be exchanged in a reciprocal matter, and ironclad security guarantees for Ukraine. Those security guarantees need to be robust — which means far stronger than anything the “coalition of the willing” can currently provide. Yet given the risk of Trump cutting off aid and intelligence to Ukraine if Zelensky rejects these unfair terms, Europe needs to intensively prepare for a scenario whereby it alone tries to supply Ukraine with weaponry.

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How Russia fell out of love with Trump

By Ian Garner

Zelensky is also right to reject a lopsided deal that would involve his forces backing away from fortified defensive lines and which does not mention Russia withdrawing from the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant or from positions in Kharkiv, Sumy, Dnipropetrovsk and Mykolaiv oblasts. For Ukraine to withdraw from the contested oblasts would merely put Russia in a stronger position to attack and make further gains at a later date.

However, many in Ukraine are horrified not merely by the grossly unequal terms of this offer but at the prospect of Ukraine surrendering any land at all — a conversation that frankly had to happen sooner or later. Zelensky has pointed out that the Ukrainian constitution prevents him from doing any such thing, while various Ukrainian MPs have indicated that they would not vote to ratify a deal that would see parts of the country left to Russia to secure an end to the conflict.

It’s clear why Zelensky has maintained the maximalist, patriotic position that he cannot cede any territory to Russia. It is difficult to accept that land acquired through hostilities and atrocities should ever belong to the aggressor. It is similarly difficult to accept that Ukrainian citizens will be lost to Russian occupation. They would be subjected to ruthless suppression of Ukrainian identity and an atmosphere of constant fear and suspicion. They are also likely to face egregious human rights abuses and civilian executions. One wonders how long local resistance fighters can cling to hope once they realize their life under brutal occupation has been quietly accepted by their own government.

But even Zelensky has admitted that Ukraine will struggle to get the occupied territories back by military means. In his New Year address, he called for a “just peace” and reassured those in Moscow’s grip that “one day, Ukraine will return to be together”. Unless Kyiv is able to turn the tide of this war, then any peace deal will likely involve Russia holding on to some of its gains, with Ukraine and the West refusing to legally acknowledge the new borders, and Kyiv planning to take them back through diplomatic means later. As problems with desertion and exhaustion persist, even Ukrainian citizens are now reluctantly coming around to the idea of accepting — de facto, if not officially — Moscow’s occupation of the captured lands, provided that entails receiving security guarantees. However, we should expect stringent Russian demands for Kyiv to surrender further Ukrainian territory — and that will be harder to sell to the public.

There has to be greater public acknowledgment in Ukraine that Russian-occupied land will need to be abandoned, if only for now, for Moscow to agree to any peace. That prospect is not merely unjust — it is monstrous. But it is reality. It is the nature of war. And unless Kyiv can reverse the course of the war and reclaim its occupied territories, we must now finally confront what peace truly looks like.

I was right, and the recent Tulsi Gabbard document release suggests the same. I knew I was right, because elite Moscow power circles are fairly small, and back then, we were in them. My then-husband (we are now divorced) worked for a Russian oligarch; his father was a Russian ambassador. No Russian officials were sharing state secrets with us, but we thought a Trump–Moscow relationship was the kind of thing you’d pick up from silences, or too many denials, or the puzzle pieces of some previously unexplained corruption suddenly falling into place. Russians are not loose-lipped, but one can read the tea leaves. Instead, there was nothing. And to Russian eyes, the details as they emerged were more nothing — paper trails littered with suspicious Cyrillic e-mail addresses, as if that proved anything, shady and powerless people being played up as Kremlin insiders.

We thought that our friends would believe us and be grateful for the information — foolishly, as it turned out. Instead, as a binational couple with a foothold in both worlds, we watched our lives, and our faith in Americans and their institutions, fall apart as the relationship between our two countries did. This has been a tragedy. I lived in Moscow briefly in 1998 and again with my husband from 2003 to 2006, and I remember the heady, early days, when Americans and Russians were exotic and intriguing to each other, business relationships were being developed instead of severed, and, on the Russian side, there was at least a skeptical hope for good political relations.

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The totalitarian logic of trans activists

By Valerie Stivers

What’s gone wrong has not been Russian imperialism, but the American kind, characterised by a stunning rejection of fact and assumption of innocence. Events today, including those in Ukraine, are based on a stealth American chauvinism that flowered during Russiagate. I know, because I experienced it firsthand, over my own dinner table, as my liberal friends, sometimes trembling with rage, Russiasplained its government to us.

This might seem like a narrow thing, a matter of our personal social lives, but it was eerie and stunning to live through the sea change. We remembered that six months earlier, these same people had been generally friendly and culturally tolerant about Russia, despite its many problems, but no one else did. We saw the extremist frame lock into place: Russia murders journalists, or it annexed Crimea, or it’s not a democracy, or it’s anti-gay, and those things are Very Bad and must be opposed by the good Americans. It was time for a reckoning.

We felt helpless, and to some extent, I still do. Some of those things are bad, and Russians know it better than anyone. But some are much more complicated. And American persecution produces Russian defensiveness, and has the frustrating, contrary effect of strengthening Vladimir Putin and blocking paths to necessary organic change within Russia. I saw this in my own life. In the new climate, my husband and I occasionally found ourselves defending Putin, which was new for us. A family photo that included the Russian president which hung on our living-room wall became a battleground with our friends, several of whom told us to take it down. Its original intent had been somewhat ironic, yet we refused, and we felt violated, too. Our Russia was a troubled place, but it was still ours, and not for Americans to dispose of.

The simplicity and ignorance of the frame came to seem like a crime in its own right, and a betrayal of American liberal values. Such thinking — “Russia is bad, and we must oppose it with all our might” — denies a country’s right to set its own values and to have its own imperfect governance. It’s a form of American cultural imperialism; it creates an enemy; it’s stupid and belligerent foreign policy; and it’s richly hypocritical. Americans, after all, invade other countries and manipulate elections themselves. We discovered to our surprise that liberal Americans think they’re critical of their government, but beneath the surface, they’re convinced they’re the good guys, even when they’re harming their own cause and have no idea what they’re talking about. There was delicious irony in being lectured about freedom of the press by people being deranged by fake news.

My Russian husband and I separated in 2020 and divorced in 2024. This was determined mostly by our personal issues. But his experience of being besieged and harassed as a Russian, both personally and professionally, didn’t help. Despite our differences, my now-ex is a smart, savvy businessman with enormous personal honor and unusual skill at translating between the Russian and American business climates. He had much to offer this country, as did his employer, who was sanctioned in 2018 on the abstract grounds of “participating in the Russian energy sector”, and who departed New York, pulling the financing for the US businesses he funded along with him.

These people were the future of relations between our two countries. They were valuable, and they and others were destroyed by a dirty campaign trick and the paroxysms of self-righteous public rage that followed it. Barack Obama’s response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 was measured, taking the mixed populations and military assets, as well as Russia’s legitimate interest in the peninsula into account. Yet in December 2016, he rushed through a package of punitive sanctions, threw out diplomats, and seized property on the grounds of the alleged collusion.

And Trump in his first term was noticeably “tough on Russia”, perhaps through inclination, but one suspects it was also an expedient choice to battle the collusion narrative. He hardened and extended sanctions and rapidly escalated hostile, anti-Russian militarisation in Europe, including providing Poland with Patriot anti-missile systems, and supplying Ukraine with Javelin anti-tank missiles — for use against Russians.

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Has Zelensky lost the West?

By Thomas Fazi

Current events in Ukraine are more of the same. It has always been obvious that too much Western armament, or Nato membership for Ukraine, would lead to war with Russia, with potentially catastrophic potential for expansion. Russia, at least, has said so clearly. Washington under both Joe Biden and Trump nonetheless pushed these agendas, with the kind of liberal voices who might once have called for moderation fallen silent. On the eve of full-scale invasion, Biden failed to reassure Russia on the Nato question, an enormously provocative act, though naturally supported by the anti-Russian American public.

The results are destroyed cities, more than a million dead, untold economic suffering in Europe, growing hostilities with China and India, and a vastly increased risk of nuclear catastrophe. For what, beyond Americans’ self-righteous belief in a fight for freedom and democracy, based on an enmity they only half-understand? Is this really so right and wonderful, given the current consequences for Ukrainians and the potential consequences for us all?

For me, the outbreak of war in 2022 was Russiagate all over again, including the shockingly distorted coverage in the major media. There’s a creepy thing that happens when people call me “just to check in” or “say hi” or on some pretext, but what they really want to do is discuss Russian politics. They don’t know it’s obvious, but I do, because the phone has been ringing all morning. And there’s no chance they’re going to listen to me, despite that I’ve spent more time in private spaces listening to high-level Russians fume about American provocation in Ukraine than any of them ever will. The blindness concerning our own rectitude is astonishing, especially coming from people who are highly critical of their government in other contexts.

In 2022, the people around me believed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was “unprovoked”, and that it could be explained only by Putin’s actual insanity. But it’s not insane at all. Putin seeks an independent Russia, one among several players in a multipolar world, for which he needs the power of strategic military deterrence against Uncle Sam. The people waving their Ukraine flags may believe they’re for “peace”, but they’re actually supporting the reckless expansion of American power and war. The enmity comes from us, and we don’t even realise it.

When the drone reached its target, however, it dropped not a bomb but a bottle of water. The men were not soldiers but civilians, part of a national effort to prepare for a Russian invasion they hope will never come.

As America attempts to enforce a ceasefire and eventual peace in Ukraine, leaders in the Baltics are worried about where Vladimir Putin’s battle-hardened forces might turn next. When the Russian army has no war left to fight to their south and no grinding battles slowing down the rate at which their manpower can be replenished, these small nations, so they warn, will become Europe’s new frontline.

Lithuania — nestled snugly between Kaliningrad, a Russian outpost, and Belarus, a vassal — is preparing rapidly to defend against its eastern neighbor. Last month, Vilnius authorities published wartime evacuation plans. The government is building “dragon’s teeth” anti-tank fortifications along its borders. Speaking last year, then defense minister Laurynas Kasčiūnas said he hoped his country might become a “Lithuanian hedgehog” that could deter the “much stronger Russian bear.”

Increasingly central to these efforts is the Lithuanian Riflemen’s Union, a state-backed paramilitary that has seen its numbers double to 17,000 since 2022. Around 11,000 members are adults, with the remainder composed of teenagers who go hiking, help the elderly and study warfare in preparation for future service in either the armed forces or the militia. Lithuania, with a population of just under three million, does not have a professional army capable of effective defense on its own. So, as they did in the Forties against the Soviets, its civilians are preparing to fight.

In the event of a war, the Riflemen will be called on to secure the nation’s critical infrastructure and defend its interior while the military battles Russian troops. If Lithuania is occupied, they will remain as stay-behind forces and conduct armed resistance.

Over several bright spring days earlier this month, teams of Riflemen gathered from across the country in Telšiai, a picturesque town that slopes down to the shores of a lake. There they competed against each other in a series of tasks designed to prove their readiness for combat: shooting drills, crossing a fake minefield, and crawling through rotting animal carcasses to simulate the sensory horrors of war.

Small groups of young men and a few women could be spotted taking a break — with painted faces, listening to heavy metal on portable speakers, cigarettes between their teeth.

Watching an inexperienced team as they attempted to steer a first-person view (FPV) drone, 41-year-old Andrius struggled to contain his disappointment. “These drones are not hard to fly,” he said. “There are clips on YouTube where a chimpanzee flies one.” Spending most of his time administering Linux servers in Vilnius, he had the distinct look of a man more comfortable in an office than on the battlefield.

Long a hobbyist who lived for drone racing “from dusk till dawn,” Andrius first realized the military significance of his passion when he saw FPV footage from Ukraine in late 2022. “I remember only Ukrainian shouting like, ‘that target is behind the blue door’,” he said. “They were looking from the drone and flying trying to catch the enemy around the building.” Now, he said, nobody can hide.

As a part-time volunteer force, the Union’s great advantage is that it can draw from the expertise of professionals across Lithuanian society. Members have been called on to teach the army how to hide from, deploy and fight drones. Other Riflemen are using their expertise in tactical combat casualty care to help hospitals practice wartime treatment. “When I joined the Riflemen it was an organization for children and pensioners,” one 20-year veteran told me. “Now we are a real military force.”

Since he signed up with the militia following the invasion of Ukraine, Andrius has traveled to Kyiv to learn how his counterparts are holding the line against the odds. In 2022, civilian volunteers proved essential to defending the Ukrainian capital from advancing columns of Russian tanks. Lithuanian military planners believe the same will likely prove the case for them.

Overseeing the Telšiai exercise was Lieutenant Colonel Linas Idzelis, a former military officer elected to lead the Riflemen in 2023. When we met in a field outside the city, he told me he had been reading The Home Guard Companion, a training manual given to British civilians during the Second World War.

Discussing Russia he began to fizz with anger. They are Asian, not European, he insisted: the Mongol Yoke turned them into savages; in the 17th century they cut one third of Lithuanians into pieces. “If they go into Europe,” he argued, “there will be no civilians anymore.” For Idzelis, there is no debate as to whether Russia will attack the Baltics. “If you read all the assessments which are provided now by the intelligence organizations, this is just a matter of time,” he said.

When the Soviet Union began to fall apart at the end of the Eighties, Idzelis was a long-haired teenage metalhead attending school in Vilnius. Once protests began against Moscow’s rule, he attended with his parents, brandishing a Lithuanian flag and helping to construct barricades.

In 1990, the country became the first member state of the Soviet Union to declare its independence. Gorbachev responded by declaring an economic blockade and then, when Vilnius refused to back down, sending forces from the army and the KGB to launch a coup. When civilians rushed to the capital to defend their newfound independence, 14 were killed as soldiers began firing on the crowd.

“When one of the buildings was assaulted, I was standing like five meters away from the colonel who was shooting into our guys who had defended the building,” Idzelis remembered. Ignas Šimulionis and Darius Gerbutavičius, two fellow heavy metal fans who had studied with him before joining the Riflemen, were killed.

Over 30 years later, the lieutenant colonel is clear about the threat facing his country. “The understanding is that for us no one really wants to go to Siberia,” he said. “It’s better to die in a trench than to chop trees somewhere in Siberia.”

The torture of Ukrainian civilians by Russian soldiers was not a shock to Lithuanians, he said. “Maybe for you this is, ‘Oh, fuck, shit’. But we experienced it many times. We know what we can expect. In the United Kingdom you cannot expect such kinds of things.”

Europe will never reach a war footing until its citizens witness Russia attacking a NATO power, Idzelis believes. The continent’s latent military industrial capacity has handicapped his preparations for combat. “In the Western world, I think in the future we’ll be lacking manpower,” he said. “Here, we have manpower but no equipment.”

The Riflemen’s Union has paid a Swedish defense firm for a shipment of grenade launchers but will not see them for another three years. An order of tanks will not be ready for between five and eight. In response, the militia is building its own FPV drones, ready to follow the Ukrainian lead and inflict mass casualties at little cost.

Until relatively recently, NATO military planners believed there was little chance that the Baltics could hold off a Russian invasion. They also feared that expanding into eastern Europe might antagonize Putin. In 2017, however, their mindset shifted in response to the invasion of Crimea and battle groups were sent east.

The numbers involved have been largely symbolic, however. These forces were intended to act as tripwires rather than to fight a real war. Under a defense-in-depth model, the alliance expected to throw reinforcements forward following an attack and only retake territory from Russia after it had been occupied. Since 2022, with the horrors of Bucha and the resilience of Putin’s forces in holding territory, thinking has changed.

Four months after the invasion of Ukraine, NATO leaders meeting in Madrid declared that they would now defend “every inch” of allied territory. Last month, Germany formally launched the deployment of a 5,000 strong armored brigade to Lithuania — its first permanent foreign troop deployment since the Second World War.

In the wake of Donald Trump’s reelection, however, some have grown jittery at the thought that America’s commitment to the alliance is waning. Speaking anonymously, one military commander told me that if the US were to quit NATO then, “the first step, we will shit ourselves, and then think of the next step.”

So far, American troops remain stationed in Lithuania. Trump has recently dubbed Putin “CRAZY” and threatened fresh sanctions on Russia. Vilnius, which is slashing budgets elsewhere to spend 5.5% of GDP on defense while boosting purchases of American liquid national gas, is bullish about its chances of convincing his administration it is pulling its weight.

According to Linas Kojala, who runs the Geopolitics and Security Studies Center, a Vilnius think tank, it is unlikely in any case that Russia would launch a full-scale invasion of the country. “What we also want to create is a feeling in the Kremlin that they would never be able to take Lithuania over,” he said. “They might control us militarily but they would not take Lithuania over in terms of having society obliging to the occupational forces.”

It is more likely that Putin would either launch a limited invasion of the Baltics and dare NATO to respond, or simply place large troop numbers on the border and attempt to restrict their independence. “This is not an all-out attack on us, but still a very threatening scenario to consider,” Kojala said.

Over several days across several cities in Lithuania, not one person told me they feared war. Conflict with Russia is the natural state of affairs in this corner of Europe. Concerns that NATO might buckle under Trump’s influence are rising, however. As he watched the Riflemen complete their exercise in Telšiai’s town square on an unseasonably warm morning, Henrikas, who grew up under Soviet occupation, told me he believed it was “impossible” to defend Lithuania without the alliance.

Romena, a curator in the town’s Jewish museum, knows the cost of defeat better than most. Until the Soviet and then Nazi occupations, Telšiai was a center of Torah study. Then, in 1941, German troops and local collaborators eradicated its Jewish population forever over the course of a few short months.

The historian, who works to educate locals about the area’s history of mass killing, previously considered the threat of war to be “absurd”. Now, she said, she knows people gathering cash and documents to flee an invasion. “I am preparing too but I am not going crazy,” she said with a half smile.

Others are getting ready to fight. “Lots of people are going to self-defense courses to get their gun licenses,” Lorenas, a young man hawking semi-automatic weapons to Riflemen on behalf of Vollit, a Lithuanian arms dealer, claimed. “Not specifically because of Russia but they are a bit more conscious of the need to defend their families.” After getting started a few years ago, he now owns eight guns himself.

For Idzelis, how to deter Russia is clear. “Plan maximum is to kill them all, the minimum is [what is] within our means and capabilities,” he said. Having outsourced its defense to America for decades, however, it is not clear when the continent will be ready to fight. Putin could launch a regional war in the Baltics within two years, Danish intelligence predicted in February. They claim he could wage a fresh local conflict within six months.

Darius, a 19-year-old Rifleman, exhausted and giddy after completing the training exercise, told me his friends are split between those who just want to get on with their lives and those who are preparing for war. “I do still trust NATO,” Darius added, “but it won’t do well on its own. We need to be strong to be ready.” As western Europe slowly begins to emerge from its post-war stasis, some along the continent’s eastern borderlands are steely-eyed.

Some $36 trillion in debt underscores the wide gap between America’s expansive international objectives and its limited capacity to attain them — a condition famously described by the New Deal journalist Walter Lippmann as foreign-policy “insolvency.” Continuing the hubristic course we have followed since the Nineties would be disastrous.

Trump gets all this. Which is why he is aiming to lower the temperature across various international theaters, counterbalance the power of rival states, and reset America’s global engagement. His own shorthand, Reagan-borrowed description of the strategy — peace through strength — is apt. His ability to deliver on this vision is still an open question, however. To a large degree, it depends on the people he taps to carry it out.

Richard Nixon faced a somewhat similar situation at the start of his presidency. America was overextended abroad in an unwinnable Vietnam War that bore little connection to the nation’s vital security interests. An increasingly confident Soviet Union was flexing its muscles in Czechoslovakia and Egypt and threatening to race past parity into superiority over the US nuclear arsenal. Economically, an overvalued dollar was crippling exports and rendering the United States highly vulnerable to a foreign-induced financial crisis. At home, the country was riven by violent clashes over Vietnam and racial injustice.

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Nixon’s signature foreign-policy actions — making peace in Vietnam, pursuing détente and arms control with the Kremlin, opening diplomatic talks with China, stabilizing the Arab-Israeli conflict, and ending the gold standard — were aimed at aligning America’s goals and means abroad. At home, Nixon sought a breathing spell in which the United States could heal its internal wounds. By and large, it worked.

Although the particulars differ, Trump appears to be pursuing a similar vision of settling regional conflicts, stabilizing great-power relations, rebalancing American foreign trade, and buying time to mend internal rifts. He clearly recognizes that the so-called unipolar moment — the period when US power so greatly outmatched that of any other nation that the world had little choice but to bend to Washington’s will — has long been over.

As his secretary of state and interim national-security adviser, Marco Rubio, has concisely put it, “it’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power… It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world. You have multiple countries now who have the capability to end life on Earth. And so we need to really work hard to avoid armed conflict as much as possible, but never at the expense of our national interest.”

Trump drove these points home last week in a seminal speech he delivered in Saudi Arabia. “We were the only power in the world,” he said, “and so we assumed this responsibility of sort of becoming the global government in many cases, trying to solve every problem. In recent years, far too many American presidents have been afflicted with the notion that it’s our job to look into the souls of foreign leaders and use US policy to dispense justice for their sins.”

The proponents of this model, he continued, “wrecked far more nations than they built and the [interventionists] were intervening in complex societies that they did not even understand themselves.” The contrast with President George W. Bush, Trump’s most recent GOP predecessor, couldn’t be more stark. In his Second Inaugural Address, remember, Bush called on Washington to “seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world.”

Can Trump realize his more realistic vision?

The early signals from abroad give reason for hope. The interim tariff-reduction arrangement struck by US and Chinese negotiators last week is a sign that a compromise trade deal is realistic. Iran has cautiously indicated an openness to a pragmatic nuclear deal, while key Arab states are increasingly attracted to Trump’s vision of a modernized Middle East no longer riven by conflict and dependent on oil and gas exports.

Meanwhile, Moscow’s initial skepticism over Trump’s intentions has given way to growing optimism that he seeks not just an end to the war in Ukraine, but genuine rapprochement. Europe, too, is beginning to adjust to the reality that it can no longer simply outsource its security to the American hegemon, albeit with a great deal of wailing and gnashing of teeth. Team Trump’s success last week in defusing a looming nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan demonstrated impressive diplomatic skill.

Success requires much more than winning over foreign leaders, however. To implement deals, his administration must also engage effectively with the many moving parts at lower levels in foreign governments and manage those broader relationships. For this, Trump must bring Washington into line — and here, the early signs are more sobering.

Part of his challenge is institutional: the US government spent much of the past three decades building policy bureaucracies devoted to transforming foreign societies, and these groups have a clear self-interest in resisting Trump’s vision. The period of unipolarity also encouraged bad habits in the parts of the government supposedly designed to conduct and support diplomacy, because America’s coercive capabilities made the traditional arts of balancing the power and interests of foreign competitors seem unnecessary.

Part of the challenge is personal and political. There is a good deal of truth in the old Washington adage that personnel is policy. Finding staff that has the requisite combination of talent, experience, and loyalty is no simple matter, particularly when large parts of the GOP, and nearly all mainstream media, remain convinced that diplomatic engagement with adversaries constitutes appeasement and is therefore counterproductive.

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Trump’s painful first-term experiences with opposition within his own administration have made him unusually sensitive to this problem. Still, there is no easy solution. Few of the officials who have been overseeing America’s long string of fruitless wars and failed democratization campaigns favor a new approach. And many of those calling for change lack the diplomatic polish and administrative dexterity born of experience. The large number of unfilled foreign-policy slots in the administration and the recent controversies over appointments at the Pentagon and on the National Security Council staff underscore just how difficult solving this issue is proving to be.

So while there is cause for optimism, the reality is that the much-needed change Trump is seeking in American foreign policy will be agonizingly difficult to achieve. It will certainly not come quickly. For Nixon, finalizing a peace accord in Vietnam took years. Full diplomatic relations with China were not established until well into the Carter administration. If Trump achieves even half of what he envisions during the next four years, he will have made remarkable progress. But his legacy will be that much more enduring and important if he manages to select and build a new cadre of able experts that share his foreign-policy ideas and carry his work forward.

Correction: Due to an editorial oversight, an earlier version of this essay misstated the size of the US debt.

But unfortunately for Rutte, it is likely too late. In the two months since the last major blow-up between Trump and Zelensky, that infamous Oval Office fight, almost no progress has been made in the Trump administration’s talks to end the Ukraine war. And though the contours of the current standoff are slightly different than they were in February, the crux of the problems remains the same. The only terms Russia is willing to accept amount to the neutering of Ukraine as a sovereign state, something Kyiv is unlikely to ever accept.

For Trump, that leaves just one alternative: abandoning Ukraine to its fate and rushing ahead to reconfigure the geopolitical map with Putin unilaterally. The real question, then, is what’s next for Kyiv’s hapless European partners — whether they’re ruthless enough to finally take the continent’s defense into their own hands, and whether they’ll even be able to focus on Ukraine now that other new threats emerge much closer to home.

Spirits had been high going into last week’s talks, where European leaders were finally given a seat at the negotiating table. But shortly before flying back from Paris, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio admitted the truth: that if no significant progress is made in the coming days, the Trump administration may walk away from the talks altogether. A week later, the funeral dirge duly sounded. The Ukrainians have rejected Trump’s “final offer”, which apart from handing Crimea to Moscow, included a “de facto” acceptance of Russia’s occupation of 20% of Ukrainian territory, a pledge that Kyiv would never join Nato, and the lifting of all sanctions imposed on Russia since 2014.

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Given these concessions would effectively extinguish Ukraine as an independent state, and leave it deeply vulnerable to future Russian aggression, it’s little wonder that Kyiv promptly dismissed them. It’s also unsurprising that, after Rubio refused to attend, planned talks in London were hastily downgraded to meetings between minor diplomats, and that the European leaders who were beaming in Paris are now panicking.

Of course, understanding the failure of the talks goes far beyond the Ukrainians themselves. Trump’s entire approach was colored by domestic political concerns, a warped understanding of the nature of the conflict, and his own personal agenda. Certainly, the President misunderstood his counterpart in the Kremlin. One mistake was imagining Putin would accept a post-war European peacekeeping force in Ukraine. Another involved dispatching separate envoys to Kyiv and Moscow, which not only led to contradictory messages being sent to both sides, but also made it easier for Steve Witkoff, Trump’s Russia envoy, to buy Putin’s narrative on the war hook, line, and sinker.

That all hints at a broader strategic failure. By jumping haphazardly from preliminary ceasefire agreements to an overarching peace deal, both were doomed to fail, as fundamental disagreements between the Russians and Ukrainians on issues large and small never had space to be resolved. Despite its frequent and determined shuttle diplomacy, the Trump team was never willing to undertake the subtle, painstaking work that conflict resolution of this sort requires, attempting instead to force through particular outcomes rather than figuring out if they actually made sense.

Putin himself also underestimated the role of Trump’s narcissism in the negotiation process. Though he succeeded in getting Trump and his clique to swallow much Kremlin propaganda on Ukraine, Trump’s willingness to regurgitate Russian talking points was superseded only by his desire to feel in control. Zelensky, with few other options, was forced to bend to Trump’s will, while Putin, negotiating from a position of strength, never felt compelled to offer Trump anything more than diplomatic flattery.

Even so, the Russian leader has on several occasions made gestures to appeal to Trump’s ego, including most recently offering to “give up” his aim to annex the parts of Luhansk, Donetsk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia Oblasts that Russian troops don’t currently occupy — a performative “concession” that European diplomats believe may be just another ruse. Putin knows that any negotiated settlement would have likely ended with a freeze of the conflict along existing frontlines anyway, making it hard to read his offer as a genuine attempt at compromise. That’s especially given he has continued to refuse to budge on every other major issue at play in the peace talks.

Nevertheless, the move was a retreat from Putin’s most maximalist aims, and clearly signalled that he would prefer to reach a deal on Ukraine under Trump’s auspices if at all possible. All the while, the Russian president is clearly aware he has other, less elegant, ways of reaching his goals, as Russian forces have so brutally demonstrated throughout three years of war. Unlike Trump and Zelensky, then, Putin not only has no incentive to end the conflict. He also has the added luxury of time. Failing to understand both of these facts has been Trump’s mistake from the start.

So if the talks have failed, what next? What the Americans want is clear: unilaterally normalizing ties with Russia. Both Trump and Putin would have much preferred to settle the issue of Ukraine diplomatically before moving on to the grand bargain on Europe’s future, something that the Russian leader has wanted to pursue for years. Putin has long seen Trump as the ideal partner through whom he might finally be able to end Russia’s international isolation from the West, establish new rules of play between Russia and the US in Europe, and at last clarify what sort of relationship Moscow will have with Washington on the world stage. Ever the businessman, Trump’s goals are slightly less lofty — opening up trade and gaining access to Russia’s wealth of rare earth metals top his agenda, as does driving a wedge between Moscow and Beijing.

Yet without the easy end to the war that Trump had promised, he’s characteristically likely to sidestep the problem instead, moving to remake the US-Russia relationship and establish the limits of American involvement in European affairs — leaving Ukraine and its neighbors to deal with Russia alone.

Based on progress so far, that’ll be challenging. For one thing, the continent has struggled to develop a comprehensive plan to support Ukraine. In summit after summit, well-intentioned proposals have fallen flat on their face. That’s most stunningly last month when, during a session of the European Council, a €40 million aid plan for Ukraine was whittled down to just an eighth of that, before further divisions led the idea being abandoned altogether. The Europeans have equally found it hard to develop their own defense industries since Trump’s election. Though they’ve taken several notable steps here, for instance exempting defense spending from EU budget caps, creating a unified security industry across the continent is difficult precisely because the bloc continues to be an amalgamation of different governments and economies. Whatever the EU’s detractors may say about Brussels overreach, the truth is that Europe is still far too disunited to build a single defense sector — without significant bureaucratic hand-wringing anyway. Even so, as hope for any additional American weapons shipments is effectively nil, the long-running pressure on Europe to fill at least some of that void is only growing.

To be fair, there are bright spots amid the litany of failed summits. One is the Danish model of using frozen Russian assets and other sources to fund domestic weapons production in Ukraine. That might make it easier for Ukraine to get desperately needed ammunition and artillery to the frontlines, while European militaries are increasingly moving away from American suppliers to domestic ones. Giving Ukraine the cash it needs to arm itself might also prevent a looming EU schism, with countries like Hungary increasingly unwilling to fund the Ukraine war. By funnelling aid for Ukraine’s domestic arms production through individual EU states, rather than the bloc itself, European countries can let Hungary have its cake and eat it too.

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Even so, there are only so many ways that European military aid can replace America’s. The US, after all, has the power to dictate life and death on the Ukrainian battlefield beyond merely cutting off weapons shipments, as it so cynically demonstrated in March when it turned off the targeting systems of the Ukrainian army’s HIMARS, Patriots, and other missile batteries. Without such basic capabilities, which Europe would hardly be able to replicate, it is very possible that Ukraine’s ability to resist Russian advances, even in its current limited capacity, would be greatly jeopardized.

Not that Ukraine is the only calculation here. There’s already an unspoken logic taking hold among some states in Nato’s east that, if push comes to shove, they too may have to abandon Ukraine to protect themselves. The departure of American troops from a key base in Poland only heightens these worries, as do Pentagon proposals to withdraw up to 10,000 soldiers from right across Eastern Europe. Despite working with its regional partners to build a wall of fortifications along Russia’s border, and strengthen itself militarily, Lithuania for one is not taking any chances — its capital city Vilnius has just unveiled a sweeping plan to evacuate its entire population in the event of a Russian invasion.

Regardless of how unified Europe ultimately becomes on defense in the years to come, countries with the most to lose from an unrestrained Russia — from Poland to the Baltics — are already coming to the conclusion that acting unilaterally will be the only way to protect themselves. Latvia’s recent exit from the Ottawa Treaty banning anti-personnel mine deployment is only one example, with more European states likely to take matters into their own hands as Brussels keeps prevaricating. With competing agendas weakening the EU and NATO at this pivotal moment of crisis, regional alliances that act independently of both are likely to arise. There are already clear precedents for this. In 2020, after all, Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine created an alliance called the Lublin Triangle, which has remained active throughout Russia’s war against Ukraine. Though its function is currently diplomatic, it isn’t hard to imagine the Lublin Triangle, or alliances like it, taking on security functions too.

Nor can you blame the Europeans for such frantic action. After all, they may soon find themselves facing a resurgent Moscow — for the first time able to act with impunity on the continent with the tacit blessing of the world’s premier power. Another D-Day is obviously unlikely anytime soon, indeed, but the Europeans may eventually need to consider the US itself as a rival power. And just as the US has increasingly abandoned them, the Europeans may need to face the fact that there may come a day when they too might have to abandon Ukraine — not out of selfishness, but out of cold, hard necessity.

No, the first — and only — humans ever to have discovered America were Russians. They did it 14,000 or so years ago, back in the late Pleistocene, following migrating herds of edible fauna across the landbridge that then connected the easternmost tip of Siberia and the westernmost point of North America. Here were monsters: dire wolves, short-faced bears, saber-toothed tigers. But there were also huge creatures of abundant dumbness and blubber. It was an Eden of unimaginable plenty. And as with space, the Russians crossed the frontier first.

Now, I realize it is a stretch to call these pioneering Paleo-Siberians “Russian” — existing as they did thousands of years before the idea of the nation state even existed. Still, as a foundation story, this tar-deep history at least lends some much-needed grandeur to the emerging ambition of Tsar Donald’s second reign — Make America Russian Again. How else to read the world’s richest and most powerful nation’s craven subordination to Vladimir Putin and its abandonment of America’s Ukrainian and European allies? The charitable interpretation is that Trump and the boy Vance are avenging the genocide that the native Americans, the descendants of those Siberian wanderers, experienced at the hands of the post-1492 Europeans. Now, they are pivoting back to their true mother country. And if they can grab back Greenland too, well, screw you Vikings — not feeling so lucky now, are you?

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As silly as all this may seem, it’s hardly less implausible than the current working scenario, recently outlined by Britain’s former defense secretary Ben Wallace. In this reading, Trump and Vance are “clueless” dupes — victims of Russian propaganda, wilfully naive. They have spent so much time in their MAGA feedback loop that they have come to believe every piece of post-truth fanned their way by Putin’s disinformation machine. Democratic ideals don’t matter; the sovereignty of random backwaters like Ukraine doesn’t matter. The rule of law, the free press, free trade, freedom of speech: all this is so much wokery. All that matters is money and power and the preservation of Trump’s ego as the world’s biggest bully, its Nelson Muntz, haha.

And if you find it hard to believe that the World’s Greatest Democracy could elect a leader that dumb — well the only remaining alternative is that Trump is doing all of this on purpose. He has seen what Putin has achieved in Russia and he wants the same for America — or rather, for himself. Since like a Tsar, Trump is the state, and the richer, the more powerful, the more famous he is, the better for everyone but especially him. Putin has not achieved personal hegemony by strengthening civil society, creating a well-functioning state or improving the lives of ordinary Russians. Instead, he has run Russia like a mafia boss, terrorizing his neighbours, destroying his enemies, demoralizing his opponents, distorting truths, and basically murdering dissent via conscription — so that the only person anyone has to turn to is him.

Hence, Trump employing his pet oligarch Elon Musk as chief saboteur. The mission of DOGE is, of course, not to make government efficient — remember, we now live in opposite-land, nothing is true and everything is possible. It is rather to get rid of the competent people, the useful programmes, the necessary functions. As the historian of Ukraine Timothy Snyder has argued, a weak state is easier to manipulate. This, Snyder says, is Trump First, a policy of “deliberate weakness” which ultimately puts Musk and Trump’s emotions over the lives of normal Americans.

The great intellectuals of the MAGA movement usually cite Viktor Orbán’s Hungary as a vision of how to dismantle a democracy. But Orbán, naturally, learned most of his antidemocratic tricks from Putin. As with Sputnik, Russia got there first. Chaos, in short, is the point. “For which Russian does not love to drive fast?” wrote Nikolai Gogol in the celebrated conclusion of Dead Souls. “Which of us does not at times yearn to give his horses their head, and to let them go, and to cry, ‘To the Devil with the world!’?”

And here is a point that us cosseted and complacent Westerners often fail to grasp. Russia is habitually portrayed as a backwards country, a place that has somehow failed to meet the demands of modernity. That, indeed, is the reality for millions of ordinary Russians, living in “monotowns” such as Ulan-Ude or Krasnoyarsk, at the mercy of malfunctioning infrastructure, arbitrary police power, local corruption, and a lack of viable futures other than enlisting. Much of Dead Souls is taken up with complaints about terrible roads and weird innkeepers and paralytic peasants. But a land so vast, so unruly, also makes an amazing laboratory for the future — the future never arriving all at once, but sporadically, in jolts and leaps. Russia was and remains the most avant-garde place on earth.

Certainly, the 20th century was far more Russian in character than American — a point lost amid the Western triumphalism that followed the end of the Cold War. Almost all of the West’s artistic leaps (African-American music aside) last century were initially taken by Russians: Stravinsky and Diaghilev’s Rite of Spring; Malevich’s Black Square; Stanislavsky’s productions of Chekhov for the Moscow Arts Theatre. The early Soviet filmmakers Eisenstein and Vertov revolutionized cinema. There has arguably never been a greater concentration of literary talent than the Russian “Silver Age” poets: Mayakovsky, Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, Blok, Mandelstam. The Formalist literary critics — people like Shklovsky and Jakobson — pre-empted the French post-structuralists by decades with their concepts of “defamiliarization” and “laying bare the device”. Revealing how truth and meaning are constructed, it is little wonder that the worst Soviet artists could be accused of was “formalism”.

But these were just the artistic pioneers. The 1917 Revolutions unleashed the most avant-garde experiments in nationhood ever undertaken. “The streets are our brushes, the squares our palettes,” wrote Mayakovsky in “150,000,000”, his revolutionary poem. The Soviet Union’s rapid industrialization and collectivization would be — at the cost of unimaginable human suffering — an inspiration to Chinese communists and Western democrats alike. Free healthcare, social housing, and the advancement of women would soon be offered to Western voters as sweeteners for not turning fully Red. The Russians were also, naturally, the first people to put a dog and then a man and then a woman into orbit. Indeed, the three signature obsessions of contemporary Silicon Valley — colonizing space; living forever; and artificial general intelligence — were all core precepts of Cosmism, the quasi-spiritual scientific movement that influenced the Soviet space program. The Soviet elites were no less obsessed with gerontology than Peter Thiel and Jeff Bezos. They too dreamed of capturing Mars. Yet if “New Planet”, a 1921 painting by Konstantin Yuon is anything to go by, the Russians would have done so with a lot more style.

The conventional understanding is that all this breakneck pioneering came to a horrible halt with the fall of the Soviet regime in 1989. In reality, though, the ensuing chaos laid the conditions for a new experiment in capitalist authoritarianism of which Donald Trump is now the shining exemplar. This was where neoliberalism economics were pushed to their limits, oligarchs seized state assets, inequality and insecurity flourished, millions died from deaths of despair — and a vengeful strongman eventually emerged as the only person who could be trusted to keep things vaguely together. And, indeed, for all his disinformation experiments and his non-linear wars, Putin has brought a sheen of modernity to Russia. Hence, a dupe like Tucker Carlson can visit Moscow in a strange 21st-century echo of the visits that Western socialists once made to Soviet Potemkin villages — and be absolutely gobsmacked that there are Metro stations and supermarkets and iPhones and tasting menus.

Of course, for most of recent history, the idea that an American leader might envy his Russian counterpart would be absolutely absurd. Russia and America may both be continent-spanning nations with abundant natural resources and deep histories of slavery — but they have long endured like Cain and Abel, as the cursed and blessed sons. America has the dual aspect oceans, the navigable rivers, the benign climate, the easy-going neighbors, the abundant resources. It is playing Civilization on chieftain mode — to use an analogy from one of Musk’s favorite video games. Russian leaders, meanwhile, are stuck on deity mode, the hardest setting. Russia has trouble on every frontier; it has vast flatlands that make it easy to invade; it has huge tracts of uninhabitable permafrost; and it is shut out of the Atlantic — hence the obsession with Crimea as a window onto the Mediterranean. Russia’s citizens look upon America’s law courts, its civil society, its businesses, its opportunities, its lavishly funded universities, its blue jeans and rock’n’roll — and sigh.

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But the politics of envy cuts both ways. There is the more straightforward envy that the have-nots hold towards the haves, for their ease and security and luxuries. A far less examined but more potent political force is increasingly the envy of the haves towards the have-nots: for their perceived virtues, for the poetry in their souls, for their resilience and stubbornness. One of the strangest aspects of modern America is that no class seems quite so consumed with envy as the billionaires who now crowd around Trump, who have benefited from the easy-setting US economy only to find that their billions do not, after all, purchase them the unbending admiration of the masses, nor the power they desire, nor the immortality they crave. I doubt very much that the average resident of Columbus, Ohio or Gary, Indiana would find much to relish about life in Tomsk or Nizhny-Novgorod. But it’s not hard to see why an American would-be autocrat would look to an actual Russian autocrat and think: damn. Look at his weapons. Look at his gold. Look at the fear he inspires.

Russians have their pride too. Just as Americans tend to see their country, albeit without much evidence, as some uniquely free place, so Russians often cherish an image of themselves as a uniquely spiritual people — the tough ones, the hard ones, the ones who can withstand suffering. The ones who, unlike Americans, are never protected from the consequences of their actions and are a good deal less naive as a result.

Gogol saw far enough into the future to perceive an age in which his backwards nation had finally taken the lead. “Whither, then, are you speeding, O Russia of mine? Whither? Answer me!” he wrote at the end of Dead Souls, picturing his homeland as an out-of-control troika, rushing headlong into the snow. “But no answer comes. Rent into a thousand shreds, the air roars past you, for you are overtaking the whole world, and shall one day force all nations, all empires to stand aside, to give you way!” Whether the rest of American society will stand aside quite so obligingly as Trump and Vance, we shall see.

Once again, Stefan Zweig has it spot-on. He understands the strategic complexity of a game in which just repeating known moves doesn’t necessarily result in victory. The puzzle changes with each move you make — and your opponent’s response. This understanding is central to his novella The Royal Game, and it has significant bearing to our current political moment: Zweig’s characters bear an uncanny resemblance to geopolitical actors.

The story takes place on a ship traveling from New York to Buenos Aires in the Thirties. One of the passengers is the reigning world chess champion. He is described as uncouth, semi-illiterate, the opposite of intellectual; he’s a transactional type who is only interested in money, but endowed with the singular talent of being able to win chess games by just looking at what’s happening on the board. His opposite character is a cultured intellectual, Dr B, in many ways the better chess player. Unfortunately, Dr B has never played against a real opponent. He taught himself to play while in solitary confinement, from a book. Having memorized all the games detailed in the manual, he then attempted to play them in his head. When two play against each other, Dr B is tormented by the world champion, with his irritating, unpredictable moves. He’s not playing according to the formulas Dr B committed to memory. Inevitably, Dr B folds.

What is Zweig trying to tell us? That to triumph at chess requires anticipation. It is not merely about logic. There are people who try to play intellectually, who have a capacity to memorize entire games and then try to repeat them. But then there are intuitive geniuses like Zweig’s antihero, who hasn’t memorized anything: he just knows how to exploit his opponent’s mental weaknesses. Remind you of anyone?

I have heard Donald Trump being described as post-literate. He has no understanding of European history, and confuses all-important details, like who started the war in Ukraine. Nor does he really care when he gets things wrong. When he expressed regret at his statement that the EU was founded “to screw the US”, he was only apologizing for what he described as a “bad word”. It is a complete waste of time trying to fact-check what he says. What we should be doing instead is trying to anticipate his next move.

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But we Europeans seem to have an institutional incapacity to think two steps ahead. As a result, we aren’t asking the important questions: such as what capabilities does Ukraine need to win the war? Where are the bottlenecks, and how can we fix them? What are the end-game scenarios? What would be an acceptable second-best outcome? What does it mean to win, or to lose?

Instead of strategic game, we Europeans have principles. We want Russia to be evicted from all occupied lands. Some of Europe would like to see regime change enacted. But as the passive tense in these statements suggests, we want someone else to do it for us. We need someone else to do it; not being strategic, we haven’t invested in defense.

This also means that no one has an intelligent response to the question of what would happen if Putin, when pushed into a corner, were to opt for nuclear escalation? This was, after all, a scenario deemed credible by the CIA back in 2022. He would almost certainly not begin with an all-out nuclear strike. But what if he were to detonate an underwater nuclear bomb in the Baltic Sea, close to the shore of a NATO member state? The Baltic Sea is very shallow. A nuclear explosion could give rise to a tsunami. The radioactive isotopes released from a nuclear explosion could contaminate coastal regions. There would be airborne radioactive fallout.

This is only one of many grey-zone escalation scenarios to which we have no answers. At a loss, what our leaders do instead is repeat the mantra that they will do “whatever it takes” to help Ukraine defeat Russia. The fashionable expression was famously employed by Mario Draghi, the former president of the European Central Bank. He used it as a credible threat against speculators. But what worked so well in finance does not play so well in war. When you fight a war, you are subject to all manner of constraints, physical, human, financial and political. That’s what it means to be in a democracy: it dictates that we quite simply cannot do whatever it takes.

But what we do instead, as non-strategic players, is deploy some ostentatious symbolism. When Volodymyr Zelensky walked around the table at last week’s European Council, every European leader got up to embrace him. They wanted to produce a counterpoint to that sofa scene in the Oval Office. But pointless posturing is not a strategy. I have yet to see any strategic purpose behind anything any of the Europeans, including Starmer, have done in the past two weeks. Everything they have done, including Friedrich Merz’s decision to exempt defense spending from Germany’s constitutional fiscal rules, has been as a result of Trump’s first move. They aren’t anticipating his second.

Trump, by contrast, is an intuitive, transactional strategist. He looked at Zelensky and concluded that the Ukrainian president was not ready for peace. Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, then doubled down on this by saying: “I understand that many people believe that a peaceful solution or a ceasefire is a good idea, but we risk that peace in Ukraine is actually more dangerous than the war that is ongoing now.”

Washington’s suspicions thus confirmed, the President promptly responded by withdrawing military aid from Ukraine, switching off the US satellites and halting intelligence sharing. The Europeans keep on expressing shock and dismay at every Trump move. But if you look at the situation purely from a strategic standpoint, his actions should hardly come as a surprise. He certainly knows what he wants to happen next.

And he has a lot more room to escalate this stand-off. He could withdraw intelligence support for NATO. He could withdraw US troops from Eastern Europe. He could recuse himself from the commitment to NATO’s Article 5 collective defense clause, on the grounds that the US has warned the Europeans not to engage in a proxy war against Russia. He could start withdrawing troops from Western Europe, too. He could warn US citizens against traveling to Europe and sound the alarm for investors. Has any European leader thought about how to respond to any one of these potential escalation steps? Or will it just be more photo ops with Zelensky?

Nor is Trump only just playing chess on the battlefield. He’s doing it in economic policy, too. On 2 April, the US will impose reciprocal tariffs on all trading partners. He could, and probably will, do more. Trump talked about 25% tariffs on most EU goods. If the Europeans retaliate, as they threatened, and if he responds in kind, what will the Europeans do then? Retaliate again? This is not a game they can win.

In chess, tit-for-tat is a terrible strategy when you play against an opponent who is prepared. The same goes for geopolitics. Forget the nonsense that there are no winners in trade wars. If you are the one with the large trade surplus — the EU’s surplus with the US is over $200bn — then you are going to be the bigger loser. A strategic response would be to take Trump’s trade tariffs on the chin, and to address the underlying problem of structural trade surpluses that make you vulnerable to such blackmail in the first place. But the Europeans have forgotten the art of thinking beyond the first move.

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The end of the transatlantic alliance

By Wolfgang Munchau

The extraordinary thing is we invented strategic diplomacy. Niccolò Machiavelli was an Italian. The Austrian-French duo of Klemens von Metternich and Charles Maurice de Talleyrand were the masters of political strategy in the early 19th century. Around the same time, Carl von Clausewitz, a Prussian military historian, wrote his famous book On War, a masterpiece on strategic warfare.

So where have all our great European strategic thinkers gone? Certainly they are not in politics. Nor are they, I should add, in journalism. Instead, we now talk endlessly about relationships. The whole of the EU is a relationship project. We talk about the UK wanting to reset its relationship with the EU. We talk about the transatlantic relationship. Nobody is talking about strategic interests. But, then, if you believe in win-win games, as Europeans do, who needs strategy?

Zweig wrote The Royal Game in 1941, not long before he committed suicide, and the Nazis reigned supreme. He could see exactly what a lack of strategy had done to Europe. His chess story represented what was playing out in global politics as opposing forces clashed: the ancient order outsmarted by the new. Today, it’s happening again, and Europe is in check.

Through the lens of Putinism, the global stage in 2025 looks remarkably similar to 1945. Russia’s sphere of influence, and even its heartland, is under threat from forces to its west. But like 80 years ago, in the eyes of Kremlin ideologues, Russia is pushing back the tide, militarily and civilizationally too. But think again to that picture: and who Stalin is slouched with. Not some lackeys from the Politburo, but his two rivals, who both, in their way, would help dictate his country’s imperial ambitions for decades to come. That, for me, is the real lesson of Yalta eight decades on — not that Russia was naturally destined to dominate Eurasia, but that it can only succeed with help from the West.

Even before Russia really existed, its rulers leaned on outsiders. Consider the early 17th century, the so-called Time of Troubles, when Muscovy was beset by succession crises, civil wars, and foreign incursions by the Swedish Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Contrary to the popular version of history most Russians know, Michael Romanov, the first tsar of Russia’s most storied house, was crowned in 1613 only after collaborating with foreigners. Nationalist epics, notably the 1836 opera A Life for the Tsar, have paraded him as an austere hero, who fled the invading Poles instead of submit. In truth, his uncle supported Polish efforts to put a foreigner on the Russian throne, while Michael himself even lived for a time in the Polish-occupied Kremlin.

It’s a thread woven through the long centuries of Russia’s history, as it struggled to overcome the geographic prison that is Eurasia. Despite giving Russia ample space to expand, its geographic position leaves it vulnerable to land invasions from both the east and the west. Flanked, moreover, by mountains to the south, the Arctic ice to the north, and European competitors to the west, it traditionally had scant opportunities to develop its naval strength — vital for any modern superpower. Getting creative about securing sea access, and acquiring plenty of colonial possessions to act as buffers, was crucial if Russia wanted to be anything beyond a backwater outpost along the Moskva River.

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In practice, this could only happen through collaboration with outsiders, something clear enough far beyond the Time of Troubles. In the final decades of the 18th century, for instance, Russia had no qualms about flexing its military muscles. Yet when it came to vanquishing its old rival Poland-Lithuania, it relied on deal-making to carve up the Polish state alongside Austria and Prussia. In the process, it drew up a new balance of power in Eastern Europe, finalized at the Congress of Vienna and which mostly endured until 1914. It was a similar story at sea. Snatching windows on the Black Sea and the Baltic would have meant very little if Russia hadn’t equally secured passage through the Bosphorus (from the Ottomans) and the Kattegat (from Denmark) into the seven seas beyond.

Not, of course, that this heritage has stopped Russian rulers from parading their would be independence. All nationalisms are, to an extent, based on narrative-building and historical erasure, and just as A Life for the Tsar lionized Tsar Michael for the St Petersburg nobility, so too have these themes endured into the 20th century. That’s clear enough from Russian narratives about the Great Patriotic War, which describe how 20 million Soviets gave their lives to defeat the German invaders.

That sacrifice is indisputable: but Russia’s victory in Berlin would have been meaningless had it not been accepted by the Western superpowers. For if Nazi rule in Europe was undone at Stalingrad and Kursk, what came later was decided between 4-11 February 1945, at Yalta, where Roosevelt and Churchill gave Stalin their blessing to establish a new European order. In the space of just a week, Stalin convinced his allies to let him extend his reach right across Eastern Europe, annexing the Baltic States and adding a sizable chunk of Eastern Europe to his sphere of influence.

For Russian elites accustomed to thinking in historic cycles, a revised geopolitical compact, a Yalta 2.0, is therefore unsurprisingly long overdue. Not that we should think Putin is keen on just another power-grab. His famous 2005 quip that “the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century” has been interpreted as a glib expression of Soviet nostalgia — but beneath the surface lurked a deeper fear. A new age had indeed arrived, but an updated balance of power to replace the Cold War order was never established, leaving Russia rudderless in wild geopolitical waters.

To an extent, then, Putin has long felt America’s unipolar moment was simply a delusion, an aberration of history that stubbornly denied the geopolitical realities of Russian power. And with American dominance now sliding, Putin can equally point to the revival of multipolarity, with great powers from Beijing to Delhi establishing geopolitical centers. To rephrase, then, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was never just about that country alone. Rather, it was Putin’s attempt to force America and the West to confront what it sees as its natural rights, to settle the destabilizing ambiguity between where Russia’s sphere of influence ends and where America’s starts, and to finally restore balance on Moscow’s terms — the wishes of the locals from Kharkiv to Aleppo be damned.

But just as it always has, Russia cannot set up this new international system alone — despite what he might claim, Putin relies just as much on the West as his precursors in the Kremlin. One good example is that perennial quest for warm-water ports, with the fall of the Assad regime in Syria forcing Moscow to pursue good relations with its revolutionary successor. In an irony of history, and thanks to Ankara’s influence in Damascus, Russia is again forced to bargain with Turks to keep its empire afloat. On the far side of its territory, meanwhile, Russia must reckon with the presence of NATO states like Norway and Canada, as they race to establish facts-on-the-water while the ice caps melt. Faced with America and China, certainly, brute force alone is not a realistic option.

Putin will also be conscious of what happens when Russia tries to act unilaterally. Following the October Revolution, in 1917, communist fervor compelled the Bolsheviks to spread their revolution westwards. Eschewing the diplomatic waltzing of the tsars, they rejected dialogue with Europe’s bourgeois states. Following some initial successes — against newly independent Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia — they were stopped by the Poles at the gates of Warsaw. After defeat in 1920, Lenin was forced to sign the Treaty of Riga, delineating the Soviet Union’s boundary with Poland. The young USSR thus had little to show for this brute display of force, and had failed to regain much of the territory Nicholas II had lost through the First World War.

Stalin’s approach two decades later took vital lessons from this historic mistake, combining the military might of the Red Army with clever diplomatic maneuvering at Yalta. Through tough negotiating and sleights of hand, Stalin convinced Roosevelt and Churchill to accept a dramatic expansion of Soviet territory, alongside a bevy of buffer states from Bulgaria to Hungary. In exchange, Stalin promised to hold free elections in places like Poland and Czechoslovakia, a vow he never had any intention of keeping. The results of this maneuvering spoke for themselves: Russia extended its power further than it ever had under the tsars, and governments as far west as Berlin answered directly to Moscow.

These days, there are signs that Putin is ready to talk once more. Even before he attacked his neighbor, he had effectively demanded that Nato expel all new members since 1997. That was clearly unrealistic — but nonetheless hinted at an awareness, somewhere behind that inscrutable facade, that negotiations with the West were necessary. That’s doubly true now there’s someone new in the White House. An instinctive dealmaker, ruthless and transactional, Donald Trump may be the partner Putin needs to formalize the bounds of Russia’s new empire, establish a new balance of power in Europe, and ultimately lay down the ground rules of international relations for the rest of the century.

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Russia's propaganda machine is failing

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The President’s other foreign ventures speak vividly to this shift. With Trump on the verge of launching a trade war with the EU, and pushing to construct a new geopolitical pole stretching from Greenland to Panama, Putin’s threats, once fantastical, now seem eminently achievable. And if all this clearly has significant implications for Ukraine — American recognition of Russian sovereignty over swathes of the country beckon — a range of far-reaching issues are also on the agenda for a future Trump-Putin meeting. Among other things, that includes nuclear arms control and energy prices. Worryingly for the Europeans, meanwhile, it’s becoming ever clearer that any such summit will exclude Ukraine, at least at first, and that Trump won’t merely represent the United States, but rather personify Nato and the whole Western world. Putin certainly sees him that way: with the precedent of Yalta at his back, he’ll view the talks as a generational opportunity to clarify the global playing field from the Pacific to the Danube.

That still leaves the question: what exactly might Putin try and secure from his negotiations with Trump? Once more, Yalta is a guide. Trump himself may see Europe as a sideshow, but for Putin, like Stalin before him, it will always be ground zero for the country’s ambitions. Ukraine may have replaced Poland as the primary object of Russian geopolitical maneuvering, but like in 1945, conversations about its future will form only the backdrop for wider questions about Russia’s sphere of influence. Moldova and Georgia are two obvious candidates here, even as Hungary and Romania, both firmly within the Nato orbit, could yet be up for discussion.

In other words, then, whether or not Ukraine is eventually included in the talks will ultimately be irrelevant. For Putin, the country is little more than an American puppet, and for Trump, it’s a burden. Like Poland and the rest of Eastern Europe in 1945, Ukraine’s fate will be decided by Russia and the United States alone, and any subsequent involvement by Kyiv will be little more than window dressing. Once again, we’ve seen this play before. Harry Truman wholeheartedly disagreed with the terms Roosevelt had reached with Stalin — but by the time he took office after FDR’s death, it was too late, and he had no choice but to rubber-stamp Yalta at the Potsdam Conference five months later.

In the end, the green light Moscow received from America was a more powerful tool for its expansionist ambitions than any tank or bomb. Even so, Soviet leaders saw no hint of irony when they played the orchestral finale of A Life for the Tsar at their victory parade in June 1945, a musical retreat to a Russia that never truly existed. Eight decades on, if Yalta 2.0 does indeed come to pass, it will be curious to see if Putin goes for the opera once more. Either way, Michael Romanov would surely be proud.

By now it is obvious that Ukraine is not winning the war. Nato has provided many billions of dollars worth of sophisticated weapons to Ukraine including Patriot missiles, HIMARS and ATACMS missiles, Abrams tanks, F-16 aircraft, and now Storm Shadow missiles. None of this has produced a successful Ukrainian offensive. Instead, the conflict has become a war of attrition that relentlessly drains Ukrainian manpower and Nato arsenals. A nation of around 35 million people with a GDP of around $180 billion cannot hope to defeat a nation with a population of 150 million and a GDP of $2 trillion. The harsh reality is that Ukraine has as much of a chance of defeating Russia as Belgium would of defeating Germany, no matter how many Western weapons they receive.

The fall of Assad is not necessarily a sign of Russian weakness. In 2016, Russian air power, not ground forces, helped the Syrian army maintain control of the country. In 2024, a demoralised Syrian army dissolved without a fight. With Assad’s own army disbanding, there was little Russian air power could do to rescue him. At the moment, Russia’s two bases in Syria remain in Russian hands and their future is unclear. What is clear, however, is that Putin has kept his eyes on Ukraine, where Russian forces continue to take as much territory as possible before any potential negotiations begin.

Nor will economic sanctions change the war’s outcome. Beginning in 2022, Western nations imposed on Russia the most extensive sanctions regime seen since the Second World War. All in all, several thousand sanctions were placed on Russian individuals, businesses, and government institutions. This caused only a mild recession in 2022 which was quickly turned around. Instead of collapsing, the Russian economy has grown rapidly. Russia’s GDP grew by 3.6% in 2023, and is estimated to grow at the same rate this year. Ironically, the Russians have done better than those imposing the sanctions. In 2023, the US economy grew only by 2.5% while the German economy actually shrank, and the EU as a whole grew by less than 1%.

We should also remember that not losing the war is far more important to the Russian people and leadership than it is to Britain. Russians believe they are fighting a war for survival against a corrupt, godless, and implacable West. When Leopard tanks arrived in Ukraine, the headlines in Moscow read “German tanks again on Russian soil”. Every Russian parent who has lost a son to a German tank or a British missile is now demanding victory and revenge. What’s more, if Russia is defeated, President Vladimir Putin will not survive politically — the more Putin fears losing, the more he will escalate. If he falls from power, he will not be replaced by liberal democrats, but by even more hard-line Russian nationalists.

The justifications for Britain supporting Ukraine have always been questionable, but very seldom questioned. Instead, a jingoist media has consistently understated the risks involved while encouraging support for the war based upon three assumptions: Russia’s invasion was unprovoked; Ukraine is a democratic, long-unified nation worth defending; and Ukraine can win the war. Each of these assumptions is badly flawed.

The truth is, Russia was provoked. Why, Russian leaders ask, does a purely defensive alliance need to expand its membership? What is wrong with formal Ukrainian neutrality similar to that provided by the Austrian State Treaty of 1955? Why was Nato giving Ukraine a wide range of weapons, training, and intelligence long before the Russian invasion?

Ukraine in Nato would mean the US Navy in Sevastopol and American missiles 300 miles from Moscow. For a nation that has long based its security on trading space for time, that is a problem. Yet since the end of the Cold War, Nato has added 16 new members and moved 1,000 miles closer to Moscow and repeatedly voiced its willingness to welcome Ukraine as a new member. The logic of Moscow’s concern should be clear to anyone familiar with America’s own reaction to Soviet missiles in Cuba.

Russia’s leaders have repeatedly made their concerns clear. Twenty years ago, the American ambassador in Moscow advised the then secretary of state Condoleezza Rice that: “Ukrainian entry into Nato is the brightest of all red-lines for the Russian elite (not just President Vladimir Putin). In more than two-and-a-half years of conversations with key Russian players, from knuckle-draggers in the dark recesses of the Kremlin to Putin’s sharpest liberal critics, I have yet to find anyone who views Ukraine in Nato as anything but a direct challenge to Russian security.”

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Western intelligence agencies warn us that if Putin is not stopped now, his next move could be to invade Western Europe. Might these be the same intelligence agencies who told us Saddam Hussein was building a nuclear bomb? Or who tell us daily how the poorly trained, ill-equipped and overstretched Russians will soon be defeated? In more than two years, the Russians have not managed to capture Kharkiv, much less Kyiv. The EU alone has three times the population of Russia, and 10 times the GDP. With the United States included, the military disparity between Nato and the Russian Federation becomes overwhelming in all but nuclear weapons. The idea that Putin plans to invade Europe is simply silly.

Then there is the question of whether Ukraine is worth defending. Ukraine is hardly a flourishing democracy. Rather it is a corrupt, one-party state, with extensive press censorship. Opposition parties have been suspended. Religious freedom has been restricted. Young men are forbidden to leave the country. Even before the war, the US Congress formally condemned Ukrainian nationalist groups such as the Azov Brigade as “white supremacist neo-Nazis”.

Nor is modern Ukraine a longstanding historic, geographic, or linguistic unit. The Russian-speaking eastern and southern regions were annexed to Ukraine by the Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin in 1922, specifically to make Ukraine less Ukrainian. The Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev added the overwhelming ethnically Russian Crimea to Ukraine by administrative fiat only in 1954. Unlike Canada, which found ways to meld anglophone Protestants and francophone Catholics into one nation, Ukraine failed to embrace pluralism. Ukrainian nationalist governments in Kyiv rejected a federal model with autonomy for Russian-speaking regions. They rejected calls for adopting two official languages throughout the nation and went so far as to ban the use of Russian in administrative and commercial matters, even in predominantly Russian-speaking regions. As a result, many ethnic Russians and Russian speakers living in the country do not identify with Ukrainian nationalism and never have.

The recent deployment of Britain’s advanced Storm Shadow missiles in the Ukraine war represents a significant escalation in the provision of Western military aid to Kyiv. It has strengthened Britain’s commitment to Ukraine, but it has not slowed Russian’s grinding advance westward. More importantly, it has intensified Britain’s conflict with Russia. Moscow understands that unlike previous weapons delivered to Ukraine, Storm Shadows require direct foreign involvement in their targeting and guidance procedures. For some Russians, this means that Britain and Russia are already at war. The possibility of this situation spiralling out of control through miscalculation is what former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld would refer to as a “low-probability high-impact event”.

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The lesson of l’affaire Huang

By David Rundell

Since the end of the Cold War, Russia has invested heavily in nuclear armaments; today, it possesses roughly 10% more warheads than the United States. Some of these can be mounted on hypersonic missiles against which there is no effective defence; others travel on unmanned submarines designed to swamp coastal cities with enormous radioactive tidal waves. The Russian Sarmat missile carries the equivalent of 600 Hiroshima bombs.

Such weapons have never been used, and their effect on populations and the climate are unknown. What is certain, however, is that a modern nuclear exchange would not resemble those of the Second World War. Comparing today’s nuclear weapons with the bombs dropped on Japan is like comparing a Mini with a Tesla. A single Sarmat could depopulate London and the home counties. Is there anything at stake for Britain in Ukraine to justify taking such an enormous risk?

Anyone truly concerned about the Ukrainian people should want this war to end as quickly as possible. The nation has already lost 20% of its territory. Nearly a third of its population has fled or been displaced. Thousands more have perished, and much of its infrastructure lies in ruins. The situation reminds one of Vietnam, where villages were burned in order to “save” them from the Communists. And yet the price of peace is affordable. It can be negotiated on the positive principles of Ukrainian neutrality, funding for reconstruction and self-determination for ethnic Russians.

This would be in Britain’s own interests too. Should the Exchequer be paying the pensions of Ukrainian civil servants when British pensioners have lost their fuel allowance? Moreover, history offers many examples of nations sleepwalking into wars that prove far more destructive than anticipated. Britain entered the First World War to defend Belgium and the Second World War to defend Poland. Launching Storm Shadow missiles to defend Ukraine will not defeat Russia, but it could well produce another confrontation far greater than initially foreseen. After successfully defusing the Cuban Missile Crisis, President John F. Kennedy warned against ever again forcing Russia to choose between national humiliation and nuclear war. We should heed his advice.

Yet 16 years later, there’s no doubt that the Russo-Georgian War marked the start of a new era in Russia’s relationship with its near abroad, culminating in the invasion of Ukraine and the shadow conflict with the West that followed. Now, after all, Georgia has once again become the epicentre of this new Cold War. It’s just that this time, Russia and its proxies are using ballot boxes rather than tanks to capture the Georgian state.

Ahead of the country’s pivotal parliamentary elections on 26 October, Georgian liberals were cautiously optimistic. For the first time in years, the country’s fractured opposition stood a chance of ousting the pro-Russian Georgian Dream party from power. Initially favourable exit polls only confirmed their hope. But soon enough, their excitement was dashed. Despite pursuing a highly divisive policy agenda — including the passage of an infamous foreign agent law in May, dovetailed by more recent laws limiting LGBT activity — Georgian Dream secured a stunning 54% of the vote.

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The same evening, opposition parties appeared on national TV, denouncing the vote as illegitimate. Among other things, they cited electoral fraud, violence, and intimidation. Videos of a Georgian Dream loyalist stuffing ballots into a box went viral across Georgian media, as did clips of government supporters attacking election observers. Independent statistical analysis corroborated many of their claims. Over the following days, meanwhile, the country’s opposition-aligned president called for protests against the results of the election, accusing Russia of orchestrating Georgian Dream’s victory. The four main opposition parties also pledged to boycott Parliament, effectively incapacitating the Georgian Dream government.

Though investigations into the vote continue, the battle lines have already been drawn. So far, only Russia, Hungary, China, Turkey, Armenia, and Azerbaijan have recognised the result. On the other hand, the US, the EU, and various European governments have denounced the voting irregularities and expressed “alarm” at the electoral process. Already, Sweden has cut ties with the Georgian government over its democratic backsliding.

With few signs the opposition will back down, comparisons have already been made between Tbilisi and Kyiv’s Euromaidan revolution of 2014. Certainly, the showdown in Georgia could yet prove just as consequential: not just for the small mountain nation but for the whole post-Soviet space. Like Ukraine a decade ago, after all, Georgia has become ground zero for confrontation between Russia and the West.

And while the slaughter in the Ukraine may be the shadow conflict’s most dramatic expression, it’s in Georgia where Russia’s ability to dominate its neighbours is being tested most vividly. “Russia will say that ‘we win like always.’ But Russia will lose this battle against Ukraine and Georgia,” says Luka, a 21-year-old student at an opposition-led protest on Monday. “We will fight until we die.”

Certainly, the stakes for young Georgians couldn’t be higher. For those eager to finally join the European Union — according to one poll from last year, that’s almost 90% of the population — the fight is existential. If Georgian Dream’s victory holds, the country’s EU ambitions are dead. Democratic politics more generally is fighting for survival too: Georgian Dream has pledged to outlaw the majority of opposition parties, likening Saturday’s vote to the Nuremberg Trials.

Given this polarised atmosphere, there are only a few ways the crisis could end, especially when both the West and Russia have so much to lose. Having staked their reputation on challenging the election results, opposition parties are unlikely to accept a Georgian Dream government. If the opposition maintains its boycott of Parliament, and the president continues to refuse to approve the new government, Georgian Dream will be unable to hold parliamentary sessions without two-thirds of elected members being present. That, in turn, would make Georgian Dream — and by extension Russian — unable to legally govern.

In such a situation, Georgian Dream could conceivably choose to buck the law and sidestep the opposition entirely, leading to a constitutional crisis and putting Georgia on an even more perilous collision course with the EU and the US. Brussels and Washington, for their part, are already looking to expand their sanctions against the party.

On the other hand, Georgia could head for a political stand-off in which neither Georgian Dream nor the pro-Western opposition budge. That would doubtless lead to political paralysis: which Russia would be sure to exploit. Already, officials in Moscow have stated that they’re prepared to intervene on Georgian Dream’s behalf if the situation called for it. Nor is this bullishness very surprising. As I explained back in May, Georgia’s position by the Black Sea, along both trade routes and energy pipelines, makes it strategically vital to both Russia and Nato.

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Europe's fate rests on Georgia

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Beyond Georgia itself, meanwhile, a Russian victory here would have repercussions much further afield. Consider Armenia, which has been slipping away from Moscow for years, but which is nonetheless dependent on Georgia for transit. To put it differently, Russian domination of Georgia could force Yerevan to move back towards Moscow’s orbit too. The fall of Georgia could equally demoralise anti-Kremlin movements in places like Moldova and even Kazakhstan.

There are other reasons for Russia to force the issue in Georgia too. The war in Ukraine may be going reasonably well — but fighting a full-scale war is nonetheless risky, costly and domestically destabilising. On the other hand, electoral trickery of the sort Moscow’s trying in Georgia is relatively straightforward, and indeed has been part of its playbook for years. The point, clear enough from Baku to Almaty, is this: if Russia gets away with state capture in Tbilisi, it can do the same anywhere.

While, in short, the Euromaidan revolution was the first attempt to reverse Russian domination of its near abroad, Georgia has now become another kind of test case: is it possible that Putin’s expansionism can be defeated through peaceful means alone? And while the fight in Tbilisi is only just beginning, and Western powers are so far holding back, escalation is inevitable — Georgia, and all it represents, is far too important to abandon.

Yet if a June 2024 agreement between the countries is certainly worrying, especially when dovetailed by Chinese sabre-rattling in the Pacific, the West is facing less an axis of evil than of convenience. The truth is that Vladmir Putin is deeply reliant on Kim Jong Un — and the help he’s getting from the hermit kingdom is basically a sign of weakness, not strength. 

The sudden appearance of North Koreans in their country was unsurprisingly greeted by alarm in Kyiv. And considering how the conflict is going, Yermak’s dramatic language surely makes sense. Over the last few months, after all, the Russians have made grinding gains right across Ukraine, sometimes advancing as much as a kilometre a day and threatening strategically significant cities like Pokrovsk. To an extent, meanwhile, the recent alliance between Moscow and Pyongyang reflects a long-standing amity. The countries have enjoyed generally warm relations since Putin’s ascension to the presidency 25 years ago. Among other things, Pyongyang played host to one of the president’s first state visits abroad, when he hailed the Soviet army’s special role in “liberating” North Korea from Japanese occupation in 1945.

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Nonetheless, Moscow issued firm condemnations of North Korea’s erratic and dangerous behaviour on the international stage in the mid-2000s, when Putin hoped to burnish his international reputation by playing mediator on the Korean Peninsula. No less important, the sweep of Russian history demonstrates the real balance of power between the two countries. During the early years of the Cold War, the North Korean regime relied on Soviet help to carve out territory. From there, it spent decades oppressing its population while dodging Soviet retaliation. While the Kim dynasty were never Russian pariahs, in other words, they were always treated as junior partners, to be praised or scolded as it suited Moscow. 

Since his 2022 invasion, however, Putin has been desperate for partners wherever he can find them. Now, the president makes naked attempts to rewrite history and paint Russia and Korea as old and equal partners. The security partnership signed this year, and North Korea’s increasing provision of soldiers and shells, seem to suggest that equality is being embraced by both sides. Yet despite the pageantry of the official dinners, and the finesse of the PR statements, Putin is clearly desperate for Kim Jong Un’s support. 

Notwithstanding recent Russia’s victories around places like Pokrovsk, that’s fundamentally down to its broad geopolitical frailty. Russia is today struggling with a deep crisis in military recruitment, fuelled mainly by the huge losses it’s suffered at the front. Each month, 30,000 men enter the military — and the same number are invalided home or killed on the battlefield. Despite the vast bonuses offered to contract soldiers who choose to enlist, which by some measures now account for 1.5% of the Russian spending, the state is still forced to scour the globe for mercenaries to support its war. A division of raw North Korean conscripts, ignorant of Russian and unfamiliar with their officers, would vanish if thrown into the Ukrainian meat grinder. 

And if its reliance on North Korea speaks to a military problem, meanwhile, Russia also leans on the DPRK economically. Though the Kim regime can certainly manufacture shells in vast numbers, reportedly shipping some five million to its Russian allies, many appear to be badly made. The fact that Putin is accepting them anyway suggests that he has nowhere else to turn. That’s clear elsewhere: though Russia is now spending some 40% of its budget on defence, and refurbishing factories to pump out munitions, it remains totally reliant on external partners like North Korea. Despite boasting an economy some 10 times larger than North Korea’s, in short, Russia, seems incapable of waging an independent war on Ukraine — let alone launching an attack on Nato as part of some nefarious plot to explode the global order. Pyongyang, for its part, can only offer marginal support to their desperate Russian partner, assistance they’re anyway giving mainly to extract cash, scientific research, and other goodies.

Despite the ominous signs, then, the purported axis of evil probably shouldn’t worry Western leaders. On the contrary, the June alliance points to Moscow’s ever weaker position on the world stage. Putin, frantic to pick up whatever scraps of men and materiel he can, has been reduced to begging. And as soon as the North Koreans spot a better deal, particularly from China, they’ll have little incentive to remain loyal to Moscow. Should China demand or buy Pyongyang’s support for an invasion of Taiwan, Putin’s war will be forgotten in an instant.

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Russia may win some small gains from its North Korean ally. But 10,000 troops — as unwelcome as their presence in Ukraine undoubtedly is — ultimately won’t change the course of the war. Yet if the world at large has little to fear from Putin and Kim’s fair-weather friendship, might the West have an opportunity here? If, after all, Kim Jong Un can be tempted to stop providing shells and soldiers to Moscow, either by China or a Western coalition, might an exhausted Russia be forced to retreat from Ukraine? Such a move won’t, of course, win the war alone. Re-supplying Ukraine’s own exhausted military is vital too. Yet squeezing Russia’s supply of weapons would surely hamper Putin’s ability to hold the line, or indeed prepare for another attack against Ukraine. Divided by ideological differences, and opposing medium-term goals, the new “axis of evil” is hardly an axis at all. 

But Limonov’s story can’t be captured by Manichean binaries. It is more a profound tale of the inevitable downfall of the bohemian contrarian.

A poet courting fame through infamy, Limonov rebelled against conventions and revelled in being vilified. His heroes were not Russian tsars or religious zealots but the Sex Pistols and Yukio Mishima; his writing style was more influenced by Louis-Ferdinand Céline than Leo Tolstoy. “I did not want to play their game. I wanted, as in Russia, to be outside the game, or if possible, if I could, to play against them,” said the narrator of his first novel, It’s Me, Eddie, which remains his most important work.

Written in the United States in 1976, the book would be considered autofiction in today’s terms, based as it is on Limonov’s life as a welfare-relying immigrant in New York. The narrator of this picaresque tale is resentful towards what he sees as a racist and corrupt country and is driven by dreams of sex with both men and women. Writing of this desire in disturbing detail, Limonov’s ability to ditch the antiquated style of classical Russian literature would prove scandalous in his native land. Decades later, a Russian activist would famously say that she learnt to perform oral sex by reading Limonov.

Born into the family of a low-level NKVD (future KGB) officer during the Second World War, Eduard Savenko grew up in Kharkiv in Soviet Ukraine. A friend of petty thieves, the young Eduard won a poetry competition in 1957. He would choose Limonov for a pseudonym and conquer the local unofficial poetry scene before setting his sights on Moscow where he would begin to earn a living as a poet.

Limonov was forced out of Russia in 1974 when he refused to become an informant for the KGB. He migrated to New York where he rallied against Western hypocrisy and free-market capitalism, on the one hand, and the Soviet system, on the other — both to him were equally oppressive. While more and more ordinary Russians were realising their country was a failed state, Limonov wasn’t impressed by the staunch anti-communism of dissidents back home either. The émigré Limonov was, instead, developing a revanchist nostalgia whose forbidden appeal would soon conquer masses.

The collapse of communism brought Limonov back to Moscow. He almost immediately assumed the role of revolutionary-in-chief, founding in 1993 the National Bolshevist (NazBol) Party. Its manifesto was an awkward mix of Russian chauvinism, vulgar communism, Italian fascism, and geopolitical wisdom of Ayatollah Khomeini, while its logo was a marriage of communism and Nazism. It called for the creation of a new Russian empire with nationalised land, the abolishment of human rights, and the annexation of all Russian-populated neighbouring lands from Ukraine’s Crimea to Northern Kazakhstan and swathes of the Baltic states. Soon, he commanded an army of young blokes, idealists and thugs who called themselves “Nazbols”, ready to go to barricades for him. Such radicalism was a slap in the face for the then-liberal Kremlin and well-meaning public. Something like a Hamas National Front would be an equivalent in today’s Britain.

With time, the Nazbols developed an authentic, macabre, youth subculture with its own lore, music universe and slogans like, “Yes, death!” They published a cult zine titled Limonka, slang for a hand grenade and a pun on Limonov’s name. It was coined by Slava Mogutin, a young gonzo journalist who would later become a prolific chronicler of queer life in New York. He was among many conceptual artists, crusading philosophers, journalists, actors, cool kids and lost souls surrounding Limonov at that time.

While Limonov also engaged in war tourism, briefly fighting alongside ethnic Serbs in the Bosnian War and separatists in the Georgian Civil War, it was not the guerrilla cosplay alone that attracted thousands of young Russians into the party. By the late Nineties, crime and corruption were rampant, and people felt crushed by the new market economy. President Boris Yeltsin, the face of Russia’s new democracy, was permanently drunk, embarrassing himself in front of foreign leaders, with his family engulfed in corruption scandals. By contrast, the athletic and eloquent Limonov was a fresh face. At unauthorised rallies and on TV shows, Limonov would expound his revanchist politics: the collapse of the Soviet Union was a crime, Crimea should be Russian, and Nato and America were plotting to destroy Russia.

Today, these sound like lines from Putin’s annual press conferences that drag on for many hours. Yet in the Nineties, every word was a challenge to the status quo — to the Kremlin’s recently adopted faith in democracy and its new friendship with Bill Clinton. Everyone knew the future was liberal. Applications for the Nazbols to be officially registered as a party and run in the elections were thrown away. There was no place for the lost cause of Soviet nostalgia.

When a former KGB officer took over in 2000 as a hand-picked heir of Yeltsin and his oligarchic backers, like his predecessor he at first had little time for revanchism. Back then, Putin dismissed any talk of annexing Crimea as provocation, and was ready to admit at least some of Russia’s historic crimes. And he was not going to tolerate real opposition. A year into Putin’s first term, Limonov was arrested by the FSB. He was sentenced to four years in prison on charges of possessing weapons and running armed groups.

While in prison, he resumed his literary career, completing several novels and revolutionary manifestos. The time for revolution, however, had passed; Putin made sure there would not be one. Limonov still tried his luck, revitalising the Nazbols once he was released on parole in 2003. It was now a different party: gone were the days of fascist cosplay. Its new manifesto called for greater freedom of press and the development of civil society and grassroots politics.

Limonov would paint a cold and frightening portrait of the new Russia. In his 2006 book, Limonov vs Putin, he described a poor, dark, hopeless place with freedoms taken away by an all-powerful president. But, he wrote, the secret was that Putin was not a strong man. He was a power-hungry mediocrity, a liar and a coward afraid of the people he ruled over. He could be summed up as: “Short legs. Narrow shoulders”, a mocking portrayal which would be popularised years later by Alexei Navalny. In response, the Nazbol party was officially outlawed and proscribed as a “terrorist organisation”, on one list with al-Qaeda.

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Cornered, Limonov started an elaborate dance with the liberal opposition. Whatever their past disagreements, they now had a common goal: to prevent Putin’s third presidential term. In 2011, he launched a presidential bid, endorsed by the united opposition front. As always, he was refused registration. Yet, for a few fateful years, Limonov would be among the leaders of a protest movement that held mass rallies just across the Kremlin. For the first time during his presidency, it felt like Putin had lost control of the capital if not the whole country.

Putin persevered and, having crushed the opposition, turned to Ukraine. In 2014, he annexed Crimea and occupied parts of the Donbas. Immediately, Limonov, always a Russian nationalist, suspended his political career and endorsed the land grab. By invading Ukraine, Putin was not fulfilling Limonov’s dream of restoring Russia’s greatness. The president used revanchist slogans and nationalist fantasies to expand his personal rule to a foreign country. It was the same rule that had brought nothing but “humiliation, suffering, misery and unfreedom”, according to Limonov’s book. Regardless, yesterday’s sworn enemy of the Kremlin was now a paid guest on state TV shows.

Limonov’s life was a series of conquests and break-ups. He would waltz into an exclusive literary or political circle and become its darling, grow disillusioned and move onto the next one. From the small poetry scene in Kharkiv to Moscow literary circles, the émigré community in New York, and so on. The Kremlin, though, wouldn’t totally yield to Limonov’s charms by joining his long list of conquests. The award for crossing the floor was modest: invitations to the state talk shows or a column on the Russia Today website. Unlike third-rate Western actors or loyal local proxies, he would never be showered in praise or granted exclusive meetings in the Kremlin. And his party, despite its members fighting for Putin in Ukraine, remained outlawed.

Increasingly cranky and listless in the last years of his life, Limonov wouldn’t admit that the late Putinism that he allied himself with was the total sum of all things he hated: a declining empire destroying its neighbours, an economy dominated by billionaires but propped up by migrant labour, with officials seeking to control the citizens’ private lives.

His life is best understood as a cautionary tale of the downfall of the bohemian provocateur, as an illustration of what happens to a politics based on vibes, not principles. He was too focused on attacking the delusions of his own intellectual class — the “opinion leaders” who were stuck in the anti-communism of their youth — to clearly see what they were up against. Ironic detachment and outrageous provocation were Limonov’s powerful tools in exposing the corruption and hypocrisy of post-Soviet Russia’s liberal establishment. But when his slogans were cynically appropriated by Putin’s anti-liberal establishment, Limonov failed to see that the new regime was even more corrupt and ruthless.

And his descent was not unusual — other provocative outsiders in the West have undergone a similar trajectory. Figures like the comedian Russell Brand went from asking inconvenient questions to feeding conspiracy-minded audiences a steady ration of rants about “globalist elites”, vaccines, “Ukrainian Nazis” and “revelations” about 9/11. Equally predictable was Kanye West’s evolution from protesting the tyranny of groupthink to saying, “I like Hitler.”

In today’s angry and polarised world, where any opinion or artistic act must be pigeon-holed into a political camp, there is little space left for the provocative outsider. There is nothing uniquely Muscovite about Limonov’s downfall — the writer, militant, and counterculture icon is, rather, just another of the West’s very own enfants terribles.