Since 2017, Germany has led NATO’s multinational force in Lithuania, with troops from eight other countries rotating in and out to serve alongside German forces. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 prompted Vilnius to seek firmer guarantees that its allies would come to its defense if the Baltic states became the Kremlin’s next target. Berlin responded by committing to permanently station an armored brigade in Lithuania, establishing a combat-ready deterrent on NATO’s northeastern flank. The move is unprecedented for the Bundeswehr: this is its first permanent military deployment abroad since the Second World War. Latvia and Estonia sought similar commitments from Canada and the UK, respectively, but Lithuania alone secured an entire brigade.

Addressing parliament in Vilnius two years ago, Germany’s Defense Minister Boris Pistorius promised that German troops would stand shoulder to shoulder with their Lithuanian counterparts, ready to defend the country — part of a wider Alliance commitment to protect every inch of NATO territory. A year later, in May 2025, Chancellor Friedrich Merz attended the commissioning ceremony of the newly created 45th Panzer Brigade against the backdrop of a grand neoclassical basilica in Vilnius’s Cathedral Square. “The security of Lithuania is also our security”, he declared. “The protection of Vilnius is the protection of Berlin.” 

The brigade has its own coat of arms, worn on every soldier’s uniform. A black Staufer lion, the heraldic emblem of Germany’s medieval Hohenstaufen dynasty, stands next to a sword and Gediminas’s Tower, one of Vilnius’s most famous landmarks. Green, red, black and gold, the colors of the German and Lithuanian flags, tie the design together. 

Germany’s newly formed brigade will be supplied with state-of-the-art equipment designed to repel a potential Russian attack, including kamikaze drones, Leopard 2 A8 main battle tanks, Puma infantry fighting vehicles, and Panzerhaubitze 2000 self-propelled howitzers. It brings together combat battalions from Bavaria and North Rhine-Westphalia, backed by artillery, reconnaissance, armored engineers, logistics and signals units. Next month, more than 700 drones will take to the skies as the 45th Brigade puts new reconnaissance, strike and loitering munition capabilities to the test. 

The arrival of the 45th Brigade marks a major shift in how NATO plans to defend the Baltics. Under the old “tripwire” strategy, a small force would be expected to hold off an attack until allies arrived to push the invaders back. Now, the aim is to stop an invasion from the outset. That means keeping tanks and other heavy equipment in Lithuania, ready to fight, rather than waiting weeks for them to arrive from Germany or other NATO countries.

One of the brigade’s main jobs is protecting the Suwałki Gap, a 40-mile strip of land along the border between Poland and Lithuania — the vital land link between the Baltic states and the rest of NATO. It’s the region’s Achilles Heel or “neuralgic point”, as the German Lieutenant Colonel escorting me puts it. 

We drive through a small village and stop at a level crossing. A freight train rumbles past, heading west from neighboring Belarus towards Russia’s exclave of Kaliningrad. Perched on the Baltic Sea, it is a Russian island inside the European Union, sandwiched between Poland to the south and Lithuania to the north and east. The wagons are marked “Sodruzhestvo”, the name of Russia’s top agro-industrial conglomerate. Lithuanian border guards constantly monitor the trains to prevent illegal military equipment from passing through the European Union corridor. 

Western intelligence agencies have long suspected Russia may have nuclear weapons stockpiled in Kaliningrad. Since 2016, Moscow has stationed 9K720 Iskander short-range missiles there, capable of carrying nuclear warheads. Yet new research conducted by the Baltic International Security Centre (BISC), a nonprofit policy institute, suggests that the region has been “stripped bare” of ground forces and air defenses because Russia is diverting resources to the war in Ukraine. 

“They may have nuclear warheads,” says Edward Lucas, security expert and director of the BISC, “but they haven’t got anything to launch them on because the missiles are all busy bombarding Ukrainian cities.” He adds that there is no real difference from NATO’s point of view whether a nuclear warhead is launched from Kaliningrad or from a missile on a Sukhoi Su-57 bomber or from a submarine because “in the end, if Russia wants to go nuclear, it’s not going to be the nuclear warheads in Kaliningrad that are decisive”.

However, he stresses that the exclave remains an important hub for hybrid operations such as GPS electronic warfare or propaganda and, crucially, serves as a useful pretext for escalation. In September, Moscow accused NATO of plotting to blockade Kaliningrad and threatened nuclear retaliation. More recently, the Russian military website Voennoye Delo suggested that a hypothetical blockade might require Russia to seize a 100-kilometer swathe of Baltic territory to secure access to the exclave. 

Such sabre rattling, Lucas tells me, has led to a complete overhaul of defense policy in both Poland and the Baltic States. “I can’t quote him by name,” he says, “but a Baltic official once told me, “If a seagull shits in the harbour, we know what it had for breakfast when it last went to Russia, who it dates, where it nests. And what its parents did during the Soviet era”.” In other words, monitoring Kaliningrad is a priority for the Valstybės Saugumo Departamentas (VSD), Lithuania’s counterintelligence agency.

Despite heightened vigilance, Lithuanians feel increasingly exposed. In May, residents of Vilnius received emergency alerts on their phones ordering them to immediately take cover amid suspected drone activity near the Belarusian border. It was the first major alert to send people in an EU and NATO capital scrambling for shelter since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Then, in September, an Italian fighter jet on a NATO mission shot down a drone over Lithuanian airspace. A Ukrainian military source identified the wreckage as belonging to a Geran-2, a long-range attack drone widely used by Russia. 

Across Vilnius, bright yellow signs reading “Priedanga” — “shelter” — sprung up following Russia’s full-scale assault on Ukraine in 2022. But when frightened residents rushed to them in May, some found the doors locked. Others described them as unfit for purpose: dilapidated and covered in cobwebs. The chaos and complaints prompted Prime Minister Inga Ruginienė, who had sheltered with the President in a strategic government bunker, to apologize and promise a review. But many fear their country is woefully unprepared for worst-case scenarios. In 2016, the US think tank RAND war-gamed a Russian attack on the Baltics and reached a chilling conclusion: without more NATO troops on the ground, Russian forces could overrun the Baltic states in just 36 to 60 hours. Lithuania has been a NATO member for more than two decades but that did not prevent an MP from Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party publicly questioning Lithuania’s independence in Russia’s State Duma four years ago.

Most Lithuanians know from bitter experience what it means to be controlled by Russia. Memories of the Soviet occupation, which lasted nearly half a century after the Second World War, are still fresh. Almost every family has relatives who were murdered or sent to gulags in Siberia. There’s a dark history with the Germans too. Vilnius was once known as the “Jerusalem of the North”, home to at least 55,000 Jews and a celebrated tradition of Torah scholarship. Across Lithuania, Jews made up nearly a tenth of the population. But under Nazi occupation, the country suffered one of the highest per-capita rates of Jewish murder in Europe.

Today, though, Lithuanians are grateful for German support. The government has pledged up to €1.7 billion to construct housing, training areas and support facilities while the Germans supply the military hardware and the troops. Bundeswehr soldiers are applauded in the streets and people buy them drinks. Lithuania’s national army has surrendered its new garrison at Rokantiškės to the Bundeswehr; men from its own infantry are sleeping in tents and portacabins until the Germans’ facility is ready. 

Germany’s ambassador to Lithuania recently praised the new modern barracks at Rūdninkai, near the Belarusian border. Each soldier gets a private en-suite room, a queen-size bed and a kitchenette. With gleaming sports facilities and vast windows overlooking the pine forest, the barracks could almost pass for a hotel rather than a military base. For soldiers bringing their families to Lithuania, homes in or near Vilnius are less than an hour away. German schools and kindergartens have opened in both the capital and Kaunas, the country’s second-largest city.

Despite the warm welcome and all the perks on offer, the Bundeswehr is struggling to find enough volunteers for the brigade, which is due to be fully operational by the end of next year. The German defense ministry says around 80% of the brigade’s 5,000 posts are filled, but key roles remain vacant, particularly IT technicians, tank mechanics and medics. These specialists are in short supply across the Bundeswehr, which struggles to compete with civilian employers.

Ambivalent attitudes towards the military may in part explain the Bundeswehr’s recruitment problems. In Berlin, soldiers were once warned for their own safety to change into civvies before going home from work. Germany’s unease with its army was shaped by the atrocities of the Nazi era and decades of anti-militarist sentiment. Now uniformed soldiers get free train tickets, and nobody bats an eyelid. Yet growing respect for the military has not erased divisions over plans to introduce a new form of military service. The prospect of a draft has already fueled protests, particularly after the government introduced mandatory medical checks this January for 18-year-old men. Last month, tens of thousands of students walked out of class in cities across Germany carrying banners with anti-war messages including “conscription means cannon fodder” and “We are peaceful, what about you?” 

All this gives political ammunition to those at the extremes of Germany’s political spectrum who resent government funds spent on Ukraine and who lobby to get sanctions against Russia lifted. Sahra Wagenknecht and Amira Mohamed Ali, co-leaders of the populist Left-wing BSW, have denounced Merz’s military service reform as “absolute madness” and empty warmongering. On the far-Right, the AfD is divided: while some back conscription for 18- to 25-year-olds, others rally behind the slogan “Keine Wehrpflicht für fremde Kriege” — “No Conscription for Foreign Wars”. They argue that young Germans should not be drafted to fight for “foreign geopolitical or power interests”, a thinly veiled swipe at NATO and German support for Ukraine.

During a coffee break at the Rukla base, I meet Staff Sgt Phil — Bundeswehr protocol insists that the media use only first names — from Hamburg, who trained as tank commander and drone operator. I ask him whether tanks are becoming obsolete in the age of drone warfare. He shakes his head. “They deliver a lot of firepower and can move speedily on the battlefield,” he says. “Plus you still need heavy armor to take and hold ground.” He adds that in Lithuania, German crews are fitting their Leopard tanks with anti-drone cages, electronic jammers and active protection systems to counter incoming threats. 

He says Lithuanians he meets in cafes and shops often tell him they feel safer because of the brigade’s presence. In Germany too, he adds, he is now increasingly thanked for his service. Like many in the Bundeswehr he believes that conscription is needed — the sooner the better — because you cannot create a combat-ready reserve overnight. The war in Ukraine, he says, has forced a change in mindset: “We’re beginning to understand that we can no longer take our liberty for granted.” 

But now, all the Russian tourists are gone and the border traffic has ground to a halt. The Allegro train no longer runs. Finnish media recently called Imatra “the emptying city”. Its sprawling Tsar Outlet Village, which once catered to Russian shoppers, is deserted. Imatra’s economy, already reeling from the pandemic, is seriously ailing. The city has an unemployment rate of 16.4%, well above the national rate of just under 12%. And South Karelia is said to be losing an estimated €1 million in tourism revenue each day.

Many residents say it’s a worthwhile sacrifice. The border with Russia has been closed since late 2023, when the Finnish government accused Russia of weaponizing migrants by sending waves of asylum seekers into Finland. Helsinki claimed this was retaliation for the Nordic country’s decision to join Nato earlier that year, a choice made in the aftermath of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The Finnish government responded by closing the entire 1,340-kilometer border and announcing the construction of a 200-kilometer border fence. The forbidding metal barrier was finished last month, but the beefing up of security continues. On Monday, the Finnish government announced that it was procuring one million anti-personnel landmines for the border, following a decision by Helsinki and other regional capitals to withdraw from a humanitarian UN treaty banning their use.

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The border region’s economic decline and rapid militarization are emblematic of the entire Nordic region’s radically changed approach to relations with Russia and the United States. During the Cold War and to a lesser extent after it, Finland and Sweden managed relations with Moscow through a combination of pragmatic diplomacy, deterrence, and trade. Today, after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, both diplomacy and trade have been severely downgraded. These two Nordic nations, which touted an enlightened neutrality during the Cold War and maintained good relations with both the Soviet Union and the West, have recently joined Nato. Meanwhile, New Defense Cooperation Agreements (DCAs) signed with Sweden, Finland, Norway and Denmark, have given the US armed forces “unimpeded access” to 47 military bases across the region, some of them perilously close to the Russian border. Sweden and Finland are even weakening their long-standing taboo on nuclear weapons.

As the region’s security order has undergone an accelerated Americanization, Nordic societies have also increasingly been remade in America’s image. They have become more militarized, more hawkish and more hostile to diplomacy, while their once-robust social welfare states have been gutted and inequality has soared. In Finland, there has even been a marked increase in homelessness. Many say the deteriorating quality of life is a small price to pay in the face of Russian aggression in Ukraine. But others warn that the Nordic countries have surrendered their sovereignty to an unpredictable United States, which has left them weaker and more exposed — rather than more secure.

Overt dependence on the United States would have been unimaginable not so long ago. During the Cold War, Finnish President Urho Kekkonen saw neutrality as a natural state for his country, a function of both its geography and its history of wars with Russia. Neutrality, Kekkonen said, “is not the product of abstract thought nor is it imported from elsewhere: it has grown out of the soil of Finnish history”. Finland’s neutral position was articulated in the preamble to the 1948 Agreement of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance with the Soviet Union, which emphasized the country’s desire “to remain outside the conflicts of the great powers”.

Complicating matters, however, was the fact that the same agreement also contained a military-consultation clause: if an adversary like Germany were to launch an attack on the USSR from Finnish soil, then Finland was expected to consult with Moscow about a response. The clause was politically sensitive, as it would permit the Soviets to exert diplomatic pressure on Helsinki. Indeed, Atlanticist critics have characterized Finland’s Cold War neutrality as quasi-neutrality, one that supposedly cloaked deference to the Kremlin in neutral garb. There is even a pejorative word for it: “Finlandisation”. And yet, Finland’s foreign policy was also effective. It kept the peace, and by the Eighties, Finland was one of the richest countries by per-capita income in the world, exceeding both Britain and France. When the Soviet Union collapsed, Finland lost one of its most important trading partners. The effect was immediate and devastating: Finnish economists call the ensuing crisis “The Great Depression of the Nineties”.

Sweden embraced neutrality much earlier, following a succession of wars with Russia, particularly the devastating 1808-9 Finnish War that saw a defeated Sweden lose more than a third of its territory. The country’s longstanding doctrine was “non-alignment in peace, so as to maintain neutrality in war”. Indeed, non-alignment was part of Sweden’s nation-branding as a “moral superpower”, which supporters saw as a “cherished model for the world” ripe for emulation. During the Cold War, the policy was best embodied in the figure of Social Democratic Prime Minister Olof Palme. The late premier, who was assassinated in 1986, presided over what Swedish sociologist Göran Therborn has called “a radical independent internationalism”. Over the years, Palme was photographed chomping on cigars with Fidel Castro, protested the war in Vietnam (prompting the US to recall its ambassador on two occasions), and likened the 1972 American bombing of Hanoi to “Guernica, Oradour, Babi Yar, Katyn, Lidice, Sharpeville, and Treblinka”.

While Finland’s and Sweden’s decisions to join Nato may have looked like an abrupt decision made entirely in response to the war in Ukraine, Euro-Atlantic integration had actually been a long, gradual process that started soon after the 1991 Soviet collapse. Finland’s choice to purchase 64 McDonnell Douglas F/A-18 hornet fighter jets from the US in the early Nineties was a critical turning point. Finland and Sweden joined the Partnership for Peace program in 1994, and began participating in military exercises with Nato. The next year, Finland and Sweden joined the EU, unofficially ending their neutrality. Throughout the early 2000s, both countries supplied troops to Nato-led combat and stabilization missions, including in Afghanistan and Kosovo. These steps laid the groundwork for their rapid accession to Nato. All that was required was a trigger that could convert public opinion to Atlanticism en masse, and Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine provided it. Nato accession was presented as the only response to the shock of the Ukraine war, and with no alternatives discussed and the public afraid, the final push towards membership was made with a conspicuous lack of debate.

But Nato accession was just the start. Some commentators, including former Finnish President Sauli Niinistö, say the recent defense agreements have been even more pivotal than Sweden’s and Finland’s decisions to join Nato. The surge in DCAs actually began shortly before Russia’s full-scale invasion, with Norway. In 2021, Oslo and Washington signed an “SDCA”, or Supplementary Defense Cooperation Agreement, which eventually gave US forces and contractors “unimpeded access” to 12 military bases. After the Russian invasion, the SDCA with Norway served as a template for the entire region. In December 2023, the US signed new DCAs with Finland, Sweden and Denmark, bringing the total number of Nordic military bases granting unimpeded access to the US military to 47. The DCAs also authorize the US to take “necessary and proportionate measures” to protect US forces “within or in the immediate vicinity of” said bases, meaning they give US military personnel and military police power over local civilians in and around these locations. In addition, they grant the US exclusive control over who enters specified military facilities, construction rights to build on Nordic soil, and jurisdiction over crimes committed by American soldiers.

The DCAs have not passed without controversy. In 2022, the top military and civilian prosecution authorities in Norway expressed concern that the Americans’ threat perception might differ from that of Norway’s. Some fear that US forces might therefore drag the country into a confrontation without its consent. Others worry that an enhanced American military presence in Nordic countries would make them obvious targets in a war between the US and Russia. These concerns grew more acute after the start of the US-Israeli war on Iran, when American allies in the Middle East found themselves on the receiving end of Iran’s retaliatory strikes. Meanwhile, analysts at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute have warned that a US decision to deploy missiles to Nordic bases close to Russian assets could provoke a situation akin to the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The agreements were signed with an initial duration of 10 years. Researcher Joel Linnainmäki, at the Finnish Institute for International Affairs, notes that this 10-year duration “somewhat cushions against political turbulence in the transatlantic relationship”. The DCAs were drawn up at a time of both deteriorating regional security and uncertainty over trans-Atlantic security guarantees. With the specter of Donald Trump omnipresent, the Nordic states sought stronger bilateral defense relations with the US outside of Nato. The DCAs also reflect the belief that even the Nordics’ accession to Nato is insufficient to counter the Russian threat.

“The underlying idea has been that Nato alone is ultimately not enough,” Markku Kangaspuro, professor and research director at the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki, tells me. “Rather, the commitment of the United States is indispensable for a military deterrent that, in the final analysis, rests on nuclear weapons.”

Indeed, Sweden and Finland are doing away with their long-standing aversion to nuclear weapons, another dramatic transformation. During the Cold War, Finland championed disarmament and nonproliferation, hosting the first US-Soviet Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) in Helsinki from 1969 to 1972. Over in Stockholm, Prime Minister Palme joined a 25,000-strong anti-nuclear protest in 1983; demonstrators formed a four-mile human chain linking the American and Soviet embassies to protest against the planned deployment of 108 American missiles in Western Europe. The Stockholm protest was part of that year’s Europe-wide demonstrations against the stationing of US “Euromissiles” on the continent, which drew up to five million people.

The mass mobilization of the Eighties contrasts with the comparative silence that reigns today. In June, Finland lifted its blanket ban on nuclear weapons. The Nuclear Energy Act, on the books since 1987, had criminalized the import, transport, and possession of nuclear weapons on Finnish soil; amendments passed this summer have lifted those prohibitions. Kangaspuro tells me: “Finland is now signaling in many ways that its priority is no longer to promote international control and limitation of nuclear weapons, or nuclear disarmament, as it has done until now.” While there was political opposition to the decision and some small protests, it did not prompt demonstrations of the kind seen during the Cold War.

Similar changes have been floated in neighboring Sweden. Earlier this year, Defense Minister Pål Jonson said that Sweden should consider allowing nuclear weapons to be deployed on its territory in wartime. It was a pronounced shift from even just a few years prior, when both then-Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson and conservative leader Ulf Kristersson agreed that Sweden’s decision to join Nato should not change its prohibition on nuclear weapons on Swedish soil. Earlier this year, Sweden, Norway and Denmark were also among the first countries to join France’s Forward Nuclear Deterrence Initiative, while Finland became a member in mid-December last year. The war in Ukraine and Trump’s unpredictability have again made the unthinkable thinkable.

Meanwhile, Nordic countries have dramatically increased their defense spending in recent years. Sweden, Norway and Denmark have more than doubled their spending since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, while Finland has nearly doubled it. In Finland, the government has tied brutal austerity measures in part to wartime necessity. Campaigning in 2023, Riikka Purra, the chair of the nationalist Finns Party and current minister of finance, declared culture “a luxury service, which unfortunately costs too much money in present-day Finland”. As the Nordic countries have adopted a more US-dependent security policy, their economies have also grown to resemble the American one. The marketization of education and health care, rising inequality, and beefed-up military budgets are bringing once strong welfare states more in line with American free-market orthodoxy.

The Atlanticization of the Nordic states’ security policies occurred in tandem with the liberalization of their economies, and with direct and indirect influence from the United States. As Swedish historian Jenny Andersson describes it, during the late Sixties, the Swedish Employers’ Confederation (SAF) began to “actively promote international neoliberal ideas”, with the aim of changing attitudes towards the welfare state within Swedish society. Meanwhile, the neoconservative Swedish think tank Timbro, founded in 1978, “was directly modeled on the American Heritage foundation”. In 1982, SAF director Sture Eskilsson initiated the Market Economic Alternative for Sweden (MAS), adopted from the Heritage Foundation’s own Mandate for Leadership, a vast policy program prepared for Ronald Reagan’s administration during the early Eighties. One of the activists for MAS was Sweden’s uber-Atlanticist former Prime Minister Carl Bildt, who was a young MP at the time. In Finland, meanwhile, the adoption of economic liberalism was directly tied to the notion of “joining the West” — liberalization and free markets were always bound up with geopolitical alignment with Nato.

Today, between Trump’s demand that Europe spend more on its own defense and the threat of war with Russia, Nordic social welfare is being squeezed out of existence. The remnants of Cold War Nordic distinctiveness in both security and the economy are disappearing. These nations are gambling that all the breakneck changes are worth it. But by allowing the US armed forces unimpeded access to their military bases, the Nordic countries have sacrificed some of their sovereignty in pursuit of security. This has been presented to the public as an unambiguous good, with little discussion of the risks. But in tethering their fates to Washington’s whims, Nordic nations have reduced their own ability to act autonomously and painted a target on their own backs.

Diesel fuel trades in a global market. Gulf states usually provide 20% of this market, and Russia another 10%. Notwithstanding Donald Trump’s new plan to suspend sanctions on diesel imports from the latter, both these supplies have been severely disrupted. Yes, crude oil is now leaving the Gulf via pipelines, while a shuttle system of state-owned vessels, protected by the US Navy, ensures volumes very close to their pre-war level.

But shipments of refined products and petrochemicals have not recovered. Ukrainian drone attacks have damaged several Russian refineries, perhaps also explaining Trump’s rising anger with President Zelensky, whatever the truth of this latest “energy ceasefire”. China, for its part, has also prohibited the export of refined products in an effort to control domestic prices. Little wonder the rest of the world’s refineries are hard-pressed to meet demand. First of all, there are simply fewer refineries. In 2000, Britain had 18 refineries. Today it has four. Many of the closed refineries were too small to compete internationally, but high industrial electricity costs and environmental regulations also helped make them uneconomic.

Second, a barrel of crude oil contains a variety of molecules that refineries break down into different products: based primarily on their boiling points. Gasoline is a light distillate with a low boiling point. Diesel and jet fuel are middle distillates with higher boiling points, while marine bunker fuel is a heavy distillate. Most refineries are built to process specific types of crude and produce a specific mix of fuels. Separating the different segments of a barrel of crude oil is a complex process; refineries cannot always adjust quickly, even if demand shifts from one product to another.

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Another factor is the shipping industry, which uses 4% of global oil production. In 2020, the United Nations’ International Marine Organization dramatically shifted global energy demand, when it compelled the world’s ship owners to stop using heavy marine bunker fuel, and start burning more environmentally friendly fuels like marine gas oil. Unfortunately, marine gas oil comes from the same segment of the crude barrel as diesel and jet fuel. While the impact of this change was initially masked by Covid, which reduced oil demand, this has permanently increased demand for middle distillates. That, in turn, has raised the cost of all shipping, flying and heavy goods transport, and made diesel and jet-fuel prices more volatile.

Britain now produces only half of the roughly 500,000 barrels of diesel it consumes every day. The rest is imported. Since Russian supplies were suspended in 2022, most of those imports come from the US, Belgium, the Netherlands and the Middle East. All over the world, refineries that can produce diesel and jet fuel are operating at maximum capacity. In the US, capacity utilization has reached 98%, the highest utilization rate in a quarter of a century. The “crack spread”, which measures the difference between what a refinery pays for crude and what it sells product for, is now three times its historic average. If refineries could produce more diesel, they surely would.

The headline-grabbing news in the UK has been £2-a-litre diesel. However, the fuel’s retail price has actually risen by less than the price of crude oil. Dated Brent crude is up 70% this year, while the price of diesel has risen by only 40%. This is largely because, in the UK, two fifths of the price of diesel is tax: which does not vary with the price of crude. Moreover, dated Brent is a spot price that changes with the latest news, while refineries producing diesel operate on more stable long term contracts.

Things look very different in America. The United States is the world’s largest oil producer, and its largest diesel exporter. Most of those exports go to Latin America, not Britain. Nevertheless, diesel fuel prices in the US have risen by nearly 80%, compared with only 40% in the UK. In fact, while retail diesel prices in the UK have risen by a smaller percentage than the price of Brent crude, in the US the opposite is true.

With diesel prices reaching the equivalent of $200 per barrel in the US, and crucial midterms coming up, the Trump administration had ample motivation to act. America is exporting 30% of its diesel production into a global market. At the same time, America’s own strategic petroleum reserve is at its lowest level in 44 years. Between 2021 and 2025, the Biden administration drew down America’s reserve by 45% — or 245 million barrels — largely following the Russian invasion of Ukraine. During that same period, all the other G7 nations together drew down their own reserves by only 40 million barrels. In other words, the US government provided the global market with 85% of the oil used to calm markets after the Russian invasion.

Always a proponent of America first, President Trump concluded that other nations should now draw down their own stocks, rather than continue to rely on American reserves. Trump’s threat to ban US diesel exports has anyway been effective, resulting in a commitment by other G7 members to release 100 million barrels of oil over just four months. As a result of this agreement, diesel prices in both Europe and the United States have declined slightly. For his part, Trump has also signed an executive order granting fuel tax breaks, usually reserved for farmers, to truckers. This latest diesel-exporting agreement with Russia — while mattering more from a geopolitical perspective — is also perhaps intended to help drivers at the pump.

Whether any of this will bring down prices enough to benefit Republican election prospects next month remains to be seen. What may be more long-lasting is the damage done to public opinion on both sides of the Atlantic. Americans increasingly view European governments as freeriders: unwilling to meet their Nato defense commitments, but quite happy to use America’s strategic petroleum reserve and diesel exports to keep their own fuel prices down. As for the Europeans, they see a transactional Trump administration extorting its allies for domestic political purposes. Both sides have a point. Either way, the old political adage remains true: if loyalty is a sentiment, leverage is a fact.

What happened next has done little to allay concern.

Reports circulated that Shipilova had contracted pneumonic plague following a lab accident involving a broken test tube. Russian authorities deny this. They say there is no evidence of an accident involving dangerous pathogens and that testing has not established a connection between her illness and her work. Yet around 200 contacts have reportedly been placed under medical observation, parts of the hospital where she was treated were quarantined, and Anna Popova, the head of Russia’s public-health agency Rospotrebnadzor, flew to Siberia for an emergency meeting. One local government official confirmed over the weekend that Shipilova had died from the plague, only to later edit his statement to add the word “possibly”. Meanwhile, the world has seen footage of men in hazmat suits stalking the streets of Irkutsk.

For the moment, there is no sign of a spreading plague outbreak. No further infections have been identified among Shipilova’s contacts, and the World Health Organization (WHO) has assessed the public-health risk as “moderate to low” in Irkutsk, and “low” for the country as a whole, while seeking further information from Moscow.

But there is a more unsettling question lurking behind the headlines. What exactly goes on in a “plague institute” in Siberia? Might the organism involved have been altered in some way? Since Russia inherited part of the Soviet Union’s enormous biological warfare infrastructure, is it conceivable that this was not simply a laboratory accident, but pointed to something much more dangerous?

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So what do we know? It’s important to understand that there is nothing inherently sinister about having an anti-plague institute in Siberia. Plague did not disappear with the Black Death. Yersinia pestis still circulates naturally in populations of rodents and their fleas, including across parts of Russia, Mongolia and Central Asia. While human infections are relatively rare, the Irkutsk institute grew out of this natural prevalence. The regional anti-plague institute for Siberia and the Russian Far East has, for more than a century, monitored dangerous infections, investigated natural disease reservoirs and maintained specialist teams capable of responding to outbreaks of plague, anthrax, cholera and other serious infectious diseases.

In other words, its existence makes epidemiological sense. Nor is it uniquely Russian. Across the world, labs which are capable of working with dangerous pathogens are maintained. They are essential for diagnosing outbreaks, developing vaccines and treatments, and understanding diseases that might threaten us in future.

Russia does, however, have baggage. The Soviet Union secretly operated the largest-known biological weapons programme in history: Biopreparat. Soviet military scientists were working on pathogens which caused anthrax, smallpox and investigating whether they could be turned into effective weapons. Founded in the Twenties, it continued clandestinely even after they had become signatories of the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention. This history matters because it inevitably colours the interpretation of unexplained incidents at Russian biological facilities. Let’s not forget the smallpox outbreak of 1971.

But here is currently still no evidence that Shipilova encountered an engineered strain of plague; still less that Russia is developing a “pandemic weapon” at the institute. Could Yersinia pestis be used as a biological weapon? Certainly. Its potential has been recognised for decades. Pneumonic plague is particularly frightening because of its historical associations. Infection of the lungs can progress extremely rapidly and can spread between people through respiratory particles. Untreated, it is frequently fatal.

But plague today is not the Black Death. It is a bacterial infection for which effective antibiotics are readily available. If recognised and treated quickly, patients have a good chance of recovery. Public-health authorities also know how to contain it: isolate suspected pneumonic cases, identify and monitor contacts, provide preventive antibiotics where necessary and protect healthcare workers.

This also puts the Russian response into perspective. The extensive quarantine measures have fuelled speculation that the authorities know something they are not saying. Perhaps they do. But the measures themselves are not proof of an engineered pathogen, nor even that Shipilova acquired her infection in the laboratory. If doctors genuinely suspected pneumonic plague in somebody who had already been treated in hospital, isolating contacts and healthcare workers is precisely the precautionary response one would expect.

The more disturbing hypothetical is not that this was ordinary plague, but that it was an engineered form of the pathogen, deliberately altered to make existing defences less effective. Modern biotechnology raises possibilities that 20th-century biological weapons programmes did not possess. Pathogens might, in principle, be altered in ways that change their disease-causing properties or reduce the effectiveness of existing medical countermeasures.

Indeed, one of the great difficulties with biological threats is precisely that the same scientific capabilities can serve very different purposes. Scientists legitimately study how pathogens spread, why some variants cause more severe disease, and whether treatments will remain effective. But the knowledge and techniques needed to defend against biological threats can also potentially be repurposed to deliberately cause harm. The boundary between defensive research and activities that could contribute to weapons development is therefore not always visible simply by looking at the equipment inside a laboratory.

And this problem is becoming more important because the number of labs capable of conducting high-consequence biological research has grown. The Global BioLabs initiative, which I established at King’s College London, has documented a substantial expansion in maximum and high-containment laboratory capacity around the world. There are good reasons for this. Covid taught governments that the ability to detect emerging diseases, characterise pathogens and develop medical countermeasures must be part of national security.

Yet more labs and more work with dangerous pathogens also means more opportunity for something to go wrong. Of course buildings, protective equipment and elaborate operating procedures will reduce risk enormously. But they cannot abolish it. Equipment fails. Samples are mishandled. Procedures are breached. Humans tire. Researchers can be infected without immediately recognising their exposure.

We know this because it has happened before. After the 2003-SARS epidemic had been brought under control, laboratory-acquired infections subsequently occurred in Singapore, Taiwan and Beijing. In Beijing, one such infection led to further transmission outside the laboratory. But, accidents are not proof that dangerous-pathogen research should stop; they are proof that humans work in laboratories.

Covid should have forced us to confront the second half of this problem: not merely how to prevent lab accidents, but how to establish whether one has taken place.

Within weeks of Covid reaching Europe, when discussion of the origin of the enfolding pandemic was already becoming politically toxic, I argued that a credible investigation was needed to examine all plausible routes of emergence. Evidence of SARS-CoV-2‘s evolutionary history could not, by itself, establish how it first entered the human population. A naturally occurring virus could pass directly from animals to people. It could also, in principle, infect somebody collecting animals or samples in the field, or someone subsequently working with them.

Instead, the Covid origins question became trapped in geopolitics. On one side, to raise the possibility of a research-related accident came to be treated as equivalent to promoting a conspiracy theory. On the other, the absence of transparency was taken as proof that a lab leak had occurred. Intelligence agencies were asked to resolve questions that would require scientific, epidemiological and forensic investigation. Years later, we still lack a definitive explanation that commands broad international confidence. That failure is directly relevant to Irkutsk.

Traditional outbreak investigations start with straightforward questions. Who became ill? When? Where? What did they have in common? What were their likely exposures?

But when a plausible connection to a laboratory emerges, investigators need to be able to ask another set of questions. What pathogens were being held there? Which strains? What work was being conducted? Who handled them? Were any incidents recorded? Did staff report unusual illnesses? What do clinical samples, sequencing data, laboratory records and occupational-health records show?

The purpose of such an investigation is not to prove that a lab caused an outbreak. It is to provide a credible way of determining whether it did or didn’t. That capability remains surprisingly weak internationally. WHO can investigate disease outbreaks and request information, but it cannot compel a sovereign government to provide unfettered access to outsiders. Other international protocols, including the Biological Weapons Convention and the UN Secretary General’s mechanism for investigating allegations of biological-weapons, are primarily concerned with suspected use of deliberately engineered pathogens. But they were not designed as routine forensic systems to answer a more basic question: did an outbreak occur naturally, or was it the result of a laboratory accident?

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This creates a dangerous vacuum. We do not know whether Shipilova died from plague. We do not know whether she was exposed to anything at the Irkutsk institute. There is no proof that the pathogen involved was engineered, nor that this episode reveals a Russian pandemic-weapons programme. But nor should the world have to choose between taking Moscow’s assurances on trust and imagining the most frightening alternative.

What is needed now, then, is quite mundane: a clear diagnosis; an account of what Shipilova was working on; confirmation of whether a lab incident occurred; the results of testing and sequencing; and, ideally, sufficient independent scrutiny to make those findings credible. Essentially, we need informed transparency.

The gap between what is known and what is imaginable is where speculation flourishes. Covid demonstrated just how politically destructive that gap can become. The lesson from Irkutsk is, therefore, not that every unexplained illness in a biological researcher should be treated as evidence of a lab leak — still less a bioweapon. It is that, six years after Covid began, we still lack an international system capable of showing convincingly when one is not.

Certainly, Radoslaw Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, is prepping for it. “I have stocks of rice, I have a hand pump at home, and I have also made preserves from fruit from my own garden,” he told the Polish magazine Fakt last week.

It is easy to mock Sikorski and his jam. But he does have a point. In times of war, nobody cares about the percentage of GDP that their country is spending on defense: they care about food and water. Not  that our military leaders and planners will listen, though; soldiers like to talk about battles and gear, not rice and jam.

Tales of heroic battlefield victories are far more persuasive, after all, than those of supply chains. And yet, defeat often comes because of weakness elsewhere. A few years before Napoleon lost his famous battle at Waterloo, he had launched a disastrous attempt to invade Russia. Although the brutal winter contributed to his failure, Napoleon had struggled to keep his troops fed and healthy. Hunger and disease took a terrible toll. As much as the enemy, it was his supply chains that thwarted him.

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Likewise, when the German high command unveiled its master plan to invade France in August 1914, the generals hadn’t factored in an unexpected heatwave. The right wing of the German army was to invade France from the north and encircle Paris. But the soldiers were marching in thick woolen uniforms and carrying heavy backpacks in 30-degree heat. As the men advanced, the supply lines fractured leaving the troops exhausted, hungry and weakened.

Meanwhile the Allied naval blockade of 1914 triggered food shortages in Germany which escalated over the years into a full-blown humanitarian catastrophe. Germany and Austria did not lose the First World War on the battlefield alone, they also lost it in the warehouse and the kitchen. The people starved.

The food situation was better during the Second World War, but this time the critical shortage was of oil. Back then, the US produced over 60% of the world’s oil and together, the Allied powers controlled most of the global oil supply. But the German generals were heavily reliant on machinery that used diesel and the chronic shortage of oil was why Hitler diverted his troops from the outskirts of Moscow to the south of Russia: to capture the oil fields in Azerbaijan and the Caucasus. En route, they became trapped in Stalingrad and suffered their worst defeat of the Second World War.

The battlefield perspective of history, then, critically underestimates the importance of supply chains. The stories of Europe’s wars are understood much better in terms of logistics than in tales of battles.

And nothing has changed. One of the consequences of the Iran war is the fluctuating cost of crude oil. But that is only part of the story. As the Ukraine war has led to critical shortages of diesel and kerosene on global markets, the price of European diesel has gone through the roof. In a display of his classic short-termism, Donald Trump suggested that the US should stop supplying Europeans with diesel. He almost certainly did not think this through. If the US were to carry out his plan, Europe would suffer an immediate supply emergency. And we need only look at the vast number of diesel-powered lorries on European motorways to realize how critically reliant we are on the fuel. The economy would grind to a halt. It might be a smart idea if our leaders addressed that situation before heading into battle with the Russians.

But it’s not just diesel. The other shortage is natural gas. Iranian attacks have taken out 17% of liquid natural gas (LNG) production in Qatar, the world’s second largest LNG producer after America. Russia is the fourth — but Europeans have imposed an import ban on their gas. That’s why Europe is currently assessing whether it has enough fuel to get through the winter. And remember, this is still peacetime.

On the other side of the ledger is Russia. It, too, suffered from a diesel shortage last spring after Ukrainian attacks on its energy infrastructure. But Moscow immediately increased production in the east and halted exports of diesel to stabilize the situation. By doing so, Putin reduced the globally available supply of diesel and contributed to the rise in prices.

Russia’s food supply is also secure. This year, it had a bumper crop of grains, the wheat crop is forecast to be one of the best on record and oilseed production is also better than usual. Is this the “bad position” Rutte was talking about?

And let’s not forget those other vital commodities: good, old-fashioned money and debt. Russia is practically debt-free. It runs a small fiscal deficit because of the Ukraine war, but nothing compared with the crippling deficits of the US, France, and nowadays also Germany.

As a consequence, the West is vulnerable to a potentially crippling financial crisis. Last week, the interest rate on 10-year US Treasury bonds, the most important financial security on earth, rose to a 21-year high of 5.2%. Ordinary investors such as pension funds are dumping their US bond holdings because they are no longer secure following Joe Biden and Donald Trump outbidding each other in terms of fiscal irresponsibility.

All the while, the war in Ukraine drags on. And could get much worse this winter. The peace process is effectively dead; Putin gave up on it after Ukraine rejected his demand for the entirety of the Donbas region and is now determined to achieve his military goals by war alone. Ukraine is running short of interceptor missiles and so is more vulnerable to attacks on critical infrastructure. And there is no sign of Ukraine’s western supporters stepping up military supplies — if only because they need what they have for themselves. Exacerbating the situation in Europe are the attacks, possibly orchestrated by Russia, on western supply infrastructure for Ukraine within Germany and Poland.

So this is how the Ukraine war risks escalating. Consider if Russia shoots down a plane over Nato territory carrying supplies to Ukraine. If Nato were to retaliate with a strike on Russia, we would be at war. Over the past few months, my assessment of this scenario has shifted from small but non-trivial, to one with a significant probability.

We should be under no illusion about a war with Russia. We are absolutely not in a position to win. Whose bond markets are going to be blown up first? Who is going to run out of interceptor missiles first? Thanks to the much maligned Common Agricultural Policy, Europe is not going to run out of food. But on every other count — military, energy, finance — Europe is at a disadvantage.

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That’s not all. There is a relatively plausible scenario in which Ukraine and Iran merge into a single West Eurasian war — and become the ultimate proxy conflict between the US and China. The love-in between Trump and President Xi Jinping of China notwithstanding, the rivalry between the US and China is and will remain the dominant geopolitical story of our time.

Trump’s war against Iran and Putin’s war against Ukraine have demonstrated how difficult it is even for a larger power to impose its will on a smaller adversary. Putin may have the advantage over Ukraine, but his struggles there suggest that war against Nato wouldn’t produce a quick or decisive victory.

More likely, it would be the kind of war where, in the end, nobody would care who won and who lost. You might as well stock up with jam.

Following a Russian strike on an air-defense system in Poland a week before, which Putin framed as retaliation for Nato involvement in the war in Ukraine, the alliance has sheepishly declared Article V. But, leaning on the North Atlantic Treaty’s legal technicalities, Donald Trump has refused to intervene, preferring to support European allies in “other ways”. Without American backing, only a handful of European states have deployed their armed forces to bolster Poland and Estonia. And with a second Russian army assembling in western Belarus, and the prospect of missiles flying at Warsaw from Kaliningrad, Poland’s large and robust military is mostly tied up at home. As American envoys arrive in Moscow to negotiate Putin’s terms on Estonia, and likely much of Nato’s east for that matter, British commanders aboard HMS Duncan train their guns on the Neustrashimy, a Russian frigate just appeared on their radar. With fighters screaming into action overhead, the Duncan’s crew hold their breath, as their ship enters the range of Russian guns.

I’m hardly the first observer to speculate on what war between Russia and Nato might look like — and, given the storm clouds gathering in Eastern Europe, I surely won’t be the last. After months of escalating Russian gray-zone attacks against Nato, ranging from drone incursions to stray missiles and attempted bombings at Leipzig airport, warnings about Putin’s plans for Europe have grown louder on both sides of the Atlantic. And now, just last week, Polish and Lithuanian leaders have both separately claimed to have intelligence that Russia is planning “accidental” rocket and drone strikes on pro-Ukrainian members of Nato, a conclusion corroborated by Emmanuel Macron. Together with CIA chief John Ratcliffe’s unannounced visit to Moscow last month, among other things to warn Putin off attacking Nato, the atmosphere feels worryingly similar to the months leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.

Yet if a flashpoint on Nato’s borders appears increasingly likely, we equally shouldn’t expect a shooting war to start tomorrow. If he does indeed choose to throw his armies westward, Putin’s aim will first be to break the alliance’s internal cohesion, and to exploit its central weakness in an age of hybrid warfare: that the cost of actually honoring Nato’s self-defense clause is too much for most members to contemplate, until it’s too late anyway. It helps, here, that just like in Ukraine, Putin’s goal wouldn’t really be recovering lost territories. As always, rather, it’d be about control. Removing Nato as a cohesive bloc would allow Russia to once again dictate terms to its European neighbors, a generational shift in the balance of power on the continent, and marking the apotheosis of Putin’s decades-long political project. And, if all went to plan, the Russian premier could plausibly achieve all of this without triggering the world war many in the West have feared.

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The first phase of any Russian provocation campaign would likely start with a strike on a border crossing between Poland and Ukraine. Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk has already warned of just such an attack, claiming that one has already been foiled via a joint Polish-Ukrainian operation. Russian forces have already been striking targets mere kilometers from the Polish border, and attacked a civilian Warsaw-Kyiv train not long after European officials including Boris Johnson had traveled along the line. Hitting border crossings would benefit Russia from several standpoints: Putin could plausibly claim attacks were accident; could make weapons shipments to Ukraine via Poland more logistically difficult; and crucially, could broaden the “acceptable” field of operations of the Ukraine war.

Now is where things would start to get really dangerous, with drones of the sort that were shot down by Nato jets over Lithuania this week finally starting to find their targets, striking critical energy or security infrastructure close to the border with Belarus. Such strikes may start innocuously enough, with drones “accidentally” hitting unmanned border watchtower or rural power lines. But then, one might damage an oil pipeline in Latvia; or a critical LNG terminal in Lithuania; or even a section of Poland’s Rzeszów-Jasionka Airport, which serves as a logistics hub for transferring Western arms to Ukraine.

Ultimately, though, the real aim of such attacks would not be material damage — but instead making low-level air assaults a regular part of European life. Poles, Germans, and Lithuanians alike have already become inured to headlines about Russian-sponsored arson attacks or drone incursions, and it’s not a huge stretch to imagine they’d do the same with this new wave of provocations. That matters: for despite the alliance’s tough talk, no one, including Putin, realistically expects that Nato would go to war with Russia over a damaged pipeline, no matter how important it might be. We already have clear proof of this: Nato failed to act even after a Russian drone struck a residential building in the Romanian city of Galați in May, injuring two residents. The trouble with the alliance’s intentionally defensive framework is that there is no clearly stated middle ground; war and peace are the only two options available. And, within such binary parameters, Nato will almost always choose an insecure peace over a highly disruptive total war.

All the same, European Nato states would have to send a message to Moscow sooner or later. Rather than striking at Russian soil directly, however, they’re more likely to give Ukraine the intelligence and hardware to hit drone-launching sites on their behalf. In the end, though, politicians in Nato’s east would still have to signal to their citizens that they were willing to take decisive steps to protect them and their infrastructure, and would finally take a leap into the unknown: shooting down Russian projectiles heading toward their borders. This is something Polish leaders have been discussing for years, and within such a volatile threat environment, it would be the obvious next step for the alliance short of full-scale war.

At this point, for Putin, all the pieces would be in place for the final step in the escalation ladder. The Russian leader, and the Russian public for that matter, have considered themselves to be in a de facto state of war with Nato for quite some time now. Not only would all of these developments make this even clearer, but would also fit squarely within the foundational push of Putin’s national narrative. Russian aggression against Georgia in 2008, Ukraine in 2022, and the West in 2026 has always been justified by the politics of grievance — and, by becoming directly involved in Ukraine, Nato will have crossed a red line. Coming off the high of a record win in Russia’s latest State Duma elections, Putin’s party would gladly use these events as fuel for another, much-anticipated mass mobilization, adding some 300,000 new conscripts to his armed forces. Russian authorities would still face plenty of resistance, but much less than if the drive had been solely framed around the war in Ukraine.

With Europe besieged but complacent, Putin could then make his biggest gamble: a direct missile or drone strike against a Nato battery involved in aerial combat in Ukrainian airspace. Poland’s Small Narew surface-to-air missile system, stationed in the quaint city of Zamość near the Ukrainian border, would make a perfect target. And this time, there would be no beating around the bush: Russia would own the attack, framing it as a retaliation for Nato intrusion in Ukraine, and demanding that the alliance reverse course to safeguard Russia’s “legitimate security concerns”.

A tired Europe would finally consider Article V at Poland’s request. But the outcome would be a foregone conclusion: the appetite and social cohesion necessary for a war of this scale simply isn’t there, especially in Washington. What’s crucial to understand here is that, in a Nato-Russia shadow war, there wouldn’t be some single event, like the 1939 invasion of Poland, that suddenly snaps Europe from its lethargy. This is what lies at the core of Putin’s strategy: even if the frog finally realizes it’s being boiled, things will be too far-gone for it to gather the strength to jump out the pot.

Far from Nato’s frontline, meanwhile, publics in both Western Europe and the US would hardly be willing to leap headfirst into a conflict with Putin: the strike on Zamość would hardly be shocking at this point. More than that, Putin’s rhetoric of victimhood would play well with both MAGA and Left-wing campists, who’d probably see the circumstances of the Zamość strike as yet another reason to disengage from both Ukraine and Europe. With the Iran war still unresolved, meanwhile, Trump would see no reason to commit troops to a European theater he has long seen as marginal — especially if Pete Hegseth’s “force posture review” ends with the withdrawal of up to 25,000 American soldiers from Europe later this year.

Though the US might acquiesce to an Article V declaration, in short, it would likely also use the Treaty’s open-ended language around mutual-assistance obligations to weasel its way out of fighting. Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico has already stated he would do exactly that if Article V were ever invoked. Of course, no one will miss Slovak troops in the event of a conflict with Russia, but the lack of American involvement would surely dissuade many smaller countries from sending help. So Article V or not, make no mistake — American apathy would break the alliance, something Putin himself is well aware of.

Nato structures may remain strong on paper, in this scenario, but the organization would actually resemble a malleable “coalition of the willing” — far more than an all-encompassing defensive alliance. That would be a massive blow for the bloc’s frontline states, and with dramatically lower stakes and a broader field of movement, Putin would act accordingly. Any strike against Poland likely wouldn’t lead to an actual invasion, but it would keep its forces locked in a cross-border standoff. That leaves Estonia. Though Britain, France, Germany and Poland, perhaps alongside Denmark or Canada, are likely to send troops or ships to defend a threatened Tallinn government, US indifference precludes a broader campaign. Even nearby Sweden and Finland would likely be cautious about overextending themselves too early, mobilizing their populations but then remaining holed up for whatever comes next.

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What would come next? Certainly, whatever the limitations of the Russian military machine, victory for the new anti-Putin coalition would be far from guaranteed. Yet even if, to borrow our scenario, the Neustrashimy’s commander relented off Hiiumaa, or else engaged HMS Duncan, lost, and rendered Russia unable to enforce a blockade, Putin might still hope to carve a new European order from the chaos — especially if he felt he still enjoyed Trump’s good graces.

Alongside what we might call the “Belarusification” of Ukraine, that would surely include attempts to disarm the Baltics, while keeping heavyweights like Poland contained and self-interested. To be clear, Putin would likely be unsuccessful in meeting all of his goals here. Indeed, surrounded by sycophantic generals, he may well stumble. But like in Ukraine, after suffering an initial loss in Estonia, the Russians could yet regroup, adjust their strategy, and lock Nato’s rump in a fresh quagmire, turning border cities like Narva into Bakhmuts on the Baltic. Whatever happens, Putin will understand that, without America, the old equation in Europe has gone, while his new opponents will hardly have time to react.

Some might see these hypotheticals and conclude that the only way out for Nato is to disengage completely from Ukraine. But this would simply kick the can further down the road — Russia at this stage sees Ukraine as merely one theater within a much greater war over the future of Europe. Even if Trump decides to unilaterally welcome Russia back into America’s embrace, Putin’s steadily escalating gray-zone war with European Nato would anyway likely continue, regardless of events in Washington or Kyiv. The choice facing the Europeans, then, is not simply between peace and war, but between accepting Russian hegemony over Eastern Europe — and opposing it. Exactly how they do that remains the challenge of our time.

Officials, meanwhile, look on them all with scorn. In the Foreign Office, politicians are considered movable — and discardable — pieces of furniture. In a memorable scene from Yes Minister, Sir Humphrey and the Cabinet Secretary discuss reshuffles, complacently agreeing that “power goes with permanence. Impermanence is impotence. And rotation is castration.”

Since the start of the Ukraine crisis, Britain has churned through seven prime ministers, nine defense secretaries, and 11 foreign secretaries. Our elected leaders are rotated so often that no one has the balls left to introduce new ideas. The result? Britain has a monomaniacal, single-issue foreign policy: backing Ukraine in its war against Russia, something it pursues at the expense of practically everything else.

In his first speech as prime minister, Andy Burnham described how he was “acutely conscious” of being Britain’s seventh PM in a decade. To correct that record, he said, “requires my generation of politicians to raise our game”. But here, he faces a considerable challenge. The bureaucrats will have already assumed that he will be replaced in the next three years, and their respective ministers probably sooner.

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Meanwhile, even when they’re in office, our elected leaders appear to have little influence over the direction of policy, canceled out by civil servants who spend most of their time gossiping about them. There is always a creative tension between the inertia of the permanent staff and the energy of elected officials. But the merry-go-round over the past decade has shifted the balance of power decisively towards the gray suits.

In his first statement as Foreign Secretary, Ed Miliband spoke of the need to end the war in Iran, bring peace to Israel and Palestine, and stand shoulder to shoulder with Ukraine. This is exactly what his predecessors would have been told to say by their officials — just keep on fighting to the last Ukrainian in a country which has seen its population halve since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Ministers used to arrive loaded with their own ideas. I worked in the Foreign Office for 24 years, and William Hague is the last foreign secretary I recall capable of bending the bureaucratic machine to his will during his four-year tenure. He did this by having a clear vision for what he wanted to achieve, but also by retaining a studied (if aloof) courtesy when working with permanent staff and by deploying well-liked junior ministers like Alastair Burt to help him deliver. I organized the London Conference on Libya for him at five-days notice in 2011, and his showpiece Preventing Sexual Violence in Conflict Initiative in 2012, just 12 days ahead of time.

Hague also opened 50 new diplomatic missions around the world and boosted the Foreign Office budget by grabbing £140 million of  overseas development funding, recruiting the help of Andrew Mitchell, minister at the now-dissolved Department for International Development. Hague re-opened a foreign language school closed under New Labour, and launched a Diplomatic Academy. Altogether, then, he seized back some control over Foreign Policy from No. 10, following its capture by Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell in the aftermath of 9/11.

During those years, the Foreign Office had a renewed sense of purpose; Hague was secure enough in his job to whip the bureaucracy into action, despite efforts by Sir Simon Fraser, then the permanent secretary, to water down his efforts and do things on the cheap. The Foreign Office multi-year budget settlement doesn’t assume the arrival of new ideas; Fraser thought the Prevention of Sexual Violence Initiative was a wasteful diversion of effort. Having forked out for a gleaming new language center, he set up the Diplomatic Academy on a shoestring. I had to beg and borrow money from other government departments to pay £70 million on the 2013 G8 Summit.

Unfortunately, even Hague was castrated in the end, with Foreign Office officials ensuring that Britain was shut out of the French-led Normandy peace process for Ukraine in June 2014. Britain had played a leading role in imposing sanctions on Russia after the annexation of Crimea but while David Cameron hoped that sanctions against Russia would be a temporary measure, officials saw them as the main effort. Now, Cameron had become obsessed with the obviously pointless task of blocking Jean-Claude Juncker from becoming European Commission President, sucking up most of Britain’s diplomatic bandwidth in this failed endeavor.

The French President Hollande had managed to get Presidents Putin and Poroshenko around the table with Chancellor Merkel in order to hammer out a process to resolve the conflict in the Donbas, but the Foreign Office dismissed its importance. Its Russia experts said: “Well, the Americans aren’t touching Hollande’s peace initiative so why should we?”

Britain has shut itself out of efforts at peace in Ukraine ever since. Phillip Hammond simply refused to engage with the Russians directly in diplomacy and the habit of not talking to the Russians stuck, while the Ukraine crisis slowly got worse. with officials coolly in control. During his tenure at King Charles Street, Boris Johnson was quickly dismissed as “not up to the job”, while his successors as foreign secretary have been rated by the extent to which they followed the policy scripts drafted by their officials.

As for Britain’s latest prime minister, a senior Labour insider told me recently that Andy Burnham is “absolutely not a warmonger”. Still, he has since handed over blueprints for British-made components for long-range missiles to Kyiv, even though Zelensky is in deep trouble domestically following a spate of corruption scandals among his inner circle, alongside growing internal repression. Burnham has also backed further deep strikes by Kyiv into Russian territory, even as Ukraine faces the prospects of having its energy infrastructure obliterated over another cold winter, with insufficient air defense to prevent the inevitable. All the while, Burnham has offered to support Ukraine “for as long as it takes” at a cost of £4.5 billion per year to British taxpayers.

To his credit, Miliband has now shifted UK foreign policy to take a tougher position towards Israel, starting with his recent sanctioning of trade with West Bank settlers. But I have seen no evidence of any change of tack on the war in Ukraine which, by conservative estimates, has killed or injured over two million people on both sides since 2022.

It is clear to me, then, that Burnham and his government have been given the usual script by his officials — and decided it’s too difficult to change.  To understand why you must understand how the Foreign Office works. That begins with Whitehall’s vast Russia blob. A large cross-Whitehall Russia Unit sits in the Foreign Office in King Charles Street yet, remarkably, it appears unable to come up with new ideas beyond continuing to back Ukraine — then crossing its fingers and hoping for some miraculous breakthrough against Putin.

There are several reasons for this. The main one is that, since 2015, leadership of the Russia Unit has been shared by the Foreign Office and the intelligence community. This followed the creation of a £1.5 billion Joint Security Fund to increase coordination across departmental lines. Of course, our spies conduct vitally important work for this country — but they should be a tool of foreign policy, not its author. Putting them in charge of Britain’s Russia policy has inevitably indulged their self-serving instincts. No enemy means no budget. It’s no coincidence that the 2018 post-Salisbury reflection retreat was held with great hospitality at MI6’s training center at Fort Monckton.

Second, a vast increase in staffing quantity doesn’t equate to quality. When I visited GCHQ in 2017, some of the new staff I met didn’t obviously appear to have any background knowledge or experience on Russia, instead just representing seats to be filled. The same is true in the Foreign Office. New people are shipped in, listen with great admiration to the old sweats in the Eastern Research Group, then quickly toe the party line. There is no critical challenge function.

Added to that, the British press, which is stock full of ex-military and intelligence types, snuffs out any suggestion of engagement with Russia to end the war, which is shouted down as “appeasement”. People who express an alternative view are called out as Kremlin stooges.

Yet, diplomacy isn’t about friendship but rather talking to those with whom you most disagree — ideally before shots are fired but especially when the missile are flying.

Of course, diplomacy is only one arm of foreign policy, alongside warfare and espionage. Yet while the UK has pumped billions into the spying, it has disinvested in diplomats. Hague’s dream of driving up country-specific expertise has long withered on the vine, and there is now a dearth of officers with Russia knowledge. The Foreign Office continues to have a woeful track record in foreign language attainment, including Russian. Speaking foreign languages is increasingly seen as an optional extra, especially at a time when British universities are shutting down foreign-language degree programs. As with country-specific knowledge, so too with diplomatic skills. When I left King Charles Street in 2023, there was still no systematic program of diplomatic skills training.

As I quickly learned from my own time in Moscow, you simply cannot operate effectively out of the British embassy there unless you speak Russian and have some basic skills in talking to people who violently disagree with you. When the Russians  do agree to meetings, their officials will only talk in their native language, even if they are fluent in English. I recall one chap who would batter me with machine-gun Russian, then turn up at residence receptions speaking better English than me. Having kicked out so many of our embassy staff, the Russian state knows full well that any new folk who turn up from London are, more often than not, ill-equipped to do their jobs.

Diplomats also need to get out of their grand embassy building, meet ordinary people, and have tough conversations at the ministries. I often had slanging matches with Russian contacts over vodka yet ended on good terms. Many Brits get disgruntled with disagreement; Russians get disgruntled at dissembling — and suspect you are up to something behind their backs.

There’s a broader point here too. The Russians don’t care if we don’t talk to them or not. Yet out of a sense of self-righteous indignation, and a vastly over-inflated sense of our place in the world, we remain snootily aloof, even as we reduce ourselves to a diplomatic nonentity. I can’t remember a time when Britain has appeared so irrelevant.

The policy of talking about Russia and not to Russia has now been been set in stone since July 2014, an aversion to dialog that has now infected all the major states in Europe, such that no one can see the value in pursuing an end to a war in Ukraine, which is costing us billions and making us less safe. But amid all this, the basic facts remain the same. Heavily indebted and de-industrialized, Britain’s army is at its smallest for 200 years. Burnham can’t even commit to increasing defense spending because the country is skint. More than that, Ukraine cannot win a war against Russia. The state is bankrupt and operates on the basis of payday loans from its European sponsors. Little wonder Zelensky has just asked for another $27 billion from Europe: his ministry of defense has already spent money earmarked for the second half of this year.

Meanwhile, despite the seizure of $300 billion of its foreign exchange reserves in February 2022, Russia has rode high oil prices and now has an additional $420 billion at its disposal, most of that in gold. Its debt is 20% of GDP. Certainly, Russia has suffered petrol shortages following Ukrainian deep strikes, yet it continues to export vast amounts of unrefined crude oil around the world at a time of constrained supply. Ukraine and Europe are both energy dependent, leaving them at the mercy of high prices, shuttering factories from the Midlands to the Ruhr.

At the same time, Russia has built up a formidable industrial base, one that consistently outperforms the US, Britain and Europe combined in munitions production. Britain, of course, has spent decades outsourcing defense production to fat-cat contractors who fleece us and consistently deliver kit that arrives late and often doesn’t work. Graft in Ukraine hardly helps either. Western allies have tipped $350 billion into Ukraine in the hopes of beating Russia, some of which has been stolen by Zelensky’s cronies.

I visited Kyiv several times while stationed at the British Embassy in Moscow and corruption was the issue that ordinary people wanted most to be tackled. Western “support” has not helped Ukraine discover the peace and independence its rapidly shrinking pool of citizens deserve. Two thirds now wanting the war to end, a reversal from demands for the total defeat of Russia four years ago.

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Since we don’t want peace — but are too weak to actually fight Russia directly — economic sanctions have become our principal lever to affect Putin’s thinking. But here, again, British policy simply hasn’t worked. Before anyone accuses me of being a cheese-eating surrender monkey, I’d point out that I personally authorized around half of the UK sanctions against Russia after the war broke out in 2022. At the time, their stated purpose was to encourage “Russia to cease actions destabilizing Ukraine or undermining or threatening the territorial integrity, sovereignty or independence of Ukraine”. That manifestly hasn’t happened.

To be sure, sanctions have changed the structure of Russia’s economy since 2014. But the moment of peak pressure was between 2014 and 2016, when Russia was hit by the double whammy of sanctions and low energy prices. Since then, Russia has completely reoriented its monetary and industrial policy to embrace a weak ruble as an article of faith, managing inflation while piling up its reserves and prioritizing its state-owned energy and defense monopolies.

Russia’s fortress economy — a mix of monetary austerity and military Keynesianism — means that it can keep on fighting with little risk of running out of money. Its large population also means that Ukraine will run out of men before it does, even as both countries have already suffered hundreds of thousands of deaths and injuries. Engaging with Putin to broker peace in Ukraine therefore isn’t weakness: but necessity. Diplomacy isn’t about friendship, it’s about conflict resolution.

The Foreign Office has produced no new ideas to resolve the Ukraine conflict since 2014. If Andy Burnham really wants to pass the “Makerfield test” — ensuring that every government policy helps working people — he might come up with his own ideas on foreign policy: rather than reading the standard script he is given by the Foreign Office mandarins. It’s time for Burnham to grow some foreign policy balls or, even better, ask Ed Miliband to do so.

The film presents this as a feat of sinister brilliance, in which the Kremlin ruthlessly manages reality itself. In doing so the movie conforms to a well-established genre: the glamorization of autocracy by Western intellectuals. The sordid, boring, vulgar and power-hungry bureaucrat is transformed into a Machiavellian prince. The film uncritically adopts the regime’s narrative about itself: that the Kremlin is a machine of cold-blooded sophistication, with tentacles in every corner of political life, and the opposition existing only when the puppet-master wills it to.

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What the movie cannot imagine is that the political machine it finds so intriguing might be a desiccated husk ravaged by decades of corruption. It gives us a Kremlin of great cunning even as the regime suffers the consequences of bad decisions by its purported wizards.

Take one such decision: the recent Yabloko fiasco. Yabloko is Russia’s oldest liberal party, founded in 1993. To call it anti-war would be an understatement. It is the only anti-war party. It opposed the 2014 annexation of Crimea and the 2022 invasion of Ukraine, and is the only legally registered party in Russia to call for a ceasefire. But the last time the party had a representative in the State Duma was 1999. It got 1% of the vote in the 2021 election and has been politically irrelevant for a generation.

But in late July, Russia’s Election Commission approved Yabloko’s registration for the September elections. The party would run 269 candidates on its federal list and 135 in single-mandate districts under the slogan “For Peace and Freedom”. The Commission chair told reporters: “We treat everyone equally, and it’s up to voters to decide.” This was a startling claim to make when over the preceding months, authorities had fined 58 Yabloko members, raided five regional offices, detained 29 people, labeled 10 as foreign agents, and jailed six; 32 members had been barred from running under laws introduced after the invasion. The party had been harassed by every available instrument of the state, and then the state let it on the ballot anyway.

A source close to the Central Election Commission told a reporter that the logic behind the change was straightforward: give citizens a safe channel through which to express discontent. Better that unhappy voters mark a ballot for a small, manageable, long-neutered party than spoil their ballots or drift toward the Communists. The idea has a long pedigree in the study of autocratic regimes: semi-competitive elections serve as release valves and informational sources for rulers, a way to take the population’s temperature without loosening control over discourse.

But then something went wrong. Polls revealed Yabloko drawing real support, and some projections showed it could even win seats. A party that had been irrelevant since the last century had suddenly become a vehicle for anti-war sentiment that happened to be far greater than the Kremlin had anticipated. On 8 August, the nationalist party Rodina filed suit to have Yabloko removed from the ballot, and two days later, the Supreme Court agreed.

After more than four years of war, the managed opposition is no longer so easy to manage. Coverage of the ban has focused on what it tells us about the state of Russian civil liberties, but the more interesting question is what it says about the regime’s informational blinders. The Kremlin allowed an anti-war party onto the ballot, and the party turned out to be too popular. The regime built a pressure gauge, got a reading it did not expect, and smashed the gauge shut. This is not the behavior of an all-knowing puppeteer, but of someone increasingly ensconced in an informational bubble.

Why do autocrats even bother with allowing opposition parties or holding elections? Scholars who study the roles of elections in closed regimes have come up with several answers beyond “keeping up appearances”. Elections project strength and legitimacy to the population, co-opt elites, and provide a way to distribute patronage. Mexico’s PRI held elections for decades because the results told the party leadership which regional bosses were effective at delivering votes. In Mubarak’s Egypt, elections resolved internal conflicts over who got access to state rents.

But elections perform another key function for rulers: generating information about people’s actual preferences. Information is an artificially scarce resource for rulers, who face what scholars call the Dictator’s Dilemma. The same repression that keeps rulers in power cuts them off from honest information about what their people want. Fear induces silence, making it harder to anticipate unrest. Subordinates tell the ruler what he wants to hear. The security apparatus focuses on threats it has a bureaucratic interest in inflating. The ruler sits at the center of a system that keeps him ignorant of what’s really going on.

Elections are a way for rulers to manage the dilemma. By allowing a controlled opposition to contest seats, the regime creates a channel through which popular sentiment can register in a credible way. Yabloko’s registration was a textbook application of this logic. The Kremlin had a party that polled at 1% in the last election. It let the party run on an anti-war platform, expecting it to absorb a small, containable share of dissatisfied voters and produce a signal about public sentiment.

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The irony is that the Kremlin did get a signal, just not the one it wanted. It learned that anti-war sentiment was far larger than it had assumed. But it learned it in the worst possible way: through a public result it did not anticipate and could not contain, forcing a ban that advertised the regime’s miscalculation to everyone watching. The September election will now feature only parties that support the war, guaranteeing an uninformative result.

The Kremlin’s informational problems do not stop with the Yabloko incident. Analysis by ISW and the Financial Times suggests Russian generals are showing Putin maps of victories that did not happen. US intelligence reached this conclusion as early as March 2022, when officials said that Putin’s advisors were “too afraid to tell him the truth” about his military performance and the economic impact of sanctions. This was true four years ago; today the problem of informational isolation has only gotten worse.

An autocrat stumbling around an increasingly darkened room is both good and bad news. On the one hand, an uninformed autocrat makes bad decisions, which hastens the regime’s demise. There is evidence for this: Putin’s belief that he can take the Donbas by autumn, based on maps his generals have fabricated, may lead to operational choices that squander forces Russia cannot replace. And the fuel crisis is already straining a social contract built on the promise that war would not touch ordinary life. Another mobilization based on bad information would compound these problems.

On the other hand, ignorance may be a form of bliss for Putin. The cinematic wizard of the Kremlin manufactures a false reality for others, but his real-life counterpart is increasingly manufacturing a false reality for himself. A leader who is only being told what he wants to hear does not become more cautious as real conditions get worse. If the intelligence reaching Putin about his military position, his economy, and his population’s tolerance is as skewed as the evidence suggests, then his behavior becomes only more difficult to predict from the outside. The room might be getting darker, but that makes it ever more difficult to peep through its window.

Based on the information we have, the most plausible explanation for the visit is that Ratcliffe and his Russian counterparts were discussing de-escalation. If Russia’s war against Ukraine were to turn into a broader European war, it would pose a vast security risk to the entire world.

What the US and Russia have in common is that they are both already fighting wars. Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump clearly do not wish to go to war with each other. There are reports that Putin may be planning a large autumn offensive in Ukraine. Russian troops are currently making slow but steady progress towards the Donbas cities of Kramatorsk and Sloviansk. It is quite plausible that Putin could step up this war — but for this he would need to recruit more troops and intensify his attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure. Some Western security officials are convinced that once Putin is done with Ukraine, he will try to test Nato’s cohesion.

I struggle to see what purpose this could possibly serve. If he really wanted to test Nato’s resolve, by far the best way would be to escalate the hybrid warfare that is already going on. One of the more serious recent incidents was a military drone flying into the wing of a parked Ukrainian cargo aircraft at Leipzig airport in early August. Attached to the drone was 600g of Semtex explosives, which did not detonate because of a malfunction. At the time there were several drone sightings in Germany. However, military leaders tend to underestimate hybrid warfare, even though it can easily morph into a conventional war.

Another escalation scenario is disagreement on what constitutes legitimate European support for Ukraine. International diplomacy has its rules on this that everybody including the Russians pretend to accept: if you support a party in a war financially, or with defensive weapons, you are not deemed to be participating in the war. If you take part in maneuvers, you are considered a party of the war. The supply of offensive weapons falls into a gray zone. Nato has gone to great lengths to steer clear of that zone. The Western European countries that support Ukraine also made it clear that they did not wish to participate in the war.

But beware of the gray zones. The issue is not who is right and who is wrong. Wars are not settled by fact-checkers in broadcasting companies. The issue is disagreement itself.

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Another gray-zone matter is the raids by Western countries of Russian ships or vessels that transport goods from Russia. The same goes for the supply of British drones for Ukrainian attacks inside Russia. Russia has responded with outrage to Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s decision to provide Ukraine with technical blueprints that would enable Ukraine to manufacture the Franco-British Storm Shadow cruise missiles. This prompted Putin’s spokesman to declare Britain to be a participant in the war. This is how escalation starts.

There is an awful lot of stuff going on that could blow up in our faces. The US economist Branko Milanović wrote an essay last week in which he described a very plausible escalation scenario. He writes the thirst for war is palpable in the Nordic and Baltic countries and is also growing in the UK and Germany. “The role of small countries—that through their geopolitical irresponsibility can wreck great damage to the world—tends to pass under the radar,” he writes. “The Nordic-Baltic coalition is essentially calling for a war with Russia, citing its own fears and traumas of Russian/Soviet control and occupation.”

I agree with his assessment. If I listen to assorted Finnish and Baltic politicians, it feels to me like 1914, the year when Germany started the First World War in a mood of euphoria. The person who sets the tone in European foreign policy right now is Kaja Kallas, a former Estonian prime minister who is now the EU’s high representative for foreign and security policy. I see her as the European warmonger-in-chief. 

The job of diplomacy is to find solutions to problems. This is a tough job. You keep your diplomatic back channels open and talk to the enemy. But the EU has cut off all diplomatic channels with Russia. EU countries have their ambassadors in Moscow, and they all reiterate the official lines they are given.

The US, meanwhile, has maintained diplomatic relationships with Russia. The Ratcliffe-Russia meeting makes it clear that these exist at several levels, including that of intelligence chiefs. The officials in charge of nuclear policy also talk to each other. Henry Kissinger maintained a strong diplomatic back channel with the Soviet ambassador to the US during the Nixon administration.

The reason why a war with Russia is so dangerous is the presence of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. Russia has an estimated total inventory of over 5,400 nuclear warheads. France has 290 and Britain has 225. Given the vast size of Russia, the French nuclear arsenal could make 0.1% of the Russian territory uninhabitable. The Russian nuclear arsenal could completely destroy all of Western Europe, and still have a lot of missiles left. This is not a war Europe can win.

If Putin were to launch an unprovoked attack on a Nato country, the picture would be different. This would draw in the Americans. I assume that Ratcliffe would have taken the opportunity to clarify the US position and possibly contradict statements from some administration officials that Europe is now in charge of its own security and that the US would not directly intervene in case of a war.

The big European countries, meanwhile, are following the lead of the war-mongering minions because they have no plan B. If the war in Ukraine were to end, they would have to provide security guarantees. They would have to integrate Ukraine into the EU at an enormous cost. Only last week, Germany and five other EU countries announced that they would cut the EU budget by several hundred billion euros. This is Germany not putting its money where its mouth is.

Rhetorical escalation often precedes physical escalation, often triggered by a particular event — like the assassination of Franz Ferdinand in 1914. One such foreseeable event would be the seizure of Russian assets held in Europe, which amount to around €200 billion. People have gone to war over much less.

The Europeans already tried to seize the money at an EU summit last December. They failed. Most of the money lies at Euroclear, a large bank depository and clearing house in Brussels. If the EU had seized it, Belgium would have been legally liable in the case of litigation in foreign courts. Belgium is a very small country with a very large bank — a bad combination. Back in December, Bart De Wever, Belgium’s prime minister, demanded robust risk-sharing guarantees by the other EU members. They refused because they did not want to put themselves at risk of another financial crisis.

But if the EU is good at one thing, it is coming up with technical solutions to complex problems. They could attempt to develop a hideously complex financial instrument, similar to the subprime loans that gave rise to the global financial crisis 20 years ago. There is only ever one purpose behind such financial instruments — to hide risk, and lure naive investors into making unwise decisions. The same logic applies here. National parliaments would have to sign up to any risk-sharing deal, but they might be fooled into thinking that the risk is well controlled.

I have no idea how likely such a scenario is. All I am saying is that the sequestration of Russian assets is once again under discussion. If it were to happen, I would attach a high probability that it would trigger a dramatic Russian response.

It is, of course, entirely possible that Ratcliffe and his Russian counterparts spoke about something entirely different: Iran. But Russian support for Iran is not the critical factor in the Gulf War right now. Trump has clearly found himself in a predicament in Iran. He cannot afford another conflict. Therefore, an attempt to de-escalate tensions with Moscow seems like the most plausible explanation of the Ratcliffe-Russia meeting. A war is in nobody’s interest, least of all Europe’s. European countries are simply not prepared; de-escalation is the only rational strategy.

The problem is that escalation is not by definition a rational thing. The fact that something is in nobody’s interest does not mean that it is not going to happen. History is littered with examples of irrational wars and, lest we forget, the biggest ones were mostly Europeans.

The bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines — which had up until then supplied Germany with cheap Russian gas — revealed an aspect of Ukraine’s military defense strategy that had previously been hidden. It became clear that the Ukrainians were seeking to break up the Russian-German relationship, which they saw as a direct threat to their own security.

The first of the Nord Stream criminal trials will start on 26 October in Hamburg. It will expose many unsavory details. The prosecutors might ask questions such as: who ordered the attacks? What did President Volodymyr Zelensky know? When did he know it? The attack left Germany in a perma-energy crisis. And while I don’t think the trial will affect Germany’s support for Ukraine in the short run, it could — depending on what is revealed — make Germany more reluctant to support Ukraine’s membership of the EU and Nato in the future.

The pipeline explosions have a long pre-history. Germany’s energy relationship with Russia dates back to the Seventies. Gerhard Schröder, a former German chancellor and personal friend of Vladimir Putin, supercharged this relationship when he proposed the Baltic Sea pipeline projects in the early 2000s. The project later became known as Nord Stream. The first pipeline, which became operational in 2011, ran from near St Petersburg in Russia to Mecklenburg-Vorpommern in eastern Germany. Before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Nord Stream 1 provided Germany with 55% of its gas supplies. Nord Stream 2, which was only completed in 2021, had the capacity to increase the gas flows substantially.

The Germans treated their business dealings with Russia as separate from geopolitics. The standard answer you got from German officials before the war was that the best way to foster democracy in Russia was through trade. They called it Wandel durch Handel — change through trade. If it rhymes, it must be true.

Eastern European countries, notably Poland, treated the Nord Stream pipelines as a security threat. If Germany made itself dependent on Russia for its gas, Poland would once again be surrounded by a hostile alliance. Later, France joined the group of critics. More importantly, the US Congress passed successive acts, supported by both Democrats and Republicans, to impose sanctions on Germans involved in the pipeline project. They did not go after Schröder personally. He was the supervisory board chairman of the project. But they went after Matthias Warnig, the Nord Stream CEO. Warnig was a former East German Stasi officer and another close friend of Putin. The pipeline diplomacy became particularly heated in the two years leading up to Russia’s invasion in February 2022. I myself criticized the pipelines on the grounds that they made Germany dependent on Russian gas and undermined European solidarity. At that time, virtually nobody in Germany thought about energy in geopolitical terms — but everybody else did.

A few days before Putin invaded Ukraine, the German government agreed to suspend the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, which by then had been constructed but not yet used. It still needed certification. When Putin invaded, the project died. But Nord Stream 1, the older pipeline, was still operational. Even the Green Party, the only big German party that opposed the construction of Nord Stream 2, favored the continued operation of Nord Stream 1. By that time, the Greens were responsible for energy policy in the German government. As Germany was phasing out nuclear energy and coal, the country had no alternative to gas. Even when most of their energy was coming from renewable sources, they still needed gas to cover periods when there would be no wind and no sun.

There were alternative gas suppliers back then. The US and Qatar, for instance, sold gas in liquefied form (LNG) — but during this period, Germany did not have the infrastructure in place to process it. Russia’s gas, meanwhile, was pumped directly into the gas grid.

Each of the pipelines, the old Nord Stream 1 and the new Nord Stream 2, consisted of two big tubes. On 26 September 2022, three of the four tubes exploded near the Danish island of Bornholm, including the two that made up Nord Stream 1. Initially, everybody suspected the Russians. Then the US journalist Seymour Hersh wrote an article claiming that the explosion came at the behest of the CIA.

The German prosecutor eventually established that the attack was launched from a sailing yacht chartered in Germany by a group of Ukrainian citizens, with links to the Ukrainian army and secret service. Initially, the Ukrainian government tried to deflect attention from this evidence, arguing that the plot was funded by a wealthy private individual. But that story has since been debunked.

The operatives were highly trained explosives experts and deep-sea divers. The pipelines were located 80 meters below sea level. Diving that deep is not something you learn at your local scuba-diving club. The German prosecutor established that this was a military operation through and through. The estimated physical weight of the C4 explosives used to detonate the pipelines was in the order of 50-100 kilograms. Only governments have explosives on this scale.

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The German prosecutor issued a European Arrest Warrant for the operatives. The first successful arrest came in August last year, when Italian police detained Serhiy Kuznetsov, the suspected ringleader of the operation, who carelessly went on holiday to Italy. He was extradited to Germany and placed in a high-security prison. His trial is due to start this autumn.

What confuses me is why Kuznetsov thought it safe to go on holiday in the EU. Even more astonishing is the fact that the second suspect, Volodymyr Zhuravlev, whom the Polish authorities previously refused to extradite, also thought it safe to go on holiday abroad. Last week, the Croatian police arrested him. He is now awaiting extradition to Germany. This is one aspect of the story that I find puzzling. These are highly trained operatives with fake passports. Why would they go on holiday in unsafe locations?

So far, this all makes for a gripping spy story. But it may soon become a political one. Details will matter. The Wall Street Journal journalist Bojan Pancevski claims in his book, The Nord Stream Conspiracy, that the attack was orchestrated by the Ukrainian military and intelligence network, and that Valerii Zaluzhnyi, then commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces and now Ukrainian ambassador to the UK, was the most senior officer involved. We don’t know whether Zelensky gave the order or was informed. I don’t think it really matters. As president, he is responsible for the actions of his military and his intelligence service. What matters is that a Ukrainian commando sabotaged the critical energy infrastructure of a friendly country.

The media covered the pipeline explosions and the immediate aftermath half-heartedly. I suspect editors did not want to be accused of disseminating anti-Ukraine propaganda. The media supported Ukraine — and the pipeline story did not sit well with the hero worship of Zelensky. The German government also did not comment on the prosecutor’s action. But it’s worth remembering that both Olaf Scholz and Friedrich Merz could have stopped the investigation if they had wanted to. The Poles are outraged that they did not. Last week, Donald Tusk, the Polish prime minister, said that the bigger crime was the construction of the pipelines, not their destruction. I recall a tweet by the current Polish foreign minister, Radoslaw Sikorski, who was an MEP in Brussels at the time of the explosions. “Thank you, USA,” he wrote.

So, was it really a conspiracy? Over the course of my journalistic life, I’ve come to the conclusion that there are many fewer real conspiracies than most people think. What looks like a conspiracy is usually just a series of blunders. I think this was the case here too. A giant miscalculation by the Ukrainians. Back in the summer of 2022, they had pushed back the Russians. The war was going their way. Everybody wanted a photo with Zelensky. The Ukrainians thought it within their power to ensure that the Germans would not revert to their previously cozy relationship with the Russians. But after the Trump administration ended financial and most military support for Ukraine, Germany became Ukraine’s biggest supporter. What were the Ukrainians thinking?

However this story ends, I don’t expect Germany to revert to its old, naive pro-Russian reflexes. Germany will not make itself dependent on Russian gas once again. But I cannot exclude the possibility that Germany may, after the war has ended, reopen at least one of the pipelines. Germany has become reliant on natural gas — and Russia could become one of its several suppliers. We are one cold winter away from an energy crisis in Germany. And when that happens, we’ll remember who bombed the pipelines. Even without a winter crisis, I suspect that Germany’s future support for Ukraine will be less enthusiastic than it might otherwise have been.

The upcoming trial is going to release a lot of juicy information into the public domain. The media will cover it. The Alternative for Germany, the party of the far-Right, is already making a big deal out of the Nord Stream explosions. They are asking: why support a country that bombs our infrastructure? It is a hard question to answer. The German government, for sure, has not answered it.

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.

Now, should the worst come to pass — should Western civilization be erased from the face of the earth — then those of us who make it to the fallout shelter will be able to add another crime to the list. Annihilation will also be Sydney Sweeney’s fault. A culture that can produce a scene like the one in Euphoria season three — in which Sweeney’s character performs sex-cam work while dressed as a baby — apparently deserves all the hydrogen bombs coming to it.

The HBO drama appears to have been the final straw for the influential ultra-nationalist Russian “philosopher” Alexander Dugin, who earlier this month launched into an extraordinary rant on X, apparently inspired by his late-night TV viewing. “Look: is there at least one argument why the US shouldn’t be erased from the face of the earth?” he asked. 

To those who might respond: “Sydney Sweeney in American Eagle jeans”, Dugin offered short shrift. Sweeney may be a MAGA darling — she is, after all, blonde haired and blue-eyed and comes from a Republican-coded family — but to a committed Russian nationalist, this is irrelevant. “You are not the people,” he wrote. “You are stupid slaves on the Epstein’s menu of cruel cannibal elites. You are eaten, your brains are. It is why you watch Euphoria. Because all of you are perverts. Disgusting civilization. No reason to exist. Please, die.” Thanks — we’ll take that on board. 

It’s not too hard to see why Euphoria — with its interracial, intersex, into-absolutely-anything cast — would be a particular trigger for the Kremlin’s on-off court philosopher. Born in the Khrushchev era, Dugin spent his youth vaguely agitating against communism before the break-up of the Soviet Union deeply wounded his national pride. Like every fascist before and since, he became obsessed with the idea of humiliation. He co-founded the National Bolshevik Party — the “Natbols” — with Eduard Limonov in the Nineties. The party’s flag was a Nazi-style white circle on a red background — only instead of a swastika, it had a black hammer and sickle. Russians aren’t generally fans of the Nazis; Dugin admired both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks for their Nietzschean will to power. It was the liberal West, with its dangerous ideas like human rights and free speech, that he regarded as the true evil. A hairy ogre of a man, Dugin conveyed his ideas with charisma and force. He was a hard drinker and a rich storyteller with a deep resonant voice in which he delivered mesmerizing monologues about the destiny of Russia to the eager young jackbooted Natbols. 

For all his mad array of influences — Hitler, Stalin, Guy Debord, Terminator, Lao Tzu, Mishima, Rosa Luxemburg, René Guénon — and his fondness for terms like “rhizomatic” and “hermeneutic circle”, Dugin’s philosophy is actually pretty simple. In Foundations of Geopolitics (1997), he argues that Russia must reverse the humiliation of the Soviet collapse by rebuilding itself as the core of a new Eurasian empire that is destined to challenge and ultimately dismantle Western (i.e. American) hegemony. America and the EU in this vision are not merely political rivals like China, India or Iran, say — but decadent forces, intent on dissolving Russia’s identity and historical purpose. Beneath the book’s strategic language lies a messianic strain: a wounded civilization is redeemed through expansion, action, spiritual renewal and permanent struggle. Only Russia, with its spiritual depth, its powers of endurance, its capacity for hard action, is capable of saving the world from the liberal antichrist. The book has become a set text for Russian military leaders and seems to have guided Vladimir Putin’s strategy in Ukraine. Asked what policy Russia should take towards its Western neighbor as early as 2014, Dugin’s response was: “Kill! Kill! Kill! There can be no other discussion.” 

Dugin’s pronouncements became more deranged following the assassination of his daughter Darya in a car bomb in 2022, and his targets have become a little more scattergun. He has a particular hatred of the popular Russian cartoon character, Cheburashka, for example — “the concentrated expression of that very feeblemindedness against which I have battled my whole life” — and frequently rails against Marvel movies, McDonalds, and various other symbols of American cultural power.

But Euphoria — in which literally every character is performing sex work to support their crystal meth addiction and/or gender reassignment surgery — would strike Dugin as a representation of everything evil and degrading in Western culture. And the fact that America permits this depiction of itself — indeed, that Euphoria has launched the careers of some of its most lauded stars, including Sweeney, Jacob Elordi and Zendaya — is further evidence of the moral degeneracy of a culture. In his fawning interview with that useful American idiot, Tucker Carlson, Dugin declared that the dystopian futures depicted in Hollywood movies like The Matrix and Terminator were not warnings, but actual visions of where the West was heading. Why do American filmmakers never depict happy families or thriving communities in their future visions, he asked. It’s because Americans are willing on this apocalypse. Thus Euphoria’s self-loathing, atomized, narcotic, nihilistic, multi-racial hell is basically a warning — this is what America would impose on the rest of the world, a staging post on the way to Skynet. 

What’s interesting about all this — and what Russocurious American conservatives like Carlson often seem to miss — is the strain of messianism in Russian thought. Americans are so accustomed to thinking of their culture as the envy of the world and their eccentric conception of “freedom” as the universal absolute that the idea Russia might have its own global vision seems not to have occurred to them. They are more comfortable patronizing Russia as a backward, violent, pitiful place — much of which goes back to those images of Russians in the Eighties queuing for Big Macs in Red Square and going crazy for Levis (which clearly made Dugin furious). Thus Carlson could tour a Moscow supermarket in 2024, simply amazed that they have affordable groceries. But this cultural complacency frequently leads non-Russians to miss Russian critiques of the West (say, of American racism) and to underestimate the very real strain of messianism in Russian thought — that is, Russia’s own mission to save the world.

So as ludicrous as Dugin often appears, there is a coherent set of ideas behind his philosophy — and in any case, recent history tells us that it is the ludicrous people we need to take most seriously. To understand where Dugin is coming from you need to understand the Eurasianist tradition of which he is a mutant 21st-century outgrowth, as well as Russia’s dual conception as both an Asiatic and Christian civilization. There are many ways this dichotomy manifests. You can see it in the rivalry between the two capitals: St Petersburg, constructed by Peter the Great as a “window onto Europe”, and Moscow, the older Slavic center of Orthodoxy and imperial memory. But there are two key moments in Russian history that the Eurasianists have drawn upon to lend grandeur to their vision.

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The first is the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380, when the forces of the Russian principalities defeated the Tatar army of the Golden Horde and began to free their lands from their Mongol oppressors. In the Russian cultural memory, this event has mythic significance: the point at which Russia begins to define itself through resistance to, and absorption of, the steppe world. “Our path runs through the steppe – and boundless anguish / Your anguish, O Russia!” wrote the symbolist poet Aleksandr Blok in his cycle On the Field of Kulikovo (1908), which conjures a “holy banner” and the “Khan’s sabre” rising against a blood-red horizon. The idea this animates is Russia as a land formed of Mongol violence and Christian redemption — with a destiny of, hurrah, “boundless anguish”. 

The influential Central Asian scholar (and virulent antisemite) Lev Gumilev — son of the appallingly persecuted poets Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev, both acquaintances of Blok — built an entire civilizational theory from this image. He argued that the Mongol period had not merely been an occupation but a formative synthesis. Rather than seeing Tatar horseman rampaging through Russian villages, raping Russian women, burning Russian crops as a catastrophe, he reframed it as a creative ethnogenesis. The Russian “ethnos”, in Gumilev’s formulation, emerges from a fusion of Slavic and Turkic elements, formed through long cycles of what he calls “passionarity” — a kind of heroic fusing of land, soul and idea. Gumilev developed an entire theory around this “ethnos”, arguing that this was no mere abstract theory but a “biophysical reality”. 

From here comes the notion that it is actually the liberalizing, secularizing, Enlightenment Europeans who are actually the dangerous ones — since they want to flatten out all ethnoi into one rainbow coalition of consumerism. Or as Dugin had it in his rant on X: “Whites? They are destroyed the world and themselves. To be white means to be nihilist. It is self hatred race. It caused so meany troubles to others and to itself. It lost the right to be something. No arguments to support their existence.” (He is said to speak 15 languages, and you have to wonder if his grammar is as bad in the others.)

The second foundational moment was the fall of Byzantium in 1453, when Constantinople was conquered by the Ottoman Turks. From this rupture emerges one of the most consequential ideas in Russian political theology — of Moscow as the “Third Rome”. As Philotheus of Pskov argued in the 16th century: “Two Romes have fallen, but the third stands, and there will be no fourth.” Rome itself had fallen into heresy (i.e. Catholicism), Constantinople to conquest, which meant that Moscow remained as the final guardian of true Orthodoxy. This notion would guide Russia’s self-conception not only as a state, but as a providential civilization — the nation destined to preserve and ultimately redeem Christendom itself and, certainly, its near neighbors like Ukraine and Georgia. So, Russia is no mere country but a vessel of sacred history, a restraining force against chaos — a katechon holding back dissolution; the dissolution of Sydney Sweeney, Zendaya, Jacob Elordi and friends. 

This is the deeper ideological field upon which later debates about Russia’s destiny take place. Whenever “Westernizers” have argued that Russia should reform itself along liberal, democratic, secular lines (Dugin would say “white” lines), there are always “Slavophiles” to argue that this is not the Russian way. In the 19th century, Slavophile philosophers like Aleksey Khomyakov and Ivan Kireevsky argued passionately against European modernity, insisting instead that Russia’s strength lay precisely in what Europe had lost: Orthodoxy, communal life, and a form of spiritual wholeness they called sobornost — a notion of organic unity in which truth emerges not from isolated individuals but from a living moral community.

There are traces of this in many of the great 19th-century Russian novels. Fyodor Dostoevsky, indeed, had his own Euphoria moment when he visited London in 1862 and was appalled by what he saw. “Everyone is drunk, but drunk joylessly,” he wrote. “Everyone is in a hurry to drink himself into insensibility…” But what unsettled him most was not vice but order — or rather, the promise of a new kind of world order. He was one of millions of international visitors to the Great Exhibition in Hyde Park, which featured 28,000 exhibitors from dozens of nations showcasing steam engines, telegraphs, leech barometers, machine tools, Japanese prints, American cocktails — the whole world assembled in one glass pyramid. Forever after, the “Crystal Palace” recurred in Dostoevsky’s work as a horrifying hallucination of mankind forced into rational order through science, commerce and industrial progress. Where Western visitors might have seen a vision of global harmony, Dostoevsky saw spiritual erasure: atomization, loneliness, the reduction of human beings to interchangeable units in a vast rational machine. If you have ever toured the shopping malls of Los Angeles or Dubai, you may have experienced a similar shudder. 

“All Europeans try to attain one and the same goal,” Dostoevsky later wrote — that is, “the universally human ideal”. But in striving toward this abstraction they dissolve the very cultures that give human life meaning. Only Russia, he concluded, had the spiritual vigor to withstand such a fate. Russia possessed “a distinct peculiarity of its own” — a “talent for universal reconciliation, universal humanity”. This is the essence of sobornost: a paradoxical unity that preserves difference within a shared spiritual whole. This idea is the great theme of Dostoevsky’s Pushkin speech of 1880, where he presents the Russian national character as uniquely capable of absorbing and reconciling all cultures while remaining spiritually intact. It is also a theme Dugin resumes in his X commentary: “To be on the side of Russia, of Iran, of China, of multipolarity is to be on the side of the being against the non-being. The (post)modern West is the citadel of the non-being, of nihilism.” Liberalism, in his reading, is a project to liberate the individual from any form of collective identity — be it Church, family, nation, empire, even gender (trans-related scare stories are a particular source of horror).

So Russia’s mission is to save the world from all this — and especially its near neighbors in the so-called Russkiy Mir, a telling phrase. Mir in Russian means “world” and also “peace” — but it also has a connotation of a peasant village community (as opposed to svet, which means “light” but also high society). So when Putin appeals to the Russkiy Mir he is not merely referring to the Russian-adjacent peoples of Belarus, Georgia, Kazakhstan, etc — but harking to an idea of organic peasant communal life. Come back to the village-empire! (Mir is, of course, also what Russians call the International Space Station. The progenitors of the Soviet space program often referred to the idea that the USSR, owing to its enormous spiritual depth, was the most suitable nation to represent Earth in the cosmos.)

All of this would be wonderful if Russian peasant life were not famously brutish, miserable and subject to ultraviolence from on high. In Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, Alyosha recounts the story of an eight-year-old peasant boy who accidentally injures his master’s favorite hunting dog while throwing stones. The landowner orders the child to be stripped naked and spend the night in a miserable hovel. In the morning, he is torn apart by hunting dogs in front of his mother and the whole village. For Alyosha the story represents the failure of any kind of system — Christian, political, philosophical — to account for human suffering: “If the sufferings of children go to swell the sum of sufferings which was necessary to pay for truth, then I protest that the truth is not worth such a price. I don’t want the mother to embrace the oppressor who threw her son to the dogs! She dare not forgive him!” In other words, any system or theory that tries to justify or excuse the suffering of the innocent is obscene. The realism of Dostoevsky’s depiction of this horrific event — and the social hierarchy that permits it — serves as a convincing repudiation of any argument that could be used to justify it. 

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Indeed, it is never entirely clear what the Russian Utopia actually looks like — beyond “eternal anguish”, that is. Nor have I ever seen any of these thinkers truly spell out what those in the Russkiy Mir are supposed to get from their spiritual communion; the millions of Kazakhs who starved during collectivization, for example, or the Siberian tribes slaughtered as the Russian Empire marched eastward; or for that matter the more than 350,000 young men (predominantly from the Muslim-dominated monotowns of the South) who have died fighting to impose brotherhood on the disobedient Ukrainians. A vision of nationhood that promises redemption through suffering is quite useful when you want to explain away millions of dead. The hardest pill to swallow for many following the Soviet collapse was the idea that all of that suffering meant nothing — hence the ever-escalating need to put all the famines, all the wars, all the purges and sieges and atrocities into the service of some higher ideal.

Still, rather like the oligarchs of America who romanticize honest blue-collar work but have no idea what it actually consists of, the great romantics of ordinary Russian life tended to be from the svet as opposed to the mir. Most of the Slavophiles were serf-owning aristocrats. Putin’s legitimacy, such as it is, is largely predicated on his ability to provide shopping malls and farmers’ markets for a Moscow elite who are quite happy to shuttle back and forth to their villas in Dubai, Zurich, London, Nice and Cyprus when it suits them. Dugin himself seems to spend an awful lot of his time watching HBO and scanning social media — and, I would suggest, not enough time reading Dostoevsky. 

It seems outside of Dugin’s philosophy that Euphoria might itself be a critique of precisely the kind of societal atomization that capitalism produces — and that this capacity of Western democracies to critique themselves might indeed be a source of strength. Putin has been careful to provide modern capitalist comforts to Russian elites, but he has meanwhile cranked up the state censorship machinery to pre-Glasnost levels, so any Russian who attempts anything like an honest depiction of Russian life will soon be censored, banned, banished, imprisoned, or voluntarily exiled, like the recent Cannes Grand Prix winner, Andrei Zvyagintsev. It’s not as if Russian youths are all happily singing patriotic songs as they march towards the drones of the Donbas. 

Meanwhile, the third season of Euphoria does gesture towards redemption. After she winds up in the home of a family of Texan true believers, the character of Rue (played by Zendaya) experiences a growing religious obsession — culminating in an epiphanic vision of God and a hint that there is, in fact, a higher meaning, beyond lonely pleasure-seeking. As Dostoevsky wrote: “Love is such a priceless treasure that you can redeem the whole world by it, and expiate not only your own sins but the sins of others.”

This is part of a broader offensive Trump has waged against NATO allies in recent weeks, for their refusal to send naval forces to help open the Strait of Hormuz. He told NATO members that they will “have to start learning how to fight for yourself” because “the USA won’t be there to help you anymore, just like you weren’t there for us”. Trump has also threatened to withdraw troops from Italy and Spain, and has once again raised the prospect of the US leaving NATO altogether. Asked in a recent interview whether he would reconsider US membership in the alliance, Trump replied: “Oh yes, I would say [it’s] beyond reconsideration”. 

In this context, Germany’s sweeping rearmament program is widely presented as a positive step in the right direction — Europe finally taking charge of its own security. But does this narrative hold up? And how seriously should one take the US’s threat of leaving NATO? A closer look reveals a very different picture. 

Last month, Germany published its first-ever official military strategy, presented by Boris Pistorius, the country’s defense minister. Its core ambition is to transform the Bundeswehr into “Europe’s strongest conventional army” by 2035, and a “technologically superior” force by 2039, with the Federal Republic positioned as the continent’s leading military power and the primary partner for its European allies. To achieve this, the strategy envisages massive rearmament with long-range weapons, extensive deployment of AI, automation and autonomous systems, and a total force — including reserves — of 460,000 soldiers. The reserve is explicitly framed as a bridge to civilian society, signaling an intent towards broader social militarization. 

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The strategy has drawn sharply divergent reactions. Some hail it as a long-overdue step towards freeing Germany — and by extension Europe — from American military tutelage, given the US’s apparent “disengagement” from NATO. Others view it as a dangerous revival of German military nationalism, one that evokes the darkest chapter of 20th-century European history. Both readings miss the point. Germany’s rearmament is not designed to make the country more militarily sovereign — for better or worse. It is designed to elevate Germany’s role as the “vassal-in-chief” within the US-controlled NATO command structure. In this sense, the Trump-Merz spat should be seen as little more than political theatre. 

The document itself makes this plain. One of its key sentences reads: “NATO must become more European to remain transatlantic”. Germany’s role is conceived not merely as that of a frontline military actor, but as NATO’s logistical and strategic hub — the node linking Eastern, Central and Western Europe while maintaining the transatlantic connection to North America. In other words: Germany must rearm in order to sustain American hegemony on the continent. To paraphrase a famous line from the Italian novel The Leopard: “Everything has to change so that everything can stay the same”. 

This was made explicit in a recent post on X by Elbridge Colby, the US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy. Colby welcomed Germany’s new military strategy as a vindication of Trump’s pressure on European allies to rearm, framing it as a step towards what he calls “Nato 3.0”. His core argument is that Europe, led by Germany, must now convert the Hague Commitments — where Europeans committed to a landmark defense investment pledge, aiming to spend 5% of their GDP on defense by 2035 — into concrete military capability. He quoted Nato Secretary-General Rutte approvingly: “Air defense systems, drones, ammunition, radars, space capabilities — that is what will keep us safe”. On Germany specifically, Colby presented the new military strategy as proof that Berlin was finally stepping up after “years of disarmament”, noting that rechristened Department of War was already working closely with the Germans to accelerate the transition.

The strategy itself, as Colby quoted it, acknowledges that Washington “is increasingly shifting its strategic focus towards its Western Hemisphere and the Indo-Pacific” and is demanding allies “step up their efforts to safeguard their own security”. Germany, in this framing, must become “an even stronger military ally to the United States” precisely because the US is repositioning elsewhere. 

This is simply a restatement of the “division of labor” that US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced at the very outset of the Trump administration. He made clear that the US needed to pivot elsewhere — we now know that meant Iran, and ultimately China — and that Europe would therefore have to assume responsibility for “managing its own security”, meaning the maintenance of pressure on Russia through Ukraine. Europe duly obliged: it has increased its defense spending and has doubled down on support for Kyiv, including through the recently approved €90 billion loan. We are now watching the natural progression of that logic, as Europe assumes the full financial burden for the continuation of the proxy war against Russia. 

In short, the US is not “disengaging from Europe”; it is simply demanding that Europe contribute more to Nato, while remaining firmly embedded within the Alliance’s command structure — in short, that it pays more for its own subordination. 

This requires a reassessment of Trump’s broader strategy towards Russia. Though he is routinely accused of “appeasing Putin” — with critics citing his cut-off of US funding to Ukraine and his (failed) attempts to broker a peace deal — the reality is more complicated. Washington has long sought to force Europe to decouple from Russian gas and replace it with American LNG, and the war in Ukraine has allowed them to achieve just that — so much so that one has to wonder if America’s decades-long strategy in Ukraine, from helping topple the democratically elected government in Ukraine in 2014, to drawing the country firmly into Nato’s informal orbit, wasn’t designed precisely to lure the Russians into war. The bombing of the Nord Stream pipeline should always be understood as part of this strategy. This becomes even clearer in light of the latest US National Security Strategy, published in November 2025, which designates “American energy dominance” across oil, gas, coal and nuclear power as a top strategic priority, explicitly framing the expansion of American energy exports as a means to “project power”. 

This logic illuminates not only the US’s military campaigns against Venezuela and Iran, but also why, in order to keep Europe dependent on American energy and severed from Russian supplies, Washington has a structural interest in keeping the proxy war going. It’s therefore easy to conclude that the US was never genuine about its intentions to make peace with Russia. The only difference today is that the war is now being waged not only through Ukraine, but through Europe itself. 

In this light, the ostensible US “threats” to leave Nato — and the European establishment’s rearmament program, Germany’s above all — are revealed as components of the same strategy: keeping Europe subordinated to American geopolitical priorities. The new German military strategy is nothing more than Berlin fulfilling the role Washington has assigned it: holding the line against Russia while the US turns towards the Indo-Pacific and the Western Hemisphere. This is not nationalism, military or otherwise, but its opposite: the undermining of German and European core interests at the hands of a transnational elite.

In this context, Germany should be understood as the anchor of a new Europeanized Nato core, comprising Germany, France, the UK — and Ukraine itself (even if formally outside of the alliance). This too reflects a longstanding American design. In his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard, the influential Polish-American diplomat Zbigniew Brzezinski predicted that “Franco-German-Polish-Ukrainian political collaboration… could evolve into a partnership enhancing Europe’s geostrategic depth”, adding that “America’s central geostrategic goal in Europe can be summed up quite simply: it is to consolidate through a more genuine transatlantic partnership the US bridgehead on the Eurasian continent”. 

This should dispel any remaining notion that what we are witnessing amounts to a move towards German or European strategic autonomy. It is no coincidence that Germany’s new military strategy identifies Russia as “the most serious and immediate threat” to European security — a claim that forms part of a broader European narrative warning of an inevitable war with Moscow in the coming years. At face value, this anti-Russian posturing might appear to reflect a distinctly “European” stance, one seemingly at odds with Washington’s public position. But this is largely an illusion. Not only has the European transatlantic establishment thoroughly internalized America’s strategic priorities, but the Nato command hierarchy makes the real chain of authority plain. 

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Real operational control of the proxy war against Russia remains firmly in Anglo-American hands. At the top sits the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) in Mons, Belgium, which translates political decisions into military objectives. The Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) — always an American general, dual-hatted as commander of US European Command — runs it alongside a British deputy. A German general coordinates staff work as Chief of Staff, but effective decision-making stays with the top two. 

Below SHAPE, operational command splits into two tracks: three Joint Force Commands (JFCs), the true theater commanders for large-scale operations, and three Component Commands covering air (Ramstein, Germany), land (Izmir, Turkey) and sea (Northwood, UK). MARCOM, the maritime command, has traditionally been UK-led, but the US recently took control of it, placing all three Component Commands under US command — a significant consolidation that has gone largely undiscussed. Even when a European officer commands a JFC — such as the leadership of JFC Naples, which recently passed from the US to Italy — the overall strategic direction remains under American control; JFC commanders implement objectives set by SHAPE. 

Two further structural dependencies reinforce American dominance. The first is the C4ISR concept of Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance: European allies are almost entirely dependent on US satellite, aerial and maritime platforms for real-time intelligence, surveillance and targeting — which together represent the backbone of Nato warfighting. Indeed, it has been acknowledged even by the Wall Street Journal that Ukraine’s deep-strike operations inside Russia — including, recently, against several oil production facilities — could not be conducted without American intelligence and satellite capabilities. The second dependency, less visible in public debate but potentially more consequential, is the dense presence of American staff officers embedded throughout Nato’s command structure at every level of the hierarchy, giving Washington an institutional grip that no change in command titles can easily displace. 

All of this should dispel any notion that the US is not deeply involved in the Ukraine war — or that it intends to leave Nato and truly “disengage” from Europe. Beyond the command architecture, the United States operates numerous bases and military installations across the continent, both within the Nato framework and under exclusive American control, which are indispensable to its global power projection. Ramstein Air Base in Germany — home to around 16,000 troops — functions as the hub controlling military drone traffic on a global scale, while coordinating American air operations across Europe, Africa and the Middle East. 

A recent Wall Street Journal investigation confirmed that, despite the public protestations of European leaders, US bases across the continent have functioned as the essential infrastructure for the American war on Iran. As the article put it, “Europe remains the bedrock of US force projection in the world”. Even Nato Secretary-General Rutte recently described the purpose of Nato as being a “platform of power projection for the United States”. 

Another element is what analysts call the “hidden dividends” of Nato: contracts and orders for American defense industries. This web of 1,300 agreements among the 32 member states that set standards for Nato weapons and equipment — covering everything from ammunition calibers to fuel-tank diameters — were originally imposed by Washington and overwhelmingly favor the American military-industrial complex. 

German and European rearmament, then, in the context of a supposedly more “European” Nato, is not strengthening European autonomy, but further eroding it. Not only does it make Europe complicit in Washington’s increasingly reckless military adventures, as the Iran war demonstrates, but more gravely still, it is pushing the continent towards a potentially catastrophic confrontation with Russia. Moscow is watching and responding accordingly. In a recent speech, Foreign Minister Lavrov stated openly: “A war against us has been openly declared. The Kyiv regime is being used as the tip of the spear. However, everyone is aware that this tip is unusable without Western supplies of weapons, intelligence data, satellite systems, training of military personnel and much more”. Lavrov added that Western leaders are actively preparing their publics for war with Russia — using Ukraine to buy time — and that Russia takes the threat very seriously. One cannot overstate the dangers of the path we are treading. 

A final observation is warranted. The French historian Emmanuel Todd has argued that much of what passes for nationalism in the West today — from Germany to Japan — is in fact a form of “imaginary” nationalism: vassalage towards the US dressed up as sovereignty. He contrasts this with “real” nationalism, a genuine sovereignty-oriented politics that is today largely absent. German neo-militarism, as argued here, falls squarely into the former category. But this does not mean that a “true” German nationalism — with its attendant aspirations towards continental hegemony — could not resurface. The militarization of German society and the hardening of anti-Russian sentiment are real and deepening phenomena. There is a historical precedent, after all. A century ago, the Anglo-American establishment tolerated the Nazi military build-up as an anti-Soviet bulwark — only for the German monster to eventually slip its leash. The domestic German context today is obviously very different — and of course one may argue, and hope, that a “true” German nationalism would recognize that the country’s genuine interests lie in peace rather than war. Even so, the parallels are impossible to ignore. 

Europe’s leaders chose forever war. They labeled Vladimir Putin the new Hitler. Once they had done so, it was impossible to envision any agreement with him. Like Donald Trump, who had hoped that shock-and-awe over Tehran would trigger an internal coup or rebellion that might topple the Islamic Republic, European leaders placed their bets on the prospect that the combination of tough sanctions on Russia and arms for Ukraine would topple Putin. It didn’t.

Four years of sanctions and war have achieved the opposite result. They rebalanced Russia’s current account, energized factories that lay dormant since the end of the Soviet Union, transferred foreign-owned companies to Russian oligarchs and kept oligarchic profits within Russia. Thus, the sanctions combined with military Keynesianism to stabilize Putin’s reign. Meanwhile, despite its impressive resistance on the battlefields, Ukraine’s economy is being steadily weakened while Europe is trapped in a geostrategic conundrum of its own making and the new oil crisis engineered by Israel and the United States.

Lacking both a strategy for winning the war and an interest in suing for peace, European leaders have ended up struggling to find increasingly scarce means of prolonging the war a little more in the vain hope that some miracle may deliver them from their strategic void or that their tenure will have ended by the time their folly has been exposed for all to see. Meanwhile, the bodies pile up in Ukraine’s killing fields and Europe’s social economies are hemorrhaging.

With Europe’s strategic defeat a near certainty, there are only two ways it will play out. One is that President Trump puts on the table a take-it-or-leave-it peace plan that President Zelensky and the European Union must accept, or else the United States ceases to share intelligence and to sell weapons to the Europeans to pass on to Ukraine. Exhausted by their energy crisis, fiscally stressed, and unable even to maintain the current level of support to Ukraine, German, Italian and French politicians will acquiesce to Trump’s plan. A Europe that has left them high and dry will leave Ukrainians feeling abandoned, unsafe and disillusioned. The ignominy will be complete when Russian natural gas begins to flow again into Germany, Italy and the rest of the European Union through pipelines that are, now, partly US-owned, with Washington retaining a share of the proceeds, while the European Union foots Ukraine’s reconstruction costs in their entirety.

The other possibility, one that will obtain if Donald Trump remains distracted for the rest of his tenure by his Iran war folly, is even less appetizing. Russia’s juggernaut, boosted by the windfall from high oil and gas prices, ekes out the rest of the Donbas slowly, painfully, devouring lives with a ruthless, mechanical precision until, at a moment of his choosing, Vladimir Putin declares victory and announces a unilateral ceasefire. Then, any leverage the European Union might have had to shape a peace and security agenda for its neighborhood withers to nothing.

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What if Europe were to ditch forever war in favor of its second option, the path never taken? What if it were to offer Russia a sensible peace and security pact that extends beyond settling the Ukraine war? Just posing the question will, undoubtedly, trigger howls of betrayal, charges of appeasing the new Hitler, accusations of reciting Moscow’s speaking points. These are the natural responses of having made, initially, the forever war choice which, as already argued, leads to a bitter betrayal of Ukraine and a miserable outcome for Europe.

To envisage this second option, a European offer of a peace and security pact, there are three prerequisites. First, the abandonment of the delusion that the offered pact should contain nothing that Putin can present as a victory. All pacts, agreements, peace deals, etc., must offer each signatory things they can present as great gains to their own constituency. Is there something that Putin can present to the Russians as worthy of their sacrifices during this awful war which Europe, including Ukraine, can live with? I think so. How about that, in the same way the United States can say an emphatic “No!” to the right of Mexico to deploy Chinese weaponry in Tijuana, Russia also has the right to seek security by demanding, as it has done for three decades, that Nato stay out of Georgia and Ukraine? A provision in the proposed European Peace and Security Pact that recognizes this Russian concern is not just a particularly small price to pay but also one that Europe should desire, in view of the dangerous tensions that a face-off between Russian and Nato troops within a postwar Ukraine, or indeed in Georgia, would generate.

The second prerequisite for a genuine peace and security pact is the rejection of the notion that it will have to involve an Anglo-European “coalition of the willing”; that is an army of British, German, French soldiers facing off their Russian counterparts along whatever line of control is agreed to. To insist on such an army is to state that Europe is not even attempting a genuine détente, assuming it to be impossible. The United States did exactly that on the Korean peninsula, leaving behind an ironclad, nuclear armed, huge army to police an impenetrable line of control. Europe cannot and should not want to do likewise in Ukraine. The best Keir Starmer’s “coalition of the willing” can deliver is a sad outfit facing the fate of UN peacekeepers in South Lebanon. It takes no more than a few moments of clarity to recognize that a functional peace and security pact must involve full de-militarization of the contested territory and its surrounding areas. In turn, this requires a spirit of détente based on the recognition that Europe must provide both sides, Ukraine and Russia, with security guarantees.

Finally, the third prerequisite is a readiness to be creative with issues of sovereignty and governance over disputed territories with a view to preventing the type of airtight partition left behind by the British Empire in India, Palestine, Cyprus, and Ireland, guaranteeing permanent conflict. Speaking of Ireland, the Good Friday agreement, a worthy effort to part ways both with the logic of strict partition and Westphalian sovereignty, is a splendid example of how the Donbas and other contested areas can be governed after the cessation of hostilities as part of a comprehensive peace and security pact.

Having stated the three prerequisites for a European pivot from forever war to offering Russia a peace and security pact, and before delving into what such a proposal might contain, the importance of rebuilding channels of communication with Russian society cannot be overestimated. The European Union’s policy of frowning upon, even sanctioning, anyone who dares maintain communication channels with Russian civil society is a form of self harm. This is why I accepted an invitation to address an investment conference in Moscow last week, one that involved no government representatives but did engage a large audience of financiers, technologists, students and journalists. If channels of communication are to be rebuilt, this is the type of audience that needs to get involved.

My visit to Moscow did not come out of the blue. In April 2022, two months after the war’s commencement, the movement that I helped co-found, DiEM25 (the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025), canvassed a five-point solution which I subsequently campaigned for, leading to the Athens Declaration on behalf of the Progressive International which called for a solution to the Ukrainian tragedy within the broader framework of a new Non-Aligned Movement. That was the background to my recent Moscow visit. Naturally, a Moscow visit by a former finance minister who failed spectacularly to alter Europe’s course a decade ago is not any kind of breakthrough, at least not in itself. However, what it can do is to demonstrate how Europeans can begin to mend fences with Russian civil society.

Turning to the actual proposal for a comprehensive European peace and security agenda, which I went to Moscow to canvas for, it consists of six parts.

First, Ukraine becomes in the 21st century what Austria used to be during the Cold War: a neutral but armed European country with its territorial integrity and political sovereignty jointly guaranteed by all European countries, plus Russia, under the auspices and in accordance with the Charter of the United Nations.

Second, the signatories of this Peace and Security Agenda shall agree on the gradual elimination across Europe of certain categories of weapons (including nuclear, chemical, and AI-powered drones). Within this context of deescalation, Russian and Ukrainian troops shall withdraw fully 300 kilometers on either side of the agreed border or line of control.

Third, all war refugees will have the right to return to their pre-2014 homes, with all sides committing to aid their return in practice.

Fourth, the Donbas and other disputed territories that come under Russian control shall be demilitarized and governed in the same manner as Northern Ireland under the Good Friday Agreement. Just as London retained sovereignty on paper but, in practice, shares it with Dublin, while the two communities share power equally on every governing body (from local government to Stormont), the idea here is that sovereignty of the areas that Russia is granted will remain formally within Russia, but free movement within and outside these regions will be guaranteed, and each municipality as well as every Oblast will be governed on the basis of equal representation of Russian- and Ukrainian-speakers. Anyone who says that this is impossible must be reminded that, not long ago, it seemed similarly impossible to envision Sinn Féin and Ulster Unionists power-sharing.

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Fifth, the European Union unfreezes Russia’s assets and removes all sanctions. Meanwhile Russian energy begins to flow again to Europe, with a portion of all proceeds dedicated to a Ukraine reconstruction fund.

Sixth, modeled on South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established after the fall of apartheid to offer an opportunity to air grievances and to be heard by the opposite side, a similar council shall be convened by the UN, led by judges with experience in restorative justice from South Africa and other countries.

As wars and the fear of war expand their domain, an international push for peace is more pertinent than ever. An inability to imagine what a comprehensive European peace and security agenda would look like is perhaps the worst impediment to its emergence. The above six-point proposal is meant as an example of how to overcome this obstacle, outlining concrete steps Europe could take to break the deadlock and give itself a chance to become relevant again.

Many will ask: how would the Russian government, Vladimir Putin in particular, respond to such a proposal? While no one knows until it is on the table, my recent experience in Moscow tells me that Russian civil society is not only ready to welcome it enthusiastically but also to pressurize its government to take it seriously. Eager to reconnect with the West, but repulsed by the clear signs EU leaders want to see Russia torn apart by centrifugal forces, Russian public opinion is keen to enter into a fruitful dialog on the basis of such a plan — including opponents as well as supporters of Putin’s government.

Last but not least, many of the Russian technocrats, students and journalists I met in Moscow last Saturday told me there was a reason they were more amenable to this particular proposal for a European peace and security agenda: it was put to them by someone whose stance on the Ukraine war four years ago (“Stand with Ukraine but not with Nato’s expansion”) was attacked with equal venom by the Russian government’s supporters and Nato stalwarts. This may help explain the impromptu party atmosphere, following the proposal’s presentation, to which I surrendered happily. Mending fences in the cause of peace takes a variety of small, human steps.

At the global level, Cold War II is a struggle between the incumbent superpower, the United States, and a rising challenger, China. And unless Washington adopts a less ambitious global strategy, the United States is doomed to lose Cold War II.

The reason is simple: America’s strategic objective — perpetual US military hegemony in East Asia, Europe, and the Middle East — is far too costly to achieve. In contrast, the goal shared by China and Russia — a multipolar world of great-power spheres of influence — is not only possible but probably inevitable. The Chinese dragon and the Russian bear can patiently wait until Uncle Sam exhausts himself from overextension and then goes home, just as he did when he abandoned Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. And the major beneficiary of America’s military overextension is likely to be its greatest rival — Beijing.

The sharpest figures in the Trump orbit appreciate this, and see the linkages between the various flashpoints. But the administration as a whole can’t resist the strategic hubris and haphazardness that have characterized many post-Cold War American governments — indeed, with the new Iran War, the Trumpians have displayed this tendency on overdrive. 

At last month’s Munich Security Conference, for example, America’s envoy to NATO, Matthew Whitaker, observed: “China could call Vladimir Putin and end this [Ukraine] war tomorrow and cut off his dual-purpose technologies that they’re selling.… You know, this war is being completely enabled by China.”

Whitaker was right. The People’s Republic has allowed both Russia and Iran to evade American and European sanctions by buying their oil, with the help of “shadow fleets” and transactions denominated in China’s currency, the yuan. In addition, Beijing has supplied the Islamic Republic with components used in its devastatingly effective (and remarkably cheap) Shahed drones. The Chinese are reportedly negotiating to provide Iran with antiship missiles and have likewise transferred dual-use technology, which can be used for both military and civilian purposes, to the Russian defense industry.

More: the Chinese regime has helped Iran to use its Beijing’s encrypted Beidou-3 global satellite navigation system and provided the Islamic Republic with stealth radar systems. For its part, the Kremlin has supplied Tehran with satellite intelligence showing the location of US naval ships and aircraft in the Persian Gulf. The backscratching is mutual. Iran has supplied Russia with thousands of drones used in Ukraine.

In one telling, America’s new war against Iran helps advance its position in Cold War II, by taking out the weakest of the three pillars that uphold the adversary’s Eurasian power. Yet this is a comforting after-the-fact narrative, typically offered by academics and magazine writers. They do it to console Western audiences dismayed by the war’s aimlessness and potentially devastating consequences for American prestige as the Iranian mullahs appear to hold on and even squeeze Washington. 

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In reality, China and its ally Russia benefit from Trump’s foolish diversion of American military resources to the Persian Gulf. To sustain the operation, the United States has stripped South Korea of missile defense systems and dispatched them to the Middle East and has diverted two guided-missile destroyers based in Japan to the Persian Gulf area. According to the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in a war with China over Taiwan, the United States would run out of missiles in less than a week.

The Iran war benefits the Sino-Russian entente in other ways. It has divided NATO, with President Trump denouncing America’s European allies as “cowards” and then calling on them for aid. Having stumbled into a trap, Trump has humiliated himself and the nation by begging Beijing to help in the Persian Gulf. On March 14, in a Truth Social post, Trump desperately called on China along with other countries to send “War Ships, along with the United States of America, to keep the Strait open and safe.” China declined the invitation. 

What incentive does Beijing have to rein in its proxies Russia or Iran? While watching Uncle Sam struggle in the steel traps of Ukraine and the Persian Gulf, China’s leaders can focus on capturing one global industry after another and increasing the dependence on China of other nations — including America’s own allies.

Long ago, Chinese leaders viewed American over-extension abroad as a means for diminishing US power. In a 1958 speech, Mao Zedong told his fellow Chinese Communists that US military bases in Taiwan, Lebanon, and elsewhere were “nooses”: “The nooses have been fashioned by the Americans themselves and by nobody else, and it is they themselves who have put these nooses around their own necks…. The longer the US aggressors remain in those places, the tighter the nooses round their necks will become.” Then as now, China benefits when the United States wastes its resources on wars in peripheral countries. 

The military realm is not the only area in which Washington is losing Cold War II. Whether in the form of hot wars or cold wars, modern great power struggles ultimately are wars of economic attrition. As in the two World Wars and the first Cold War, the side with superior industrial resources tends to prevail. It matters, therefore, that in the words of economist Richard Baldwin, China is “the world’s sole manufacturing superpower.”

In 2025, China manufactured more goods than the next eight largest manufacturing countries combined. In addition to being the workshop of the world, the Middle Kingdom dominates global trade. Today, only 30% of the world’s countries trade more with the United States than with China, down from 80% at the turn of the millennium.

During the first Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union competed for global influence in part by competing to finance projects like Egypt’s Aswan Dam. In today’s Cold War II, China has far outpaced America as the world’s leading source of development finance, providing $68 billion to developing countries, compared to only $39 billion from the United States in the first two decades of the 21st century. Indeed, the United States spent a paltry $76 billion on infrastructure in other countries over the past decade or so, compared to China’s $679 billion.

With the help of unpatriotic American corporations and investors, moreover, China has made the US defense and civilian economies dependent on Chinese factories. In 2023, China was the largest supplier in critical US military supply chains — ahead of Britain, India, and Japan.

China controls 80% percent of global graphite, necessary for batteries, 62% of fluorspar used in nuclear fuel and semiconductors, and a majority of the world’s magnesium, necessary for aircraft and missiles. Raytheon, a major US defense contractor, has declared that it is so dependent on Chinese suppliers that decoupling its supply chains from China is impossible. And while the Biden and Trump administrations have sought to boost US rare earth mining and processing, the American military may be dependent on China for at least a decade.

But surely America is far ahead in tech research? Wrong. According to the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, China leads global research in 90 critical technologies, the United States in 74. In quantum computing, a frontier technology, China is ahead of the United States, according to the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

What, then, is America’s comparative advantage over China as a great power? China has surpassed us in manufacturing, but we Americans lead the world in militarism — in lashing out here and there without a sense of deep strategic purpose or an appreciation for the problems associated with scarcity.

Since Trump’s second term began in January 2025, the United States has bombed governments or nonstate actors in seven countries — Iran, Venezuela, Nigeria, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia. The Trump administration has illegally engaged in the extrajudicial murder of around 100 alleged drug smugglers on the high seas in the Caribbean and Pacific, even though drug smuggling doesn’t carry the death penalty in the United States. Likewise, the United States has kidnapped the president of Venezuela and allowed Israel to assassinate most of Iran’s leadership in a Pearl Harbor-style sneak attack, before unleashing an American military campaign of massive bombing of Iran with no evident plan to counter Iran’s violent response — or even a cogent definition of victory.

In the same period, China, while quietly enabling its Russian and Iranian proxies, hasn’t bombed any countries or killed any foreign nationals. Indeed, while the United States for decades has been almost constantly killing suspected terrorists, bombing and invading multiple countries, and piling up foreign civilian corpses all over the world, China has grown rich and influential without firing a shot.

Since 1979, when it fought a brief war with Vietnam, China hasn’t fought any wars, although it has engaged in border skirmishes with India and has bullied other countries with shows of force in the South China Sea. By avoiding military quagmires and concentrating on internal development and strategic trade, China in the last three decades has become the dominant manufacturing power on earth. 

And here is the absurd result. Even though the United States gets less than 10% of its oil from the Persian Gulf, American soldiers must die or be maimed for life and American taxpayers must spend hundreds of billions of dollars to prevent Iran, whose largest customer is China, from blocking oil shipments to China by Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and Iraq — all of whose largest trading partner is also China.

Meanwhile, American taxpayers must also spend money on European bases and fund the war in Ukraine to protect the European Union, which imports one and a half times as much from China as it does from the United States, from a hypothetical invasion by Russia, whose largest trading partner is… also China. In East Asia, Washington spends a fortune to defend Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan — all of which trade more with China than with America — from a hypothetical attack by China. Why China would want to attack its trading partners is never made clear.

In short, America’s global grand strategy consists of using the US military, reliant for weapons on Chinese supply chains, to protect China’s trading partners from China or other Chinese trading partners, at the expense of American soldiers and American taxpayers.

Cold War II is also fought in the arena of legitimacy or “soft power.” Does the claim that America fights other people’s wars for them so they don’t have to defend themselves result in gratitude to the United States? According to a poll this month, citizens of Canada, Britain, Germany, and France now regard China as a more reliable partner than America. In the United States itself, according to the Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs, public opinion has shifted under Trump, away from confrontation with China to “friendly cooperation and engagement with China,” rising to 53% of respondents last year, up from 40% percent in 2024.

Why wouldn’t people in nations all over the world have a more favorable view of a repressive but unwarlike state like China, which makes first-rate consumer products and offers trade and investment opportunities, than they would of the United States, which, under any president of any party at any given time tends to be killing people in multiple foreign countries while boasting that it is the greatest country ever?

While the People’s Republic has risen to global industrial and commercial supremacy by following former Chinese leader Hu Jintao’s slogan “peaceful rise,” the arc of the United States since the 1990s can be described as “violent decline.” Post-Cold War America has repeated the strategic mistake of leaders in London in the three decades after 1945, when Britain imagined that it was still a major power because its troops were still machine-gunning natives in places like Kenya and Oman, even as it lost its manufacturing leadership to Germany, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan; Uncle Sam is the new Colonel Blimp. 

America’s bungling militarists in both parties can’t even tell us what they imagine a US “victory” in Cold War II would look like. In the world wars, the strategic goal was stripping Germany and Japan of their foreign empires, without which they would be nothing more than medium powers. In the Cold War, the similar goal of the United States and its allies was achieved when the Soviet Union gave up its essential Eastern European empire, even before the USSR disintegrated along lines of nationality, leaving the Russian core smaller than it has been in centuries.

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But China’s power, like that of the United States, is based on its own internal population, workforce, and markets, augmented by peaceful, civilian trade and investment. Outside of Tibet and Xinjiang, China is an empire of commerce, not conquest. Absent total collapse, China is likely to be a superpower, and Russia a regional great power, for centuries or millennia, under regimes of any kind. If it survives the current American-Israeli onslaught, which is likely, Iran will likewise endure as a civilizational state, albeit as a client of Moscow and Beijing rather than a fully coequal partner in their Eurasian bloc.

China, especially, is well-poised to inherit the outcome of Cold War II. If East Asia is defined as China, Taiwan, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Japan, then China accounts for around 90% of the East Asian population. If Germany had made up 90% of the population of Europe in 1914 or 1939, it would have been the European hegemon without any need to augment its strength by conquering its neighbors. 

Even if China and Russia were to adopt multiparty liberal democracy tomorrow, national pride, expressed through free and fair elections, would prevent their new democratic leaders from accepting humiliating, permanent subordination to US military power in their own neighborhoods. The same would be true of a proud and patriotic Iranian democracy freed of the mullahs. Somehow, the Trump administration, which promotes nationalism and sovereigntism for the United States, hasn’t figured out that other nations may feel strongly about their sovereignty, too, and be willing to die for it.

Sadly, we know how today’s Cold War II will end: in the eventual abandonment by the United States of its attempt at permanent US global hegemony, and the adoption by default of the Chinese and Russian alternative, a multipolar world characterized by spheres of military influence and trade blocs based on a handful of regional great powers. One need not have any sympathy for Putin’s gangster regime or China’s Communist dictatorship to recognize that their vision of world order is likely to be achieved, while the delusory post-1989 goal of American global hegemony can never be realized.

A multipolar world order is inevitable, because American voters since the fall of the Berlin Wall have never been willing to pay the costs, in American taxes and American blood, that would be required for the United States to be “the sole superpower” in every region on Earth for generations or centuries to come. American voters thought they were getting less unnecessary foreign military intervention in 2008 with Obama, who then launched new wars of regime change in Libya and Syria, and in 2016 with Trump, who has now begun an unnecessary and disastrous third Persian Gulf War. But sooner or later, the war-weariness of the American people will bring an end to the fantasy of a global Pax Americana built on drones and bombs. Perhaps we Americans in the 2030s or 2040s will finally get the kind of patriotic statesman we did not get after the Cold War — an American de Gaulle, who will liquidate too-costly overseas commitments and focus, at long last, on nation-building at home.

Right now, Trump has three choices. In scenario one, he sticks to his four-to-five week timetable, flattens the place, declares victory and gets out without destroying the Islamic Republic. The Strait of Hormuz would at this point not be truly secured. Scenario two is that he continues his campaign until the Strait is open, and he’s assured it’ll stay that way. That might involve using a limited number of ground troops to secure the Iranian coastline abutting the Strait. There would be no regime change in this scenario — but at least Washington would have reopened the Persian Gulf.

There’s also a third scenario: Trump concludes that, for as long as the existing Iranian regime is in power, the Strait cannot be secured. To get the job done, he must launch a full-scale invasion. Yet as Condoleezza Rice, national security advisor and later secretary of state under President Bush just reminded us, it took his administration a full year to prepare for the occupation of Iraq. There are currently no signs that an equivalent operation is being planned for Iran.

Scenario one would be the ultimate defeat, on the scale of Vietnam. It would stand as the greatest political and military misjudgment of our time — and for that reason alone, I would rule it out.

We are currently in the midst of scenario two. The difficulty commentators have during wars is that they’re not privy to classified information. Trump may have information that gives him the confidence to think America can totally destroy the Iranian regime’s military capabilities. I therefore can’t exclude the possibility that he is right, and that his critics are wrong.

History, however, would suggest otherwise. During the build up to the Iraq War, George W. Bush and Tony Blair wanted to believe the briefings they received from officials. Officials, for their part, delivered the briefings their political masters wanted to hear. I was a newspaper editor in Germany at the time, and attended one such high-level briefing. Unfortunately, the information I heard turned out to be completely wrong. The big conclusion I drew then is that privileged information doesn’t necessarily mean leaders make wise decisions.

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And certainly, based on what’s happening so far in Iran, it’s clear that the Trump administration misjudged the power of asymmetric warfare. It also misjudged the changed nature of military supply chains. Twenty years ago, military power was all about weapons of mass destruction, missiles, warplanes and tanks. And, to that extent, I do believe that the US has indeed succeeded in destroying a large portion of Iran’s conventional military infrastructure.

But the regime’s most potent weapons are mines and kamikaze drones, each costing just a few tens of thousands of dollars. If one of these were to hit an oil tanker, and cause an oil spill in the Strait of Hormuz, the effect would be devastating. No ship would be able to pass until the waters are cleared. And even if the US were somehow able to reopen the Strait, it would still have to protect every single ship — whereas the Iranians only need a single successful hit to close the Strait once more.

That’s asymmetric warfare: and the Iranians are leveraging their one and only strategic advantage for all it’s worth. They have already carried out drone and missile attacks on ships on oil installations in the Gulf states, and may also have laid mines in the Strait. The strategic objective of the Revolutionary Guards is very similar to strategies employed by both Russia and Ukraine: to come out on top in a prolonged war of attrition. The Iranian calculation is that the US will ultimately fold under economic and political pressure.

That may be the best strategy available to them, but it is not guaranteed to succeed. Scenario three, a full ground invasion, still looms in the background. If chickening out is politically catastrophic for Trump, and the current air campaign fails, what else can he do but prepare for scenario three? It is not what he wanted. But at the point when he finally makes the decision, it may be the obvious thing to do. If you have no other options left, the impossible becomes the inevitable.

Clearly, this would clash with what Trump long promised: no more wars in distant lands. Nor do I doubt that he meant it when he said it. But when you’re in the hot seat in the White House, your job is to manage conflicting objectives. When faced with a choice to unseat the Revolutionary Guards in a six-months ground war, or suffer a humiliating defeat, we should not automatically assume that Trump would choose the latter.

We should also not underestimate the role of Israel. I know that many inside the Israeli government expected Trump to force regime change in Iran at some point during his second term. And now, if Trump were to chicken out without getting the job done, he’d leave Israel humiliated and exposed. To be clear, the US is clearly the senior partner in the relationship, but Israel had at least some influence in Trump’s decision to go to war. Why, then, wouldn’t Netanyahu exert similar influence in how to end the conflict?

Of course, I am not predicting anything here. Unexpected events intrude. They already have. But based on what is publicly known, and on conversations I had ahead of the invasion, I would want to keep an open mind on any of those options. And since few people expect scenario three, I would call it the “underpriced” option. It is not necessarily likely, but a lot more probable than many think. Besides, an extended air campaign and boots on the ground are hardly mutually exclusive, and could overlap for a time.

Another factor here is how the Iran war interacts with Ukraine. For Europe, the rise in oil prices that resulted from the closure of the Strait of Hormuz is a geopolitical disaster. Why? Because it destroys the continent’s strategy to starve Russia of its oil revenues. The price of Urals oil, the benchmark for the oil sold by Russia, has risen from under $40 per barrel to almost $90 — and lately peaked at over $100. In February, before the Iran war started, Russian oil tax revenues had fallen to around $4 billion per month, after oscillating between $6-10 billion per month since 2022. If Urals oil stays at this price, meanwhile, Russian oil tax revenues would jump to around $10 billion a month: enough to fund Putin’s war.

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It’s obvious, then, that Europe’s strategy rested far too much on oil prices staying low, something I always thought was naive. Even before this month’s shock, Russia wasn’t running out of money, and now it definitely won’t. The truth is that Europe has no strategy for a Ukrainian victory — and never did. It’s just that now, this reality is becoming impossible to ignore.

As for the future, the oil markets are ominous. After initially taking a relatively optimistic view, they now expect a longer war. The Russians themselves believe that the oil prices will remain elevated for another year. And if Trump were to pursue his war for a longer period, he would really need to force Ukraine and Russia to cut some kind of deal. No wonder he’s already piling up pressure on the beleaguered Kyiv government. As Trump told NBC: “I’m surprised that Zelensky doesn’t want to make a deal. Tell Zelensky to make a deal because Putin’s willing to make a deal.”

Certainly, I don’t think it is possible for the West to fight two wars at once: against Russia in Ukraine and against Iran. The US is already running low on some supplies, while Ukraine itself is facing an acute shortage of air defense missiles. One war has to end for the other to proceed. And for Trump, Iran is the priority.

It would be comforting to know that a strategic operator is pulling the strings in the background, someone like Colin Powell, when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the first Gulf War. Trump, unfortunately, has surrounded himself with sycophants. The image of Marco Rubio, secretary of state and national security advisor, being forced by Trump to wear shoes that are too big for him, tells us all we need to know. All I can say, then, is that the logic of war has taken over — and it’s driving America on.

He is us, an equal creation of the Left and the Right, and our leaders will all be Trumps from now on — unless we do something. Gavin Newsom, the democratic frontrunner for 2028 has explicitly styled himself after Trump. And a new crop of politicians from Republican James Fishback in Florida to Democrat Kat Abughazaleh in Chicago have adopted his divisive, confrontation-all-the-time style.   

I first noticed the total-hatred phenomenon while living in Moscow in 2004, in the months leading up to the Orange Revolution. At that time, a corrupt outgoing president of the Ukraine, Leonid Kuchma, widely seen as a Kremlin puppet, had anointed his corrupt, Russian-leaning prime minister, Viktor Yanukovych, a representative of the oligarchic crime syndicate from the Donbas, as a successor. Yanukovych was facing a stiff challenge from the Western-leaning Viktor Yushchenko, who was campaigning against corruption and who had been spectacularly disfigured by an attempted assassination with the poison dioxin. 

To Americans in Moscow, already high on blue passports and cultural superiority, and to the Western-leaning Ukrainians among us, this was a clear battle of democracy against autocracy, and good against evil, with Yushchenko’s scarred face as a banner to elicit passionate feelings of outrage and righteousness. It was easy to dismiss the more pragmatic Russian opinion: that Yushchenko was merely the representative of a different crime syndicate; and that Russia and Ukraine were neighbors with mixed populations and deeply intertwined trade and military relationships, and they had to get along.

Prior to this point, at least in the United States, politics had been the business of politicians and a niche interest among wonks and lobbyists. To the extent that anyone got angry at their friends over dinner over the issues of the day, it was a foible. We lambasted our presidents — Reagan was an evil representative of wealth and greed, Clinton a liar with bad morals, George W. legendarily stupid. But personally, passionately, hating them, and delegitimizing them through the intensity of our hatred, that was still in its infancy.

Yanukovych — who appeared to deserve it — was the first politician I saw receive this kind of total character annihilation. 

He was a criminal and a rapist, Ukrainian friends told me, a person so tarred by savagery that any means were necessary to prevent his ascendency. One young Ukrainian woman, married to an American banker, trembled with rage when she discussed him over drinks. Her anger seemed so justified that it was easy not to notice that it shut down consideration of the issues. Frankly, there didn’t seem to be any issues — always a warning sign.

According to the website of the now-shuttered, reformist English-language daily The Moscow Times, Yanukovych was convicted for robbery as a teenager, served time three years later for severely beating someone, and was accused of large-scale theft, tearing earrings from people’s ears, and an attempted rape, all prior to being appointed Kuchma’s prime minister as a representative of the Donetsk oligarchy. Records of these crimes were missing from the local police stations that handled the crimes. 

In the event, Yanukovych won the election, which was swiftly condemned as rigged by then-US Secretary of State Colin Powell. My Ukrainian friends decamped Moscow for Maidan Square and, along with many others, overturned the election through sheer force of rage, and the rest was a beautiful Orange victory for democracy. 

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Except, from this early, larval form of total-virtue politics, sprung the hideous insect of total-hatred politics that afflicts us today. 

Total hatred, on the Left, is the belief that our political opponents are not just people with reasonable disagreements about how to achieve the common good, or different beliefs about what the common good should be — but that they are, personally, bad people, who want something bad, and their leaders are really bad people. To demonstrate your hatred of these bad people, in the most explicit and grotesque terms possible, becomes the highest good. You #Resist, nevermind that you’re resisting the results of a free and fair election in your own country. 

Trump Derangement Syndrome, of course, is the flower of total-hatred politics; as is cancel culture, and the split between Twitter and Bluesky, and all the broken families and broken friendships that have come in the wake of polarization. The arts have fallen victim, with satire and rage becoming the dominant mode of production. The Netanyahus, a satirical, fictionalized version of Bibi’s family’s visit to Harold Bloom at Cornell in 1960, by Joshua Cohen, won a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2022. Satirist laureate George Saunders, once a good writer, has turned full-time to Trump-parody dreck. Since when has it been a virtue to make each other appear worse than we are? Performances demeaning the American president — he’s a giant inflatable toddler, wearing a crown! — have become so routine that even The New York Times is bored. 

The hatred has never felt quite so personal coming from the Right, but it’s equally destructive, taking the form of pointless norm-breaking, aggression, and rebellion against perceived injustices from the Left. One of the most insightful comments I’ve seen about Trump was that he had a seven-letter platform that starts in F and ends in U. Decisive pluralities of Americans voted for this — and relished doing so. And now we’re seeing the fruits. 

F-U to the Gulf of Mexico, to Europe, to Greenland, to Venezuela, to Iran. F-U to the illegal immigrants, and to the blue states that want to shield them, and to the many Americans who will be distressed by seeing long-standing neighbors ripped from their homes and deported.

Neither form of hatred has respect for American institutions or the rule of law. Democrats turned the mainstream media into organs of overt activism, discriminated based on race, passed off a vegetative president, and engaged in frivolous impeachments. Republicans are attacking free speech and academic freedom, and breaking norms on a massive scale. 

The emotional manifestation of total hatred is an urge toward murder and death, as we can see on social media, where calls for people to die have become their own form of parody. Trump should die. Netanyahu should die. A departing editor at the Los Angeles Review of Books thinks that the upper management — of a nonprofit book review — should die (for failing to pay staff and contributors). And of course, people are actually killing each other or trying to: Donald Trump, Charlie Kirk, Renee Good, Alex Pretti, three people in an Austin bar on Sunday. 

The political manifestation is what we have today: a politics that is increasingly incoherent, illiberal, and anti-democratic, and which makes no effort to fulfill its core function of negotiating a shared settlement. When the Democrats are in power, they illegally throw open the borders. When the Republicans take their place, they pursue the legitimate end of deporting people by cruel means. They kill people.  “Fuck Trump” and “Fuck ICE” the other side responds, and surges onto the streets to carry out its agenda by force.  

When we discuss this kind of dynamic, the usual culprit is social media. As the writer Freddie DeBoer once said, “the human mind was not meant to be constantly rubbing up against other human minds.” 

And surely that’s been an accelerant, but I’d place the moment we gave up on each other many years earlier, during the transition that, paradoxically, occurred with the triumph of Western liberal democracy in the post-Cold War era. 

Which brings us back to my first brush with Ukrainian hate politics. The fall of the Soviet Union was perceived as a victory for the West, chalked up to Ronald Reagan’s commitment to the arms race and his promotion of democracy and American values. Reagan’s foreign policy was a pivot for Republicans, who had previously stuck to a Kissinger doctrine of realpolitik — the idea that politicians should seek stability, rather than pursue a foreign policy that promoted ideology. Arguably, realpolitik worked — at least, it was inclusive, in the form of Nixon bringing both China and Russian into political relation — but it was easy to brand as both amoral and soft, and we’ve abandoned it. With Reagan, it became impermissible to demand anything less than Total Victory Over Evil in foreign policy.

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The moral high produced by winning the Cold War has been long-lasting. Star Trek: The Next Generation, a deeply influential and treacly good television show about exporting liberal democracy to the entire galaxy aired from 1987 to 1994. The West Wing, a similar idealization of the liberal project, ran from 1999 to 2006. The Wire, from 2002 to 2008, a deeply influential show that formed the moral architecture of most of today’s educated Left, was a grittier version of the same good-versus-evil narrative. These shows ran through the presidencies of George H. W. Bush to Bill Clinton, George W. Bush to Obama, all offering different flavors of the same virtue. A virtue that criticizes America, to be sure, but in the deep grounding of each human soul, a prideful, crusading one, that tells us we’re the good guys.  

This has rendered us unable to face reality and grapple with opposition. If Evil Russia has interests in Ukraine, we erase them. If Muslim theocrats wouldn’t actually be nice people to live with, and that contradicts our tolerant self-image, we deny it (Queers for Palestine, folks. Hands off Iran). If people in our own country aren’t totally with the program, we bully them into submission. And it’s that slippery spot where we can’t see our own pride that has shifted the political ground from reason to emotion, and from negotiation to sheer rage.

 Democracy is better than autocracy; Viktor Yanukovych stole an election and was a bad guy; Ukraine should be allowed to govern itself — none of these things is wrong. But promoting these goals in a complex world requires a foundation in the older, more rigorous Judeo-Christian values, which caution against pride, and promote self-sacrifice, and don’t ever allow us to view the other as all-bad. 

Without this kind of tempering, we get total virtue, and its corollary, total hatred. 

The pitiful fact is that unlike most political problems, the power to end total hatred really does rest in the hands the individual haters — in their personal relationships (stop canceling your friends and family), in how they behave online (stop telling people to die), and in how they consider their politics (consider the other side; give more than you’d like to). Given the state of world and domestic affairs, it would be impossible not to be angry; everyone is angry. But the first step toward healing the body politic and ourselves would be to consider that a vice. 

When Putin first became the country’s president, back in 2000, Russian national security doctrine claimed that “multipolarity” meant “equal and equitable relations with all countries” and the “universal observance of human rights and freedoms and the impermissibility of dual standards in this respect”. Over the last 25 years, however, it’s become clear that “multipolarity” in practice doesn’t mean any of those things. Rather, it means the end of American dominance and the restoration of post-Soviet Russia as a great power. In this world, large states will set the rules within their own backyards — ignoring international boundaries and treaties — while weaker ones will have to suffer the consequences.

Putin has become increasingly obsessed with these ideas, pursuing them through his war against Ukraine, and his constant demands that Russia holds special rights over the political future of its neighbors’ “ethnic Russian” populations. Disruptive behavior at the United Nations fits into the same pattern. Amid speculation about peace deals in Ukraine and Donald Trump’s conspicuous performances alongside Putin — including the much-discussed Alaska meeting — commentators have suggested that the White House may be about to grant Moscow its sphere of influence, leaving it free to redraw borders and reorder the post-Soviet space.

Today, in the wake of the strikes on its strategic partner Iran — which has provided significant support for the war against Ukraine — and the violence spilling into Lebanon, Moscow is playing out a role at what it would call the top table of a “multipolar world order.” State media outlets speak with striking confidence. Commentators speculate about a potential American “defeat” in Iran that could trigger the “inexorable collapse” of the United States itself. Reports highlight Iran’s retaliatory strikes against regional targets, suggesting Tehran is undeterred even after the killing of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Meanwhile, Western allies and Western publics are purportedly gripped by total panic.

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At the diplomatic level, Russian officials present themselves as guardians of stability and law — harking back to the familiar but hollow language of the “multipolar world order”. Russia’s Foreign Ministry has declared that “Russia, as always, stands ready to assist in advancing peaceful solutions grounded in international law, mutual respect and balance of interests” (a familiar line harking back to Putin’s violent war against Chechnya in the 2000s). The language, absurd given Moscow’s propensity for waging war and advocating brutally for its own interests, echoes the early formulations of “equal and equitable relations” and the rejection of “dual standards”. In the Kremlin’s strategic narrative, American power is brittle, Iranian resolve undamaged, and history is bending in Russia’s direction.

In reality, of course, the limits of Russian diplomatic and military capacity have been brutally exposed. There is no serious prospect of Moscow deterring the US or Israel. There is no realistic mechanism by which Russia can guarantee or even influence Iran’s security. Unlike in Syria a decade ago, when Russian airpower altered the balance on the ground, the Kremlin today lacks the capacity required to shape events in the Middle East. Its military resources are heavily committed elsewhere; its diplomatic leverage is negligible; its economic tools are non-existent.

Russia thus talks the talk of great power arbitration — while exercising no control over outcomes. Its media and diplomats read loudly from the Putinist script of sovereignty, balance, legality, even as more powerful actors decide the fate of the region. Donald Trump’s government is flaunting its global strike capacity in Iran and Venezuela. Putin’s old Syrian ally, Bashar al-Assad, is confined to a sordid exile in a Moscow apartment block.

Meanwhile, Russia is bleeding economically, militarily, and demographically from its war against Ukraine. Moscow’s security guarantees for Armenia proved unreliable when tested by Azerbaijan. China, for its part, is increasingly strident in Africa and Central Asia, where once Soviet and post-Soviet Kremlin governments were the undoubted military and economic top dogs. In an international free-for-all — and despite the pageantry of state visits to and from China, the United States, and Central Asian states — Vladimir Putin is ever weaker on the global stage.

Putin has got the world he asked for, but not the one he wanted. As Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney recently warned, countries now face “the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where geopolitics, where the large, main power, geopolitics, is submitted to no limits, no constraints.” But that reality has only revealed how weak Russian power really is. Putin can only watch on as the United States, China, and anybody else who chooses eliminate his erstwhile friends in South America and the Middle East.

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The last time Putin was confronted with a moment of such global fragility was in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. As authoritarian regimes collapsed across the Middle East and mass protests filled Russian streets in 2011 and 2012 — this was the era of Boris Nemtsov and Alexei Navalny — the Kremlin briefly feared for its own survival. Gripped by paranoia, Putin openly feared that the revolutionary wave might reach Moscow. The response was swift and decisive. A sweeping security crackdown followed. Freedom in political life was extinguished. The language of nationalism and civilizational struggle hardened. Next came Crimea, war against Ukraine, and a foreign policy defined by aggressive confrontation.

Today, Putin and his coterie of hangers-on might be wondering what would happen if an opposing power or even an internal enemy — unlikely as it seems, even if Yevgeny Prigozhin’s ill-fated march on the Russian capital took place barely three years ago — decided to blitz Moscow and topple the Russian leadership. In the Putin regime’s eyes, weakness demands a response. If the multipolar disorder now taking shape continues to marginalize Moscow, Putin may again turn inwards to tighten repression and outwards to make the world pay attention to Russia through violence. The question is no longer whether the world has entered the harsher era of disorder Putin long desired. It may be how far he is prepared to go to avoid becoming one of its losers.

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.

The 3.5 million pages released last week by the Department of Justice confirm that these are, in fact, the same story. Treating Russiagate as a case of isolated foreign interference or the Epstein revelations as a story of individual depravity are limiting and, strange as it sounds, comforting frames because they give each side a convenient villain.

The real story is more systemic. It rests on the emergence, from the ashes of the Soviet Union, of a transnational kleptocratic class that has grown to encompass Western elites too — many of whom are only too happy to collude with the Russians, the Saudis, the Israelis, whoever, in undermining democratic institutions. The Epstein Files need to be reframed: this is a story about modern geopolitics.

It should not be surprising that Russian names are all over the Epstein Files. Russia was the laboratory that birthed the modern transnational kleptocratic class. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 created new oligarchs, as Soviet state assets were liquidated and former intelligence officers became freelance. But it also created a global template that opportunistic would-be Western oligarchs could follow in their turn.

The men who emerged from post-Soviet lawlessness — bespredel is the Russian term — built their fortunes by moving money across jurisdictions, leveraging kompromat, and treating governments as service providers instead of sovereigns. In this they were enabled by willing partners in the West, who provided the shell companies, the anonymous limited liability corporations, and the real estate loopholes. As Casey Michel has documented in American Kleptocracy, the US was not a victim of this corruption. Rather, it built the frameworks that enabled it.

Jeffrey Epstein appeared to understand this intuitively. He brokered connections across the worlds of Israeli intelligence, Gulf royals, European politicians, and the Russian state. One of his most frequent contacts was Sergey Belyakov, an FSB officer. Epstein helped Belyakov to locate tax havens and to evade sanctions; he also assisted in laundering the reputations of Russian intelligence officers, introducing them as legitimate businessmen to high-profile Americans to help them operate in the US without raising suspicion.

Russia’s former ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin, was another recurring contact. He went to Epstein for advice on handling Trump. “Churkin was great,” Epstein wrote in June 2018. “He understood Trump after our conversations. It is not complex.” This was sent weeks before the Trump-Putin Helsinki summit, where Trump sided with Russia, contradicting US intelligence. Epstein also pushed to meet Russia’s foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, telling his frequent intermediary, former Norwegian prime minister Thorbjørn Jagland: “I think you might suggest to Putin that Lavrov can get insight on talking to me.”

Epstein also promoted de-dollarization schemes like BRIC currencies and crypto, via his ties with US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick. There were the inevitable honey-traps, too — he introduced Russian women to targets like Prince Andrew and Bill Gates.

There’s even a Silicon Valley dimension. One of his associates was Masha Drokova, a former commissar of the pro-Putin youth movement Nashi who later reinvented herself as a Bay Area venture capitalist. The files show she represented Epstein as a client and embedded Russian capital in the American tech sector through the same networks. An email from 2015 finds Epstein pitching Peter Thiel, chairman of the Palantir, in order to set up a meeting in Palo Alto with his “very good friend” Belyakov, who was organizing an “innovation conference in Moscow”. Epstein had previously facilitated meetings between Thiel and Churkin. The connection between Palantir’s surveillance capabilities and Moscow’s interests was framed as just another networking opportunity among friends.

The British dimension is equally revealing. Lord Mandelson, the “Prince of Darkness” who was a key architect of New Labour, appears throughout the files as a willing conduit between Whitehall and Epstein’s network. While serving as Business Secretary during the 2008 financial crisis, Mandelson forwarded internal government communications to Epstein — including advance notice of the €500 billion bailout and discussions about selling off UK government assets.

This behavior tracks with Mandelson’s broader cultivation of Russian kleptocracy. He vacationed on the yacht of aluminum tycoon Oleg Deripaska, whose company benefited from tariff cuts that Mandelson oversaw while serving as EU Trade Commissioner. Mandelson’s firm later leveraged these ties to lobby the Kremlin directly, with Mandelson even writing to Putin to intervene in a dispute involving a Russian defense conglomerate on whose board he sat. Mandelson also offered to secure a Russian visa for Epstein using his backchannel to Deripaska. In November 2010 — when Epstein was already a convicted pedophile — he emailed Mandelson asking for a workaround to get a last-minute Russian visa. Mandelson replied the next day, confirming that he had an associate “helping on visas” to expedite the paperwork.

As we’ve known for a while, a lot of the Russiagate revelations turned out to be completely true — despite being labeled cringe lib paranoia. Trump’s campaign manager Paul Manafort really was colluding with the Russian agent Konstantin Kilimnik. I’ve had an interest in this subject for some time, arguing in 2017 that the collusion was a byproduct of long-standing financial schemes. The protagonist was not Putin but the money itself.

At a certain point it began to feel like shouting into the void. People were so fixated on the overhyped effects of Russian troll farms that they forgot that the source of the problem, as usual, is not anonymous shitposters but the people in charge. As David Klion argued years ago, the Steele dossier spy-thriller framing of Russiagate was a distraction; the Left should have treated the scandal as a means to critique global capitalism — rather than a pretext to leap to the defense of the FBI. We can have a debate over how much Russia influenced the 2016 election, but this is a bit of a red herring; in any case, the shady links were there years before Trump developed political aspirations.

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I suspect one of the reasons Epstein was able to coast for so long is that many sensible people — especially educated liberals — found the idea of viewing the world through a conspiratorial lens vaguely distasteful and rube-coded. The liberal epistemic style has a strong allergy to connecting the dots, partly as a reasonable response to growing paranoid thinking on the Right — but also as a class marker. Baroque patterns of elite coordination became associated with Glenn Beck’s chalkboard. As Thiel wrote to Curtis Yarvin in 2014, “one of our hidden advantages is that these people” — he meant the progressive Left —  “wouldn’t believe a conspiracy if it hit them over the head…Linkages make them sound crazy, and they kinda know it.”

Epstein’s case seems almost designed to exploit this blind spot. The actual facts sound like QAnon fever dreams, which made the serious people instinctively skeptical, because believing it pattern-matched to believing nonsense. The deeper issue is that educated liberals tend to have high trust in institutions and credentialed expertise. The idea that prosecutors, academics, and journalists might all fail simultaneously due to social pressure, career incentives, or willful blindness cuts against the assumption that these systems basically work.

But if liberals were guilty of an anti-conspiratorial reflex, the Right bears responsibility too, for flooding the discourse with QAnon fever dreams, anti-vaccine hysteria, and stolen election fantasies. When everything is portrayed as a conspiracy, the term loses its sting. The tools that might have exposed Epstein’s network earlier — investigative journalism, institutional accountability, the rule of law — are precisely the liberal inheritance that the post-liberal Right treats with such contempt.

Connect the dots and the files do highlight connections that span decades and resurface in unexpected places. In a 2019 email Epstein flagged a “coincidence”: the Russian billionaire Dmitry Rybolovlev bought Trump’s Palm Beach mansion for more than twice what Trump paid for it four years earlier. Rybolovlev never occupied the property before demolishing it. He was the same man who sold a Leonardo da Vinci painting to Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman for $450 million — a price that Epstein claimed was absurdly inflated. As Epstein noted, Rybolovlev “knows all”.

Last year, Rybolovlev appeared as part of Russia’s delegation in the Ukraine peace talks held in Riyadh, sitting across from Trump’s team. Just to be clear: the same man apparently involved in laundering money through a Trump real estate deal is now helping to negotiate the end of Europe’s largest war. One of the most spiritually exhausting elements of all this is that it’s impossible to discuss such things without sounding like a conspiratorial lunatic. But here we are.

As for Trump himself, Epstein described him in the emails as “the dog that hasn’t barked” — someone who knew all but stayed silent. Lutnick appears throughout as an obsequious dinner companion and fundraiser contact. William Barr, who repeatedly appears in the files, unilaterally cleared Trump of Russiagate charges in 2019. He was also Attorney General when Epstein died in federal custody. His father had given Epstein his first job at the Dalton School decades earlier.

But it wasn’t just Trump cronies. Kathryn Ruemmler, counsel to the White House under Barack Obama, wrote that she “adored” Epstein. Bill Gates met with Epstein repeatedly after his conviction for pedophilia. Bill Clinton flew on his plane. Noam Chomsky offered him advice. Larry Summers took his money.

The Russian collusion story was never about shadowy foreign forces assaulting an innocent democracy. This lets the US off the hook too easily. It was about a sphere of elite impunity. American consultants, Russian oligarchs, Saudi princes, European politicians, Israeli intelligence figures and British ex-spies all swim in the same waters.

Abstracted from the lurid details, Epstein and Russiagate are two manifestations of the same phenomenon. Epstein was a node in that global infrastructure and Russiagate was one operation that ran through it. You don’t need an elaborate conspiracy if you have lots of power and similar concerns.

Russia wants to weaken Western institutions and will pay for it. The borderless elite profit from weak institutions and enjoy getting paid. Their interests converge. At a certain altitude, the lines on the map disappear.

***

A version of this article first appeared on Hegemon.

Journalists parsing the files have found thousands of references to Vladimir Putin and to Russia. There is still no proof that these files relate to a real espionage operation, in which victims were blackmailed after sordid encounters with Russian women. But connecting the dots leads to what sounds like an absurd conspiracy theory, where some of the world’s most powerful men, men with security teams and agencies meant to guard and protect them, were left exposed to an age-old, tried-and-tested Russian trick: the “honeytrap”.

The honeytrap is as straightforward as espionage maneuvers come: the sexual seduction of a target is photographed or filmed then used for blackmail. In return for keeping the indiscretion secret, the blackmailer demands information or political favors. If the Epstein case was a honeytrap, who can know what Epstein, his guests, or his Russian contacts knew, agreed to, or wanted? But what is certain is that the scandal summons up the memory of honeytraps long past. It’s precisely because it sounds like pulp that the scandal now lands with such force in a political culture already primed to believe the worst about elite networks and hidden influence.

If the Epstein story has provoked hand-wringing and disbelief in the West, the reaction in Russia has been something closer to glee. On Russian Telegram channels, nationalists and Kremlin-supporting patriots are delighted. The dominant tone is a rolling mix of mockery and derision. But it’s also permeated with a sneering commentary on the West’s “perverse ecosystem” which permits such behavior, combined with a knowing scorn for a tabloid culture that yearns for Russiagate tapes and kompromat porn. One widely shared post treats the entire affair as confirmation that Western elites are decadent, hypocritical, and permanently compromised. But it also says that claims about Russian involvement are false, cooked up by “British spies”. Indeed, another user dismisses the entire story as “the invention of deranged Brits”.

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Alongside this ire runs something even less subtle: unalloyed delight at the West’s rich and powerful looking ridiculous. One popular channel revels in the image of Western financiers, politicians, and intellectuals undone not by some grand geopolitical strategy but by their own uncontrollable sexual appetites. Should they exist, these Russian women should not be ashamed of degrading themselves or being trafficked, say the Putin supporters. Instead they should be proud: they have fulfilled their patriotic duty by undermining the West.

In this framing, Epstein is not an aberration or a one-off monster, but merely the latest episode in a long and satisfying history of honeytrap stings on Westerners that reveal their sexual avarice. Proof, once again, that the West cannot be trusted to govern itself morally and that Russia is the world’s real bastion of “traditional values”. Sex trafficking, simply put, is less a tool for corrupting the West than for revealing its inherent corruption. Thus some Russians cheer the Epstein scandal as the latest example of their spy agency’s most beloved technique.

The history of Moscow’s honeytrap operations runs back to the early Cold War days. The KGB professionalized seduction with an almost bureaucratic seriousness. Female agents known as lastochki — “swallows” — were trained to target foreign diplomats, journalists, soldiers, and businessmen. There was remarkably little shame in the Russian secret services about using underhanded or dirty methods. Former KGB “swallows” later described their work as patriotic duty.

Honeytraps were a common feature of everyday espionage. Diplomats were told to assume that everybody they met was an agent and, accordingly, to behave with discretion. Bars and clubs, especially in the homosexual underground, were constantly monitored. Foreigners visiting Moscow were funneled through official Intourist hotels staffed and monitored by NKVD and KGB personnel. Soviet women were deployed by the security services, sometimes to target a specific individual and sometimes to seduce any Westerner they could. Anyone, wherever they sat in the social or political hierarchy, could be targeted — after all, even low-level functionaries might still have some useful information. Rooms fitted with hidden cameras and microphones ensured that sexual encounters were recorded. The kompromat factory was a nationwide affair.

A compromised Westerner might never be contacted at all. Some ignored the KGB’s threats: the American columnist and CIA operative Joseph Alsop was compromised in a gay honeytrap in Moscow in 1957 but rejected the ensuing blackmail attempt. Counterintelligence prevented other scandals getting out of hand: Sir Geoffrey Harrison, Britain’s ambassador to Moscow, was recalled after being confronted with compromising material in 1968. Others proved more pliable: Clayton Lonetree, a US Marine guard, was seduced in the Eighties by a woman posing as a translator and went on to pass sensitive information to Soviet handlers.

The honeytrap was so effective because it was a ruse that gathered intelligence which also produced explosive political material that could damage Western democracies. The classic British example is the case of John Vassall, a junior Admiralty clerk who was photographed in a homosexual encounter in Moscow in 1954 and for several years passed classified information to his handlers. When the case finally became public, the scandal caused huge embarrassment to then prime minister Harold Macmillan’s government by exposing failures of vetting, security, and judgment at the heart of the British state.

But the Russian state’s security organs don’t only use the honeytrap strategy on Westerners; they sometimes use it on their own citizens. It has been deployed against Putin’s challengers, such as the opposition leader Ilya Yashin who was subjected to a crude attempt to undermine his political credibility by letting him drown in a moral quagmire of his own making. In Russia, humiliating and denigrating an opponent is politics as normal; the same offensive tools used against Western targets are just as easily deployed against Russians by a Kremlin that’s terrified of both internal and external threats.

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The honeypot approach is still used because it’s blunt but effective. It uses kompromat sometimes in exotic, outrageous forms, but just as often in banal, almost bureaucratic ways that resemble those of the Soviet era. One entirely ordinary Estonian soldier, for example, was seduced on a trip to visit family in Russia and subsequently convicted for espionage.

It would be a surprise if sexual blackmail is not being deployed against high-level Western businessmen, diplomats, and politicians today. Russia does not primarily seek to attack the West by surgically extracting targeted information, as traditional espionage would. Instead, it seeks to embarrass, humiliate, and degrade Western societies into destroying themselves by widening existing political fissures and disagreements and watching as a story-hungry media and viral social media storms do the hard work.

From Moscow’s perspective, it doesn’t matter so much whether the latest poisonous claims in the Epstein files are true. Even if the most sensational claims about who is (or who isn’t) a Russian agent collapse under scrutiny, the story itself will please Putin immensely. It will fuel suspicion that, regardless of their political orientation, the rich and powerful in the West can commit moral aberrations with impunity, and that institutions will shield them from consequence, instead of investigating them.

Backed by a group of supporters with no moral limits when it comes to undermining the West, the Kremlin will surely keep drudging up kompromat. But next time around, it may not need to wait for some hapless Westerner to fall into its trap. In the age of hacking and AI fakery, anybody, anywhere can be made the target of such blackmail. The future honeytrap does not need hotels and hidden cameras. It will be enough to make Western publics ask only whether something could have happened — and that, played out to the roaring crowd on social media, will achieve the Kremlin’s aims.

Nor do things end there. American LNG is not only significantly more expensive than Russian pipeline gas, it is also far more volatile. Pipeline gas was typically delivered under long-term contracts with predictable pricing. LNG, by contrast, is tied to global spot markets, making prices highly sensitive to fluctuations in supply and demand, weather events and geopolitical shocks. Indeed, the timing of Europe’s announcement could not have been more unfortunate: as officials in Brussels congratulated themselves on their newfound “energy autonomy”, US gas prices surged around 70% in a week, reaching their highest level in three years after severe cold weather froze pipelines, disrupted supply, and drove up domestic demand in the US.

Those price spikes will feed directly into higher gas and electricity costs in Europe — during one of the coldest winters in years, and at a time when millions of Europeans are already unable to afford adequate heating. Higher energy prices have already crippled industrial competitiveness and pushed major economies, above all Germany, towards deindustrialization.

Taken together, the episode encapsulates the self-destructive character of EU energy policy over the past four years. Yet the problem is not merely that cheap and reliable Russian gas has been replaced with costlier and more volatile American LNG. More troubling still is that the United States is far more likely to use its energy exports as an instrument of political pressure than Russia ever was, leaving the EU more dependent on its imperial master than ever.

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For all the talk of Russia’s “weaponization” of gas supplies, history tells a different story. For decades, first the Soviet Union and later Russia continued supplying energy to Germany and the rest of Europe through multiple geopolitical crises, including during the height of the Cold War. More recently, even after the delivery of German weapons to Ukraine, and then the attack on Nord Stream, Moscow repeatedly stated that it was up to Berlin whether to resume gas supplies or not.

The United States, by contrast, has a long and well-documented history of weaponizing energy — using it as leverage to extract economic and geopolitical concessions. And under Donald Trump, this has become explicit policy. The US National Security Strategy, published in November 2025, designates “American energy dominance” across oil, gas, coal and nuclear power as a top strategic priority, explicitly framing the expansion of American energy exports as a means to “project power”. This is not mere rhetoric. The Trump administration has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to intervene aggressively in domestic and global markets, upend established policies and exert pressure not only on adversaries but also on long-standing allies.

By the time Trump returned to office, Europe’s dependence on US energy was already a fait accompli, following the EU’s decision to cut itself off from Russian gas and the sabotage of Nord Stream. Since then, Trump has only actively sought to deepen that dependence. In April 2025, for instance, his administration used the so-called “Liberation Day” tariffs to pressure Germany and other EU states to refrain from importing any Russian energy.

A few months later, Trump strong-armed the European Commission into a commitment to buy $750 billion worth of US LNG, oil and nuclear energy products, in exchange for avoiding punitive tariffs. The figure in itself is unrealistic, but that was never the point. As Trump’s energy secretary Chris Wright put it, the objective was to signal that Europe’s energy dependence would be “long-term”. The pressure worked. According to Bruegel, a Brussels-based think tank, LNG shipments from the United States to the EU rose by around 60% in 2025 compared to the previous year.

At the same time, Washington has increasingly politicized these energy flows, with US officials openly linking continued LNG supplies to regulatory and political concessions. Just months ago, Wright and his Qatari counterpart jointly urged EU leaders to repeal climate and environmental regulations deemed obstacles to fossil fuel imports, explicitly tying these demands to Europe’s reliance on LNG from America and the Gulf.

But it took Trump’s explicit threat to take over Greenland to finally snap Europeans out of their complacency. As The New York Times reported, European leaders and analysts now fear that Trump could weaponize US energy exports to extract concessions not only over Greenland but across a wide range of issues. As Sophie Corbeau of Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy put it, “people have started to realize we are probably a little bit too dependent on US LNG.”

That’s a polite way of describing the fact that Europe now finds itself heavily dependent for its gas on a country whose President openly threatens the territorial integrity of a European state. Whatever risks were associated with dependence on Russian gas, they pale in comparison. It is telling that the EU’s energy commissioner, Dan Jørgensen, is now speaking of the need to diversify away from American LNG.

However, this is little more than performative indignation. The prevailing European narrative suggests that none of this would have been conceivable before Trump. But this is ludicrous. Trump’s crude tactics pale in comparison to the bombing of the Nord Stream pipelines, the single largest act of industrial sabotage in Europe’s history — an operation that was either directly carried out or politically sanctioned by the Biden administration to forcibly sever Europe from Russian gas and lock in dependence on US LNG. Recall, if nothing else, Washington’s own threats on this very issue. Germany’s — and Europe’s — silence in the aftermath of the attack makes today’s expressions of shock look like mere political theater.

The truth, then, is that the dangers of replacing Russian gas with American LNG were obvious from the start. The economic and political costs were foreseeable and indeed widely predicted. The only difference between then and now is that Trump has made Europe’s squalid reality impossible to ignore.

It is crucial to understand, however, that Trump’s weaponization of European energy supplies is about far more than bluster or the ruthless pursuit of short-term gains. As the US National Security Strategy makes clear, these moves are part of a broader, long-term strategy aimed at securing American energy dominance for decades to come. No less important, US bullying should be seen as part of a last-ditch effort to preserve the country’s hegemony in a rapidly changing global order.

Control over energy has long been a central pillar of US postwar foreign policy. For much of that time, this effectively meant control over the global oil trade. From the overthrow of Iran’s nationalist government in 1953, to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, virtually every major US intervention in the Middle East followed this logic. This was never solely about securing oil supplies for domestic consumption. More fundamentally, it was about entrenching American global power.

By ensuring that oil was traded in dollars — and that exporting countries recycled those dollars back into the US financial system — Washington was able to elevate the dollar to the status of the world’s reserve currency, granting itself what Giscard d’Estaing called the “exorbitant privilege” of self-financing its imports. At the same time, by controlling the physical and financial choke points of the oil trade, the lifeblood of the global economy, the US acquired a powerful coercive tool: the ability to punish states whose policies ran counter to American interests, either by cutting off their access to energy supplies or by excluding them from the dollar-centric financial system via sanctions.

In recent years, though, the foundations of this system have come under increasing strain. Countries operating outside US control — notably Venezuela, Iran and Russia — have supplied growing volumes of oil to global markets, especially China, helping fuel its rapid rise. In parallel, these and other oil exporting countries, including traditional allies of the US such as Saudi Arabia, have begun pricing oil in non-dollar currencies or openly threatened to do so, challenging the monetary underpinnings of American power.

Until Trump’s recent attack, for instance, Venezuela was supplying around 5% of China’s oil needs. Iran, despite years of sanctions, has maintained remarkably high oil export levels. More than 80% of the Islamic Republic’s crude now goes to China, accounting for 13% to 15% of the PRC’s total crude oil imports. The freedom of countries to export oil and other resources on terms not dictated by the US — and this also applies to Russia’s gas exports to Europe before 2022 — poses a dual threat to its hegemony. It not only undermines dollar dominance, but also weakens Washington’s ability to use energy and sanctions as tools of geopolitical discipline.

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Trump has been candid about these stakes. In 2024, he warned that losing the dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency would be “like losing a war”. Others have been similarly explicit. Marco Rubio, commenting in 2023 on a trade agreement between Brazil and China, cautioned that such deals were creating a parallel global economy “totally independent from the United States” — one in which Washington would no longer have the ability to enforce economic sanctions. This is why any country pursuing an independent energy policy is automatically framed as a security threat.

Seen in this light, many US actions in recent years — from severing Europe’s access to Russian gas, to the seizure of Venezuelan oil assets, to escalating pressure on Iran — can be understood as elements of a single, coherent strategy: reasserting American physical and financial control over global energy flows, gaining leverage over adversaries and allies alike, and deterring countries from breaking with the unwritten rules of the US order.

Trump summed up this strategy when he said, after the attack on Venezuela, that “China can buy all the oil it wants from us” — but in dollars, and on American terms. It remains to be seen whether this gamble will be successful. But one thing is clear: the greatest threat to peace today doesn’t lie in the emergence of a multipolar world, but in the United States’ determination to prevent it, even at the cost of driving its own allies into the ground.

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.

 Yet the Islamic Republic declined to participate, with the Iranian foreign ministry justifying its rejection by citing America’s “criminal acts” during the 12-Day War: namely, joining Israel’s bombing raid and thus violating Iran’s sovereignty in contravention of international law. Soon after, Iran’s foreign minister condemned Trump’s decision to resume American nuclear testing as a “blatant violation of international law” and Washington’s obligations under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

On the surface, these gestures appear merely rhetorical — symbolic denunciations intended for foreign media. Yet they reveal a consistent pattern in Iranian discourse: an almost obsessive appeal to international law and the alleged double standards of the Western powers in applying it. Iranian leaders, including Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, routinely invoke the sanctity of international legal norms to indict Washington and its allies for hypocrisy. This language of legality, justice, and sovereignty has become central to Tehran’s moral posture as a self-declared righteous challenger of what it calls the “hegemonic order.”

We have, then, a curious paradox: a state that defines itself as revolutionary, revisionist, and “anti-Western” is apparently one of the last true believers in a rules-based international order that the Western powers are increasingly abandoning. Leaders in Tehran and other “outlaw” states often believe, with apparent vehemence and sincerity, that if they can just get the United Nations or some other transnational body to view their situation objectively, the world will know, once and for all, that they aren’t outlaws.

In other words, the Islamic Republic (and China and others) still have faith in the institutional and legal architecture of the liberal international order — an order designed to enshrine Western priorities. The invocation of international law by a regime that claims to reject Western liberal modernity isn’t merely incoherent; it is a symptom of an internalized Westernization, a sign that the ideological liturgy of liberal modernity has colonized even its most strident critics.

Iran is not alone in this contradiction. Russia, too, has cloaked its actions in Ukraine in the language of international law. Moscow’s justifications for its “special military operation” have drawn heavily on the doctrines and precedents pioneered by NATO itself — particularly the “responsibility to protect” invoked during the 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia. In this case, Moscow claims to be protecting ethnic Russians in eastern Ukraine trapped under an ethno-chauvinist Kyiv regime. China, meanwhile, regularly extols the principles of state sovereignty, non-interference, and equality enshrined in the United Nations Charter. In each case, powers positioned as adversaries of the West strive to articulate their worldviews within the normative and legal frameworks that the West itself created.

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On one level, this may indicate a certain pragmatism: none of these states seeks to dismantle the liberal international order outright. Their declared objective isn’t revolution, but reform — an ostensibly fairer and more balanced application of existing rules. Yet such demands betray a fundamental naiveté. To call for the impartial enforcement of international law presupposes that such a law exists independently of power — that international norms can restrain states, and that international institutions can tame the will to power. But this is fiction. From a realist standpoint, international law isn’t an autonomous realm of justice; it is an expression of power, a moral architecture used to clothe domination in legitimacy.

As Carl Schmitt observed, every legal order is ultimately grounded in a concrete spatial and political order: the result is a “pluriverse,” which he identified as the nomos of the Earth: the concrete, culturally-rooted structural reality of the world. The artificial, legalistic world that emerged after 1945 and that deeply entrenched itself after 1991 thus merely reflects the geopolitical ascendancy of the West and the universalization of its parochial values under Pax Americana. To demand that the international legal system be applied fairly and equitably is thus to demand the impossible: the false dream of a neutral, global law, detached from the particular political and material conditions that produced it and that overcomes the biases of those self-charged with enforcing it.

In their appeals to legality, these “anti-Western” powers expose not only their idealism, but also their dependence on the very metaphysical assumptions of liberalism that they purport to oppose.

The paradox runs deeper still. The faith of Iran, Russia, China, and others in legalism, proceduralism, and egalitarianism in international politics points to their thorough entrapment within the globalist paradigm of modernity. Each of these states proclaims its civilizational distinctiveness — Persian, Russian, or Sinic — but all are, in essence, products of the modern state system. Their bureaucratic rationality, meliorism, and moral universalism are hallmarks of the same Enlightenment project that gave rise to liberalism. They are haplessly embedded in the very worldview they claim to want to overthrow.

Modernity’s essence lies in its universalizing impulse — the conviction that history has a direction, that reason can order the world, and that moral progress can be codified into human institutions and norms. Even those regimes that reject the West’s liberal ideology have internalized this mental structure.

The Islamic Republic’s doctrine of “resistance” against America and Zion, for instance, is a sort of liberation theology, premised on a universal moral dichotomy between the oppressed and the oppressors, possessed and dispossessed, echoing the moral Manichaeism of liberal humanitarianism. Despite its broad support for multipolarity, China remains a defender of economic globalization and inclusive global governance based on what it calls the “common values of humanity.” Likewise, Russia’s self-conception as a Katechon — an Orthodox Christian bulwark against terminal liberal decline and a defender of “traditional values” and “civilizational diversity” — echoes the same universal and moralistic tone it attributes to the Global West.

In their current form, the so-called “pariah states” are not civilizational alternatives to the liberal order, but its dialectical mirrors. They contest its dominance not by exiting its sacred moral canopy, but by claiming to embody its true meaning. Just as Marxism arose within and against liberal capitalism, these contemporary challengers articulate their opposition within the same fundamental framework. Their rhetoric of justice, equality, and international legalism reproduces the liberal myth of moral progress, even as it is turned against liberal (political) hegemony.

Realism teaches that in the anarchic realm of international politics, power, not morality, is the final arbiter. Norms, laws, and institutions are mere superstructures built upon the scaffolding of material power: the ability to transport whole infantry divisions across the globe, to parachute special forces behind enemy lines, to deliver strategic weapons that can turn nations and continents into radioactive glass. When Iran denounces US actions as “illegal,” it is not appealing to some transcendent order of justice (even if it professes to do so); it is engaging in the moral theater of power politics. But by doing so, it inadvertently legitimizes the very discourse it seeks to undermine.

Indeed, the liberal international order survives not because of its moral superiority, but because even its critics play by its discursive rules. Every invocation of international law, every appeal to the United Nations, every citation of the NPT or other postwar treaties reinforces the moral authority of the very institutions that entrench Western dominance in the first place. The unwitting tragedy for states like Iran and Russia is that their defiance is conducted in a language that ensures their subordination.

The recent turn toward civilizational discourse — what might be called the “pluralist turn” in global politics — appears at first glance to signal a break from liberal universalism. When leaders from Beijing to Moscow to Tehran speak of cultural particularity, historical continuity, or their unique civilizational spirit, they seem to reject the homogenizing cosmopolitanism of liberal modernity. Yet this, too, may conceal a moral universalism in new garb.

This is because, at present, even civilizational states (like nation-states) are first and foremost modern states, which are systemically prone to totalizing their non-political and sociological basis of power for more central control. As modern Leviathans, they politicize every aspect of human life to become the sole sovereigns of human society, obliterating the traditional guardrails that historically separated and thereby protected the different domains of human societies (familial, cultural, religious, economic, political, and others) from overreach and tyranny. 

By concentrating all authority within itself, the totalistic modern state cannibalizes its own body politic to feed its incessant hunger for power — eating away at the very social fabric that sustains it and that it is supposed to protect, and leaving a hollow shell organized by a draconian bureaucracy and ruled by a professional managerial class whose values and ideals refract those in London or New York.  

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Given the Manichaean backdrop of the postwar order — good versus evil, democracy versus autocracy, human rights versus atrocity — civilizational states could be even more tempted to assert their own exceptionalism or mission, inevitably claiming a universal significance for themselves. They could subvert their own historical cultures by reducing them to an ideology, tout their inherent superiority, and claim for themselves a world-historical role in redeeming mankind from decadence and barbarism. 

Civilizational politics thus risks becoming yet another moral crusade, a dialectic substituting one universalism (the liberal kind) for a new one elevated as its other. In the process, the rhetoric of cultural authenticity may paradoxically deepen, rather than overcome, the moralization of international relations. But its ultimate result remains tragically unchanged: more global convergence, the proliferation and hardening of modern statism, and the cancerous growth of modernity and its metaphysics. 

Significantly, the return of “civilization” does not necessarily herald the return of realpolitik; it may instead inaugurate new forms of moral imperialism, with each civilization seeking to universalize its own particularity as the Civilization fighting global barbarism — in a clash of abstracted civilizations, a Huntingtonian world where civilizations merely mask the global domination of the modern state and all harbor the same force behind their religio-civilizational “veil” (Confucian, Orthodox, Shiite): namely, modernity. 

The tragic insight here is that the moralistic impulse seems inescapable within the framework of the modern state. Every modern regime — whether liberal, communist, Islamist, or nationalist — claims to possess the formula for human flourishing. Modernity itself is a theological project, animated by the belief that politics can and must redeem humanity. As long as this metaphysical conviction endures, the moralization of international politics will persist and, with it, the illusion that law and justice can transcend power.

In the end, the ideological opposition between the “liberal” West and the collection of renegade, revisionist, non-Western powers is an illusion. The contest between them is not a clash between different worlds, but an internal struggle for primacy within the same modernist paradigm.

Iran, Russia, and their allies self-project as the moral conscience of an unjust world order, yet their very moralism reveals their complicity in the postwar world’s ideological foundations. Their invocation of international law is a testament to its total victory — the triumph of a moralized conception of politics that even its enemies cannot escape, at least until such a time when modernity itself, as a zeitgeist and worldview, disintegrates under the weight of its discontents and contradictions. 

The true alternative to liberal hegemony would require the deliberate renunciation of the political and normative universalism associated with the modern project, rather than multiplying “universalisms” under different national or civilizational disguises and claiming one’s own moral superiority. Meanwhile, practically speaking, the insistence on vindicating sovereign “rights” under international law leads these powers to miss actual opportunities to engage with the West and win real concessions — such as by showing up to meet Trump in Egypt. 

Yet so long as even the global adversaries of liberalism remain enthralled by its moral categories, the world will continue to revolve within modernity’s closed circle—an endless dialectic without transcendence, a tragedy without catharsis. Ironically, Trump, the leader of the power that presides over the liberal imperium, has moved on from rules-based-order cant. It’s time the self-proclaimed enemies of that order did the same.

His offense? Opposing Brussels’s plan to seize Russia’s frozen assets held in Europe. The overwhelming majority of them are parked at Euroclear, a Brussels-based clearing house that sits at the heart of global securities settlement. For Europe’s pro-war lobby, led by France and Germany, confiscation was presented as the only way to continue financing Ukraine’s war effort — or, failing that, to force member states to assume the burden collectively through other, increasingly extraordinary means.

Belgium, however, had compelling reasons to resist. Confiscating — or functionally expropriating — Russian central bank assets would violate one of the most sacrosanct principles of international finance: the neutrality and inviolability of sovereign reserves. Breaching that principle would not only set a dangerous precedent, but would also expose Belgium to potentially severe legal, financial and geopolitical consequences — as Euroclear is domiciled there.

As Robert Volterra, one of London’s most respected international lawyers, warned, confiscating Russian assets would be “absolutely illegal” and would haunt the EU for generations. The legal fallout could be enormous. Russia had multiple avenues for challenge and had begun to explore them, already filing a lawsuit in Moscow against Euroclear.

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From there, Russia could pursue litigation in Belgian courts, potentially all the way to the supreme court. Belgian judges would be forced to determine whether Russian property rights under domestic law had been violated and whether the principle of sovereign immunity had been breached. On both counts, Russia’s case would be strong. Were Russia to prevail, Euroclear itself would be liable. Given the sums involved, the clearing house would almost certainly be rendered insolvent, triggering national and EU-level deposit guarantee mechanisms.

In such a scenario, Euroclear would in turn be compelled to sue the Belgian state, which would have ordered the effective expropriation of client assets. The prospects of such a claim would be far from negligible. Beyond Belgium, Russia could also bring cases before the European Court of Justice, the International Court of Justice and multiple international arbitration forums. Even setting litigation aside — one might argue that in the current context it would be hard to find a Western judge willing to rule in Russia’s favor — it is difficult to see how Belgium could justify refusing to unfreeze Russia’s reserves if and when a peace settlement is eventually reached.

It is therefore hardly surprising that Belgium emerged as one of the most vocal opponents of the plan. De Wever has bluntly warned that confiscation would amount to “an act of war”, likening it to entering a foreign embassy, stripping it of its contents and selling them off. One might reasonably conclude that he is simply defending his country’s interests by upholding international law. And yet, for this, he has found himself subjected to a smear campaign by the EU’s political and media establishment. He has been accused of acting under Russian intimidation — or worse, of being a Russian asset himself. At the same time, Brussels threatened to “treat Belgium like Hungary” if it continued to oppose the plan. That’s what happens when even loyal pro-EU governments dare to step out of line.

Despite the massive pressure, De Wever stood his ground. And he was joined by a growing front of dissenters. Hungary and Slovakia openly rejected the scheme, with Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán accusing the Commission of “systematically raping European law”. Italy, Bulgaria and Malta also expressed reservations.

The economic and financial implications of confiscation, after all, would extend far beyond Belgium. Once the assumption that sovereign reserves held abroad are immune from political seizure is broken, there is no telling what the consequences may be. Countries would begin to view euro-denominated assets not as a safe store of value, but as a political liability — one that can be confiscated at Brussels’s discretion. The message would be unmistakable: your assets are safe only as long as you remain politically compliant. The result would almost certainly be that capital would start to flee Europe — even faster than it already is.

Nonetheless, faced with growing resistance, Brussels last week resorted to invoking emergency powers under Article 122 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union to indefinitely freeze the Russian assets, claiming this would allow it to act by qualified majority rather than unanimity. Yet this represents a blatant distortion of the Treaty. Article 122 applies strictly to emergency economic measures in response to natural disasters or severe economic disturbances. It does not apply to foreign policy, which unequivocally requires unanimity. The fate of Russia’s frozen sovereign assets, however, is self-evidently a foreign policy matter. Claiming otherwise is an extra-legal sleight of hand.

This is another example of a Brussels power grab. If Article 122 — or any other provision — can be stretched to justify the seizure of foreign sovereign assets and the imposition of massive liabilities on unwilling member states, it can be used to circumvent unanimity across a wide range of foreign policy decisions.

The threat, however, worked. On Friday, at the European Council meeting, the Commission failed to secure an agreement on the use of the frozen Russian assets. Instead, it secured agreement on a separate €90-billion loan, backed by the EU budget and underwritten by all member states except three (Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic), which were granted opt-outs. In effect, the political obstacle was bypassed not by changing strategy, but by shifting the financial risk directly onto European taxpayers. As von der Leyen made clear in advance of the summit, there was little room for dissent: “No one will leave the EU summit until the issue of Ukraine’s financing is resolved.”

Incredibly, the deal foresees that the loan will have to be repaid by Ukraine only if and when Russia agrees to pay war reparations — effectively transforming hypothetical future reparations into immediate financing. This idea is, at best, wishful thinking. It is highly unlikely that Russia would accept binding reparations even in the event of a peace deal, meaning that there is little chance Ukraine will ever repay the loan. This is all the more striking given how much Europe has already spent: EU parliaments have approved at least €187 billion in support for Ukraine, on top of massive indirect costs.

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This episode illustrates how the EU operates: by manufacturing false binaries that foreclose genuine political choice. Member states were presented with a stark alternative — either agree to confiscate Russia’s frozen assets or be prepared to collectively underwrite a massive new loan. What was never seriously considered was a third option: to stop pouring money into a demonstrably failed strategy and instead work to bring the war to an end through negotiations.

Yet it’s easy to see why the EU can’t afford to confront the failure of its Ukraine strategy — one that has inflicted immense economic damage on Europe while delivering nothing on the battlefield, and that has left Ukraine in a worse position than at the start of the war. Acknowledging this reality would carry enormous political costs for EU elites, particularly those most invested in the victory-at-all-costs narrative — hence their determination to keep the war going at all costs. This is why, even after failing to agree on confiscation, Brussels pushed through a massive, budget-backed loan as a substitute. The consequences will be dear: Ukrainians will continue to suffer and die in an unwinnable war, while Europe will remain entrenched in a permanent state of economic warfare and military-by-proxy confrontation with Russia, with a constant risk of escalation into direct conflict.

If there is a silver lining to this grim trajectory, it is that the recklessness of these choices will only exacerbate the contradictions of a project that is pushing the continent to the brink, ultimately forcing a reckoning — within member states and among Europe’s citizens alike. Indeed, the Commission may have succeeded in avoiding a catastrophic humiliation, but in doing so it exposed the increasingly authoritarian nature of the Union, willing to override national interests and discard legal constraints, democratic norms and basic economic rationality in pursuit of ideological crusades. Meanwhile, the enormous financial burden imposed by the latest deal will only deepen internal fractures and push national budgets to the breaking point — especially when it becomes clear that it will entail yet more resources diverted from Europe’s own crumbling infrastructure, underfunded hospitals and overstretched schools.

And Ukraine is far from the only flashpoint. Brussels is also struggling to secure backing for the Mercosur free-trade agreement with Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. Here, too, resistance is growing. France has long led the opposition, with Emmanuel Macron reiterating recently that the deal lacks reciprocity on production standards, pesticide rules and food safety. The front broadened significantly this week, when Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni described the deal as “premature”, citing inadequate safeguards for European agriculture. Italy’s stance is pivotal, as it raises the prospect of a blocking minority in the Council that includes Poland, Hungary and Austria too.

Protests have added to the pressure. On Thursday hundreds of tractors converged on Brussels as farmers from across Europe denounced what they see as unfair competition. Proposed safeguards have done little to calm opposition — leading to the ratification of the deal to be postponed once again at the European Council.

And so, as the contradictions within the EU continue to accumulate, it is increasingly difficult to see how Brussels can manage the backlash for much longer. The Union is beginning to resemble a crumbling empire, reliant not only on repression, censorship and electoral manipulation to maintain control, but also on ever more aggressive tactics directed even against pro-EU governments themselves. By forcing through ever more reckless commitments in the name of unity, it is simply setting the stage for an even more catastrophic implosion down the road.

The road from contract soldier to violent criminal has become all too familiar in Russia in recent years. At least 500 civilians have been killed or seriously injured by returning veterans since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, and the tide of violence shows no signs of slowing.

Tune into the state’s propaganda channels, however, and a different picture emerges. On 31 December 2024, a handful of “Special Military Operation” veterans in immaculately pressed uniforms were feted as heroes at Goluboi Ogonek, Russia’s glitzy televised New Year’s light festival, alongside the usual cavalcade of pop stars and celebrities. They sang the praises of their government, their country’s war, and their comrades-in-arms.

Similarly glittering visions of soldiers, hymned as the saints of the Kremlin’s cult of war, are plastered over Russian state-owned media. The image of ordinary soldiers returning from the front, flush with cash, to acclaim and accolades is everywhere in popular culture. Billboards with the faces of the “Heroes of Russia” sprawl across highway bridges and loom over city streets throughout the land. The Russian Orthodox patriarch sings the praises of veterans from the pulpit, claiming that to die in Ukraine “washes away all sins”.

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On top of this choreographed public zeal is a deluge of advertising that promises up to $60,000 (USD) to those who enlist and survive a year as a kontraktnik, a contract soldier. The adverts promise Russian men that they can be rich and successful — which, stuck in the underdeveloped, stagnant regions outside wealthy cities, most ordinary Russians cannot otherwise hope to be. And it’s not just talk: as much as 1.5% of Russia’s GDP is being spent on these bonuses. The mostly uneducated men who seize the chance and survive their year in the “meat grinder”, which has left hundreds of thousands of Russian men dead in Ukraine, brag on social media about the cash lining their pockets. Yet there is nothing to brag about during their time at the front, where they are initiated into Russia’s particularly brutal way of warfare which embraces violence, torture, rape, and the murder of combatants and civilians alike.

Russian soldiers are promised the very best treatment on their return from war. The Kremlin has created a special “Defenders of the Fatherland” foundation, led by Vladimir Putin’s cousin Anna Tsivileva, to advocate for veterans. State-run groups on VK and Telegram — two of the country’s most popular social media platforms — run Q&A sessions for those seeking to maximize the new benefits the Kremlin is supposedly offering, which include access to family and child support, employment opportunities, and healthcare. The media explains how soldiers and their families can access free trips to luxurious recuperation sanatoria; meanwhile, the wounded are supposedly cared for at hyper-modern rehabilitation clinics. In reality, such benefits are available only for the lucky few who can navigate their way through Russia’s arcane veterans bureaucracy.

Behind the Kremlin-orchestrated spectacle, however, lurks an angry, violent group of veterans. The state deliberately leaves its demobbed troops in a perpetual battle mode, firing them up with social and mainstream media campaigns that promise that, since Russia is surrounded by enemies at home and abroad, the battle is never over. Men who have killed for the state are told that they may have to fight again to defend their meager gains. Those who return home are thus often left unrecognizable. As one wife commented on social media: “My husband returned home from the war. But this isn’t my husband, he’s not the man I knew before. Sometimes it feels like he was killed. His body came back, but not his soul. He’s become irritable. Everything angers him. Me, the kids, and everyone around him.” All over the country, Russia’s ex-soldiers seem incapable of interacting within a peaceful civilian milieu.

Meanwhile, murder after murder hit the headlines. A veteran beats his friend to death with a chair; another stabs his ex-girlfriend to death while her daughter watches; a Chechen man is butchered at a bus stop. These stories don’t receive much coverage in the Russian media, even as the violence conducted by ex-soldiers let loose on civilian society spreads. Serious crimes are punished with heavy jail terms, but the spiraling cases of domestic violence result in fines as small as $55 — pocket change for men who have made thousands of dollars by fighting in Ukraine. There is little real justice, and the state barely pretends to care.

When soldiers are demobbed from modern Western armed forces, they are offered psychological and reintegration support to help them leave their identity as soldiers — as killers — behind. But in Russia, no widespread programs exist for the hundreds of thousands of men Putin has sent to fight in Ukraine. The few rehabilitation centers that do exist are overwhelmed and poorly equipped to treat deep psychological trauma. And for those who develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) — a diagnosis barely even acknowledged in official media — help is scarce and stigmatized. After all, the state has no intention of transitioning these soldiers away from the violence of war — and that violence continues to offer plenty of rewards.

Problems are glossed over in the stilted bureaucratic language of the administrative state: “We have faced a shortage of rehabilitation institutions with highly qualified personnel,” explained one official this summer — but now the problem is “solved”. Wives are expected to support their husbands instead of psychiatrists, reinforcing the state’s strict gender rules about women’s roles as supporters of male violence. Yet even the Kremlin does not pay more than lip service to the idea of instructing women on how to stem the rising tide of violence. One Moscow psychologist running a private practice told me they have treated a handful of former soldiers, but have been contacted by many more distraught wives — terrified of and for the men who came back from the front.

To those familiar with Russia’s history, this might seem par for the course. Over the past century, Russia has embroiled itself in vast wars that have left millions of men and women engulfed in post-traumatic nightmares when the guns have gone quiet. At times, this has tipped the country into outright chaos: would the Civil War have seen a wave of unfathomable brutality sweep across the country, resulting in at least eight million casualties, had the Eastern Front of the First World War not been so violent? Would post-Soviet Russia have been so dominated by criminal thuggery had a generation of young men not been sent to fight in Afghanistan, then welcomed home with a shrug as the USSR collapsed? Would the nihilism of the late Nineties, before Putin swept to power on promises of masculine and national renewal, have been so acute if Boris Yeltsin hadn’t sent a generation of conscripts into a conflict in Chechnya?

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Each time Moscow sends its young to kill and be killed, it promises personal and collective triumph but delivers disillusionment. As one veteran of the Afghan war explained in Nobel prizewinner Svetlana Alexievich’s seminal study of those who had returned from that conflict, Zinky Boys: “I wanted to be in a war, but not like this one. Heroic World War 2, that’s what I wanted.” Successive regimes have seemed determined to treat the mass of their soldiers as human capital more than as heroes. These angry bands of ex-soldiers have plagued the Kremlin’s incumbents with criminality, opposition and uprisings.

It might, therefore, appear that Putin is repeating the mistakes of the Eighties and Nineties as he foments another generation of angry soldiers who behave as brutally at home as they did at the front. But the state has done little to stymie what is an obvious problem. Instead, it almost seems to encourage it as a means to keep the entire population on edge, ready to engage in what the Kremlin claims is an endless war against enemies that are out to destroy Russia.

Putin has chosen to pursue a particularly bloody form of warfare in which soldiers are rewarded for committing violent atrocities. When they return home, the Kremlin’s soldiers are in turn offered opportunities to act as its agents of violence by enrolling in the domestic security services, taking up positions of power in the war economy, and advocating for further conflict. This is the approach Putin took in the 2000s, when he offered the disillusioned and criminal veterans of Afghanistan and Chechnya paths into the hierarchy of power as municipal police, security agents, mayors, governors, and even Duma deputies as a means to placate them. Now he is repeating the trick at a far larger scale.

These violent men do not represent a threat to Putin’s regime; in fact, they are key to upholding it. The Kremlin has put the country on a constant war footing, ensuring it is always ready to fight the next battle, which leaves it with little incentive to aid veterans. It thus pretends to help ex-soldiers while counting on those embittered and psychologically broken men to keep Russian society enveloped in a cycle of conflict and repression that Vladimir Putin’s allies claim is essential to the nation’s survival (and, of course, to their own hold on power). The soldier who lives by violence may prove necessary to an increasingly draconian regime that is struggling with a faltering economy, spiraling inflation, and a lackluster war effort. After all, history tells us that oppression at home and conflicts abroad will be far more easily waged by bands of men who are psychologically traumatized by war and convinced that violence is simply part and parcel of political life.

Meanwhile, back in Chelyabinsk, Sergei Moskalenko is awaiting trial for the murder of his wife. Should he be convicted, he may not languish long in jail. Almost 200,000 Russian prisoners have already enlisted to, as the Red Army’s propagandists in the Second World War christened it, “atone for their crimes by blood”: to fight in return for their freedom. Moskalenko, in this case, may be back at the front within months — free to abscond, free to serve out his time, and free to return home, just as full of violence as when he left.

Russians had plenty of reasons to protest, yet very few of them did. This was not because of repression; as flawed and corrupt as he was, Yeltsin was no authoritarian. You were free to mock and deride the head of state, and many did. The issue was that hardly anyone saw the point of protesting as they were too busy struggling to survive. Half a decade into Russia’s experiment with democracy, the state had effectively disintegrated. Thieves and “violent entrepreneurs” rushed in to take advantage of the chaos, and most people accepted there was nothing they could do about it.

Yet one group of Russians refused to accept this national humiliation: the elderly. It was common in those days to see pensioners demonstrating, especially if you worked in central Moscow. I regularly passed by groups of communist babushkas standing in front of the statue of Marshal Zhukov just off Red Square (men were a less common sight; I attributed this to the drastic decline in male life expectancy). In their shawls and overcoats, these old women looked just like the ones you saw lighting candles in churches, except they read Lenin instead of the Bible and held aloft banners featuring the hammer and sickle instead of icons.

At the time, this struck me as a strange and exotic spectacle. My own grandparents, born during the First World War and raised in “Red Clydeside”, the epicenter of radical Scottish leftism, were not political at all. Whether they had been in their youth I did not know. The only activist pensioner I knew of was an old lady from the village of Lumphinnans, who had dictated a memoir of her life as a communist activist; my mother had typed it up for her. We regarded her as “a character”.

In Russia, the radicalism of the old was just as futile, but much more depressing. The Communist Party was led by a mediocrity called Gennady Zyuganov, who had inherited leadership of the proletariat when everybody with talent quit to get rich. In 1996, he ran against Yeltsin for the presidency, who at the time had a 6% approval rating. Zyuganov came within a whisker of winning the first round, but then Yeltsin staged a remarkable comeback, supported by state- and oligarch-controlled media, which blacked out all coverage of the communists. Yet this did not bring out the masses in revolt, only the elderly, and the regime knew it could ignore them. It saw the sea of gray hair and knew that the frail opposition had no place in the future being built.

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And so, powerless as they were, the pensioners performed ritual acts. Banners were waved, speeches were given, rallies attended, and holidays celebrated (I remember picking up a flyer for an event commemorating Stalin’s birthday at my local cinema). These protesters had spent their entire lives under communism and endured war and hardship — but they also remembered moments of triumph, like the Red Army raising the Soviet flag over the Reichstag, or Yuri Gagarin beating the Americans in the space race. Now they were being told that their sacrifices were in vain and all that meant nothing. I did not blame them for taking to the streets. To do nothing, to say nothing, would be to admit defeat and acquiesce to their own humiliation.

Around a decade later, I moved to Texas and stopped thinking about elderly protesters. That is, until the second Trump administration got underway. The American variety first came onto my radar when Elon Musk’s DOGE laid siege to USAID, and congressional Democrats, some of whom were considerably older than the Soviet gerontocrats the Western media had once mocked, turned up at the head office to try to gain access. Out of power, these ancient politicians suddenly looked incredibly frail: I couldn’t help but notice their implausible wigs, their halting speech, the tremble in their voices as they attempted to lead a chant that quickly faltered. I saw how easy it was for a security guard to ignore them.

Since then, anti-Trump protests have been held across the nation, and, as many have observed, they are a lot grayer than they were the first time around. At first, I ignored the online snark about “boomer liberals”. But when I reported on a protest against redistricting at the Capitol in Austin in August, it was impossible to ignore the abundance of white hair, the tie-dye t-shirts and occasional wheelchairs. The energy levels were low. Like the wizened Democrats outside the USAID building, the protesters attempted to start up a chant, but it was hesitant and unenergetic and soon died down.

I hadn’t seen so many angry pensioners since Russia. But whereas the babushkas were performing rituals that dated back to the dawn of communism, these elderly Texans were following a script that was written during the heyday of their youth in the Sixties — those heady days of sex, drugs and protests against LBJ and Nixon. Their homemade signs bore profane messages like “GOP Guarding Old Pedophiles”, “Abort Greg Abbott”, and “Fuck ICE, Fuck Trump”.

The aesthetics of it all were very poor. When the rock band Country Joe and the Fish led the crowd in a chant of “FUCK” at Woodstock, it was about youth and sticking it to the man. More than five decades later, the same generation was still in rebellion mode, but the swearing had a crotchety, yelling-at-the-TV energy. When I stumbled upon a No Kings protest in a small town in the Texas Hill Country several weeks later, the atmosphere was more congenial. It ended in time for lunch, and some of the retiree protesters went to get barbecue. It was a nice day out, I suppose, but it wasn’t the future. Like the old communists in Russia, these pensioners had assumed the world they had built would last forever, but now they could feel it receding into history. And just as the regime in Moscow ignored OAP protesters, so Trump was not remotely threatened. He responded by posting an AI video of himself wearing a crown, flying a plane over a crowd and dumping shit on the protesters.

Where have the young people gone? It’s not that Gen Z doesn’t like a good protest: two years of marches against the war in Gaza demonstrated that. Nor is it true that they have lost faith in politics; the recent triumph of Zohran Mamdani in New York demonstrates that they are as easily gulled by charismatic charlatans as every generation that came before them. Perhaps it’s that, rather like the music of Country Joe and the Fish, the story that’s being told just doesn’t resonate in 2025. Trump as tyrant/Hitler/existential threat to democracy etc is a boring, rebooted narrative that didn’t work the first time around, and which doesn’t actually address any of their concerns. And so, as the second Trump administration proceeds, we can expect the median age of the protesters to creep steadily upwards.

On the one hand, I understand the desire to join together and express disapproval, even if it changes nothing — just as those babushkas in Moscow did. There’s something existential about it. But I also wonder whether the best way to spend your final years is in a fit of rage, shaking your fist at a man who will himself very soon exit the stage of history.

For me, the bleakest aspect of today’s geriatric protests is not the ease with which they are ignored, but rather that they reveal the impossibility of escaping from the corrosive effects of American politics. When I see videos of protesters piling unsteadily out of assisted-living facilities, handmade placards in hand, I don’t think “fight the power!” Instead, I imagine retirement homes across the country where the TV is permanently tuned to MSNBC and CNN, and the residents are in a permanent state of febrile rage and terror, fulminating about Trump all day.

Anything — knitting, bridge, chair yoga — would be better than that. I remember a story a friend in Moscow told me about his wife’s 95-year-old grandmother. She had lived through everything from Stalin’s terror to the Second World War to the collapse of the USSR. However, unlike the impoverished babushkas I saw on the street, she lived with her family, was well looked after, and enjoyed good health. She could have rested in those final years, satisfied that she had made it safely to the end, surrounded by her great-grandchildren. Instead, she watched the news obsessively and fretted about the future of Russia.

Given that she was not going to live to see any of the apocalyptic scenarios she was concerned about come to pass, my friend thought that she was upsetting herself needlessly. “Why are you so worried?”, he would ask. But she couldn’t help herself. And so she kept fretting until one day she suffered a fall, dying a week or two later. History rolled on regardless.

There’s a lesson in there, I think. I prefer the way my own grandparents spent their last years — watching game shows on TV, reading books, gardening on their allotment. Dylan Thomas was wrong: given the chance, you absolutely should go gentle into that good night.