“Ivan” pauses. He is involved in civilian resistance activities in Southern Ukraine, and he has pointed views on the occupiers, borne from first-hand experience. “Well, actually, the Russians generally just leave their dead behind in the field. So they don’t go back to Russia, in fact. We fertilise our soil with them.”

On the morning of 21 September, President Vladimir Putin went on Russian State TV to face his nation and, by proxy, the world. He told his people that there would be a mass but limited mobilisation for the war in Ukraine. He would be calling up “military reservists, primarily those who served in the armed forces and have specific military occupational specialities and corresponding experience”. It would be Russia’s first mobilisation since World War II, which he announced on the International Day of Peace. For all his flaws, Putin does have a sense of humour.

The speech comprised Putin’s usual mix of mendacity, self-pity and delusion: a toxic combination in autocrats that invariably leads to violence (just ask the people of Iran). He began by talking about the need to protect the “sovereignty, security, and territorial integrity of Russia”. By this, he meant areas inside Ukraine that Russia has stolen and now occupies.

His declarations come in the wake of the recent Kyiv counteroffensive that has driven Russian troops out of much of the north-eastern parts of Ukraine. Of course, Russia could never have lost to Ukrainians. It was, as Putin explained, the West that is behind Russia’s recent defeats — not that he calls them defeats — because it “wants to destroy our country.” For that reason, the West is trying to “turn Ukraine’s people into cannon fodder”.

According to Putin — and it’s important to understand this — the West unleashed this aggression “back in 2014”. What actually happened was that Russian soldiers marched into Crimea without provocation, stole it, and then invaded eastern Ukraine. It was retaliation against the Ukrainian Euromaidan Revolution of 2013, which overthrew Kremlin stooge Viktor Yanukovych: Putin could not allow a democratic revolution next door to pass off without issue. Who knew what thoughts it might put into the heads of his own oppressed citizens?

Putin refers to Ukraine’s post-Euromaidan government  as “the result of a state coup”. He is, it seems a stickler for democracy. Between the 23-27 September, there will be “referendums” in the occupied territories of Ukraine over formal annexation to Russia. Pretty much the entire world has, inevitably and correctly, denounced them as a sham.

Putin now posits his unprovoked and militarily foolish invasion of Ukraine as an existential conflict for Russians: “The goal of that part of the West is to weaken, divide and ultimately destroy our country. They are saying openly now that in 1991 they managed to split up the Soviet Union and now is the time to do the same to Russia, which must be divided into numerous regions that would be at deadly feud with each other.”

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With its paranoia about Western intentions, nostalgia for a supposedly halcyon USSR, and belief that Russia must fight (ergo, conquer more land) to survive, this statement pretty much sums up the entirety of Putinist foreign policy over the last 15 or so years. The international reaction has been as expected. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was typically eloquent: “Putin wants to drown Ukraine in blood, including the blood of his own men.” UK Defence Secretary Ben Wallace saw it as an “admission that his invasion is failing”, and that Russia is fast becoming a “global pariah”.

Recent events have undoubtedly been a colossal setback for Russia. There have now been 7 months of fighting and Putin has failed to meet the 15 September deadline he set his army to take the Donetsk region. In that time, it has suffered. Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu has gone on record admitting that his people may have sustained up to 6,000 casualties. Ukraine claims the figure is over 55,000. The truth lies somewhere in between (though almost certainly closer to Kyiv’s estimation than Moscow’s). And this doesn’t take into account the hundreds of desertions from the Russian army to date.

Back in Moscow, there was even public criticism from former parliamentarian Boris Nadeszhdin. “It’s either full scale war or we get out,” he said on a heated panel discussion on state TV. Nadeszhdin is an “approved” opposition figure, so his comments were to be expected. Nonetheless, he voiced what many are thinking: the war is not going to plan, despite Kremlin claims that its retreat in Kharkiv was a tactical move.

The Ukrainians are, naturally, loving all of this. The Defence of Ukraine tweeted on Tuesday: “Why did the chicken cross the road? Because it was regrouping”.

Putin is not the only one with a sense of humour.

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“This [mobilisation] means the war is coming ever closer to ordinary Russians.” “Petya” is a Ukrainian soldier on the country’s southern front, and he’s weighing up what recent events mean for those on the front lines. “He recognised that he needed more troops, more people to reach his goals. Before this moment, for ordinary people in Russia, this war was something very far away but now, ordinary Russian people will feel what this war means in their personal life.”

This is important. Even in a dictatorship, which Russia emphatically is — no matter how many democratic veneers Putin tries to paste over his actions — you can’t enrage too many people too many times if you want to govern more or less unhindered. When I was last in Ukraine, over the summer, I lost count of how many people told me the USSR’s failed invasion of Afghanistan was the final nail in its coffin.

At first glance, Russians are unhappy. The most searched terms on the internet in Russia following the announcement were, according to one anonymous tweeter, “how to break your arm”; “how to leave Russia”; “foreign passport”; and then “how to avoid mobilisation”. There’s a great joke doing the rounds in Moscow right now, too. “As a reservist, you have been mobilised!” “Who are we fighting with?” “The Nazis.” “Yes, but against whom?”

Discontent is being expressed in various ways. One-way airline tickets are soaring in price and selling out fast. Meanwhile, small-scale protests are making themselves heard in towns across the country, and over 1,000 Russians have now been arrested for dissent. In a country where you can get 15 years in prison for speaking out, these are the acts of either extremely brave, or extremely fed up, people. Both are a grave danger for despotic regimes.

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Then again, Russians are often unhappy. As a Russian friend once said to me: “Yeah, politics sucks, but it’s like the weather: you can’t do anything about it.” Any claim that Putin is in imminent political or indeed personal danger must be dismissed as almost certainly false — with the caveat that in life, and especially in Russia, anything can happen.

Petya understands the truth of all this. “The future of this war depends not only on the force of the Russian army against the Ukrainian army, but also on the views and position of the Russian people.” And he is hopeful. As are most military-minded Ukrainians I speak to. Ignore the noise (or as one so memorably put it, “politician bull poo poo”) and look at what is happening on the ground. Ukraine continues to advance in the North, having retaken over 8000 square kilometres to date, and soon hopes to encircle the city of Kherson in the occupied south (a goal that might be a touch too ambitious).

Kyiv is not letting up. Zelenskyy is now focused on “speed” in liberated areas. Ukrainian forces just captured Bilohorivka, a small village in Luhansk, which is a small but symbolic achievement, as it’s 10km west of the city of Lysychansk, which fell to the Russians in July. This causes Russia more problems. In each new territory that Ukraine seizes back, more evidence of Russian atrocities emerges: more mass graves, more scenes of torture, more tales of the brutality of occupation from those who endured it.

Putin’s response is simple. “People in the Zaporozhye and Kherson regions, in Lugansk and Donetsk, saw and are seeing now the atrocities perpetrated by the Neo-Nazis in the (Ukrainian-)occupied areas of the Kharkiv region,” he said. It’s a simple rhetorical device beloved of despots everywhere: just deny the reality of everything. And keep denying it. Blame the victims; you know most won’t swallow the nonsense, but the crucial constituency will.

It doesn’t matter that people can see the truth on TV. It doesn’t matter that they can read it in the press and hear it on the radio. This is what totalitarianism is: the Leader controls not just your civil rights and your freedoms, but your very senses, too. What you heard you did not hear; what you saw you did not see.

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But once you go down the road to outright despotism, there is no going back. There can be no failure either, as failure can only lead to downfall or death, and usually both. “Partial mobilisation by Russia means only one thing,” continues Petya. “The defeat of the so-called special military operation declared by Vladimir Putin. And practically, it means that Putin has recognised defeat.”

But if Putin has recognised the defeat of what he thought would be a “special military operation”, he cannot accept the defeat of the wider invasion of Ukraine. In his speech, he said Russia will “use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia and our people. It’s not a bluff.” He was talking about nuclear weapons — his ultimate trump card. If it’s a sign of weakness (and it is), it’s also a sign of how far nuclear taboos have been eroded. Throughout the whole of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, neither John F. Kennedy nor Nikita Khrushchev once mentioned the possibility of nuclear strikes. The Kremlin now alludes to it on a daily basis.

The Russian establishment remains mostly united and on message. Recently, Andrey Gurulyov, State Duma Deputy, expressed a desire to end Ukraine’s existence. Russia’s largest defence company, Rostec, has drastically increased its arms production after bringing in an overtime schedule.

On the ground, though, Petya is equally determined. “Nothing has changed because we still continue to defend our country,” he says. “We see our task as still the same as it was before [the mobilisation]. Our goal is to liberate occupied territories of Ukraine and achieve victory over Russia. Every soldier understands this goal, and the military spirit [morale] is still very high.”

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But to do this, as Petya knows, Ukraine will keep needing Western weapons and support. Key to the Kremlin’s strategy is the belief that we will eventually give up and abandon Ukraine. It’s easy to see the logic behind this. Putin looked at Iraq; to Barack Obama’s failure to keep to his own redline after chemical weapon use in Syria; and most recently to the flight from Afghanistan; and he concluded the West was exhausted and spent.

So far, we have proved him wrong. The EU Council just adopted a new €5bn assistance package. When I met Foreign Office officials recently, the message was simple: full steam ahead with supporting Ukraine. Britain has a new Prime Minister, fully aligned with her predecessor. She has made this abundantly clear.

Petya is keen to emphasise the importance of this continuing support. “To reach victory we need more help from the side of our Western partners,” he says. “We need new armaments, we need new technologies. We see that Russia’s entire policy is its human potential but not technology — winning by quantity, not quality. That’s all they can do.”

Now, across the occupied territories the referendums are beginning. Putin is going to annex larges parts of southern Ukraine to Russia. But as much as he tells himself — and Russians — otherwise, this will only make Ukrainians, yet again, more determined to resist; and the Russians, yet again, more violent. Yesterday morning I received a message from a Ukrainian friend. “News from Kh [Kherson] are bad. Russians with riffles and unforms [sic] coming in villages from house to house and press people top vote. Often threaten if they don’t want to.”

The war is far from over — the violence will continue; Ukrainians will continue to die. And so the West’s involvement must continue, too. There can be no retreat — either for Ukraine, or for the international order we have so painstakingly built over the seven decades, since the last time a tyrant unleashed industrial war on the European continent.

We wanted to look at the future of the war. Will it escalate — with the use of chemical or biological weapons, or expanding into attacks beyond the border of Ukraine? Or might the two sides reach a ceasefire? Fifteen forecasters with exceptional track records gathered to discuss these three questions:

1. Before the 1st of August 2023, will chemical or biological weapons be used in the Russia-Ukraine war?
2. Before the 1st January 2023, will there be a full-scale ceasefire declared between Russia and Ukraine?
3. Will events involving Russian security forces result in 25 or more fatalities on a Nato member state’s territory before the end of 2023?

Before the 1st of August 2023, will chemical or biological weapons be used in the Russia-Ukraine war?
Median forecast: 12%

The use of proscribed weapons of mass destruction — by either side, although most people think Russian rather than Ukrainian forces are more likely to deploy them — would mark a significant escalation in the conflict, and a further breach with international laws and norms.

All forecasters think this outcome unlikely, although there is a reasonable spread — one puts it at a 1% chance, while another goes as high as 23%. It’s worth being clear that 12% is not a trivial chance: if the use of chemical or biological weapons would have serious repercussions, such as bringing Nato forces into the war (or simply killing large numbers of people with the weapons themselves), then that level of risk would be worth taking seriously. That said, there are chemical weapons and chemical weapons. Poison gas dropped on a city is very different from phosphorus weapons used against combatants.

One forecaster, who puts the outcome at 14% likely, reasons that Russia clearly has no moral problem with using chemical weapons. Putin’s regime has used them for targeted assassinations before, as in Salisbury. But it hasn’t deployed them in battlefield situations, even during the siege of Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol, “which would have been an ideal tactical condition to use them in order to kill or force out deeply entrenched opposition forces.” “I don’t think anyone wants to really escalate in this direction,” the forecaster writes, “but I can see some borderline cases of phosphorus use.”

Another points out that there are issues with resolving the question. There are rumours that Russia already has used chemical weapons in Mariupol, delivered by a small drone — but “given that the source for these claims was the Azov Battalion and the inability of any external observer to verify them, it’s hard to give them much credence”. They note that more clear-cut uses of chemical weapons in Syria remain controversial. So the chance of the question being resolved positively are somewhat smaller than the chance of chemical weapons being used.

Most of the forecasters feel that the upsides of using these weapons were low. “I don’t think chemical weapons or typical bioweapons are very tactically useful”, writes one. “It’s fairly likely they didn’t use them in Mariupol, a long and bloody siege; it raises the question ‘Where else might they use them?’”, writes another. And they feel that the downsides are large and obvious: not simply the risk of blowback from Nato, but the cost elsewhere. “Some level of semi-explicit Chinese political support is required [for Russian war aims], and this gets harder to maintain if WMDs are used”, they write. “It would also make it harder for European states to push Ukraine to accept a ceasefire that cedes Crimea and Donbas.”

That said, forecasters whose estimates were on the higher end pointed out that expecting Russia to make sensible, rational decisions was not always a smart bet. “There are far more negative political ramifications for using chemical weapons than tactical or terror gains from them to make it a good decision”, one writes. “But I’m not lower than 15% because Russia has already made many bad decisions.” Escalation of the war via proscribed WMDs would indeed be risky, writes another, but: “Putin’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was a fairly risky decision, so it seems that he is certainly willing to take measures that Western geopolitical analysts previously thought were extremely unlikely.”

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Before the 1st January 2023, will there be a full-scale ceasefire declared between Russia and Ukraine?

Median forecast: 21%

While the use of WMDs would represent an escalation, the war could go the other way, and begin to wind down. But while the forecasters felt that was more likely than the deployment of weapons of mass destruction, they all — even the most optimistic — still feel that it’s an unlikely outcome. The highest probability given was 30%.

For a ceasefire to become a realistic possibility, one points out, at least one side in the conflict would have to see diminishing political support for the war. Similarly, they would have to see some sort of tactical advantage in ceasing hostilities for a period. But it is doubtful whether Ukrainian public opinion will shift, at least until the winter, if limited gas supplies and damage to electricity generation lead to widespread energy shortages. (As a second forecaster writes: “The will of the public in Ukraine is definitely not in favour of accepting Russian aggression at this time.”) Despite heavy Ukrainian losses, they have manpower reserves, a constant flow of Western weapons, and training support to use those weapons.

On the Russian side, “casualties seem to be running at an unknown but politically manageable level, and the Russian state has the financial resources to shore up at least temporary population support with higher levels of social spending,” the same forecaster writes. The regime is insulated from the worst of the political consequences of casualties since most of the urban warfare has been fought by troops from the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics rather than those recruited in Russia itself. And Putin’s industrial base should be able to support the warfare we’re currently seeing — “slow concentrated troop movements preceded by the application of massive artillery bombardments, the kind of thing the Russian military is good at” — for “many years to come”, even with Western sanctions.

There is, writes one forecaster, “some fairly low chance the Ukrainians could come under pressure from the central Europeans to move towards peace” as the economic consequences of the war continue to bite, and as concerns grow about a widening of the war. “But I’m reasonably pessimistic, as I think Ukraine will have to be in a different position or hold quite a different mentality to be able to give up any of its land for a ceasefire to hold,” they continue. “I think the Ukrainian leadership will pretty much fight until they are not supported by the West.” The West’s stockpiles of weapons and munitions are depleting, but there’s plenty left in reserve, especially if you include lower-tech weapons than those currently being sent.

In the credit column, the political leaders might not be implacably opposed to a ceasefire. Volodymyr Zelensky has said that he wants the war to end, notes one forecaster, “and seems somewhat willing to compromise for that to occur”. Meanwhile Putin “could be open to a deal taking place if he still has some way to save face and convince Russians that it was still a victory, such as the capture of a small but strategic piece of territory”. “Six months is a long time”, writes one forecaster, and the political and military situations could change dramatically. But nonetheless, it remains unlikely. “I could see a small-scale ceasefire for a couple of cities for a short humanitarian window — early March had one for two cities”, says another. “But a full-country ceasefire would be a much less likely scenario.”

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Will events involving Russian security forces result in 25 or more fatalities on a Nato member state’s territory before the end of 2023?

Median forecast: 8%

Not long ago, it looked as though there was a chance that conflict would expand. The Russian port of Kaliningrad on the Baltic Sea is cut off from the rest of Russia by a 40-mile stretch of Lithuania known as the Suwalki Corridor. In June Lithuania said it would restrict exports of goods into Kaliningrad through its territory. Russia responded with threats to seize the Corridor and join its territories together.

That seems to have eased off. “The chance of something going wrong in Lithuania seems much lower than it did a couple of weeks ago,” one forecaster says, “but it was a good example of how things can escalate due to nested games and mistakes. There is plenty of scope for conflict spillovers and accidents as well as intentional escalation.”

Nonetheless, the forecasters think most of the Russian rhetoric is “chest-thumping without action” and that “actually Russia is very careful about going to war with Nato.” If they were to do it, Lithuania is the likely starting point, but “it would be a massive escalation and I think both sides really want to avoid it”.

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Still, there are other ways for the question to be resolved positively other than a deliberate action in a Baltic state. One would be a stray missile hitting a Nato country. Another would be the accidental shooting-down of a passenger plane. Then there are other conflicts Russia is embroiled in. “Russia and Turkey have a ceasefire in Syria”, notes one forecaster, and Turkey is a Nato member. But that is also doubtful: “There have been no deaths caused by Russian soldiers on Turkish soil. A Turkish F4 was shot down by Syrian forces in 2012, but that incident was over international airspace and did not involve Russia.”

Russian attacks on military bases near the Ukrainian city of Lviv could also lead to the question being resolved positively. Lviv is 70 kilometres from the Polish border and there are military bases within 10 kilometres of that border, at least one of which has been attacked already. A missile launched from the Black Sea that misses its target could conceivably hit Poland.

The forecasters agree that intentional escalation seems far too risky to occur. “If this were to happen, I think it would either be the result of an accident or because a small amount of Russian forces or a Nato member’s forces attacked the other side without permission”, writes one. Even that is dubious, but if it were to happen, “I think both leaders would try to de-escalate just because the ramifications would be too terrifying (a nuclear exchange) if they didn’t defuse the situation.” Taking that into account, one forecaster points out that, “One and a half years are an eternity here, and the situation could change”, so they kept an 8% chance to represent the uncertainty.

…

The most likely outcome is that the war does not escalate either with the use of chemical and biological weapons, or the deaths of significant numbers of people on Nato soil through Russian action. That’s mainly because the risks of widening the conflict would be significant and the benefits nebulous for all parties. Doubt does remain though. We know that the Russian leadership has been willing to make high-risk decisions in the past, not least launching the invasion in the first place.

On the other side, an imminent ceasefire is also unlikely, because public opinion in both Russia and Ukraine would be against it, and both countries have the manpower and resources to continue fighting, Russia through its own industrial base, still producing though affected by sanctions, and Ukraine with Western support.

***

A version of this research first appeared on the Swift Centre.

In a 2am tweet yesterday, Ellwood claimed: “Pleased to see powerful voices joining my call for a humanitarian partial or total NO FLY ZONE. What scale of war crimes, what numbers of civilian deaths must we witness — before Nato, the most powerful military alliance in the world, is tasked to intervene?”

While wars are not won by manic late-night tweets, they can nevertheless create much damage, in this case the risk of significantly escalating the conflict through creating unrealistic expectations among the British media class about what should be done, and among the Ukrainians about what will be done.

As the Biden administration’s spokeperson Jen Psaki very sensibly observed last night in her attempt to persuade journalists to tone down their rhetoric, a No-Fly Zone “would essentially mean the US military would be shooting down planes, Russian planes. That is definitely escalatory. That would potentially put us in a place where we’re in a military conflict with Russia. That is not something the President wants to do.”

As Psaki continued: “We are not going to have a military war with Russia with US troops. And [Biden] thinks it’s vitally important… to be direct with the public about that.”

Aside from dramatically increasing the risk of a nuclear exchange with Russia, the idea of a No-Fly Zone is a non-starter for many reasons. Even if it did not cause Russia to heighten its preparedness for a nuclear strike against us — which is surely reason enough — shooting down Russian jets would make Nato a military party to the conflict in a way that could soon spiral out of control. This ought to go without saying, but apparently it is now necessary to explain to Britain’s political class in very simple terms.

If Nato jets are flying from airbases in Central and Southeastern Europe to shoot down Russian aircraft, not only would the jets become military targets for Russia’s air defences, but those bases would themselves then become likely targets for Russian military retaliation, along with the basing locations of Nato air defence systems covering Western Ukraine. For all their diplomatic support of Ukraine and their supply of vital munitions to Ukrainian forces, countries such as Poland, Romania and Bulgaria will naturally shy away from a course of action likely to lead to Russian air and missile strikes on their own territory.

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When advocates of a No-Fly Zone in Syria demanded such a course of action, it was before Russia entered the Syrian war, when Syrian airbases could reasonably be put out-of-action by long-range missile strikes without any serious risk of retaliation. This is not the case with the Ukraine war: is Ellwood seriously advocating that we strike the airbases in Russia and Belarus from which Russian aircraft are deployed? If so, then he should be explicit about what he is calling for, and the consequences that will ensue.

In any case, Russia has so far refrained from utilising its vast air superiority against Ukraine, for the possible reasons outlined in this excellent RUSI essay; namely, the lack of guided munitions to strike targets without causing widespread civilian deaths, the poor coordination of Russian air defence systems deployed in Ukraine which may cause jets to be downed by friendly fire, and the relative inexperience of Russian pilots when faced with competent opponents.

Monday was the first day in which Russian jets were visible in the conflict, flying close air support missions over the Kharkiv front. The only meaningful Russian air activity so far has been the use of helicopters to land airborne forces at the Hostomel airbase outside Kyiv in the war’s opening phase, to create a staging ground or potential bridgehead for the coming assault on the capital, and the limited use of attack helicopters to destroy Ukrainian ground positions and vehicles moving along the roads in convoy.

Instead, the most dreadful Russian bombardments of the war so far have been by ground-based artillery and long-range missile systems against the besieged city of Kharkiv on Monday and yesterday, causing great destruction and terrible civilian casualties among the city’s mostly Russian-speaking population, as well as on Ukrainian military installations elsewhere in the country.

The Russian way of war is based on heavy artillery barrages to soften up defences for a ground assault, unlike the Western approach in which aerial bombardment has become the dominant tool. A No-Fly Zone would do nothing to prevent this outcome, though rhetoric demanding one may well play a role in encouraging Russian decision-makers to intensify their artillery bombardment in search of a swift and overwhelming victory — one which would cause vast numbers of civilian casualties.

Our aim at this point should be to dissuade Putin as far as we can from deploying the artillery assets he has so far barely used, not in encouraging him to go all out before a Western response can realistically be organised. We do not want Putin to turn Kyiv into Nineties Grozny or Aleppo, and over-promising and under-delivering military support is an almost guaranteed way to speed up this outcome.

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Perhaps Ellwood and others have had their expectations of what is possible or desirable raised by the NATO No-Fly Zone against Libya in 2011. Cautiously agreed to by Russia at the UN Security Council, it swiftly evolved into a close air support campaign against Libyan ground forces which allowed the rebels to defeat Gaddafi  — an outcome which enraged Putin, and shaped his attitude to the following Syrian conflict.

But Gaddafi’s decrepit Libya is not Putin’s Russia and such a campaign is simply not achievable. Does Ellwood want us to strike Russian tanks and artillery in Ukraine? Again, he should be honest about what he is calling for and about what the Russian response would look like.

We should sigh with relief that Johnson yesterday uled out the No-Fly Zone idea that America has already dismissed, telling a Ukrainian journalist, with painful but realistic frankness, that “Unfortunately the implication of a [No-Fly Zone] is that the UK would be engaged in shooting down Russian planes … and be in direct combat” with Russia, and with consequences “truly difficult to control.”

Britain, and other Nato countries are already doing about as much as we can, by supplying Ukraine with the munitions making the Russian advance so costly, and by imposing great financial and diplomatic costs on Russia for Putin’s invasion. Beyond this, there is little more we can do other than encourage Russia towards meaningful negotiations before Kyiv is encircled and Ukraine’s bargaining hand is dramatically weakened.

Unless he has genuinely taken leave of his senses, Ellwood’s “hold me back!” posturing is possible purely because he knows the course of action he is calling for is already out of the question. He can raise the stakes in this dangerous and irresponsible manner because it wins him attention for the forthcoming Tory leadership contest, and because there are no negative consequences for him doing so.

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That must change: the risk of escalation is too great for this rhetoric to be permitted at so dangerous a moment for Britain and Europe. The Conservative party must get a grip on Ellwood and others’ irresponsible late-night interventions in an already fevered online discourse: the whip has been withdrawn for far less.

Nothing good will come of such insane talk, for Britain, or most acutely, for the Ukrainians seemingly about to suffer a devastating campaign of artillery bombardment. Raising their expectations with false hopes at this stage of the war will not help them. But raising Russia’s threat calculus may harm them a great deal, at a time when Putin seems already poised to take his gloves off after a so-far half-hearted campaign. That is too great a price to pay for Ellwood’s desire to raise his profile — and the party needs to step in soon.

It’s well-documented that social media is playing a vital part in this conflict: Ukrainians with working smartphones are publicising the terrifying experience of having their home invaded. But in Russia, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and Instagram have all been banned, leaving all but the most determined with nothing but fake news and propaganda.

Tinder, though, continues to operate normally. Some in the West have passported to Moscow to talk with beleaguered Russians and find out what their lives are like now. But others are passporting with more explicit political aims. A Slovakian media agency has launched an initiative called Special Love Operation, which encourages Tinder users to bombard Russian singles with images from the war in Ukraine to show them what’s really going on. “The Russians do not know the truth about the war in Ukraine,” its website reads. “Putin ignores the whole world, but maybe he doesn’t ignore his own people. We found a way to bypass censorship on Tinder.”

The agency tells users to change their profile picture to a selfie with a picture of a war-torn Ukrainian city (it provides 12 images), and change their profile description to a paragraph in Cyrillic, which reads: “Please don’t turn away, don’t turn a blind eye — innocent people like you and me are dying in Ukraine. They too wanted love, [to] live and get acquainted — now they sit in basements … lose their loved ones and relatives, freeze.”

Tinder has also become a way to connect meaningfully with those on the ground in Ukraine. Many in the West are desperate to help Ukrainians — especially since the refugee schemes were announced, and then promptly descended into chaos. Tinder has become one way for those in the UK keen to sponsor a refugee through the government’s scheme to connect with someone in need of shelter, albeit a mode uncomfortably adjacent to sex.

Curious, I decided last week to revive my Tinder. I was reporting in Dubai at the time, so started by swiping past a warning that I was in a country that did not respect LGBTQ rights, into a sea of slick-haired men looking for, among other things, “nothing serious”. With a few taps, I had upgraded my Tinder account so that I could passport — not to news-bomb or refugee-seek, but to hear what people are thinking, doing and feeling in both Russia and Ukraine. After all dating apps, unlike Twitter, encourage people to share their thoughts privately.

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I swiped in Moscow for a few days, and then in Kyiv and Odessa, sending messages that were as transparent as possible: I made it clear that I was concerned and curious to hear the perspective of individuals caught up in a hyper-reported crisis. I was friendly but non-flirtatious. I set my search to both men and women but got messages — and responses — only from men. The dozen or so from each country who I communicated with seemed content to converse without any sexual or romantic overlay, though a couple of Muscovites offered to show me around their city in the hazy future when this was all over.

For some Russians, everyday life has transformed since the invasion. With the mass exodus of Western companies, many connections with the outside world have been abruptly severed, along with options for getting out physically (flights to and from 36 countries, including the EU, the US and UK have been banned). My first Russian connection, a pale young call centre worker who remotely helps people fix their cars, messaged in under a minute after I swiped: “I would love to leave Moscow, from Russia. Maybe you can help me.”

He was translating his Cyrillic into English online and asked me to do the same. I enquired about the situation and what he thought of it. “I am very glad that I do not watch the TV that we have,” he told me. “I’m against. Now the sanctions this month are just beginning to feel them. We will feel them after April 1, when there will be nothing on the shelves, and in 3 months people will go hungry. Can we call on WhatsApp? I will show you a photo … Will you help me?”

I replied that I hoped he would be ok, and we should stay in touch, but I was unsure how I could help him. Still, his profile picture, in which he smiles wanly before St Basil’s, haunts me; I have checked in daily, getting ever-terser bursts of Cyrillic in response.

Most of the men I spoke to in Russia, though, didn’t share his negative view of Putin’s actions. Nikolay, 25, a cocky banking analyst, revealed a frankly sinister perspective. His profile picture featured a man’s silhouette licking a stiletto at the end of a long leg. He said sanctions had had little impact: his work “just reviewed our project pool from Europe to more domestic and east”. He added, “flexibility is key”, with an emoji of a smiling face with a halo. The fact that McDonalds has abandoned its Russian outlets, he said, has just made room for some “cool, a bit more expensive but tasty” Russian equivalent. “The only point is Instagram perhaps.”

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As for the invasion: “Putin is the face of Russian community and basically nearly 85-90 per cent see eye to eye … Most Russians understand the reason of it and support our military and I as a former soldier but we regret that we are supposed to kill our ex bros as they were fooled by US.” I asked what he meant by that. “Do you believe US are willing to bring peace and prosperity to Ukraine and other countries they interfere in?” he responded. It’s a question that many Western liberals have posed.

But then Nikolay expanded, warning that the West, like the Roman empire, had become too decadent, and was in for a shock. “I would like my children to raise up healthy, know the history as is it, realize that boy is a boy and girl is girl and to fuck ur friend isn’t appropriate cos then ur nation will die … Western world lost when these things became normal.” And then came Hitler. “Except for the worst things Hitler did he got some good ideas concerning the concept of Europe.” Shocked, but pretending not to be, I asked what he meant. “He made Europe decide how to live, not States”.

Nikolay’s analysis was particularly wide-ranging, but his view of the West as corrupt and devious cropped up repeatedly among the men I chatted to. Alex claimed: “Ukraine bombed Donbas for 8 years, in fact, the US and London benefit from this conflict, since they always have tried to do meanness to the Russians.” “The sanctions spoiled life a little,” he admitted, “but not much.” He was one of the men who offered to show me around Moscow “when the crisis is over.”

Until I passported, the Russian perspectives I’d heard were mostly outraged, against the war, intent on protest and appalled by Putin. But Tinder revealed that a plenty of educated young people do not share that view, offering a depressing glimpse at how deep the Russian threat goes: this is not, after all, a question of one isolated ruler running amok. At the very least, it seems that Russian propaganda has been successful, where the young men I matched with — most of whom had good English and seemed middle class — were concerned. Alex told me, “we don’t really want to fight, it’s just that some countries don’t keep their promise, and so I like London, and people too.”

The Ukrainians I spoke to were less verbose, but didn’t shy away from the need to fight. Vitaly, in Kyiv, said, “the war is going on and we need to fight! It’s scary, but we’re strong and we’ll win!” Alex said some of his friends had joined the army, but that he was working on some “social projects.” I asked about mandatory universal conscription for all men of fighting age, and he clarified that it was “not really all, yet.” His project was “psychological help for Ukrainians and info project to show mental trauma civil people get while the conflict.” He was “also launching YouTube video soon.”

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Navigating a world of real disaster, peril, anxiety, and fear — all from a comfortable perch in the West — I had expected that the panic and misery communicated by the Muscovite car mechanic would be more widespread, particularly in Ukraine. But instead, the men I matched with seemed either to feel relatively safe, or keen to appear unruffled. The fact that they had time to be on the dating app, of course, suggests they weren’t in the thick of the conflict.

Except, as Russian troops have made clear, you don’t have to be on the sidelines to be on Tinder. There have been reports of Russian troops bombarding Ukrainian women with messages in towns they are about to literally bombard, giving away their classified locations as they go. Dasha, a young woman in Kharkiv, matched with a number of soldiers, including a bearded Chechen fighter calling himself Black. She ended up talking to Belgorod-born Andrei, whose picture showed him in full combat gear wielding a Kalashnikov. “I love travel to Asia, particularly Thailand,” he told Dasha. “But now it’s a difficult time … because no one likes Russia right now.”

Kyiv was also my first taste of Tinder as refugee-sorting tool. I matched with Tom, an Englishman in his 30s, whose profile said he was looking to find someone to sponsor to come and live in his house. There was not a trace of sexual innuendo on his profile. But surely the men using a dating app to find a Ukrainian refugee to house are at least partially aware that Ukrainian women are reputed to be the most beautiful and brainy in the world.

Tom’s opening message to me was all business: “Hi, are you interested in the room/visa sponsorship?” I replied with the truth, asking him how it was going. “It’s proving to be quite difficult as I don’t think the UK’s policy has been published very well,” he wrote, echoing the widespread criticism of those trying to navigate it.

Whether people like Tom’s intentions are entirely innocent is hard to know; humanitarian, political and sexual goals are difficult to distinguish on the battleground of Tinder. But this conflict has highlighted that dating apps can go beyond their basic function, even if the promise and dangers of sex lurk in the background. Where other social media are mouthpieces, possibly to a vast audience, Tinder offers a more intimate view. And so long as it’s used carefully, the app could prove to be one of many powerful yet non-violent weapons in this war.

The blight that is wheat took root 10,000 years ago, when Triticum aestivum, or bread wheat, was domesticated from wild grasses in the “Fertile Crescent” of the Middle East. Initially, the local Neolithics cultivated wheat alongside traditional hunter-gathering and incipient pastoralism (livestock farming). But wheat is a slave-master, demanding in its specific and daily needs, not least the endless — or so it seems to us who have ever grown the stuff — weeding. Wheat locked us into a seasonal cycle of planting, weeding and harvesting from which we have been unable to escape ever since. It also made us more sedentary, both in terms of chaining us to static settlements, and becoming less active. Guarding a wheat field from wild boar requires less energy than hunting wild boar; the lineal ancestor of the couch potato was the campfire bun.

Crop-watching may demand little energy, but it is demanding of time. With fewer hours to hunt and to forage, we settled for a restricted diet. At Abu Hereyra in Syria, archaeology records this shift: when the occupants were hunter-gatherers, they consumed 150 wild plants; as arable farmers, they ate just a handful of crops. Human health deteriorated; the human body changed. Singularly, the jaw shrunk, since the new wheaty diet required less chewing than meat. Human teeth did not reduce proportionately to the smaller jaw, so dental crowding ensued. The diet of starch — wheat’s principal component — caused cavities. And the dietetic value of wheat, which was anyway only modestly nutritious, has declined by as much as 30% under contemporary industrialised agriculture.

The intriguing question is: if wheat-growing altered our corporeal structure, did it alter our brain? Did the systematic rituals and requirements of planting and harvesting wheat change our brains to make us more docile? Organised? Cooperative? Disconnected from nature? Did it turn us away from animism to praise of Ceres, goddess of grain crops, and then to an abstract, monolithic God of whom we ask our daily bread.

What wheat certainly did do was facilitate the rise of the state. As James C. Scott, co-director of the Agrarian Studies Program at Yale University, explains in Against the Grain, wheat became the best way to tax the people: “The key to the nexus between grains and states lies, I believe, in the fact that only the cereal grains can serve as a basis for taxation: visible, divisible, assessable, storable, transportable, and ‘rationable’.”

Wheat-fields are fixed and surveillable; livestock moves about. Counting sheep is easy in bed but for a state flunky on an arid hillside, the accurate checking of ovines (which are, anyway, easy to transport, and therefore to hide) is all but impossible. Similarly, communities reliant on tubers or root vegetables such as yams as their staple were more able to evade taxation since the crop can be left in the ground and harvested when the tax collector has gone home. Such societies rarely developed into states.

But where you have wheat, historically, you have state control or its like. The taxing of wheat enabled the emergence of non-productive elites, who required an armed wing to defend their regime. The food that fuelled the necessary population increase to staff the army, the fist of the state? Wheat. Nutrient poor but energy dense, fodder for the masses, it provided just enough energy and health to work, breed, fight. The early grain states were “population machines” (Scott again), domesticating people as the farmer domesticates the cow herd.

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The most “domesticated” people were slaves, utilised in wheat’s more unpleasant aspects of production. Wheat states were slave states. The Roman writer Lucius Apuleius recorded in Metamorphoses IX the lot of millers:

“Their skins were seamed all over with marks of the lash, their scarred backs were shaded rather than covered with tattered frocks. Some wore only aprons, all were so poorly clothed that their skin was visible through the rents in their rags! Their foreheads were branded with letters, their heads were half-shaved. They had irons on their legs. They were hideously sallow. Their eyes were bleared, sore, and raw, from the smoke of the ovens. They were covered with flour as athletes with dust!”

To prevent the enslaved fleeing the dirty work, law and policing were invoked, even invented. The legal Code of Hammurabi (c1750 BC) has six clauses to punish the escape of slaves.

Western society was eventually organised around the production and consumption of wheat. And so it became the ultimate political tool. Communism’s iconography of a hammer for the proletariat and a wheat-cutting sickle for the peasantry turned out to be one of history’s crueller ironies. The hammer was taken to the workers, the sickle to the peasant. As well as being easy to tax, wheat is easy to confiscate. And since wheat is a subsistence crop, remove it and you have starvation. During the Holodomor, the Ukrainian famine of 1932-3, Stalin deliberately deprived the country’s population — who lacked sufficient ardour for rule from Moscow — of wheat. Some 3.9 million Ukrainians, about 13% of the population, perished.

Meanwhile Hitler, a few years later, planned to feed the unformed millions of his master race with wheat tended by Ukrainian slaves, or neger, in the Reich’s terminology.

But the tyranny of wheat can be more subtle than the feeding or impoverishing of the masses in totalitarian grain states, old or new. Since the Second World War, the chief agricultural aim of government (and transnational governments such as the EU) has been productivity: quantity over quality. Wheat farming has become a yield-obsessed industry dependent on labour-reducing but expensive technology. Unsurprisingly, it has become a cereal-killer of small, family farms: a brand-new combine harvester can cost £100,000. Farmers who do fork out for one become indentured to an agribusiness complex, which oversees their production of wheat from cultivation to sale.

One example will serve: farmers who participate in the “Climate View” bio-tech programme of chemical giant Monsanto supply harvest data through sensors on combines manufactured by John Deere; Monsanto then sends prescriptions back, telling farmers which product he or she should apply to maximise yield. In his book Perilous Bounty, Tom Philpott recounts an interview with an ex-Monsanto executive who “painted a future in which farmers would essentially outsource their decisions to Monsanto”. There is a Latin phrase for farmers in such corporate controlled agriculture: instrumentum vocale. Talking tools. Slaves.

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Really, one becomes slyly indentured. Back in 1976, Monsanto developed the herbicide Roundup. They then genetically engineered wheat cultivars resistant to their own product, eventually mass-producing the Roundup Ready line of seed in 2019. Yes, you read that right: the grains were developed for their ability to cope with a chemical product that Monsanto wanted to flog. So if the farmer buys Roundup Ready seed, then he or she buys the tied-in Roundup herbicid. And Monsanto cashes in twice.

Chemical use in conventional wheat-growing does much for the coffers of Monsanto (now owned by Bayer), but it is turning swathes of the UK countryside into a coffin for nature. Wheat is the cause of more environmental problems than you can wave a baguette at. Although the lobbyists and the apologists of agribusiness insist that pesticide use has declined over the last quarter of a century, this is not the case when it comes to wheat. Between 2000 and 2016, average spray passes (applications) over wheat increased from 5.5 to 6.6, while the active substances in sprays went from 14.7 to 20.5. Actually, forget  the mgs, and the ratios. The countryside is doused in chemicals.

According to Cornell University’s Environmental Impact Quotient (EIQ), which compares approximate toxicities for pesticides, an EIQ of 7 indicates toxicity to wildlife. The fungicide chlorothalonil, usually bought in the UK as Bravo, has an EIQ of 33; it is widely used on winter and spring wheat. Chlorothalonil is now banned by the EU. Extinction of nature is not confined to the savannah and the jungle. It happens at the cottage door. Five wildflowers — “weeds” to some — associated with cereal and arable farming in the UK are now dead and gone due to chemically addicted  industrialised agriculture: So, farewell, Lamb’s succory, Interrupted brome, Thorowax, Small bur-parsley and Downy hemp-nettle.

The environmental woes of wheat go on and on. Yearly planting requires yearly tilling and this constant churning of earth kills the soil’s living organisms, spumes CO2 from soil-stored carbon, and exacerbates climate change. And I have not even mentioned the negatives of nitrogen as industrial wheat’s mainstay artificial fertiliser, what with its polluting run-offs and its release of nitrous oxide — a greenhouse gas which, pound for pound, warms the planet 300 times as much as carbon dioxide.

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Of course, wheat has its champions. According to agribusiness’s advocates, industrial wheat production must continue if we are to satisfy the stomachs of a growing global population. There is not a grain of truth in this. Farming already provides more than enough food for the future; the problem is simply that the West wastes a third of its food, and less developed countries lose about the same amount due to poor processing and storage. Anyway, in a world going to fat and type 2 diabetes more carbs from Mother’s Pride sliced white are hardly necessary.

Humanity took a wrong turn with wheat. But all is not lost. If the Russian invasion of Ukraine is causing a rethink of our reliance on oil and gas, this too is the moment to sow seeds of doubt about our dependence on the “golden grain”. Why not grass over swathes of the arable prairies of East Anglia — and Ukraine — and stock them with free-range cattle and sheep? Grass requires no lashings of chemicals, and livestock dung is excellent at restoring soil fertility and biodiversity; a single cow can feed 2.2 million insects per year, which means snacks galore for the birds and the bats.

I know, I know, as every vegan will exclaim: “Cows belch methane”! But it is not the cow, it is the how. An outdoor cow, on established grass, with methane-reducing seaweed supplement and low stocking density, is actually sequestering carbon. So, bovines are less of a climate problem than synthetic clothes, given that trainers alone cause 1.4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. One can only presume that the Oxford councillors who took the decision recently to go “meat free” are nudists. Or stupid. Or anti-nature. Or all three.

To save the planet, pastoralism is the intelligent solution. The brain is 60% fat, and omega-rich fat from grass-fed meat is excellent for mental health. The sine qua non of free thinking. Beef and liberty! More meat, less wheat!

The road is quiet, and the day is hot outside the administrative HQ of the Operational Group of Russian forces in Tiraspol. A few peeling murals of past triumphs can be seen over the wall. A notice promises that “Wartime service in the Russian army is a real man’s activity”. 

A weathered-looking soldier with the Russian tricolour on his arm stands guard at a run-down depot across the road. He stares at the sky with a cigarette in his mouth, rifle hanging limp at his side. A modern digital camouflage pattern cover stretches awkwardly across his wide bowl-shaped helmet, which belongs to a different era.

A rusty gate swings open. Another middle-aged man with a paunch pushes a wheelbarrow onto the road. He chirpily asks how I am doing and, discovering I am a foreigner — a military-aged Westerner at that — laughs and nonchalantly waves me away.

These men are a snapshot of the rogue, disconnected Russian forces of Transnistria. Mostly locally recruited, the 14th Soviet Guards Army, fewer than 2,000 men, were reportedly put on full alert on April 26. If such an order has been issued, it is being carried out with a lethargy reflective of this breakaway republic as a whole. 

While the armed forces offer regular pay, reliable housing, and social security, young men, who ought to carry the military vitality of this society, resist its call. They do not flock to join the army. 

Instead, they, like the young women here, want out. Average salaries on this side of the Dniester River are around 200-300 US Dollars a month. Travelling through the country, it becomes apparent — despite the existence of a few cafés with Instagram-friendly decor — that Transnistria’s raison d’être is to soothe the anxiety of nostalgic pensioners. 

Tiraspol looks as if it is still part of the USSR. Lenin’s face, grave in concrete, is all over the place. But despite the aesthetics, Marxism-Leninism is not so easy to find. Due to geopolitical quirks, socially and economically, the country has little in common with the old USSR. 

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Though reliable statistics are hard to obtain, due to official secrecy and the fact that most residents also hold Moldovan, Russian, or Ukrainian passports, the total number of pensioners was estimated to be as high as 135,000 in 2014. This out of a shrinking overall population of 300,000 — 500,000 (down from 706,000 in 1990). Moscow pays every pensioner here a monthly stipend of 10-15 US dollars. As such, the aged are firmly pro-Russian. 

The legal grey zone established in Transnistria after it gained de facto independence from Moldova in the 1990-92 War, suited, and continues to benefit, semi-legal commercial activity. The omnipresent Sheriff Corporation, the undisputed winner of the Nineties in the region, is more East India Company than Soviet command economics. With Russian backing, Sheriff effectively runs the state, holding significant control over local politics, media, sport, and with a monopoly on most other major industries. 

Between Sheriff and the pensioners, Transnistria exists in a kind of suspended animation. The majority of the middle-aged and the elderly own their apartments, and utility costs are relatively low due to Russian gas subsidies. Often, they are more materially comfortable than their equivalents over the border in Moldova. Thus, with the help of a few hammers and sickles, Victory Day parades, and some cognitive dissonance, the majority, squinting hard, can convince themselves that the stability, purpose, and structure of the good old days never really went away. 

Transnistria, then, is a gerontocracy. Along Tiraspol’s main avenue, 25th October Street, elderly males wearing military decorations and the Saint George’s Ribbon (a symbol of Russian allegiance now banned in Moldova) reprimand young strangers for sitting on the steps of the monument to Catherine the Great. I watch a lone mother push a single pram around playgrounds designed for crowds of children. Maria, a Sheriff supermarket worker in her mid-30s, coming home from a trip to Chisinau, lists the family members who have left, rarely to return. These include her former husband and children, along with her sisters and aunts. “I’m the only one left” she says. 

Transnistria isn’t alone in Eastern Europe experiencing such rapid demographic decline. But, unlike elsewhere, there is no youth migration from rural villages; almost all leave to go abroad. Tiraspol simply does not have the pull of Moscow, Warsaw, Kiev, or even Minsk for those in the provinces.

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Plugging the demographic gaps are pro-Russian Ukrainians who arrived after 2014. They make up a fair share of Tiraspol’s service workers and are naturally comforted by the semiotics. Something of the old Soviet bunker mindset survives in them. I spoke to several café workers the morning after a military recruitment centre was reportedly attacked with a Molotov cocktail, and they claimed to have heard nothing of it. Nor, for that matter, had they heard of the rocket-propelled-grenade attack on the Ministry of State Security building that was reported in the West, the destruction of the radio broadcast tower at Mayak, or the shots reportedly fired from Ukrainian territory near the huge ammunition dump at Cobasna.

Transnistria’s official name, The Pridnestrovian Moldavian Republic, acknowledges it is part of a larger country. But Transnistria’s relationship with Moldova is not a particularly bellicose one any more. The old and the middle-aged — and those with one child families — do not like fighting. The border crossing is surprisingly painless and un-militarized, even during the current tensions. The football team, “Sheriff” Tiraspol (who beat Real Madrid in the Champions League last year), play in the Moldovan league. Citizens come and go on a daily basis and Russian forces are said to change into civilian clothing and fly in and out of Chisinau airport, having long lost their transit privileges through Ukraine.

The recent attacks in Tiraspol have seen false flag accusations thrown at Moscow’s door. This could well be the case; Russian military doctrine places a great deal of importance on the sowing of confusion – see the much cited and not often fully understood work of General Gerasimov. It should be noted, though, that official Ukrainian advisors such as Oleksiy Arestovych and Anton Gerashenko have been openly calling for the seizure of Transnistria. Such rhetoric — and the inevitable counter-rhetoric — could lead to escalation without the planned intention of either side, especially if it were to gain traction among the populace.

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However, while Transnistria is culturally pro-Russian, there is little observable aggression towards those on the other side of this Slavic feud, or those in power in Chisinau. Most are friendly, open to outsiders, and are genuinely proud of the state’s multi-ethnic make-up: only 29.1% of the population were recorded as ethnically Russian in the 2014 census.  Observers place the total strength of the Transnistrian military at less than 10,000 active soldiers, with little in the way of operational heavy weaponry, aircraft, or armoured vehicles. An image recently released by the Transnistrian Ministry of Defence, widely mocked on Twitter due to the vintage character of the weapons, vehicles and uniforms, would appear to be an accurate reflection of the combat readiness of their armed forces.

Neither Tiraspol nor Chisinau want the war to spread across the border from Ukraine. In Maia Sandu’s recent speech to the European Parliament, she was reported to have “demanded” Russian Forces withdraw from Moldovan territory. In reality, this “demand” was somewhat more of an audience pleasing request. The bulk of the speech reaffirmed Moldovan peacefulness and constitutional neutrality. If the war that continues to burn in Ukraine does spread across the border to Transnistria and Moldova, it will not have been driven there by the mentality and ambitions of either of these aged, fatigued societies.

Have you had experience of being cast as pro-Putin for expressing unease about some of the Western measures against Russia?

Immensely, and painfully. But let’s be clear, my pain is neither here nor there when you have atrocities, murders, a whole country being devastated by Putin’s armies. Who gives a damn about how I feel about my treatment by people on social media?

Back in 2001, I labelled Vladimir Putin a war criminal because of the murder of 250,000 people in Grozny, Chechnya. It was in a Senate meeting of the University of Athens, which was discussing the motion for awarding an honorary doctorate to Putin, who had just become president of Russia. And I was in a minority of one opposing it. So having gone out on a limb, having condemned Putin, it was a bit surprising to be lambasted by several commentators as “Putin’s useful idiot.”

Was the charge against you based on your blaming Nato expansion for the current crisis?

The most pertinent criticism that I received was that I was “Westsplaining” — this is a version of “mansplaining” — that I was being condescending in the way that I was telling Eastern Europeans what’s in their interest. Now, that is a very serious accusation. Because we do know that mansplaining is something that we men often do.

While I’m not claiming to have the monopoly of truth, I do believe that as a European, as a citizen of the world, I have the right to, for instance, comment that Vladimir Putin’s authoritarian power was built on a bedrock of animosity between the West and Russia, and that Putin exploited the humiliation of the Russians — at the hands of Nato, at the hands of the International Monetary Fund.

Don’t forget how in the Nineties, even the reformers — liberals, neoliberals in Russia — were crushed by the West, by the International Monetary Fund, forcing Russia into an awful default in 1998 that caused the life expectancy of men in Russia to drop from 75 to 58. It was a catastrophe, a humanitarian catastrophe. And Putin, being a KGB strategist, utilised that pent-up frustration of Russians against the West in order to build up his horrid empire.

Is your argument that without Nato expansion in Eastern Europe we would not be in this position?

My point is this: there was an agreement between Gorbachev and George Bush Senior that Gorbachev would let Eastern Europe go its own way, on the condition that Nato would not expand eastward. We know that; this is well established. Given that Putin was pushing Russia back towards a re-militarised stance, and Nato and Russia were always going to develop an enmity between them, is it not a good idea to have a neutral zone between the two? Do we really want Russian nuclear weapons and Nato nuclear weapons to be side by side? For me, the neutrality of Eastern Europe is not a second best, it would be first best. It will be good for the people of Eastern Europe, it will be good for Nato, and it will be good for Russia, to minimise tensions to the extent that we can do that.

But in any case, I am perfectly willing to accept an Eastern European progressive who says to me that I’m wrong. What I find intolerable is the lack of tolerance — that I’ve been told, “butt off, you’re a Westplainer in that you even have an opinion about what should be happening in Eastern Europe”. This is not a good foundation for Europeanism.

They do say that when war begins, the truth dies very quickly. But it’s not just truth. It’s a capacity that we have in the West to have a civilised, rational debate amongst ourselves.

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What about the sanctions against Russia — do you support them? 

Well, it’s always the case that when sanctions are slapped on a dictatorial regime they hurt the people, not the dictators. Especially in the case of Putin. Putin has a war chest, which is quite large. And he doesn’t care about the plight of Russian people. But let me be clear on this. I’m not against the sanctions. Watching the atrocities coming out now — the towns, the villages that the Russian army has vacated — watching the devastation on the coastal areas of eastern Ukraine, I can understand why people say, “look, we simply do not want to trade with these people — we’re not going to let them have access to their yachts, and to their money, and all that,” that’s fine by me.

I think that, in the end, we are going to have a lot more suffering — as a result of price increases, especially electricity prices — among the poor in Western Europe. I believe the dollar as the reserve currency is being placed under immense pressure. So I think that the American administration is going to live to regret the cutting off of the Central Bank of Russia from the dollar payment system.

But none of that matters really at this very moment. Because what matters is the war. Freddie, what keeps me up at night is that people are being killed. And what I want us to work for, all of us — and let’s iron out our differences: how can we have an immediate cessation of fire and a withdrawal of Russian troops?

What appalls me about those who purport to support Ukraine and who are attacking my position, is that they seem to be seriously considering the possibility that Ukraine is going to win the war and overthrow Putin. Now that’s completely pie in the sky. Anybody who believes that is jeopardising the lives of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians as we speak.

At best, you’re going to have a stalemate. Now a stalemate is terrible for the people of Ukraine. Because we know what Putin is going to do. He’s going to do what he did in Grozny. He’s going to raze to the ground areas that he needs to abandon. The Ukrainian army has been very heroic, and I applaud them for having resisted. But they cannot win the war. Do we really want this painful, murderous stalemate go on and on and on? Do we really want to invest in regime change in Russia that is instigated by the United States? Whenever the United States has tried to regime change we’ve had complete catastrophe. Look at Afghanistan, look at Iraq, look at Libya. And this is a nuclear power. Do we want to play with this fire, with this nuclear fire?

We should have an immediate ceasefire. President Zelenskyy, to his credit, has now adopted the proposal that I’ve been making from day one: that we should have an agreement between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin — of course, with Zelenskyy, and the European Union participating — that makes a very simple trade, a deal. Russia withdraws from Ukraine, in exchange for an end to the sanctions and a commitment, by the West, that Ukraine is going to be part of the West but not part of Nato.

Does that include being part of the EU?

Putin wants a way out. I think that the United States and Zelenskyy, together, and the EU, must give him a way out. If he can be seen to have won a victory — something that he can present to his own people as a victory (“I have ended Nato’s eastward expansion. I went to war to stop Nato expanding and I succeeded”), I think that we have a moral duty to give him this way out. Now, I can’t guarantee that he will take it. But the West can offer him this way out, to stop the killings.

A few weeks ago, giving an off-ramp to Putin might have proven popular. But it feels like the situation is different now. We’ve had a full-scale withdrawal of Russian troops from around Kyiv, and there seems to be increased confidence that something like a full-scale defeat might actually be in sight. What’s your reaction to that?

That’s madness. There is no way that the Ukrainian army is going to defeat the panoply of the Russian army in Mariupol, in the areas between Crimea, and Donbas. All power to them if they can do it. I don’t believe that Zelenskyy believes it. I don’t believe that anybody actually believes it. Yes, it is wonderful that Putin did not walk into Kyiv unopposed. It’s wonderful that he’s been given a bloody nose. This is the time to sue for peace.

Look, the West did that after the awful civil war in Yugoslavia. You’ll recall Srebrenica. We had atrocities galore across Bosnia. And not just in Bosnia — in Croatia, in Ukraine, in various areas that were devastated by the original civil war within Yugoslavia. And yet, under the auspices of the American President, the West sat down with Milosevic and they created an imperfect peace for Bosnia, which has been holding since then. Was that a mistake? Should we have continued the bloodletting, hoping that one side would completely annihilate the other side? I don’t believe so.

There’s talk of really escalating the amount of military hardware being sent to support the Ukraine war effort. I’m presuming from what you’re saying that you’d be against that?

While the Ukrainian army is resisting, I think we have a moral duty to support them militarily. Not me and you personally, but I’m not going to criticise the West for sending weapons to the Ukrainian resistors. But the whole point of resisting is to come to the point where we sue for peace. We can come to an agreement that leaves everybody slightly dissatisfied, which is the optimal agreement. Where, for instance, Ukraine stays out of Nato, it stops arming itself. Maybe there can be a demilitarised zone on both sides of the Russian-Ukrainian border. Crimea can be discussed in the next 10 years or so.

Such an agreement could also be augmented with an understanding that Ukraine would not be prevented from entering the EU. Well, that agreement goes hand-in-hand with ending the arms race on both sides. Because who knows, maybe Putin tomorrow is going to be supported by the Chinese military? Do we really want that kind of escalation?

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By Edward Luttwak

Something’s happened quite suddenly where to speak like that is now seen as a betrayal.

It’s what happens when war begins: we lose our head. Warmongering becomes cool and mainstream. Now, I have no doubt that there are cooler heads around Europe who are despairing. But they can’t speak out. I can see it in Germany, I can see it within the government of the Federal Republic: there are people who are besides themselves. They are pulling their hair out. Because if they speak out they will be immediately taken to task by the warmongers who are having a field day.

This is why it’s important that we band together to bring a modicum of rationality back to the debate and to focus on the only thing that matters at the moment. It’s not money. It’s not trade. It’s not natural gas. It is human lives in Ukraine. How can we stop people from dying? Because if they continue — the ones who put the theoretical right of Ukrainians to be members of Nato above the life of people in Ukraine, and above the opportunity of Ukraine to prosper as a Western democracy, which is inside the EU and outside of Nato — we’re going to be creating a quagmire that will ensure two things. Firstly, that thousands of people will die who could be saved, and secondly, that Ukraine is going to be a desert.

Do you observe that the people leading this warmongering, as you call it, would mainly describe themselves as liberals?

Yes. I can see that. But it’s not the first time. I remember when the United States were about to invade Iraq, even Left-wingers like Christopher Hitchens, a man that I admired all my life, became liberal imperialists. He was gung-ho about invading Iraq and spreading democracy. If you think of the early 1960s, it was JFK who initially showed a degree of enthusiasm for taking over Vietnam.

I do fear that it’s not just some liberal imperialists or liberal supporters of victory — of war until the final victory is achieved, as if it is possible to imagine invading Moscow. I feel that there’s something else there: a missing ingredient. Follow the money. The United States is a very complex economy. And it’s not homogeneous. Segments of the American economy are suffering as a result of the war, with the increasing price of oil. I believe Silicon Valley is not happy, because they’re being put in a very difficult situation. Even the banking sector, Wall Street, can’t really be enjoying what’s going on.

But if you are selling weapons, you are having a party. You have Olaf Scholtz, the German Chancellor, about to order 100 billion euros worth of American equipment, because the Germans are not making the stuff. If you are providing fracked oil and gas from New Mexico, from Minnesota, from Texas, you are looking at the new deals that are being struck between the European Union and the United States for LNG (liquefied natural gas), and you are rubbing your hands with glee. Because what was a dying industry in the United States now suddenly has been given a huge lease of life. This is not a conspiracy. If you have liberal imperialists, and you’ve got people that are going to make a lot of money out of this liberal imperialism, and you bring these together, you have a very powerful constituency in favour of maintaining the conflicts.

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By Philip Cunliffe

A lot of people will listen to what you’ve just said and think that it is verging on conspiracy: evil Americans in suits sitting around board tables, trying to create wars in order to profit from them. 

There’s no conspiracy; nothing of what I said is conspiracy. It’s the truth that if you’re selling arms, you are making a lot of money. If you’re selling oil and gas that is fracked in the United States, you are making a lot of money. We know that.

It’s not causation though, is it? It’s one thing to observe that, but those people aren’t in charge of making the decisions.

Of course. Because why didn’t they do it ten years ago? They would have had an interest in doing this ten years ago. Nobody forced Putin to invade. It wasn’t Nato’s fault that he invaded, even if Nato created circumstances for him to be powerful, in my view. It was Putin’s criminal choice to invade Ukraine. And that gave rise to military resistance by the Ukrainians, which I applaud. And then on the coat-tails of these developments that have nothing to do with them, people come in with particular axes to grind, political ones, and financial agendas. So the whole thing acquires momentum. This is not a conspiracy theory. That is, I think, a solid rational analysis of what was going on.

How, then, should we treat the very popular and successful president of Ukraine? He has been incredibly effective at generating international attention. Should we support him? Should we be critical of him?

We should be critically supportive. Look, I followed Zelenskyy’s career. It was interesting that he was elected on a platform for making peace with Moscow, and for sidelining the oligarchic and ultra Right-wing elements within Ukraine. We have to note that. It’s also true that he failed in doing this to a very large extent: the oligarchs that he was going to wage war against effectively had him. His reign has not been easy. And the oligarchs managed to maintain their control over the country, some would say, forcing Zelenskyy to succumb.

The neo-Nazi Azov battalion in Mariupol and so on maintain their swastikas. I’m sure that Zelenskyy wanted to get rid of them, but he couldn’t. But none of this matters. Because when a country is invaded, I feel a natural duty to support the people who have been invaded and to support their leader — even if it’s somebody I would not have voted for, had I been one of them.

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But what about this overt campaign by Zelenskyy to encourage more direct Western military intervention?

He’s the leader of a country that is being invaded: it is perfectly natural for him to be calling upon the rest of the world to come to their assistance. I’m sure he would have loved it if Nato waltzed in, even though I’m sure he understands that it would bring us to the precipice of a nuclear catastrophe. It is his job to ask for us to step in.

But to his credit, he’s done something else as well. He’s embraced the neutrality solution. And he is participating in discussions with Russians, and negotiations. Let’s face it, the European Union is a figment of our imagination. We’re so fragmented, we are a non-player, really. It’s only the United States that can provide Zelenskyy with the backing he needs in his negotiations with Putin.

What people object to about that is that it has the whiff of people making decisions for smaller countries over their heads. What the people of Ukraine want is neither here nor there.

My own country would not exist if we didn’t have such an arrangement back in the late 1820s. We were under the Ottomans for 400 or 500 years. We had our own revolution, our own resistance against the Ottoman armies. In the end, how did Greece come about? It came about because the great powers — the English, the French, and the Russians — sat down with the Ottomans. And they said: “Greece becomes an independent state, it’s a kind of buffer zone between the Ottoman Empire and the West”. And we were given a chance to exist.

What is your message, then, to people who object to the invasion of Ukraine but also feel deeply uneasy about the West’s involvement? How should they react when they are called Putin supporters?

Be kind. I don’t think you should antagonise anybody these days, because there is so much antagonism already. Maintain your cool, support the Ukrainian resistance against Putin’s armies. Do not succumb to the silence of militarism and perpetual war. And always keep your eye on the trophy, which is immediate peace, withdrawal of Russian troops — and a neutral, democratic Ukraine that we all help get back up on its feet.

The tight-lipped statement didn’t mention Vladimir Putin’s war in Ukraine. But that’s hardly surprising. For much of Europe, the outcome of the war is existential: all eyes are currently on China to see if it will back Putin. Just days before Russia’s invasion, Xi Jinping and Putin announced that the friendship between their two nations had “no limits” and “no forbidden areas of cooperation”. Yet in the weeks since, Xi has been distracted: he has far more pressing issues to worry about than war in far-off Ukraine.

While bombs rain down on Mariupol, Covid remains the main story in China. Much of the rest of world has opened up, including India, but China and Japan remain major outliers. This week, the mega-city of Shanghai, with a population nearly half that of the UK, is being locked down; first, its futuristic eastern zone of skyscrapers and towers, and next week, its western half defined by its British-style art deco waterfront, the Bund.

Stories of commuters emptying shelves in supermarkets fill the headlines, just as in Britain in spring 2020. Hong Kong’s politics is no longer dominated by the struggle for democracy. Instead, public anger, still more freely expressed than in the mainland, has attacked Chief Executive Carrie Lam for a policy that has seen the city isolated from the world and the Chinese mainland for weeks, but still ravaged by growing deaths, particularly among the unvaccinated and elderly.

The economic and social turmoil that Covid has brought to China has shaped its reaction to Ukraine. It is certainly true that China will seek to strengthen its geopolitical position where it can — as indeed does every other major power. However, right now, any decisions on Ukraine will almost certainly be filtered through a domestic lens first and foremost. What will any decision do to the economy? How will it affect the march toward a third term in office for Xi, a decision unprecedented in the modern era but likely to be achieved this autumn at the Party Congress? These are hard questions to answer: no wonder that Xinhua readout was so short.

China’s relationship with Ukraine is part of the equation. Since 2019, China has been Ukraine’s largest single trading partner. And Ukraine is part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, along with Russia. For years, Ukraine was proof that European powers at odds with the EU could find friends in Beijing; Serbia being another example.

China also imports grain from Ukraine, not in a way that makes it dependent on that supply in the way that some Middle Eastern countries are, but usefully nonetheless. And it has invested heavily in projects in Ukraine such as a metro rail system and wind energy farms, which it would presumably want to keep going in the event of a peace deal. A settlement that allows China to restore Ukraine to its existing place in its economic matrix would be welcome; whether Putin will permit that is another matter.

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There are also small, but significant opportunities for China to burnish its global image in its handling of the Ukraine crisis. It has plenty of peacekeeping experience via the UN, and actually has more peacekeeping troops trained than any other permanent member of the UN security council. In theory, then, its troops could be part of a UN force that keeps order, assuming that Russian soldiers would be unacceptable to the Ukrainians.

However, this remains unlikely, even if the UN does play a central role in any potential settlement. Past experience shows that China is uncomfortable with the political aspects of peacekeeping — particularly post-civil conflict resolution in sub-Saharan Africa — as it involved bringing civil society and opposition groups into authorised dialogue with government, something which China does not do at home.

Overall, China is much more comfortable talking about physical and economic reconstruction, as it did when it offered to build roads for the Taliban regime last year. But cash alone is not going to settle the Ukraine situation. As its relative distance from the current talks in Istanbul have shown, China is not yet ready to step up as a prominent mediator with a democratic state, just as Western actors have sometimes struggled in the past to deal with hybrid or semi-authoritarian states.

There is another area where China may use Ukraine for political rethinking: on Taiwan. It is far too simple to read Taiwan as a direct analogy to Ukraine, and Beijing does not do so. It has been thinking about the Taiwan issue for years, and regards it as a matter of internal politics, not an external breach of sovereignty. However, one revelation from the past month should surely have set alarm bells ringing: the massive miscalculation by Russia’s political and military elites about the nationalist sentiment and will for resistance of the Ukrainian people.

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The case of Russia suggests that a propaganda echo chamber does not produce good intelligence; if you only listen to your own propaganda, you can’t be surprised when it turns out to be wrong. There are thoughtful voices in the Chinese foreign policy world, muted but audible, that have suggested that China should take its own rhetoric about the decadence and weakness of the West with a pinch of the delicious weijing that makes much Chinese food so sharp.

The Chinese Communist Party has reportedly introduced a programme in selected universities and schools to educate children on the correct approach to understanding the “tragedy” of the Ukraine situation. The overall message is that the crisis is the fault of the West, and Chinese sympathy should take Russia’s feelings into account. Yet the programme still pulls its punches, and it’s still a long way from all-out support for Moscow.

According to the South China Morning Post, one university pledged to provide “positive guidance to ignite their learning passions as the Russia-Ukraine situation remains a hot topic for students,” while another addressed “the fundamental causes to Ukraine’s national tragedy.” But a clear direction on who is right and who is wrong is singularly lacking.

Like the rest of the world, China is going through a period of maximal uncertainty. Just as in recent years the British have adopted the term “permacrisis” to describe the endless rolling news cycle, the Chinese now speak of the world “going through major changes not seen for a century” (“bainian weiyou zhi da bianju”). China may have a five-year plan for its economy, but right now, regarding Ukraine, it appears that Beijing is as uncertain as the rest of us as to what the next five minutes might bring.

The West was still panicking over Islamist extremism but far-Right violence was on the rise, and Ukraine’s Azov Battalion had become legendary in white supremacist circles. It had a reputation as the only well-armed and well-organised white nationalist group training foreign fighters as it battled Russian incursions into Ukraine. Toby was desperate to join them.

He had little interest, however, in the battle against Russian imperialism. And although he embodied the stereotypes of a far-Right thug, he had little interest in neo-Nazi ideology either. He slept under a swastika flag, wore T-shirts emblazoned with Nazi slogans, and would happily do Heil Hitler salutes for the camera while knocking back bottles of strong cider. But what mattered to him was having a cause, a purpose, and sense of meaning in his life — and that could have come from anywhere.

“If it had been radical Muslims who got to me before the far-Right, I probably would have joined ISIS,” he told me, after leaving the movement. “If it had have been radical leftists, I would have been a leftie.”

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By Aris Roussinos

Throughout the 2010s, as many parts of the world experienced a surge in extremism, pre-conceptions flourished about what kind of person became what kind of extremist. Efforts to combat radicalisation, therefore, often focused on countering specific ideologies, rather than looking at the individual needs and broader social factors that drew people to fringe beliefs.

Measures to combat extremism in the UK and the US for a long time disproportionately targeted Muslim communities, for example. Meanwhile, public awareness campaigns supposedly tailored to people vulnerable to far-Right and conspiratorial disinformation ended up reinforcing narratives of a shady global cabal trying to brainwash people.

But in the years spent researching my book on extremism, for which I interviewed dozens of people who found themselves drawn to extreme beliefs, what was striking was how rarely people fit the narrow mould of who or what we might expect an extremist to be. A child of Muslim-American refugees who fled ethic nationalism in Bosnia is drawn to white supremacy. A Hindu nationalist becomes an Islamist extremist. A Norwegian aristocrat finds herself sucked into a Marxist cult. Toby has an Iranian grandfather, yet railed against non-white immigration.

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Today, the Russian invasion of Ukraine is raising concerns about deeper radicalisation, in part because people like Toby are now being actively encouraged to head to the war zone. But the conflict has also exposed the shallowness and fluidity of extreme belief. If we examine activity in far-Right channels today, we see neo-Nazi, white supremacist, and conspiracy groups mobilising both for the Russian President and recruiting for Ukrainian militia.

This reveals the tangle of extremist contradictions that has been manipulated — and even manufactured — by the Kremlin over the past decade. As the EU bickered over the refugee crisis in 2015 and 2016, Putin saw his chance. Russia fuelled disinformation about migrants, including the infamous “Lisa case”, in which a German-Russian woman falsely accused a Muslim migrant of rape; the story was then amplified by Russian state media and the German far-Right. Many of Europe’s far-Right parties have received Russian funding, while the US intelligence community believes Russia provided indirect support to openly neo-Fascist groups too.

But now Putin justifies his brutal invasion of Ukraine by claiming to be countering extremism himself; he has promised the “de-Nazification” of Ukraine.

The far-Right’s response has not been coordinated. Some groups are spreading Russian disinformation; others are lionising Putin as a hero of the far-Right, with white nationalists fawning over his culturally conservative ideology. But other far-Right groups in Europe are encouraging their supporters to sign up to fight or fundraise for Ukrainian militia with white supremacist links, both because of ideological animosity towards Russia’s communist past and — more opportunistically — to gain direct military experience.

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The far-Right ecosystem has never been a coherent space, encompassing everything from National Socialists to incels. But Tim Squirrell, who monitors far-Right activity for the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, believes the Ukraine War has the potential to split the far-Right more than any other issue. While he has observed many conspiratorial groups latching onto the false claims of US-funded bio-labs in Ukraine, there is still what he calls a “Balkanisation” of the space.

That fluidity does not necessarily harm the movement. QAnon showed that extreme beliefs do not have to be logical, and collective brainstorming is part of the draw for people seeking feelings of power and inclusion. “People can make all sorts of ludicrous, outlandish claims, and they won’t necessarily suffer for it, because the idea is that you are building a shared worldview,” Squirrell explains.

The far-Right’s contradictions over Ukraine demonstrate that extreme recruitment is not about ideology, but opportunism; it exploits individual human experience, rather than beliefs. While this shallowness may not undermine the movement, it can help us better understand why people are attracted by these groups, if it is not by the ideology itself.

“You need to understand what need a conspiracy, ideology, or a world view is filling for someone,” Squirrell says. “Once you identify that, then you can start to target it and try to understand what you might be able to do to get them out of it.”

It is more important than ever that we recognise this, given that the Covid-19 pandemic had already created the conditions for a surge in fringe beliefs. All the feelings that the pandemic sparked in the population — powerlessness, trauma, loneliness, alienation, fear, uncertainty, distrust — allow extremism to thrive. Indeed, Covid-19, like this war, upended some of our assumptions about who or what an extremist is, as we saw how people can cast around in a confused world and seek solace in conspiratorial narratives. The pandemic saw a convergence of the far-Right and far-Left around anti-vax and anti-lockdown movements, creating a confusion of paranoia and division.

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By Terry Eagleton

Powerlessness is one of the strongest drivers of extremism — and powerless is how many now feel, watching the conflict between Ukraine and Russia from afar. The more uncertainty and fear there is in the world, the more we cling to those things that promise to bring meaning and control. Sanctions against Russia are also likely to lead to greater economic strain, and the political fringes are adept at exploiting financial hardship, as we saw during the eurozone crisis. And while most people volunteering to fight in Ukraine are not neo-Nazis, large numbers of people traveling to a foreign war zone carries inevitable radicalisation risks.

Toby never made it to Ukraine. Australian intelligence intercepted his communications, confiscated his passport, and enrolled him in a deradicalisation scheme. In the end, it wasn’t government intervention that drew him back from the brink, but encounters with ordinary people who simply engaged with him and showed him that he could live a fulfilling life outside of the far-Right. He has since left the neo-Nazi movement, and has spent the last few years reflecting on the underlying insecurities that drew him to the fringes of society.

Toby’s story illustrates the need for society to focus on the genuine drivers of extremism. The most successful counter-radicalisation programmes do not focus on changing people’s minds and refuting ideologies, but working on their underlying problems. After all, extremist recruiters know all too well the complex web of hopes, grievances, fears, insecurities and disappointments that can make people susceptible. Unless we recognise them too, the Ukraine War will be yet another global tragedy ripe for their exploitation.

It’s a humiliating state of affairs because Russian power has always been built on the foundation of demography. Back in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville foresaw that Russia would become a world power, because “Russia is of all the nations of the Old World the one whose population is increasing most rapidly”. The only other country with its population potential was the United States. De Tocqueville prophesised that, “Each one of them seems called by a secret design of Providence to hold in its hands one day the destinies of half the world.” A century later, they were the world’s two uncontested superpowers.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Russia’s population was 136 million, and was still booming, just as those of other European powers started to slow. Germany’s population was 56 million, excluding its colonies, and the threat of ever-larger cohorts of Russian recruits into the Tsar’s ranks haunted Germany’s leadership; historian and public intellectual Friedrich Meinecke fretted over the “almost inexhaustible fertility” of the Slavs while Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg complained that “Russia grows and grows and lies on us like an ever-heavier nightmare”. This pressure was probably the decisive factor in Germany’s 1914 leap in the dark. German Secretary of State Gottlieb von Jagow wrote to the German ambassador in London as the storm was gathering that “in a few years, Russia will be ready … Then she will crush us on land by weight of numbers.”

In the First World War, it turned out, numbers were not enough to compensate for Russian industrial and organisational inferiority. But by the Second World War, Russia’s numeric superiority had exploded. Despite the horrors of Civil War and Bolshevism, the nation’s population grew at about three times the speed of Germany’s in the opening decades of the century. The army had an endless supply of soldiers, the military infrastructure an endless supply of workers, giving the country a decisive edge in the Forties. Vast spaces and appalling weather helped, but ultimately it was the endlessness of Russian manpower which ground down the Wehrmacht in what was perhaps the most epic military struggle of all time. Field Marshall Erich von Manstein complained as he faced Russia’s armies: “We confronted a hydra: for every head cut off, two new ones appeared to grow.”

But if demographic prowess buttressed Russian power then, population decline has undermined it in the years since. Most nations have developed out of the high birth and death rates seen throughout most of human history: as mortality and then fertility falls, first the population expands, then it flattens; eventually, it may contract. But in Russia this process has taken place with a vengeance.

At the time of its dissolution, the Soviet Union was the home of 290 million people, 50 million more than the USA. Today, the Russian Federation has less than half that number — and less than half of the USA’s current total. In large part, this is the result of the loss of non-Russian republics, including Ukraine (which at the outbreak of the current conflict had a population of 43 million). But in the late Soviet and early post-Soviet period, the country also collapsed into an orgy of suicide and alcoholism, particularly affecting the country’s men.

One journalist in Russia at the time wrote about how “the deaths kept piling up. People … were falling or perhaps jumping, off trains and out of windows; asphyxiating in country houses with faulty wood stoves or in apartment with jammed front door locks … drowning as a result of driving drunk into a lake … poisoning themselves with too much alcohol … dropping dead at absurdly early ages from heart attacks and strokes”. By the early years of this century, life expectancy for Russian men was on par with countries such as Madagascar and Sudan.

Meanwhile, Russian women were having fewer and fewer children. In the later decades of the Soviet Union, the average woman in the Slavic heartland had an estimated six or seven abortions in the course of her life. The populations in the Caucasus and Central Asia were booming, though, undermining Russians as the USSR’s majority ethnicity.

This proved especially corrosive in the military. Year after year, the share of recruits from the peripheral republics went up, while the share from Russia went down; in the late Eighties, three-quarters of recruits from Central Asia could not speak Russian. (The problems of having a polyglot military had been rehearsed earlier in the century by the Austro-Hungarian Empire — which had, of course, fallen apart.)

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It’s also worth recognising that the Russian men who fell fighting the Germans in the Forties were from families of six or seven siblings; those who fell fighting the Afghans in the Eighties were from families of two or three. Those falling now, fighting in Ukraine, are likely to be only-children or one of two siblings. The preparedness of a society to sustain military losses falls as family size falls; the only conflicts in today’s world that go on and on for years — from Libya to Syria to Yemen to Congo — are in places where the men who die have many brothers.

Once the Soviet Union was abolished, Russia maintained its population size only by inward migration. Ethnic Russians returned from the now-independent periphery to the Soviet heartland. Increasingly, people of other ethnicities followed them to the North-West, where prospects were better. At least a million and a half Muscovites are ethnically non-Russian, some from places such as Azerbaijan and Uzbekistan, others from Muslim regions of Russia like Tatarstan. In 2013, the mayor of Moscow swore that there would be no more mosques built in the city, hoping to discourage more Islamic migration.

Putin has never publicly expressed concern about the ethnic mix of contemporary Russia, but this demographic nightmare haunts him, and informs his worldview. In 2006, he launched policies to encourage larger families. And last year he lamented: “We have a little more than 81 million people of able-bodied age. We are obliged to increase the number by 2024 and 2030. This is one of the factors for economic growth. Not to mention the geopolitical component of this major issue.” At around 1.5 children per woman, Russia is still dwindling. In the next decade, Russia’s population is forecast to decline by around 300,000 a year, though some suggest the decline will be much faster — perhaps 12 million in the next 15 years.

This steady depopulation is more than a nuisance; it is a strategic headache. Russia’s immense size was supported by the preparedness of its people to settle in some of the most inhospitable habitats in the world. As it reduces, it retreats back towards the big cities of the west and centre, and will leave vast regions uninhabited. “In Siberia it becomes harder and harder to find people to maintain big infrastructure. Things are starting to collapse. And that is making the place less and less liveable which reinforces the problem,” one expert told me. Thousands of villages have been abandoned, particularly in remote areas.

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What is Putin to do? “Ensuring sustainable natural population growth” was at the top of the executive order of National Goals and Strategic Objectives of the Russian Federation signed by the President in 2018. Payments were given to those with two or more children, who are eligible for increasingly generous welfare benefits. Now, payments are given to those with one child. But the best evidence so far suggests that, after a modest bounce-back, fertility is in decline again. At this stage it is not clear that these policies have had any material impact at all.

Of course, one way of growing the population is to annex neighbouring countries and try to persuade its people and the world that they are really Russians. After all, definitions of ethnicity and national identity can be easily manipulated. Turkey, for instance, has tried to redefine Kurds as “mountain Turks”. There were even suggestions in the 18th century that Scots be considered “North Britons”.

But if an incorporation of Ukrainian identity into a wider Russian one was Putin’s plan, it has backfired. The invasion has undoubtedly solidified a sense among Ukrainians that their identity is distinct and that they are in no way Russian. Vitaly Chernetsky, an expert in Slavic languages, commented that, “this crisis galvanized, consolidated, accelerated the development of this new civic identity, where folks who never in their lives spoke Ukrainian all of a sudden made a conscious choice to make an effort to start speaking Ukrainian in public”.

Meanwhile, the war could undermine Putin’s plans to boost the birth rate in Russia’s heartlands. With sanctions starting to bite, the funds for generous payments to parents will simply not be available. On the contrary, the economic hardship which the Russian population must now endure is likely to further depress childbearing.

And to compound the problem, many Russians will look to emigrate. It was said in Soviet days that dissidents were trying to change the unleavable, refuseniks to leave the unchangeable. Putin’s Russia seems unchangeable but, for now, it remains leavable. It is estimated that 200,000 people left the country in the first ten days of the conflict alone; millions more are likely to follow, whatever the outcome — partly to reject the regime, partly to escape the impending, sanctions-driven economic crisis which the country faces.

Meanwhile Russia is losing thousands of young men in the war in Ukraine. Many in their early twenties, they are unlikely to have had any children, which doesn’t bode well for Russia. Already ageing and shrinking, the nation simply cannot sustain the kind of campaign it has fought in the past. Its days of vastly superior manpower are over. A long, grinding war followed by a bloody occupation would cripple it.

Others had a different explanation. Voltaire satirised the Christian idea that the world was being ultimately organised by some benevolent Deity. In seeking to defend God in the face of human suffering, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz had claimed that this was “the best of all possible worlds”. In other words, of all the possible worlds that God could create, this one, with all its pain and suffering, was the best one available. No one really bought this argument. Voltaire took Leibniz’s phrase and turned it into a sarcastic attack on the naively religious. The Lisbon earthquake is often pointed to as the moment the European intelligentsia lost its faith in God. Atheism entered the Enlightenment during the period of its conception. Reason and God were no longer compatible.

But suffering and pain are still with us. Mariupol is being starved and bludgeoned into submission as if it were some medieval siege. The innocent are blown up in their beds, maternity hospitals are targeted with high-tech missiles. And dark talk of nuclear war has returned, with nightmares of a Third World War. Has the age of reason really served us any better than the age of faith?

Back when I used to teach Philosophy of Religion in Oxford, I spent many hours sitting in tutorials with undergraduates discussing the “problem of evil”. If God is all powerful and perfectly good, then why is there great suffering in the world? One can, of course, discuss the difference between natural evil and that caused by human beings. But whatever the cause, great suffering is often cast as the slam dunk of atheism. Now that God is supposed to be dead, and suffering remains, I wonder if humanism could be said to have an evil problem too? It’s not quite the same problem, but it is adjacent: if human beings are good and increasingly powerful, how come there is so much suffering in the world?

Scrolling through humanist websites on Ukraine, one of the interesting things is that you can find a kind of defence of humanity in the face of human evil that is not unlike the defence that Christians sometimes use to defend the existence of God in the face of human evil. Consider this, on Ukraine, from the explicitly “humanist” Gold Foundation website:

“Still, through the scenes of rubble and destruction, we see humanity. Humanity in the healthcare heroes dodging artillery as they work tirelessly on the frontlines of the conflict. Humanity in those rising to defend their homes, their country, and democracy at large. Humanity in the charitable donations and mobilization here in the United States and around the globe.”

Compare it to Rowan Williams answering John Humphrys asking “Where was God?” the morning after the Beslan Massacre in 2004.

“The short answer is that God is where God always is, and that is with those who are trying to comfort and bring light in any situation. … I would guess that there must have been older children putting their arms around younger children, you might see God there.”

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German pacifism is dead

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These are remarkable similar responses, exonerating God or humanity by pointing towards what is best in the response of these respective actors. But this much is obviously true: evil and suffering have outlived the loss of faith. Once we had God to blame. But now that God has gone (… other explanations are available …) we have no one left to blame but ourselves. Not for earthquakes, but certainly for the horror of war. Humanists now own the problem of evil. So why don’t humanists more often experience some sort of loss of faith in humanity? Where is their existential crisis? I may be wrong, but it seems to me like it’s a dog that doesn’t often bark.

Yes, humanists disagree about the extent to which they think of human beings as intrinsically good. Though, in truth, they do dither on this. Nonetheless, they place human beings at the centre of their belief system. And indeed, why would you call your belief system after human beings if you didn’t think human beings are in some ways fundamentally good? For instance, I’m not sure that you could believe in some kind of secular equivalent to original sin and still call yourself a humanist, though I would be fascinated to be contradicted on this.

My own view is that the Enlightenment too often used human suffering as line in a handy argument against an all-powerful, benevolent Deity, but only feigned to be interested in suffering itself. Suffering was deployed as a part of a syllogism against God. But it felt existentially inert, absent of the kind of crisis that suffering created for faith. Humanist suffering always seems a bit too much like suffering at a philosophical distance. Indeed, the kind of crisis of faith that suffering causes for Christianity seems to be just the sort of perfectly appropriate response that suffering should create in all of us.

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Sanctioning Russia could topple the West

By Thomas Fazi

With Easter round the corner, it’s worth saying that for Christianity, the proper response to human suffering and evil — and by proper, I mean the response that is internal to Christian theology — is the cross. This is not the sort of answer that was admissible in Philosophy of Religion tutorials, because it presumes faith rather than holding it up for critical scrutiny. But when Christians talk of suffering, they are not so interested in trying to reconcile the all-powerful, good God plus suffering “problem” — because people being murdered by Russian bombs isn’t first and foremost an intellectual “problem”. It is a crisis, a collapse of faith, a desolation. The cross is where all of that is carried, and — for Christians – overcome. Humanists will scoff that this doesn’t answer the question, and they are right. For Christians, the “problem of evil” is a very different kind of question. To call it a problem is too cold, too detached.

Humanists have responded to the crisis in Ukraine with generosity, as many have. Of course, I applaud them for this. But what I can’t quite figure out, is whether humanists ever experience what might be called a crisis of faith? Do they ever wonder whether human beings are ghastly creatures and that it makes no sense to follow a philosophy named in their honour? And if they don’t, then it seems to me that humanism is all the poorer for it. What we see on our TV screens should quite properly rock us to the core. It should make us question our deepest commitments, there should be a dark night of the soul.

The British Humanist Association offers a downloadable primer on humanism and suffering. They conclude: “For humanists then, the answer to the question why bad things happen is simply, because they do: that is just the way the world is.” In other words, shit happens. What I find most objectionable about all this is not the atheistic cosmology so much as the kind of detached emotional shrug that accompanies it. A world view that has become intellectually insulated from a crisis of faith is not one that has properly exposed itself to the horrors of the world.

War, the subject of Hemingway’s two most famous books, is perhaps the quintessential subject of such manly writing. From the Mahabharata to the Iliad, it’s the central theme in the ancient world’s most immortal works. But something has happened to war-lit: first, the industrialisation of fighting, which Hemingway himself lived through and documented; then, the development of war technologies so terrible that battle itself came to seem unthinkable.

The world that has emerged since is in many ways (or at least in many places) a safer and more peaceful one. But what has become of those men who actually like danger, and for whom warfare has always been a proving-ground?

Some are still running into danger. There was a surreal echo of Hemingway’s love of danger in a recent wave of young Americans joining a conflict overseas, and then (albeit with less positive consequences) documenting it.

Hemingway was among the thousands who travelled to Spain between 1936 and 1938, to support the Republican side against Franco in the Spanish Civil War. In February, Ukrainian president Zelenskyy issued a formal call to foreigners to join an “international brigade” fighting for the Ukrainian side against Putin’s invasion. At least according to Ukrainian reports, an estimated 20,000 have signed up to help — and many view what they’re doing as fightback against “a 21st-century version of fascism”.

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You would think the Weird Online Right, the contemporary subculture most concerned with masculinity would approve of this risk-taking. A recurring theme in such spaces is the perceived subjection of manliness to the shrunken, heroism-free horizons of modern life and the culture of “bugmen” it has produced. Perhaps the most influential sacred text of this subculture is Bronze Age Mindset, an unclassifiable “exhortation” written in 2018 and now immensely influential among disaffected young men.

Written by the pseudonymous Bronze Age Pervert, it blames modern comforts and the undue influence of women for the stifling and emasculating nature of modern life: “In fact everything that you hate about modern life and that makes it into an Iron Prison … represents a return of the endless sallow night of matriarchy.” BAP extols the virtues of pre-Christian heroes of antiquity, and predicts that “Leviathan will not be able to hold itself together” whereupon “the age of high piracy will return”, enabling the men capable of it to develop “their ability to wage war”.

But instead of lauding their bravery, the Very Online Right tends to dismiss Zelenskyy’s resistance as a “fight to the death for globalist oligarchs like Soros and Kolomoisky” and mock any evidence of fear, regret or incompetence displayed by the young foreigners flocking to help. This so-called “Reddit Battalion” has been widely mocked for having reportedly compromised operational security on the battlefield by continuing to post from their phones while in a warzone: their compulsion to document their experience emitting signals allowing their location to be pinpointed and shelled.

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What’s going on here? One response might be that simply proving oneself as a man isn’t the only consideration in battle, and if you are there in service of a despised political agenda, you’re still not one of the good guys. But there’s something deeper at work, too: an ambivalence about the idea of masculinity and writing as such that runs through the conflicted contemporary debates about men, warfare, heroism and propaganda that now orbit the conflict in Ukraine.

For while Hemingway is long since a byword for “masculine” writing, there’s also a tragic sense in which his work traces the Twentieth-century demise of an older, more warlike form of masculinity, at the hands not of the “endless sallow night of matriarchy” but of technology itself.

War literature prior to the Twentieth century is often unabashedly heroic, even as it documents horrors. Tennyson’s 1855 Charge of the Light Brigade describes an 1854 battlefield in the Crimea in terms both terrible and stirring, then asks:

When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.

“When you go to war as a boy you have a great illusion of immortality,” Hemingway wrote in 1942, of his experiences as an ambulance driver in World War I when he was just 19. “Then, when you are badly wounded the first time, you lose that illusion.” The war that deprived Hemingway of his illusions about immortality also stripped many of confidence in military glory full stop.

Wilfred Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est, published 1921, draws a contrast between the heroic motto about dying for one’s country, and the reality of dying of poison gas in the trenches. In 1935, Hemingway expressed the same sentiment in an Esquire essay, where he stated that “in modern war, there is nothing sweet nor fitting in your dying. You will die like a dog for no good reason”.

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Even so, to Hemingway the Spanish Civil War was a clear-cut moral issue: a battle between good and evil, man and machine, via the horrifying industrial technologies of Twentieth-century total war. And if, as some historians argue, this conflict was in fact the true start of the Second World War, what started as a battle between man and machine ended with the machine’s victory, in the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

A whole generation, slightly older than I am, grew up in the shadow of Mutually Assured Destruction: the fear that either (or both) sides in the Cold War might at any moment launch unstoppable nuclear-powered death through the air, obliterating millions in seconds.

Over the same period, conflict between nuclear powers avoided direct confrontation. Armies have shrunk, nationalism has been widely deprecated, and the world (unless you’re unlucky enough to live in a theatre of one of America’s or Russia’s proxy wars) is generally more peaceful than in Hemingway’s youth.

And while that has many upsides, it has also, paradoxically, created disaffected young men. For when national identity is infra dig, and open warfare is discouraged lest it set off nuclear Armageddon, what’s left for young men who thirst for danger and intensity?

Some find it anyway; some, too, also write about it, including my UnHerd colleague Aris Roussinos. As he said in 2014 of his experiences in Syria: “The hidden awful truth about war is how much fun it is.” But for those in the developed West, this is the exception rather than the rule. Most men remain in the “Iron Prison”. Many chafe at it, and seek to reclaim some form of masculinity, but few seem very certain as to how this might be done in practice.

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Lessons from a war zone

By Aris Roussinos

Some, too, write about the stultifying nature of the world in which they remain. Two realist writers emerging from the disaffected online Right are the short story writers “Delicious Tacos” and “Bad Billy Pratt”, both of whom document the nihilistic landscape of contemporary sex relations in an aggressively unsentimental style. And it’s hardly surprising that writers committed to (as Pratt put it to me) “the unfiltered truth” should focus on the sexual anomie of self-absorbed protagonists.

After all, modern life has become — in BAP’s words — “an economic zone arranged much like a work camp”, a regimented place “of incredible ugliness” and “hateful to the raising of boys”. It’s easy to see how, as Pratt himself might conclude, “the only fiction worth writing is incel fiction”. What, in that context, is left but the self, and the sexual warzone?

And with heroism, action or drama in short supply in everyday life, those hungry for intensity must resort to the world of computer gaming — or fantasy writers such as Mike Ma, described as “Chaotic 21st century pastiche of Hemingway, Kierkegaard, Kaczynski, and the guy in your econ class who wears combat boots”; or else the neo-reactionary sci-fi writer “Zero HP Lovecraft”, a “horrorist” whose self-published short story collection sold out in less than 24 hours.

Hemingway began his life in the shadow of Tennyson’s Light Brigade, and finished it in the shadow of Hiroshima. Over the same period, the raw, elemental struggles between man and man, or man and nature, so characteristic of Hemingway’s work, grew more attenuated. His literary career was both as a “masculine” writer, but also as an elegy for a world where the conventionally masculine virtues of courage, risk-taking, stoicism and heroism were easily celebrated and widely accepted as culturally essential.

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The importance of Bronze Age Pervert

By Murtaza Hussain

Since his time, the world has retreated steadily from conflict, toward mechanised and then mediated life; a process culminating in the radical safetyism and dematerialised common life of Covid lockdowns, and the online-first social life the pandemic ushered in. And now that we have virtualised social life to the point where any physical violence is foreclosed, even most arguments about masculinity now inevitably take place in the feminine key.

Young men, already restive, are growing mutinous under this regime. The lurid and angry literature emerging captures these men’s ambivalence: sickened by, but also usually still implicated in, the banality and perceived effeminacy of a modern world denuded of both danger and opportunity. We can only speculate on what may happen if (or when) such men leave behind the neutered disaffection off the internet, and start searching en masse for danger and heroism beyond the screen.

Some people are seeing this war as further evidence of the demise of the liberal world order; you seem to see in it an opportunity?

Vladimir Putin is at the centre of a global anti-liberal campaign waged by authoritarian great powers like Russia and China, but also by a number of populists that have arisen in democratic countries, like Viktor Orbán in Hungary or our Donald Trump. Putin said very explicitly that he thought liberalism was an obsolete doctrine. And a lot of conservatives in the United States have actually (they’re backing away from it now) said they like Putin; they like the idea of a strongman that could cut through all the liberal nonsense they saw going on in their societies. With this invasion of another democratic country, Putin has created a certain amount of moral clarity. The biggest advantage of a liberal state is the fact that it’s not authoritarian. It’s not a dictatorship; it doesn’t kill people; it doesn’t invade neighbours. Putin’s demonstrated what the alternative to liberalism is.

So you see in this war the possibility of “a new birth of freedom”. What do you mean by that?

Well, I think that our liberal democracies have gotten very complacent over the last 30 years. After the fall of the former Soviet Union, we had this extended period of peace and prosperity. And I think that especially younger people who grew up in that world, where they didn’t experience either the violent conflict of the twentieth century, or the dictatorship of a communist regime, began to take liberal democracy for granted. They assumed that this was simply the way the world was, and nobody could threaten that. And as a result, they weren’t willing to actively defend democracy where it was under threat. And I think that’s one of the reasons that Putin thought that he could get away with this invasion: because he thought that the United States is internally very divided, that Europe really doesn’t believe in much of anything anymore. One of the nice things that has happened is the unity that’s been expressed within the Nato alliance, especially in Germany, where they basically revised 40 years of Ostpolitik.

But the reality is that it’s a nationalist battle, isn’t it? 

I don’t think you can be in favour of liberal democracy unless it’s embedded in a nation. I don’t think there’s an abstraction called “liberal democracy” that people fight on behalf of; they fight for liberal institutions in their country, and they fight as a result of national pride, and because they like the institutions. I remember distinctly — I’ve been to Ukraine many times since 2013 — walking around Maidan Square: you feel like you’re in a free society because people can come and go as they wish, they can criticise the government, they can vote for opposition parties. There was a freedom that you could experience in Ukraine prior to this invasion that you couldn’t experience in Russia. That’s really what made Ukrainian nationhood different from Russian nationhood: Russians had to live with this centralised dictatorship and Ukrainians could live with a very similar culture, but in a free society.

Is there an outcome where, while the West becomes more assertive, it continues on the road of becoming essentially less liberal — because it’s more effective to assert your competitive advantage in a more Chinese or East Asian-style society?

No, I think that the real alternative is to correct some of — what I would regard as — the excesses of liberalism that have driven some of the opposition to liberalism itself, and I think that exists both on the Right and the Left. It has nothing to do with accommodating a more Chinese type of regime. But really the important choices are within what we’ve understood to be the liberal tradition, and I think that’s true on both the Right and the Left. On the Right, you had a kind of economic liberalism that evolved into what’s now called neoliberalism, which was a kind of worship of the market and a denigration of the state, which led to a kind of globalisation that put economic efficiency above all other social goods and led to a big increase in inequality. Globally, it led to a deterioration of a lot of public services; everything was just seen to be an expression of private interest. That needs to be walked back. On the Right, you had a vast expansion of the idea of personal autonomy. One of the good things about a liberal society is that it protects personal autonomy, but our autonomy is not unlimited. We are creatures that want community: we want to share values with other people. When you have a liberalism that is like an acid that destroys any prior sense of community: that’s something people don’t really like. When it undermines a sense of nation, and the ability to feel patriotic: that’s a problem liberal societies have had.

One example of this is the debate around free speech, which you observe has become more problematic in the past few years. Do you now see that being able to be reversed?

Some of the biggest threats to free speech are not actually those that are being done by governments, particularly governments in the democratic world. The real problem is a private one. Big internet platforms like Google and Facebook have been amplifying material that is toxic — often conspiracy theories — because what they’re primarily interested in is not the broader democratic community. They care about their bottom lines. A big concentration of private power has contributed to the toxicity of a lot of the discourse in modern democracies. And it leads to these real conundra, because there’s then a call for the government to regulate their activity. So in Germany, they have the NetzdG law that criminalises publishing false or fake news. And that’s where you get into real danger, because it’s not clear that the government is the right regulator of that kind of activity. But it’s not clear either that these large platforms should simply be allowed to make these determinations on their own. Right now, for people on the Left, the leaders of Google and Facebook are sympathetic to their agenda. But imagine if a Rupert Murdoch takes over Facebook, or some equivalent character on the Right, and has that kind of power to amplify certain messages and suppress others.

One of the deeper themes in your work that stretches right back to the End of History — you talk about the Greek word thymos in that book — is that there’s something about polite, liberal democracy in its perfected sense that doesn’t answer some deep questions in the human soul. Do you now think we are predisposed to prefer war to peace in some way?

Not under all circumstances. But there is something that drives us in that direction. Thymos is usually translated into English as spiritedness. You could call it pride, or the demand for respect or recognition. And I think that a great deal of politics is really not about contest over material goods, it’s really a contest over respect. So you think about something like gay marriage or the Me Too movement, these are fundamentally dignity issues where gays and lesbians want to have their unions celebrated as having equal status to heterosexual unions, or women want to be treated with the same respect as men. And this is not really governed by economic calculations. It’s governed by a different kind of desire that oftentimes works at cross-purposes. If you think about what’s going on in populist politics: this kind of demand for respect was very much driving the whole upwelling of voters that voted for Brexit and voted for Donald Trump. It’s really the more educated, more cosmopolitan people living in big cities like London, or New York, or San Francisco, that tended to vote for progressive parties, and then people living in smaller communities in the countryside with more traditional values that voted for populists. There’s an economic division there. But there’s also a respect division, because those more educated people tended to look down on the others that didn’t share their particular kind of cosmopolitan worldview. And a politician like Donald Trump was quite brilliant in understanding how much resentment there was, and could play on those resentments. That’s defined a lot of our politics in recent years.

You don’t actually differ that dramatically from some of the more populist thinkers — only while they felt these impulses were virtues or important things that needed to be accommodated, you seem to think they are dangers. Is that fair?

No, I don’t think that’s right. I think that any human striving depends on this sense of pride. This is true at an individual level. If you didn’t want to be recognised as a great pianist, or a great writer, or baseball player, or football player, or whatever, you probably wouldn’t strive for excellence. All of us want the attention and the respect that comes with great human achievement. But the greatest criminals in the world are driven by that desire to stand out. Donald Trump realised that he could be noticed by everybody for saying completely outrageous things that didn’t make any sense in a more narrowly rational way, but they excited people and it got him attention. This desire for respect and recognition is the basis of good behaviour and it’s the basis of bad behaviour. But it doesn’t fall within the economic calculus associated with classical liberalism.

What about the instinct to want to belong to a culture that you recognise as your own, and that you feel at home in. Is that something that the liberal world needs to accommodate better?

It really depends on what that community is based on. In today’s world, if you simply base it on race, or ethnicity, or on a single religion, it isn’t going to work — because our societies today are too diverse, really, to have a single point of reference. But people have a very deep social instinct: they want to have something in common, they want to conform to social norms, they believe in their national identity. And I think the key trick is to make that national identity compatible with liberal values. So it should be based on things that can be accepted by people regardless of their gender, race, ethnicity. That kind of community is going to be thinner than one that’s based on a single, let’s say, religious belief. But I think that it can still be built. The classic one was the Republican community coming out of the French Revolution: it was based on the French language, literary tradition, even a culinary tradition. Someone like Léopold Senghor, the great Senegalese poet, could be taken into the Académie Française because, despite the fact that he’s a black man, he writes beautiful French. That’s my understanding of what a liberal national identity is. You need that identity, but it also needs to be an open and accessible one that accommodates the actual diversity that exists in your society.

So you’re arguing for a pushing back of some of the excesses of liberalism: less ultra-individualism, more of a sense of community, a sense of virtue. In a European context, you’re sounding like a conservative.

If to be a European conservative means that you still believe in the importance of nations, then I would probably categorise myself that way. You need nations, for very pragmatic reasons. The nation is the repository of legitimate violence, basically. This is the old Max Weber understanding of what a state is: a legitimate monopoly of force. And right now, there isn’t an alternative to the nation as a locus of power that is, at the same time, controlled by institutions like the rule of law, and democratic accountability. Therefore, you’re going to have to deal with a world of nations. The European Union sought to get beyond that. In theory, you could have created a federated Europe that behaved more like an actual nation, but what you ended up with was something that wasn’t really that. And when push came to shove, like during the Euro crisis, it fell apart it. There wasn’t that sense of European solidarity between, let’s say, Greeks and Germans.

In this latest book you discuss the preconditions for a confident liberal democracy — its institutions, its rule of law. Are you worried that confidence has now gone in Western countries?

I worry about that more in the United States than in most parts of Europe, because our polarisation has become really intense, to the point where a lot of people on the Republican Right are willing to actually abandon some really important aspects of institutionalised democracy: a pretty strong majority of Republican voters believe that the 2020 election was fraudulent, based simply on a manufactured lie by one person. That’s a really big threat. Liberalism does not accommodate all forms of diversity. If you have a particular party or force or political movement within your society that rejects some of the foundational principles of liberalism, you can’t deal with that. And I think we do face that kind of threat in the United States. It’s ironic, because the United States was always seen as the ur-liberal country. But actually, it’s safer in most parts of Europe, where there’s a greater degree of political consensus.

So does that mean you’re less optimistic about the future for the US?

There are scenarios for the 2024 election that could be very, very nasty, and involve actual violence. I hope it doesn’t come to that. But I think it’s a real danger that, as an American citizen, I’m quite worried about.

Your phrase, “the end of history” is constantly quoted back at you, but it quite accurately describes a period of history. What are we to call the next period that’s coming?

I don’t know what it’s going to look like. A lot of it will depend on the outcome of this war in Ukraine. Because if Putin, who has been so central to the anti-liberal world order, succeeds, then that period is going to look much more authoritarian. On the other hand, if he’s humiliated, forced to back down, then it’s going to look much better for liberal societies around the world. But even if the latter materialises, and he is forced to back down, there are plenty of other illiberal forces out there in the world. There’s China, which is a bigger challenge in a sense, because they’re a more powerful country, and more successful in many ways than Russia has been. There’s all the Venezuelas and Irans and Syrias — these would-be authoritarian or actually authoritarian countries that have ambitions. There’s going to be plenty of struggle left, even if we win this one in Ukraine in the short run.

And your bet, for the record, is that we are going to win that one in some form?

The only reason I think liberalism is going to survive all of this the history of the last 300 years. Liberalism arose after the European Wars of Religion because people realised that fighting over which sect of Christianity you followed was not worth it, and therefore we should have religious toleration. It then got challenged by the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And after those two bloody world wars, people again said, “Well, maybe we shouldn’t be fighting over which nation is dominant, maybe we should come up with a more tolerant system.” And we’ve now gone through another cycle where we have taken liberal principles for granted. And now people are striving for more. So maybe we have to go through another cycle of witnessing the alternatives to liberalism, before we come back to saying, “Oh, well, maybe, tolerating diversity is not such a bad thing after all.” It’s not as bad a cycle as the previous ones. Maybe we might get a little bit inoculated by what Putin has done in Europe.

It’s like a necessary war of some kind?

I hate to say that any war is necessary. But that’s the way it’s worked out in prior centuries of human history.

The most controversial aspect of the new sanctions regime is without a doubt the freezing of Russia’s offshore gold and foreign-exchange reserves — about half of its overall reserves — but even this is not unprecedented: last year, the US froze foreign reserves held by Afghanistan’s central bank in order to prevent the Taliban from accessing its funds; the US has also previously frozen the foreign-exchange reserves of Iran, Syria, and Venezuela.

So, taken individually, these measures are not as exceptional as they’ve been portrayed. However, never before have so many sanctions been deployed at once: there are already 6,000 various Western sanctions imposed on Russia, which is more than those in existence against Iran, Syria and North Korea put together. Even more importantly, none of the previous targets of sanctions were remotely as powerful as Russia — a member of the G20, and the world’s largest nuclear power.

Likewise, none of the 63 central banks that are members of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) in Basel — known as the central bank of central banks — has ever been the target of financial sanctions. The BIS itself has even joined in on the sanctions in order to prevent Russia’s access to its offshore reserves. This really is unprecedented: since its establishment in 1931, the BIS had never taken such a measure, not even during World War II.

So what should we expect from the sanctions? Western pundits and commentators have little doubt: the sanctions will hamstring the Russian economy, sow discontent among the Russian people and elites alike, and possibly even cause the downfall of the Putin regime. At the very least, we’re told, they will hinder Russia’s war efforts. But history suggests otherwise: see Iraq, or more recently Iran. Far more likely is that this turns out to be the latest Western strategic miscalculation in a long list of strategic blunders, of which the United States’ inglorious withdrawal from Afghanistan is just the most recent example.

After all, Russia has been preparing for this moment for quite some time. Following the first wave of Western sanctions, in 2014, and partly in retaliation against them, Putin embarked on what analysts have dubbed a “Fortress Russia” strategy, building up the country’s international reserves and diversifying them away from US dollars and British pounds, reducing its foreign exposure, boosting its economic cooperation with China, and pursuing import substitution strategies in several industries, including food, medicine and technology, in an effort to insulate Russia as much as possible from external shocks.

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True, Putin made the mistake of leaving around half of those reserves parked in foreign central banks, resulting in these now being confiscated. But nonetheless Russia still has access to more than $300 billion in gold and foreign-exchange reserves — more than most countries in the world and more than enough to cushion any short-term fall in exports, or prop up the rouble (for a while).

Moreover, the Russian central bank reacted to the sanctions by stopping capital flows out of Russia and nationalising the foreign exchange earnings of major exporters, requiring Russian firms to convert 80% of their dollar and euro earnings into roubles. It also raised interest rates to 20% in an effort to attract foreign capital. These measures are aimed at bolstering the rouble’s value and providing a flow of foreign exchange into the country. They appear to be working: while the rouble is around 40% of its value since the start of the conflict, the Russian currency’s free-fall seems to have come to a halt for now, even registering an uptick over the past two weeks. For the time being, Russia’s financial account — the difference between the money flowing in and out of the country — is far from disastrous.

Let’s not forget that the main source of Russia’s foreign-exchange reserves — oil and gas exports — has been excluded from the sanctions, for obvious reasons: for most European countries, Russia accounts for a huge part of their oil and gas imports (and other staple commodities), and there’s simply no way of replacing those energy sources from one day to the next.

In short, Russia runs no risk, in the short term, of running out of reserves and not being able to pay for its imports. But even assuming that the West decided to put a stop to all its imports from Russia overnight, there’s no reason to believe that this would bring the Russian military machine to a halt. The notion that “we are financing Russia’s war by purchasing gas and oil”, as the Finnish prime minister recently stated, is fundamentally misplaced.

As the economist Dirk Ehnts has observed, the Russian military machine, for the most part, doesn’t rely on imports (if anything, Russia is an arms exporter). It is sourced domestically and, like the salaries of its soldiers, is paid for in roubles, which the Russian central bank can create in an unlimited quantity, just as the Bank of England does when it comes to pounds.

Equally unfounded are rumours of an impending Russian default. In recent years, the Russian government has taken steps to reduce its foreign liabilities: its foreign currency-denominated debt amounts today to about $40 billion — a tiny amount compared with the size of Russia’s yearly exports of more than $200 billion in oil and gas. Any decision to default would be entirely political. We mustn’t forget that the very creditors expecting to be paid back in dollars are the same that have just confiscated a good part of Russia’s dollars — if the latter were to default on their payments, it would be an even bigger problem for their Western creditors. As with Russia’s oil exports, hurting Russia inevitably means hurting ourselves as well.

Moreover, thanks to the Russian government’s successful efforts at boosting domestic agricultural production, domestic food production now accounts for more than 80% of retail sales, up from 60% in 2014. This means Russia is largely self-sufficient food-wise. So even if its export revenues were to plummet (which is unlikely), the country wouldn’t go hungry — unlike the rest of the world — and would most likely be able to continue to finance its war efforts.

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Might a selective ban on exports of specific high-tech Western components, some of which are bound to be used in Russia’s defence industry, prove more effective? Possibly. But Russia has been reducing the dependence of its military-industrial apparatus on foreign components and technologies for years. More importantly, both hypotheses — that Russia’s economy and military can be brought to their knees through export and/or import bans — rest on the flawed assumption that the whole world is on board with the sanctions. But that is far from the case.

While most of the world’s nations — 143 out of 193 — voted for a resolution in the UN’s General Assembly condemning Russia, the 35 countries that abstained include China, India, Pakistan and South Africa, as well as several African and Latin American states. These and many more countries — including several that voted in favour of the resolution, such as Brazil — have strongly criticised the sanctions against Russia and can be expected to continue trading with Putin. It’s frankly very hard to call Russia isolated when some of the world’s largest economies have refused to support the West’s sanctions regime.

China, in particular, has been very vocal in its support of Russia. Beijing is already the Kremlin’s main trading partner, and it alone can absorb huge quantities of Russian energy and commodities, as well as provide Russia with basically any industrial and consumer goods that the latter currently imports from the West. China also operates an alternative to the Western-managed SWIFT system called CIPS to manage cross-border transactions in yuan, which could allow Russia to partially circumvent the West’s financial blockade. Even though the yuan still makes up a small percentage of international transactions, its role is bound to grow rapidly in the coming years (consider the news that Saudi Arabia may start pricing its oil sales to China in the latter’s currency). All this helps explain why even Western financial analysts, such as Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, predict a year-on-year contraction for the Russian economy of about 7% — bad, but hardly catastrophic (Covid caused a much larger drop in GDP for most countries).

However, much will depend on the policy response of the Russian government. Obviously, the withdrawal of many foreign firms and decline in foreign investments will increase unemployment. But the Russian government can cushion the blow by resorting to a “Keynesian” expansionary fiscal policy aimed at boosting domestic investment and supporting incomes. If ever there were a time for Russia to abandon its historically ultra-tight fiscal policy, as several Russian economists have been arguing for some time, it is now.

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America has won Europe's war

By Thomas Fazi

Two weeks ago, I suggested that, in the short term at least, the US will benefit from the conflict in Ukraine. In the long term, however, it is slowly becoming clear that US-led global Western order will suffer. The West’s imposition of sanctions — involving not only governments, but also private companies and even allegedly apolitical organisations such as central banks — has sent a clear message to the countries of the world: the West will stop at nothing to punish countries that step out of line. If this can happen to Russia, a major power, it can happen to anyone. “We will [never again] be under the slightest illusion that the West could be a reliable partner,” the Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov has said. “We will do everything so as never, in any way, to be dependent on the West in those areas of our life which have a decisive significance for our people.”

Those words are bound to reverberate across the world, with dramatic implications for the West. As Wolfgang Münchau has warned: “For a central bank to freeze the accounts of another central bank is a really big deal… As a direct result of these decisions, we have turned the dollar and the euro, and everything that is denominated in those currencies, into de facto risky assets”. At the very least, it will inevitably push countries to diversify their reserves and increase their yuan holdings, in order to loosen the West’s grip on their economies and bolster their economic resilience and self-sufficiency. Even if it doesn’t push countries straight into Beijing’s arms, as is already happening with Russia, it will likely lead to the emergence of two increasingly insulated blocs: a US-dominated Western bloc and a China-dominated East-Eurasian one.

In this new pseudo-Cold War, “non-aligned” countries could find that they are in a better position to assert their sovereignty than they were under the American global empire. Forget “the collapse of the Russian economy” — this could be the result of the West’s new economic war.

Chaos is a void because nothingness has no shape. There isn’t a triangular kind of negativity as opposed to an oval one. So-called “chaos theory” deals with systems whose behaviour is random and unpredictable, one of which is known as Vladimir Putin. One of the curious features of the Russian president’s attack on Ukraine is its recklessness. Former KGB agents may be callous or thick-headed or sadistic, but one would not expect them to be impetuous.

Still, Putin was a KGB man a long time ago, and has had plenty of time to go mad since then. Not mad in the sense of not knowing what he’s up to, but mad in the way that pop stars who are surrounded by sycophants and don’t know what a can opener is. Shakespeare’s Lear is in something like this state when the play opens, and has to be hauled through hell in order to be cured of it. (He didn’t know what a can opener was either, but that was understandable.)

Putin’s motive in flattening Ukraine is partly ethnic. He thinks that the country is ethnically speaking a fiction, a cardboard cut-out of a nation, and should be wound up as soon as possible. Ukraine is a void, a non-entity, and Russia will impose some order on this chaos by incorporating it into itself. Then the Ukrainians will cease to be unreal and become what they essentially are, namely Russians.

In this sense, the war reminds us of the dangers of ethnicity. Contrary to postmodern thinking, it isn’t always to be applauded. You don’t have to be a racist to be aware of the murderous conflicts ethnic difference has inflicted on humankind. If everyone came from Cornwall or the Democratic Republic of Congo, the world would be a lot more dreary but a lot less bloodstained as well.

Behind Putin’s assault on his neighbours lies one of the worst ideas humanity has had for a long time: the Romantic-nationalist demand that there should be a precise fit between politics and ethnicity, so that an ethnic ‘people’, whatever that means, is entitled to its own sovereign state, and should extend this sovereignty to those of its own kind currently living under different regimes.

The result of this doctrine has been political havoc. The English have a right to self-determination, but not because they are English. Scottish independence is a question of democracy, not a genetic or patriotic affair. Colonised nations from India to Mozambique have thrown off their colonisers, but this is a political matter, not an ethnic one.

Colonialism is objectionable even if those who have plundered your resources are of the same ethnic origin as yourself. There are Republicans in Northern Ireland who oppose the partition of the country because they would prefer to live with their fellow Gaels over the border rather than with a bunch of benighted Ulster Scots who believe the world was created only 6,000 years ago. There are, however, better reasons for opposing partition than that. Ethnicity in the West is mostly a matter of ensuring equal rights, and is thus to be affirmed; yet ethnicity on a more general scale has piled the bodies high, and continues to do so as I write.

Too sharp a contrast between order and chaos is misleading. War creates chaos, but it is a deliberately manufactured disorder, not an arbitrary mess. You spread ruin and despair, but in as planned, well-disciplined way as possible. Besides, what you regard as chaos depends largely on your idea of order. In this sense, the two concepts are mutually parasitic.

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The emptiness of Evil

By Terry Eagleton

Anyone who has just returned to Britain from a so-called developing nation will be struck by how surreally neat and tidy everything seems, but people in poorer countries don’t consider their lives to be anarchic. Virginia Woolf saw life as fragmentary and formless, but it’s unlikely that the housemaids who scrubbed her floors felt the same.

My university tutor regarded almost everything around him as chaotic, from the gurgling of a baby to the purring of a car engine, but this was because his notion of order was pathological. He would refuse to shake hands with you in the vacation because of some medieval university statute which nobody else had ever heard of. I once asked him at the end of a tutorial whether I might consult him in his role as a university officer, whereupon he asked me to leave the room, knock on the door and wait till he invited me to come in again. People like this should be chained to the wall in padded cells, approached only by those wearing protective suits. One could only wonder what wild orgiastic urges he was repressing.

Like many deep-dyed conservatives, my tutor was a devout adherent of what one might call the floodgates argument. Allow one person to play the trombone in a tube station, and (key phrase) before you know where you are the whole of the London underground system will be packed wall-to-wall with people playing trombones and chaos will ensue. In Freudian idiom, this man had fallen morbidly in love with the law. Like the Pharisees of the New Testament, he had turned the law into a fetish in order to keep chaos at bay.

Naive libertarians react to this pathology by ditching the law altogether, but this fails to acknowledge the distinction between obeying the law because of what it commends and obeying it for its own sake. “The law is the law” is one of the most lethal tautologies in any language. On this view, you don’t do what the law demands for a reason, because that would mean that legality was dependent on rationality and was thus no longer absolute.

For Immanuel Kant, probably the greatest of modern philosophers, you should be moral because it is moral to be so. This is deeply questionable, but it contains a kernel of truth, which is that being moral doesn’t get you anywhere. It isn’t necessarily a path to a more fulfilling life. In fact, for the New Testament it is a path which leads to a squalid death at the hands of the state. The 18^th century novelist Henry Fielding writes that there is a noble doctrine to the effect that the virtuous will reap their reward in this world — a doctrine, he adds, which has only one defect, namely that it is not true.

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Putin can't win a Cold War

By Dominic Sandbrook

There are other ways in which order and chaos are old friends. In Freud’s view, what enforces law and order is the superego, a faculty which draws its formidable strength from the forces of the chaotic unconscious. No political order could endure if it didn’t engage us at this kind of depth. You can’t govern people off the top of their heads, not even if they are French. Any political power which can tap into the collective unconscious will prove remarkably difficult to dislodge. If it also provides its citizens with just enough satisfaction, however meagre, to keep them going, it is very likely to survive. There has to be something in it for you. If there isn’t, however, either affectively or materially, power is highly vulnerable.

Social order is shrewd enough to encourage us to disrupt it from time to time. The traditional name for this in medieval Europe was carnival. The common people tumble into the streets wearing monstrous papier-mâché phalluses and vaginas and hump merrily away in defiance of the state. A wave of travesty and inversion — nose/phallus, face/buttocks, mouth/anus, high/low — sweeps through social life. Absolutely nothing escapes this great spasm of satire. Nothing is too solemn or sacred to be blasphemed. People dress up as Cardinals and piss in the streets. All this calls the established social order into question, but it is also a way of protecting it, a collective blow-off after which the sun will rise on myriad empty wine flagons and gnawed chicken legs and the populace will return obediently to work.

You need order if you want to be free. Unless you can predict how the world is likely to behave, you can’t fulfil your powers and capabilities, which is the positive meaning of freedom. You can’t play croquet if the hoops consist of flamingos which keep wandering around, as they do in Alice in Wonderland.

All the same, social life wouldn’t work if every bit of it was bound by precise rules. You wouldn’t be able to say “Stand roughly there”, which makes perfect sense, or shake someone’s hand, since there are no rules which determine how long a handshake should last. Maybe this is why my tutor was so wary of them.

We live and work on what Ludwig Wittgenstein calls the rough ground of social existence, even if there are those who try to walk on the pure ice of some flawless vision of order. But the two are not simply opposites. What we have witnessed in Ukraine is how easily such flawless visions can create the rough ground of a city brought to ruin.

But the answer is not so simple. Nuclear bombs have been dropped in conflict just once, in August 1945, by the United States. The horrific scenes of destruction and human suffering in Hiroshima and Nagasaki — and a death toll estimated to be about 200,000 civilians — provoked widespread condemnation. The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr wrote in the New York Times that the bombings were “morally indefensible”. Even hardened military figures were aghast. “We had adopted the ethical stand common to the barbarians in the Dark Ages,” grieved Admiral William Leahy, the US’s highest-ranking military commander.

Years later, the former Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower told Newsweek: “It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing”. It was a comment that alluded to the military tactics behind the decision, which are separate from the more emotive philosophical debate over the morality of dropping the bomb. What does it mean for it to be “necessary” to drop a nuclear weapon? If it wasn’t necessary, then why did the US government — indeed, why would any government — willingly inflict such pain and suffering on civilians if there was a legitimate alternative path to peace?

The man who made the decision, Harry Truman, gave a lecture in 1959 to Columbia University students about the powers of the presidency. The talk was described as “earnest, good-humoured, and sometimes salty”, and was well-received by the 1,200-strong audience. But during the question and answer session, things took a more serious turn. A student thought it was odd that Truman had skirted over the nuclear question. When confronted with it, the usually good-natured Truman became a touch defensive:

“It was used in the war, and for your information, there were more people killed by the fire bombs in Tokyo than dropping of the atomic bombs accounted for. It was merely another powerful weapon in the arsenal of righteousness. The dropping of the bombs stopped the war, saved millions of lives”.

This is the orthodox view: dropping nuclear bombs saved lives. In this telling, the Japanese were not prepared to surrender, meaning the US and Soviet Union had two choices. They could either launch a land invasion, something on the scale of the D-Day landings in France, in which an estimated million US soldiers alone would be lost. Or they could prevent such a bloody undertaking by shocking the Japanese leadership into capitulation.

Death was not enough. The fire bombings of Tokyo, in which 100,000 people died in one night, had not proved sufficient. Something beyond conventional warfare was needed. Nuclear warfare was, as Truman’s Secretary of War Henry Stimson put it, the “least abhorrent choice”; though the bombs killed hundreds of thousands, even more would have died had they not been dropped.

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The drawbacks of Japan's cult of peace

By Eri Hotta

The orthodox account depends on a number of key claims, including that the Japanese were unwilling to surrender in the summer of 1945. These claims have since been challenged by “revisionist” historians, who argue that Japan was in fact on the verge of surrender when the bombs were dropped.

The previous summer, Japan had lost Saipan, an island in the South Pacific, to America, meaning its mainland was within range of USAF B-29 bombers. This made Japan highly vulnerable to sustained US attacks from the air. On the night of 9 March 1945, over 300 B-29 bombers descended on Tokyo, inflicting the deadliest bombing raid in world history. After that, the revisionist account goes, the question was not whether Japan would surrender but on what terms.

The revisionists place heavy emphasis on contemporary reports that suggest the Emperor and some (but not all) of his advisers were inclined to surrender, so long as his position could be guaranteed. A month before Hiroshima, Navy Secretary James Forrestal wrote in his diary: “The first real evidence of a Japanese desire to get out of the war came today… [indicating] the Emperor’s strong desire to secure a termination of the war”. A 1946 report by the US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded: “in all probability prior to 1 November 1945 [the planned invasion date], Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped.”

The revisionists believe that the US rushed to use nuclear weapons not because of Japanese intransigence, but because of the Soviet Union. Throughout the war, the USSR and Japan had honoured a neutrality pact. Stalin, however, assured Truman’s predecessor Franklin Roosevelt that three months after victory in Europe was achieved, the Soviet Union would turn its attention to the Pacific and declare war on Japan. Truman and his closest advisers believed that Roosevelt had already conceded far too much to Stalin at Yalta, effectively giving the USSR free rein to dominate eastern Europe. They were not keen for the same thing to happen in Japan.

The first bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6. On August 8, exactly three months after the surrender of Germany, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. The following day, the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. The day after, the Japanese government offered its surrender. The revisionists look at this timeline and intuit that the nuclear bombs were dropped primarily for political rather than military reasons. The US wished to deny the USSR credit for ending the war, which would have given Stalin greater leverage in the post-war settlement.

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Putin can't win a Cold War

By Dominic Sandbrook

These two accounts — the orthodox and the revisionist — are the dominant explanations offered by historians, but they are not the only ones. Some scholars focus on the internal politics of Japan, arguing that the key figures who were ready for peace, not least the Emperor, were poor at communicating their wishes. They were, perhaps, drowned out by the powerful voices who wanted to continue the war. Many in the rank and file of the military were believed to be prepared to fight at all costs. US propaganda, which was racially inflected, tended to exploit the perception of Japan as a “warrior culture”, in which people would choose death over the shame of defeat. It was hard for Americans to discern Japan’s true intentions.

Other accounts suggest Truman was locked into decisions made by his predecessor. It was Roosevelt who had pushed for “unconditional surrender” at the Cairo conference in 1943. And the idea of dropping nuclear bombs on Japan was one Roosevelt had first dreamed up. In September 1944, he and Churchill met at FDR’s estate in Hyde Park, New York and agreed that “when a bomb is finally available, it might perhaps, after mutual consideration, be used against the Japanese, who should be warned that this bombardment will be repeated until they surrender”. Once Truman became president after Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, only one thing could apparently bring about “unconditional surrender”, and that was the bomb.

All of these interpretations offer important lessons to today’s leaders, but that last one is particularly chilling. If dropping the nuclear bomb was not militarily necessary to bring about an end to the war, then Truman opted for a decision that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians in part to save face. Once the US was committed to demanding “unconditional surrender” — for which there was enormous public support — Truman could hardly change his mind and say he wanted a negotiated peace. The new president, who had no political mandate of his own, would risk tanking his own domestic popularity before his term had even begun.

In other words, leaders must avoid making dangerous commitments from which either they or their successors will struggle to back down. Fortunately, in today’s conflict, no one has rashly insisted on “unconditional surrender”. A negotiated settlement is still possible.

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Is this Ukraine's last chance for peace?

By Aris Roussinos

With that in mind, it’s worth considering the vital role of intermediaries in such high-powered conflicts. With the help of a neutral party, could the Japanese peace camp have communicated its position more clearly, so as to assist those within the US administration who might have urged caution? The Japanese saw the Soviets as possible intermediaries, a view that was shattered when Stalin declared war on them. Today, Israel seems to be the go-between, though the nation has been criticised by Western commentators for not condemning Putin.

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America has won Europe's war

By Thomas Fazi

At Columbia University, Truman was asked, “With the development of nuclear weapons, do you think the United States would be willing to risk entering a third world war if a small European country in the Nato pact were to be involved in an act of aggression?” His answer was tepid: “I don’t know”. On consideration, he explained that the circumstances were now different, because unlike in 1945, the US was no longer the sole possessor of nuclear weapons: “I don’t think there’s any possible chance of doing what I tried to begin with, when we had absolute control of them, of nuclear weapons”.

This, strangely enough, is cause for optimism. When the US dropped its bombs on Japan, there was no other nuclear power to retaliate. In the intervening years, the threat of mutually assured destruction has seemingly prevented any other country from using such dangerous force.

It’s also worth observing that, while Ukrainians have shown an admirable fighting spirit in defending their nation from Russia, in the eyes of their people the two nations have a lot more in common than the Japanese did with the Americans. There has been no real attempt to use racial differences to demonise the enemy.

There is still a chance, then, that this war can be resolved through conventional methods. Putin is not in the same place Truman found himself in. Putin does not view it as “necessary” to drop a nuclear bomb. It has not yet become Putin’s “least abhorrent choice”. Let us hope it never does.

Once wars united people, but not in modern America. Here, the vast majority of citizens share remarkably similar opinions about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine: that it should be condemned outright. Our politicians, however, seem blissfully unaware of this.

In Congress last week, despite strong pro-Kyiv sentiment among the vast majority of Republicans, pro-Trump acolytes constituted the largest faction of those who voted against supplying aid to Ukraine. Yet on this issue, there is little to distinguish them from the Democratic Socialists of America, who have called for America’s exit from the “imperialist” Nato. There are even some on the far-Left who believe the West’s sympathy for Ukrainians reflects our unredeemable racism.

And yet the past fortnight has revealed something more optimistic than the intellectual adolescence of America’s politicians. The key to repelling Putin’s campaign of division in the West has also become apparent: unifying around basic economic interests.

Much attention has been paid in recent years to Russian online interference in our elections. But it is tangible realities — such as oil, food, and the ability to build things — that will determine our ability to resist external autocratic forces. And it is here that energy policy becomes crucial.

Before Biden became President, America was well on its way to energy independence, and emerged as the world’s leading gas exporter. Far more than words or military threats, the US energy revival was a blow to Russia, Iran and Saudi Arabia. American production was a critical factor in weakening the price of the one commodity that keeps their economies alive.

Yet this weapon is being systematically dismantled. Since taking the White House, Biden has turned the Federal Reserve and other executive departments into enforcers of “net zero” policies. From the very beginning, Biden and his green allies have busily cancelled gas pipelines, ended new leases for offshore oil, and introduced new regulations that make it harder to build new fossil fuel plants. All of this was manna for Moscow.

Biden’s energy policies, so poorly timed amid the prospect of a looming Russian invasion, has also widened a deeper, more long-lasting schism that will reverberate for years to come. Perhaps more than anything else, it seems certain to expand both class and geographic divisions.

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Green hypocrisy hurts the poorest

By Joel Kotkin

The decision by his administration to double down on green policies, while blaming Putin for their hefty cost, has exacerbated the already-wide divide between the coast-hugging financial and tech oligarchs and the oil drillers, truck drivers, factory workers and farmers labouring outside the big cities, particularly in the country’s vast heartland. America’s coastal elites may express moral outrage about the Kremlin’s behaviour, but for those living and working in energy-producing states such as Texas — whose energy boom represents a far greater threat to Putin than elaborate virtue-signalling — this is not a matter of morals, but of livelihoods.

Oddly, American progressives even seem to lack the sense of realism that their German counterparts, once models for the Left, have adopted. Despite all evidence to the contrary, our greens cling to their fantasy that renewables can magically recast the laws of physics, the length of a day or the oscillations in the wind. Meanwhile, Germany’s greens now realise that such a boneheaded energy strategy essentially turned their country into a satrap of Sino-Russian neo-Eurasianism and helped embolden Putin’s aggression.

So far, no sense of this reality informs the Left-wing Congressional squad, whose pronouncements now constitute the leading edge of Democratic thinking. They generally oppose military aid to Ukraine, and their response to the energy shortage is to propose shutting down our entire fossil fuel production. When the mid-terms come around in November, this will likely help the Republicans in the leading gas and oil producing states. Almost all are in the heartlands, Alaska or the Intermountain West; California, the last blue energy giant, has committed itself to wiping out its large local energy industry while importing oil from Saudi Arabia and, at least until recently, Russia.

But it’s not just the government seeking to wipe out the energy sector. Big Business, through its cherished ESG investment standards, is making it increasingly difficult to start or expand energy production. Following Lenin’s supposed dictum about capitalists providing the rope with which they can be hanged, our corporate elite, perhaps unwittingly, also supports China, whose economy is fuelled increasingly by Russian oil and gas, a tie that has recently been consolidated by a plan to build a new gas pipeline between the countries.

But while such divides threaten the ability of America to lead in the current crisis, the news is not all inevitably bad. Americans can be deluded and stupid but are also capable of change. For generations, many in the West have celebrated the notion of inevitable American decline, particularly in Europe. Yet the country has a history of responding to challenges, albeit sometimes taking longer to respond than ideal.

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Is this the end of progressive America?

By Joel Kotkin

One has to remember that during the run-up to the Second World War, America was distinctly divided — but by the time it came to mobilise, even fascist sympathisers such as Henry Ford pitched in massively. Likewise, today, there is growing concern among Democrats that the party’s energy positions are untenable for the working and middle class. It’s not inconceivable that the Democrats, and the coastal enclaves, are forced into action by the reality of soaring food, car and energy prices.

When this happens, the party’s priorities must lie both in pumping more oil and gas, as well as learning how to manufacture goods outside China. Some Democrats, rather than tightening the relentless squeeze on the working and middle classes, might even consider introducing a modest carbon tax, expanding remote work, and restoring our nuclear power industry, as even some greens now support.

This is also good politics. Some 80% of voters, and an equal percentage of Democrats, favour the use of both fossil fuels and renewables, while support for the net zero Green New Deal hovers around 20%. “Climate catastrophism”, notes the liberal strategist Ruy Teixiera, is a political “loser”, particularly among working-class voters of all races.

For the Republicans, meanwhile, the war in Ukraine also poses a challenge due to the still considerable influence of Donald Trump, who views Putin as “a genius”. Although Trump’s views are out of step even with the bulk of his own supporters, Democrats see an opportunity to link the Republicans with Putinism, and make Biden the staunch defender of democracy.

Of course, moving America in one direction is a fraught enterprise in these times of extreme polarisation. But preventing a deepening civil war here is critical if the world is to stop the likes of Putin from returning us to the Middle Ages. Foreigners may find our political divides diverting, but only the US, if it can get its act somewhat together, has the resources, the human assets and military power to fend off the unrelenting assault of the autocratic powers.

What bothered me was the extent to which several high-profile populist conservatives were seeming to reflexively side with the cruel Russian autocrat. I watched as Tucker Carlson and J.D. Vance defended Putin, or adopted the Kremlin’s critique of Ukraine. The country was a “pure client state of the United States State Department” said Carlson. “Spare me the performative affection for the Ukraine” said Vance on Steve Bannon’s War Room podcast.

These interventions, made as Russia began an invasion that looks set to result in the deaths of thousands of Ukrainian civilians, look high risk and low reward. These commentators are undermining the credibility they have accrued for taking bold stances on the “security and identity” issues their base really cares about. Namely: wokeness, the border, crime and defending national heritage.

This is a real shame for populist conservatism in the United States. During the height of progressive moral panics such as the Covington Boys, George Floyd protests or Rittenhouse trial, Tucker’s show was an oasis of sanity. It was, too, on exposing campus craziness and anti-white rhetoric in institutions, or the scale of illegal immigration. He defended the legitimacy of Americans who wanted to regulate the pace of ethno-cultural change and protect social cohesion, taking immense flak from the great and the good. Others, such as Glenn Greenwald, highlighted the blind spots and biases of progressive organisations and tech firms. Most American politicians and legacy media outlets failed to cover these issues objectively.

And yet, when it comes to a suite of other problems, the incisive logic of the sceptics and their marshalling of evidence yielded to sweeping neo-Marxist conspiracy theories about a manipulative power elite. This became evident during the pandemic, a tricky new challenge in which experts and politicians had to optimise between death rates and freedom. While governments and public health bodies may have got the balance wrong, and overreached with mask mandates, such a complex issue does not lend itself to maximalist claims.

Instead, the difficulties of policymaking during the pandemic demanded building a patient case with data and arguing for the dial to be turned a bit towards greater personal autonomy. Indeed, the politics of anti-lockdown libertarianism has not paid off for those, such as Nigel Farage, who have attempted to campaign on it. It was never a populist position.

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The rise of Europe's fake populists

By Thomas Fazi

Another tricky issue which is largely tangential to populist voters’ concerns is foreign policy, where, even with Putin issuing marching orders to unprepared conscripts, populist elites continued to carry water for this killer. Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Eric Zemmour, and Viktor Orbán all, at various moments, spoke warmly of him. While it is legitimate to make a realist case — as John Mearsheimer has done — for tempering Ukrainian demands and accommodating reasonable Russian security concerns, the inability of some to reject the moral equivalence of Ukraine and Russia was glaring.

What lies behind this bizarre empathy toward Putin’s thuggish regime?

First, there is an important disconnect between Right-wing populist elites and their audience. Populist elites compete with mainstream intellectual elites, yearning for an overarching meta-theory to rival progressive liberalism or libertarianism. Many also desire a modicum of politically-correct respectability and thus try to pretend they are motivated by a desire to speak for the downtrodden. This typically results in a neo-Marxist mélange focused on globalist power elites and their manipulation of the masses. All of which pushes populist intellectuals toward grand theories of global economic and political order that bear little relationship to what national populist voters and audiences actually care about.

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How the Democrats could split

By Eric Kaufmann

Steve Bannon talks endlessly about the perils of free trade, Davos and the working class, despite the fact the data shows very clearly that cultural attitudes and views on immigration, not material deprivation, are what predict support for Trump. Likewise, Brexit elites such as Boris Johnson or Douglas Carswell, with their libertarian dreams of a sovereign free-trading Britain, are strangely disconnected from actual Brexit voters, who were — like Trump voters — mainly motivated by a desire for less immigration and slower cultural change. The more Brexit voters glimpse the real Johnson, who cares nothing for these things, the less connected they feel to him.

Populist elites have developed a fixation on global elites and institutions as self-interested scheming actors, and have become obsessed with mobilising opposition to the globalist juggernaut. Rather than viewing the problem as a western cultural-Left worldview which repudiates national tradition and elevates a cult of victimhood, we are treated to conspiratorial musings about the “Great Reset” and elites in Davos, Geneva or Brussels. My limited experience, having given talks at some of these institutions, is that the more international the organisation, the less woke it is. Yes, western high culture permeates global institutions, but these are nodes rather than the epicentre of the problem.

Once convinced of their neo-Marxist grand theory, some populist elites, fired by hostility to the rules-based liberal world order, feel compelled to develop an anti-western foreign policy. “Enemy of my enemy is my friend” logic carries them toward Putin’s Russia and quasi-illiberal democracies such as Hungary. An isolationism which originally sprang from the valid concern — after protracted wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — that American nationhood not be defined by missionary democracy promotion has mutated into support for autocracy.

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Escaping American tribalism

By William Deresiewicz

The perception that Russia is a masculine, white, Christian country unafraid to stand up for its traditions forms part of its appeal to conservative populist thinkers. “Putin ain’t woke,” Steve Bannon said last month. “He’s anti-woke.” The Russian President’s 2019 interview with the Financial Times, when he declared that liberalism has “become obsolete” clearly impressed many Western conservative populists. Against Drag Queen Story Hour and self-flagellation about the sins of the past could be set Putin’s macho, Christian, nationalist Russia. Clearly, some populist elites took the bait.

Yet any honest appraisal of Putin’s Russia would reveal that its religiosity is weak, immigration substantial, and the Eurasianism of Putin and Alexandr Dugin would readily trade cultural homogeneity for more territory. Moreover, as the Russianist Edwin Bacon observes: “Eurasianists embracing Orthodoxy identify themselves as having far more in common with what they would call other traditional faiths — notably Islam, and principally Shi’a Islam — than with other Christian churches.” Putin’s Russia is a ramshackle, corrupt, aggressive despotism. It is not “really hot stuff” as Donald Trump put it once. It is not a post-woke paradise.

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The Russia we have lost

By Ben Judah

Populist elites also appear to like Russia because it has spurned liberalism, failing to appreciate that wokeness, whose sacralisation of minorities is used to restrict liberty, is best resisted by liberal arguments. They confuse procedural liberalism, which has been vital for the West’s success, with Left-modernist values such as celebrating diversity and change, which developed much later and are not central to liberalism.

As a ‘rational populist’ and liberal nationalist, I maintain that the values of the median voter should be reflected in policy, but that those tasked with carrying out such policies should be guided by science, analytic logic, and expertise. The problem with many Western elites is not their technical skills, but their post-national woke values, which spring from religious rather than rational wellsprings. While populist commentators correctly skewer the progressive pieties of the elite media and political class, the anti-globalist conspiracy theorising of many needs an urgent reality check. Populist pundits and politicians should resist the urge to stake out contrarian positions on every news item, tacking instead to the centre ground on side issues to avoid losing support for core issues.

Hopefully the Ukraine crisis can serve as a wake-up call, drawing them back toward the cultural problems their base actually cares about.

One feels compelled — especially when one comes from Eastern Europe — to look to literature for answers to bigger questions about Russia’s history and presence in the world. The Brothers Karamazov is a highly symbolic book, and Smerdyakov is perhaps the ultimate symbol in it. As he grows up, he gets better and better at gratuitous evil. Now an adult, Smerdyakov teaches kids in the neighbourhood a certain trick: “take a piece of bread, […] stick a pin in it, and toss it to some yard dog, the kind that’s so hungry it will swallow whatever it gets without chewing it, and then watch what happens”.

Why torture the dogs? Why not? Eventually Smerdyakov develops this into a systematic, coherent behaviour. He kills Fyodor Pavlovich without any clear motive; he plans the murder to the last detail and commits it in cold blood, but we don’t know why. He kills just because.

Smerdyakovism is an obscure, yet tremendous force that runs deep throughout Russian history. Its basic principle is formulated succinctly by the lackey himself: “The Russian people need thrashing”. Why? Just because. Smerdyakovism flares up especially in the form of leaders and institutions that rule through terror alone; repression for the sake of repression. Its impact is overwhelming, its memory traumatic, and its social effects always paralysing. Joseph Conrad sees “something inhuman”, from another world, in these Smerdyakovian institutions. The government of Tsarist Russia, relying on an omnipresent, omnipotent secret police, and “arrogating to itself the supreme power to torment and slaughter the bodies of its subjects like a God-sent scourge, has been most cruel to those whom it allowed to live under the shadow of its dispensation”. And that was just the beginning.

It was Stalin who brought Smerdyakovism to perfection. Under his rule, Smerdyakov starved to death millions of Ukrainian peasants and killed tens of thousands of Polish prisoners. In Siberia he built a vast network of camps and prisons whereby a significant part of Russia’s population was turned into slave labor. All this for no particular reason — just because.

In The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn documents the whole thing in maddening detail. The Great Terror that Stalin orchestrated and put into practice with the help of the NKVD in the late 1930s is perhaps the most eloquent example of Smerdyakovism in 20th-century Russia. Without any trace of rational justification, the country’s artistic, scientific, political, and military elites were decimated within a few years. Some of its best writers, scientists, engineers, and generals received then a bullet in the head. Among them was Pavel Florensky (1882-1937), philosopher, theologian, mathematician, physicist — one of the greatest minds Russia ever had, often called the “Russian da Vinci”. And so was Osip Mandelstam (1891-1938), one of its finest poets. But maybe we should not be surprised that Stalin killed poets: after all, Smerdyakov never liked poetry. “Verse is nonsense”, “who on earth talks in rhymes?” he complains. “Verse is no good”.

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Privilege is the new original sin

By COSTICĂ BRĂDĂȚAN

The more fascinating the philosophical vistas opened up by The Brothers Karamazov, the more puzzling its author. Dostoevsky is a complicated case. As a creative artist, he is as insightful as it gets. He has given us access to regions of the human soul that few before or after him have. He is bold, visionary, and uncannily prophetic. As a novelist, Dostoevsky is a most generous demiurge: each of his novels emerges as a universe in its own right, a polyphonic world where characters have their distinct voices, independent from their author’s. Yet as a journalist Dostoevsky can be embarrassing. He was narrow-minded, often mediocre, and parochial, when not openly xenophobic and anti-Semitic.

This Dostoevsky — the nationalist, the inveterate Slavophile for whom Russia was a “God-bearing country” that had some natural right over others — would have likely approved of Putin’s efforts to save Ukraine from the paws of the godless West. Ever since he died Dostoevsky has not ceased to supply Russia’s political establishment with ideas, one fancier than the next.

We should not be so surprised, though. For that, too, is in The Brothers Karamazov. Throughout the novel, Ivan toys with the idea that “if God does not exist, then everything is permitted”. He drops it carelessly in conversations so that any idiot can pick it up and use it. Then, one day, Smerdyakov tells him that he just used it to murder his father. The killing “was done in the most natural manner, sir, according to those same words of yours”, says the lackey, barely containing, we surmise, sardonic laughter. Smerdyakov is of course lying — he killed Fyodor Pavlovich just because — but his mockery of Ivan’s idea is real. Mocking philosophical ideas is another facet of Russia.

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By Dominic Sandbrook

Putin’s spin doctors are always ready to connect his politics to a line of Slavophile thought that runs deep in Russia and leads straight to Dostoevsky himself. Indeed, Putin is often seen crossing himself in the presence of Orthodox clergy and lighting candles in the midst of pious, simple Russian folk. Cameras are always close at hand to capture his churchgoing, just as they are to seize his tiger hunting, horse riding, crane saving, reindeer feeding, topless fishing, tank driving, or jet flying. Putin must be laughing like mad at Dostoevsky’s Slavophilia, just as Smerdyakov was laughing at Ivan’s philosophy. For Putin cares as much about ideas (Slavophile or otherwise) as he does about the tigers he kills.

Putin can be a politician, a thinker, a hunter, a fisherman, a hockey player, a fighter pilot — he can be anything he likes because he is nothing in particular. “He is an excellent imitator”, writes Anna Politkovskaya. “He is adept at wearing other people’s clothes, and many are taken in by this performance”. Journalists have often noticed how difficult it is to “read” Putin, since he is always so slippery. Yet for any serious reader of The Brothers Karamazov this is something familiar. Featurelessness itself can be a feature — that’s one of the indications that you are in Smerdyakov’s presence.

Putin, too, is Smerdyakov. The institution that created him (the KGB) is one of the most Smerdyakovian institutions ever devised. His unapologetic defense of the Soviet Union and his attempts to revive it, his recycling of the Stalinist propaganda machine, the silencing of human rights movements all over Russia, the manner in which he annihilates his opponents — all are signs that Smerdyakovism enjoys a new life in today’s Russia. Most significant of all, however, was Putin’s first vivisection of Ukraine; Smerdyakov’s signature all over it. An army of faceless, nameless, insignia-less “little green men” who steal themselves into the country under the cover of night and, before anyone knows it, cut off a piece of it. Since they do everything on the sly, and the whole operation looks more Mafia-like than military, people liken Putin’s army to a gang of thugs. That’s inaccurate: the “little green men” are not thugs, they are Smerdyakovs in action. There is nothing fake about them; their modus operandi is the lackey’s 100%.

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To be sure, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin is not Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin. They are both Smerdyakovian, but, by its very nature, Smerdyakovism is protheic, multidimensional, complex. Stalin’s Smerdykovism manifests itself especially in his “just because” acts, while Putin’s in his anonymous, cowardly mode of operation. But that’s little consolation to an Eastern Europe traumatised for centuries by its stronger, always erratic, always drunk-like neighbor. For these countries the danger does not necessarily come from Putin or Stalin personally, but from Russia’s timeless Smerdyakovism, of which they are only temporary embodiments.

Politically, the tragedy of Eastern Europe comes from the fact that its security ultimately depends on what happens in Russia. Here political legitimacy is produced not through ordinary democratic practices, but through fabricated crises, at home and especially abroad. Putin has staged the farce of free elections several times already; he’s had his fun, but must be tired of it. At the same time, as he well knows, to stay in power he can’t rely on photo ops alone, no matter how lowly they get. Having made a mockery of democracy, Putin has reached a point where only inventing conflicts and invading countries could bring him what, in Russia, passes for political legitimacy. That’s true of the Smerdyakov who rules Russia now, as it is of those who will rule it in the future.

This in an extract from a piece published in the LARB in 2014, after Russia’s invasion of Crimea.

Within 24 hours, Ukrainian soldiers were reporting bullets missing them and a housewife in Kyiv brought down a drone with a tin of tomatoes (not, as some sensationalist early accounts reported, a jar of pickles). Coincidence?

Michael Hughes has form: five years ago, he was behind the binding ritual against Donald Trump, which involved the burning of an unflattering photograph of the President (a visually appealing photograph, it was made clear, would not be suitable materium). This ceremony had the option, as the President turned to ash, to chant either “So mote it be” — a ritual phrase in Freemasonry, Rosicrucianism or Wicca — or, if preferred, “You’re fired”.

And even this hocus-POTUS was not unprecedented: magic regularly plays a part in resistance. The English occultist Aleister Crowley, for example, claimed to have invented Churchill’s V-sign as a magical foil to the Nazis — in his Lesser Ritual of the Hexagram, V represents Apophis, the destroyer, whose slaying of Osiris is symbolised by the swastika — although the general consensus among historians is that the V stands for Victory.

Crowley repeatedly tried to offer his esoteric services for King and Country, but each time was told that “the Director of Naval Intelligence presents his compliments to Mr Aleister Crowley and regrets he is unable to avail himself of his offer”. It seems that the only person, apart from Crowley himself, who suggested that he should play an official role in the war effort was Lord Haw-Haw, who said that his celebrating a Black Mass in Westminster Abbey would be as effective as Britain’s National Day of Prayer. Crowley, of course, took this as a compliment.

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By Suzannah Lipscomb

Francis Young’s new book, Magic in Merlin’s Realm: A History of Occult Politics in Britain, sees Crowley as the last person to make a serious attempt to fill a role which has been a surprising constant in British history — magical advisor to the rulers of Britain. Merlin may have been a myth, but figures like John Dee, Elizabeth I’s astronomer, self-consciously placed themselves in his tradition. And even when belief in magic has disappeared from the body politic, the role has not: Dominic Cummings, that “wizard” known for practising the “dark arts”, is accused of bending people to his will through powers that no one really understands, or even can prove exist.

Cummings himself said he wanted to fill government with “weirdos” — “wyrd” means, of course, having the power to control the fates — and super-forecasters, albeit ones with a background in statistics rather than traditional methods of seeing the future. An adept told me that he knew Cummings had no interest in astrology when he didn’t capitalise on the fact that, when we left the European Union, Saturn and Pluto were conjoined in the sign of Capricorn. This was happening for the first time since Martin Luther nailed his theses to the door of Wittenberg Cathedral, making Brexit not just an echo of the Reformation but a rerun ordained by fate.

I’m not, of course, saying that Dominic Cummings is Merlin, only that people talk about him as if he were. To be fair, as Arthur C Clarke used to observe, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic — which goes for the manipulation of big data as much as it does for “experiments” in previous reigns. Gunpowder, for example, was developed by alchemists, who had experience of sulphur and saltpetre; and the word for poisoning (veneficium) also meant witchcraft until the seventeenth century, when the ability of plants to kill was no longer believed to be an occult power.

And there has always been a political dimension to magic — especially in Scotland, where witch-hunting was one of the few ways in which the Scottish government could impose its authority on local magnates. Nicola Sturgeon’s apology for the witch trials last week omitted to mention their political role in legitimising the Scottish state. In England, it was much easier to prosecute someone for “compassing and imagining” the death of the king under the Statute of Treason than for actually committing treason.

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But political magic was never just propaganda. Even in the twentieth century, the Anglican exorcist Gilbert Shaw was convinced that the General Strike was the result of Russian adepts projecting psychic forces at Britain to foment unrest and lead to Socialist revolution. Luckily, he was conveniently close to the ley line along which this psychic pressure travelled, and, by exorcising an ancient tumulus next to his church, was able to cut off this occult communication. A week later, the General Strike was over.

Father Shaw — like most Anglicans with an interest in the Occult, he was an Anglo-Catholic — quickly became the Church of England’s leading expert on combating black magic, and claimed, like Crowley and many others, that his preternatural assistance played its part in defeating Hitler. There was no officially approved magic resistance during the Second World War — and there hardly could be, the argument runs, since the Witchcraft Act of 1735 was not repealed until 1951 — but many modern Wiccans believe that there were unofficial rituals.

Gerald Gardner, the grandfather of modern Wicca, reports that he was initiated into a coven in the New Forest who performed a ritual on 1 August 1940 — Lammas Day — to prevent the Nazi high command invading. Or, rather, to prevent them wanting to invade: as he wrote, “The witches met, raised the great cone of power and directed the thought at Hitler’s brain: ‘You cannot come across the sea, You cannot cross the sea, Not able to come, Not Able To Come’…  I am not saying that they stopped Hitler. All I say is that I saw a very interesting ceremony performed with the intention of putting a certain idea in his mind, and this was repeated several times afterwards; and the fact was that Hitler never even tried to come”.

The account is corroborated by the occultist Louis Wilkinson, who claimed that some of the more elderly participants died as a result of the psychic energy they expended — while conducting the ritual naked, in the middle of the night, in England. Whatever the truth of the story, the New Forest coven is an important part of the founding myth of modern Wicca, and I have heard contemporary Wiccans vigorously maintain that it was this ceremony that foiled Operation Sealion.

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The hex against Putin, then, like the binding of Trump, is part of a long but hidden tradition. But there are differences. The Cone of Power has, according to Gardner’s account, been raised on three occasions: to prevent the Armada invading in 1588, Bonaparte in 1800 and Hitler in 1940. These rituals, as recounted by Gardner, concentrated on changing Hitler’s mind, or telling Bonaparte to think again. Even the spell against the Armada was about persuading the Spanish (“Go On, Go On, Not Able to Land”), although, since they had already embarked by the time the ritual was carried out (by Sir Francis Drake himself, according to Devonian folklore), it appeared to take effect by creating the storm that scattered the fleet.

Modern magic has given up on the idea of changing anyone’s mind. Like modern politics, the aim is not to persuade your opponent, not to influence his thoughts, but to bring ruin and destruction upon him, breaking his bones and casting him down into dust and ashes.

Some magical practitioners question the wisdom of this, and not just because of the Law of Threefold Return, the Wiccan principle that the energy you put out into the world will be thrice returned to you. More worrisome is the idea that Putin has his own protections in place. Aleksandr Dugin, the nationalist philosopher known as “Putin’s Brain”, is known to have an interest in the occult, dating back to his days editing Elementy. On its second issue, the magazine’s cover star was the goat-god Baphomet, who has an important role in Aleister Crowley’s cosmology. The fact that Russian troops entered Donetsk and Luhansk on 22.02.2022 does suggest that Putin is receiving a certain kind of advice.

Perhaps the most profitable line of attack is not against Putin himself, but against his soldiers. When young Russian soldiers entered Konotop — known from stories as a place where old women have occult powers — they were told by an elderly Ukrainian woman: “Here every second woman is a witch. Tomorrow you’ll no longer be able to get your dick to stand”. As Nicola Sturgeon did point out, a fear of witches is often a fear of women; and their words were enough to terrify any Russian man.

Truman was nobody’s idea of a great man of history. A small, trim man with neatly parted grey hair, his hazel eyes framed behind thick spectacles, he had a flat, Midwestern twang and a complete lack of stage presence. When Harry Truman walked into a room, nobody looked up. Even if you did notice him, you might mistake him for the man he had once been — not the President of the United States, but a Kansas City haberdasher whose store had gone bust after just two years. A little man, then. A modest man, with much to be modest about. As everybody knew, the S. literally stood for nothing.

What was Truman doing there? The short answer is that he had been extraordinarily lucky. After serving as a captain in the First World War, he had gone into politics, a Democratic party hack working for the corrupt Kansas City boss Tom Pendergast. But when, in the last year of the Second World War, Franklin D. Roosevelt ran out of potential vice presidents, he was persuaded to consider Truman as a compromise candidate. Roosevelt barely knew him — who did? — but he picked him anyway. Truman could barely believe it. He, Harry S. Truman, the farmer’s son from Independence, Missouri, Vice President of the United States!

Then fate took another twist. On 12 April 1945, with his forces fighting their way into Nazi Germany, Roosevelt dropped dead of a massive stroke. Suddenly, unbelievably, Truman was President. When he got the news — he was, naturally, having a drink with his old Senate pals — the colour drained from his cheeks. Immediately he went to see Roosevelt’s widow Eleanor and asked if there was anything he could do to help. Her response spoke volumes. “Is there anything we can do for you?” she said. “For you are the one in trouble now.”

That was two years ago. Now it was 12 March 1947, and the American political elite were looking up at him, and Truman was peering through his glasses at his typewritten text. His voice was as flat and characterless as ever, and as he launched into a detailed description of the political situation in divided, bleeding Greece, the soaring oratory of his charismatic predecessor seemed like ancient history. The haberdasher was in the house, and it was only a matter of time before people started snoring.

But they didn’t. For what Truman said that day was so electric, so momentous, that it arguably had more impact on history than almost any other speech by any other president since Abraham Lincoln. The United States, he told his listeners, was in a new world war — an undeclared war, not of armies but of ideologies. “At the present moment in world history”, he said, “nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life”. One was based on individual liberty, free speech and democratic elections. The other, Communism, relied upon “terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio; fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedoms”.

They all knew that. But what followed was the real surprise.

Truman wanted Congress to give $400 million immediately in aid to Greece and Turkey. It was essential, he said, that neither fell to Communism, and the United States must ensure that they didn’t. And he went further. This would not be a one-off; it must be a general rule. “I believe”, Truman said, “that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures. I believe that we must assist free peoples to work out their own destinies in their own way. I believe that our help should be primarily through economic and financial aid”.

It would be expensive, he admitted. But it was an “investment in world freedom and world peace” — the kind of investment that only the United States could afford. That was their historic challenge, and Harry Truman was not afraid to meet it.

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Kyiv will rise again

By Dominic Sandbrook

Today that speech is remembered as the genesis of the Truman Doctrine, when the United States committed itself to the defence of democracy against the advance of Communism. The usual word for this campaign, which never appears in the speech, is “containment”, and that sums it up pretty well. Truman had no intention of going to war against Stalin’s Soviet Union, and was careful to avoid any overtly military provocations. But he was in absolutely no doubt that there were such things as right and wrong; that Soviet Communism was wrong; and that it was his patriotic and moral duty to contain it.

You can probably guess where I’m heading with this. First, though, an illuminating historical side-note. The man who coined the word “containment” was an American diplomat called George F. Kennan, who had studied Russia’s language and history as a young man. In February 1946, Kennan, then deputy head of mission in Moscow, had sent a long telegram to Washington urging his bosses to ditch any idealistic assumptions about reaching a modus vivendi with Stalin.

“At the bottom of the Kremlin’s neurotic view of world affairs”, he argued, was a “traditional and instinctive Russian sense of insecurity”. And though Kennan took Stalin’s Marxism seriously, he thought it was mixed up with something else, something older, perhaps even darker. For in some ways, he wrote, Marxism was simply the “justification for the Soviet Union’s instinctive fear of the outside world, for the dictatorship without which they did not know how to rule, for cruelties they did not dare not to inflict, for sacrifice they felt bound to demand”.

What Kennan also recognised, though, was that for all Stalin’s purges and persecutions, even his imposition of puppet governments in the brutalised capitals of central and eastern Europe, the Americans could not just fight him. Even with their nuclear monopoly, they would probably incur hundreds of thousands of casualties as they tuned their guns on the Red Army. Europe would be utterly devastated; the total death toll would probably run into millions. There was right, and there was wrong; but doing the right thing was complicated.

So as Kennan argued in a subsequent article, the West really only had two options. They could sit back and let Stalin get away with it, playing the part of appeasers once again, and allowing him to erode democratic freedoms in one European country after another. Or they could draw a line and say: “This far, and no further”, and do all in their power to undermine those regimes that flew the red flag. Their strategy, wrote Kennan, “must be a long-term, patient but firm and vigilant containment of Russian expansive tendencies”. They would corral the Eastern monster and defend Western freedom by “a policy of firm containment, designed to confront the Russians with unalterable counter-force at every point where they show signs of encroaching upon the interests of a peaceful and stable world”.

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Putin has history on his side

By Dominic Sandbrook

As Kennan and Truman both knew, containment would take time. Not months, not years, but decades. There was nothing very romantic about it, nothing swashbuckling. It condemned millions of people to continue living under totalitarian rule. If you were 17 in 1947, and living in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia or East Germany, you would be very close to retirement when the Berlin Wall came down. You would have spent almost your entire adult working life under a system you probably despised, with Russian troops occupying your country. All that potential wasted; all those chances for travel and self-expression denied you; all those lies, all those betrayals. But you would still be alive — and with luck, you would see your grandchildren grow up in freedom. Those were the upsides.

So let’s turn to the present. With the headlines full of the atrocity at the Mariupol maternity hospital, the slaughter of Ukrainian civilians and the looming siege of Kyiv, as well as Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s rousing Churchillian rhetoric, it’s easy to dismiss containment as a kind of appeasement, an acceptance of defeat. Most of us would love to see Russia defeated, its troops streaming back home to launch a revolution and Vladimir Putin on trial in the Hague — just as most decent people in the late 1940s and early 1950s dreamed of seeing Stalin toppled and Communism overthrown from Trieste to the Baltic.

But in truth this feels depressingly unlikely. For the time being, the Putin regime seems entrenched. And of course Putin has something Stalin didn’t in the spring of 1947 — nuclear weapons. That’s why most Western politicians have ruled out a no-fly zone over western Ukraine. It’s entirely understandable that people think we should “do something”. But there’s no point in doing something if the firestorm kills the very people you were hoping to save.

Containment was precisely the kind of policy you would expect from a man who had run a gentlemen’s outfitters in Kansas City. But you can tell that story in two different ways. Yes, it was unglamorous, gradualist, boringly undramatic. Yes, there was nothing obviously heroic about it.

Yet at the same time it reflected a very Middle American confidence in the Western way of life. Like his British counterpart, Clement Attlee, Truman was a modest man, the incarnation of patriotic ordinariness. He believed, without the slightest shadow of doubt, that one day democratic capitalism would beat Communist repression. But he also knew it would take years of effort, and he had no intention of blowing up the world in the meantime.

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There’s part of me, I admit, that feels wretched in urging a policy of Cold War containment on the leaders of the Western world. Against the background of so much Ukrainian suffering, the thought of Vladimir Putin’s regime enduring for years — and not just surviving but glorying in slaughter — seems almost intolerable. But what are the alternatives? Appeasement, as recommended by certain so-called realist professors of international relations, strikes me as not merely morally contemptible but stupidly self-defeating. As for NATO intervention, how many Ukrainians would die in even the most limited nuclear exchange? Millions? Tens of millions?

Truman didn’t live to see the success of his policy. In very basic terms, though, containment underpinned the Western world for the next 40 years. The Cold War was a hard slog, involving a lot of false steps as well as some dreadful mistakes. But it worked. That was the important thing. I sometimes read that we should never return to the Cold War. But why not? It was the right thing to do, and the right side won.

And remember: Soviet Communism was a much more formidable adversary than Putinism. The latter offers nothing but a nihilistic celebration of warmongering nationalism, but Communism held out the promise of a better world, illusory as that was. Containment beat it, all the same.

I think it will beat Putin, too, given time. It may take years of unrelenting political, economic and cultural pressure, but we should have no doubt about the outcome. The little man from Missouri has already beaten Lenin and Stalin. Even in death, he can wipe the floor with Vladimir Putin.

It is thought that 600,000 people have fled Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city (population 1.4 million). Mariupol no longer has enough electricity, water, food or medicine for its population of less than half a million. Children are dying of dehydration. Russia has bombed the largest nuclear reactor in Europe and now controls a further two power plants. Two days ago, Chernobyl was shut off from the grid and, with that, the IAEA monitoring systems. The spectre of nuclear disaster hovers.

The Ukrainian Armed Forces and Civilian Territorial Defense have fought with immense courage and skill to defend their homeland. Putin thought Ukrainians would welcome his invaders with cheers. He thought he’d be sitting in Kyiv after 72 hours. He was wrong. So now comes the “scorched earth” strategy. Just as they did in Chechnya and Syria, Russian forces are destroying everything in their path, with no regard for human life. Unless something changes, Kyiv will become the next Aleppo.

Can the West save Ukraine? Make no mistake: we are helping. Putin is paying a military cost he didn’t expect largely thanks to the bravery of Ukrainians, but it’s bravery made possible by the incessant flow of military equipment and training from Europe and the US and, perhaps above all, the UK. But the Russian convoys rumble inexorably on. Ukrainians continue to die. More is needed. The question is: what?

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“I think we have been too slow and too selective,” says Natalie Jaresko, who served as Ukraine’s Minister of Finance from 2014-2016, soon after Russia first invaded, and who was responsible for renegotiating Ukraine’s debt following the Maidan Revolution. “People in Ukraine are dying… More sanctions need to be rolled out with immediate effect.” And they must be broadly applied to both state-owned entities and political leaders — in Belarus as well as Russia.

“They must also comprehensively target Russia’s economic elite and their families,” she continues. “A good place to start would be the top 100 richest Russians as ranked by Forbes. We must put as much pressure as possible on Russia’s elite to force Putin to end this unprovoked slaughter of Ukrainians.”

The West’s financial sanctions are biting. The Central Bank of Russia (CBR) has already lost access to around two thirds of its reserves, so it’s having a hard time defending the rapidly devaluing ruble. Russians can no longer access hard currency as a result. The removal of certain Russian institutions from the SWIFT payments systems, and the exit of American Express, Mastercard and Visa from the country, are also pummelling the Russian banking system. But Putin continues, nonetheless.

More needs to be done, says Jaresko. We could delist all Russian public entities from our stock markets,  We could divest public pension funds from Russia. We could require all publicly-listed companies to report on any Russia-related activity. “We need to sanction all state-owned banks, not select banks, immediately; and we need to exclude all Russian banks from the SWIFT system”, she tells me.

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Jaresko speaks of hammering Putin financially, but there’s more than one way to pile on the pressure. Yuriy Vitrenko, Ukraine’s former Minister of Energy and the CEO of Naftogaz, Ukraine’s state gas supplier, sees energy as the way to squeeze Russia. When I call him, I’m told he’s in “a bunker somewhere in Kyiv with a Kalashnikov nearby”. Perhaps not meant to be taken absolutely literally, the comment points to a wider truth: Ukraine’s entire governing infrastructure is now more or less underground.

“We are in charge on securing the supply of gas to Ukraine,” he tells me. “Probably 90% of Ukraine households use it for heating, and we still have minus temperatures at night. If there’s no gas, then it’s a national tragedy. The Russians are deliberately targeting coal supplies and of course they are attacking nuclear power plants — there’s lot of pressure on the energy system.”

But Vitrenko understands that Putin, too, is vulnerable when it comes to energy. Russia is a malignant petrostate that doles out gas to a gasping Europe. This is both its major strength, and a weakness. If you can hit Russia here, you hit it hard.

Vitrenko wants concrete steps to be taken. The first is to set up a mechanism by which money from the sale of oil and gas is put into a dedicated escrow account accessible to the Kremlin only when it withdraws from Ukraine. It’s a system used in dealings with Iran, and Vitrenko believes that Moscow is now more of a rogue state than Tehran.

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But this is not enough. In the medium term, he says, the West needs to do everything it can to halt its reliance on Russian gas and oil. “The US will have to up its output as well as Norway, while Europe needs to start switching to biogas,” he says. Critically, he also wants to see a temporary switch to coal until “we get rid of our dependency or get additional volumes of gas that are not from countries invading other countries”.

I point out that there might be criticism of the environmental impact of reverting to coal. “Trust me, the environmental damage of war is far greater than that of coal,” he says. “But we need to understand that the dependence problem we have is not just about being dependent on fossils fuels but also on Rogue regimes.”

Vitrenko recognises that the initial reaction from the West has been strong, and that it surprised the Kremlin, but he also emphasises that it must last. “It is important that western leaders show that they will not backtrack”, he tells me. “We need to change the calculus of Putin and those around him. It’s clear that they expected a softer reaction from the West, but unless it’s maintained they will be able to find ways around it.”

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Svitlana Zalishchuk, a former MP who now works with Vitrenko, is equally blunt. “Putin is not going to stop,” she says. “He is trapped by his own bad decision-making, if he loses the war in Ukraine, he’s dead politically — he won’t be the president of Russia anymore. He’ll continue so we must, too.

“It’s true people are always afraid of escalation, about starting World War III, but it has already started… We allowed his disinformation, his election interference, his killing of own opposition, the imprisonment of Navalny. We didn’t respond to any of that that which is why invasion came. But now we’re still afraid of escalation.”

Her words shame the West. In 2001 and 2003, we promised to liberate Iraqis and Afghans from tyranny and instead eventually abandoned them to it. In 1994, under the Budapest Memorandum, we promised Ukraine that if it gave up the nuclear weapons on its territory after the fall of the USSR, we would guarantee that it didn’t face aggression from the UK, the US or, critically, Russia. But when Russian troops marched into Crimea and then eastern Ukraine, we looked away. We did nothing.

Betrayal, in the movies, is crystal clear. But in reality, few of us are Benedict Arnold or Kim Philby or Ephialtes. We tend to betray not in black and white but in a thousand shades of grey. The averted gaze, the shuffle across the street, the decision to ignore what is plain to all.

This is what we have done to Ukraine and to so many allies over the last 20 years. Right now, the Kremlin is suffering, but it will calculate that in a month or two — when the news cycle has moved on — things may be different. Will bank accounts quietly reopen, along with the Moscow branches of Zara and McDonald’s? We need people to buy our overpriced houses, and pay our libel lawyers and fork out for our school fees.

But we cannot allow it to happen again. If not for Ukraine’s sake, then for ours. As Jaresko concludes, “Ukraine’s survival is the world’s only guarantee that this conflict does not expand into Europe and the wider world. The actions we take now will be worth any short-term cost. Global peace and freedom are at stake.”

After all, this war is nothing less than a godsend for Western elites. Domestically, it is a well-known fact that periods of international crisis or war tend to bolster the popularity of a country’s government or political leaders (the rally-around-the-flag effect) — especially if the country in question doesn’t actually have boots on the ground, and therefore coffins returning home, in which case it’s all gain and no pain.

You might remember the eerily prescient 1997 satire Wag the Dog, in which the US president enlists the help of a Hollywood producer to fabricate a fictional war in Albania to distract voters from a sex scandal in which he’s involved. Every major Western leader could do with a similar booster shot. Joe Biden, Boris Johnson, Emmanuel Macron, and Justin Trudeau have all been performing abysmally in the polls, due in no small part to their disastrous (if not outright authoritarian) handling of the pandemic and its social and economic fallout.

The latest data shows that the rally-around-the-flag effect is already working its magic: approval ratings for all Western leaders have registered a significant bounce since the beginning of the war. Biden has enjoyed the best makeover of all, going overnight from Sleepy Joe — the embarrassing grandad known for farting at parties — to “leader of the free world”, as he self-styled himself in his State of the Union address last week.

But there’s more at play here than a few percentage points in the polls. On a deeper level, we seem to have entered a particularly decadent stage of Western capitalism. Today, ruling elites are increasingly unable to generate societal consensus or hegemony in either material or ideological terms — due to neoliberalism’s innate tendency towards ever-growing levels of capital concentration and its disdain for democratic participation and empowerment — and are therefore forced to rely on repressive and militaristic measures in order to remain in power and stifle any challenges to their authority.

Hence their need for a more or less permanent state of crisis or emergency capable of justifying such measures. Which might help explain why the West seems to have been mired in a perennial state of “crisis” for much of the past 20 years: the post-9/11 global terrorism crisis, the post-2008 financial-economic crisis, the pandemic crisis and now, just as the latter seemed to be waning, the military crisis in Ukraine. All this against the background of a worsening climate and ecological crisis. Indeed, “crisis” no longer represents a deviation from the norm; it is the norm, the default starting point for all politics in the West.

In this sense, the framing of Covid as a “war” — the ultimate state of exception — was no accident. But nothing beats a real war when it comes to rallying people around the status quo. This moment is bound to exacerbate the worrying trends that have emerged during the pandemic: the consolidation of the media, the blatant resort to crude propaganda, the shutting down of any meaningful form of public debate, the “cancelling” of dissenting voices, and the demonisation and criminalisation of whomever happens to be the public enemy of the moment — yesterday the unvaccinated, today the “pro-Russians”.

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At the international level, the weaponisation of the suffering of the Ukrainians might prove even more beneficial to Western elites. Their order isn’t merely in an internal crisis but externally as well. It’s threatened by the rise of new regional powers — first and foremost China but to some extent Russia as well. In the US, they still struggle to accept that the “unipolar moment” is over. Our world is multipolar, whether the State Department in Washington likes it or not. The crisis in Ukraine is in many ways a result of this collective denial, of the West’s inability to conceive a new order, and of its foolish dream of somehow turning the clock back to the Nineties.

By meddling in Eastern Europe, and ignoring Moscow’s security interests, the West invited conflict in Ukraine. It’s worth noting that the US is now adopting against China the same strategy of military encirclement that ended up triggering Putin. When a similar crisis breaks out with China at some point down the road nobody should be surprised.

Events in Ukraine make such a conflict increasingly probable. And that is because they offer the West and its military-industrial apparatuses the perfect excuse to whip up a new Cold War and militarise Western foreign policy, under the guise of defending the “free world” from a new Russo-Chinese Evil Empire. It also helps that billions of dollars are waiting to be made in the process. Indeed, arms manufacturers are licking their lips at the prospect.

The consequences for Europe will be profound. From the perspective of the US, it prevents the strengthening of Russian-European relations and the rise of a Eurasian geopolitical reality. It allows the US to reassert its hegemony over Europe, in particular Germany. Indeed, several commentators have argued that the crisis in Ukraine was partially manufactured by the US in order to torpedo the controversial Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline.

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That pipeline was vehemently opposed by every element of the US establishment, from Joe Biden to Donald Trump. It’s no secret that thanks to the “shale revolution” the US is now a direct competitor of Russia in the field of natural gas exports. But even more importantly, the US feared that stronger, friendlier relations between Germany — and with it the rest of the EU — and Russia would have chipped away at Europe’s reliance on the United States’ security umbrella.

Well, as a result of recent events, the pipeline has been shelved once and for all. In fact, the talk in Europe is how to “decouple” once and for all from Russian gas (that’s if Putin doesn’t decide to turn off the tap beforehand). This is a double win for the US. Europe is likely to pivot towards the US for its gas imports as relations with Russia grow colder. And tensions with Russia have already boosted European support for Nato, which had become lukewarm in recent years. The result: the US maintains its military stranglehold over Europe.

It’s worth remembering that not too long ago Macron diagnosed Nato as being “braindead” and called for Europe to build its own common defence system. Both France and Germany reacted with the diplomatic equivalent of disgust to the new security pact between Australia, the US and the UK (AUKUS). That’s a thing of the past: now European leaders are once again lining up to pledge their unconditional allegiance to Nato — and to bolster their military spending and thus their contribution to the Alliance.

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Consider Germany’s foreign policy pivot — the announcement that it will be increasing its military spending to over 2% of its GDP in direct response to the situation in Ukraine. Sweden and Finland have reportedly given consideration to joining Nato; Switzerland is ending its neutral status and joining the EU’s sanctions on Russian assets. Even Ireland, neutral for a century, is considering joining Nato. Increased military spending in Europe means more US military hardware entering the continent. Moreover, the crisis along Europe’s eastern flank, should it be prolonged, will inevitably hamper trade relations with China. For America the geopolitical view looks cloudless.

The EU’s political autonomy will be reduced, to the extent that military considerations — determined in Washington — will trump other concerns. It will now be far harder for the EU to punish countries like Poland and Hungary for alleged deficiencies in their “rule of law” given their strategic importance for Nato. As Wolfgang Streeck writes: “In short, as Western Europe is returned to “the West”, the EU is reduced to a geoeconomic utility for Nato, aka the United States. The events around Ukraine are making it clearer than ever that for the US, the EU is essentially a source of economic and political regulation for states needed to help “the West” encircle Russia on its Western flank… The implication for von der Leyen and her crowd is to confirm their subordinate status”.

That’s not to say that the crisis is not an opportunity for EU elites as well. It offers them a chance, at last, to push ahead with plans for a “common defence policy”, something Macron has been advocating for a long time. The issue had been contentious, both in Washington — where it was feared that a militarily independent Europe would be less reliant on the US – and in Berlin, which was sceptical of helping France use the EU as a cover for its global ambitions. Public opinion in Europe never embraced the idea.

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However, the conflict in Ukraine has swept away any doubts. For the first time ever, the EU is supporting member states as they supply military equipment to embattled Kyiv, mobilising €500 million under the European Peace Facility. This is a classic example of the EU’s long standing integration-through-crisis strategy: exploiting moments of public fear and disorientation to surreptitiously deepen an integration process that lacks popular support.

From the US perspective, such plans don’t represent a direct threat at the moment, so long as Europe’s military machine remains under the effective command of Nato. Whether they will create transatlantic tensions down the road remains to be seen. For the peoples of Europe, neither option is particularly appealing. Either a European army under the aegis of the US security establishment or one under the aegis of France and a remilitarised Germany? Whatever happens, arming the EU — an institution as undemocratic and oligarchic as they come — remains a bad idea. But war is a racket, as US Marine Corps Major General Smedley D. Butler famously claimed, and no one wants to be left out.

The first is the war on social media: in this war, a combination of genuine and impressive Ukrainian tactical successes and inspiring but self-evidently dubious propaganda stories meld into a narrative of a shambolic Russian army falling apart after failing to seize Kyiv on the first day of war and sinking into a quagmire it cannot win. Boosted by social media influencers, some online veterans of earlier narrative wars, this is clearly the dominant framework, a heroic David and Goliath story emotionally resonant to external well-wishers.

And then there’s the second war, the one on the ground. Every day, new maps are released by professional and amateur military analysts which make grim reading for Ukraine’s supporters. In the south and in the east, a great pincer is slowly grinding forward to surround the bulk of Ukraine’s troops deployed along the line of contact against separatist (that is, pro-Russian Ukrainian) forces. If these Ukrainian troops do not withdraw soon, and form a new defensive line further to the northwest, they will be encircled, starved of supplies and rendered ineffective. In smaller pockets, like the defenders of Mariupol, they will simply be destroyed by artillery. 

In the northeast, Russian troops have bypassed the near-besieged city of Kharkiv, nearly encircled the strategic city of Chernihiv, and are moving in force on Kyiv’s eastern suburbs. Around a week ago, the first reconnaissance units were seen outside the satellite town of Brovary. Now they have been reinforced with armoured battalion tactical groups (BTGs) and artillery units, which have begun shelling the area around Kyiv’s Boryspil international airport, presumably to soften it up before continuing to tighten their noose around the city.

Both the optimistic and pessimistic interpretations — viewed from a Ukrainian standpoint — are correct, just as both reveal only partial truths. The brave and dogged Ukrainian resistance has definitely caused the Russians greater losses than they were expecting, at a scale unimaginable to far smaller Western European armies, and has surely slowed their advance. The Russians have pursued often mystifying courses of action, barely using their overwhelming air force, and indeed deploying assets they are known to possess like guided munitions and armed drones at a scale far below that seen in the distinctly less existential Syria conflict. 

If the evidence of destroyed and abandoned tanks shown online is any guide, they have preferred to use their older armour rather than their first-line T-90 tanks as the bedrock of their attacking force, perhaps because they are reserving their most modern equipment for a potential military escalation with Nato. On a human level, Russian troops have displayed poor tactical awareness, allowing their convoys to be ambushed by highly-motivated Ukrainian regular and irregular forces, and poor morale, surrendering en masse or simply abandoning their vehicles to capture and destruction and themselves to international derision. 

And yet, every evening the map updates are published, and the Russians are still moving forward and pressing dangerously closer to their objectives. It is undeniable that they are taking heavy punishment, and may not be able to sustain this tempo of movement or of losses for many weeks longer; but, then, it seems possible that this phase of the war will be over by then. We should also remember that a Ukrainian-dominated media campaign does not provide a clear sense of the condition of the Ukrainian army after two weeks of war: it too has been taking heavy losses, and its losses are significantly harder to replace. So while it is of course foolish to pronounce with any great certainty about the outcome of a war that is still less than two weeks old, there are perhaps tentative reasons to think that a negotiated settlement may be closer than it looks from outside.

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If the interpretation is correct that Putin expected his Russian troops to be welcomed by Ukrainian civilians, or at least tacitly acquiesced to, then he has been dramatically shown otherwise. The scale of Ukrainian resistance has been revelatory, perhaps to Ukrainians as much as to Putin, uniting even previously opposed factions in what is little short of a Ukrainian war of independence. A new legend, one of the type essential in the formation and consolidation of any new nation state, has been born, and has won the Ukrainians the admiration of much of the world. Ukrainian regular troops and newly-enlisted Territorial Defence units have fought doggedly and courageously to blunt the Russian advance. Similarly, Ukrainian civilians (perhaps sensing that the Russian military police occupying them will not clamp down too hard on them at this stage), have begun a growing campaign of public protests against Russian occupation. 

Watching all this, Putin must surely sense that even if a narrow military victory is visibly in grasp, the result will only be a political defeat. Ukraine will not happily re-enter the Russian World of his dreams in these circumstances. Even previously sympathetic or ambivalent Russian-speakers in cities like Kharkiv have been lost to Putin by their horrific experience of bombardment.

Instead, the invasion has deepened the common sense of Ukrainian nationhood, as well as deepening its emotional and political enmeshment with the rest of Europe. It is difficult to imagine that, even if they should seize the capital and decapitate the government, the Russians will find occupation an easy or bloodless task. Indeed, the opposite may be true: it is likely the case that the Russians will need to employ the moral and political capital Zelensky has acquired over the course of the conflict in selling a deal to his domestic audience. 

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If we assume that it is preferable for both sides to avoid the destruction of Kyiv, and the death of thousands on each side during its storming that an assault would entail, then the moment Kyiv is encircled would be a logical moment of pause lending itself to a ceasefire (another such circumstance might be the encircling of tens of thousands of Ukraine’s best troops in the East, but the isolation of Kyiv will likely happen sooner). The Russians and Ukrainians are already negotiating, and Zelensky has at the time of writing begun to hint that the status of the Crimea and Donbas are up for negotiation, and that Nato membership seems unachievable for now: all Russian political goals and not far from the terms Russia initially demanded to stave off an invasion. It would be a difficult domestic sell for Zelensky, after so many tactical victories against overwhelming odds and after forging such a fever pitch of unity against the invader, to sign away what would amount almost to a surrender, but the no-fly zone discourse perhaps points at one way he might.

The Nato summit last week at which the Western alliance emphasised that there would be no no-fly zone created, for risk of escalating into a greater European war, was a very public nudge to the Ukrainians to negotiate in earnest. There simply will be no Nato deus ex machina to dismantle Russia’s superiority in the air or on the ground. Equally, Zelensky’s increasing tendency to lambast the West for not providing enough military support (despite Nato doing everything but engage in open war against Russia on Ukraine’s behalf) can perhaps be setting up the conditions under which he can regretfully sign away control of Crimea and the Donbas and blame it on faithless external patrons. Both regions were probably already gone for good, in any case. It would be a stab-in-the-back myth of sorts, perhaps with unintended consequences down the line, but immediately preferable to a continuance of the war into a second, bloodier phase; these, though, are decisions for Ukrainians to make.

For the Nato alliance, there are two opposing paths to choose between. One strategy would be to force Putin to deal with a long Ukrainian insurgency which would bleed Russia, distracting it to a point where it would pose less of a threat to Nato’s eastern flank. To this end, flooding the country with portable anti-tank weapons and anti-aircraft missiles would, as well as being support for the Ukrainian cause, weaken Russia just as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan weakened America — most probably more so. Yet against this viewpoint, we can also see that prolonging the war in Ukraine over years or decades would, like the war in Syria, be devastating for the country, for its historic cities and for its people. Two million refugees have already fled for Europe in the war’s first fortnight, and though they are more welcome in Central Europe than Middle Eastern refugees, millions more would be a significant challenge to their hosting nations. 

A prolonged insurgency, organised around a rump Ukrainian state in the country’s nationalist western heartland, might not win support for long from neighbouring European states. The prospect of a European Syria or Afghanistan in Galicia and Transcarpathia, where well-armed militia groups who are already a concern would challenge the authority of a weakened, and perhaps exiled Ukrainian administration, from where untraced weapons would likely leak back into the European Union, and along whose borders Nato would daily run the risk of small military incidents with Russia escalating out of control, is not an appealing one to European leaders.

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For Ukraine, Russia and the Nato alliance, the next week or so may present a slim opportunity for a ceasefire and de-escalation, introduced by a sudden tilt of the scales in Russia’s favour, such as the encirclement of Kyiv. All sides involved have a clearer appreciation of the facts on the ground than any of us trying to parse the outcome of the war from glimpses of clashes, losses and troop movements on social media’s restricted window. Nato was right to provide Ukraine with the munitions that have made the Russian advance so costly — and which should give Putin pause before ordering the assault on Kyiv. These munitions have enabled the Ukrainians to negotiate from a position of relative strength: yet once Kyiv is besieged, the Ukrainian position will weaken with each passing day.

Nato’s insistence there will be no no-fly zone also puts the already low prospect of a Ukrainian military victory far beyond reach. The alliance has gone almost as far as it can go in supporting Ukraine, and everyone involved knows it. Negotiating a painful peace deal may seem all stick and no carrot for the Ukrainians, who have fought hard and well. The EU should hold firm in insisting on some closer and more generous form of relationship, including membership candidacy status, with postwar Ukraine. 

The situation for Russia, though better than it may seem online, is worse for Putin than he would wish. Economically and diplomatically isolated, Russia is now rapidly approaching a narrow military victory on the ground, beyond which a bloody and costly war of occupation appears to stretch into the future. If Putin entered the war with more expansive dreams, he must surely realise they are now beyond his reach.

A golden bridge away from war may now be forming, very soon and for a very short period of time. If those involved do not take it, it is very likely they will all soon wish they had.

You can see where they got the idea. Putin is clearly invested in portraying himself as a literal strongman. He’s posed shirtless, riding horses and doing judo on camera; there have been photo shoots with tigers and bears. He’s spent years building an image of strength and daring, both as a person and as a leader. (Meanwhile his new nemesis Zelensky became an overnight heartthrob when Twitter discovered that he appeared on the Ukrainian equivalent of Strictly Come Dancing in a hot pink suit.)

But using the very Western, very modern framework of identity politics to discuss deep-rooted geopolitical tensions is shockingly irresponsible. The Right often condemns such behaviour, accusing the Left of being decadent or frivolous. And they’ve got a point.

Identity politics have become hegemonic; any news story that can be viewed through their lens seems instantly worthier of our attention. A debate about whether a legal decision or a politician’s speech has racist or sexist implications will generally get more traction than whether it contributes to income inequality or environmental degradation. And so its vocabulary has been trotted out to convince people that they need to take the conflict in Ukraine seriously — more seriously, for whatever reason, than the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan or the 3 million people displaced by conflict in Yemen (which only makes headlines when Angelina Jolie gets involved). Accusing Putin of “toxic masculinity” reels in people who support women’s and queer rights, which have been truncated in Russia, in the same way that the hashtag  #ukraineisgeorgefloyd reels in those whose primary concern is racial justice.

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That’s not to say that the concept of “toxic masculinity” is empty. It emerged from feminism as a shorthand for the idea that certain masculine traits once heralded as beneficial — chivalry, strength, competitiveness — could be potentially oppressive, especially when they metastasise into violent behaviour against women and other vulnerable communities. And it can be useful in critiquing what we look for in a national leader — a role that has typically been filled by men. Force and self-assuredness have previously been seen as desirable; asking whether they are “toxic” allows us to see how these qualities can shade toward authoritarianism. It can also help us see that qualities once associated with weakness — eagerness to compromise and maintain peace — are in many ways beneficial.

The focus on identity politics more broadly has also highlighted previously under-examined aspects of authoritarianism, like the fact that it is often disproportionately harmful to women and the LGBT community. When a state turns repressive toward gay rights or reproductive rights — either through restricting access to abortion or by forced sterilisation — it can indicate a dangerous turn. Authoritarian governments often try to control rigid gender roles and demonise “deviant” sexual behaviours.

Still, a focus on identity politics can crowd out other criticisms. And it can also be used to shut down criticisms completely. It is tempting to see a government that ostensibly protects women and other marginalised communities as ethically “good”. But it’s common for governments that have faced accusations of corruption or wrongdoing to fight back with symbolic gestures toward these communities.

The Right-wing Colombian administration, headed by President Iván Duque, has faced a year of street protests for its economic reforms and police brutality. It recently decriminalised abortion up to the 24th week of pregnancy: a huge victory for women’s rights groups. Sarah Schulman has documented the way Israel has used its progressive queer rights policies to shore up its international reputation after it was damaged by its treatment of Palestinians — an act she calls “pinkwashing”.

And Israel, she points out, is hardly the only nation to use identity politics to cloak its less progressive reforms. The United States celebrated gay marriage while conducting drone warfare in Yemen; it called the appointment of Ruth Bader Ginsburg a feminist triumph while passing legislation removing social welfare programmes for mothers and children.

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Part of the problem is that toxic masculinity is squishy language, used to describe everything from war crimes to taking up too much space on the subway. There have been several high-profile cases where a corrupt or otherwise objectionable politician has been attacked for exhibiting toxic masculinity — while his other, arguably worse decisions went unpunished or unacknowledged. The debate over Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court mostly turned on one accusation of sexual wrongdoing decades ago against one woman; but it was his “toxic masculinity” that led many to believe he was not fit for the powerful position he now holds, whether or not he was guilty. This line of argument overtook any other objections one might have about him occupying a seat on the highest court in the land: his participation in the George W. Bush administration’s torture programme, for example.

A similar problem arose with New York state governor Andrew Cuomo, who ultimately had to step down because of allegations of unwanted touching. He maintains that even if his behaviour was inappropriate at times, it was never criminal — further proof of his toxic masculinity, some feminists would argue. But in all of this his role in the New York’s unnecessarily catastrophic pandemic is ignored. Obviously sexual assault and the violation of interpersonal boundaries doesn’t reflect well on a person’s character, but Cuomo was terrible for all the New Yorkers who voted him in, not just the women who worked for him.

But clearly the US is not ready to confront its Covid failures — the confused messaging, the crumbling public health system, the lack of compensation for job loss, the massive fraud that was committed via its Paycheck Protection Program. These things led to unnecessary suffering and death. Similarly, it’s worth wondering whether, had Kavanaugh not been accused of sexual assault, his other transgressions would’ve gone unconfronted. There would have had to be a widespread conversation about the torture and unjust imprisonment of those designated enemies during the war on terror. But the media, the justice system, and politicians of both parties supported these ethical transgressions. And we still can’t seem to close our Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp.

And now that Cuomo is trying to stage a comeback, based on the image of a reformed man (reformed for his misogyny, not for his pandemic policies), we should pay attention to the way “toxic masculinity” can be a gift to the men accused of it, because it downplays their other crimes. As useful as the accusation of “toxic masculinity” can be as a political weapon, it can also have a nasty rebound effect.

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Critics often suggest that identity politics have created brain rot in the West. Lionel Shriver wrote in The Spectator that Putin felt free to invade Ukraine because we’ve gone soft: “Decolonisations, contextualisations, gender-neutralisations … — it’s all a load of onanistic, diversionary crap, and the West having shoved its head up its backside is one reason that Putin feels free to do whatever he likes. We’re not scary, because we’ve made ourselves ridiculous.” Ben Shapiro made a similar accusation on Twitter, blaming Russia’s invasion on “The West” being obsessed with “exploding the gender binary”.

But they, too, are trapped in this conversation about identity politics, even if in an adversarial mode. They can’t stop referring everything, even serious geopolitical matters, back to a battle about pronouns and racial discrimination.

Of course, they’re right to point out that our conversation about Ukraine is blinkered. Like the culture war, this war is framed as a battle between good and evil, and this simplification allows us to ignore the fact that it has roots in centuries-old discussions of territory and autonomy. It’s about the meaning of nationhood, which is not always straightforward.

If we faced that, we’d also be forced face our own hypocrisy, as nations that feel free to violate airspace whenever it suits us. If we weren’t distracting ourselves with condemning the insecurities of one dictator, we might consider that our democratic countries, too, have let economic concerns drive international policy. We have invaded sovereign nations. We have killed civilians.

Or perhaps we’d find another easy answer, to help us ignore awkward questions.

In the late 2000s, we drifting twenty somethings took our freedom for granted. You might have a friend doing something unclear in Shanghai. Somebody else appeared to be rather bored learning Arabic in Aleppo. You could go to any of these places. Never realising we were living in a low-key golden era: a time when things were more or less open and alright. 

It felt so easy. We went so casually to these places. Now, never again will we spend long afternoons smoking in the French Institute moaning how dull it is in Damascus. Or get drunk in the hutongs by the Drum Tower in Beijing talking big money dreams and see Hong Kong for the first time and think — I could live here forever. We might go back there, someday, and stroll, like we did, through Aleksandrovsky Sad. But never will the ground feel solid beneath our feet.

Because that Moscow I knew — nocturnal, daring, drunk — has finally been destroyed completely. Since we watched him — there’s only been one “him” in Moscow for a very long time — declare “a special military operation”  at 5:45 in the morning. Half of those characters I used to drink with were all WhatsApping in shock: He’s actually done it. Now we are watching a map turn from one country’s colours to another. It’s so horrifyingly simple. It’s happened so many times. And even tweeting that what he’s doing in Ukraine is a war could mean fifteen years in prison. But then: even with all those MAs in Russian Studies we couldn’t conceive of it.

Minute by minute the collapse of Russian capitalism is coming through in Telegram alerts. Apple leaves Russia, Netflix suspends operations, so has Louis Vuitton, brand after brand after brand pulling out until, even though my job is to analyse this stuff, I can barely make sense of the sanctions and capital controls that have cut Russia off from the world. And somehow I’ve ended up at a think-tank Kremlin labelled an “undesirable organisation” and that means I can’t even phone half the people I want to because I’m nervous what it might mean for them. Russia has gone through the looking glass and I can only see my time there like Stefan Zweig. A world of yesterday. 

Now, a decade of obsessions make sense. Vladikavkaz. Vladivostok. I would look at these places on that incredible map and know I had to get there. I’ve often wondered why I let that emotion carry me for so long but only now, belatedly, do I realise I was running out of time. I kept on going back to this spot in the Urals, pulled by some force, shuttling on the platskart wagon onwards to Siberia, to stop at this monument, the obelisk on the Europe-Asia border.

I kept wanting to stand there, each time I went east, at this point in the forests. Almost like a premonition. I’d read a story (I didn’t even care whether or not it was true) in a history book that grabbed me. It was about the Decembrists, those officers, exposed to Europe and the enlightenment, in the afterglow of the Napoleonic War, who rose up in St Petersburg for something like a constitutional monarchy. It was a moment Russia could have turned — who knows who she would have been had they succeeded — but of course, she didn’t. And they were exiled, so many of them with everything they had to give, to Siberia. They had stopped here: by the cross on the continental border and wept. Knowing they would never see Europe again. 

Now people can barely even get there. Friends are booking flights to Tashkent. The FSB are interrogating them at the border. Others are panicking; there are hardly any flights left: they’re all booked up, everything’s grounded, sanctions have closed allied airspace in every direction. And these are same people, the same generation, who only ten years ago, were marching happily through Moscow, raising money and fighting corruption, only to dash their heads, just as the Decembrists had, when it frightened Him, when it enraged Him, when He turned out not to be this pathetic topless clown — he was Gollum in all of the memes — but truly a beast. Those were the protests that set it in motion: the squeezing of freedom, the arrests, the filetting of journalists, until now we have this.

Why did I refuse to see it at the Tretyakov Gallery? The whole of Russian history is laid out in wall-sized gold rimmed portraits of autocrats: Nicholas I to Joseph Stalin. Each saying: there is something both very fragile but very durable about repression in this state. Something undying about the spooling “organs” as you say in Russian: security forces with shifting names like the Cheka, NKVD, KGB — who have always supported these tyrants, more or less, since they were founded as the Oprichniki of Ivan the Terrible for the task. Men just like him.     

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Millennials were Putin’s Decembrists. Back in 2011, young Moscow crackled with a kind of giddy excitement that it was happening — that this generation, if it just tweeted, if it just Facebooked and posted enough — could topple Him. This energy that youth, technology, the world as it was and was becoming — would simply prevail. Because who was He really? Just some squinting little bureaucrat in a pinch. Alexei Navalny, he looked so young, he was far away from prison, yelling at the big protest on Prospekt Sakharova, flanked by liberal celebrities screaming: “Rossiya Budet Svobodna” — Russia will be Free. I believed him. 

What is Russia’s future? I must have asked everyone, every EU think-tanker, every sallow faced-Western diplomat I met in Moscow the same question. Like it was the only one that mattered. The answers came in a hundred and one theories, not one of them, it pains me to say, as mad and dark and pornographic as where we are now in Ukraine. I was swamped with academic gibberish such as “competitive authoritarianism” or “mimetic institutions”. They didn’t say that Napoleon is always with us, that in every generation, there’s a leader who has grabbed such control over his society, whose mind is so set on glory, he has to invade somewhere. Like it’s a role coded into the human species in some way we’ll never understand.

Instead, I was told Russia was a “BRIC” or a “normal middle income country” and now all I see is the absolute intellectual poverty of looking at things only in data sets. We should have listened to the one thing — in that language of Fyodor Dostoevsky — that Russian culture has always revered as holding that gift of vision. That is to the prophetic power of art. 

The writer Vladimir Sorokin, with his long, flowing grey hair, was one of the first people who “knew”. He was woken up one morning to be told, His creepy but still little comic youth movement, were chucking his books into a giant toilet. One placed right outside the Bolshoi Theatre. Then they started harassing him. A strange woman came to his house saying she’d got an order to fit his windows with prison bars. The doorbell rang and there was a sack of his books: each stamped porn. Then the prosecutor called. They’d opened a case against him, this satirical novelist, who’d written these weird, funny scenes, about a Stalin clone fucking a Khrushchev one — for pornography. 

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Then something came over him like a fugue state. He got in the car, with his wife, and they drove north, out of Moscow, out of Russia, until they were in Estonia, in the woods. And then after that he wrote. It was like a trance. Like he was vomiting bile. It had taken him five years to write a novel and this one had come in one month. Published in 2006. 

I read it around then on one of those trains, The Day Of The Oprichnik, those swamps and forests, flashing past on a visa run: my mind half seeing tanks that had been there in the second war world between the birch trees. In this book, The Tsar, at last, has been restored. The country walled off behind a Great Russian Wall: only pipelines sticking out of it. It’s this latter-day Opritchnik’s hours: this fured agent hard at work murdering a boyar, gang raping his wife, then visiting a clairvoyant in the name of The Tsar. One day in 2028. But it’s a fake Empire: utterly dependent on China. Their characters have crept onto everything and even the Tsarina makes sure to educate her son in Mandarin.

I put this book down but it never left me. A feeling like I had seen the future. And now — its pieces falling hour by hour — everyone I know in Moscow is living in it. I don’t know for how long.

After all, what else were they going to do?

The conflict in Eastern Europe has thrown the inherent tensions of digital culture into sharp relief. If the war itself is unfolding too slowly, a public hungry for content will get their fix in other ways, filling the void with viral videos and Ukrainian flag emojis, finger-wagging everyone else for being insufficiently engaged, or sombre, or whatever. We may not be on the ground in Ukraine, but we’re on the front lines of the accessory culture war, fighting our common enemy with the only weapon we’ve got: cancellation.

Russian films have been barred from festivals in Glasgow and Toronto, while Hollywood films from Disney, Sony, and Warner Bros are skipping their Russian release. London’s Royal Opera House has cancelled the Bolshoi Ballet. Russian athletes (and in some cases, those from neighbouring country and ally Belarus) have been suspended from competition by FIFA, the International Skating Union, and the Paralympics. In Milan, a course on Dostoevsky — which perhaps didn’t mention the fact that he spent multiple years in exile for defying the Russian state — was cancelled (albeit reinstated after backlash).

And then there’s the vodka, that famous export now the subject of performative destruction. In American liquor stores and supermarkets, Russian vodka has been removed from displays; in a viral Twitter post, a bartender at a ski resort in Vermont poured a bottle of Stoli down the drain.

Even as reasonable voices beg the general public to maintain a sense of perspective — and as countless articles seek to remind us, “the war is not about you” — the impulse is nevertheless easy to understand. No longer is politics a topic thought to be best avoided in public; these days, your good standing in polite society (not to mention the continued operation of your business) requires your vocal participation in the cause du jour. One is reminded of that moment in mid-2020 when every corporation suddenly felt compelled to announce its support of Black Lives Matter in the most strident possible terms. Neutrality was complicity; silence was violence. Somewhere along the way, we decided that we need to know who our neighbours vote for. We need to know if the local hardware store supports the LGBT community. We need to know Doritos’ deep thoughts about racism and police brutality. We need, we insist, to know how the International Cat Federation feels about Vladimir Putin.

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Because in spite of everything, we remain convinced that this is, somehow, all about us: our sense that we are owed complete political solidarity by the brands we consume, our histrionic sense of betrayal when we don’t get it. The ski resort bartender pouring his Stoli down the drain would probably like to think of himself as a resistance hero; really, he’s more akin to the angry Republicans who set their Nikes on fire when the company hired Colin Kaepernick as a spokesman.

Now, as in 2020, people generally mean well — even if what they’re doing ranges from empty gestures to gross absurdities. As those in charge strategise support for Ukraine and sanctions against Russia in the hopes of achieving submission through economic starvation, culture warriors hope that barring Russian athletes and artists from the global stage is an effective secondary strategy. One such argument in The Atlantic suggested that depriving ordinary Russian citizens of the pleasures of seeing their country compete in the Olympics or enjoying the latest MCU blockbuster might provoke them to turn on their leaders — not to mention how much it’ll piss Putin off. (“The decisions to strip him both of his titles as honorary president and ambassador of the International Judo Federation and of his honorary black belt in tae kwon do are particularly personal blows”.)

That’s the optimistic take, of course; the cynical one is to note how very, very reminiscent this argument is of that moment when Left-wing commentators thought they were really sticking it to Donald Trump by making fun of the size of his hands and referring to him as “Drumpf”. You know, right before he was elected the President of the United States.

And even if the symbolic resistance of cultural boycotts is an important piece of the puzzle, then those measures still need to make sense — and here one must note, setting aside the questionable impact of one man in Vermont trashing one bottle of spirits that was already bought and paid for, that Stoli vodka is not actually produced in Russia. The Stoli company is Latvian and owned by the Luxembourg-based SPI beverage group.

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This absurdity reveals the dark side of the current fever: adopting a hostile stance toward anything that sounds Russian is undergirded by a potent mix of ignorance and misdirected aggression that ought not to be indulged. It’s the sort of blunt impulse that led to the harassment of blameless, turban-wearing American Sikhs in the wake of 9/11, a spasm of bigotry against anything that seemed Muslim which we now look back at with shame and chagrin. Even as much remains uncertain, we know that this with-us-or-against-us line of thinking rarely leads anywhere good.

Well-intended or not, imposing guilt by association on ordinary Russians — the classical musicians, the cat owners, the athletes — in the hopes of inspiring mass resistance against Putin is absurd. Demanding that Russian expats denounce their homeland contains ugly shades of McCarthyism (not to mention that speaking out may put their families at risk). And in the case of Russians now trapped in their country, it’s not just morally questionable but unlikely to be effective, given the country’s merciless crackdown on dissenters against the war. It’s easy for westerners to forget that our willingness to protest our government goes hand in hand with the guaranteed freedom to do so; if speaking up came at serious personal risk, many of us would choose to keep quiet (and keep our skulls intact).

It’s also a betrayal of an important tradition, one in which art, sport, and culture are supposed to sustain our sense of shared humanity in times of tragedy, including war. There’s a reason why the famous Christmas ceasefire during World War I was marked by football matches and music — or why, when the Cold War between the then-USSR and the US finally ended, it was thanks in part to the effects of cultural exchange and engagement between the two nations. Of the many videos to emerge from Ukraine in the past week, some of the more hopeful ones show Russian prisoners being offered bread, tea, and a chance to call their parents.

Yes, these isolated feel-good stories pale in comparison to the wide-ranging and countless horrors of war, but the sentiment they contain is anything but cheap: embedded in each of these moments is a broader perspective, the understanding that we all still have to share a planet when the fighting is done. To isolate, alienate, and demonise those on the other side may satisfy one’s sense of purpose in the moment, but it also creates rifts with our neighbours that are not easily fixed.

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Meanwhile, Americans of all people should understand that the citizens of a country cannot be expected to shoulder the guilt of their president’s misdeeds. The character of an entire people is not defined by the worst whims of its most authoritarian lunatic. But here, too, our perspective is skewed: we are too used to being able to criticise, insult and openly rail against our political leaders. We are too used to the meaningless performative bluster of American politics. We are, in short, so used to culture wars that we’ve forgotten that real wars have different stakes and are not won by rhetoric — and that if the US decided to truly involve itself in this conflict, a victory would not be measured by how much we managed to hurt Putin’s feelings.

In the meantime, punishing a bunch of figure skaters, cats, filmmakers, and the corpse of Fyodor Dostoevsky for Vladimir Putin’s warmongering is the emptiest of endeavours, like painting half your face blue and booing your favourite football team’s rivals from the safety of your living room. But nobody will emerge at the end of this conflict to hand out awards for team spirit; nobody will congratulate you for all the vodka you didn’t drink. Nobody will ask you, “What did you do during the war?”, when the war had nothing to do with you. And when someone says, “We cannot just witness these atrocities and do nothing”, the truth is: yes, you can. Better a witness than a self-involved keyboard warrior. Better to watch than turn away.

A week after it launched its attempted blitz across Ukraine, finally the Russian army has taken its first major city: Kherson, a key port city in the south of the country. But the defenders of Kyiv and Kharkiv have held out; elsewhere, Ukrainians have succeeded in repelling the invasion.

Vladimir Putin gambled everything on swiftly dismantling the Ukrainian state — and on that front, he has failed. That the vastly outnumbered Ukrainian air force has yet to be knocked out of the sky is in itself a surreal expression of how terribly Putin underestimated the capacity of the Ukrainian army and population. Simply put: those in Putin’s circle who believe that Ukraine doesn’t exist, that Ukrainians are simply exiled or confused Russians just waiting to be invited back home, have categorically been proved wrong.

Many more innocent people will likely die before this is all over; many more houses will be bombed. Bridges will be demolished by retreating Ukrainian forces. Already, several thousand civilians are reported to have been killed, while millions of others have been forced to flee into neighbouring countries. And yet the country has so far survived a massive assault by a numerically and technologically superior foe. Across Ukraine, the Russian army has failed to achieve any of its strategic or tactical goals.

President Zelenskyy has not yet fled or been executed, and it is now obvious that Russia’s troops will not be able to hold onto Kyiv if they capture it. It remains unclear why the electricity, heating, water and internet have not been knocked out in any part of the country (with the partial exception of Mariupol)  — though the answer must surely lie in the incompetence, logistical failures and lack of preparation that have underscored the Kremlin’s offensive.

While it is possible that the Ukrainian government could still capitulate, this does not seem likely, and would require a drastic escalation of force from the Russian army, up to and including leveling Kyiv to the ground. Whether Moscow can countenance such a level of violence is another question: it is unlikely to support such drastic measures if it wants to integrate Ukraine into a wider project, rather than simply massacre its citizens and plant a flag in the ruins of their capital.

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The Kremlin may not have committed enough manpower to conquer a country the size of Ukraine when much of the population is willing to resist so valiantly. However, a week into the war, we do have an idea of what Putin had intended if his troops were successful. According to a recent article in the Russian-state tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda, he intended to conquer the country and split it into four regions: Crimea, New Russia, Little Russia, and West Ukraine.

While the Russian/Ukraine expert community has spent the past week debating what a post-war settlement might look like, it now seems that the partitioning of the Ukrainian state was always Putin’s intended strategy. After all, the alternative — imposing a Moscow-controlled proxy puppet government — was always going to be impossible. Blowing up Ukrainian cities is not a constructive way to entice Ukrainians to your political cause. Even among the most rabidly pro-Kremlin politicians and media figures in Ukraine, the Russian attack has elicited tremendous disgust and embarrassment.

As for the pro-Russian political proxies within the Ukrainian parliament — who make up roughly 10% of its representatives — most fled the country in the days leading up to the invasion. There are, as a result, quite simply not enough serious pro-Kremlin politicians left in the country to form a puppet government. Meanwhile, those who had fled will now look tarnished if they return to a ruined Ukrainian capital to be established as quislings.

The idea of a symbolic restoration of Yanukovych/Azarov cabinet, which had been quietly floated by the Kremlin, is also a non-starter. Even the most pro-Yanukovych sympathisers in the Donbas now view him as a cowardly weakling, after he fled for Russia at the end of the Maidan revolution. Eight years later, there is simply no appetite for a restoration of his people or regime.

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In the lead up to the war, when the Americans and the British tried to dissuade Moscow from invading by leaking both real intelligence and what may have been unverified information, the Western allies identified various local proxies as potential leaders of a puppet regime. The UK Foreign Office in particular suggested that Yevheniy Murayev, the leader of an insignificant pro-Russian faction in the Ukrainian parliament, would lead the new government.

Of course, Murayev denied the entire plot and swiftly went underground. But the names of other minor politicians were soon circulated, and then ridiculed — by both local and Western analysts — for being trial balloons, misinformation, or proof that the Kremlin has zero understanding of the nuances of Ukrainian power dynamics. Either the people concocting these plans in the Russian Defence ministry were fools, or this was all a bad joke. Oleg Voloshin, for instance, one of the more marginal names offered, has ranted at me over lunch that gay marriage was merely a cover for demon-worshipping paedophilia. You wouldn’t trust these people to run a local council, let alone the second-largest country in Europe.

Yet not every nominee was a joke. Viktor Medvedchuk, who picked Putin to be godfather to his daughter, was always the most likely candidate. But in what can only be described as an act of total incompetence, the Ukrainians allowed Medvedchuk — the main proxy of Russian power within Ukrainian politics — to escape the country over the weekend. This may very well prove to be a terminal mistake by the Ukrainians, who should have kept him as a hostage to ensure that Zelenskyy would not be assassinated. Medvedchuk is perhaps the only pro-Russian leader within Ukraine with the gravitas to fill the leadership role.

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It is doubtful, however, that even if he were to return to rule Ukraine, he would succeed as Putin’s puppet. One of the reasons Putin decided to proceed with a fundamentally foolhardy and unlikely plan of invasion was his correct sense that the window of opportunity was closing. Indeed, the absence of an organised group of proxies waiting to form a quisling government is, if anything, an apt demonstration of how far Ukraine has already floated outside of the realm of Russian control.

This is the dilemma Putin faces: even if his army finds a way to repress the so-far irrepressible Ukrainian resistance, what next? A Russian occupation is off the cards. A puppet government will swiftly fall. When the bombing finally stops, Putin will look around at a defiant country — and find that he has already lost.

Making colleagues nod and bootlick when they have no desire to do so is the essence of power. But the despot feels the need for this sham acknowledgment not to demonstrate strength. At root he is irritable, morbid, totally oversensitive. Watching sycophants crawl along marble floors confirms his deep suspicion: human beings are low creatures. This confirmation makes him feel better.

Imagine we are allowed to send one writer into the Kremlin, with the intention of translating its walls and turrets and atavisms into literature. I’d choose Ryszard Kapuściński for the assignment. Nobody ever captured despotism with such vividness; no other witness, and no other stylist comes close. He would have seen the table, and known.

For much of his professional life Kapuściński was communist Poland’s lone foreign correspondent. He was always broke, being shot at, sneaking on to planes, and taking notes. Reporting for PAP, the Polish news agency, he made the brokenness of the world his subject. In Africa, Latin America, parts of Asia, and eventually with Imperium (1993), in the ashes of the USSR.

“I was an envoy,” he wrote, “engaged to render an account, to transmit, relate.” As envoy, Kapuściński witnessed 27 revolutions. Bolivia, Mozambique, Sudan, Benin, Iran… Rulers changed; governments fell. Surfing the roar and the blood, the only thing Kapuściński thought constant was “helplessness”. A revolution like Iran’s “demolishes so ruthlessly that in the end it annihilates the ideals that called it into being”. Experience taught him to fear desperate crowds chanting slogans.

Three elements combine frictionlessly in his work. There is Kapuściński the reporter, who hangs out everywhere with anyone, observing perpetually, a world-class noticer. Insanely brave and desperately lonely, he is nearly killed by snakes and bullets. He bypasses high politics and slums it in the places where maggots wriggle under people’s skin. This is the Kapuściński who said: “I don’t want to stop at observation. I want to take part.” Then there is Kapuściński the excursive essayist, the expert on anything, who can explain the tragedy of Shi’ism, or the history of the Iranian oil industry. Finally there is Kapuściński the poet, the imaginative genius, armed with metaphor, simile, and a subtle Aesopian language that can hold the universe in a rain drop.

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Wonderfully, vast areas of Kapuściński’s life and work turned out to be lies. The envoy was an occasional spy and willing informer for Poland’s communists. The supposedly journalistic accounts he rendered were exposed: tattered and hole-ridden. His transmissions were deceptions. Kapuściński, often described late in life as the “greatest war correspondent in the world” and “the reporter’s reporter”, had been spinning fantasies for decades. Serious journalists hated this. They were ashen, and felt cheated. They shouldn’t have been shocked. You only needed to read a sentence of Kapuściński to know he was more than a journalist: he was an artist. He had to allow himself more. His ultimate creation was himself.

The character was mottled with fictions. Had he really awaited execution by Belgian mercenaries at Usumba airfield in the Sixties? Did he genuinely witness a massacre in Mexico City in 1968? Was he actually in Santiago for the Pinochet Coup in 1973? Nope: lie, lie, lie. He did not meet Che Guevara before his death in a seething Bolivian jungle. Nor did he meet Patrice Lumumba, nor did he watch fish deflesh the corpses of Idi Amin’s opponents that bobbed on the waters of Lake Victoria. Did his father escape the Katyn massacre, when Stalin murdered 20,000 Polish soldiers, as Kapuściński said he did? Oh, you better believe it’s a lie.

When a friend confronted him with the truth that a Tanzanian riot he wrote about was, in fact, utterly different to his account of it, Kapuściński shouted at her: “You don’t understand a thing! I’m not writing so the details add up: the point is the essence of the matter.” He maintained that formal objectivity was the real lie. Nobody was impartial. Trying to be was the fantasy.

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Adam Hochschild called Kapuściński’s work “magic journalism”. A genre all of his own. And like every good magician Kapuściński was a con artist. Since the full reveal of his lies in 2010 many have chosen to place the emphasis on the con, not the art. But I’d forgive almost anything to read a good paragraph. Kapuściński tuned more of those than most. Many truths are less profound — and frankly, less entertaining — than most of Kapuściński’s lies. The world suffers from a deficit of good paragraphs. It has more than enough facts.

And they’re not straightforward lies either. He liked to make wild literary images stand place for the facts of whole empires. In Imperium he states the simple data of the USSR’s size, twenty-two million square kilometres, with continental borders longer than the equator. So far, so factual. Then he goes further. Kapuściński says that he has never seen these borders without “thick coils of barbed wire.” In the constant snows, heats, and sand storms of the Imperium, the wire quickly deteriorates. The wire must be replaced — “one can assume that a significant portion of the Soviet metallurgical industry is devoted to producing barbed wire.” (Can one assume?) But then he goes even further.

What about the prison camps? They must need wire too! What about the wiring for atomic ranges, barracks, warehouses!? Multiply, he demands, the amount of wire needed by the number of years the USSR existed for… That’s why nobody could buy a spoon or a hammer in Smolensk or Omsk in 1987! All the raw materials were “used up in the manufacture of barbed wire.” He imagines the most important telephone call one imperial official could make to another being: “Are you all properly wired in?” The whole flight of fancy is daft. Completely untrue. But does it express the “essence” of the USSR — that it was inefficient, wasteful, cruel, essentially an enormous open-air prison — yes. Like Tony Montana, Kapuściński always tells the truth, even when he lies.

So we parachute Kapuściński into the Kremlin to uncover the “essence” of the place, and of Putin. His credentials for the task, though faked, are peerless. Kapuściński planned, though did not complete, a trilogy on absolute power, its consequences, and its downfall. The two books he did produce, The Emperor (1978) and Shah of Shahs (1982), describe the rule and overthrow of Ethiopia’s Haile Selassie and Iran’s Mohammed Reza Pahlavi. The third, clinching book would have been about Idi Amin; for some time Kapuściński kept a hand-drawn diagram of the Ugandan despot’s brain in his Warsaw flat. As soon as the USSR began to tremble during the Gorbachev era, Kapuściński realised he had other things to describe.

The Shah and the Emperor are different but the same. Kapuściński plays the surreal medievalism of the Ethiopian court for laughs. After the Emperor’s undoing he claims to have tracked down every flunkey: the pillow-bearer, who slipped the appropriate cushion under Selassie’s feet when he sat on thrones built for taller emperors; the servant who followed the Selassie’s dog around with a satin cloth, ready to wipe away the urine it habitually sprayed on visiting dignitaries; the Minister of the Pen, and the Keeper of the Third Door, and the Servants of the Bed Chamber… Like the Shah’s poets, generals, and economists, the Emperor’s lackeys cringe, push, and jostle.

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Despots seek abjectly loyal men. Their inner circles are composed of galley slaves, without any autonomy. Their property and their lives are always at risk. This is Putin’s world too. “The smart oligarchs get how things work here and the dumb ones aren’t oligarchs any more,” a senior Kremlin official told the Financial Times this week. “Everyone who doesn’t like it is out, or in prison.”

In Kapuściński’s imagination despotism is a guise. He depicts the Shah and the Emperor as actors, with Iran and Ethiopia as tragic stages. The Shah performed “a one character play, and the actor was also a director. Everyone else was an extra.” The aged Selassie weighs a mere fifty kilograms. His knees are stiff and he can barely walk. But he understands his role; he is a “theatrical paternalist”. When watched “he forced a certain elasticity into his muscles, with great effort, so that he moved with dignity”. Everyone, despot included, is forced to pretend. Think of Putin’s “gunslinger gait”. Farcical dissimulation flows from the top down.

Society under the despot is fatalistic and paranoid. Iran and Ethiopia are choked and immobile places. The people exist largely to be spied on. The Emperor’s courtiers are embarrassed that there even are Ethiopians. They lament “provinces where the people are depressingly savage, pagan and naked; without instructions from the police they might do something that might offend His Majesty’s dignity”.

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Iran’s difference with Ethiopia is oil. The Shah gets drunk on it. Like Putin, he confuses petro-billions for strength, wisdom and authority. Kapuściński sees oil as “a resource that anaesthetises thought, blurs vision, corrupts”. The filthy liquid, and all the billions, poison the Iranians who control it. Western operators scramble — as they have done in Russia for decades — to pick scraps from the table. They ignore the secret police, and the vanished journalists, because the pickings are so sweet.

The Westerners ingratiate themselves with a new class: “the petro-bourgeoisie”. They produce nothing but consume restlessly. The only thing Kapuściński’s Iranian oligarchs don’t buy are English football clubs. In the sight of cramped towns and the sullen majority, the new class “mounts an exhibition of the Iranian dolce vita, knowing no measure in its dissoluteness, rapacity, and cynicism.” Do the upper echelons realise their elegant lives are being played out on a volcano’s edge?

In both cases the mixture of ever more isolated courts and rulers with an ever more immiserated population, eventually produces the explosion that destroys the regime. Though never made explicit, that was Kapuściński’s lesson for the communists who ruled Poland for most his life, and for today’s despots: you will miscalculate in the end. The despot pursues unpopular military adventures, he promises too much, and he is no longer able to see himself from the outside. Their tables stretch longer, and longer still. His people become conscious of the “subjugation, barrenness, vagueness, and the emptiness of existence”. The moment they snap — and Kapuściński calls the timing of such moments “the greatest riddle known to history” — it ends.

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The Shah tries everything. He shoots protestors, and promises democracy. His prisons overflow and they empty out. Repression and liberalisation do an ugly, jolting dance. The despot does not know which partner to choose. In Ethiopia, the Emperor begins to give up; “He was too old to stop the impending avalanche.” All is in vain. In Iran the people “simply did not want a Shah any more”. The performance ends, the lights go out, and the despot trudges off stage.

Despotisms, like great art, linger after they finish. Kapuściński lied about many things, but he was under no illusions about the fate of the despot’s audience. If life was a film they would achieve catharsis. They kill the despot. Their flags fly above the capitol’s square. Flowers are pushed down gun barrels. Kapuściński knew this was wrong. In the real world real damage cannot be undone.

His exiled Shah jets forlornly between five star ski resorts. His senile Emperor is left under house arrest. Endings that are minimal, not maximal. But the audience, their peoples? You can remove the despot, you can use his table for firewood, except he has already salted the earth. Psychologically and socially despotism lives on. What is left behind in Kapuściński’s fables of Ethiopia and Iran is “an empty sour field on which the tree of thought won’t grow quickly”.

His fable of today’s Kremlin would end this way if he were alive to write it. There are 144 million Russians. Putin may be assassinated by one of them during a palace coup. They may fill the streets until the pressure scuttles him. He will be removed somehow, one day. But if Kapuściński is right, Putin will live through what he’s done to his people for decades yet.

This isn’t the first time the Wagner Group has taken part in a war; it’s just the first time it’s caught the attention of UK newspapers. In France, though, it has been on the radar for years. And with good reason. The Putin regime has long had bases in the south of France (Putin himself was actually holidaying in Biarritz when Yeltsin called him with the order to take over the Kremlin). But more pressingly, in the last decade Wagner have increasingly interfered in French zones of influence in the Middle East and Africa: Syria, Libya, the Central African Republic and, in January this year, Mali, the focus of France’s Operation Barkhane against Sahel jihadists.

As Alexandra Jousset and Ksenia Bolchakova’s TV documentary made plain, the key problem in understanding the Wagner Group is this: it does not officially exist. No company of that name is registered in Russia. Instead, Wagner is a grey network of Russian businesses and mercenary activity. But what is clear in the murk are two key figures.

Wagner’s founder and leader is former Russian special forces officer Dmitry Utkin, a veteran of the Chechen wars. Reputedly, Lieutenant-colonel Utkin’s military call sign was “Wagner”, after Hitler’s favourite composer (Utkin is obsessed with Nazi Germany, suggesting Putin’s “de-nazification” programme could start closer to home than the Ukraine). But the power behind the Wagnerian throne is oligarch Yevgeny Prigozhin, who is serially sanctioned by the United States, including for his financing of the troll-factory Internet Research Agency, which interfered in American elections in 2016 and 2018.

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In 2020, investigative news site Bellingcat published telephone records revealing that Prigozhin had made 99 calls to Vladimir Putin’s chief of staff in eight months. So cosy is Prigozhin with the Russian president that he is dubbed “Putin’s chef”, metaphorically serving up what the Kremlin requires in foreign policy. The Kremlin itself maintains that Prigozhin is quite literally Putin’s caterer — he is, after all, a skilled restauranteer. Beginning as a hot-dog seller in Leningrad, Prigozhin went onto oversee a chain of classy restaurants good enough even for the epicurean French president Jacques Chirac, and has coordinated many banquets for Putin.

Still, the Kremlin continuously and strenuously denies it has any influence over Wagner. French foreign minister Jean-Yves Le Drian recently blasted the group for ”supporting” Mali’s ruling junta, and accused Russia of lying about Wagner’s existence. “When we asked our Russian colleagues about Wagner, they said they don’t know anything,” Le Drian told France 24. He added: “When it comes to mercenaries who are Russian veterans, who have Russian weapons, who are transported by Russian planes, it would be surprising if the Russian authorities did not know about it.”

In truth, Wagner and Russian security departments overlap. Putin has been photographed at a Kremlin banquet with Wagner troops (including Dmitry Utkin), whose training facility at Molkino in southern Russia is next door to that of Russian special forces, the spetsnaz.

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The Wagner Group was birthed in Ukraine in 2014, when Russian military intelligence backed unmarked troops led by Utkin in the annexation of Crimea. Since then, the group’s web of influence has spread to the Middle East, Latin America, and principally Africa. Shocking revelations about the conduct of Wagner fighters followed. In 2017, four Wagner operatives — the group’s distinctive skull logo clearly visible on their uniforms — mutilated and eventually beheaded a Syrian army deserter, Mohammed Taha Ismail al-Abdullah, with a spade. (Tracking down, interrogating and murdering rebels and deserters is very much the Wagner Group’s modus operandi; in Ukraine it is most likely to be at work in areas already seized by the Russian Army.) A fifth Wagnerian acted as the cameraman for the movie. A lawsuit brought by al-Abdullah’s brother got unsurprisingly short shrift from the Moscow City Court.

Meanwhile, in the Central African Republic, both the UN and France claim that Wagner have been responsible for raping and robbing unarmed civilians in the country’s rural areas. An exclusive document obtained by France 5 details the execution of a man on the side of a road in the north of the country by a Wagner unit. In Libya, the BBC obtained a Samsung tablet owned by a Wagner fighter, which revealed he had been placing unmarked personnel mines in a civilian area — an unalloyed war crime, enough to get any real army in the dock at Den Haag.

Which explains, perhaps, why Putin uses the Wagner Group. In the words of Kevin Limonier, Professeur en Géopolitique et Études Slaves at the University of Paris, subcontracting operations to Wagner allows the Kremlin the “denial of causality”. Cost is also a factor: Wagner creatively self-finances (Bashar al-Assad’s regime allowed the Group 25% of the profits from oil and gas fields seized), thus lifting pressure on Moscow’s coffers.

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But the group’s usefulness goes beyond that. Using Wagner as a proxy avoids home scrutiny of combat losses. As many as 600 hundred Wagnerians died fighting in Syria alone. In early 2018 Wagner fighters — who, paid about £2,000 a month, are mostly former Russian regulars — attacked an outpost manned by US special forces and their allies at a Conoco gas plant in Syria’s Deir Ezzor Province: embarrassingly, the Wagner company suffered 200 casualties. Yevgeny “The Chef” Prigozhin is unlikely to inform potential clients that his crack force is not all it’s cracked up to be.

It is flexible, though. An examination of the Central African Republic’s recent history shows how Moscow has shifted Wagner from combat roles to propping up fragile regimes by providing troop-training, defence of installations, and the protection of top officials. France 5 also discovered that Wagner is behind troll factories in Mali and neighbouring countries pumping out anti-French propaganda.

Indeed, no regime seems more prone to Wagner’s influence than Mali, where the group’s appearance at Camp 101, north of Bamako airport, in January was one of the reasons given by French president Emmanuel Macron for his recent decision to pull out 2,400 troops from the country. Macron told French media that the Mali military junta considered Wagner “the best partners they can find to protect their power, not to fight against terrorism”. France was not interested in junta-propping. Macron also claimed the Wagner group was “arriving with predatory intentions, but why?”

To build Russian influence, Monsieur Macron. Wagner is the Kremlin’s new favoured tool for establishing a political presence in receptive regimes. Macron’s retreat from the Sahel, where the French army has fought an insufficiently applauded and under-supported war against Islamic extremism, leaves a vacuum, and politics hates a vacuum. Enter: Putin, Prigozhin, and 1,000 Wagner troops.

Ukraine. Mali. Syria. As far as the Wagner Group is concerned it is all one simultaneous war. As Vassily, an active Wagner mercenary, told France 5, “At present, the Russian Federation is not yet an empire, but it intends to become one again… Wagner is one of the instruments to achieve this goal.” The danger is that while all eyes are on Ukraine, Putin is wielding the Wagner Group to achieve victories for Russian power politics in parts of the world British newspapers pay less attention to. And that would be a real Götterdämmerung for the West.