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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More from this author

Lionel Shriver's migration thriller

By Valerie Stivers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suggested reading

Meet Chicago’s AOC 2.0

By Ryan Zickgraf

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

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

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

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

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

But the Russian claim is false: Ukraine is a genuine liberal-democratic state, though an imperfect one, with free elections that produce significant changes of power, including the election, in 2019, of the liberal-populist reformer, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Ukraine is, unequivocally, not a Nazi state: the Russian casus belli is a lie. And yet, there is a danger that the understandable desire by Ukrainian and Western commentators not to provide ammunition for Russian propaganda has led to an over-correction — and one that may not ultimately serve Ukraine’s best interests. 

During one recent news bulletin on BBC Radio 4, the correspondent referred to “Putin’s baseless claim that the Ukrainian state supports Nazis”. This is, itself, disinformation: it is an observable fact, which the BBC itself has previously reported on accurately and well, that the Ukrainian state has, since 2014, provided funding, weapons and other forms of support to extreme Right-wing militias, including neo-Nazi ones. This is not a new or controversial observation. Back in 2019, I spent time in Ukraine interviewing senior figures in the constellation of state-backed extreme Right-wing groups for Harper’s magazine; they were all quite open about their ideology and plans for the future. 

Indeed, some of the best coverage of Ukraine’s extreme Right-wing groups has come from the open-source intelligence outlet Bellingcat, which is not known for a favourable attitude towards Russian propaganda. Bellingcat’s excellent reporting of this under-discussed topic over the past few years has largely focused on the Azov movement, Ukraine’s most powerful extreme Right-wing group, and the one most favoured by the state’s largesse. 

Over the past few years, Bellingcat researchers have explored Azov’s outreach effort to American white nationalists and its funding by the Ukrainian state to teach “patriotic education” and to support demobilised veterans; it has looked into Azov’s hosting of neo-Nazi black metal music festivals, and its support of the exiled, anti-Putin Russian neo-Nazi group Wotanjugend — practitioners of a very marginal form of esoteric Nazism, who share space with Azov in their Kyiv headquarters, fight alongside them in the front line, and have also played a role translating and disseminating a Russian-language version of the Christchurch shooter’s manifesto. Unfortunately, Bellingcat’s invaluable coverage of Ukraine’s extreme-Right ecosystem has not been updated since the current hostilities began, despite the war with Russia providing these groups with something of a renaissance.

The Azov movement was founded in 2014 by Andriy Biletsky, former leader of the Ukrainian neo-Nazi group Patriot of Ukraine, during the battle for control of Kyiv’s central Independence Square during the Maidan Revolution against the country’s Russia-leaning, elected president Viktor Yanukovych. Back in 2010, Biletsky claimed that it would one day be Ukraine’s role to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade… against Semite-led untermenschen“. The revolution, and the war which followed, would give him the national stage for which he had so long craved.

Suggested article

Is this Ukraine's last chance for peace?

By Aris Roussinos

Alongside other far-Right groups, such as Right Sector, the nascent Azov movement played an outside role in the fighting against Ukrainian security police which left 121 dead and secured the success of the revolution. Acquiring control of a large property, just off Independence Square, from the Ministry of Defence, Azov turned the building, now named Cossack House, into its Kyiv headquarters and recruiting centre. Though Azov has since toned down its rhetoric, and many of its fighters may be non-ideological and simply attracted by its martial reputation, its activists are often to be seen covered in tattoos of SS totenkopfs and lightning bolt runes, or sporting the Sonnenrad or Black Sun symbol of esoteric Nazism. Derived from a pattern created for Himmler at Wewelsburg castle in Germany, chosen as an occultic Camelot for senior SS officers, the Sonnenrad is like the Wolfsangel rune of the SS Das Reich division one of Azov’s official symbols, worn on their unit patches and on the shields behind which their fighters parade in evocative torchlit ceremonies.

I’ve visited Cossack House multiple times to interview senior Azov figures, including the leader of its National Militia (which provides auxiliary patrolling muscle to Ukraine’s official police force), Ihor Mikhailenko, and Azov’s International Secretary and intellectual linchpin, Olena Semenyaka. It’s an impressive setup: along with classrooms for the educational lectures they provide with state funding, Cossack House is home to Azov’s literary salon and publishing house, Plomin, where glamorous young hipster intellectuals busy themselves with organising Right-wing seminars and book translations, beneath glossy posters of fascist luminaries such as Yukio Mishima, Cornelius Codreanu, and Julius Evola.

But Azov’s power derives from the gun, not their literary efforts. Back in 2014, when the Ukrainian army was weak and underequipped, Azov volunteers under Biletsky’s leadership fought at the vanguard of the battle against Russian-speaking separatists in the east, reconquering the city of Mariupol, where they are currently under siege. Effective, courageous and highly ideological fighters, Azov’s efforts in the east won them great renown as defenders of the nation, and the support of a grateful Ukrainian state, which incorporated Azov as an official regiment of Ukraine’s National Guard. In this, Azov is believed to have enjoyed the support of Arsen Avakov, a powerful oligarch and Ukraine’s Interior Minister between 2014 and 2019. 

Suggested article

The Russia we have lost

By Ben Judah

Both Ukrainian human rights activists and leaders of rival extreme Right-wing groups have complained to me, in interviews, about the unfair advantage Avakov’s patronage gave the Azov movement in establishing its dominant role in Ukraine’s Rightwing sphere — including official functions as election observers and state-sanctioned auxiliary police. Ukraine is not a Nazi state, but the Ukrainian state’s support — for whatever reasons, valid or otherwise — of neo-Nazi or Nazi-aligned groups makes the country an outlier in Europe. The continent has many extreme Right-wing groups, but only in Ukraine do they possess their own tank and artillery units, with the state’s support.

This awkwardly close relationship between a liberal-democratic state supported by the West and armed proponents of a very different ideology has caused some discomfort in the past for Ukraine’s Western backers. The US Congress has gone back and forth in recent years on whether Azov should be blocked from receiving American arms shipments, with Democrat lawmakers even urging in 2019 that Azov be listed as a global terrorist organisation. In interviews, Semenyaka complained to me that this unease was a result of their listening to Russian propaganda, and insisted that American cooperation with Azov would be beneficial for both parties.

In this, the current war has surely come as a blessed relief for Azov. Biletsky’s attempt to found a political party — the National Corps — met with almost zero success, with even a united bloc of Ukraine’s far- and extreme Right-wing parties failing to clear the very low hurdle for parliamentary representation in the last election: Ukrainian voters simply do not want what they are selling, and reject their worldview. Yet in time of war, Azov and similar groups come to the forefront, with the Russian invasion seemingly reversing the downward spiral that set in for them following Avakov’s resignation due to international pressure. Judging by their social media, Azov’s armed units are expanding: they’re forming new battalions in Kharkiv and Dnipro, a new special forces unit in Kyiv (where Biletsky is organising at least some aspects of the capital’s defence) and local defence militias in western cities such as Ivano-Frankivsk.

Suggested article

This is how despotism ends

By Will Lloyd

Along with other extreme Right-wing groups such as Karpatska Sich (whose militancy against Western Ukraine’s Hungarian-speaking minority, including Roma, has drawn criticism from the Hungarian government), the Eastern Orthodox group Tradition and Order, the neo-Nazi group C14, and the extreme Right-wing militia Freikorps, the Russian invasion has allowed Azov to restore its earlier prominence, burnishing its heroic reputation with its dogged defence of Mariupol alongside regular Ukrainian marines. While just a few weeks ago there was still a concerted Western effort to not directly arm Azov, now they seem to be a prime beneficiary of Western munitions and training: these pictures tweeted by the Belarusian opposition outlet NEXTA show Azov fighters being instructed in the use of British-made NLAW anti-tank munitions by blurred-out trainers. 

Similarly, until the Russian invasion, Western governments and news outlets frequently warned of the dangers of Western neo-Nazis and white supremacists gaining combat experience fighting alongside Azov and their allied Nazi subfactions. Yet in the heat of the moment, these concerns seem to have dissipated: a recent photograph of newly-arrived Western volunteers, including Britons, in Kyiv shows Azov’s Olena Semenyaka smiling happily in the background, alongside the Swedish neo-Nazi and former Azov sniper Mikael Skillt. Indeed, Misanthropic Division, a unit of Western neo-Nazis fighting alongside Azov, is currently advertising on Telegram for European militants to join the flow of volunteers and link up with them in Ukraine, “for victory and Valhalla.”

Like Ukraine’s other extreme Right-wing militias, Azov are dogged, disciplined and committed fighters, which is why the weak Ukrainian state has found itself forced to rely upon their muscle during its hours of greatest need: during the Maidan revolution, during the war against separatists from 2014 onwards, and now to fend off the Russian invasion. There has been a certain new-found reticence abroad to speak frankly about their role, no doubt for fear that doing so will provide ammunition for Russian propaganda. This fear is surely misplaced: after all, groups such as Azov are only prominent precisely because of Russia’s meddling in Ukraine. Instead of de-Nazifying the country, Russian aggression has helped solidify the role and presence of extreme Right-wing factions in Ukraine’s military, reinvigorating a waning political force rejected by the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians.

Suggested article

Populists are losing this war

By Eric Kaufmann

If anything, the primary threat posed by groups such as Azov is not to the Russian state — Russia happily supports extreme Right-wing elements in its Wagner mercenary group and in the separatist republics, after all — nor to Western nations whose disaffected citizens may find themselves drawn to a combat role alongside them. Instead, the threat is to the future stability of the Ukrainian state itself, as Amnesty and Human Rights Watch have long warned. While they may be useful now, in the event of the decapitation or evacuation of Ukraine’s liberal government from Kyiv, perhaps to Poland or Lviv, or more likely, in the event of Zelenskyy being forced by events to sign a peace deal surrendering Ukrainian territory, groups like Azov may find a golden opportunity to challenge what remains of the state and consolidate their own power bases, even if only locally.

Back in 2019, I asked Semenyaka if Azov still saw itself as a revolutionary movement. Thinking carefully, she replied, “We are ready for different scenarios. If Zelenskyy is even worse than [ex-president] Poroshenko, if he is the same kind of populist, but without certain skills, connections and background, then, of course, Ukrainians would be heavily in danger. And we have already developed a plan of what can be done, how we can develop parallel state structures, how we can customise these entry strategies to save the Ukrainian state, if [Zelenskyy] would become a puppet of the Kremlin, for instance. Because it’s quite possible.”

Senior Azov figures have been explicit, over the course of years, in stating that Ukraine has unique potential as a springboard for the “reconquest” of Europe from liberals, homosexuals and immigrants. While their broader contintental ambitions may have a very doubtful chance of success, a broken, impoverished and angry postwar Ukraine, or worse, a Ukraine suffering years of bombardment and occupation with large areas outside central government control, would surely be a fertile breeding ground for a form of extreme Right-wing militancy not seen in Europe for many decades. 

Suggested article

The rise of Europe's fake populists

By Thomas Fazi

Right now, Ukraine and Zelenskyy may well need the military capabilities and ideological zeal of nationalist and extreme Right-wing militias simply to fight and win their battle for national survival. But when the war ends, both Zelenskyy and his Western backers must be very careful to ensure that they have not empowered groups whose goals are in direct conflict with the liberal-democratic norms they both pledge adherence to. Arming and funding Azov, Tradition and Order and Karpatska Sich may well be one of the hard choices forced by war, but disarming them must surely be a priority when the war ends. 

As we have seen in Syria, there is nothing that radicalises a civilian population more than dispossession, bombing and bombardment. Just as in Syria, there is surely a danger that temporarily empowering extremist factions for their military utility, even indirectly, may have grave and unintended consequences. And in Syria, too, there were strong early taboos among Western commentators in discussing the rise of extremist militias that would later cannibalise the rebel cause, for fear of validating Assad’s propaganda that the rebels were all terrorists: this early reticence did not, in the end, work in the rebels’ favour. 

It is not doing Putin’s work for him to observe frankly that there are extremist elements fighting against him in Ukraine: indeed, it is only by carefully monitoring — and perhaps, curtailing — their activities now, that we can ensure they will not deepen Ukraine’s misery in the years to come. For years, liberal Western commentators complained that the Ukrainian state was turning a blind eye to its Right-wing extremist factions: it serves no good purpose for the same commentators to now do the same thing themselves.

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.

Suggested reading

Ukraine is winning the online war

By David Patrikarakos

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.

Suggested reading

How Vladimir Putin weaponises refugees

By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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.

Suggested reading

Europe must prepare for war

By Aris Roussinos

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.

The original intel estimate of 127,000 troops was grossly inadequate, and when it was raised to 150,000 including forces already within the Russian-held parts of eastern Ukraine, it was still much too low for a coup de main that would start and end the war in one go — the only kind of war that Russia can fight without quickly incurring dangerous levels of economic damage.

Of course, reckless gamblers are undeterred by risks, but Putin’s record until a week ago was that of a very patient hunter, who waits until the target walks into his sights, only then pressing the trigger for a sure hit. That is how he gained Abkhazia and South Ossetia from Georgia in 2008 after inter-ethnic fighting, and broken cease-fires since 1994. Both are small but significant territories — Abkhazia because it is the southernmost, most “Mediterranean” of all Russian-controlled territories, with oranges and lemons as well as a nominally independent government, and South Ossetia because it is an Orthodox enclave in the mostly Muslim Caucasus.

And that is also how Putin won his biggest prize so far, Crimea, detaching its several pieces from Ukraine in the turmoil following the Maidan uprising that sent President Viktor Yanukovych fleeing from Kyiv on 21 February 2014: a few thousand Russian operatives with some locals took over the territory of  Ukraine’s Autonomous Republic of Crimea, the autonomous city of Sevastopol, and a coastal strip in the Kherson mainland and all without firing a shot: a quickly concocted Republic of Crimea then “voted” to join the Russian Federation along with the city of Sevastopol.

To do the same thing across the 1500 kilometre width of Ukraine, it would take not less than half a million well-trained soldiers. They would need to move quickly overland to seize the cities nearest to the border such as Kharkov less than twenty miles away, or by large-airlift to reach distant Lviv, or helicoptered to simultaneously seize the regional capitals, from Lviv in the west to Kharkiv in the north-east, to Odessa in the south west, and Zaporizhia in the center-east, in addition to Kyiv, itself a metropolis of almost three million inhabitants. And yes, it all presumed only token resistance by such Ukrainian soldiers as would fight at all.

The once patient hunter turned reckless gambler persuaded himself of that, and of much more: that Ukraine’s Jewish ex-comedian turned President Zelensky would promptly flee, that his government would then collapse as ministers rushed off to escape arrest, that the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Air Defence, long starved of funds in any case would dissolve, so that Russian forces would advance unopposed to quickly seize every city, with Kyiv’s population obediently awaiting Russian rule. Then former president Yanukovych could be brought back to form a new government for the TV cameras, whose task would be to vote immediately to re-join the Russian Federation, thus ending the fighting in glorious victory for Putin and his empire.

None of the above was wildly improbable — but it hardly takes much in the way of prudence to eschew war planning that consists of stringing together best-case scenarios, which is exactly what Putin chose to do, ignoring his own Intelligence chief and veteran Kremlin official Sergey Naryshkin. That much is proven by a truly extraordinary document: the video of Putin’s eve-of-war meeting with his ministers and advisors, ostensibly on the annexation of the self-proclaimed independent Donbas republics, but actually on the imminent invasion.

More from this writer

The myth of Chinese supremacy

By Edward Luttwak

We see a carefully staged display of imperial authority that has Putin sitting high up at his desk while the advisers sit in chairs below him, till each one in turn goes to stand in front of a microphone to endorse what Putin has just said. But the script fell apart when it was Naryshkin’s turn to speak. He clearly said that there should be “talks” to give the Western side a “chance”, pronouncing that French word in the French way, as Russians do. Visibly surprised, visibly angered, Putin demands an answer “yes or no” on the annexation itself, sidestepping Naryshkin’s real point: to rely on talks, not tanks in dealing with Ukraine.

The build-up to the war went well for Putin. He had the German government firmly in his camp — to the improbable extent that it went far out of its way to prevent Estonia from donating old Soviet 122mm howitzers to Ukraine, on the flimsy ground that they had briefly been in German possession when the West German army inherited East Germany’s military equipment. Nor would the German government agree to suspend the certification of the giant new Nordstream 2 gas pipeline that would have increased German dependence on Russian gas, uncaring of the vehement objections of the United States, Britain, the European Council and Poland.

Given that, Germany was bound to rule out effective sanctions in the lead-up to the fighting, with the most effective — the exclusion from the Swift payment system — not even considered, because it would block payments for Russian gas, stopping its supply. A request for weapons from the immense German surplus stocks yielded an offer of old helmets, on the grounds that German parliamentarians would prohibit the supply of lethal weapons. Providing cover for the Germans, the Italian government also ruled out a Swift cut off, and it was only Italy’s embattled Defence Minister Lorenzo Guerini’s personal determination that kept the door half-open for Italian military supplies.

Nor was the US Government much of an obstacle: instead of emulating the British airlift of anti-tank missiles on a much larger scale, the US focused on evacuating its diplomats in hysterical haste — as if to support Putin’s intimidation campaign — and then failed to airlift any of the tens of thousands of highly suitable “point and shoot” anti-tank rockets in Army depots that any civilian can use with one minute of training.

But war is the greatest contingency. As all veterans know — and that includes the present writer — until the fighting starts, no soldier knows how he will react to combat, and still less which of his comrades will fight bravely and which will keep his head down, waiting for the noise to end. And that goes for war leaders too: in 1939 the mediocre dictator Ioannis Metaxas replied to Mussolini’s verbose ultimatum with a monosyllabic ohi — “no” — inspiring victorious fighting by the hugely outgunned Greeks. And now in 2022 Zelensky’s comedic turn as a TV President, followed by a respectable showing as an actual President, set the stage for his current act as an indomitable war leader, totally uncaring of the risk to his own life as the number one target of Russian under-cover killer teams.

More from this writer

America's failed Machiavelli

By Edward Luttwak

After refusing Biden’s ill-judged offer to evacuate him (he asked for weapons instead) Zelensky declared that he would remain in Kyiv with his entire Cabinet to lead the fight for the city. That played its own undefinable role in inspiring Ukraine’s soldiers to resist no matter what: to hold the city of Kharkiv, close enough to the Russian border to have been within artillery range from the start, to defend Zmiinyi (snake) island in front of coastal Odessa, whose 13-man garrison came under overwhelming naval bombardment after impolitely refusing to surrender, to defend Mariupol the country’s eastern harbour, whose half a million inhabitants live less than 30 miles from the Russian border (but are holding out with the Russians still 15 miles away as of this writing), and on the Kyiv approaches through which the Russian army was supposed to swiftly advance on the city and finish the war in two days if not one.

The Ukrainian army did not run away, it did not surrender, it did not abandon its weapons to walk home, and neither was it quickly outmanoeuvred by the much better-funded Russian army, which has had the fuel, ammo, and replacement parts for much more intensive training than the badly underfunded Ukrainians. It turns out that motivation beats even training: Russian armoured columns that were supposed to advance at motor speed on the highways to Kharkov and Kyiv brushing aside token resistance to quickly seize both cities, were instead forced off the road by sustained Ukrainian anti-armour fire, and then blocked again by hard fighting when they gave up on highway momentum to advance cross-country at 3mph. Day after day, Kharkov and Kyiv not only held out but were not even attacked, except by a few missiles, more terrifying than destructive.

That is when Putin’s timetable and entire war plan fell apart.

The world could close its eyes for a day and a night to allow the Russians to finish the job, so as to continue business as usual for everyone: the trucks delivering French and Italian luxury goods to the Moscow bourgeoisie along with Audi and Mercedes cars, Dutch hydroponic vegetables and much more from Frankfurt an Oder via Warsaw and Minsk; the aircraft bringing Russian skiers to Courchevel and Megève, and shoppers to London and Paris.

Suggested article

Putin's spiritual destiny

By Giles Fraser

But when the Russian attempt failed, and the dramatic news was made by Ukraine’s heroic resistance rather than by the expected Putin victory, Western Europeans had to open their eyes, they had to look at the Russian aggression that had brought large-war to Europe for the first time since 1945.

After Italy’s Draghi spoke with Zelensky, Italy’s objection to the Swift ban suddenly gave way to approval, forcing the Germans to switch also to avoid opprobrium as the only hold-out. With that the silent opponents like Luxembourg also had to go along, and soon enough Japan also agreed to exclude the most regime-connected banks. With that the destruction of the Russian bourgeoisie’s way of life was underway in earnest: no skiing trips to France, or foreign trips anywhere outside the Russian sphere, no sending of children to expensive boarding schools in Britain or Switzerland, no new German cars, nor fresh tomatoes.

Concurrently, the spectacle of civilians, ladies of advanced years included, preparing Molotov cocktails out of beer bottles as a last resort to defend their streets, broke down the dam of Pacifist hypocrisy (“weapons only make war worse”) releasing an expanding torrent of weapons, with Germany, last seen stopping others from helping, itself offering 5,000 Stingers, aspirational anti-aircraft weapons against jets, but deadly against helicopters. Italy is sending badly needed anti-tank weapons, and others such as the British who did not wait for the fighting to begin in order to send anti-tank missiles, are sending more weapons as the US, Canada, Sweden and others are also doing, but adding a so far unique official encouragement of volunteers willing to fight for Ukraine.

Suggested article

Vladimir Putin's dangerous madness

By David Patrikarakos

Suddenly the hitherto untouchable Putin is in trouble. He promised a quick, almost effortless victory, to instead plunge into a war increasingly costly of lives (hundreds of Russians are dead by all accounts), increasingly costly for the entire Russian economy, and disastrous for its bourgeoisie. And this for a war that Russia is not winning. That Putin has invited the Ukrainian President to send envoys to cease-fire talks is itself a tremendous defeat for him: he had insisted that he could not negotiate at all with the“drug addicts and Neo-Nazis” of Zelensky’s government, but now he must negotiate, to extricate himself from the war he deliberately started, whose costs have risen phenomenally.

If talks do start, the Ukrainians can have only one demand: an immediate and total withdrawal of Russian forces to their starting positions. And if the Russians accept that inevitable demand, it seems unlikely that Putin can remain in power, not after having overruled his Intelligence chief, to deliberately start a costly war, only to lose it.

If the Russians refuse, they must revert to a very hard fight, a slow-motion drive into Kyiv that will be marked by rising casualties, as Ukrainian resistance is strengthened by the influx of better weapons and rising military competence. Then the Russians must conquer the whole of Ukraine out to Lviv and the Carpathian mountains — where the population is mostly anti-Russian, promising ever more grinding combat.

Suggested article

Europe must prepare for war

By Aris Roussinos

It is hard to imagine how Putin could emerge from this scenario victorious. Yes Zelensky might be reached and murdered at any time, but it seems entirely unlikely that the morale generated by the ferocious resistance he inspired would simply disappear — if anything it might well increase.

Another possibility is nuclear escalation, and Putin’s latest is indeed to talk up in his most ominous tones Russia’s forward-deployed nuclear weapons.

Unfortunately for Putin, the action is now in the hands of old ladies with Molotov cocktails, shoe salesmen with bazookas, and increasingly experienced street fighters. None of them are likely to pause this fight for fear of Russian nuclear escalation.

That leaves Putin with no way of redeeming his promise of a swiftly victorious war, no defence against the accusation of having grievously damaged Russia and humiliated its army. The spy chief Naryshkin in the Kremlin might be the one to remove Putin with the least disruption, but of course there are other Putin appointees also ready to save mother Russia.