Trump’s presidency has now entered its most dangerous phase. With little left to lose after an earth-shaking midterm wipeout, he is released from political restraint. He has accepted the result with apparent grace, dismissing the fact that the elections were a referendum on his presidency with the assertion that he was not on the ballot — an amusing claim, since he spent the campaign saying the opposite. The mood in the party is somber. The Florida governor Ron de Santis, mooted as a presidential candidate, has described the results as “close to an extinction-level event for Republicans”. No doubt rightly, given its impact on prices at the pump, the vice-president JD Vance — also looking to his future — has averred “the reason we lost is the war”. They and many others are pointing the finger at Trump, but he may not care. 

In control of the House and Senate, the triumphant Democrats can launch as many legal challenges as they like. They can block legislation, launch investigations into his crimes and impeach him, but he retains the presidential veto, and the supreme master of the attention economy will not be out of the limelight for long. An adventure in Cuba would be a welcome distraction, and he may yet trigger a greater cataclysm in the Gulf. Trump’s second administration is the experimental refutation of liberal legalism. Post-Trump America is not a constitutional republic but an illiberal democracy, the triumph of politics and executive power over law and procedure.

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John Gray: liberal civilisation is finished

By John Gray

Those who believe Trump shares a mindset with the world’s leading tyrants are mistaken. Neither the Russian nor the Chinese leader displays his all-consuming narcissism. Putin is an archetypal creature of the Soviet system, a cold-eyed killer schooled in the art of survival. Xi is a suspicious autocrat possessed by the insecurity of his position. Putin’s aggression combines self-preservation — his own survival inseparable from that of his regime — with a neo-tsarist vision of a mystical “Russian realm” targeted for destruction by the West. Xi’s “Chinese dream” is the project of making China into the global hegemon and an unapologetic affirmation of Chinese civilization.  

Embodying nothing except his own emptiness and venality, Trump is the ideal dupe for these flinty tyrants. Possibly he fears Putin as the possessor of kompromat of some sort — there must be many possibilities — and he has certainly done business with the regime. But if Trump is behaving like a Russian asset, it is not because he was recruited as a Manchurian candidate in Moscow 40 years ago. Putin never expected Trump to become president (any more than Trump did himself) and seems to view him with bemused contempt. Trump sees the Russian dictator through the lens of his ideal self-image as strongman and admires him as a model of how to use state power to accumulate personal wealth. 

Those who speak of the Putinisation of America can point to undeniable parallels. Putin is a master of vranyo, the Bolshevik practice of telling lies that both speaker and audience know perfectly well are falsehoods — as when he denied that the “little green men” invading Crimea in 2014 were Russian troops. The goal is not persuasion but domination: by imposing a narrative that is transparently false, the very idea of a domain of facts independent of power is undermined. With his incoherent boasting — claiming to have “completely and totally obliterated” Iran’s nuclear capability, then justifying a resumption of the war to destroy it — Trump also asserts power over facts. The difference is that Putin knows he is lying, whereas in Trump’s moment-by-moment solipsism, truth has no meaning.

For his critics, Trump is the kingpin of a Putin-style kleptocracy. It is true that his second administration has seen the presidency monetized to an unprecedented degree. Diplomacy has become a rent-seeking family business. Insider trading has been normalized. In August of this year, the Trump Media and Technology Group (TMTG) launched a premier data feed allowing Wall Street banks and high-frequency trading firms access to his market-moving Truth Social posts milliseconds before they become available to the public, with subscribers paying a hundred thousand dollars a month for the service. 

By the time they leave office, Trump, his family and acolytes will have amassed immense riches. Likewise, Putin’s extraction of capital from Russia’s economy has, by some estimates, made him richer than Elon Musk. Yet wealth and government interact differently in Putin’s Russia and Trump’s America. Under Trump, the US is ruled by a variant of capitalism in which the state is used as a means of corporate enrichment at the expense of America’s strategic interests. In Russia’s version of state capitalism, corporate influence is curbed when it threatens the state itself. The same is true in China.

When Russia’s richest oligarch, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, became involved in opposition politics and negotiations to sell part of his oil company, Yukos, to American firms, he was arrested at gunpoint on his private jet, sentenced to 10 years in a Siberian penal colony and Yukos bankrupted. When the CEO of the Alibaba Group, Jack Ma, criticized China’s financial regulators, he was taken out of circulation and his business empire dismantled. In contrast, the Trump administration authorized the export of high-end computer chips of Jensen Huang’s Nvidia for export to China. During Xi’s visit to Washington, Trump bent the knee in more than one sense. He reportedly pitched the Chinese leader regarding purchases of American military technology, violating decades-long commitments to Taiwan and other allies. He prioritized corporate gain over national security and America’s standing in the world.

Trump’s “transactional” diplomacy consists of the exchange of American power for promises of private gain. The settlement of the Ukraine war being brokered by Trump’s special envoys, his son in law, Jared Kushner, and the real estate investor Steve Witfkoff, follows this playbook. A multibillion-dollar deal to acquire the international holdings of Lukoil, Russia’s largest remaining private oil company, has apparently been discussed, along with reopening the Nord Stream pipeline, blown up in September 2022. Elon Musk’s Space X — on Trump’s instructions, according to Musk — imposed speed limits on Starshield, which allowed Ukraine to intercept Russian drone and missile attacks. Sanctions have been paused, and Trump has called more than once for Zelensky’s removal. 

Trump’s aim is full-scale economic détente with Russia, which he believes will realize large profits for him and his coterie. Very likely he and they will benefit, but there is something spectral about the fabulous wealth envisioned in these sordid machinations. Why should Putin respect the terms of any deal? The “energy ceasefire” Trump believed he had agreed with him was flouted within hours. Much of Trump’s chicanery is based on fantasies — the reverse of realpolitik. If Ukraine is being sold out, it may be for next to nothing. 

Lured by dreams of financial gain, Trump has torn up whatever remained of an American-led “rules-based” order. This is more than the much-discussed passing of a unipolar order. American power is imploding, with the post-Cold-War leviathan now a floundering, flailing behemoth. Rather than an “unreliable friend”, the US seems closer to the enemies of the countries that depended on it for their security. Yet there can be no assurance that America’s new strategic partners will keep their end of the deal. When they met in St Petersburg in October, Witkoff praised Putin as a “humanitarian” for releasing an American prisoner captured in eastern Ukraine in April 2022. Such a toadying eulogy may be understandable. For the US, Yalta 2.0 may yield little more than the prisoner’s release. The presumed exchange is that Russia ends its support for Iran while the US forces Ukraine to surrender; but America has no way of ensuring Russia’s compliance, let alone that of China or Iran.

The Iran debacle itself began with a whim that set in motion a fateful escalation. The illusory prospect of another Venezuela-style coup, semi-magical in its flawless operational execution, was irresistible. What Trump described in March as “a little excursion” has been a forced march to strategic defeat. The result of decapitating the Iranian leadership has been to install a military dictatorship more repressive than the decaying theocracy it replaced. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps has become a permanent threat to the Strait of Hormuz. The pre-war status quo, in which it was an open international waterway, is irrecoverable. 

This was not unforeseen. Similar bombing campaigns have been war-gamed many times, with similar results. As Barbara Tuchman showed in The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam (1984), history is not so much a catalog of error as a succession of follies whose consequences can be known in advance. 

However the war develops, America has forfeited its position in the Middle East. Over the past months, its bases in the Gulf and Iraq have been disabled and its armories depleted. Tens of billions of dollars have been expended using costly missiles against cheaper and more quickly replaceable drones. Iran’s partner in the “Axis of Resistance”, the Houthis have turned another vital waterway, the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, into a high-risk corridor, while launching a deadly wave of strikes on Saudi airports and refineries.The Gulf monarchies are constructs of European colonialism propped up by American security guarantees that have proved effectively worthless. It cannot be long before regime change comes to the Kingdom, weakened by festering rivalries within the House of Saud since Mohammed bin Salman’s Ritz Carlton coup in November 2017. How could the debt-laden US withstand the collapse of the petrodollar, which channeled Saudi oil revenues into an AI-led stock market bubble already showing signs of bursting? 

Another “short, intensive” bombing campaign against Iranian nuclear and energy facilities, which seemed to be prefigured in the “limited” American strikes on Qeshm Island in the Strait of Hormuz early this week, would only postpone a further American retreat. Trump’s curtailing aid to Israel has been seen as reducing the likelihood of a resumption of the war. But Benjamin Netanyahu and Trump may still think they can “finish the job”.  

Iran’s economy is being slowly strangled by the American naval embargo that is blocking its seaborne oil exports. Yet the regime retains the capacity to devastate the Gulf’s energy production, causing acute shortages of diesel — the fuel on which the global economy runs — and irreplaceable agricultural chemicals. Undersea cables and data centers could also be attacked. The true Iranian nuclear option is disabling water and desalination plants. Weaponizing its geography, with its mountainous streams, inland rivers and lakes, Iran could wreak an enormous civilian catastrophe in the desert kingdoms of its Gulf enemies. 

At a global level, a species of total war is already underway. In the delirium of the Western mind, Gaza has been singled out as a unique catastrophe, but the reach of the battlefield into civilian life is practically universal. In Ukraine, Putin’s relentless bombardment destroys schools and scientific academies and cuts off electricity and water, aiming to render Kyiv uninhabitable and drive out millions of desperate refugees. Across Europe, Russia is orchestrating assassination, arson and cyber-strikes, together with drone strikes that could easily spiral into mass casualty events.  

The Baltic and Nordic states have fortified their defenses, but most European countries seem paralyzed. Poland — the most militarily prepared — is in the throes of constitutional crisis. Emmanuel Macron’s technocratic centrism has reached its endgame. Teetering on the edge of default, the Fifth Republic is rehearsing the upheaval that will come when Marine Le Pen enters the Élysée Palace — as must now be likely — and Jean-Luc Mélenchon mobilizes an insurrection against her. “Cost-of living” rioting and looting has spread to Belgium, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Greece, Germany, Switzerland and Albania, among other countries. It is hard to envision the French banlieues and AfD strongholds in former East Germany accepting the cost of deploying European troops indefinitely in Ukraine. Nor is it clear that Europe could afford to forgo the billions of euros’ worth of oil and gas it buys from Russia (which help Putin fund the war). A European solution is a mirage, and for all the heroic resourcefulness of its struggle, Ukraine cannot go it alone. Unless Zelensky’s supporters in Washington can somehow tie Trump’s hands, the logic of the situation is a brutal partition.

In America, Trump’s rise was a by-product of the neo-liberal cult of globalization. It was not simply an increase in inequality that stoked “populist” revolt. Whole sections of society were denied any productive role. Capital was exported and manufacturing offshored, labor imported and communities abandoned. With their workless families, drug habits and short lives, the human detritus of American industry could be safely left to molder on their reservations. Yet post-industrial decline has now affected much of the middle class. Occupations and career structures have melted into air. Neoliberal economics was the enterprise of re-engineering capitalism without a bourgeoisie, and the hollowing out of middle-class life has continued under Trump’s corporate kleptocracy. There was bound to be a countermovement from the Left. New York mayor Zohran Mandami’s “democratic socialism” is not a movement of organized labor. Like Jeremy Corbyn’s and Zack Polanski’s movements, it is a bourgeois populism, varnishing the status anxieties of heavily-indebted graduates and downwardly-mobile professionals with high-rent progressive causes. Incubated in campus seminaries of anti-Western orthodoxy, Mamdani’s leftism is set to be a deciding force in Democratic politics. 

A sea change is underway in the Republicans as well. As he limbers up for a presidential campaign in 2028, JD Vance is cultivating the same nativist constituency that is the audience of Tucker Carlson — aside from Trump, America’s most accomplished demagogue. A devil’s brew of anti-Semitism, historical revisionism and conspiracy theory is shaping up as the ruling ideology of the MAGA Right. As in Europe, the old center ground no longer exists. 

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Where is Trump’s heir?

By B. Duncan Moench

The midterm clean sweep was a repudiation of Trump more than an endorsement of the Democrats. The winners included Dr Abdul El-Sayed (Michigan, US Senate) and Dr Abdul Hamawy (New Jersey, US House), Egyptian-born Muslims closely aligned with the progressive wing of the Democrats who campaigned strongly against the war. Foreign policy positions that used to be bipartisan are being questioned and rejected in both parties. Europeans who are still invested in the notion that the Trump era is an unfortunate anomaly would be wise to think again. Nothing is further from reality than a reversion to Nikki Haley-style interventionism. It is not fantastical to see the US becoming the first advanced post-Western state and joining Russia in a China-led Eurasian bloc. 

That does not mean such a concert of powers would be stable. If a trilateral summit between Xi, Putin and Trump is held at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) conference in Shenzhen scheduled for later this month, their exchanges may well come to nothing. In some ways this looks less like February 1945 and more like the run-up to August 1914. Now as then, great powers are engaged in wars for control of natural resources against a background of tangled and shifting alliances. With multiple players and no one in charge, miscalculation by any of them could bring disaster on all. 

Another future is possible, however. Rather than drifting towards another Great War, we may be entering an era of peace. A curious kind of peace, to be sure, accompanied by unending bloodshed. Proxy wars and urban terrorism will rage unabated. War and peace will, in effect, be one and the same. The West will cease to exist as a geopolitical or civilizational bloc. But joining forces with its adversaries will fuel another stock market boom, and what neo-Marxian theorists fondly call “late capitalism” will enjoy a new lease of life. Having used the neoliberal interlude to build a mercantilist juggernaut, China will re-establish globalization in a dirigiste form that entrenches its economic primacy, with Russia exploited as a vassal state. A certain equilibrium will prevail, underpinned by the shared interests of transnational ruling classes.

Then again, none of this may come to pass. The future may not be advancing authoritarianism but accelerating disintegration. If Taiwan is not easily absorbed, Xi’s autocracy may be overthrown, and China could revert to disunity of a kind recurrent in its history. Putin might be toppled by war-weary oligarchs, only to be replaced by a more extreme anti-Western despot ruling a nuclear-armed Muscovy surrounded by breakaway fiefdoms. The United States may fragment, with enclaves of anarchic high-tech vitality booming alongside wastelands of poverty and desolation, presided over by an enfeebled federal government.

But of one thing we can be certain. Donald Trump has brought Western hegemony to a close. A world-historical figure as much as Napoleon or Mao, the founder of MAGA has ushered in a post-American age.

Perhaps Mr Carlson needs to be reminded of his history. In fact, the United Kingdom was a senior convener and signatory of the Versailles Treaty, which was negotiated by her prime minister, David Lloyd George. The ethnolinguistic demarcation line between Poland and Russia was called the Curzon Line, after the British foreign secretary Lord Curzon who delineated it. And when it came to Hitler’s invasion of Poland, Britain was intimately involved after her guarantee of Poland’s integrity on 31 March 1939.

This isn’t the first time Carlson has indulged Hitler apologism. Last September, he interviewed Darryl Cooper, who told him that Winston Churchill, not Hitler, was the “chief villain” of the Second World War. A few weeks later, Carlson interviewed Nick Fuentes, the livestreamer who has described Hitler as “awesome”, “right” and “fucking cool”.

These commentators are not unhinged outliers; they are part of a larger movement of ultra-MAGA propagandists who want to rewrite the history of the Second World War, only with Churchill and President Franklin Roosevelt as the villains, and with Hitler as a visionary but misunderstood leader who was merely trying to do the best for his people. They are helped by the sad fact that so much of the generation who remembered the war, and thus can give first-hand testimony to what ludicrous rot this all is, are naturally slowly succumbing to the inevitable passing of time. In Britain there are wannabe MAGA types, including “groypers”, “incels” and “chuds”, as well as devotees of the manosphere, who also circle around weird antisemitic conspiracy theories and Nazi-adjacent worldviews.

But when one examines “the actual facts”, one soon recognizes that it is Carlson himself who is indulging in “lies”. And Rees-Mogg who deserves high praise in batting back Carlson’s by turn faux naif, ignorant and fascist-adjacent statements and questions.

After all, if Hitler had merely been interested in overturning the Versailles Treaty, as he himself claimed and Carlson seems to believe, he would have stopped at Posen and the (previously German) Danzig Corridor, rather than occupying the entirety of Western Poland in September 1939. A month later, Hitler allowed the Russians to occupy the whole of eastern Poland, under the terms of the Nazi-Soviet Pact that his foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop had negotiated with the Soviet foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov in August.

As was clear to everyone at the time — and should be even clearer to Carlson today — Hitler’s plans ever since he wrote Mein Kampf in the early Twenties were to seize Lebensraum (“living space”) for his Aryan empire in eastern Europe. In March 1939 he had proven that overturning Versailles was not the limit of his territorial ambitions, when he invaded Bohemia and Moravia in Czechoslovakia, which had not been taken from Germany at Versailles.

If overturning Versailles had been Hitler’s aim, why, then, did he invade Denmark and Norway in April 1940, and then the following month attack neutral Holland and Luxembourg, which had not gained territory from Germany under the Versailles terms? The obvious answer, that the Fuhrer craved hegemony over Europe, seems to have been lost on Carlson. Whether out of contrarianism, naivety, or misplaced curiosity about alternatives to perceive Western weakness, Carlson and his fellow travelers are all too willing to explain away the terrible misdeeds of tyrants.

Just as Carlson denies that Hitler was unjustified in overturning an international treaty, he makes excuses for Putin and his invasion of Ukraine. “I never cared, for the record,” Carlson told Rees-Mogg about Putin’s 2014 seizure of the Crimea, because Ukraine “is the most corrupt country in the world”. He also denounced Volodymyr Zelensky as a “dictator”, claimed that the USA “was not in a state of Total War” against Japan in 1945, and even asserted that “Russia has a much larger economy than Britain”. Flattering, but untrue. The UK has a GDP of $4.66 trillion according to the 2036 IMF predictions, against Russia’s $2.66 trillion, and Britain’s GDP per capita, at $61,000, is more than thrice that of Russia at $18,525. So sympathetic is Carlson to Putin that even the Russian president himself, reflecting on Carlson’s interview with him in 2024, remarked that it was softball.

That same instinct has caused Carlson to ignore some of the darkest acts in Western history. Carlson’s belief that Britain and America were no “better than the people you were fighting” in the Second World War ignores the fact that, by and large, the Allies observed the Geneva Convention, whereas the Nazis and Japanese routinely ignored its provisions. Germany allowed prisoners of war to starve to death while the Japanese brutalized captives.

Far from Britons having “lost your self respect” as a result of the Second World War, in fact it is a primary reason why we are rightly proud of our country. We were, along with the British Commonwealth, the only countries to fight the Axis throughout the war from start to finish, and therefore won untarnishable glory in standing against the most evil regime in history.

Carlson’s attempts to smear that record are unfounded and destructive. When Rees-Mogg correctly pointed out that if Hitler had won the war, Britons would today be speaking German, Carlson replied, “Who cares? There are a lot of people in Britain who can’t speak English. So it would be nice to have at least a European language spoken in your country.” According to the Office for National Statistics, some 0.3% of residents of England and Wales cannot speak English at all, so once again Mr Carlson falls into the category of those who, in his own words, “know nothing of the actual facts”.

Nor is it true that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was morally wrong because, in Carlson’s words, Japan “was already a defeated nation”. When the nuclear bombs were dropped in August 1945, Japan still had 1.5 million men occupying the major urban, industrial, and coastal regions of eastern and northern China, as well as in Inner Mongolia and in Japan’s puppet state of Manchuria. Japanese submarines were still operating widely in the Pacific.

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Does Nick Fuentes have daddy issues?

By Kathleen Stock

In early August 1945, Japan occupied Formosa (modern-day Taiwan) and the whole Korean peninsula, and had forces in Burma, Thailand, Malaya, the Dutch East Indies and New Guinea. It was furthermore preparing for an invasion of the Japanese home islands, and considered itself far from being defeated. Indeed, its War Cabinet considered surrendering after the initial bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and formally decided not to. It took the attack on Nagasaki for Emperor Hirohito to declare that the war “had not necessarily gone to Japan’s advantage”.

We can be disgusted at the revisionist way that Mr Carlson twists history — he even considers Sir Oswald Mosley, leader of the British Union of Fascists, to be one of Britain’s “great war heroes” — but we should not be shocked. He has long had form for doing exactly that, and Rees-Mogg was correct in accusing Carlson of “verging on defending Hitler”, which is precisely what the remarks about the Versailles Treaty were intended to do.

We should be concerned, though, that Vice President JD Vance has not yet distanced himself from Carlson. Vance has a serious chance of becoming president of America, yet remains friends with a man who does not consider the Second World War to be a just war, one worth fighting.

Fortunately, the present ultra-MAGA movement centered around Carlson bases its entire argument regarding the Second World War on historical falsehoods that are relatively easily refuted. And their motivation is similarly easy to follow: in attempting to relativize the aggression and crimes of Adolf Hitler, while using antisemitic tropes to relativize the actions of the Nazis, they are trying to cast doubt on criticisms of Vladimir Putin. It is vital that these revisionists do not win the battle for the historical narrative, otherwise Hitler will posthumously win the peace in a way that he and his vile creed could thankfully not win the war.

It is all so transparent, and the best way to refute it is to do what Jacob Rees-Mogg did so admirably: stay calm, and recount the historical truth by way of factual evidence. As Sir Winston Churchill — who Carlson considers a “villain” — put it, “Study history, study history. For therein lie all the secrets of statecraft.”

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

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Will the queue bring down Putin?

By Seva Gunitsky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The case for de-escalation with Russia

By Wolfgang Münchau

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

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

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

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

Mussolini has analogs the world over today, as leaders of all stripes stage photo ops framing them as godlike and invulnerable physical embodiments of the state. Podgy Kim Jong-un exhausts a poor white horse with symbolic gallops at Mount Paektu, then commissions paintings about it. Nicolás Maduro, pre-abduction, drilled with Venezuelan troops in airport hangars, looking for all intents and purposes like a divorcée at zumba. And, of course, Vladimir Putin stalks Siberia in Y2K shades, baring his torso to the wilds of Tuva like a Muscovite Action Man. One 2009 photoshoot baked his outdoorsman image permanently into the global imagination: there he fished, he rode, he swam butterfly, he sat in a tree wearing khaki. The horse in question belonged to a local shepherd; by way of thanks for the lift, Putin gave the shepherd’s son his Swiss watch. At a time when Russian oligarchs were flouncing about on yachts in Monaco, Putin — who had just been replaced as president by Dmitry Medvedev — was busy embodying rugged Russian masculinity (while holding on to most levers of power). Three years later, he was back in office. 

Putin has long been the master of the muscly political stunt. He’s done spearfishing, judo, ice hockey; he’s been to the bottom of Lake Baikal in a submarine. But the president is now 73, and his body, Russia’s sovereign instrument, has changed. For years there have been rumors that Putin has employed a fleet of body doubles. This would make sense: for a leader whose somatic strength stands in for the nation’s, being seen to be physically present matters; lookalikes make you safer and more available. Ukrainian intelligence officials have long pointed to changes in Putin’s height, ear shape and so on to suggest the use of “at least three people [body doubles] who periodically appear”, Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s spy chief, said in 2022; others say anti-aging procedures or even the use of steroids are more likely to account for the president’s changing looks. Putin himself naturally denies all these theories; even so, apparent slip-ups keep happening; last week, the deputy prime minister for agriculture called the president a different name — “Pal Laich” — which sleuths claim is a nickname for a supposed body double called Pavel Nikolaevich. 

Whether the president uses stand-ins or not is small potatoes in the grand sweep of dictatorial precedent; historians suggest that figures from Saddam Hussein to Joseph Stalin probably dodged assassinations and bamboozled foreign intelligence with their own doubles. In Stalin’s Soviet context in particular, deception and staged imagery were entirely normalized, part of the grammar of leadership. The greater concern for Putin seems to be longevity.

Because presidential fixations seem so often to become government fixations — consider Trump’s upcoming 80th birthday UFC match at the White House — the Kremlin has made anti-aging research a priority. As such, according to the Wall Street Journal, Russian scientists are cooking up experiments with organ printing, cryotherapy and xenotransplantation, in which human organs are grown inside the bodies of miniature pigs. They claim to have their sights on perfecting organ replacement by 2030 — probably little more than a political fantasy unanchored in published research, given that many Russian programs have been tourniqueted from Western funding since the invasion of Ukraine. Nevertheless the “New Health Preservation Technologies” initiative has enjoyed an injection of $26 billion, and is developing a gene-therapy treatment, “one of the most promising avenues in the fight against aging”, according to the Kremlin’s deputy science minister. 

Much of this has to do with the president’s well-known fear of physical decline. Putin is known to be a fan of cryotherapy, and during Covid he was a notorious germophobe, making use of comically long meeting tables to enforce distance and intimidate visitors. Commissioning cripplingly expensive longevity research during a meat-grinder war might seem the move of an egotist, but it reflects the paranoia shared by many a tyrant. Democracy replaces its leaders; continuity of power does not rest on the discontinuity of flesh. In Putin’s strongman mythos, by contrast, l’etat c’est moi; the survival of the ruler is that of the regime — and nowhere is this more true than in states as subject to subterfuge as cabal-ready Russia.

Even in democracies, the strongman’s bodily anxiety pervades his public image. In America, President Trump seems constantly to be negotiating media speculation about his physical frailty. The thousands of cameras he encounters each day threaten to catch him nodding off at cabinet meetings, or “hiding a limp”, or pastily prowling the halls of the White House “out of drag”. The press loves nothing more than ogling at bruising on his hand — frequently covered by the cakiest foundation this side of Sunderland. Putin and Kim, who are tougher on unfriendly cameramen, are rarely caught out like this. But what Trump (so far) lacks in press-bullying power he makes up for with continuous references to his own virility, starting in 2015 when a doctor’s letter supposedly prophesied the ascent of “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency”.

A century on from Mussolini’s strongman stunts, the heft of the god-king still stands in for a nation’s solidity. Yet as Putin, Trump, Kim and Maduro continue to age in public, they are subject to unprecedented scrutiny — unavoidable even for those who tightly control the press. For these social media-age leaders, transparency and availability presents a mortal quandary: how can I continue to flex my muscles to a public who can now watch, analyze and publicize my decay? Gaits and grimaces are the aging strongman’s Achilles heel. For Putin at least, the solution lies with regime scientists and, horrifyingly, perhaps even pens of organ-bearing miniature pigs. 

Trump meets this challenge in a different way, with constant verbal assurances of his fitness. Over the weekend he claimed to have achieved a perfect cognitive test score, amounting to “extreme intelligence”; compare this with his taunts over “Sleepy Joe” Biden’s latter-day dodderiness and it becomes clear that virility is as critical in the political sphere in America as in Russia and North Korea. Jill Biden’s memoir View from the East Wing, published yesterday, anatomizes the real danger of presidential frailty; Joe’s cognitive decline amounted to a sort of zombie government run by unelected advisers, a sickness in democracy itself. The former first lady recounts her husband’s nighttime agony with undiagnosed prostate cancer, and her astonishment that “the most powerful man in the world, a man who has a medical team — not just a doctor, a medical team — around him 24 hours a day could wind up with cancer so advanced”.

And perhaps that’s the real anxiety, one that unites all leaders, autocratic or otherwise: unlike the fortunes of parties and political alliances, the mysterious processes of the body cannot always be spied on or wrangled. The ravages of age are utterly democratic, and sometimes elude fleets of medics and billions in government research funding. No wonder some rulers make a fetish of health: it’s one of the only things they cannot control.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two centuries on, Vladimir Putin has framed his crusade against Ukraine as the path to recovering Russian vitality once more. Putin has repeatedly invoked memories of the Westernizing 18th-century Tsar Peter the Great, and of the Soviet Union, to equate expansion with renewal — and war as a method of national rejuvenation. Through its battle against Ukraine, Putin promised, Russia would reshape the international order, overturn Western dominance, and forge itself as a stronger, more unified society. A new, vibrant Russia could emerge from a conflict in which its army has slaughtered thousands of Ukrainians and faced death and destruction itself.

For years, state propaganda has ceaselessly pushed this vision. Occupied cities such as Mariupol are presented as showcases of a coming “new Russia”: rebuilt, modernized, and cleansed of European influence. A rash of new school textbooks describe a rising power reclaiming its historical destiny. Official imagery projects motion born of war: construction sites, patriotic festivals, soldiers as founders of a renewed nation. Even diplomatic theater — including the Russian media reception of Putin’s red-carpet welcome in Alaska — reinforces the impression of restored prestige, of a country returning to its rightful place at the center of global affairs. The war serves as the engine of historical revival; it is the catalyst for life renewed.

Exactly four years after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, of course, Russia’s war has failed. Endless casualties have bought barely a fifth of Ukrainian territory. The world has not reorganized itself around Russian power, while the promised internal renewal has failed to materialize. Behind the spectacle of official optimism, meanwhile, death has moved to the demographic, economic and cultural heart of public life. The mechanisms meant to restore national strength are instead consuming the human and institutional resources on which that strength depends. Russia’s leaders set out to escape the Necropolis. Now, though, the country is addicted to war, and entrenching itself as a land of the dead.

Wherever Russians live, death has found a burrow. Each month, some 30,000 new recruits depart from country towns and industrial outskirts, and another stream of wounded traipses back the other way. Official promises of rehabilitation, employment, and social prestige often dissolve into bureaucratic delay and indifference. Despite promises of grand new veteran support centers, complaints rumble on social and even state media about the difficulty of actually accessing them. Still, the wounded are the lucky ones. As many as 325,000 soldiers have been killed since the full-scale invasion began. The life expectancy of a Russian soldier in some places may be as low as 12 minutes. No major power has sustained losses on this scale in a single conflict since the Second World War, yet on and on the cycle of recruitment and casualty is repeated.

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The consequences are already visible far from the battlefield. Across provincial Russia, amputees hobble over icy streets; families reorganize themselves around absence; cemeteries spill over their old boundaries as the dead are put to rest. In one tiny village in far-flung Kamchatka, almost all the young men are gone: of 39 who signed contracts to fight in Ukraine, 12 are missing or dead already. Life is more brutal in other ways too. Domestic violence is up and veterans, accustomed to the amorality of the front, have committed a spate of murders. Just this week Rustam Nogmov, a former soldier, was jailed for the apparently motiveless murder of an 86-year-old woman.

Russia’s leadership makes no attempt to conceal this creeping presence of the funereal. A Kremlin-approved blend of Orthodox Christianity is today bound up with worship of the fallen from the Second World War and the casualties of the present struggle. Death in Ukraine, the Orthodox Patriarch Kirill has claimed, “washes away all sin.” Images of fallen soldiers proliferate across everyday space, as if imitating icons of Orthodox saints. Roadside billboards bear uniformed portraits; official websites praise the young dead; memorial plaques fixed to school walls hang over children who sit at “heroes’ desks” commemorating the dead. Enrolled in state-sponsored youth organizations that teach military skills and the inevitability of battle, Russia’s youth are being fed into the same pipeline that is killing their elders.

Older Russians are roped in too. In carefully staged media stories, parents declare pride at their children’s death at the front. One mother from Stavropol claimed that, after her son died, she had dedicated herself even more fully to patriotic activities. “I focus,” she said, “on teaching lessons about bravery in schools, visiting museums, and attending exhibitions related to the special military operation.” The state’s commemorative machinery absorbs individual tragedies into a pantheon of sacrifice, where ordinary citizens, through death, can be elevated into symbols of national heroism — even as their living relatives are obliged to prostrate themselves before the very machinery that brought annihilation. The boundary between the living and the dead has begun to erode; participation in national life is parsed through the language of sacrifice and loss.

Thanks to the war, meanwhile, household finances across Russia’s shabby provinces now too contend with death. Enlistment, for all its risks, has become one of the few reliable paths to economic stability available to young men outside major cities. Recruitment bonuses, combat salaries, compensation payments to families of the dead — some of these bonuses, if the sometimes-reluctant state bothers to pay them, reach figures of $60,000 and more — have funneled vast sums into pockets after years of stagnation. Provincial towns that struggled to sustain small businesses now see new cafés, gyms, dog groomers, and other big-city amenities.

This influx of money creates the impression of renewal, but the new prosperity depends on citizens turning themselves into “human capital” out there on the western steppe. Without the war, there would be no boom. This is, as one analyst has put it, “deathonomics”. And where local economies go, so too the federal government has created a wartime overheating effect. Yet as the economist Alexandra Prokopenko starkly put it, the economy is destroying itself in its pursuit of war by “metabolizing its own muscle tissue.” Military expenditure absorbs an ever larger share of state resources, sustaining defense industries while weakening civilian sectors that depend on long-term investment. Factories linked to arms production operate at full capacity, but labor shortages intensify elsewhere as workers enlist, migrate, or are redirected toward wartime production. State spending — as much as 40% of it is now linked to the war effort — desperately prioritizes military needs over infrastructure, healthcare, and education, narrowing the foundations from which future development might come.

Output rises in sectors connected to the war effort, but the money is running out. All that is left is consuming more human capital — flesh-and-blood boys from Buryatia and Belgorod and Tatarstan. Skilled workers vanish from local economies. Younger cohorts face increasing incentives to exchange long-term prospects for short-term financial security at the front. Deprived regions in the provinces have become increasingly dependent on transfers that cannot exist without continued fighting: even as their men perish in the so-called “meat grinder,” the system demands ever more sacrifice. Economic stability begins to rely on conditions that steadily erode the society meant to benefit from it. And at the bottom of it all, “deathonomics” draws individuals into sacrificing themselves in the name of war.

Peace, under such circumstances, is all-but impossible. Demobilization would remove income streams that can sustain entire communities, while returning veterans would require medical care, employment, and social reintegration on a scale the state has rarely managed. Indeed, the history of Russia’s modern wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya suggests that this latest venture will not see troops integrated peacefully into society. Ending the conflict would expose weaknesses that wartime spending conceals — a paradox that the Kremlin has no plan to avoid. Death has not just become central to Russia as a visible category and a political religion. Today, it’s at the very heart of the Kremlin’s self-destructive economic program.

All the while, Russian culture, which has given birth to some of the greatest works in human history, has slipped into a coma. The Kremlin’s wars have often produced music and books of genuine import, their authors forcing Russians to confront what violence does to a society. Tolstoy’s early sketches from Sevastopol repudiated the bombastic heroism of official propaganda; Isaak Babel turned the Civil War into a record of cruelty, racism, and moral disintegration; Vasily Grossman produced the great tragedy of the Second World War in Life and Fate.

Each of these works bears witness to the ways that leaders justify their wars through sacrifice — and how, for ordinary people, morality can be corrupted by the temptations of death. Yet this distinguished tradition of war writing depended on the ethical insights of an intelligentsia willing to frankly confront corrosive wartime violence. Today, though, Russia’s most popular and insightful artists have mostly fled the country. Alla Pugacheva, perhaps the country’s most beloved singer and a familiar face for half a century, has been an outspoken critic from abroad, slamming the war as “terrible” and declaring that “to tell your homeland that it is wrong, that is patriotism”. But voices like these are barely heard in the motherland. Most of those that remain acquiesce to a state that now uses culture to promote its cult of death.

Russia in 2026 certainly doesn’t want for cultural production. Indeed, it produces a great deal. Unfortunately, what passes for culture here is increasingly administered with bureaucratic tedium. Patriotic grants, competitions, publishing initiatives, and a constant stream of “heroic” content optimized for online circulation — all comprises the most visible output. What the state’s organs desire, above all, are odes to soldiering and sacrifice. “Fan art” competitions and children’s poetry contests fill social media with images of soldiers in battle and death. Soldiers crop up on light entertainment shows on television. The state hands out awards to aging producers and writers who beat the drum of war most loudly.

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A constant stream of identikit, state-funded (and mostly ignored) Second World War movies clog up movie theater screens. The greatest state praise today is reserved for the purveyors of so-called “Z Literature”: the war veterans who write of their own experiences in Ukraine, meditating as they go on the necessity of bloodshed in crude and gruesome doggerel. A line in a poem by Alexander Pelevin, a veteran in his thirties whose writing has been awarded and praised by state media, sums up the genre: “‘Alive’ means only ‘not yet dead’. / I am the abyss; the one that reigns supreme.” Defined by the moment of death, the soldier’s life exists in limbo. He is morally empty — an abyss — yet by fighting and dying, he can become “supreme”. State commissions seek out such writers and lavish them with prizes.

But in a bitter twist, the state breaks even those it praises. Pelevin recently posted on Telegram about his own poverty: “Your Russian writer is broke, ruined, and in debt.” He begged for financial help from subscribers. The same state that fills public spaces with heroic portraits, sanctified language, and everyday rituals of death — this state struggles to provide stable support even for the poets who reinforce its narrative. Individuals, whether soldiers or writers, remain instruments in the hands of the state. Their cultural value lies only in what can be extracted from them: death.

The state insists that war generates new life. The longer the war continues, however, the more the Kremlin and society as a whole cannot escape its clutches without economic and social collapse. Yet all the while, the war itself is a burden, dragging Russia into an economic and cultural morass. This country stuck in its own moral stagnation, just like the Russia of the 1820s, is the inescapable necropolis of late Putinism.

A decade from now, Moscow may continue to glitter, sustained by media spectacle, distance from the front, and economic support from China. But elsewhere, the necropolis will surely have taken hold. Imagine a typical small town. The war memorial has been renovated again, its granite polished and its list of names extended. Across the street, the roof of the school — now named after a local dead military “hero” — still leaks. A café opened during the wartime boom stands all but abandoned, its prices beyond what most residents can afford. Recruitment notices take up space on a bulletin board alongside funeral announcements and pleas for money for wounded veterans. The faces of the dead look down from the local church. The living cling to the hopes of a new war to inject more money into their ailing town and empty bank accounts, even as they know it will take yet more sons and brothers from them. More war — more death — is the only way out of the catastrophe. In attempting to destroy Ukraine, Russia has not revived itself: it has turned itself into the land of the dead.

This is hardly a surprise. The EU has shown an utter disinterest in hard-nosed diplomacy. If the bloc had really wanted to be a strategic actor during the Russia–Ukraine war, it would be orchestrating the peace talks rather than leaving Trump and his team in charge.

Diplomacy was a state art the Europeans themselves invented. It was the Americans, however, who transported it into the modern age. During the Yom Kippur war in 1973, Henry Kissinger, who was Richard Nixon’s National Security Advisor and Secretary of State at the time, maintained close contact with Anatoly Dobrynin, the Soviet ambassador to the US. The US supported Israel while the Soviet Union sided with Egypt and Syria. According to records later released by the US, Kissinger warned Dobrynin in a telephone conversation that he had received intelligence that Egypt and Syria were about to attack Israel. Then he said: “The President believes that the US and USSR have a special responsibility to restrain our respective friends.” It was the kind of thing that neither he nor Nixon could have said in public. Diplomacy often sounds very undiplomatic. Keeping channels open is not about being polite. It is about preventing accidents and finding solutions.

The Kissinger–Dobrynin exchange is a quintessential example of backchannel diplomacy. Effective diplomacy does not have to happen at the official level. Kissinger and Dobrynin were not even direct counterparts. If Kissinger had insisted on only talking to the Russian foreign minister, he would not have got as far as he did.

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In the first few weeks of the Ukraine war the Europeans tried top-level diplomacy through a series of progressively frustrating meetings. Four days after Russia’s invasion on 24 February, 2022, official delegations from Russia and Ukraine met for talks in Belarus, in a place close to the Ukrainian border. After three rounds of discussions, the talks moved to Antalya, Turkey, where the foreign ministers met on 10 March. The two sides then held talks in Istanbul on 29 March, after which they exchanged draft texts for a few weeks. The Russians insisted that Ukraine become a permanently neutral state and end its plans for EU membership. In exchange, Ukraine would receive security guarantees from a group of countries, including the UN Security Council members. The status of Crimea would be addressed through talks over 10 to 15 years. That was a better deal than what is on the table today.

The process stalled around mid-April and never resumed. Around that time, contact between the Europeans and the Russians also came to a close. Neither the Biden administration, nor the Europeans, maintained a Kissinger–Dobrynin style backchannel.

One of the important questions for historians to address is the extent to which European governments pushed Ukraine towards rejecting a peace deal four years ago. My reading has always been that the Europeans did not want to settle for anything less than a total Russian withdrawal from the occupied Ukrainian territories. They wanted to see Russia defeated — for their own security too — and were happy to let Ukraine fight on their behalf. But they had no strategy for a Ukrainian victory. And since they ended all diplomacy, they had no strategy for peace either. This, in a nutshell, is why Ukraine is losing the war.

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Recently, Emmanuel Macron and Giorgia Meloni have suggested that Europe resume diplomacy with Putin. Neither France nor Italy can afford an ongoing war, now that the bloc cannot fund its support for Ukraine by sequestering the frozen Russian assets. Meloni and Macron are right. The Europeans made a monumental error of judgment when they ended the communication that still happened in the early phase of the war. To be fair to Macron, he tried harder than others.

It would, however, be unwise to resume diplomacy at the level of heads of government or even foreign ministers. The stars of the Congress of Vienna in 1815, which laid the ground for one of the more peaceful centuries of modern European history, were four diplomats: Klemens von Metternich from Austria, Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand from France, Viscount Castlereagh from Britain, and Karl August von Hardenberg from Prussia. With the exception of Russian Tsar Alexander I, Europe’s emperors stayed in the background. Peace is hard, detailed work.

Today, by contrast, Trump’s much-maligned emissary Steve Witkoff is a businessman, with no previous experience in diplomacy. I recall a scene in the Elysee Palace where the German ambassador to Paris laughed at him for comparing the grand ornaments in the Salon des Ambassadeurs to those of the Mar-a-Lago beach club. The President’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who has played a key role in the peace talks, is much the same. They are the kind of Americans who bring out the worst in Europeans, but the former have ultimately been more successful than the latter. If there is a deal, the Americans will have been the one to have prepared it. When Witkoff went to Moscow, he spent hours in detailed negotiations with Kirill Dmitriev, who heads the Russian sovereign wealth fund. Business can unlock problems that are not solvable through classic diplomacy.

So, who is Europe’s Witkoff? Given that Kissinger was a morally compromised person who was excellent at his job, I would probably pick one of the many morally compromised Germans. Perhaps Gerhard Schröder, the former German chancellor who knows Putin, but maintains loyalty to his home country. You do not want to give that job to Kaja Kallas, the EU’s chief diplomat. She loses no moment to tell us that Putin must be defeated but has never given us a convincing plan on how to do this.

A politician who is sometimes mentioned as a potential interlocutor is Alexander Stubb, the President of Finland, who is more of a political realist than Kallas. The EU might be a place in which politicians from small countries play important roles, but that doesn’t mean they can suitably represent Europe in geopolitical power battles. Just look at Vivian Motzfeldt, the Greenland foreign minister, who broke down in a live TV interview after meetings with JD Vance and Marco Rubio. The EU sometimes likes to think of itself as a big country, but when it comes to foreign policy, it really is a collection of minions.

The restoration of diplomatic ties would be an opportunity for the UK to offer leadership, but the four prime ministers since the start of the war have shown no interest. Yvette Cooper, the current foreign secretary, has thoroughly rejected the idea of reestablishing talks with Putin. “I think what we need is evidence that Putin actually wants peace and at the moment, I’m still not seeing that,” she recently proclaimed. Is it not the whole point of backchannel diplomacy to get people to create the evidence? Diplomacy is not about sitting back and waiting for things to happen.

War and diplomacy are two sides of the same coin as the German military historian Carl von Clausewitz reminded us. You talk. You fight. Then you talk some more. The Second World War was the exception, not the rule. The Western allies did not maintain backchannel diplomacy with the Nazis. They did, however, have a strategy for victory, and they won. It is unfortunate that the Western commentary continues to draw so many parallels today with a war that could not be more different.

Based on the imperfect information we have today, the best outcome for Ukraine would have been a deal based on the draft that circulated after the meetings in Istanbul. The second best outcome would be a deal based on what Witkoff and Kushner are currently negotiating.

Yet it is possible that the peace process fails. Russia is seeking to gain full control of the Donbas region, including land in the east it does not occupy. Ukraine is unwilling to hand it to them on a platter. We could be looking at some really bad scenarios. Russia may seize more Ukrainian territory than it currently claims. Ukraine may lose its independence or be reduced to a small rump state surrounded by Belarus in the north, Russia in the east and the south, and cut off from the Black Sea. This is not the most likely scenario, but it’s more probable than glorious victory. Without some dirty diplomacy, I don’t see a good outcome of the Russia-Ukraine war.

Remember, though, the Kissinger–Dobrynin channel was arranged within a few weeks of President Nixon’s inauguration. That was almost five years before the Yom-Kippur diplomacy was masterminded. Even if the Europeans started to regrow a diplomatic brain, it would take time. We should not expect miracles. But if they don’t start now, they will forever stay where they are today: out of the reckoning.

Yet the deal also provides Ukraine with a security guarantee modeled after NATO’s Article 5. It doesn’t recognize Moscow’s territorial claims as a legal matter. And it stipulates Russian withdrawal from several territories that it claims to control. Under the plan, some $100 billion in expropriated Russian assets will be used to fund Ukraine’s postwar reconstruction. President Trump has given Ukraine a week to accept this deal; it is unclear which of its 28 points can be negotiated, if any.

Capitals in Western and Northern Europe are irate, feeling cut out of the process and confused by an apparently dovish turn in Washington’s approach after a few weeks during which Trump had ratcheted up pressure on the Kremlin. They shouldn’t be surprised: The Ukraine settlement is part of Trump’s broader effort to free America from its strategic entanglements in Europe (and the Middle East) to focus on more strategically crucial — and politically rewarding — regions.

The hawks and Atlanticists still operate on the assumption that America’s and Europe’s strategic interests are deeply aligned. Trump, like many ordinary Americans and Europeans, understands that the age of alignment is over, and that a fundamental break with the 20th-century arrangements was long overdue.

Since the end of World War II, the pursuit of three core interests has defined American grand strategy. First was the security of postwar Western Europe. Through military alliances like NATO and economic programs such as the Marshall Plan, Washington provided an effective bulwark against both the forward expansion of the Soviet Union and the threat of revolution within the war-shattered European societies. 

Second, the United States has maintained a considerable presence in the Persian Gulf region, assuming Britain’s former role as the principal outside power to ensure continued Western access to the region’s oil. Third, America has viewed the East Asia-Pacific region as a core strategic interest, ever since the seizure of the Philippines by President William McKinley during the Spanish-American War in 1898, which protected US commercial entry into Asia and signaled Washington’s ambitions as a global power.

The three regions of interests formed a hierarchy of sorts: Europe first, the Middle East second, and Asia third. And despite runaway globalization, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the rise of China, this hierarchy of priorities has largely remained consistent. The past several US administrations doubled down on toppling regimes in the Middle East while acting as though Western Europe requires the same amount of US assistance that was needed to remedy the destruction of WWII and fend off Communism.

Despite President Barack Obama’s promises to “pivot to Asia” in response to China’s rise, Washington launched interventions in Libya, Syria, and Yemen, while expanding military aid to support the actions of other states in Mozambique, Ukraine, and Gaza, among others. President Joe Biden likewise maintained the priority of Europe and the Middle East, notwithstanding his withdrawal from Afghanistan. 

Now, a quarter century into the new century and an additional decade since the end of the Cold War, the second Trump administration is finally giving shape to a new, post-Cold War framework of American grand strategy.

This Trump Doctrine appears to be a reorientation of American strategic interests for the 21st century. While media critics initially framed Trump as an “isolationist,” his record has unambiguously disproved that allegation. This doctrine is best understood not through universal principles, but by examining how Trump is diverging from America’s traditional priorities and interests. 

At the heart of the president’s vision is a desire to devolve European security back to European states and to disengage from the sands of the Middle East. Reducing American commitments in those two regions is paired with an activist approach to the Western Hemisphere, while playing hardball economic statecraft with Beijing. While the execution of this reorientation has been mixed and, in several cases, dangerously flawed, the Trump Doctrine is a much needed update to last century’s strategic status quo.

Start with Europe. American presence in Europe has been consistent since World War I. After assisting the European allies in two world wars, Washington turned its attention to the long-term containment, and later “rollback,” of Soviet Communism. The United States stationed troops throughout Europe, and granted institutionalized security guarantees to NATO allies, all under the shadow of nuclear war.  

America paired this projection of military power with the largest foreign-aid program in global history: the Marshall Plan. Between 1948 and 1952, the United States supplied more than $13 billion in economic assistance to Western Europe, equivalent to approximately $160 billion today. The Marshall Plan acted as a mass subsidy for postwar social and Christian democracy, thus staving off revolution and realignment with the Communist sphere.

While the Soviet threat is no more, and the Continent has long since recovered from the destruction of World War II, Europe has continued to stay at the forefront of American foreign policy. Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Biden administration sounded Cold War-era civilizational rhetoric. “If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine,” Biden claimed in his 2024 State of the Union Address, “I assure you he will not.” 

Vladimir Putin’s Russia came to serve as a substitute for Stalin’s USSR in the minds of hawks in Brussels, London, and Washington. This, despite contemporary Russia’s weakness relative to a Soviet Union that had just defeated the Nazi war machine, occupied most of Central Europe, and installed puppet governments in multiple states. While Soviets steamrolled through half the Continent, today’s Russia has gotten stuck in an embarrassing war of attrition with one of the poorest countries in Europe, experiencing casualties that dwarf those of the Soviet-Afghan War. Despite Cold Warrior fantasies to the contrary, the conquest of Europe is not on the agenda for a country that can’t manage the conquest of eastern Ukraine.

That said, Russia’s resolve in Ukraine shouldn’t be underestimated, either. Putin has stated that he considers Ukrainian accession to be an existential threat to Russia: whether or not you believe him, it is clear that the Russians are not about to retreat empty-handed. Despite a massive Western sanctions regime, considerable aid to Ukraine, and a coup attempt, there has been little evidence that Russian military efforts are on the brink of collapse.

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Having borne high costs, Putin’s behavior reveals his belief that the costs of surrender are still higher. The last three and a half years have shown that Putin is committed to this conflict for the long haul, and that Moscow will continue expending the resources necessary to pursue its objectives in Donbas. Biden’s strategy was to lean into that resolve, running down Russian resources in the hopes that Putin would withdraw from Ukraine or lose domestic support at home. Neither outcome came to pass, and hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian lives were destroyed in the bargain.

Trump, by contrast, has long disdained — and now explicitly broken with — the postwar status quo in Europe. Yet rather than abandoning Ukraine, his approach has involved consistent efforts to pressure both Volodymyr Zelensky and Putin to the bargaining table, while passing responsibility for European security to the likes of Germany, France, and Poland.  

Trump hasn’t been soft on Russia — he has continued to provide considerable aid to Ukraine, granted permission to use Western weapons on targets within Russian territory, and imposed a new set of extremely harsh sanctions on Russian oil following the cancellation of peace talks in Budapest this autumn. However, these actions aren’t instruments of attrition, but rather intended to pressure Putin to negotiate. Biden’s policies were intended to extend the war by keeping Ukraine in the fight. Trump’s approach, in contrast, has been focused on ending the conflict altogether.

The new 28-point peace plan comes at a moment when the United States has started deporting Ukrainian refugees so that they can be drafted into the Ukrainian military, with Zelensky saying of the deportees, “We’ll find good use for them.” If this is what Ukraine’s defense now relies on, a deal is best approved sooner rather than later. The plan’s core features are consistent with what smarter analysts have been saying for multiple years now. Ukraine is denied NATO accession but is granted a non-NATO security guarantee and a pathway to EU membership, while Russia keeps the territory it has held behind a line of conflict that continues to creep westward. While it remains to be seen if the proposal will be adopted, it offers the opportunity to stop Ukraine’s continued bleeding. Zelensky would be wise to accept it and focus on his country’s recovery and opportunities as a member of the European Union.

In the meantime, the administration has maintained a consistent message that the days of European “dependency” on Washington are coming to a close. While this initially sparked a panic that Trump was about to withdraw from NATO, this has not happened. Instead, European leaders have now agreed to a new distribution of burden-sharing by committing to invest 5% of GDP annually on their own security by 2035. Eighty years after the end of World War II, the responsibility for European security is being handed back to Europe in a fraught but measured transition.

Which brings us to the Middle East. American strategy in that region has also largely been determined by the postwar status quo, with a considerably more imperial bent than in Europe.  US involvement began with treaties ensuring American access to oil in 1928 and 1944, coinciding with the handoff of Western hegemony from the declining British Empire to the rising American imperium. 

The struggle to control access to the region’s natural resources persisted throughout the Cold War, with ambiguous CIA involvement in the 1949 Syrian coup d’état followed by the CIA-led operation to overthrow the government of Mohammad Mossadegh in Iran after he nationalized Iranian oil. Efforts to prevent Soviet capture of the Persian Gulf region led to numerous interventions, proxy wars, and covert operations, a habit that wasn’t broken when the Soviet Union fell.

Here, too, Trump has departed from the status quo. Beginning in the 2016 Republican primary, when he described the Iraq War as a “big fat mistake,” Trump has consistently expressed a desire to get the United States out of the Middle East. The result has been a significant shift in both policy and public discourse. While Trump received some criticism for negotiating with the Taliban, his goal of ending the American occupation of Afghanistan after 20 years of continuous and counterproductive military presence has been one of his chief achievements — even if it was Biden who pulled the final Bandaid.

Trump’s second term has involved new challenges, above all the war in Gaza. While Trump has followed an approach similar to the policy pursued in Ukraine — supplying significant aid to Israel while pressuring both sides to reach a negotiated settlement — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has consistently derailed American attempts at diplomacy. The Israeli attack on Iran scuttled US efforts to negotiate a new treaty governing the Iranian nuclear program and ultimately pulled America into military action, albeit in a manner designed to limit escalation.

The Jewish state’s strike on Iran — and similar attacks on targets within the sovereign borders of Lebanon, Syria, Tunisia, Qatar, and Yemen — severely undermine the strategic interests of the United States, both in the region and globally. At a moment when Trump is attempting to turn the ship of American policy around, Israel continues to sow chaos among its neighbors. While “mowing the lawn” in the region may (or may not) be in the best interests of Israel’s security, it is destabilizing, and impels Washington to deploy back to a region Americans across the political spectrum are resolved to leave behind.

Furthermore, Israel’s incommensurate response to Hamas’s Oct. 7 terror attack has been a disaster for American legitimacy abroad in increasingly multipolar times. Israeli impunity has fueled claims of Western hypocrisy, pushing states out of reach of American influence as its material supremacy is increasingly eroded. The peace plan currently in place for Gaza — potentially the crowning achievement of Trump’s presidency and recently adopted by the United Nations — rests on an extremely fragile ceasefire which has already been violated a number of times.  

If Trump wants to pacify and deprioritize the Gulf region, he will need to ensure that Netanyahu does not derail his strategy to extricate America from the Middle East. He has, so far, failed on that count.

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Then there is the Asia-Pacific region.  Here, Trump has maintained the greatest strategic continuity with his predecessors. Biden’s national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan, advocated for what he called “a foreign policy for the middle class,” focusing on industrial renewal at home and measured economic competition with China, undergirded by stable security commitments to allies in the Indo-Pacific. 

At the macro level, Trump’s approach to Asia has emphasized the same points: self-sufficiency in the tech domain, coercive economic statecraft, and secure trans-Pacific commerce, while attempting to revive American industry. While avoiding the previous administration’s direct provocations of China and apocalyptic rhetoric concerning global democracy, Trump has again made some missteps in execution that have undermined America’s position in the Pacific.

Trump’s affinity for tariffs has been the distinguishing characteristic of his foreign policy. As an instrument of statecraft, tariffs have a few different logics. First, a regime of broad, long-term tariffs on imports are designed to protect domestic industry from being undercut by foreign producers, a key concern among Trump’s base. 

Second, tariffs can be used in a way similar to sanctions, as an instrument of economic coercion, imposing costs on a specific state until it cedes to American demands. This use of tariffs involves sanctions targeted at a specific country, with clear conditions for their removal. Finally, tariffs have historically been used as a revenue source, requiring a broad, continuous application while maintaining significant trade relationships to keep the revenue flowing.

The issue is that the Trump administration has claimed all three of these logics at one time or another, despite that they are mutually exclusive. Protectionist policies would not involve the on-again, off-again application of coercive tariffs, which should not be broadly applied to loyal trading partners; and tariffs as a source of revenue boost consumer prices in the long run, without the revitalization of domestic industry. For tariffs to be an effective instrument of policy, there needs to be a clear strategic objective guiding their use. Trump’s tariff policy has been strategically incoherent.

While the tariffs levied against stalwart American allies such as Japan, South Korea, and Thailand have allowed Trump to extract some marginal concessions on trade policy, raising trade barriers against these countries is deleterious to American interests for two reasons. First, it renders trade with the United States more difficult, costly, and unpredictable, goading allies to find more dependable trading partners (hint: like China). If these policies are meant to help America compete economically with Beijing through cutting better deals, they have been counterproductive. The long-run effects of playing economic hardball will be a decreased reliance on trade with America.

Second, tariffs on military allies undercut their ability to invest in their own security. Trump’s demands of Asian allies have been similar to the demands he has made of Europe — America will help those who help themselves. Encouraging allies to raise their own defense spending has been a core component of Trump’s approach to foreign relations. Such demands are difficult to fulfill, however, when facing a punitive tariff regime imposed by the global hegemon. 

Antagonizing allies in the Pacific undermines the American security architecture, drives Asian states into closer economic ties with China, and places the costs of these missteps on American consumers. While macro-level strategy in the Pacific has been conventional, its execution requires a reevaluation.

Finally, there is Latin America. The true revisionism in Trump’s strategic orientation is taking place here, much closer to home. American engagement in the Western Hemisphere has historically oscillated between neglect and heavy-handed intervention. From the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 to Theodore Roosevelt’s 1904 corollary, which endorsed US intervention into unstable or uncooperative South American countries, successive administrations justified US dominance over Latin America as a means to protect its own backyard. 

Today, Trump’s foreign policy marks a return to that logic after decades of relative neglect during the post-Cold War focus on the Middle East. Trump, it seems, is staging something of a sequel to the Roosevelt Corollary. His administration has revived a muscular and interventionist approach to the Americas — justified in the language of law enforcement and border control, rather than the old rhetoric of hemispheric solidarity. 

Washington has used coercive diplomacy, sanctions, and military threats, including moving an aircraft carrier group to waters just off Venezuela’s shores, under the pretext of deterring narco-traffickers. Trump’s turn to South America suggests an updated form of gunboat diplomacy aimed at maintaining dominance of the hemisphere and curbing the influence of rivals like China.

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Yet the pursuit of regime change and coercive diplomacy in Latin America risks deepening the very crises it purports to solve. In countries like Venezuela and Nicaragua, US pressure has hardened authoritarian resolve, without producing stable alternatives. Interventions framed as humanitarian or anti-narcotics operations will create disorder in Latin America, destabilize local economies, empower non-state armed groups (primarily the established cartels), and push displaced populations northward, fueling the very migration surges that Trump has pledged to stop.  

The expansion of US involvement in regional politics has also provided new openings for Chinese influence. As Washington relies on sanctions and pressure, Beijing offers a menu of loans, infrastructure, and trade that pulls Latin American states further into its economic orbit. The outcome is a paradoxical weakening of US influence in its own hemisphere.

Trump’s Western Hemisphere strategy, then, reflects both regression and innovation: a reassertion of American primacy through coercion, but couched in the language of sovereignty and border control. Whether this revived “gunboat diplomacy” can secure American interests without repeating the errors of past interventions remains an open question. What is clear is that the Western Hemisphere, once peripheral to US grand strategy, has again become a central concern of foreign policy.

Taken together, these regional realignments suggest not a retreat of American power, but its reorganization. The Trump Doctrine doesn’t mark an abdication of global leadership so much as a recalibration of it — an attempt to convert sprawling, open-ended commitments into a more contained and transactional system of influence. Europe and the Middle East are being nudged toward self-sufficiency, the Pacific remains the primary arena of great-power competition, and the Western Hemisphere has reemerged as a laboratory for coercive diplomacy and border-focused security politics. 

The underlying logic is one of consolidation: a recognition that America’s resources, attention, and legitimacy are finite, and that sustaining primacy requires pruning rather than perpetual expansion.

Trump’s style has suggested a desire to cut America’s losses in peripheral regions and an experimental exercise of alternative modes of power in Asia and South America. For all its inconsistencies and failures of execution, the Trump Doctrine represents an effort to realign America’s commitments with its interests. The resulting strategy is untidy, often improvised, and occasionally self-defeating, yet it gestures toward a long-delayed reckoning with the limits of American reach.  

After decades spent expanding a liberal order now fraying at its edges, Washington is beginning to ask what can — and what should — be preserved. The answer, imperfect as it may be, is the outline of a humbler but more deliberate kind of primacy: a United States that still seeks to shape the world, but finally on terms it can sustain.

The plan, first circulated on a Telegram channel, is clearly not a great one for Ukraine. But, equally, it isn’t a “capitulation” and those who have described it as such don’t really want a deal. Ukraine will be able to improve on it. But, admittedly, not by much. “You don’t have the cards,” Trump once told Zelensky. Unfortunately, after the recent corruption scandal, his hand is weaker than ever.

Over the past three years, US officials have repeatedly told me that Ukraine has no chance of winning the war. And after America withdrew support earlier this year, it was clear that they had a point: Europe was in no position to plug the gap. Europeans might be the self-righteous defenders of the fast-collapsing multilateral world order, but history will record that when push came to shove, they weren’t ready to put their money where their mouth was. On average, the total support for Ukraine was around €4 billion per month during the first half of the year. In July and August, it collapsed to under €1 billion per month, according to the Kiel Institute. No major European country has been willing to cut spending or raise taxes to fund Ukraine meaningfully. The Europeans’ strategy, such as it was beyond photo-ops with Zelensky, was to keep the Russians fighting until they got tired. Unfortunately, America tired first. And Europe had no Plan B.

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Now Europe is out of money and out of ideas. And Trump does have a plan. He has been playing the long game. His tough talk against Vladimir Putin was merely tactical, intended to mask a long-term strategy to force an end to the war. As Phillips O’Brien has suggested, in his “Long Con” analysis, even Trump’s secondary oil sanctions were part of this gambit. These were supposed to take effect on 21 November. And yet nothing happened. India and China can continue buy Russian oil with impunity. The sanctions were never serious.

Trump has a singular priority — to end the war, whatever it takes. And he has two major advantages in this bid. One is Ukraine and Europe’s military dependence on the US. The other is America’s unique status as the only influential Western power with direct diplomatic channels with Moscow. The Europeans committed a huge strategic blunder when they simultaneously ended their conversations with Vladimir Putin.

And so Trump’s 28-point plan was negotiated by Steve Witkoff with his counterpart in Russia, Kirill Dmitriev. Admittedly, it does have the feel of a work in progress: the leaked version was written in Russian and, when translated into English, is clumsy. It is detailed, but by no means a formally agreed text.

There are, though, some non-negotiable elements. One is the territorial agreement which would give Russia a part of Ukraine it does not yet occupy. Russia already holds almost 90% of the entire Donbas region — all of Luhansk, and roughly three quarters of Donetsk. Trump’s peace plan would hand Russia the remaining territory of Donetsk, along with the 200,000 Ukrainians who are still resident in the Ukrainian-controlled parts of the oblast. Under the plan, the territory would be demilitarized and become part of a buffer zone.

Trump’s team accepted this because they concluded, correctly, in my view, that without it there would be no deal. Putin would have continued to fight and eventually captured more territory. Russia has been making advances: it recently managed to occupy the vital frontline town of Pokrovsk. It could take another year for Russia to capture the remainder of Donetsk, before it went for the big prize: Zaporizhzhia, a city with approximately 700,000 inhabitants, and the capital of the region that bears the same name. At that point, Ukraine’s future independence could could no longer be assured.

This peace deal, though, is not as one-sided as its critics say. It formally recognizes the sovereignty of Ukraine, and its right to join the EU. It also allows Ukraine to maintain an army, capped at a reasonable 600,000 troops. Nor does restrict NATO countries from providing further assistance, except for certain weapon categories like long-range missiles.

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But there are some real curveballs. I almost fell off my chair when I read Point 14, which suggests the investing of $100bn of Russia’s frozen assets in the reconstruction of Ukraine — with the US taking half of the profits. This is classic Trump: playing commercial games which are beyond the imagination of our European diplomats. In addition, Europe would be obliged to pay $100bn of assistance from their own pockets. There will be a US-Russian investment fund to finance joint American–Russian projects, with profits shared.

But most importantly, the deal forces Europe to unfreeze the $200 billion in Russian assets currently held in European accounts, mostly in Belgium. This is a bitter pill; Europe had hoped it could use the Russian money as collateral for Ukraine loans. Trump has no authority to force Europe to release the funds — Friedrich Merz already said No to this demand — but he could make life difficult if it refuses.

Europe’s only semi-coherent strategy regarding Ukraine had been to withhold these assets as leverage for future reparations  — a plan built on the fiction that Ukraine would win this war. But if Russia and Ukraine end up agreeing a deal, this scheme would be rendered unworkable, since would be a tool with which the Europeans could sabotage the deal.

Another red-line in the peace deal is the gradual lifting of sanctions. Readmitting Russia to the Group of Seven advanced industrial nations — making it the G8 again — would be painful for the Europeans. Russia was expelled in 2014, after Russia annexed Crimea. A revived G8 would effectively be ruled by Trump and Putin.

No surprise, then, that EU leaders at the G20 summit in South Africa this weekend issued a statement to say that they wanted to make a counterproposal, designed primarily to frustrate Trump’s plan. They insisted on a ceasefire — a non-starter. And after senior US and European officials met in Geneva on Sunday, they said they had made some progress but gave no details.

Ukraine, by contrast, made some positive noises about a new version of the deal. The Kyiv Independent quoted a senior US official saying that the plan had been drawn up with Rustem Umerov, the secretary of the National and Security Council of Ukraine, and one of Zelensky’s closest aides. Umerov reportedly agreed to the majority of the deal, after making several modifications, which he then showed to Zelensky.

Domestic attitudes in Ukraine are also shifting. I noted a post from Iuliia Mendel, Zelensky’s former press secretary and staunch defender of Ukraine. Over the weekend she tweeted: “My country is bleeding out. Many who reflexively oppose every peace proposal believe they are defending Ukraine. With all respect, that is the clearest proof they have no idea what is actually happening on the front lines and inside the country right now.” She is absolutely right in her observation that the loudest supporters of Ukraine in Europe are those with no understanding whatsoever of the military reality on the ground.

So will the Europeans encourage Zelensky to keep on fighting? I am sure they will try. But I am not sure they will succeed. Ultimately, they will back down.

Because if Ukraine were to reject the deal, Trump would formally disconnect his remaining military aid and intelligence support to Ukraine. The country relies on this as its early warning system for any incoming attacks as well as guiding its own strikes on Russian infrastructure.

Trump could go even further and renounce US responsibility for Europe’s security, on the grounds that the continent is taking unacceptable risks. The Europeans know this, of course. While outwardly, they may give an impression of defiance, their actions suggest otherwise. After Trump imposed tariffs on European imports this summer, the EU folded and agreed to a big increase in military spending. If Europe really wanted independence from the US, it would have created a defense procurement union, with a “Buy European” mandate and started to reorganize its militaries. None of this is happening. Nor will it. This is the problem with the multilateral crowd. They care too much about procedures.

We can expect a good deal of huffing and puffing coming from European capitals over the next few days. Leaders will insist that they are retain sovereign decision-making. Legally, this is true. The US has no rights to decide the fate of Russian assets held in Europe.

But this is not a legal dispute, it is a political one. Europe never had a viable strategy for the war — and now it’s becoming clear it has no strategy for peace either. The Europeans have no choice but to make a deal: they have no cards left to play either.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Max Weber, whom we know of as a harsh melancholic realist, wrote about ‘this great and wonderful war’ and how marvelous it was to still be alive to experience it, and yet how bitter it was that his age prevented him from going to the front.”

At no point did Weber and many other war-cheerleading Germans of the time appear to consider the possibility that the war might not turn out the way they thought it would.

I see Europe in a similar position today. Like Weber, many intellectuals and politicians of our era are gung-ho about going to war with Russia. One of the biggest cheerleaders for Western military intervention is the historian Timothy Snyder, previously at Yale, now at the University of Toronto. He said in 2023: “The Russians have to be defeated, just like the Germans were defeated.”

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European politicians, too, are becoming increasingly gung-ho about fighting the Russians. One of them is Alexander Stubb, the Finnish president. I knew him from my time in Brussels, when he was a humble MEP, the embodiment of a calm, intellectual northern European. He said last week that security guarantees for Ukraine invariably mean that the guarantors are willing to fight the Russians.

I am not underplaying the security threat posed by Vladimir Putin. The intrusion of Russian fighter jets into Estonian airspace no doubt constitutes an unacceptable act of aggression. Nato has every right to shoot them down and should signal strongly that this is what will happen next time. But defending your alliance is different from fighting a proxy war in Ukraine, a country that is not part of Nato.

The Cold War was a period of relative stability not only because of balance-of-power politics, but because politicians who experienced the horrors of the Second World War wanted to secure peace. Most of that generation is no longer with us. Like Weber, today’s European elites have missed out on the opportunity to fight a glorious war. The difference is that they would prefer to let others do the fighting for them.

The likelihood of an escalation into a hot war is big enough to be taken seriously. Apart from a general war-hungry disposition, the biggest risk today is that we, like those Germans in 1914, are misjudging the enemy. Putin, too, misjudged the Western response to his invasion of Ukraine, and the resilience of the Ukrainian army. But the Western misjudgments are more persistent.

The biggest of all was that Russia’s economy was weak and would ultimately buckle under Western pressure. This misjudgment has several layers. It started off with a statistical lie — that Russia was really only a small economy. If you measure the size of the Russian economy by its annual output in US dollars, that would have indeed been the case. At the start of the war, the Russian economy was approximately the size of Spain’s if measured in US dollars. But this is not a good way to judge a country’s capacity in times of war. What matters is the spending power of their money — how many tanks their money can buy. The answer is they can buy a lot more tanks than us.

If you measure an economy on the grounds of purchasing power, a completely different picture emerges from that suggested by our complacent statistic. According to the World Bank, the world’s largest economy, by far, is China, provided the measurement is made on the basis of purchasing power parity. (Purchasing power parity accounts for goods being more affordable in some countries than in others.) Number two is the US. Then comes India, and then Russia. Germany, in sixth place, is the biggest of the European countries.

Based on this measure, the 10 countries that form part of an alliance with China and Russia, the so-called Brics, are bigger than the US, Western Europe and Japan together. We live in a truly bi-polar world. The US and China are the leaders of each side. We no longer call the shots, even if we think we do. Over time, the other side will become bigger, because they are growing faster than us.

Since the start of the war, Russia has outgrown all of the G7 economies. The British economist John Maynard Keynes would not have been surprised, because what happened was a classic Keynesian war economy effect. The UK experienced this effect during the Second World War. Putin re-organized Russia into a war economy.

I am emphasizing these economic facts because this is what will inform the reality on the ground in Ukraine going forward. It is money that buys weapons. This money for Ukraine has dried up. The US has given €115bn in total bilateral aid to Ukraine so far, which dwarfs Germany’s €21.3bn and €7.56bn from France. Without the US, there is absolutely no way that the Europeans could afford to bankroll the war themselves. For that, they have to borrow money.

Or they could raid the €210bn of frozen Russian assets that sit in Europe. Previously, Germany, France, Belgium and the European Central Bank have opposed an asset raid — for different reasons. Belgium has most of the money on its soil. The money sits in the vaults of Euroclear, a large financial depository based in Brussels. France and Germany might be on the line for any compensation claims should Russia win in commercial courts. The ECB believes that an asset raid is illegal and would irrevocably damage Europe’s reputation as a financial center. Under normal circumstances, it would be hopping mad for the EU to take such risks, but if they want to continue to support Ukraine, this is the only financial vehicle they have at their disposal. Now that the European Commission has come out with a proposal for unlocking the money, there is now a good chance that it could happen.

And then what? Leaving the complex technical and legal issues aside, the EU will run into a problem very similar to Margaret Thatcher’s caricature of socialism: eventually, they will run out of other people’s money. The misjudgment is that the €200bn will tide us over until Donald Trump leaves office, when he will be succeeded by a Democrat who will happily resume providing the lion’s share of the funding. Friedrich Merz, the German chancellor, said recently that the war will end when Russia is economically exhausted. That’s the Western strategy.

But our sanctions have failed to cripple the Russian economy. Remember Einstein’s characterization of madness as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different outcomes. The EU has so far agreed 18 packages of sanctions against Russia. A nineteenth is now being prepared.

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There are indeed some signs of financial stress in the Russian economy. Russia’s central bank chief, Elvira Nabiullina, admitted earlier this year that the Russian economy managed to expand on the back of essentially free resources, labor, sequestered industrial capacity, and liquid assets from the country’s National Wealth Fund. These resources have been truly exhausted, she said. But this comment was not addressed to the West, but to Putin. Putin needs to find means to create new resources. As does the West.

But Russia has something that Ukraine has not. China is a better ally to Russia than the US is to Ukraine. The Western neocons keep on underestimating the depth of the China-Russia alliance, which is the result of inept US foreign policy over the last ten years. By placing sanctions and tariffs on both countries, the US ended up creating a strategic alliance between them. The US, meanwhile, is much more detached from Ukraine under Trump than under Biden.

The mistaken idea behind Western sanctions is that Russia and China are dependent on Western technology like semiconductor chips. Very much to the surprise of the Biden administration, China managed to build high-performance chips themselves. Last week, China turned the tables by placing a ban on the import of Nvidia chips.

The €200bn in frozen assets that we might unleash in loans to Ukraine can also easily be matched by the other side. China could give a loan to Russia, collateralized on Western assets in China, or on receipts from legal compensation that Russia may be entitled to in the future. It is an ongoing misjudgment to think that the West — the smaller part of our duopolistic world — is going to smoke out the larger one.

Misjudgment of this scale and number is what turns regional wars into world wars. Our army of tweeting, war-hungry Western intellectuals are Max Weber’s successors. They leave me in no doubt that there is substantial support for a glorious war, just as there was over 100 years ago.

Monday’s summit earned Trump praise even from usually critical mainstream outlets. “It was the best day Ukraine has had in a very long time… President Donald Trump offered tantalizing glimpses of how he could approach presidential greatness by saving Ukraine, securing Europe and genuinely deserving the Nobel Peace Prize,” CNN enthused. Yet the meeting would not have occurred had it not been for Trump’s summit with Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, just two days earlier — which instead drew near unanimous criticism from Ukraine supporters for “legitimizing” Putin. But this carefully staged “de-demonization” of Putin injected a much-needed dose of realism and pragmatism into the discussion.

The Alaska meeting formally reestablished direct dialogue between the world’s two largest military and nuclear powers. It marked the first face-to-face meeting between a US and Russian president since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, and the first such encounter on American soil in nearly two decades. It also marked a turning point in US-Russia relations which, since 2022, had reached levels of hostility not seen since the Cold War.

The symbolism was carefully staged: from the red-carpet reception and the ceremonial ride in the American presidential limousine to Trump’s informal reference to “Vladimir”. It was all intended to signal a new chapter in US-Russia relations. But for Moscow, it meant even more. The summit was a political victory. The sight of Trump hosting Putin exposed the failure of the Western strategy of “isolating Russia” and “crippling its economy”. Far from being marginalized, Russia has emerged stronger: it has deepened its strategic relationship with China, expanded its influence among Global South states, and weathered the sanctions regime that was supposed to destroy its economy. Simply by shaking Putin’s hand, Trump acknowledged that Russia remains a power to be reckoned with, not a pariah state.

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More importantly, the summit amounted to an indirect acknowledgment that the West has effectively lost this war. Ukrainian forces cannot retake the territories annexed by Russia. On the contrary, Moscow continues to make incremental advances on the battlefield. This reality makes a negotiated settlement the only possible exit from the conflict — one that would necessarily involve territorial concessions: Crimea, plus the four annexed eastern and southern oblasts.

This perhaps explains why Trump quietly backtracked on the various threats he has leveraged at Russia over the past weeks. In July, he announced a 50-day deadline for Russia to halt the war or face “severe economic consequences”. Putin ignored it. Trump shortened the deadline to 12 days. Putin did not respond. Even on the eve of the Alaskan summit, Trump was still insisting on a ceasefire as a minimum outcome. Yet Putin had been clear: Russia has no interest in a ceasefire that would allow Ukraine to rearm and bolster its defenses with Western support.

Moreover, Moscow’s demands have always extended well beyond the question of territorial recognition, seeking a comprehensive settlement that addresses the “primary roots of the conflict”, as he repeated in Anchorage: that Ukraine will never join Nato, that the West will not transform it into a de facto military outpost on Russia’s border, and that a broader “balance of security in Europe” be restored. As even the hawkish New York Times recently acknowledged: “The Russian leader’s overarching goal is primarily to secure a peace deal that achieves his geopolitical aims — and not necessarily to conquer a certain amount of territory on the battlefield.”

In an effort to strong-arm Putin, Trump also threatened to impose secondary sanctions on purchasers of Russian oil — including China and India. Yet both countries swiftly dismissed the threat, making it clear such measures would be ineffective. Far from isolating Moscow, the sanctions would only have pushed Beijing and New Delhi even closer to Russia.

After Anchorage, Trump abandoned both of his original positions. He said that a peace deal was preferable to a ceasefire, and that secondary sanctions were off the table. For Putin, this was a major win. For the US, it was an implicit admission that Washington lacks the leverage to impose terms. In Trump’s words, it simply “doesn’t have the cards”. This was a blunt recognition of the diminished military and economic clout of the United States and the collective West.

A comprehensive peace deal, however, remains elusive. No terms were agreed in Alaska, largely because Europe — and Zelensky himself — remain opposed to any settlement on Russian terms. European leaders are so heavily invested in the narrative of “victory” that conceding even part of Russia’s demands would be suicidal. Having spent two years assuring their citizens that Ukraine was winning the war, they cannot suddenly pivot without facing public outrage — especially given the dramatic economic repercussion of the war on European economies.

But the deeper issue is structural: European leaders have come to rely on the specter of a permanent Russian threat to justify their ongoing erosion of democracy — from expanding online censorship to persecuting dissenting voices, and even canceling elections, all under the pretext of combating “Russian interference”. Zelensky, too, has reasons to resist peace. Ending the war would mean lifting martial law in Ukraine, exposing his government to pent-up discontent over corruption, repression and the catastrophic handling of the war. Indeed, a recent poll revealed that Ukrainians themselves increasingly favor negotiations over endless fighting. No wonder the Alaska summit triggered panic in European capitals as well as in Kyiv.

Perhaps this explains why Monday’s discussion carefully sidestepped the most sensitive question — territorial concessions — with Zelensky and the Europeans instead pressing for “Article 5-style” security guarantees for Ukraine, effectively treating Ukraine as a Nato member even if it is not formally one. While Russia has signaled general openness to the concept of Western security guarantees, the devil lies in the details. European leaders demanded legally binding US participation and backing — something neither Moscow nor Washington is likely to provide, given the risk of being drawn into direct confrontation with each other. Even less acceptable to Russia is any arrangement involving a Nato military presence in Ukraine, as floated by Britain and France. It seems European leaders have adopted a strategy of expressing openness to a settlement while ensuring, through their conditions, that no such agreement can realistically materialize.

More fundamentally, though, it’s unlikely that Trump himself is prepared to concede to Putin’s demand for a wholesale reconfiguration of the global security order — one that would reduce Nato’s role, end US supremacy, and acknowledge a multipolar world in which other powers can rise without Western interference. For all his rhetoric about ending “forever wars”, Trump continues to embrace a fundamentally supremacist vision of America’s role in the world — albeit a more pragmatic one than that of the liberal-imperialist establishment. His administration continues to support Nato rearmament and even the redeployment of US nuclear weapons along multiple fronts, from the UK to the Pacific. Trump’s policies toward China, Iran and the broader Middle East confirm that Washington still sees itself as an empire whose global dominance must be preserved at all costs — not only through economic pressure, but also through military confrontation when deemed necessary.

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Within this framework, Russia remains a central challenge. As a pivotal ally of both China and Iran, it is embedded in the architecture of the emerging multipolar order that threatens US hegemony. For Washington, Moscow is not simply a regional actor but a key node in a broader strategic realignment.

Trump, however, appears willing — at least temporarily — to put the “Russia problem” on hold, focusing instead on the larger confrontation with China. But this indicates a shift in priorities rather than principles: the logic of American supremacy ensures that Russia will remain on the list of adversaries, even if the spotlight briefly shifts elsewhere.

In this sense, Trump would probably be content with a scenario in which the US extricates itself from the Ukrainian debacle while leaving Europe to shoulder the burden a while longer — possibly until conditions on the ground deteriorate so severely that a settlement on Russian terms becomes unavoidable. Indeed, JD Vance and Pete Hegseth said as much, arguing that the US will stop funding the war, but Europe can continue if it wishes — buying American weapons in the process. This “division of labor” would allow Washington to reallocate resources to the coming confrontation with China, while leaving Europeans stuck in an unwinnable war.

The Russians are well aware of all this. They likely harbor no illusions about the real objectives of the US imperial establishment. And they know full well that any deal struck with Trump could be overturned at any moment. However, Putin’s short-term goals align with Trump’s. one could say that Russia and the United States are strategic adversaries whose leaders nonetheless share a tactical interest in cooperation.

Seen in this light, one might postulate that the purpose of the Alaska summit was never to secure a final peace agreement. Both Trump and Putin doubtless understand that such a deal is currently impossible. Rather, the meeting was about allowing the US to step back from Ukraine without admitting defeat, while Russia continues to advance. For Washington, this creates political cover: Trump can claim he tried diplomacy, while offloading the burden of war onto Europe. For Moscow, the advantage lies in Ukraine’s gradual weakening as US logistical support fades. Indeed, in order to encourage an American exit, Russia might even agree to a temporary ceasefire and possibly also to vague US “security guarantees” — with Russia and the US presenting these as significant concessions and victories, respectively — though such a truce is unlikely to hold.

The most likely outcome will be a temporary thaw in US-Russia relations, though the broader geopolitical struggle will go on. And the real losers will be Ukraine and Europe. Ukrainians will continue dying in a war they cannot win, while Europeans will continue to foot the bill. Eventually, they too will be forced to accept a deal on Russian terms — but only after further suffering. Even then, Europe will remain trapped in a hostile and militarized relationship with Russia, with the potential for renewed conflict at any time. At best, the Alaska summit and its aftermath signals a temporary relaxation in an ongoing confrontation between the West and the emerging multipolar order. At worst, it ensures that Europe and Ukraine continue to pay the price for a war that the US has already chosen to leave behind.

The Kremlin has thus far shown no signs of easing off its offensive campaign against Ukraine. Indeed, it is pummeling its neighbor with rocket and drone attacks almost nightly. But for once, Trump’s MAGA supporters, who have been skeptical toward granting Ukraine aid and even supportive of Vladimir Putin, have shown little signs of disagreement. The loudest voices, such as that of Senator Lindsey Graham, have promised that the President means business: “To those in Russia who believe that President Trump is not serious about ending the bloodbath between Russia and Ukraine: You and your customers will soon be sadly mistaken… Get to the peace table.”

Will the sheer strength of Trump’s nerve, backed up by the threat of a more united Republican Party, yet more American military support for Ukraine, and further sanctions against Russia, be enough to finally force Putin to retreat? The reaction in both Russian diplomatic and political circles, and in the social media spaces where hundreds of state-aligned and funded influencers, bloggers, and “grassroots” news services disseminate opinions on the war against Ukraine, suggests not. Trump’s once enviable stock has plummeted in the Russian patriotic sphere, which now treats “grandpa Donny” as a flaccid figure of fun and laughs off his threats of repercussions.

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The transformation of Trump’s image in the Russian public eye has taken place at lightning speed. During Trump’s first four years in the White House, Russia was disappointed by the American President’s coolness toward the Kremlin. However, the promise of a newly combative Trump returning to power and pulling the rug from under Ukraine sent Russian hopes sky high. Moscow sent a string of positive signals in the wake of Trump’s inauguration, congratulating the leader and indicating its readiness to talk terms not just on Ukraine but on Russia’s re-entry into the global financial and political elite. Mere weeks ago, Russian politicians were still sprinkling their public pronouncements with praise for a leader they considered, if not quite Putin’s equal, then at least the kind of old-fashioned quasi-authoritarian with whom they could do business.

A series of phone calls between Putin and Trump, in which the former wished his opposite number every “success” at home and committed to collaboration and cooperation, had been heralded by the Russian President himself as “very constructive”. After all, as Putin put it in late June, Trump was just like him: a man who had battled the liberal enemy to seize power, who wanted to put his country on the right track at any cost, and who was, “a manly fellow, that much is clear”. The two men were, as one Kremlin aide put it, “on the same wavelength”: together the strongmen would bring Ukraine to heel, carve up assets and influence, and humiliate liberal factions across Europe.

The so-called “Runet” — the parallel network of Russian-language web and social media spaces that dominates the country’s online life — embraced Trump in exactly these terms. He was the sort of man who, even if they disagreed on some aspects of policy, at least respected and understood Russian nationalism and Russia’s war against Ukraine. Images of Putin and Trump conversing on equal terms, memes depicting Trump as an all-American hero crushing the liberals (often sourced from MAGA groups on Truth Social and other pro-Trump networks), and commentary anticipating a deal that would wrap up the war to Russia’s benefit proliferated.

When Trump all but kicked Volodymyr Zelensky out of the Oval Office in February, the Runet went wild. Trump had bested the “little pig” Zelensky; he had emasculated Russia’s ur-enemy.

Yet Trump’s “10 to 12 days” demand has transformed his image on the Runet. A flood of derisive material has dismissed the President’s ultimatum and belittled him in terms equivalent to those formerly reserved for Joe Biden and Barack Obama — in Russia, Biden is derided as a befuddled, powerless old man with no grasp on reality, while Obama is mocked in racist terms and called a liberal cuckold. Ivan Kondakov, a popular nationalist social media influencer who has appeared on state TV, penned a poem mocking Trump: “Each of us got lots done through the day/Sorted the mess, did work the right way/But Trump just sat there losing it,/Running his mouth, talking total shit.” An AI-generated image that has gone viral in Russia shows an exhausted Trump in a therapist’s office: “And how long has it been since you last made peace?” the therapist asks. “A week,” Trump says. “Now I really want to un-make peace with somebody.” Far from being the “manly” figure praised by Putin and the Russosphere in recent months, Trump has been cast as the fool: a leader incapable of making up his mind, and who is roundly ignored by the resolutely robust and powerful Russia.

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Many of these Runet posts are followed by a cacophony of derisive comments and reams of laughter emojis: “He came up with his own ultimatum and now he can stew in it. Donny the bullshit artist”; “The orange guy’s lying. In reality, Putin told him to fuck off. The orange guy’s just hiding it.” Gone from the Runet is Trump the strongman. In his place is a pathetic figure who is dominated by Putin and whose tantrums and threats are as easy to ignore as they are to laugh at.

Naturally, Russia’s chaotic social media sphere does not dictate Moscow’s foreign policy, nor will much of this material ever reach the eyes and ears of Trump. However, a threat made in the realm of international relations rests on credibility: will the politician or country making the threat actually follow through? The more Trump shifts from one position to another without taking action against Russia, the more likely it is that Putin will call his bluff. In the early days of his second presidency, Trump appeared to have a chance to exert his will to bring the war in Ukraine to an end or at least a standstill — whether by working with Putin or against him. But the more he flip-flops, the more he turns into a figure that the Kremlin will ignore.

Perhaps even Trump subconsciously recognizes the limits of his will. Reflecting on his latest ultimatum, he wondered aloud: “I dunno if it’s going to affect Russia.” He may not know what comes next, but the patriotic segments of Russia’s public and politicians are far more certain: they believe that Trump is an emperor with no clothes, and that Putin has bested yet another American president.

I am going to put my head on the block to predict that this crisis could come back sooner than we think. Last time, it was the southern Europeans who triggered it. This time, it is the northern Europeans with their relentless push for an increase in defense spending to 5% of GDP.

In 2010, a Greek deficit, overshot by some $20 billion, triggered the worst financial crisis in Europe since the Great Depression. But this is a tiny amount compared to the extra defense spending European countries are about to commit: $500 billion, by my calculations, every year. The Greek deficit was a finance minister taking his eye off the ball, but our increase in military spending is a life sentence. After 10 years, we will have spent a cool $5 trillion. This is on top of what we are spending already.

People get easily fazed by large numbers. Let’s put this into perspective. When the Labour government in the UK cut off the winter fuel payments to pensioners, that saved them less than $1.8 billion. We all remember the furious political reactions and the botched U-turn. If the UK was really serious about meeting the Nato 5%-of-GDP target, the UK government would have to spend a cool $100 billion each year. That’s 55 times as much as the savings on the fuel subsidies. In fact, it is more than half of the UK’s entire welfare budget, excluding pensions.

It is not just the UK. You are looking at numbers that are off the charts for every Western European country. This week, Nato leaders are about to descend on the Hague to agree the fiscally most impactful decision that politicians have ever committed to in modern history. They do so without an electoral mandate. None of them campaigned for this, including those who came to power in recent elections, like Keir Starmer or Friedrich Merz. None of them received a formal mandate from the parliaments, which are ultimately responsible for fiscal expenditures in Western democracies. They are doing this because Donald Trump just pulled this number out of a hat. It was just a number. He could have said four, or six. Nobody did a study beforehand on what Nato actually needs, and how the needed capabilities are best acquired. We are talking about the biggest fiscal program in human history — because Europeans are dead scared that Trump will feed us to the Russian bear.

This is not how military investments are normally done. The right way to do this is to start identifying the threat, and the options available to counter it. Europe will undoubtedly have to purchase capabilities it does not currently have — especially in areas such as electronic warfare, cybersecurity, satellite-based systems, and drone technology. What stands out about European defense spending is not how little we spend compared to the US, but how inefficiently we spend it. Europe has six times as many weapons systems as the US. Our drones, tanks, missiles and warships are incompatible with each other. Nato-Europe has 178 weapon systems, compared to 30 in the US. European countries have a dozen different types of howitzers, a type of artillery gun designed to fire projectiles on a high-arching trajectory. According to Reuters, the Europeans spend some €6-11 million on each one of them, while the US spends €2 million.

Would a rational security planner not start with that kind of consideration? If you were really serious about raising Europe’s defensive capabilities, you would pool this. Europe does not need a single army, but it does need a single defense procurement agency. It cannot be the EU, if only because the UK and Norway are not members.

You may accuse me of being a bean counter. We live in some of the richest countries in the world, and we are facing an existential threat. So who cares about the cost? I would agree that the threat is for real. Russia is fighting wars in Europe. It is implicated in hostile activities in the Baltic Sea. It interferes in elections and is behind cyberattacks against Western digital infrastructure. Putin has ordered the use of chemical weapons in the UK to hunt down former spies. I also believe it is important that we bolster our defenses to disabuse Russian leaders of any idea that they could test Nato’s security guarantee with impunity. We should not talk ourselves into a war, as some hotheads are doing now. But we should be in a position to fight one.

I doubt that our new NATO target will help us do this. Given the lack of any political willingness to pool our defense purchases, what will Putin make of our newly announced 5% spending target? He is already spending 6-8% of Russia’s economic output on defense, but the impact is much higher than those numbers suggest. He does not have a dozen different howitzer systems. Through presidential diktat, he redirects private-sector industrial production to defense. He pays a fraction of the cost of defense equipment that we do. His technology may not be as advanced as ours. But unlike Western countries, Russia is capable of scaling up production quickly. Putin also gets supplies of weapons and soldiers from North Korea, drones from Iran, and dual-use advanced technology from China. The West, and especially the so-called Russia experts that keep popping up in the media, persistently underestimated the resilience of Russian military supply chains. Putin has been a much more formidable warrior than Western experts believed he would be.

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The West has forgotten the art of strategy

By Wolfgang Munchau

So how would a leader, who has been in power for a quarter of a century and who has fought several wars, react to the NATO announcements of an increase in defense spending that avoids any painful decisions? Worse still, many NATO countries like France or Germany will have to fund this through debt because they do not have the political majorities to raise taxes or cut spending. Germany would have to spend $130 billion per year extra on defense. That’s about the size of the federal government’s social budget. They are not going to replace their welfare systems with food stamps, are they? That is the kind of thing Putin might do.

If NATO goes down the road of debt-funded defense spending, chances are that the bond markets will attack us before Putin does. The infamous bond market vigilantes will fight on the side of the Russians. They were the ones that brought the sovereign debt crisis to the eurozone. Their job is to attack countries that aren’t financially sustainable. Low-growth Western European economies are not going to grow out of this debt as they did after the Second World War. A debt-funded increase in defense spending of that magnitude could push some Western countries over the brink. Pedro Sánchez, the Spanish prime minister, is the only Western leader to come out openly against the NATO defense spending program for exactly this reason. It would destabilize his country, he said. But Spain is not the only country in trouble, or even the main one. Sánchez is the only guy who admits this.

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Putin’s plans for Europe

By Wolfgang Munchau

Putin knows that Western countries do not have political majorities in favor of making sacrifices to support such high levels of defense spending. A debt-funded defense program will reinforce this view.

He raised his own defense spending by seizing foreign assets. He also tapped Russia’s sovereign wealth fund. He increased company taxes, and income taxes for higher earners. And he is about to do something that we Europeans are struggling with: intensify defense cooperation with friendly countries, especially China. One of Russia’s and China’s strategic advantages is their large supplies of important commodities. What has become clear in the US-China trade dispute is that China is willing to use its monopoly of rare earths as a geopolitical weapon. These magnets are a vital component not only for electric car engines but also in military aircraft. Russia will have unlimited access to these magnets.

China will not cut off the West completely, but it will discriminate. The West has already started to lose its technological dominance which it enjoyed since the Seventies — the time when the Soviets started to fall behind. In AI, for example, China has caught up with the West and is the world leader in solar technology. The Chinese have more people. And their purchasing power is getting bigger than ours.

Perhaps the best thing that can happen to the West is that they will cheat themselves out of the new defense spending target — so that the 5% will end up like just another Western phantom spending program. Keir Starmer wants to reclassify £5 billion of investments in rural broadband rollout as a key military priority. I am hearing that the Germans are thinking of counting an electricity-price subsidy as a military investment. The truth is that we do not want to give up our creature comforts, let alone our national sovereignty, for defense procurement.

We are spreadsheet warriors. Putin knows it.

The defacement of Kropka was not an isolated incident. Around the same time, similar graffiti appeared in front of the office of an NGO providing assistance to Belarusian refugees, even as a Belarusian cultural center in Vilnius was vandalized, and an air gun was fired at a Belarusian Orthodox chapel in the Lithuanian capital, leaving bullet holes in its grill-guarded glass windows. If, however, Furmanaŭ was momentarily terrified as the assault on his shop, recalling the ethnic cleansing and genocide that devoured the Baltics in the Second World War, the former Belarusian political prisoner soon realized what he was really looking at, realizing the assault was a “provocation” by the Lukashenko regime.

In April, Lithuania’s State Security Department (VSD) confirmed what Furmanaŭ had suspected — that this string of incidents had indeed been the work of Putin and his Belarusian stooge Alexander Lukashenko. Yet according to the agency, Belarusian and Russian intelligence services have now gone even further, and had started recruiting individuals to ambush and assault Belarusian students living in Lithuania, and to film themselves carrying out other violent attacks elsewhere in the country.

Three years since the start of the war in Ukraine, and four since the beginning of Lukashenko’s manufactured migration crisis along Belarus’s borders with Nato, such activity might seem hardly surprising. In March, to give one example, Lithuania accused Russia’s GRU of conducting an arson attack on an Ikea in the country. But while these local, socially incendiary, and much less high-profile actions might seem innocuous by comparison, there is much more going on in Vilnius than mere vandalism. Attacks like the one against Kropka are the real-world manifestation of a long-running fight over identity. Increasingly stoked by Moscow and Minsk, it’s now playing out on a potent historical battlefield: the legacy of the medieval Grand Duchy of Lithuania.

The multi-ethnic and pluralistic character of the Grand Duchy, which endured for centuries until its destruction in the late 18th century, has since given rise to a uniquely Eastern European problem. Despite its name, the fact that the state encompassed not only modern Lithuania but all of today’s Belarus means it does not easily fit into the rigid boxes of 20th century nationalism. In a region where history bestows legitimacy, the battle over who owns the inheritance of the Grand Duchy carries implications not just for how Lithuanians and Belarusians see themselves, but what territory they have the right to control.

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It is no surprise, then, that this niche corner of history has become fertile soil for geopolitical manipulation by the Kremlin and its allies, whose campaign of hybrid attacks in Vilnius aims to provoke an ethnic conflict between Lithuanians and Belarusians. In this, however, Lithuania is just the tip of the iceberg. Putinist efforts to use history to foment chaos in Vilnius are a hallmark of the Kremlin’s playbook elsewhere in the region, and a means of extending Putin’s soft power at his rivals’ expense. “These attacks are a blow not only to the safety of Belarusians in Lithuania, but also to the trust and unity between communities,” Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, the head of the Belarusian democratic opposition tells UnHerd. “Attacking its history, its democracy, its role in the EU and Nato — it’s all part of the same imperialist playbook.”

At the core of Putin and Lukashenko’s hybrid warfare lies an ideology called Litvinism, whose most radical fringe claim that modern Lithuanians are in fact a different people entirely than the ones who dominated the Grand Duchy of Lithuania — and that therefore Vilnius should rightfully belong to Belarus. To that end, graffiti with slogans like “Vilnius is ours!” began appearing in the city last year, while in late 2023 a video even surfaced of self-described Litvinists threatening Lithuanian politicians.

“Historical conflict and historical misunderstandings offer very good ground, especially in Eastern Europe for hostility among nations,” says Vadim Vileita, a Lithuanian political scientist and linguist with Belarusian roots. “This situation with the Grand Duchy of Lithuania and the legacy of this old state is one of the examples of how a common heritage can not unite, but divide nations, especially in difficult geopolitical situations.”

Certainly, the Grand Duchy itself was a place of contradictions. Led by largely pagan Lithuanian leaders, in the 13th century they dramatically expanded the polity’s borders. Soon enough, their borders stretched across modern Poland, Belarus and Ukraine into Russia itself, with many of their subjects Orthodox Slavs. After the Grand Duchy and Poland fell under the sway of the same royal house, in 1386, laying the foundation for the creation of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth two centuries later, pagan Lithuanian leaders adopted Roman Catholicism and were crowned as Polish kings. While the Lithuanian language continued to be spoken on the territory of Lithuania proper, the dominant language of literature and administration in the Grand Duchy became Ruthenian, an East Slavic language similar to modern Ukrainian and Belarusian. As if this multicultural maelstrom wasn’t enough, the Lithuanian nobility was increasingly Polonised, even as the country’s laws were drafted in Latin.

None of this would survive the convulsions of nationalism. By 1918, indeed, it would be the Poles who weaponised Litvinism, as they fought to establish the northeastern borders of the Second Polish Republic. In their view, it was Polonised inhabitants of Lithuania, who called themselves Litwini, who were the real heirs of the Grand Duchy — distinct, they claimed, from the Baltic Lithuanians trying to use the mantle of this history to carve out their own modern state. It was under this pretext that Polish General Lucjan Żeligowski captured Vilnius in 1920 and annexed it to the new Polish Republic. Never mind that Żeligowski considered himself to be a Polish Lithuanian, and indeed grew up speaking a dialect of Belarusian.

In its more modern guise, however, it is Belarusians who have assumed the mantle of Litvinism. Though adherents today hold a spectrum of views, the most extreme believers see the modern Lithuanian state as a usurper of the Grand Duchy’s legacy. By extension, that means Belarusians have the right not just to the duchy’s heritage — but also to cities like Vilnius. Just like in the past, these ideas didn’t spread organically. According to Nerijus Maliukevičius, a political scientist at Vilnius University, Litvinism remained “marginal” in Lithuanian discourse until around 2020, when an influx of Belarusians into Lithuania provided Minsk with a chance to sow mischief.

That’s ironic. For though 57,000 Belarusians live in Lithuania, most of them loathe the Lukashenko regime and indeed fled Belarus for their own safety. Yet if few Belarusians have ever even heard of Litvinism, let alone support seizing Vilnius for themselves, that hasn’t stopped Lukashenko from using history to instrumentalise elements of the Belarusian diaspora, alongside other Russian speakers in the country, to carry out his dirty work. It’s unlikely that these saboteurs-for-hire are political hardliners. Rather, they’re mostly cash-strapped individuals eager for work, providing Lukashenko with a fertile base for exploitation. “He’s a huge opportunist, that’s not a surprise,” says Hanna Liubakova, a Vilnius-based dissident who fled Belarus and now serves as a non-resident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

As so often, though, history rushes in to complicate things once more. Lukashenko, for his part, is an undiluted product of Soviet Belarus, viewing his country’s history through a distinctly Russian lens. In this Sovietised historiography, Belarusians, as Moscow’s long-lost Slavic brothers, were rescued from oppression first by the Tsar and then by Stalin.

In other words, then, Minsk’s embrace of Litvinism in Lithuania is less an ideological position than a cold, calculated cudgel of realpolitik. Even so, it is precisely Lukashenko’s Soviet heritage that has made connections to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania so appealing in the eyes of many opposition-minded Belarusians, a minority of whom have sometimes embraced Litvinist ideas themselves. Figures like Zianon Pazniak, who fled Belarus out of fear of arrest by Lukashenko in the Nineties, have made statements denouncing the modern Lithuanian state — in their eyes, Litvinism distances Belarus from Russia, but also twists Lithuania into a usurper of stolen Belarusian glory.

As Liubakova says, such people are a small minority in the Belarusian opposition. But as the Litvinist threat continues to rise, Belarusians in Lithuania are increasingly seen as a menace. The Lithuanian state last year revoked the residence permits of around 600 Belarusian on national security grounds, while the country’s spies have increased screenings of Belarusian residents. And while Lithuania’s leaders have largely welcomed the foreigners in their midst, some politicians say it’s better to be safe than sorry.

“We have no problems with Belarusians if Belarusians respect our country,” Laurynas Kasčiūnas, an MP and former defense minister, tells UnHerd. “Not all Belarusians in Lithuania are democratic, we have economic migrants, we have other people who could be used by the regime for different reasons.” Kasčiūnas recently introduced a law that will allow the state to revoke the residency of Russians who travel to Russia or Belarus over three times a month without clear reasons. Though he stresses he doesn’t have the political backing to do so, he tells UnHerd he’d have liked to extend the law to Belarusians living in Lithuania too. Though such moves by the Lithuanian state would potentially make it easier to weed out Belarusians susceptible to Lukashenko’s schemes, they could conceivably also play into his propaganda, making it easier for him to drive a wedge between Lithuanians and Belarusians.

Amid the bickering over Litvinism, meanwhile, Lithuania has much bigger fish to fry. Russia’s Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently wrote a foreword to a book arguing that modern Lithuania is an artificial state built on “pro-Nazi” ideology. According to Lavrov, meanwhile, the Vilnius government has “elevated the use of falsified historical narratives to the rank of state policy to stimulate anti-Russian and Russophobic sentiments.”

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Extremists are coming for Poland

By Michal Kranz

Though such narratives are hardly new, it’s hard not to be reminded of Putin’s infamous 2021 essay about Ukraine. Through a selective reading of history, it makes the case that Ukrainian national identity is actually just a Westernized version of Russianness promoted by Nazis, serving as a prelude to his invasion of the country. Lithuania isn’t taking any chances — in addition to unveiling plans for a wholesale evacuation of Vilnius in the event of a Russian invasion, Lithuania is also upgrading its military transport routes to Poland via the strategic Suwałki Gap. Led by Kasčiūnas, lawmakers in parliament have also proposed following Poland’s example and building a line of fortifications along the country’s borders with Russia and Belarus.

Nor, of course, is Lithuania the only place where Russia has combined historical revisionism with hybrid attacks to make a real impact on national politics. Aside from the extreme example of its invasion of Ukraine, Russia has also claimed that Moldova is an artificial state bound to Russia, undermining the security of this increasingly pro-Western state. Though the Kremlin has long organized acts of hybrid warfare and spread historical disinformation in Poland, it has yet to combine the two. But just like segments of Lithuania’s Belarusian community, Moscow may eventually encourage Poland’s large Ukrainian population to undermine the state there too, inspired by the bloody legacy of the Second World War. “The genius of this strategy, in a sense, is that you don’t need to artificially create these divisions,” Maliukevičiuss says. “They objectively exist in each society, and you just work hard on them.”

Not that the situation is hopeless. Despite Putin and Lukashenko’s best efforts, and the Lithuanian state’s countermeasures, Belarusians here mostly feel at home. For her part, Liubakova underscores how much Vilnius is doing to support Belarusians at home while putting pressure on Lukashenko’s regime abroad — something Furmanaŭ, the co-owner of Kropka, was “pleasantly surprised” to experience himself. Though the assailants remain mysterious, local politicians expressed full-throated support for the Furmanaŭs in the aftermath of last July’s attack.

Though Litvinism therefore exists on the sidelines of the Belarusian community, both in Lithuania and elsewhere, what many Belarusians ultimately crave is a new perspective on the Grand Duchy of Lithuania — with a historical legacy that can be shared by Belarusians and Lithuanians alike. As Belarusians continue refining their own national self-image, after all, the Grand Duchy not only gives them an anchor to a shared regional past, it also helps them escape the Kremlin’s shadow. Whatever their varied historical grievances, that’s something most Eastern Europeans today can surely understand.

As part of its updated REPowerEU roadmap, the Commission pledged to ban spot market gas imports from Russia — including both existing and new contracts, which currently account for a third of EU gas purchases — by the end of 2025. It also proposed banning all long-term Russian energy contracts by 2027.

Prior to the war in Ukraine, Russia supplied the bulk of the EU’s gas via pipelines. Since then, the EU has slashed Russia’s share of its gas imports from 45% in 2021 to 19% in 2024, with a further decline to 13% projected for 2025. Still, Russia remains the EU’s third-largest gas supplier after Norway and Algeria. To fill the gap, Europe has turned to liquefied natural gas, or LNG, whose share in total gas imports has risen from 20% to 50%. Nearly half of that comes from the United States.

The problem is that LNG is far more expensive and volatile than pipeline gas. While pipeline imports are typically secured through long-term contracts, LNG prices are tied to the global spot market, making them vulnerable to financial speculation and geopolitical shocks — resulting in higher costs and greater uncertainty.

Ironically, while reducing pipeline imports from Russia, the EU has been increasing its purchases of Russian LNG. In the first four months of 2025 alone, Russian LNG deliveries to Europe jumped 12% year-on-year. Why? Partly because a full and immediate cut-off was never feasible; moreover, countries like Hungary and Slovakia explicitly refused to swap cheap Russian gas for costly US LNG. But this was also for legal reasons: many European companies remain locked into long-term “take-or-pay” contracts with Russian suppliers. Under these agreements — often signed before 2022 — buyers must pay for contracted volumes whether they receive the gas or not. This makes continued imports, even at higher prices, a rational choice.

France, Spain, the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy are currently the largest importers of Russian LNG. Once regasified — that is to say, converted back into natural gas — that gas enters the European grid and ultimately supplies other countries too, such as Germany. Meanwhile, Russian pipeline gas still flows into Europe — and, surprisingly, Ukraine as well — via the TurkStream pipeline, transiting through Turkey to Bulgaria, Serbia, and Hungary, even as other major routes (Yamal-Europe, Nord Stream, Ukraine) have shut down.

But Brussels now wants to put an end to all of this. “Last year we still paid €23 billion to Russia for our energy imports,” EU Energy Commissioner Dan Jørgensen stated. “We do not wish to import one single molecule in the future. For our own security and our solidarity with Ukraine.” Commission President Ursula von der Leyen added: “Now is the time for Europe to completely sever its energy ties with an unreliable supplier. The energy resources that reach our continent must not finance the war against Ukraine.”

The EU has also announced a tough stance toward Hungary and Slovakia, which still import 80% of their oil from Moscow, having been exempted from the sixth sanctions package that banned seaborne imports of Russian crude from the end of 2022 and Russian refined petroleum products from February 2023. They will be required to submit plans to phase out remaining imports by 2027. The Commission is also exploring ways to let companies invoke “force majeure” to exit Russian gas contracts without incurring penalties.

Finally, Brussels is also considering a ban on new energy contracts with Russia and fresh sanctions on existing imports. But such measures would almost certainly face vetoes from Hungary and Slovakia. As Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó put it: “The EU Commission’s politically motivated plan to ban Russian energy is a serious mistake. It threatens energy security, drives up prices and violates sovereignty.” It’s hard to disagree.

Indeed, the higher cost of imported LNG — particularly US LNG — has deeply affected European households and industries. The recent Draghi report confirmed that high energy prices are a major factor in Europe’s declining competitiveness. EU firms now pay two to three times more for electricity and four to five times more for gas than their US counterparts. The consequences have been brutal: three consecutive years of falling industrial output and stagnation across the EU, and outright deindustrialization across much of Western Europe — especially Germany.

Even though Germany, like other countries, was undoubtedly grappling with pre-existing challenges, it’s clear that energy costs are now the single greatest threat to German and European industry. Many firms have begun relocating production abroad. Major chemical groups are reportedly preparing to exit Europe entirely. One report noted that “these shifts come at a time when Europe’s energy costs have remained exceptionally high for nearly three years. The chemical sector — which accounts for 5-7% of EU manufacturing output and employs 1.2 million people — is under extraordinary pressure. The European Chemical Industry Council has warned of the planned closure of more than 11 million tons of production capacity across 21 major sites, and has called for urgent action”.

Brussels, however, isn’t listening. Indeed, a full EU ban on Russian gas would likely deliver the coup de grâce to Europe’s already flailing industrial base. Not only would Europe be forced to import even larger volumes of higher-priced LNG — primarily from the US — but, as Russia redirects its LNG to more distant markets, transport costs will rise, pushing up already volatile global gas prices and making imports to the EU even more expensive.

So what’s the logic behind this seemingly suicidal policy? The official argument — that Russian energy “funds Putin’s war machine” — is weak. Russia pays its soldiers and builds its weapons in roubles, not foreign currency. Whether it sells gas to Europe, China or India makes little difference to Russia. One can only assume that the bureaucrats in Brussels understand this — which suggests that the EU Commission’s latest move is less about weakening Russia’s capacity to wage war in Ukraine, and more about pursuing other objectives. Among them, I would suggest, is the desire to pre-empt any future normalization of EU-Russia relations.

This was made clear by the new German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, who vowed to do “everything” to ensure the Nord Stream 2 pipeline — which suffered an underwater bombing sabotage in 2022, reportedly at the hands of a rogue Ukrainian crew — never reopens. Von der Leyen even mentioned Nord Stream as part of the “new package of sanctions” her team was working on. According to the Financial Times, discussions in Berlin and Brussels about preventing any revival of Nord Stream were triggered by news of Russian and US business interests exploring options to resume the pipeline’s operations.

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Merz’s decision to endorse a permanent ban on Nord Stream is not only economically senseless — it also effectively legitimizes the worst act of industrial sabotage in European history, an event still shrouded in mystery, especially concerning potential foreknowledge of the attack by the German government and its allies. Moreover, it shows a clear disregard for the growing public support within Germany for restoring Russian gas supplies. A recent poll found that 49% of residents in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, where the pipeline ends, support resuming Russian gas imports. Meanwhile, the AfD, now polling over 20% nationally, has called for Nord Stream to be reopened — a position increasingly shared by business leaders and members of both the CDU and the Social Democrats.

It’s easy to see why: reopening the pipeline makes economic and strategic sense. Russian gas is cheaper, more stable and less environmentally damaging than American LNG, which is produced through high-emission fracking and shipped halfway around the world. The usual counter-argument to this is that Nord Stream created “an irresponsible dependency on Russian gas”. But as one German analyst pointed out, for a long time, first the Soviet Union and then Russia continued to supply energy to Germany despite several geopolitical crises. This continued even when the West unleashed an economic war accompanied by aggressive rhetoric. And even after the delivery of German weapons to Ukraine and then the terrorist attack on Nord Stream, the Russian side repeatedly stated that it was up to the German side whether to resume gas supplies or not.

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Yet German and EU leaders remain the staunchest opponents of re-engagement. Why? Partly due to their deeply entrenched hostility towards Russia. But there are also deeper geopolitical dynamics at play. The global LNG market is supply-constrained. Few countries have excess capacity. The United States — currently expanding its LNG export infrastructure — is uniquely positioned to profit. Trump has made LNG central to his trade policy, pressing the EU to buy more as a way to narrow the trade imbalance. This makes a mockery of the EU’s talk of “strategic autonomy”. Publicly defiant of Trump, EU leaders are quietly implementing his energy demands — even if it accelerates Europe’s economic decline.

As one German commentator observed: “The planned ban on Russian gas imports has little to do with the war in Ukraine — and everything to do with the American trade war. The EU is capitulating to Trump. The cost of that capitulation will be devastating, especially for Germany.” And let’s not forget the climate hypocrisy of EU leaders. US LNG has a far higher carbon footprint than Russian pipeline gas — due to both its long-distance transport and its fracking-based extraction. Yet ironically it is the German Greens, the self-proclaimed environmentalists, who are most opposed to restoring pipeline flows.

Ultimately, it should be clear that resuming Russian gas imports makes sense on every level: it is cheaper, more reliable, environmentally cleaner than LNG, and it would also help stabilize geopolitical relations with Moscow. Which is precisely why it’s no surprise that EU leaders are doing the exact opposite: deepening dependence on more expensive, more volatile, and more polluting LNG from across the globe, accelerating Europe’s deindustrialization and fanning the flames of confrontation with Russia.

Last week, the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) assessed that Russia could pose “a significant military challenge to NATO allies, particularly the Baltic states, as early as 2027”. If there is a ceasefire in Ukraine by mid-2025, Russia may have long-term confrontation in mind. According to the German security services, it has been rebuilding its military capacity and could quickly redeploy units to imperil NATO’s eastern flank. But while we can all agree that Russian leader Vladimir Putin would prefer NATO not to exist, would he truly be willing to wage war to make that happen?

It is easy to dismiss talk of Russia-NATO war as fearmongering or Cold War era thinking. Yet, the UK government is updating its contingency plans. Meanwhile, those who have engaged in military planning admit taking the prospect seriously. Gabrielius Landsbergis has first-hand experience of gauging Putin’s military goals. As Foreign Minister of Lithuania during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, he was forced to confront the possibility that his country might be next on Putin’s list. “It was on many people’s minds that if Ukraine really does fall in a couple of days, it was obvious that Putin’s ambition would not stop with Kyiv. If he can go, he will continue,” he tells me.

Attacking a NATO member would have brought Putin into direct confrontation with the whole of the Alliance. But, according to Landsbergis, that wouldn’t stop him. “I think that his ultimate goal is dismantling the Western-run global system and some of the targets are very close to him.” It is a view shared by General Sir Richard Shirreff, former NATO Deputy Supreme Allied Commander Europe, who tells me that “the challenge that NATO faces is to prevent it [the conflict] turning into a shooting war because if Putin were to get his way I’m absolutely convinced it could”.

Landsbergis and Shirreff are in agreement about the most likely scenario in which Putin would attack. A false flag operation in the Baltics, followed by local Russian minorities demanding protection. In Shirreff’s book 2017: War with Russia, he envisaged that, after an invasion of Ukraine, Moscow’s agents would foment unrest in Latvia by murdering pro-Kremlin activists and carving insignia on their corpses to pin the blame on Latvian nationalists. Moscow’s snipers then execute Russian speakers at a Riga protest. All this lays the pretext for Moscow to invade the Baltics, ostensibly on a mission to protect Russian minorities in those countries.

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Landsbergis sees two possible options for such an incident. Firstly, the Suwałki Gap — “there is a trainline going from Russia through Belarus all the way through to Kaliningrad and it brings Russian non-military passengers”. Secondly, Narva in Estonia — “it’s right on the border, it’s a town mostly inhabited by Russians and fits the Russian ‘save the Russians everywhere in the world’ narrative quite well”.

The “how” seems established, but the “when” is trickier to assess. The Russian Defense Minister has indicated that there could be war within a decade, Danish intelligence has said within five years, and now the IISS is claiming it could potentially be two. Sir Richard estimates that Putin may be ready in three to five years, depending upon the impact of casualties in Ukraine and how the Russian economy fares. What is clear is that Putin is not ready yet. He is “completely fixed on Ukraine and has no capacity for anything else” for the time being.

Yet, if Trump successfully negotiates a ceasefire in Ukraine, that could free Putin’s hand. The US President is also encouraging Putin’s ambitions in other ways. Danish intelligence assessed that Russia would be more likely to use force against NATO allies if it felt the Alliance was “militarily weakened” or “politically divided”. This is “particularly true if Russia assesses that the US cannot or will not support the European NATO countries”.

Landsbergis agrees with this assessment. The messaging from the US over the last couple of months “definitely reassures” Putin that “he can expect changes in European security to a point where it would be feasible for him to consider this option (of war)”. Two main factors would influence his decision: “the United States no longer being present in Europe and Ukraine not being able to defend its front”.

Trump’s actions now may be eroding Alliance unity enough to be laying the foundations for a Russian invasion. Sir Richard tells me that the US President’s tariffs and threats to annex Canada and Greenland are “hitting right at the heart of Alliance cohesion”. “The basis of the post-Cold War order, of the unity of purpose and Alliance cohesion and America being unshakably in support of the West, is starting to be undermined,” he says. “Give it a few more years of the major European economies failing to step up to the mark on defense spending, of Trump economics and tariffs, and all that begins to make Nato quite conceivably look like the busted flush which Putin thought it was in 2021 (with the fall of Afghanistan). Putin reckons that Nato is bluffing with Article 5 because Trump has said ‘I’m giving up on you’”. The Russian leader may decide that any invasion would have to take place during Trump’s term of office, so as to benefit from the White House being occupied by a man who might not rush in to save Europe.

So if the Russian leader does order his troops into Nato territory, what would happen then? Military historian Dr Peter Caddick-Adams believes that the initial stages would not go well for Russia. “Nato would close the Baltic Sea to Russia which means that it couldn’t get anything out of St Petersburg or Kaliningrad which would ground its entire navy. Turkey would do the same thing in the Black Sea. Russia would be left with a conventional force which is largely dissipated.” However, Sir Richard is more pessimistic, telling me that “the traditional Russian way of war is mass firepower, total destruction, brutality, onslaught and all the terrible things they’ve done to the Ukrainian civilian population. We’re talking about massive conventional operations, conventional fighting, tank battles, destruction of cities in Eastern Europe.” The ruthlessness would not only serve Putin’s war aims but also satisfy a desire for personal vengeance after years of the West supplying Ukraine with weaponry and thereby frustrating his ambitions.

There is also the risk of nuclear blackmail, as we saw during Russia’s war in Ukraine. Sir Richard says that Russia’s Zapad exercises have envisaged the occupation of a Baltic nation followed by blackmailing of the West: “If Nato threatens to come back at you, all you do is threaten the Nato capitals within range of Kaliningrad. You then present decision makers in London or Washington with a choice — accept it or risk nuclear escalation. The Russians would gamble that nobody is going to risk the destruction of Western civilization and all the cities of Western Europe for the sake of the population of a Baltic state.” Such a strategy may prove effective, the West having already judged Moscow’s nuclear warnings as no idle threats. In October 2022, then US President Joe Biden said that Putin “was not joking when he talks about the potential use of tactical nuclear weapons.”

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For any Brits reassuring themselves that a conflict would be restricted to a Russian occupation on the other side of Europe or tank battles in the Polish countryside, Sir Richard has a rude awakening. “If it turned into a shooting war, you could expect hypersonic missiles which are within range of London to be taking out key buildings as well as key sites across the United Kingdom.” Lacking an Iron Dome, Britain is “completely defenseless against that sort of threat”. “I cannot see how the army could generate the force levels required without conscription. The army would not have time to recruit and train anyway because this would very quickly become a war of national survival. Sabotage? Absolutely. Assassinations? Absolutely.”

And what would be Putin’s goals in warring against Nato? When would he be satisfied? “I would specify his objectives as decoupling America from European security, seeing the destruction or at least the neutralization of Nato and the achievement of what he described as the most appropriate security settlement for Europe, being a new Yalta — in other words, a Russian empire in Eastern Europe on the bones of the old Warsaw Pact,” says Sir Richard. Putin once characterised the break-up of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century”. If he goes to war, he may not be finished until that has been reversed.

So what can the West do now to discourage Putin? Effective deterrence, including Nato membership for Ukraine, and strong defense spending are key, according to the ex-general. “It should be at 4-5%”, he says, even though “this is a really unpopular thing for a Labour government that’s committed to growth and that faces the prospect of having to make some really tough decisions about tax and cuts to public services”. However, while Labour has pledged to raise UK defense spending to 2.5% of GDP by 2027, the promise came shortly before a meeting between Prime Minister Keir Starmer and President Trump, suggesting that it may have been more to appease the White House than from any real commitment to fending off Russia long-term.

Besides, it is not as though Moscow has shied away from aggression towards the West already. “The war goes on against NATO by hybrid asymmetric means”, explains Sir Richard, listing allegations of Russian interference in Western elections and the 2018 Salisbury Novichok attack. He says that some activity may even be conducted with an eye to preparing for a larger battle, such as reports of drones near RAF airbases. “All that kind of stuff is in the Russian playbook.” In Putin’s mind, Ukraine is merely the frontline. NATO and Russia are already at war.

Everyone wants to talk about Donald Trump, possible US betrayal and whether there really is now an end in sight to this war. Confusion reigns, with Trump reacting belligerently to Putin’s suggestion of an interim government. He says he’s “very angry” and has again lashed out with the threat of tariffs. The President might promise peace, but the lines coming out of Kyiv, Washington and Moscow are consistent only in their acrimony and confusion.

Ukrainians remain shocked at Trump’s behavior. They cannot understand why he humiliated their president (only improving Zelensky’s popularity at home); they cannot understand why he parrots Kremlin propaganda (the latest being his claim that Ukrainian forces are surrounded in Kursk when they obviously are not). And, above all, they cannot understand why he has wanted to embrace Putin, a man who so clearly despises the United States.

Last week, though, following separate meetings with each side in Riyadh, the White House announced it had brokered a deal between Moscow and Kyiv to halt fighting in the Black Sea. This is a more limited agreement than the ambitious one discussed weeks ago in Jeddah. And the situation remains complicated. From the outset, Russia insisted that for any halt in hostilities it must get sanctions relief. It wanted its access to the SWIFT payment network restored and general banking sanctions lifted. Last Tuesday, the US agreed to this in exchange for a limited Black Sea deal. But then, on Thursday, a European summit in Paris declared there will be no lifting of sanctions — European buy-in essential for any deal to progress.

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So what we have is another Trump-induced diplomatic mess. According to former Ukrainian Defence Minister Andriy Zagorodnyuk, things are at a stalemate. “We believe the Russians still have sufficient capability to put pressure on us, but not enough to make any serious breakthrough,” he tells me. “We don’t have enough to break through from our side either. No one can move any further.”

If the Russians don’t have the numbers to break through the Ukrainian lines they can, of course, mobilize yet more people, but this is not without a political cost, even for Putin. Moscow’s last mobilization was difficult. Thousands fled the country to dodge the draft, and Russia started signing people up from other countries. Despite this, they’re still attempting to build their reserves.

“They’re getting ready for another summer offensive, which will be difficult for us,” Zagorodnyuk says. “We have defensive power, so their offense won’t be as productive, but it won’t go unnoticed. But if they want to launch an offensive, this is the right time. The weather is ideal — it’s around 16°C now, which is perfect for their preparations.”

Given that the offensive hasn’t come, Zagorodnyuk wonders if their preparations haven’t gone to plan. Certainly nothing has changed in terms of their strategy. “Their goal remains eradicating and destroying Ukraine,” he added.

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As it stands, both sides need some form of respite, even if only temporary. Neither country’s economy is doing well and both militaries are exhausted. “They also have production problems,” adds Zagorodnyuk. “So they can’t ramp up production quickly enough to replace lost assets. If they’re put in a difficult position, they may go for a ceasefire, but they need to be in a very specific position for that. So, to expect them to agree to a ceasefire just because Trump asks them to — it’s not going to happen.”

But Trump can pressure Putin in several ways. First, he could give Ukraine the weapons it’s been requesting. These would include the missiles, real-time intel, long-range aviation, and the communication systems that Zelensky laid out in his victory plan for Biden. He could also drastically intensify sanctions — cutting off most of the international banking system from trading with Russia and targeting its oil trade. Biden didn’t want to do either of those. His approach was never full-throated.

Trump has now actually started talking about doing these things, hoping to bring Putin to the table. His threats to impose secondary tariffs on all oil coming out of Russia if Putin does not agree to a ceasefire suggest that he might be finally running out of patience. Perhaps the White House has realized that it can’t work with Putin, and that Trump can’t get him to behave equitably and honestly. But Putin will want to keep at least a charade of negotiations going. Partial ceasefires, shifting the goalposts, complaints, new proposals: this is the Russian negotiation playbook. We saw it play out from 2014-2020 with the Minsk Process, a series of ceasefires that never came close to ending the war (that began in 2014 not 2022) or stopping Russian aggression.

For now, then, Trump remains the ultimate variable. Say what you like about Putin, but he is at least consistent in his barbarism. Trump’s malice is compounded by whimsy. Before his most recent pivot away from Putin, he changed once again the terms of the deal by which Ukraine would give Washington a share of its huge mineral resources. Washington’s latest demand is for all of Ukraine’s natural resources income for years: Kyiv to send Washington all profit from a fund controlling Ukrainian resources until all American wartime aid was repaid, plus interest. Obviously, Ukraine cannot accept this, which allows Trump to blame Zelensky for being an obstacle to peace.

This all looked good for Putin previously, but as Zagorodnyuk cautions, you can never be sure. “Putin will just blame Ukraine for everything, so the question remains who will Trump decide to push, Ukraine or Russia. You never know with Trump.” So though life continues in Odesa, uncertainty, as ever, rules.

The first signs emerged back in 2017, during the years of Trump One, when the US for the first time acted very directly against China’s techno-economic rise. Seeing its increasing threat, the Administration cut off access to some of the advanced technology that China really needs, starting with advanced microprocessors, the “chips” of both missiles and smartphones. Tellingly, this was the one Trump policy that Biden did not reverse. Indeed, his Administration tried to strengthen the technology export controls.

Now, as Trump Two kicks off, America is dealing with a distinctly more aggressive China. It has become clear that Xi Jinping’s “China Dream” is not about a richer or a happier nation, but rather a stronger and indeed more warlike one. He has been visiting the different headquarters of the People’s Liberation Army to urge the assembled officers to be ready to fight — to really fight, and win! Further, it seems that defectors have reported that Xi has told members of the Central Military Commission to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027.

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So while the immediate rationale behind the humiliation of Zelensky in the White House would have been to soften up Russia and obtain a prompt ceasefire, and start negotiations for a territorial compromise, it was all done in the service of Trump’s larger and longer term ambition of neutralizing China. In this, he is pulling off a “reverse Nixon”: instead of courting China to oppose the USSR, as Kissinger and Nixon did in 1972, Trump wants to detach Moscow from Beijing.

Of course, today’s Russia is but a shadow of the still vigorous USSR that Nixon had to contend with. But even in its much-weakened state, Russia still adds a great deal to Chinese power. It provides everything from jet engines for Xi’s fighters (its own remain stubbornly unreliable), to Polar access via Russia’s arctic ports, railway access to Western Europe via Kazakhstan and Moscow, and overland access to Iran and the Middle East.

More simply, Russia’s immense territory interposed between China and the “West”, both in Europe and North America, would function in war as the Pacific Ocean serves the US, from San Diego and Pearl Harbor to Taiwan and China.

Trump is much better placed to bargain with Putin than Biden ever was — for one thing, he never insulted Putin as Biden did. But that is not the main reason why Trump has a decent chance of pulling off this diplomatic maneuver. These days, one of Putin’s growing worries is the territorial integrity of easternmost Siberia, Russia’s Maritime Province.

Local officials and academics in Vladivostok voiced acute concerns about Chinese intrusions even during my last visit in 2019 — before the sharp increase in China’s relative power caused by the Ukraine war. Since then, things have only grown more concerning.

Ultimately, the problem is demographic. Eastern Siberia — officially the “Far Eastern Federal District” — is a tad smaller than Australia, much bigger than the European Union and twice the size of India, but only had a population of 8.1 million at the last count. Meanwhile, China’s northernmost big city Harbin has more than 10 million inhabitants all by itself, while its Heilongjiang province has 30 million, and Inner Mongolia another 24 million.

As the Chinese increasingly outnumber Russians along that immensely long and scarcely patrolled border, there are other shifts there to alarm Moscow. One small example tells a significant tale. In 2023, the Chinese government abruptly issued an ordinance that mandates the use of the pre-Russian name “Haishenwai” for Vladivostok, in place of the previous “Fúládíwòsītuōkè” — which was clearly a meek attempt at a Chinese pronunciation of the Russian name.

This seemingly innocuous linguistic tweak belies a deep historical resentment. The Chinese still remember with great bitterness the collapse of imperial power in the 19th century, and the ensuing territorial losses under “unequal treaties” and forced concessions to the British, French, Japanese, Austro-Hungary, Germany (in Qingdao where good German beer is still made), and even Italy, in Tianjin.

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Over time, most of those territorial losses were revoked, including Hong Kong that reverted to China in 1997, but not the biggest territorial losses by far, which were extorted by Imperial Russia in 1858 and 1860. They now constitute a slice of Siberia and Russia’s Maritime Province in the Far East, including Vladivostok. In spite of the passage of time, many in China still remember the lost territories and the old humiliations only too keenly. Let’s not forget why the Russians invaded Ukraine.

Then, more recently, another warning appeared, with China’s very quiet but momentous request to build a modern container port in the bay of Slavianska, in Russia’s Maritime Province south of Vladivostok, where Chinese territory arrives within 11 miles of the Pacific Ocean. The Chinese certainly have a very good reason to build the port: the economy of the entire its north-east, the “rust belt” Dongbei, has long suffered from its distance from a seaport. As the economy there is transformed, so the Chinese threat increases.

So, yes, it is certainly a key Western interest that the war in Ukraine ends advantageously, with an agreed territorial settlement not imposed by either side. Equally, it is vitally important that Russia should not be as dependent on China as it now is. Europe may have its head stuck in the sand in this regard, but it seems that Trump has spotted this opportunity, realizing that in Putin’s pursuit of a favorable outcome in Ukraine there is an opportunity to detach him from Beijing. While it might seem far-fetched, even for this most unpredictable of presidents, the televised humiliation of Zelensky did seem to indicate that Nixonian intent.

And yet, amid all this butchery, Putin’s war machine has a steady stream of volunteer fighters — though recently these numbers had to be augmented with the help of North Korea. These “meat-grinding tactics” are rooted in a deadly combination of historical precedent, cultivated society attitudes, and ruthless economic calculus — and they present a significant challenge to Ukraine and potentially Europe.

For much of its pre-revolutionary history, what we now know as Russia was ruled by foreigners who would treat their population as slaves. Vikings, Mongols, and even the Europeanized Romanovs — all behaved as conquerors or absolutist despots. Whatever the dynasty, governance was predatory. Alien rulers had no obligations to their subjects and often acted as their worst abusers. In the polity of Kievan Rus’ established by Vikings, one of the primary commodities were Slavic slaves, often sold to the Arab Caliphate. During the Mongol era, meanwhile, the warrant to rule was typically granted to the Rus’ princes who extracted the highest tribute from their people. In Imperial Russia, roughly 40% of the country’s male population were serfs well into the 19th century. Peasants were bought and sold by owners, with families left behind. And a particular branch of serfdom was military service: those conscripted were considered as good as dead.

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That disregard for the individual has echoed through time, and is reflected in the attitude of Russian commanders towards their subordinates that could be summed up in the well-worn phrase: “Don’t spare the soldiers, Russian women will give birth to more.” Attributed to Marshal Zhukov, Stalin’s most celebrated commander during the Nazi invasion, the attitude was rooted in modern Russia’s geopolitical realities. Active expansionism, particularly after the 16th-century conquests of Ivan the Terrible, led to consistently larger populations compared with Russia’s immediate Western neighbors. Given the low technical and industrial development of the Russian state, rulers leaned on manpower to win wars.

The pattern was established in Ivan the Terrible’s Livonian War, whose enormous military and civilian casualties depopulated Russia and plunged it into large-scale political turmoil. Later, in Peter the Great’s army, conscripts were recruited for life, and discharge typically came in the form of death. Know much about Peter’s wars and that’s unsurprising. Fought against Sweden for 21 years, the Tsar’s Great Northern War “axed the window into Europe” as Russia’s newly acquired dominance in the Baltics was rendered in the Soviet textbooks. Yet that came at the expense of hundreds of thousands of lives lost in battles and famines.

That model, in which rulers treated their subjects as disposable tools, was reproduced by the Bolsheviks. While proclaiming unity between the Communist Party and the people, the Soviet state was its people’s worst enemy, grinding down millions in civil wars, purges, repressions, artificial famines. The Nazi invasion did not stop those murderous practices. The only thing the poorly armed Red Army feared more than the Germans was their own NKVD secret police units, ordered to shoot anyone retreating, reflecting Stalin’s infamous “Not a step backward” order. The USSR endured the highest human losses of any nation during the Second World War.

This long history of bloodshed is essential to understand the Russian war calculus. Dying for the motherland is not a natural state of being; few are born martyrs, and Russians are no exceptions. Recognizing this, the state invests heavily in cultivating values of self-sacrifice. “We need one victory, one for all of us — for any price,” went a line from a widely popular Soviet-era song about the Great Patriotic War, which I heard countless times growing up in the USSR. Our field trips were not to nearby play parks, but to memorials like Mamayev Kurgan in Volgograd, formerly Stalingrad, a battle which claimed the lives of 1.1 million Soviet soldiers. “The Soviet nation is the nation of victors,” was another maxim that appeared most frequently in the shape of faded billboards adorning our grim apartment buildings. “Russians don’t surrender,” the boys playing war in our communal yards shouted, a staple of countless movies.

These Soviet “memes” remain ever-present in Putin’s war on Ukraine, adjusted to a post-modern, post-truth world. The amount of state muscle that goes into the 9 May celebration of Soviet victory over Germany — complete with parades, reenactments, and “immortal regiment” processions — would make you think the war finished last month. Even kindergarteners are indoctrinated to be defenders of the motherland, encouraged by their teachers to play games like “mine the field” and “gather the munitions”. All the while, at the real front, soldiers often commit suicide rather than surrender; the cultural tropes used to shape the consciousness of Soviet citizens are revived and reapplied. Russian society tolerates the heavy toll of the Ukrainian war because, in their traumatized collective memory, “this is how it’s always been”.

There’s something different about this war, though, even with the adjustment to Russian history baggage and the way it’s exploited in propaganda. Unlike the country’s other modern quagmire, the decade-long Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which hovered menacingly over my male high school classmates — “If you don’t get into a university, you’ll be drafted!” their parents warned them — this war is a matter of patriotic pride for many Russians. Having lost about 10 times more people in the three years of the Ukraine war than in the 10 years of fighting in Afghanistan, Russians gamely knit anti-tank nets, sing ecstatically “I’m Russian” and line up to sneer at captured Nato weapons. Even those tired of war want to end it on Russia’s terms. According to a recent poll by Levada, for instance, two-thirds of Russians who want the war to end are against returning occupied territories to Ukraine.

To be sure, dissent is deadly in a totalitarian country. Initial anti-war protests were ruthlessly suppressed, and draconian laws were enacted shortly after the start of the “special military operation” — imposing harsh prison sentences for the mere act of calling the war a war. About a million people left the country. Yet the majority stayed, and now either actively support the war or try to live as though it has nothing to do with them. Their acquiescence gives their leader carte blanche to continue until Ukraine surrenders, and to throw more of their own into the war’s meat grinder. In his customary New Year address to the nation, on the eve of 2025, Putin pledged “to only go forward” and promised that “everything will be well” before declaring 2025 the Year of the Defender of the Motherland.

This collective indifference to human losses may be baffling to Ukraine’s Western allies, who operate on the assumption that their soldiers’ lives are valuable, and casualties should be minimized. Russia’s strategic interest is one consideration.

For the Russian state, near 700,000 dead and wounded to capture one-fifth of Ukraine — a region home to millions of people and rich in critical resources like coal and lithium — might just seem like a decent bargain.

As for the Russians themselves, their jingoistic bullishness is surely fueled by the fact that many casualties are simply out of sight. The lion’s share comes from the lower rungs of Russian society, including impoverished ethnic minorities and convicts. Most have enlisted voluntarily: the state offers generous payments to “contract fighters” (kontraktniki) exceeding the average salaries in their regions by the magnitude of tenfold or more.

That the life expectancy of a recruit in Ukraine is measured in weeks doesn’t seem to deter these lower-class volunteers. And their death at the front will allow their families to get “coffin money” in their place. It surely helps Putin, too, that these troops, which are running low, are reinforced with fighters from North Korea, avoiding another mobilization.

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And woe betide any lower-class trooper who tries to back out of service after signing up. “You can get discharged only if you don’t have two legs, two arms or a head,” is how one unfortunate sums up the situation. According to the same kontraktnik, he and his comrades were forced into suicidal missions, taking wild chances because otherwise they’d get killed by their own officers. Almost a century on, little has changed from Stalin’s “Not a step backward” order.

This kind of adversary presents a formidable challenge to Ukraine and any European country that Russia might target. From a military standpoint, it means that the “peace dividend”, earned from winning the Cold War, is long spent. Europe will need to rebuild its conventional forces to prepare for a conflict with an adversary that doesn’t value the lives of its soldiers. This means mass producing munitions, mines, artillery shells and drones. European nations may also have to consider the unthinkable — reinstating the draft. Any hope for a peace deal with Russia and a return to pre-2022 “business as usual” is a delusion.

Politically, meanwhile, Europe must find a way to confront a revanchist regime that is likely to persist even once Putin exits the stage. As long as Russia remains an expansionist empire, it will pose a constant threat to smaller democratic states on its borders. It will continue to meddle in internal affairs and the political process of Western democracies. It will continue building alliances like the Brics, attracting more states from the Global South, dissatisfied with American hegemony. The only happy ending for this story is if Russia stops being a “nation of serfs, a nation of masters” as the Romantic poet Mikhail Lermontov once put it. Only then can it learn to recognize the value of individual human life, both inside and outside its borders. But if history is our guide, don’t expect that moment to arrive anytime soon.

Putin has signalled his willingness to meet with Trump to discuss a peace deal, while the president-elect recently reiterated that “we have to end that war”. After meeting Zelenskyy in Paris during the reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral, Trump called for an “immediate ceasefire”. In a remarkable shift, Zelenskyy himself recently acknowledged that Ukraine cannot reclaim the lost territories through military means and even suggested that he would be willing to cede territory in exchange for Nato protection.

The mere fact that negotiations are now on the table is a welcome development in a war that has already caused immense bloodshed and triggered massive economic and geopolitical tectonic shifts. However, despite making bold claims during his election campaign that he would end the war “in 24 hours”, resolving the conflict is likely to prove very challenging — as Trump himself now admits.

The main hurdle is that the West’s relentless push for an impossible Ukrainian victory against a much stronger opponent has strengthened Russia’s hand. By rejecting earlier opportunities for negotiation — when Ukraine was in a stronger position — Western leaders have allowed Russia to consolidate its military gains, leaving little incentive for Putin to compromise.

In this sense, the belief that the West can achieve at the negotiating table what it failed to secure on the battlefield is, as political realist John Mearsheimer has argued, a dangerous illusion. “To win at the negotiating table, you have to win on the battlefield,” he explained, “and it’s the Russians who are winning on the battlefield.” Putin’s own words at his end-of-year conference underscore this: “The Russian army is advancing along the entire front line… We are moving towards resolving the main objectives that we set at the beginning of the military operation.”

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Ukraine — and the West — face a difficult decision: either accept Putin’s terms, or endure the continuation of the war, which will further weaken Ukraine’s position (while causing countless more lives to be lost for nothing). Putin’s conditions for peace are unambiguous: legal recognition by Ukraine and the West of Russia’s annexed territories — Crimea, Sevastopol, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia — as part of the Russian Federation; Ukraine’s full withdrawal from contested territories; and Ukraine’s renunciation of Nato membership aspirations and adoption of neutral, non-aligned status, coupled with demilitarisation, in exchange for Western security guarantees.

These demands render Zelenskyy’s proposed compromise — ceding territory for Nato membership — untenable. Preventing Ukraine from joining Nato was, after all, the primary rationale for Russia’s military operation. Trump appears to grasp this. Reports suggest his team is considering delaying Ukraine’s Nato membership by at least 20 years, possibly in exchange for continued Western arms supplies. Statements by his running mate JD Vance indicate Trump might advocate for Ukraine to cede Russian-controlled regions, while agreeing to a demilitarised zone.

Certain factions will undoubtedly decry such terms as an unacceptable capitulation. However, the reality is that accepting a deal now is Ukraine’s best option. All evidence suggests that the longer the war continues, the worse Ukraine’s position will become. The West bears significant responsibility for squandering earlier opportunities to pursue peace, when Russia’s demands were far less severe — and all to wage what even Boris Johnson candidly admitted in a recent interview to be a Nato proxy war against Russia.

Yet, Zelenskyy’s insistence on Nato membership essentially rules out any possibility of even starting negotiations. Trump could potentially sidestep this problem by excluding Ukraine from the first rounds of peace talks, as well as forcing Ukraine to face reality by cutting back military aid for Kyiv, but the real problem will be selling an agreement on Russia’s terms inside the US, where he is likely to face massive pushback from the pro-war establishment, including the neocons in his own party. They will try to weaponise Trump’s “America First” rhetoric against him by claiming — as they are already doing — that this would be a “humiliation” for the US.

Trump’s vision of a “quick fix” in the form of a ceasefire or truce, pending a more comprehensive agreement, is also unlikely to succeed. Putin believes a prolonged ceasefire would merely allow Ukraine to rearm and prepare for a renewed offensive; his scepticism is rooted in his perception of the Minsk agreements as a Western ploy to buy Ukraine time to pursue a military solution. And Western commentary has done little to dispel such fears. One recent RUSI article proposed using a “frozen ceasefire” à la North and South Korea to heavily arm a diminished Ukraine, transforming it into a more effective bulwark against Russia in the future. Such proposals all but guarantee Moscow’s resistance to any short-term, half-botched agreements.

The deeper challenge here lies in navigating the profound mistrust between Russia and the West. This demands a fundamental shift in the West’s approach: abandoning its (failed) attempts to isolate and weaken Russia, and taking genuine steps to address Russia’s security concerns. This is why Putin has emphasised that a comprehensive peace deal must include the removal of all sanctions against Russia.

Achieving such a geopolitical grand bargain, though, would require an all-out paradigm shift, in which the West relinquishes its pursuit of dominance and recognises the multipolar nature of global power dynamics. Yet, no Western leader — including Trump — seems prepared to make this leap. Despite potential shifts in priorities, such as focusing on Latin America and Iran, the strategic underpinnings of US policy are unlikely to change significantly under Trump’s leadership. There is little to suggest a fundamental departure from the US’s current strategy of aggressively countering the decline of American global dominance through diplomatic, economic and even military pressure.

Trump’s foreign policy picks reinforce this view. For example, Keith Kellogg, his choice for special envoy to Ukraine, co-authored a report earlier this year arguing that it is in America’s interest to ensure a “defeated and diminished Russia”, and that the next Trump administration should continue to arm Ukraine and refrain from asking Ukraine to relinquishing the goal of regaining all its territory. While Kellogg might have changed his mind over the past few months, this kind of mentality is unlikely to facilitate the reassessment of US-Russia relations that Putin views as essential for peace.

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Europe, too, represents a major obstacle. Its leaders have shown little inclination toward diplomacy, with some actively opposing Trump’s overtures. Kaja Kallas, the EU’s new foreign affairs chief, recently dismissed the idea of pressuring Zelenskyy into peace talks, claiming that Putin is unwilling to negotiate. Meanwhile, the European Council has just adopted a new sanctions package vowing that “Russia must not prevail” and reconfirming “the EU’s unwavering commitment to providing continued political, financial, economic, humanitarian, military and diplomatic support to Ukraine and its people for as long as it takes and as intensely as needed”. This comes on the heels of an even more hawkish European Parliament resolution essentially calling for a total war against Russia — or World War III.

Europe’s economic and security interests clearly lie in ending the war and renormalising relations with Russia — a stance that enjoys growing support among European citizens. In this respect, Trump could be viewed as an opportunity: to the extent that the US has always viewed Nato as a way to ensure Europe’s strategic subordination, the president-elect’s threat of reducing US commitments to the alliance could present an occasion for Europe to redefine itself as an autonomous and peaceful actor. Instead, Europe appears to be reacting to its identity crisis by projecting the United States’ role onto itself, replicating the aggressive stance of its former protector.

Meanwhile, Nato’s general thrust seems unaffected by Trump’s impending return, suggesting that it answers more to the US military-security apparatus than it does to the White House. Hence, Mark Rutte, Nato’s new Secretary-General, recently said that the alliance shouldn’t be talking about peace but should instead focus on sending more weapons to Ukraine.

The path forward remains fraught with obstacles. Putin’s conditions for peace are uncompromising, Western leaders remain entrenched in their positions, and Europe’s hawkish stance only complicates matters further. For Trump, the challenge will be twofold: overcoming domestic resistance to concessions and navigating the geopolitical minefield of competing interests. While his desire to end the war is commendable, the complexities of achieving a lasting resolution will demand far more than quick fixes or bold proclamations.

The stakes couldn’t be higher. Without a serious commitment to diplomacy and a willingness to make difficult compromises, the conflict will either continue as a slow-burning war of attrition or be temporarily frozen, only to flare up again later. In either case, this will further antagonise Western-Russian relations — with catastrophic consequences for Ukraine, Europe and the world at large.

For a quarter of a century, Putin has dreamed of ending the era of American hegemony that followed the Cold War. Just 11 days after his shock appointment as acting president in 1999, Putin signed a National Security Policy declaring that “Russia will facilitate the formation of an ideology of establishing a multipolar world”. In theory, the “multipolar world” describes the end of American unipolarity. In reality, it is a synonym for the return of Russia’s international standing. After years of humiliating decline — a national debt crisis, a military disaster on home turf in Chechnya, and Russia’s increasing marginalization in international security discussions — Putin was promising a new era of national and international strength.

Russians hoped their nation would once again become a great power. Back in the Seventies, the Soviet Union was a major player in Africa and the Middle East. By funnelling money, arms, and propaganda to support friendly countries, and fuel chaos and revolution in unfriendly ones, the Kremlin was, effectively, wrestling with the USA in proxy economic and physical wars. But as the Soviet empire unravelled at home and economic strife hit, Moscow’s influence waned. Formerly friendly countries looked to Washington instead. Throughout the Nineties, the government of the new Russian Federation was powerless to stop its influence collapsing.

Yet Syria remained one of Moscow’s most enduring friends and obedient servants, a role it has played for much of the last 80 years. After the establishment of diplomatic relations in 1944, the USSR openly advocated on behalf of Damascus. Moscow poured arms and money into Syria as the country ended French colonialism in the Forties. The following decades saw ever more tokens of friendship. A Soviet naval base opened in Tartus in 1971, and Moscow assisted Syria in the Yom Kippur War. Billions of dollars went to propping up the relationship, all eagerly received by the Syrians themselves.

Even as the USSR’s foreign power flagged in the Eighties, then president Hafez Assad’s government expressed support for the disastrous Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and continued to rely on Moscow for assistance. Their enduring relationship exemplified the old, bipolar world order. Come what may, the Syrian regime relied on Moscow for military and ideological firepower. Syria, in turn, was an unusually stable country in an often fractured region, while the Soviet Union could count itself a major regional player thanks to this one-sided relationship.

In the Nineties, Russia’s inability to provide any real support to Syria saw the partnership wither. Under Putin’s aegis, a plan was hatched to revive it. While Moscow was hesitant at first to directly intervene in the Syrian Civil War, its airpower and ground forces proved crucial in helping Bashar al-Assad cling on to power as rebel forces gathered steam. The Russian Air Force’s brutal bombing campaigns were conducted with the same disregard for humanitarian law and civilian casualties as its earlier war in Chechnya, and foreshadowed Moscow’s approach to the Ukraine conflict. In return for propping up Assad, Russia was able to keep its naval base in Tartus, which allowed it to reach further into Africa. More important, Putin sent a clear message: he was willing to use any means necessary to ensure Russia was a global power that Washington and its allies could not ignore. The “multipolar world order” — if that meant the West listening to a powerful Russia — seemed to be coming to life.

Assad has stuck by Moscow like few others in recent years. While other countries in the Kremlin’s economic and military orbit, including traditional partners in Central Asia and Africa, have attempted to play off Russia and an ascendant China, Assad remained the perfect vassal. Speaking at the Kremlin last year, the former Syrian leader expressed his fealty by parroting Russian propaganda. He offered support for Russia’s war “against neo-Nazis and their predecessors”, and went on to speak of his “devotion” to Russia and the “need to stabilize the world”. Subjugation to Russia meant stability for the dictator.

Today it transpires that this stability has been, along with Moscow’s military, economic, and cultural strength, another of Putin’s grand illusions. Just as the campaign against Ukraine revealed military weaknesses in hours, so Russian power in Syria has evaporated in a matter of days. Stretched to the limit by its war in Ukraine, where despite recent progress some 30,000 soldiers and billions of dollars are being lost every month, the Kremlin has no more forces, no more men, and no more money to send to the Middle East. The best it can offer is asylum to the humiliated Assad. Today’s “multipolar world order” has turned out to be a sham, more akin to the Eighties world of ailing Soviet power than the genuine strength of the post-Second World War decades.

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Putin’s power is crumbling across the old Soviet Empire and beyond. Ukraine may not take back Crimea and its eastern regions in the near future, but the country’s population has definitively turned away from Moscow. Ten years ago, for example, Ukrainians were ambivalent about NATO and EU integration. Today, they overwhelmingly embrace both. Across Central Asia, countries look to China, not Russia, for development aid. Azerbaijan behaves without regard for Moscow’s opinion, while Armenia looks to India, China, and the USA for support.

Even worse, Russia has been forced to accept ever more negative trade terms with stronger countries, such as India and China, thanks to the West’s firm approach to sanctions. Its few real alliances, like those with North Korea and Iran, see the smaller partners dictating terms. Today, Putin needs those countries more than they need him, and they are extracting maximum benefits in exchange for providing soldiers and military equipment to Moscow. At any moment, Putin’s whole foreign policy facade could crumble.

Russian diplomats might today claim that their country “does not betray its friends in difficult situations”, but their world is one of smoke and mirrors, in which Moscow’s PR men project dominance, with fake news, disinformation, and braggadocio about everything from Syria to ballistic missiles, to cover up their country’s comparative weakness. Russia deployed its usual range of propaganda tactics to claim Assad’s position was impregnable, but at the first sign of trouble, some of its propagandists now claim that Syria never mattered anyway.

Ever since 1999, Putin’s aim has been to recreate Russian power with mastery over vassal states like Syria and Ukraine, but he has presided over chaos. Moscow is capable of breaking things, of instigating revolutions, of creating this chaos, but it does not have the strength to institute new international power structures.

Russia no longer has any control over Syria, which is likely to collapse into a period of turmoil as new leadership is asserted and contested. It seems unlikely that the new Syrian leadership, carried to power by soldiers with memories of being brutally attacked by Russian forces, will be as favorable to Moscow as any of its predecessors. Russia today has less power in the Middle East and across the post-Soviet space than it did a decade ago. A combination of big economic and military players — above all China — and chaotic, independent-minded groups, like in Syria, is filling that vacuum.

The Kremlin lacks the money, materiel, and motivation to do little more than hope that its international influence does not erode further. Short on options, and following his response to the Arab Spring, Putin will likely attempt to boost his domestic standing with attacks on Ukraine and more aggressive nationalism at home. This inward turn is not the multipolar world order Vladimir Putin was hoping for.

Certainly, Gabbard seems to express support for America’s chief adversary. When Russia entered the war against Syria in 2015, Gabbard welcomed Vladimir Putin’s move to, as she saw it, bomb Al-Qaeda where Barack Obama would not. The then-congresswoman seemed to slavishly parrot the Kremlin’s lines that Moscow’s war in Syria was a purely anti-terrorist operation and that any evidence civilians were being harmed was a fake or Western “provocation” — claims that the Kremlin continues to make today. Subsequently, she attempted to introduce legislation in Congress to support whistleblowers — or traitors advancing Russian interests, depending on one’s point of view — like Edward Snowden and Julian Assange.

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Gabbard’s claims about Russian foreign policy have been even more pointed. She has blamed Joe Biden and Nato for the invasion, accusing them of ignoring “Russia’s legitimate security concerns regarding Ukraine’s becoming a member of Nato”. This claim has been one of Putin’s favourite lines, trotted out whenever Moscow’s bellicose behaviour in the space of the former Soviet Union has needed a flimsy justification over the past 25 years.

Naturally, Gabbard has become the subject of bipartisan opprobrium. Her unfounded assertion that Joe Biden’s government was covertly funding a series of secret biolabs stuffed with deadly pathogens in Ukraine and around the world led Mitt Romney to warn that her “treasonous lies may well cost lives”. One Democrat congresswoman received news of Gabbard’s proposed new role as intelligence chief in a similar vein: “There’s no question I call someone like her a Russian asset.” Even Trump supporter Nikki Haley was critical.

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The accusations levelled against Gabbard are fuel for fiery Russian propaganda networks, which have in recent weeks been cock-a-hoop over news of Trump’s plan. State media channels have been quick to remind their audiences of Gabbard’s apparent support for some of Russia’s more outré claims. The Telegram channel of Vladimir Solovyev, Russian TV’s loudmouth propaganda ringmaster, showed clips of Western media coverage that discussed how Americans were questioning Gabbard’s allegiances. The channel, which has 1.3 million subscribers, then posted a series of images of Gabbard, plastering the congresswoman’s “friendly” words about Ukraine, Russia, and the potential for peace over each image. A series of warm profiles have hailed Trump’s pick, which has the FBI and CIA “trembling”.

However, much of this cheery Russian propaganda is laced with irony. In the Kremlin’s narrative, Ukraine seems comically incapable of deciding whether or not Gabbard is a Russian agent. Gabbard is as much an object of mockery as a source of pride: a sign that Russia’s control over the Western information space is so complete that Americans will spend more time arguing over Gabbard’s allegiance than countering Russia’s very real threats against their homeland. The more that Gabbard becomes a central figure in Donald Trump’s pantomime, the more the Russian propaganda apparatus will use her to divide and inflame opinions abroad.

What the Russian state’s propagandists have been less keen to reveal, of course, is Gabbard’s repudiation of some of her own beliefs. Outlets have drawn attention to her comments about biolabs, for example — but they have not mentioned her claim that her support for the erroneous theory was based on “miscommunication and misunderstanding”. Gabbard is a familiar face on Russian TV, but the Russian audience is led to believe — as are many Westerners — that she is a one-dimensional propagandist or agent.

Moscow relishes precisely this sort of uncertainty, ironic distancing, and mockery, which it sees as part of an information warfare strategy designed to encourage the West to tear itself apart. Placed at the heart of the national and international intelligence apparatus, Gabbard will become an ideal weapon in that war. A woman who, with her mixed European and Samoan ancestry, ought to be the perfect fit for Democratic identity politics instead joined the military, took increasingly provocative positions on national security topics, and switched her party allegiance twice. She makes claims and walks them back, indulges in conspiracy theories, and seems incapable of making many decisions for herself. Her career is a spectacular tangle of contradictions and uncertainties, and is ripe for Russia’s propaganda narratives. Gabbard is just one of dozens of prominent Americans — from Tucker Carlson to the influencers at the heart of the Tenet Media scandal — who play this role.

As Putin ratchets up the pressure in Ukraine, and mulls the fate of Syria, the Senate and the American media are about to become embroiled in what is certain to be a bitter battle over Gabbard’s confirmation hearings. The Kremlin is already trying to dial up the uncertainty even further by using sympathetic voices in the West to suggest, as the pro-Kremlin influencer Jackson Hinkle has done, that Gabbard is the innocent victim of a series of “fakes” produced by Russophobes and war hawks. Exactly how and why Gabbard’s own comments can have been faked is left unsaid. Instead, uncertainty is left unresolved to bewilder the American audience.

If her appointment is confirmed, nobody is quite sure how Gabbard might act as America’s intelligence chief. International and internal intelligence sharing and, presumably, morale within the national security agencies and departments will suffer as a result. In an era of global fragmentation and warfare, and when the Russian Federation believes it is locked in a grand geopolitical battle with the West, this lack of trust may be hugely corrosive.

According to the Chinese military strategist Sun Tzu, one of the fundamental rules of warfare is to “know the enemy and know yourself”. Whether Gabbard is a Russian agent or not is irrelevant; she will remain an unknown quantity. The very idea that her loyalty may not be to the United States is enough to embroil America’s politicians, intelligence workers, and security operatives in a deep battle that will see Putin and his allies rubbing their hands with glee. In the disinformation era, it is no longer clear who is a patriot and who a traitor, nor where the war begins and where it ends. A divided and paranoid America can only benefit the Kremlin.

The reality is that, in many respects, Merkel paved the way to today’s crisis. Her advocacy for stringent austerity measures, implemented both across Europe and within Germany after the 2008 financial crisis, ushered in over a decade of stagnation and underinvestment. Her policies left Germany’s infrastructure — bridges, roads and railways — to crumble; her doubling down on Germany’s neo-mercantilist, export-driven economic model, especially during the euro crisis, stifled internal demand by compressing wages and encouraging precarious employment, while leaving the economy overly dependent on exports.

By pursuing an industrial policy that emphasised traditional manufacturing sectors — automobiles, heavy industry and mechanical parts — she left Germany lagging in the high-tech revolution. By phasing out nuclear energy, she deprived the country of a clean and cost-effective energy source. By opening the door to over a million asylum seekers, she created serious challenges in social cohesion and public safety. By embracing a paternalistic and TINA-driven approach to politics, exemplified in her concept of “market-conforming democracy”, she starved the German democratic discourse.

Yet, despite these shortcomings, Merkel remained one of the world’s most popular politicians upon her retirement in 2021 — both at home and abroad. Following Donald Trump’s 2016 election, Merkel was often hailed by the Western liberal establishment as the torchbearer of the global liberal order and even as the “leader of the free world”.

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Then came Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Since then, Merkel’s legacy has come under increased scrutiny. She has been heavily criticised for maintaining good relations with Russia and allegedly fostering “an irresponsible dependency on Russian gas”. “No German is more responsible for the crisis in Ukraine than Merkel”, Politico bluntly declared.

Her mammoth memoir, Freedom, is an attempt to salvage that reputation, the title encapsulating her opinion of herself as a defender of the liberal world order. Merkel uses its 720 pages to staunchly defend her record across issues such as austerity, nuclear energy, migration and Russia. On most topics, however, she deploys moral and psychological arguments, leaving the reader wanting for a deeper analysis of the broader economic and structural dynamics at play. Hence her management of the euro crisis was purely aimed at saving the blessed European project, with no mention of the way in which it benefited German banks. Similarly, her open-door immigration policy is justified on humanitarian grounds, with no acknowledgment of how it expanded Germany’s pool of low-wage labour to the benefit of domestic capital.

Merkel’s account of the Ukraine crisis, however, is the exception — probably because Merkel herself admits that, on this issue, her approach had little to do with morality and idealism, but was rather guided by hard-nosed realism, or realpolitik, as she puts it.

More than a decade ago, it was already clear to Merkel that the global balance of power was shifting away from the West towards the then-emerging Brics bloc, and that the “the United States struggled with relinquishing power”, blocking demands for the reform of international institutions such as the IMF and the WTO. Merkel favoured a more pragmatic approach, advocating for cooperation based on mutual interests, even as she acknowledged the profound ideological differences between Germany and non-Western countries like China.

The same logic applied to Russia. Merkel recalls how many Central and Eastern Europeans “seemed to wish that their gigantic neighbor would disappear from the map, simply cease to exist”. While she understood this sentiment, she also recognised a fundamental geopolitical reality: “Russia did exist and it was armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. There was no wishing it away geopolitically, and there still isn’t.” One might not have liked Putin, but “that didn’t make Russia disappear from the map”.

Merkel recalls delivering an opening speech, at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, less than two years into her tenure as chancellor in which she highlighted the need to “seek dialogue with Russia despite our many differences of opinion”. Following her remarks, Putin delivered his now-famous speech, in which he vehemently criticised the inequities of the US-led unipolar order. Alluding to the Iraq War, he spoke of “an almost uncontained, hyper use of power”; he also vehemently condemned the missile defence system that the US planned to install in Europe. Unsurprisingly, he also criticised Nato’s eastward expansion.

While acknowledging that Putin’s speech was self-serving, Merkel admits that there were points that weren’t “completely absurd”: America’s invasion of Iraq, for example, and the failure to reach an agreement on updating the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe. Her grasp of the risks involved in ignoring Russia’s security concerns became a defining factor in her decision to block George W. Bush’s proposal to offer Ukraine and Georgia a formal pathway to Nato during the 2008 Bucharest summit. She understood that Russia viewed Nato membership for Ukraine, in particular, as an absolute red line — also due to the presence of the Russian Black Sea Fleet in Crimea — and that Putin would have responded aggressively to such a move. Indeed, she argues in the book that, if Nato membership had been offered to Ukraine, war would have broken out even earlier at a greater military disadvantage for Ukraine. In light of subsequent events, this is hard to dispute.

But Merkel also makes another important point, noting that Nato should also be concerned about its own security risks when drawing countries into the alliance — whether formally or de facto. On this point, the risk of nuclear war that looms over the continent today has also proved Merkel right. In the end, she blocked the official pathway, but found herself with little alternative but to agree to the final communiqué, which declared that “these countries will become members of Nato”. Viewing this as a necessary compromise, she also recognised that the damage had already been done. By merely opening the door to the possibility, the alliance had fundamentally altered Russia’s military-strategic calculus. This effectively invited Putin to take pre-emptive measures to prevent what he now perceived as an inevitable outcome. As he warned Merkel: “You won’t be chancellor forever, and then [Ukraine and Georgia] will become NATO members. And I’m going to prevent that.”

A few months after the summit, Russian forces invaded Georgian territory. This followed an assault by the Georgian military — funded, armed and trained by the United States — on South Ossetia, which borders Russia. Although relations between the West and Russia grew increasingly strained from this point onward, Germany continued to deepen its economic ties with Moscow. In 2011, the 1,200-kilometre Nord Stream 1 gas pipeline was inaugurated, linking the Russian coast near Saint Petersburg to northeastern Germany. The agreement had been signed in 2005 by Putin and then-German chancellor Gerhard Schröder, just before the elections that brought Merkel to power.

Merkel defends the deal on straightforward economics: gas transported via pipelines was significantly cheaper than liquefied natural gas (LNG). Furthermore, the route eliminated additional transit fees associated with pipelines running through countries such as Ukraine and Poland. She also highlights that, as early as 2006, both the European Commission and the European Parliament had officially designated the project as “a project of European interest”, emphasising its role in promoting the sustainability and security of Europe’s energy supply.

From Merkel’s perspective, strengthening economic ties with Russia was not just an economic necessity but also a geopolitical imperative, as Europe had a vested interest in minimising the risk of conflict. In this context, economic interdependence was seen as a form of peace diplomacy. However, such an approach required other European countries — and, most crucially, the United States — to address Russia’s legitimate security concerns as well. As events in Ukraine would later demonstrate, however, the US had other plans.

Interestingly, Merkel offers little commentary on the critical period between the 2008 Bucharest summit and the 2014 Western-backed coup in Ukraine — or even on the coup itself. Germany, she insists, alongside other countries, had been working on a plan to defuse the increasingly violent protests. However, the protesters rejected the proposed agreement, ultimately forcing the democratically elected president to flee the country. Reflecting on the turn of events, Merkel admits: “I had trouble understanding what had happened in the previous eighteen months”.

This is surely disingenuous. While it is plausible that she was not directly involved in the regime change, she openly acknowledges her role in bringing Ukraine closer to the European Union. This, however, proved equally destabilising for Ukraine, as it compelled the country to make a zero-sum geopolitical — and even “civilisational” — choice between the West and Russia. This heightened the political divisions in the country, which ultimately resulted in the Euromaidan events following president Yanukovich’s decision to reject the proposed EU-Ukraine agreement and instead choose Russia as his country’s most important partner.

The eight years between the 2014 regime change in Kyiv and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 remain a subject of intense speculation. It is widely known that Germany and France played pivotal roles in brokering the Minsk agreements in 2014-2015, which were intended to bring an end to the civil war in eastern Ukraine. Among other things, they proposed constitutional reforms in Ukraine, including provisions for greater self-government in certain areas of the Donbas region.

However, the Minsk agreements were never fully implemented, and this failure ultimately contributed to the escalation of tensions that culminated in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Throughout the conflict, each side has blamed the other for the collapse of the negotiations. Russia has consistently argued that Ukraine was never genuinely committed to implementing the terms of the agreements. But what about the Western powers, particularly France and Germany, who acted as the brokers?

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In 2022, Merkel gave an interview that seemed to lend some credence to Russia’s interpretation of events. Speaking to Die Zeit, she stated that the Minsk agreements were “an attempt to give Ukraine time” and that Ukraine “used this time to get stronger, as you can see today”. Many interpreted this as an admission that the Western parties involved in the negotiations — including Merkel herself — were never genuinely invested in securing a peaceful resolution. Instead, they saw the agreements as a ploy to buy Ukraine time to prepare for a military solution to the conflict. I am not convinced.

I have always read Merkel’s comments as an attempt to retroactively justify what critics perceive as her irresponsible appeasement of Russia. The US might have had a vested interest in escalating the situation in Ukraine — in part precisely as a means of driving a wedge between Germany and Russia, a longstanding US geostrategic imperative. But what conceivable interest would Merkel have had in passively enabling a full-scale conflict between Ukraine and Russia, especially when such an outcome would inevitably dismantle the German-Russian economic ties that she had spent over a decade cultivating?

It was no surprise, then, to find that in her book Merkel strongly defends her efforts to secure peace — or at the very least a ceasefire — in Ukraine. Her approach was grounded in the belief that “a military solution to the conflict, that is to say a Ukrainian military victory over the Russian troops, was an illusion”. She advised Ukraine’s new government that a resolution would not be possible without dialogue and diplomacy. This, she emphasised, did not mean “that Ukraine must not defend itself when its territory is invaded, but ultimately — and incidentally, this is not the only part of the world where this is true — diplomatic solutions must be found… I could even go so far as to say: there will be no military solution.”

However, it quickly became evident that the US had a different agenda. When President Obama informed her of plans to supply Ukraine with at least defensive weapons, Merkel voiced her “concern that any delivery of weapons would strengthen the forces within the Ukrainian government who hoped only for a military solution, even if that offered no prospect of success”. In her view, such actions risked emboldening extremist and ultranationalist factions within Ukraine — a development that, arguably, aligned with US strategic interests.

Her account also reveals that Putin was resolute in his desire to reach a diplomatic solution. However, it became increasingly clear that “the Minsk agreement wasn’t worth the paper it was written on”. Powerful forces — within Ukraine, the US and even Europe, particularly hawkish nations like Poland — were advocating for a military resolution to the conflict. Over time, these voices only grew louder.

Merkel, however, continued to go against the grain by further deepening Germany’s ties with Russia through the construction of a second gas pipeline, Nord Stream 2. Despite repeated efforts by the Trump administration to halt the project, Merkel remained steadfast. Ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, she has faced relentless criticism for allegedly creating “an irresponsible dependency on Russian gas”. Yet, in her book, she contends that US opposition to Nord Stream 2 was not driven by concerns for Germany’s security interests but rather by American economic ambitions.

“In truth, I felt that the United States was mobilizing its formidable economic and financial resources to prevent the business ventures of other countries, even their allies”, she writes. “The United States was chiefly interested in its own economic interests, as it wanted to export to Europe LNG obtained through fracking.” This sheds further light on what the Americans’ motivations may have been in escalating tensions in Ukraine: did they view it as a way of bringing the pipeline project to an end?

In 2019, Zelensky was elected on a platform promising to bring peace to Ukraine, largely by implementing the Minsk agreements. And it’s clear from Merkel’s account that she believes Zelensky took his mandate seriously, at first at least. However, he soon came under intense pressure from ultranationalists in Ukraine not to implement what was deemed a “capitulation”. At the Paris summit, later that year, Macron, Zelensky Putin and Merkel collectively committed in writing to the full implementation of the Minsk agreements — but in the end Zelensky refused to accept the agreed text.

The pandemic, she writes, was “the last nail in the coffin of the Minsk agreement”. The absence of in-person meetings made it virtually impossible to resolve the lingering differences. And, by 2021, the agreements were dead. Nevertheless, shortly before leaving office, Merkel made one final attempt to broker peace by proposing a summit between the European Council and Putin. While Macron supported the initiative, Poland, Estonia and Lithuania opposed it, and the meeting never materialised. Merkel paid one last farewell visit to Moscow in August 2021, just months before the conclusion of her tenure.

Two decades of mutual encounters lay behind them — “an era during which Putin and, with him, Russia, had changed from a position of initial openness to the West to one of alienation from us”. And though Merkel does not state it explicitly, she evidently attributes at least part of the responsibility for how events unfolded to the attitude of Nato countries, particularly the United States. Her account makes it equally clear that she was steadfast in her commitment to avoiding war — and, frankly, there is little reason to doubt her sincerity.

This stance aligns not only with Germany’s economic and strategic interests, evident in her efforts to advance Nord Stream 2, but also with her understanding of the catastrophic consequences of a military conflict between Nato and Russia — “one of the world’s two leading nuclear powers along with the United States, and a geographical neighbor of the European Union”. This is a scenario that should be avoided at all costs, she writes. For her, along with that older generation of European politicians, this was not merely a matter of strategic calculation but basic common sense — two things that appear to be largely absent in the post-Merkel era.

A striking example of this shift can be seen in her successor. After the Ukraine invasion, Olaf Scholz drastically reversed Merkel’s Russia policy, announcing plans to wean Germany off Russian gas entirely. Scholz not only immediately halted the launch of Nord Stream 2; his government was also allegedly informed about a Ukrainian plot to blow up the pipeline and chose to remain silent. The dramatic economic consequences of this decoupling are currently playing out painfully. This approach would have been more logical if it had at least been accompanied by diplomatic efforts to de-escalate tensions in Ukraine. But this was not the case; indeed, Scholz waited over a year — several months after the outbreak of the war — before initiating any direct communication with Putin.

Would events have unfolded differently if Merkel had remained in power? Probably not; the forces she was up against were formidable and entrenched. But it’s difficult to imagine that she would have allowed Germany’s interests to be trampled over so blatantly, especially by its supposed American ally. Indeed, her entire tenure appears to have been guided by a persistent effort to balance Germany’s strategic interests with its transatlantic ties. If anything, her greatest shortcoming was failing to recognise that these goals had become fundamentally incompatible. Yet, it is emblematic of the paradoxical times we live in that, despite the many questionable decisions Merkel made during her chancellorship, the one aspect of her legacy that is most criticised in official Western discourse is the one thing she was unquestionably right about: trying to avoid war with Russia.

So far, so charming. The conversation then took a tougher turn when the black-robed figure began holding forth proudly on the vast sums of money which had been spent on the monastery at the behest of Vladimir Putin — turning the island into a place where the president and his elite guests could make comfortable and high-profile visits. Ash couldn’t help asking her companion whether he considered the president a holy man. “Only God knows that,” was the artful reply. But the results of this high-level patronage were visibly impressive. As Ash notes, it has been calculated that $700,000 of taxpayers’ money has been spent on the island for every member of a brotherhood supposedly devoted to asceticism and prayer; and Russia’s federal grid has supplied the 200-strong community with enough power capacity to meet the needs of a small country.

The post-communist transformation of Valaam island — from a harsh, romantic outpost into a slick and ruthlessly administered showpiece of state largesse — is one of many arresting stories told by Ash in The Baton and the Cross about the trajectory of Russian Orthodoxy since the fall of the atheist regime. Around the time of the Soviet collapse, the resurrection of Christianity felt to its participants like a valiant and counter-cultural enterprise. But with every passing year, a de facto partnership between the Patriarchate of Moscow and Russia’s earthly powers became more evident — especially after 2012 when Patriarch Kirill, having initially kept a little distance from the Kremlin, emphatically swung behind Putin and helped to ensure his re-election. In return, hundreds of millions of roubles were made available for the construction of churches and other projects that burnished the Patriarchate’s prestige and property empire.

As Ash argues, Patriarch Kirill’s strident support for the war in Ukraine — and the harsh disciplinary measures applied to priests who question this line — are only the logical culmination of an ever-tightening relationship between Church and State. Church-state interconnections in the land of the eastern Slavs have taken a bewilderingly wide variety of forms, but there is a common theme. In every era of Russia’s evolution, not excluding the Soviet one, ways have been found for earthly rulers to turn the soft power of religion to their own advantage.

Ash is not, of course, alone in making that observation. The great Russian patriot Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn  remarked that his country’s history would have been “incomparably more humane and harmonious in the last few centuries… if the church had not surrendered its independence and [had] made its voice heard among the people as it does, for example, in Poland”.

And yet, as a careful reading of her account will also make clear, Russian Orthodoxy does not — even today — begin or end with its use as a tool of state power. There is more to the story than that.

To put matters at their very broadest, any religion, passionately embraced, gives people a motive to sacrifice personal interests and even their lives; that is one reason why earthly rulers find religion’s use so attractive. But faith also gives people the courage to oppose state power, at vast personal cost, in ways that send a dazzling moral signal. As it happens, Orthodox Christianity has inspired not only the most pliant servants of Vladimir Putin but also his most doughty opponents.

Take one well-known example: during his trial in 2021, Alexei Navalny made clear that a vital part of his own personal story was evolution from the militant atheism of his youth into a morally and politically engaged understanding of his country’s historic faith. “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness”, was one of the Biblical maxims which inspired the awesomely brave corruption fighter who died in an Arctic prison in February 2024.

Vladimir Kara-Murza, an equally courageous challenger of the Putin order, had good reason to anticipate a similar fate when, in a letter from prison in November 2023, he lamented Patriarch Kirill’s moral support for the invasion of Ukraine. The dissident couched his argument in spiritual terms. “As an Orthodox Christian, this brings me only pain, grief, and deep sorrow,” he wrote. At the heart of Christianity, he added, was the rejection of murder and violence: this made it all the more deplorable that Church hierarchs “had placed the authority of Caesar over the foundations of the Christian faith”. Kara-Murza was one of 16 prisoners released to the West in a prisoner swap in August; until his liberation he was preparing himself for imminent death in jail.

Looking way back through history, it turns out there are some striking examples of tsars who thought they could turn the Church into an efficient instrument of their own power but found that the results were quite unexpected. Start with Ivan the Terrible, who held sway from 1547 to 1584 and was admired by Stalin for his savage purges and persecutions. If anyone stood up to Ivan’s murderous rampages, it was a turbulent cleric, Metropolitan Philip, who was duly imprisoned and strangled. But Philip lives on in Church history as a saint and martyr while only a lunatic fringe of religious ultra-nationalists (who do exist, unfortunately) unconditionally revere his sadistic tormentor.

Then in the 18th century, modernising emperors like Peter and Catherine imagined they could curb Orthodoxy’s mystical and monastic tradition and turn the church into a Protestant-style enforcer of morals and state loyalty. But these efforts — like the vain attempt to cure Father Iosif — were unsuccessful. Instead, there was a strange countervailing reaction. In various remote outposts of the empire there was a kind of mystical resurgence, featuring saintly ascetics and monastics with prophetic gifts — a phenomenon which inspired writers like Dostoyevsky and hence gained an unlikely place in the history of world literature.

Those three tsars — Ivan, Peter and Catherine — are worth mentioning because they are the Russian rulers Putin most admires, according to his foreign minister Sergei Lavrov, and hence took as his lodestars when invading Ukraine. Putin may imagine those monarchs as people who successfully and seamlessly harnessed Russia’s spiritual heritage — but if so, he is misinformed.

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Another unexpected twist in Russian spiritual history occurred during the death-throes of the tsarist era with the maelstrom of the Revolution and civil war. This febrile climate had an extraordinary effect on Russian religious thought, generating the so-called Silver Age whose intellectual protagonists creatively synthesised their faith with socialist atheism. That movement would, in turn, make a powerful contribution to intellectual life outside Russia.

Driven westwards by the Bolsheviks, that diaspora’s brainy, quarrelsome thinkers went on to electrify the tired worlds of French Catholicism and Anglican academia. Take the philosopher and theologian Sergei Bulgakov. Bulgakov stands out among the thinkers who on the eve of the Bolshevik Revolution abandoned secular socialism and then looked for ways to link their spiritual heritage with a practical concern for human welfare. He co-founded the Anglican-Orthodox fellowship which led to a surge of overblown excitement about a possible rapprochement or even reunion between two major segments of Christendom and had a profound impact on former leader of global Anglicanism, Rowan Williams. Amidst huge controversy, Bulgakov also foreshadowed feminist theology by reflecting on “holy wisdom” as a distinctly female form of divine power, which features rather mysteriously in Orthodox iconography and liturgical poetry. And for French thinkers like Jacques Maritain, nurtured on the medieval worldview of Thomas Aquinas, the Russian sages arriving in Paris were an exciting mixture of tradition and creativity.

Of course, not all Russia’s religious philosophers managed to escape the Bolsheviks — some, like Pavel Florensky, were among the millions of souls, including tens of thousands of priests and bishops, who perished in successive waves of repression. But those victims had a posthumous moral influence on religious thought in freer places.

In the story of Bulgakov’s friend Mother Maria Skobtsova, Russian Orthodoxy can also offer an anti-Nazi morality tale. An unconventional nun, she ran a shelter and soup-kitchen for the homeless. Having experienced the civil war in southern Russia and then a series of personal tragedies, Mother Maria had an ocean of empathy for the vulnerable and suffering — and responded positively when Jews came to her Parisian shelter asking for false documents that would help them to escape Nazi round-ups. It was for these acts of compassion that she, her son and two other associates paid with their lives. She was deported to the Ravensbrück death camp where she was executed on Easter Saturday of 1945. Among her legacies was a devastatingly accurate observation of various forms of misguided piety that she observed in her compatriots — from militaristic forms of faith to excessively ascetic and other-worldly varieties.

In short, the Russian Orthodox tradition should, from its own treasure chest, be able to offer a rich and powerful critique of the compact Putin has fashioned with an apparently docile church. It is too early to tell what opposing trends might be triggered by the present cosy and calculating relationship between an ostentatiously pious war leader and his clerical cheerleaders. But history gives us plenty of reason to suggest that Patriarch Kirill’s proclamation of Vladimir Putin as “a miracle of God” will not be the last act of the current drama. If anything can heal the pathologies now afflicting Russian Orthodoxy, it might just be the spirit of Saint Philip or Mother Maria.

The truth, however, is that the Kursk incursion does not fundamentally alter the reality on the ground: this conflict is one of attrition, which, in the long run, still favours the larger power over the smaller. Rather than celebrate, then, Kyiv’s allies, in particular the United States, would be wise to use this turn of fortune as pretext to pressure both sides into seeking an end to the war — the better for Washington to be able to pursue its own larger strategic interests.

But how might it achieve this? Whether Democrat or Republican, the incoming administration will preside over a four-year period which could see the return of peace in Europe and the opportunity to shape the terms of a settlement with the Kremlin. Given intensifying competition with China and the unthinkable consequences entailed by an American defeat, US leadership would be remiss if it did not treat this eventuality as a cue to shift the balance of power. Or, as the prescient John J. Mearsheimer explained in 2022: “If you live in a world where there are three great powers — China, Russia, and the United States — and one of those great powers, China, is a peer competitor, what you want to do if you’re the United States is have Russia on your side of the ledger.”

Such a scenario would recall the foreign policies of two past presidents. First, it would represent a “reverse Nixon” in which Washington tries to cleave Russia away from China as Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger cleaved Maoist China from the Soviet Union; and second, an attempt to enact a far more successful version of Barack Obama’s ill-fated Russia Reset. This time, however, the stakes are higher and the circumstances much more difficult than both scenarios, given the strong alliance between Russia and China. Yet insights from history can always be adapted to forge a fitting strategy for the current situation: the question is how?

Most obviously, a negotiated settlement in the form of an armistice — akin to that which ended the Korean War, in which the fighting ceased without definitive recognition of the belligerent’s competing territorial claims — may serve as an expedient conclusion to the war. The two sides could be made to return to something close to pre-2022 ante, which would regrettably allow continuing Russian control over Crimea and rule out the prospect of Nato membership for Kyiv, yet would preserve the existence of a sizeable and sovereign Ukrainian state. Such an outcome would please no one, but at the very least Putin’s ambition of conquering the whole of Ukraine would have been thwarted. There is also a parallel here with Nixon’s strategy when the Republic of China on Taiwan, formerly a key ally, had to be relegated in importance, as Ukraine may soon be, before the larger strategic goal of courting Beijing.

But will this be enough? After all, the US must prepare for the prospect of a long reset, one that will take more than just pressing a shiny button, as Hillary Clinton seemed to want to do, or even more than a future president’s visit to the Kremlin to shake hands with Putin, as with Nixon and Mao. This is because, as noted, unlike in 1972, when ideological differences in the Sino-Soviet Split kept the two communist giants apart, Putin’s Russia and Xi’s China are today in the midst of a so-called “partnership without limits”, which had been declared at a meeting between the two in early 2022. Just as the Biden administration has attempted to characterise the current geopolitical situation as a confrontation between democracies and autocracies, so too have Putin and Xi christened their bond as a bulwark against Western liberal hegemony.

In other words, anti-Americanism is the glue that holds their informal alliance together; yet take that particular element out of the equation and the picture of Sino-Russian friendship begins to look a lot more uncertain. This is because Russia and China are not natural allies and there are a number of vulnerabilities underlying their relationship that an intelligent American geostrategy can exploit:

To begin with, a longstanding sense of mistrust has persisted between these very distinct civilisations with sparse people-to-people ties, who are separated from each other by a vast 2,568-mile militarised border. There is also the aspect of ressentiment that arises out of any asymmetrical relationship: Russia, previously the dominant partner, has been relegated to junior status, and is now far more dependent on China for investment than the other way around. Even as Moscow leans into integration with China as a way to make up for lost Western trade, Chinese interest in Russia’s natural gas and industrial inputs is belied by Beijing’s strategy of diversifying energy and resource markets, such as through large investments in renewables. Unsurprisingly, Chinese investment in Russian pipeline projects in Siberia has fallen short of expectations. China also relied on Russia for its cheap weapons exports but has since become self-sufficient with the maturation of its own arms industries.

Meanwhile, resource-rich Central Asia has also seen expansion of Chinese presence, through Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which would link the landlocked former Soviet republics there into a broader Chinese-dominated trade order. Russia officially supports this and Putin has been a major presence at BRI summits, yet Moscow has struggled to sustain its own integration efforts with the Eurasian Economic Union, which has flailed since its launch in 2015 as a vehicle for the reassertion of Russian influence in an area it still sees as its sphere of influence.

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A new American strategy toward Russia for the latter half of the 2020s and beyond would seize on these weak spots in Sino-Russian relations. It would call for the progressive lifting of sanctions and gradual reintegration of Russia into Western trade, finance, and energy markets, alongside channelling Western capital into Russia to address its critical investment gaps in technology and infrastructure.

This is, of course, easier said than done. While Russian elites will only be too happy to be allowed back into the West’s banks and luxury shopping malls, the Russian state, whether under an ageing Putin or his successor, will likely be far more cautious, if not wary; Moscow will no doubt try to play off the Americans and Chinese against each other while benefiting from the largesse of both.

This will call for strategic patience on the part of Washington, which should aim to manage the residual tensions between the Kremlin and European allies, while encouraging Moscow to begin to assert itself against China in Central Asia. The US can also aim to integrate Russia with the bloc of Indo-Pacific states it is assembling — by, for instance, brokering deals and securing new customers for Russian energy and arms among the rising Indo-Pacific powers, whose defence capabilities the US is already looking to bolster as a counter to China’s growing military might.

A renewed Russo-American entente, however, would be most fruitful in a region that will only become more important in the decades ahead, namely the Arctic, where receding ice coverage will open new zones for shipping and resource exploration. China and Russia have worked towards the establishment of a “Polar Silk Road” which would give Beijing a presence in the polar north, where otherwise it would have none. The US should aggressively try to head off this possibility by making it a paramount strategic goal to ensure a “China-free Arctic”. It can only do this, however, if it can eventually convince the Russians to substitute Chinese for Western capital and technical assistance as a means of developing this vast untapped frontier. The best-case scenario would be to have an Arctic maritime trade region, managed exclusively by Russia and the Western Arctic powers, to bypass China’s BRI, through which certain resources and goods can be traded across continents without touching Chinese-controlled infrastructure.

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At a time of severe tension between Russia and the West, such projections may seem fantastical. But stranger things have happened: China’s transition from the most fanatically anti-American power to Washington’s partner was Nixon’s great feat, and the next president can start to do the same with Russia. With his expressed desire for mending ties with Moscow, Donald Trump would seem best suited to enact such a policy, but a Harris-led reproachment would actually embody the analogy better, since it was the dramatic turnaround after years as a Cold War hawk that made Nixon’s gambit such a political masterstroke: “Only Nixon can go to China,” as the saying went. One wonders if Kamala Harris can pull off a comparable pivot.

Only now, Americans will have to forgo the liberal triumphalism that proved to be so naïve in the recent past. Russia will likely persist as a distinct world civilisation and must be treated as such, even if it means countenancing its perennially illiberal forms of government. For the question of the next half-century will not be whether American political norms shall triumph over the earth, but whether America itself can survive this coming era of great power competition; and in this race, values must give way to interests and woolly-headed idealism to the coldest realism.

Shoigu has long been part of the political furniture in the Russian Federation. He was appointed Minister for Emergency Situations by Boris Yeltsin in 1991 in the dying months of the Soviet era. He remained in that post until 2012, seeing out Yeltsin, Putin and even Dmitry Medvedev’s presidential terms. But as Putin returned to the presidency in 2012 on a platform filled with militaristic ultra-nationalism — one that promised a restoration of national greatness in the face of a purported Western onslaught — Shoigu ascended to his most important post, becoming the Minister of Defence in May that year.

Barely two years later, Russia had invaded the east of Ukraine and Crimea. Shoigu and Putin’s popularity boomed. A very public bromance between president and minister saw the two regularly photographed together playing hockey and engaging in bare-chested fishing sessions.

Since 2012, Shoigu has been the ever-present face of Russia’s wars. Whether briefing Putin at heavily publicised meetings in the Kremlin, attending the state’s lavish Victory Day parades, handing out medals to veterans of the “special military operation”, or visiting the injured in hospital, this doggedly loyal Putinist — always in uniform, and often bedecked with a rash of unearned medals — has seemed to embody the new, militarised Russia.

Yet in the past two years, Shoigu has become the target of much ire over the death toll and slow progress the Russian army has experienced in Ukraine. The former, and now deceased, Wagner leader Yevgeny Prigozhin almost launched all-out war against the state after Shoigu’s Defence Ministry attempted to assert control over his forces in summer 2023. He claimed that Shoigu was the source of the army’s failings, and only wanted to wage war to award himself more military honours. A slew of similar criticisms has bedeviled Shoigu’s ministry for years: its corruption, bureaucracy and incompetence are the subject of constant public criticism. Shoigu is thus perceived as a man with few redeeming features bar his loyalty to Putin.

Into Shoigu’s shoes, however, steps yet another close Putin ally: the long-serving economist Andrey Belousov. Belousov’s public image is far blander than his predecessor’s. White-haired, quiet and always clad in a neat business suit, Belousov is known for his impressive knowledge of — and competence in — economics. Even better, given the struggles that Shoigu’s ministry experienced, Belousov has gained a reputation for incorruptibility throughout his time in government.

Yet it would be a categorical error to interpret Belousov’s appointment as a return to normality or a move toward restoring order after the aggressive, militaristic chaos of the past few years. Belousov is a strong proponent of the post-2012 order, and was one of very few economists in Russia who welcomed the invasion of Crimea in 2014 — even though it brought disastrous sanctions on the country and saw the value of the Russian ruble plummet. He has been a key architect of the transition away from a liberal capitalist order in the Russian economy toward one in which the state — and in particular the state’s military enterprises — looms large.

Early signs from Belousov’s new ministry suggest that the state is looking for ways not to rein in but to streamline its forces, to find efficiencies, resolve long-standing organisational issues and continue to wage war for years to come. Belousov has been charged with immediately looking into issues around troop survival rates and the provision of proper medical care and civil allowances for soldiers returning from the front.

Whatever the change in leadership at the Ministry of Defence portends, therefore, it will not be a move toward a more peaceful Russia. Nor will it necessarily be a more humane Russian way of warfare in Ukraine. For the time being, Valery Gerasimov — a man accused of encouraging Russian troops’ war crimes in both Chechnya and Ukraine — remains the armed forces’ Chief of General Staff with primary responsibility for operational conduct in the theatre of war. Belousov’s role will presumably not be to issue correctives to men like Gerasimov but to provide them with a more efficient supply line of troops, arms and armour to behave in the way they see fit.

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It’s hardly a surprise that Russia’s nationalist factions are cock-a-hoop at the news of Shoigu’s dismissal, which is, to quote one leading blogger, “a logical step”. Even if there is some suspicion that Belousov’s experience working with Americans might make him a soft touch (one popular commentator even jokingly called him a “veteran foreign agent”), the positive responses far outweigh the negative. Extreme nationalists — who have long railed against the logistical failures of Shoigu’s ministry — are revelling in the slew of Western news articles commenting on Belousov’s economic credentials. “They’re terrified,” claimed one user on a popular Telegram channel, “because Russia’s on the right path.” Paired with news of continued Russian progress against a depleted Ukrainian army, the sense of stagnation about the war within the country may be about to disappear.

At last week’s presidential inauguration, Putin spoke of the importance of the “special military operation” to Russia’s history. In a climactic flourish, he declared that “together, we will win!” In the past two years, Russia’s economy has pivoted from being one funded almost entirely by the sale of resources to one that funds itself through the production of material for war. Put simply, Russia now needs war to stave off economic collapse. With Andrey Belousov at the helm of the Ministry of Defence, Putin has made a choice to pursue that economic path with a ruthless efficiency that would have been impossible under the loyal but hapless Sergey Shoigu — and to provide his army with the means they need to win in Ukraine.

Chechnya has for two centuries been a thorn in imperial Moscow’s side. Over and over again, its people have revolted against the imposition of Christian Orthodox power and dragged Russia into protracted and bloody conflicts. The first of these post-Soviet conflicts, which ran from 1994 to 1996, saw Russian troops humiliated. Boris Yeltsin, who had staked his reputation on reasserting control over the region, saw his reputation permanently damaged. Worse, Russians themselves were humbled. A decade earlier, they had been vying for global supremacy with Washington. Now, they could not even win a war against a separatist rabble in their own backyard.

When in late 1999 Putin, then a young and straight-talking upstart, stormed into the halls of power, he promised to bring Chechnya back into the fold at any cost. Launching a new war, he sent his troops into the breakaway region with carte blanche to exterminate and destroy. Almost a decade of fighting left more than 50,000 civilians dead and Grozny razed. Widespread criminality — looting, rape and murder — by Russian troops at the front went mostly unpunished.

Into this maelstrom of violence stepped a young Ramzan Kadyrov, one of many former insurgents turned pro-Russian fighters. Appointed by Putin to lead the territory in 2007, his 17 years in power have been characterised by an awkward combination of Moscow-style autocracy, with various strongmen vying for favour while Kadyrov watches on, and regressive Islamism, designed through a combination of misogynism, traditionalist flourishes and militancy to appease and oppress the majority Muslim local population in equal measure.

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But above all, Kadyrov has ruled in the same style as the Russian army conducted its invasion: with criminality and absolute violence. Kadyrov and his henchmen have personally been involved in torture and extrajudicial killings of political opponents and purported criminals. Brutal anti-gay purges have seen hundreds abducted, tortured and beaten — and several killed. Putin and his ally seemed to have found a solution to the age-old problem of Chechen insurgency: a flexible nationalism, ruthless violence and a mafia-like internal politics.

Imagining a post-Kadyrov Chechnya, pundits float bold hypotheses: could Kadyrov’s death provoke a bitter succession crisis that would spark another regional war? If Russian troops had to be deployed, would Putin’s reputation as the man who quelled the restive Chechens for good be ruined? Could rebellion in Chechnya even lead to a wave of revolts across the imperial peripheries, where Muslim minorities have not profited from the past two decades like their ethnic Russian peers and where local populations have borne much of the burden of fighting in Ukraine? If the wrong leader is imposed by Moscow, could demonstrations like those in Bashkortostan — another Muslim majority province where in January several thousand angry locals clashed with security services after a local activist was jailed — break out and perhaps spread? Both Kadyrov and Putin have plans in place to ensure that such disasters don’t unfold, but the situation is flammable.

Kadyrov himself seems intent on a dynastic succession. Two of his sons, the teenaged Adam and Akhmat, are being groomed for power. The 16-year-old Adam has been appointed supervisor Chechya’s Special Forces School, while his 18-year-old brother is the territory’s Minister for Youth and even attended a one-on-one meeting with Putin in 2023. The former shows the same penchant for violence as his father: Kadyrov announced he was “proud” when footage of Adam viciously beating a man who had burned a Koran went viral.

Yet neither of these stripling dauphins, who lack the support of either the public or a force of loyal foot-soldiers, would likely be able to keep control of Chechnya for long. A crowd of potential challengers, such as Kadyrov’s right-hand man Magomed Daudov, another Chechen War turncoat, and Apti Alaudinov, who commands a unit fighting in Ukraine and seems to be the Kremlin’s preferred choice, eagerly watches on. Each possesses far more significant support among Chechnya’s elites than the risible Kadyrov siblings. Should one or the other make a play for the top spot, it is hard to see the Kadyrov dynasty surviving.

Still, none of the challengers represent a separatist movement. Each has a vested interest in maintaining Putin’s support — and thus the inflow of money and, should any troubles arise, extra security services. Each would be able to rule in much the same vein as Kadyrov. Meanwhile, a fragmented separatist movement lacks the resources and manpower to mount a serious challenge. Significant opposition to Chechnya’s status as part of the Russian Federation does exist, and some Chechens are even fighting against Russia in Ukraine, but Chechnya is not the rebellious place it once was. Unlike other peripheral regions, it has not seen major protests as a result of the 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Even anti-Russian rebel leaders have suggested that Kadyrov’s death would not be a “game changer”.

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The real danger for the Kremlin, then, is in Chechnya’s various power blocks engaging in an internal struggle so violent that it threatens regional stability. Unlike in the Nineties and 2000s, they would not fight for secession but for power. In a territory where mountainous and sparsely populated territory provides the perfect platform for guerilla warfare, and where performative masculine violence — showcased in regular mass demonstrations of Chechen military might — and traumatised veterans dominate political culture, such a conflict could easily spiral out of control. Perhaps the only way for Putin to restore order would be to deploy Russian troops en masse — and even then, judging by past wars, the conflict would not be resolved quickly.

That said, such a low-level conflict would not be regime ending. Putin’s propagandists would beat the patriotic drum, claiming that one or other (or all) sides were being funded by the usual enemies: the CIA, Islamic extremists, Ukraine. The conflict would be painted as just another example of how the West is trying to smash Russia apart — and thus proof that Putin remains the only man who knows how to face down this existential threat. It would fan the flames of anti-Muslim xenophobia, long nurtured by the Kremlin as a convenient means of rallying racial hatred for political ends and at a peak following the government’s handling of the Crocus City Hall terrorist attacks, rather than anti-Putin rebellion. Many Russians welcomed the sight of visibly brutalised Tajik Muslims appearing in court following the Crocus attacks; a wave of spontaneous victimisation of Central Asians has followed. In this febrile atmosphere, Chechens could easily receive the same sort of treatment.

In this case, Putin might emerge with his reputation intact or even enhanced. But a period of instability following Kadyrov’s death could also be a golden opportunity for Russia’s opponents to seriously weaken the Russian president. A military venture in Chechnya would hoover up significant money, manpower and materiel — all in short supply after two years of war in Ukraine. Just as the Russian army is gearing up for a big summer campaign to break through its stagnant position in eastern Ukraine, it could be drawn into a long and bloody war in Chechnya.

All Russia’s opponents need to do is fuel the ambitions of Kadyrov’s potential successors and encourage them to plot and commit violence against one another. Even providing arms to the handful of separatists operating in Chechnya or perhaps those fighting in Ukraine, if they were willing to return home to combat Putin, might be a viable option if it were to seriously disrupt Moscow’s war on Ukraine. Such a course of action would be cheap, has the potential to save Ukrainian lives, and might give Putin pause for thought as he weighs up his options vis-à-vis Kyiv. Kadyrov’s death might be the gifthorse a war-fatigued Western world is looking for.