In the election’s final days, the tone of campaigning has become unusually dark, with both sides accusing each other of being the playthings of foreign intelligence services, conjuring apocalyptic visions of the other’s victory. The news cycle is now dominated less by campaign pledges than by competing leaks of wiretaps, intelligence service interrogations, arrests and accusations of treachery and espionage. The claims and counter-claims, simultaneously dramatic and unprovable, are as dizzying as they are plausible. Even independent commentators, like the former leader of the Green Party András Schiffer, now allege the British, French, German, Polish and Baltic security services have involved themselves in influencing the election’s outcome, while journalists and activists supportive of the opposition assert Russian interference and looming false flags to keep the incumbent in power.

In the meantime, Volodymyr Zelensky’s face looms everywhere here in Budapest: in posters depicting him smugly reaching out his hand for Hungarian taxpayers’ money, or cackling evilly at passersby. As Hungary’s relationship with Ukraine, frosty at the beginning of the war, has dramatically worsened, it feels as if Ukraine itself, personified by its leader, has become Orbán’s primary antagonist in the election.

According to Gábor Győri, a political analyst from the progressive Policy Solutions think tank, this focusing on Ukraine is a tried-and-tested Fidesz tactic. Aware that the opposition’s strength lies in Hungary’s faltering economy, Ukraine is a useful external enemy for Orbán — one previously played by transnational migrants and their NGO lobbies; Brussels; and the international LGBT movement. “Since the war seems like a stalemate from a Hungarian perspective,” Győri told me, “and it hasn’t moved that much in Hungary’s direction, the recent effort has been to portray Ukraine as an active threat.” At the beginning of the war, Hungary condemned the Russian invasion, sent humanitarian aid to Ukraine, and opened its borders to Ukrainian refugees, despite Orbán’s amicable relationship with Vladimir Putin. Yet since then, Győri observes, “it has shifted to saying that, well, Russia was provoked, to now saying that, essentially, Ukraine is the culprit, the really aggressive power, so much so that they are a threat to Hungary. And I’m not sure if they can sell this, to be honest, but that’s the effort now.”

At least in liberal Budapest, not everyone is on message: it is common to see posters linking Magyar to Zelensky torn off advertising columns, or defaced with stickers saying “Vile, Deceitful Propaganda”, “Dirty Fidesz”, or simply, “Shit”. But at the Peace March, the message seemed to play well enough among the crowd, which had thronged to Budapest’s vast neo-Gothic parliament behind a banner declaring: “We will not become a Ukrainian colony!” “Viktor Orbán is one of the few in politics who is proud to be Hungarian,” attendee Marco, 42, told me, “But Tisza and Péter Magyar, I think he will make steps outside of Hungary, maybe in Brussels against his own country, against the government, and this I think is not correct.” The crowd cheerily waved placards demanding “Stop War!”, and when Péter Szijjártó, the foreign minister, gave his speech railing against the “Ukromafia” the crowd booed Zelensky’s name like a pantomime villain.

The Kyiv government, which has at times exasperated its European allies with a demanding and sometimes alienating approach to diplomacy, is partly to blame for the worsening of its relationship with Hungary. The European Union has sided with Hungary and Slovakia in the dispute over Ukraine’s closing of the Druzhba pipeline, which carries the cheap Russian oil on which both countries depend, and whose smooth operation, despite the war, is a central plank of the Fidesz electoral offer to voters. By apparently directly threatening Orbán, Zelensky recently earned another direct EU reprimand. As relations worsen, Hungary has used its veto to block the EU funding package on which the Ukrainian state survives, while Hungarian intelligence officers recently arrested their Ukrainian counterparts transporting a shipment of money across Hungary for what was heavily implied to be nefarious purposes.

In response, Zelensky’s security services arrested a Hungarian alleged to be running Budapest’s spy network in Ukraine’s Zakarpattia oblast, home to the country’s Hungarian minority, and long an area of contention between the two countries. Despite multiple requests, neither Tisza nor the Ukrainian foreign ministry agreed to an interview for this piece. The Hungarian government was more accommodating, offering unusual access to some of its senior leadership. Framing a Tisza electoral victory as a risk to Hungary’s energy security and neutrality, Péter Sztáray, State Secretary for Security Policy and Energy Security, told me “We [would] have to let through weapon deliveries through the Hungarian-Ukrainian border… while, at the same time, Ukraine is closing our energy supply, Ukraine is shrinking the rights of the national minority communities, including the Hungarian community. So why should we do that? And their political messaging is very insulting at the same time.”

Now, the war next door has moved from a source of background anxiety for Hungarian voters to the very foreground of Fidesz’s campaign. As polling day nears, it is more openly being alleged by government figures that Tisza is directly funded by Kyiv, and that it is infiltrated by the Ukrainian intelligence services. In a rather dubious riposte to claims of electoral inference, the Ukrainian government last week launched a 24-hour Hungarian-language radio broadcast, aimed directly at Hungarian voters. Should Orbán pull off a last-minute victory, despite the strong polling lead claimed by the opposition, it is difficult to see how the relationship with Kyiv could be salvaged. For Fidesz, it may not matter. Hungarian government policy is driven by the assumption that, however long it takes, Ukraine will eventually lose the war, and the rest of the EU will slowly come around to this reality, just as it eventually did on Hungary’s isolated stance on the 2015 migrant crisis. As a consequence — and fueled by equally hostile rhetoric from Kyiv — a working relationship with Hungary’s larger neighbor is seen as an acceptable sacrifice for a domestic election victory.

A few days after the march, I asked one of the most powerful men in Hungarian politics, Balász Orbán — Viktor Orbán’s strategic advisor, and campaign manager — whether the temporary demands of the election were setting up a longer term enmity with its larger neighbor.

“The conflict between Hungary and the Ukrainian leadership is based on three issues where we have complete disagreement, and there is no in-between,” he replied. The first, Orbán said, was active financial and logistical support for the war against Russia. “We don’t want to finance the war, we don’t want to give our weapons to them, and we don’t want to send soldiers for Ukraine.” The second issue is European Union membership for Ukraine: “it goes also against the interest of Hungary, because if anything happens in Ukraine, it would mean that we are in the war. And the second thing is, we don’t want to be a net contributor.” The third issue “is the Russian energy. In this situation, when the Middle East is blowing up and energy prices are again skyrocketing, we cannot say no to Russian energy, simply it goes against the interest of Hungary, and I think it goes against the interest of all other European nations. These are the three critical issues, and these are just black and white issues. So either we give it up and we surrender, or we keep our positions.”

Yet while the Tisza party is portrayed by the Hungarian government as zealous pro-Kyiv radicals, and is indeed heavily promoted by Ukraine’s excitable online fanbase on this basis, Magyar himself has avoided talking about the war on the campaign trail. Indeed, in his rare interventions so far, Magyar, a former Fidesz functionary and conservative nationalist, has seemed to echo Orbán’s policy platform, opposing sending weapons to Ukraine; insisting that Kyiv’s EU bid should be subject to a Hungarian referendum it would almost certainly lose; and stressing that weaning Hungary off Russian energy would take at least a decade. Hopes in Brussels or Kyiv of a post-election about-turn in Hungarian attitudes to Kyiv seem unlikely to survive the apparent inclinations of Magyar himself, let alone the broader suspicions of the Hungarian electorate.

Four years ago, the risks and uncertainties brought about by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine helped turn the tide in an election campaign where Hungarian voters seemed, until the results came in, to be leaning toward the opposition. The Fidesz messaging at the time, that Orbán’s long track record of steady governance was the safest option in a volatile international situation, is now being replayed, in an election where the opposition would rather focus on Hungary’s domestic problems. But the rhetoric has, since 2022, dramatically escalated, with the added novelty of Ukraine itself now being presented as a direct threat to Hungary’s sovereignty and security. Now both sides are trading accusations that their rivals are deeply enmeshed with foreign security services, working against the national interest.

If it is confusing and exhausting for foreign journalists, it must be doubly so for Hungary’s voters, 79% of whom believe foreign intelligence agencies will attempt to meddle in the election. On Easter Sunday, the Hungarian government, alongside its regional ally Serbia, revealed what it has claimed to be a plot to sabotage the vital Turkstream gas pipeline with explosives, a development that Magyar has immediately claimed to be a false flag to sway or delay the election. As Hungary’s hard-fought and ill-tempered campaigning season approaches its climax, the European Union’s most important election of the year has now fully adopted the murky and paranoid tone of a spy novel.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tensions between Iran and Azerbaijan have been rising since the start of the year. In March, the latter became the first country with a Shiite Muslim majority to open an embassy in Israel. Iran, having the largest Shiite majority of any nation, and being Israel’s historic geopolitical nemesis, did not approve. Nor did it approve, in 2020, when Israeli-made Harop drones proved crucial in helping drive the Azerbaijani military towards victory over Armenia in the shockingly underreported Second Nagorno-Karabakh War. Ties between Israel and Azerbaijan have grown increasingly close, and with Russia — traditionally the dominant regional power in the Caucasus — distracted by its engagement in Ukraine, Tehran fears that the balance of power is shifting in favour of Iran’s enemies.

Specifically, the Iranians are concerned that Azerbaijan might allow the Israeli military to use its territory as a launch pad — just as America feared Russia’s use of Cuba in the Cold War. The Azeris ruled out the possibility in March. But this has done little to calm tensions. Since January, a series of confrontations has driven relations between Iran and Azerbaijan to an all-time low that some fear could place them on the path to war.

Fazil Mustafa is a member of Azerbaijan’s parliament, and one of the nation’s most outspoken critics of Iran. The day before his nation opened its new Tel Aviv embassy, he was shot in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan. Mustafa survived the assassination attempt, which the country’s foreign ministry appeared to blame on Tehran. Following his discharge from hospital, he emailed me to say there should be little doubt as to who orchestrated the attack against him. “All the suspicion and evidence obtained points directly to Iran,” wrote Mustafa, “because it doesn’t seem likely that such an act could have been committed against me from another source.”

It is difficult to independently verify these claims, which Iran denies. But, if true, it would be the second time this year that the country has attacked an Azerbaijani political target. In a separate incident, on January 27, a gunman stormed the country’s embassy in the Iranian capital, killing its head of security and wounding two others. Baku quickly suspended its diplomatic mission in Tehran and recalled its staff, although its consulates in other Iranian cities remained open. Azerbaijan’s President, Ilham Aliyev, has since blamed the Iranian government for the embassy attack. Tehran claims that the gunman was driven by “personal motivations”.

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A long history of enmity lies behind this tense relationship between the two nations. Although they both have predominantly Shiite populations, the Azeris are a Turkic people and Azerbaijan’s ethnic ties to Turkey have underpinned its foreign policy ever since it regained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. The Republic of Azerbaijan’s founding president, Heydar Aliyev (father of the current leader), has previously described Azerbaijan and Turkey as “one nation, two states”. This irritates the Iranians, as Tehran sees Ankara as a regional rival.

Relations are further complicated by Iran’s marginalisation of its large Azeri minority. More ethnic Azeris live within Iran’s borders than in Azerbaijan itself: the community is estimated to number anywhere between 15 and 40 million people. They are the second-largest ethnic group in Iran, and are treated with great suspicion by the national government, which fears Azeri secessionism in the country’s North-West.

Iran accuses Azerbaijan of stoking separatist sentiment in the country, which Baku denies. But this has done little to calm nerves in Tehran. It was a similar — and similarly widely-ignored — geopolitical paranoia that drove Russia to invade Ukraine last year.  A failure to treat the Iranian threat more seriously could have similarly devastating consequences.

The more recent antagonism between Azerbaijan and Iran can largely be attributed to the changing geopolitical realities in the Caucasus since the brief war over Karabakh in 2020. Recognised as the sovereign territory of Azerbaijan under international law, Karabakh is home to a large ethnic Armenian minority and was illegally occupied by the Armenian military for more than a quarter of a century before being reclaimed by Baku. The 44-day conflict was suspended by a Russian-brokered ceasefire agreement, but a formal peace treaty has yet to be signed. The leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan were reported to be resuming talks in Brussels at the weekend.

Tehran enjoys close relations with Armenia, a nation often considered part of “Greater Iran”. Azerbaijan’s victory in Karabakh was, therefore, a setback for both nations: Azerbaijan reclaimed control over part of the highway that links Iran to Armenia, which is a critical trade route that also connects Tehran to the Black Sea and Russia. Azerbaijan has already imposed a steep tax on Iranian trucks carrying goods to Armenia, which it accuses of supplying separatists in Karabakh. Mustafa claims that, as a result of this new threat to its interests, Tehran is actively trying to sabotage the peace process in Karabakh.

“Iran is trying to conduct a very active policy in the South Caucasus. It acts with the idea of filling the vacuum created in the region after Russia’s war with Ukraine,” he writes. “Although Iran does not have the ability to influence the processes in the entire South Caucasus, it has made attempts to hinder the achievement of stability in the region and the conclusion of peace between Azerbaijan and Armenia.” Indeed, it is possible that Iran might provide military support to ethnic Armenian separatists; recent reports suggest that Tehran might supply this nation of “Greater Iran” with the same suicide drones it provided Russian forces in Ukraine.

Emboldened by its military victory in Karabakh — and a stockpile of high-grade Israeli arms — Baku appears unlikely to back down. Further escalation is possible, if not probable. Azerbaijan also knows that it can also rely on the support of its main ally, Turkey. The two countries have a mutual defense agreement in place and, assured by its membership of Nato, Ankara is unlikely to shy away from supporting the Azeris against the Iranians. Were that to occur, Moscow would feel obliged to step into the conflict. It is this risk of entanglement that makes the current standoff so dangerous.

Geopolitical alliances are key to preventing conflicts. They give smaller nations a degree of security against the threat posed by their larger, more malevolent neighbours. However, they can also have terrible consequences. They can cause a conflict to quickly cascade, as was the case in the Balkans in 1914: the Archduke was shot by a Bosnian Serb, which led to a standoff between Austria-Hungary and Serbia that later dragged in Russia before exploding into a world war.

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There are a number of reasons why there is a real danger of this in the Caucasus: unlike in Ukraine, where both regional and global powers have refrained from intervening directly against a nuclear-armed Russia, neither Turkey nor Iran are restrained by the danger of mutually-assured destruction. Israel, as a responsible actor that often operates by stealth, wouldn’t use a warhead against the Iranians. And, if Turkey’s military adventurism in the eastern Mediterranean, Syria, and northern Iraq, is anything to go by, Ankara looks unlikely to abandon one of its closest allies.

At the same time, a full-scale war between regional powers in the south Caucasus remains a worst-case scenario, says Michael Doran, the director of the Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East at the Hudson Institute in Washington D.C. “The likelihood of a direct military confrontation is probably limited,” Doran told me. “If a war were to actually break out between Azerbaijan and Iran it would risk bringing in Turkey and Israel against Iran and that, as a military alignment against Iran, is probably the thing Iran fears most.” Tehran would not be able to compete with their combined strength.

Tehran will also be hesitant to escalate the confrontation for fear of provoking an internal backlash from its Azeri minority. What’s more likely is that Iran will utilise more covert tactics to strike at Azerbaijan — tactics that give Tehran a degree of plausible deniability. It has form on this front, Iran has long used proxies to pursue its regional goals, most famously Hezbollah in Lebanon; it supports similar radical Shia elements in Azerbaijan. Mustafa claims that “Iran has allocated major funds for the spread of religious fundamentalism in the South Caucasus … it tries to use mosques, different groups, communities and individuals” to achieve these aims.

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With so much international attention focused on the war in Ukraine, this standoff in the south Caucasus has largely flown under the Western radar. Doran is particularly scathing of America’s failures to support the Azeris against Tehran: “This administration in Washington is not viewing Azerbaijan as a counter-balance to Iran,” he says. “That’s because it isn’t looking to counter Iran in any significant way, which is unfortunate.” America has not learned any lessons from Syria, where its failure to properly commit to intervention left the door open for Russia to step in and help Bashar al-Assad cling onto power.

But a war in the south Caucasus could set off a unfortunate chain of events. Since the invasion of Ukraine, Azerbaijan has emerged as a key alternative energy supplier to the EU: between 2021 and 2022, Baku’s gas exports to Europe increased from eight billion cubic meters to an estimated 11.5 billion, and that number is expected to rise to 20 billion by 2027. A military conflict would drastically damage Baku’s production and export capacity. Without Azerbaijan’s oil, European sanctions against Russia might become untenable. In other words, a conflict in the south Caucasus would strengthen Moscow.

Modern warfare is rarely an isolated battle between two states: it is to understand this fact that we teach the First World War. And what was true in the 20th century is even more true now, when our interconnected global economies allow the shockwaves of war to reverberate far away from the frontline. The energy crisis that arose in the wake of the invasion of Ukraine is a vivid recent example. From Washington, London, or Brussels, the Iran-Azerbaijan border might seem like a distant Eurasian hinterland — as the Donbas once did. But it is time we accepted that a faraway war can very quickly come home.

The insanity of Putin’s march on Kyiv shocked me. I had reported on Ukraine since March 2014, just after the war first began. I was in New Haven and watched on an oversized diner TV as men in green military uniforms without any identifying insignia walked into Crimea and hoisted the Russian flag over the Supreme Council building. Later, I listened incredulously as Putin denied they were his troops and then, yet more incredulously, as the West’s leading politicians appeared to accept this obvious nonsense. In those moments, a new era had started to dawn.

Despots are democracy’s most attentive students. Wary of becoming another Saddam Hussein or Bashar al-Assad, Putin was taking pains to coat his actions in the language of human rights and constitutional politics. More than this, he took care to avoid too much bloodshed. This was the brilliance of his Crimea operation. Everyone from the EU to Nato knew it was the Russians, but because there was no violence it made it hard for them to act, or gave them the excuse they needed not to.

But Putin had no intention of stopping with Crimea. I first arrived in the eastern Ukrainian city of Donetsk in April 2014, after local “separatists”, backed and coordinated by Russia, had seized the municipal building. Thugs in masks and baseball bats were hanging pro-Russia banners over the balcony and skulking in the central square. There were roughly 1,000 of them in this city of one million: strange for a place that I was repeatedly told was so pro-Russian.

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From there I moved onto Luhansk. I was inside its municipal building when a different gallery of thugs — this time armed with automatic weapons — announced the establishment of the separatist “People’s Republic of Luhansk”. Later, in the city of Sloviansk, where “protestors” seized the police station, I saw for the first time what I was certain were Russian troops: masked and without insignia. This was, I realised, now a front line. Ukraine no longer simply faced protests in the East; it was at war with Russia.

But it was a funny kind of war. Back then, Putin had no designs on marching to Kyiv and forcing Ukraine to surrender. He swiped Crimea, which many Russians had always resented being passed to Ukraine in 1954, and then sent his troops into eastern Ukraine. But this was more about enabling the Russian media to take control of information spaces and start pouring in unfiltered pro-Kremlin narratives. It was when I first encountered a term that would come to dominate our age: “disinformation”.

Since then, this word has become problematic, not least because it has become so overused that, to echo Orwell, it has degenerated to the level of a swear word. It has also spawned an industry filled with charlatans. But if we correctly understand it as just another word for “propaganda” — often made more potent through digital technologies — then its presence in Ukraine was clear, and its effects devastating.

In Donetsk and Luhansk, people told me with utter sincerity how Kyiv wanted to ban the Russian language in the country — an impossibility even if it did, which it didn’t — and how they were coming to kill all Russian speakers. They showed me articles from Kremlin news outlets and videos from Russian TV. All of them false, some outright staged. Their effects cannot be underestimated. In July 2014, for instance, fraudulent Russian media reports, started by Putin associate Aleksandr Dugin, claimed the Ukrainians had crucified a small child in Sloviansk. It has served as a rallying cry for Russian atrocities ever since.

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Ukraine was, in many regards, the laboratory for much of the behaviour we now accept as part of a public sphere: trolls, bots and fake news. “Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it,” wrote Jonathan Swift: as good a description of the current moment (and Twitter) as any I’ve ever read. Perhaps we eventually became guilty of overegging the threat. From Brexit to Donald Trump, Russian trolls became for many an excuse for everything we didn’t like. Last year’s invasion also taught the world that hybrid war has its limitations — you can’t march to Kyiv on a tweet thread; the war on the ground will always reassert itself. Those, though, who sought to dismiss the role of information entirely were also mistaken.

As information warfare has evolved, 21st-century state leadership — for autocrats and democrats alike — has evolved alongside it. When Putin, clearly chafing in his role of cuddly despot, made the decision to try to conquer Ukraine outright, he made many mistakes, but chief among them was to underestimate Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelenskyy. This was probably fair enough; his career before taking office was as a TV comedian. But in that lay his strength. Zelenskyy did two things. First, as so many soldiers on the front told me proudly, he didn’t run. Second, he used his professional experience to devastating effect.

In the months following February 24, Zelenskyy became perhaps the most televised man on Earth. He used humour, pathos and bathos to make Ukraine’s case, and in so doing, he created a new form of wartime leadership. He became master of what I call “digital statesmanship”: his output was short, to-the-point, informal — designed not for oratorical flourish but to go viral. And as a result, he influenced the war on the ground more than any Ukrainian general; his messaging made Ukraine’s case for a steady supply of weapons impossible for Western leaders to ignore. Zelenskyy did something remarkable: he transmuted Ukrainian soft power into hard power. Putin, meanwhile, has become little more than a polished Saddam.

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The two men are now fighting it out in an arena largely of their own making. In southern and eastern Ukraine last month, I heard drones buzzing overhead while Soviet-era tanks rumbled by. This is nothing new: modern technology has always rubbed up against older weapons on the battlefield. What is new is our integrated global system which means that, for example, financial sanctions can become more targeted, while the digital revolution means that wars are now fought amid near-total data coverage. You can stream pretty much any video from anywhere now. This hasn’t brought the changes many hoped. Assad’s crimes are there to download, yet he remains in power. But the ability to influence the war on the ground through non-kinetic means has increased exponentially.

But again, within the new, the old remains. I have reported from all three fronts in Ukraine — in the South, East and North East. Conditions are varied, as are the challenges the soldiers face, but one thing is constant: the understanding that this is an existential struggle for nationhood. Putin wants to expunge the very idea of Ukraine from history. He believes it to be a fallacy. The Ukrainians hold because of many reasons, including continuing Western support, but in the end they hold because they have no choice. They are fighting for their existence. Even in the age of a supranational Europe, Ukraine shows that sovereignty and national feeling still drives peoples.

Ukraine has also taught us that Europe is no longer free of history and its perennial attendant war. Nations must be able to defend themselves. The Human Rights Act is no match for a T-90 tank. Peace is not a policy, merely something most of us want; and the only thing that guarantees it is possessing sufficient strength to deter those who want its opposite.

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This is something the West seems to be learning. Part of the reason why Putin shifted from hybrid to all-out war last year was that he saw the West scuttle from Afghanistan and concluded we had no stomach left for the fight. He saw Joe Biden as old and weak, and the West as finished. In rolled the Russian tanks, only to be met by a hail of Western Javelins and NLAWs. We proved him wrong — for now. Moscow is still betting that we will falter; that Berlin will cave to the demands of German industry; that the heating bills will get too much.

Whether that happens partly depends on how long discussion over Ukraine remains charged with tropes. On the one hand, there is a rhetorical strain in politics that labels every refusal to bomb or invade “appeasement”. On the other sits its equally pernicious opposite, which labels every desire to act militarily beyond one’s narrow borders and interests as an act of warmongering. When we whacked Qasem Soleimani, and when we first started sending weapons to Kyiv, many said it would start World War Three. Well, it didn’t. In the meantime, we’ve stopped Soleimani murdering. We’ve stopped Putin conquering Ukraine and then, almost certainly, moving onto Moldova and Georgia.

But what is being decided on the battlefields of Ukraine extends far beyond them. A new Europe is emerging — one in which countries like Ukraine have become de facto garrison states against Russian aggression. We probably won’t let Ukraine join Nato, but we will arm it against external threats.

In his annual address to the Russian nation on Tuesday, Putin doubled down. “I want to repeat: it was they [the West] who unleashed the war,” he said. “And we used and continue to use force to stop it.” He also suspended Russian participation in the New Start Treaty, the last remaining nuclear arms control treaty between Russia and America. He has made it clear that, as far as he is concerned, the war will not end anytime soon.

“Sooner or later,” wrote Graham Greene in The Quiet American, “one has to take sides, if one is to remain human.” That is perhaps the final lesson of these nine years. Wars are squalid, messy things. Right and wrong can often be hard to find. But as Dominic Sandbrook eloquently argued this week, that is not the case with Ukraine. In Ukraine, a clear right faces off against an unalloyed wrong. There, they are fighting not only because it is right, but because they have no other choice. The Ukrainians — and by proxy the West — never sought this war, but it came anyway, and against it there can never be any retreat.

Sometimes it’s nice to be wrong. Like many, probably most Western observers, I held out little hope for Ukraine once the drums of war began to beat in earnest. A couple of days after Mr Putin’s brutal invasion began, I wrote a bullish essay looking back at Ukraine’s history of suffering and resilience. But even as I was agonising over my prose, the bleak news continued to pour in. “Now, while I have been writing, Russian tanks are rolling into the suburbs,” I wrote at one stage. Did I think they would be driven back? I didn’t. “Kyiv will rise again,” I wrote at the end. Stirring words, or so I hoped. But the person I was really trying to persuade was myself, and I didn’t succeed.

In truth, I underestimated the Ukrainian people’s resilience, their courage, their love of country. And I was wrong, too, about the Western alliance. After more than a decade of drift and inaction, from the shameful failure to respond to the seizure of Crimea to the near-criminal indifference to the suffering in Syria, I doubted whether any major Western leader would make more than a token protest about the first full-scale European invasion since the Forties. I never expected to see Finland and Sweden jump off the fence and apply for Nato membership. Nor did I imagine that Joe Biden would be so unswerving in his commitment, or so generous with US military aid. Above all, I never anticipated that Kyiv would hold out, that Kharkiv would stand or that Kherson would be retaken. As I say, it’s nice to be wrong.

It’s often said that the war in Ukraine feels like a throwback, returning us to an age when nationalistic strongmen nursed atavistic dreams of conquest, sending thousands of men to die so that they might scratch new frontiers into the soil of Europe. For all the drones and social media gimmicks, the fighting certainly feels old-fashioned: reading David Patrikarakos’s harrowing dispatch from the front line in Bakhmut, it’s impossible not to think of Passchendaele or Verdun. But for a child of the Seventies, perhaps the most old-fashioned thing of all is the spectacle of a genuinely clear-cut conflict, an unambiguous clash of right and wrong, that feels closer in spirit to the struggle against Hitler’s Germany than to most of the wars in my lifetime.

After all, just go through the list. Vietnam? A confused, dirty, morally squalid mess, a conflict defined in the public mind by My Lai, Agent Orange and that infamous picture of a little Vietnamese girl running naked in the road after a napalm attack. Yugoslavia? A horrendous internecine bloodbath, in which neighbour turned on neighbour while the Western powers stood by and wrung their hands. Iraq? A war based, at best, on a colossal exaggeration, in which an incontestably brutal dictator was toppled with little serious thought about what was to follow, unleashing a firestorm of chaos across the Middle East.

From the start, however, Ukraine has felt different — and some of that, at least, is down to Zelenskyy himself. He set the tone even before the first shots were fired, delivering an astonishing televised appeal in his own native tongue — not Ukrainian, but Russian — to the Russian people, imploring them to stand up against the invasion. Ever since, his defiant social media videos have been as cleverly judged as any Churchillian set-piece oration. More cynical readers might point out that he’s a practised performer with a clever scriptwriter, and of course they’d be right. But that’s true of any politician. And he didn’t have to choose that particular role. He could have run, and played the part of the president-in-exile, as so many leaders did in the Second World War. But he chose to stay, and history will reward him for it.

We should always be careful, of course, about reducing complicated international conflicts to simple morality tales. It’s undoubtedly true that the roots of the war lie in Russia’s sense of victimhood and resentment at the end of the Cold War. But that’s an explanation, not an excuse. Other European powers have lost colonial empires and tumbled down the diplomatic power rankings, from Britain to Belgium; would they all have been justified in lashing out?

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Similarly, it’s clear Vladimir Putin feels genuinely aggrieved that so many Eastern European countries elected to join Nato in the Nineties and 2000s, contravening the verbal assurances that Western leaders gave to Mikhail Gorbachev. But nobody forced them; they made their own choices; and if he wants to know why, he could try looking in the mirror. Put it this way: if you were running a country in Eastern Europe, and had seen the way the Russians behaved in Chechnya and Georgia, wouldn’t you have wanted to join Nato, too? Would you rather be in Estonia’s shoes today? Or Ukraine’s?

As for Ukraine itself — yes, it’s complicated. History always is. It’s true that ever since independence, the country’s politics have been horrendously corrupt, as evidenced by Zelenskyy’s recent crackdown on venal ministers and officials. It’s also true, by the way, that its politics have long had an unpleasantly nationalistic, indeed openly neo-Nazi fringe. But I don’t think this is the devastating trump card that professional contrarians and Putin apologists think it is. If we were to withdraw our sympathy from every European country with unpleasant far-Right political elements, then we wouldn’t have any friends left. On that basis, would we still have supported Poland in 1939? Would we intervene to help Italy today, or France, or even the United States? Presumably not.

The really striking thing about the war in Ukraine, it seems to me, is that at a fundamental level it actually isn’t complicated. And for all the cheap and tawdry attractions of contrarianism, the right conclusion is the obvious conclusion. Ukraine didn’t attack Russia; Russia attacked Ukraine. Zelenskyy isn’t perfect and Putin isn’t Hitler; but one really is on the side of the angels, and the other will surely rank alongside the villains of history. One appeals to European solidarity and common humanity; the other to xenophobia and national chauvinism. One defends his own territory; the other seeks to seize somebody else’s. One is right, the other is wrong.

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How, then, does it end? If you agree with, say, the late Jeremy Corbyn, then the answer is obvious. Peace is better than war, so all that matters is to make it stop. Go cap in hand to Moscow, and keep offering them territory until Vladimir Putin raises a hand and says: “Enough!” If you want to feel good about yourself, you can dress it up as offering the Russian president an “off-ramp”. Or, if you’d prefer to be honest, you can just call it appeasement.

The alternative is at once emotionally unsatisfying and boringly straightforward. And sadly it involves lots of people dying, because that’s the nature of war. It is simply to keep giving the Ukrainians the aid, weapons and emotional and political support they need, until they have driven every last occupier from their land — or until they’ve had enough and are prepared to cut a deal. But that should be their decision, not ours. After 12 months of war and more than 100,000 casualties, they’ve earned the right to make it. After all, we would want the same, if we were in their shoes. And like them, we’d want our friends to do the right thing.

Good versus evil; right versus wrong. In a complicated world, sometimes it really is that simple.

It’s April 2014 and Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square) contains the remnants of the 2013-14 Euromaidan Revolution. Its inhabitants have lived here in these tents for months, refusing to leave the place that has given them a reason to get up in the morning. The square is now their home: they wash and dress and cook here. The revolution has given them not just a purpose, but like Ukraine, a nascent, and now burgeoning, identity.

Beyond the square, on Kreshchatyk, stands a tall makeshift tower built from scaffolding. Festooned with posters and banners, it is dominated by a large image of the man on everyone’s mind: Vladimir Putin. He has been photoshopped to make him look like Hitler.

Ukraine gained independence from the USSR in 1991, but, in 2014, national identity is still fractured. Some of the Western Ukrainians I meet revere the far-right war leader Stepan Bandera; those from the East generally revile him. Most people I meet speak Russian; some refuse to on principle. Sympathy with Moscow, especially among the elderly, does exist. But two things everyone here can agree on: they do not want to be a part of the Russian state, and, above all, they despise Vladimir Putin.

***

That revolutionary detritus is long-gone from the square. But the city today is the nerve centre of an all-out war with Russia. “Ukrainian Resistance” reads a poster on a wall near McDonalds. A couple of soldiers walk past. A new Europe — and a new century — is being born, and at the centre of it all is Kyiv. This city sits at the heart of Putin’s efforts to recreate a mythical identity of a Greater Russia based on a fraudulent reading of the past.

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When Putin went for Ukraine this year, it was Kyiv, the home of ancient Kievan Rus, the “mother of all Russian cities”, that he wanted above all else. The Ukrainians beat him back. But now Russian rockets pound the city once more. Putin cannot let Kyiv go. But neither can the people who live here. Kyiv is not just a city; it is the essence of this conflict, which is one not just about land, but about history and geography and, on a fundamental level, about the identity of both these countries.

***

“My surname is Kozhemiaka and from that alone you know my family are Kyiv natives. There’s a street in Podol [in the city centre] that is called Kozhumiatska — we are originally from there. I have photos of my great grandfather and grandmother there from 1881.”

Angelina sends me six yellowing photos, two of which are of a solemn but kind-looking couple: he with an austere, clipped moustache; she with hair conservatively pinned back. I’ve known her for eight years but it’s the first time I’ve heard about the etymology of her name.

I think back to our first meeting late summer 2014 in Maidan, when I caught sight of her, threading her way through the square’s tents and stalls and crowds. Angelina was running a social media advertising agency (and does stuff with monetising websites that I don’t understand) and I wanted to speak to her about how social media is being used to spread propaganda.

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Always stylishly dressed and immaculately made up, Angelina likes nice hotels and foreign travel and has a keen interest in fashion. With her small toy dog (a Spitz called Preston Pit) she perfectly fits the cliché of the apolitical cosmopolitan class. But – like so many people I have met here – Angelina is different. She has been jolted into an awakening of political – and inescapably national —consciousness.

“It started with Euromaidan,” she tells me. “I went there twice. Once before the government started shooting on the protestors, and then after it was all finished. I saw the burned-out wreckage in the streets, and even traces of blood. People had started laying flowers to commemorate the dead.”

Angelina wanted to be what she calls a “witness” — to try to get some sense of what really happened there. “What struck me was a Ukrainian unity I’d never seen before. It was like that Ukrainian archetype that is so popular here Cossack Republic of 1918-1920.  I saw that brought alive: the sense of complete freedom but among a mix of different people in the square. It didn’t matter who you were, they were all united by one goal – and that was Ukraine.”

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She remembers seeing the destruction and the death on TV. “I was shocked,” she says. “I realised then what it took to be free, to become a nation.”

When Putin ordered his armies into Ukraine on 24 February this year, he was determined that it would under no circumstances ever be allowed to be a functioning nation. The very thought was bogus. So he sent his troops straight for its capital: he knew that in order to destroy the very idea of Ukraine, you must take Kyiv. Forces travelled south to encircle the city, while Special Forces (Spetsnaz) were also reportedly sent to infiltrate Kyiv but were quickly chewed up by the Ukrainians. Attempts to seize the airfields of Antonov and Vasylkiv were also unsuccessful, though troops did almost cause a nuclear incident when they took the town of Chernobyl. As they failed to make tangible military progress Moscow switched tactics: the goal was now to level as much territory as possible.

Ukrainian forces counterattacked and by 25 March they had retaken large swathes of the area surrounding Kyiv, eventually liberating Bucha on 1 April, where they discovered mass graves and evidence of widespread Russian war crimes. The Russian high command said their goal was now to “liberate” the Donbas. Putin’s dream of regime change and “restoring” Kyiv, the “Mother of all Russian Cities”, to his country was, for the moment, over.

But he won’t give up. For as long as Kyiv remains proudly Ukrainian, the Kremlin will never annex Ukraine to Russia. In early June, Russian warplanes strike the city from the Caspian Sea. Moscow says it will strike new targets if the United States starts giving Ukraine longer-range missiles. The Kremlin says Ukrainians are merely confused Russians; that Kyiv is not Ukrainian but simply the source of Greater Russia. And it is determined to bomb and kill them until they remember this fact.

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Ukrainians resist. They want to be something else. In Podol, I watch hipsters edit graphics on laptops in coffee bars; they are self-consciously western. Europe, not Russia, is their collective dream. Vadym Halaichuk, a Deputy in the national parliament, agrees: “Culturally, we’ve always been Europe,” he says. “Obviously, Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union for a long time and that has had a tremendous impact on how culture here has developed. But even those 70 plus years did not erase our European identity. So when Ukraine gained independence back in 1991 – or regained it – Ukrainians quickly began to realise how different we are from Russia and from what many Russians stand for.”

He continues. “There was still a lot of Soviet influence in the country and our corrupted communist elites did a lot to support that historical misconception that we are the same people.”

Putin, though, would drag Ukrainians eastwards, and back in time. Until then, he is content to sacrifice them at the altar to his own, mad, dreams.

***

It’s winter, 2014, the war is several months old, and there are parliamentary elections. Angelina has volunteered as an election observer. In the western city of Vinnitsa, she stands in a school and watches people casting their votes, to ensure the process accords with international standards. It isn’t much, but in a country legendary for its almost surreal levels of political corruption it is indicative of the new Ukraine that, though not yet born, many here are trying to midwife into existence.

Eight years later, Solomiia Bobrovska, the former acting governor of the Odesa region and a Rada Deputy, drinks coffee with me in Kyiv and tells me about the difficult birth of this new Ukraine. “We technically got independence in 1991 but for the majority of Ukrainians the nation was born, in fire in 2014, and the process is still continuing today,” she says, leaning across the table at me. Her white T-shirt is emblazoned with the Ukrainian trident (Tryzub) and she wears a blue and yellow wristband on her left arm. Bobrovska was born in December 1989, after the Berlin Wall came down. She has only ever known Ukraine. Now she is its future.

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“Finally all Ukrainians understand what war means,” she tells me. “When you have funerals almost every day, when almost everyone has lost someone in their families, be they warriors or children, and how much it hurts.”

It is through this hurt that Ukrainian defiance has been forged. If Putin thought he could terrorise Ukrainians into submission he made a grave miscalculation. “After Bucha, there will never be any compromise with these people,” my friend Kirill tells me later that day. “Let them come and try to take my city again. We are waiting for them — and we all have guns now.”

***

The lady is 200 feet tall. In her right hand she holds a sword and in her left a shield. She stands in the Pechersk neighbourhood in central Kyiv. The Motherland Monument is probably the most famous statue in Ukraine. Throughout a large chunk of 2014 I lived in the city, just off Kreshchatyk. Every morning I would walk through central Kyiv to get breakfast, and there she would be.

I walk past it again more on my way to meet Angelina. We haven’t seen each other for several years but have been in constant communication since the invasion. In that time much has happened.

By mid-April 2022, the Ukrainian army has beaten the Russians back from Kyiv. Greater Russia remains a Putinist fantasy. Instead, something else has emerged that, when we meet for drinks a few weeks later, Angelina wants to tell me about. “This is our war of independence,” she tells me. “Never have we been so united. We all understand what our country is now. We all know that we are Ukrainians. We all know that we will never be Russians. We all want the West not the East.”

What Angelina and I saw in Euromaidan in 2013 and 2014 has only grown since then: the slow-motion birth of a nation. The gradual evolution of a post-Soviet state into the flawed, troubled, but undeniably culturally and politically independent Ukraine that exists today. Self-knowledge is painful. This is a nation that has been forged in the crucible of Putin’s stupid, pointless and bloody war.

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This speaks to a larger truth about all conflict — and geopolitics: the Law of Unintended Consequences. Putin has, thus far, achieved almost the exact opposite of everything he intended. He wanted Ukrainians to identify with Moscow, he made them despise it. He wanted to put an end to Ukrainian national feeling, he galvanised it. He wanted to merge Ukraine with Russia; Ukrainians are dying to ensure he can’t. He wanted Ukraine to demilitarise, he made it more militarily capable than ever before. He reveres Orthodox Brotherhood; he pushed the Ukrainian Church to break from Moscow. He wanted to divide Europe, he united it (at least for the moment). He wanted to show the world the might of the Russian army, he exposed it as a paper tiger.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A few days earlier, my wife and I had met her Ukrainian family at 4am, 24 hours after they fled their home in Kyiv. We had flown out to meet her mother, two brothers (aged 8 and 15), and female cousin (16). Just like thousands of other refugees, we were crammed into a small, rented flat on the border of the old town.

We had little idea how the UK government would handle their visa applications, but I feared the process would be like everything else involving the Home Office: slow, inflexible, and infused with suspicion. My wife and I experienced this first-hand when applying for her own visa. Compared to the digitised registry office in Kyiv where we had married two years ago, the Home Office proved incapable of executing its most basic functions, hamstrung by a combination of bureaucracy and xenophobia.

Back then, none of her family could have imagined that they would be forced to flee their homes amid artillery strikes and rumours that Putin’s mercenaries were roaming the streets. But after enduring a day of bombings, they had little choice. Their initial plan was to drive to the city of Lutsk near the Polish border, where they had family. But Lutsk had also been bombed, the roads heading West were blocked, and there were reports that Belarusian forces were poised to sweep in from the North.

So they drove south, leaving behind everything they couldn’t carry. Trying to avoid the main roads, they travelled for 16 hours, stopping finally at Khmelnytskyi. The following morning, as the situation became clearer — and as the scale of Ukraine’s heroic military resistance became obvious — they eventually decided to risk heading to Lutsk. After much agonising, the family collected a cousin, said goodbye to their father (who, like all men aged between 18 and 60, had to remain behind and be ready to be called up to fight).

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Back at the visa centre, Home Office staff — some of whom had been flown in overnight — rushed from one group to the next, trying to explain what little information they knew to those who spoke little or no English. They were dealing with a WiFi network that kept crashing, laptops that had no chargers, and IT systems that stubbornly refused to accept their login details. At one point, someone copied my family’s passport numbers onto a piece of paper and handed it to someone else, who immediately copied the numbers onto another piece of paper, which was passed to a third person — who promptly put the slip of paper in the bin.

It took about a week for their visas to be issued, even though it was clear that many at the Home Office and visa centres were working throughout the night. The government has now announced a 48-hour target for processing applications, but it remains to be seen whether this is anything other than wishful thinking: I suspect my family won’t be the last to flee Ukraine with little more than the clothes on their back, only to shell out for a hotel while they wait for the wheels of Britain’s Rolls-Royce bureaucracy to turn.

The government insists that detailed security checks are vital to stop spies and people traffickers, while ignoring the lumbering clunkiness that defines its system as a whole. First, the Home Office in London sets the rules, and applications are conducted on the GOV.UK website. Then, an outsourced company called TLS Connect collects documents and biometrics at visa centres across the world (the one in Warsaw uses temporary offices inside a hotel). Applications are then sent back to Home Office centres across the UK. Here, staff reportedly use three completely different and incompatible systems, some of which are 20 years old, to check documents and run background checks. The applications, if successful, are then sent back to TLS Connect to distribute the visas and stamped passports. Once in the UK, this paper visa is then used to collect an ID permit.

Of course, my Ukrainian family are grateful for the sanctuary they can find in the UK: their visas grant them rights to work, study, and claim state support. The alternative — remaining in Kyiv — doesn’t bear thinking about.

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But the uncomfortable truth is that no visa can solve the more serious problems they face. While Kyiv is neither Mariupol nor Kharkiv, it is hard to predict what, if anything, my family will have to return to. The small restaurant they own lies in a village on the city’s outskirts that has seen some of the fiercest fighting in the area. Tales from their employees of looting Russian soldiers using the business as a base provide some warning of what to expect, but the revelations at Bucha still leave us numb. Yet still they remain certain they want to go back.

What will they do in the meantime? Well, it all depends on whether they manage to escape the complex web of Britain’s bureaucratic state. For instance, everyone in the UK knows the reams of paperwork involved in registering for a GP. Yet even I couldn’t help but laugh when my eight-year-old brother-in-law was told to fill out three forms about his alcohol consumption. Meanwhile, in an effort to register them for under-16 Oyster cards, I have become trapped between several different Transport for London systems, none of which will read their passports to verify their ages. At one point, I was invited to go to a TfL office which had been closed for several years.

Contrast this with the response of friends, neighbours and strangers, and it’s hard not to feel anything but exasperation. Since returning, we have been overwhelmed by spontaneous acts of generosity: donations of clothes, toys, and electronics; invitations to join sports clubs and visit museums; offers of after-school lessons from teachers who are happy to put in a word to get the kids registered at schools. One neighbour, out of the blue, announced he had tickets for a Spurs game, collected the elder brother, and handed him a white replica shirt (the boy, at least until now, preferred Manchester City, home of the Ukrainian defender Oleksandr Zinchenko — but we don’t tell our neighbour).

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And this spirit is being channelled across the country. Hundreds of thousands of people have signed up for the government’s Homes for Ukraine scheme. There is a widespread, almost populist, demand that Britain do more to help. Yet at every turn, the Home Office seems intent on making the system for registering for the scheme impossible to negotiate.

It is hard to imagine those fleeing the Blitz being found homes in the countryside under today’s conditions. Only yesterday, for example, it was reported that councils have denied applications from volunteers whose houses have plug sockets “that endangered children because they were placed too low in the walls”. Elsewhere, hosts have been rejected “because ponds in gardens needed to be drained before child refugees could move in”.

This, then, is my overwhelming impression of these strange few weeks: the enormous, perhaps unexpected, generosity of the British people, contrasted with the suffocating bureaucracy of the British state. It is only through the fresh eyes of my family that I realise how resigned to this shameful state we have become. We, not to mention those fleeing war, deserve better.

It’s unsurprising. Dmitry lived through the entirety of the month-long Battle of Bucha. Russian forces entered the area in late February and captured the city on 12 March, occupying it until the Ukrainian army forced them to retreat almost three weeks later. Dmitry remembers the day the Russians rolled in. He had gone to a family apartment in the city that had been shelled. It now had a huge crater where the living room wall once stood, and looking down into the surrounding streets, he saw two Ukrainian men running from Russian soldiers who were shooting at them. Dmitry had served with the Kyiv territorial defence at Irpin just 5km away and guessed that the men were soldiers: they were in civilian clothes but running in the irregular patterns the military teaches people to avoid gunfire. It made no difference. The Russians shot them down.

They were the first people Dmitry saw killed in Bucha, but not the last. “They were,” he tells me, “the only people I ever saw the Russians kill who weren’t unquestionably civilians.”

Dmitry describes the invasion without a hint of emotion. One morning, he woke up to find a Russian armoured column of roughly 250 vehicles trundling through the city. Most of the territorial defence had retreated to Kyiv because they had nothing but hand grenades left — certainly not the javelins or British NLAWs needed to fight tanks. But he decided to stay in his hometown: he thought he could be of more use there.

And so began life under occupation. Using his phone, he was able to talk to the outside world, which was crucial given food supplies were perilously low. One woman who had fled the city told him to go to her chicken coops where he would find fresh eggs. Another called him to say where she had stored sugar, and so on.

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During these daily trips, Dmitry had to cross a number of Russian checkpoints. A garrulous and energetic man, he made sure to always chat to the Russian soldiers at each crossing (the officers, on the other hand, just looked at him like he was dirt). It was nothing major, just small talk. But it all helped to create a bond so he could move freely about the city. He also always took his dog with him to make sure he was recognisable even from a distance.

During these trips, Dmitry was able to get up close to the Russian army — and he was shocked by what he saw. “They were desperate,” he told me. “They’d been given enough food and cigarettes to last two weeks when they entered Ukraine and then been basically abandoned. They had to find everything themselves. They had nothing.”

Dmitry thinks the army may even have entered the city solely because they were so desperate for supplies. When they rolled in, he watched tanks break down garden fences and drive right up to houses and apartments. The soldiers would then just get out and go inside, emerging shortly after with what they needed. “They just went in and took whatever they wanted,” he told me.

The war crimes began almost immediately. One of the first things the Russians did was to find Ukrainian soldiers who had fought against separatist forces in the Donbas in 2014. There were eight of them. The Russians rounded them up and executed them by the glass factory in the suburb of Stekolka.

When it became clear that the Russians didn’t intend to bury their victims, Dimitry stepped in, digging graves in nearby fields as the Russians wouldn’t let them use the cemeteries. But alongside Ukrainians, Russians were also being killed — indeed, the more this happened the more brutal the soldiers became. “I offered to bury them as well,” he tells me. “‘We will bury them – they smell bad,’ I said. But they refused. They just put them in piles. They didn’t even take them when they left.”

Speaking to Dmitry, what shines through is the overwhelming sense of impunity. Norms of society and decency were not suspended or ignored — they were willingly trampled upon. In the first days of the occupation, Dmitry saw Russian soldiers approach apartments and toss grenades into them. They murdered civilians without any care, or for any reason. They shelled buildings and shot up cars for fun. They did all this every morning — these boy soldiers, many of whom were not more than 20. It was Lord of Flies, but with heavy artillery.

***

Arkadiy Koval, a 64-year journalism professor who spent five years at the Ukrainian Humanities Institute in Bucha, almost broke down when he saw the columns of Russians invade the city. From his 20th-floor apartment, he filmed the vehicles snaking through the city centre. He, too, saw the desperate state of the invaders: he saw them throwing grenades to destroy the casing around the electricity generators they needed.

The serious shortages of food, electricity and medicine swiftly became a problem as his 22-year-old daughter Darina was eight-months pregnant and recovering from an operation last year to remove a brain tumour. It was terrifying. The first week was simply a question of survival; they were under constant bombardment, and they hid in the basement of the building when they weren’t scavenging for supplies. Later on, though, a neighbour told them that the Russians had come in and killed one of the people hiding there, leaving the body there to rot. So they avoided it: choosing to cower in their apartment instead.

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“Every day my son-in-law and I would go looking for food,” he tells me. “We would drive onto the Warshavske highway and each day we saw cars that had been destroyed by shells — we saw several that had white flags on them. Every day there were more and more destroyed cars — many contained dead people.”

The Russians ordered civilians to wear a piece of white fabric on their shoulder — people would generally turn their Covid masks inside out — to signal they were residents. Failure to do so would mean being shot in the knee or the foot, though one day a few soldiers shot at Andriy, Arkadiy’s son-in-law, just for the hell of it. The family needed Lamictal for Danera and fed the request along to some volunteers but heard nothing. Later, they found out the volunteers had been killed.

***

Things were getting worse for Dmitry, too. Stekolka, especially the glass factory, had gained a reputation as a place where evil things happen. One day, he went with a friend to pick up some wooden pallets to turn into firewood — and ran straight into a bunch of Russian soldiers. With them stood 25 shiny, brand-new vehicles, clearly something they were not supposed to see. The soldiers grabbed the two of them and shut them in the cupboard that houses the factory fire extinguishers. They were held there for 16 hours, within earshot of the soldiers who were radioing their commanders to ask what should be done with their two prisoners. “Do whatever you want,” they were told.

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In the end, the soldiers let them out and told them to run, but not before a soldier asked Dmitry: “When are you Ukrainians going to overthrow your government? Ukraine started this war.”

“It’s amazing,” he told me. “They thought that if we can only overthrow our president the war will end.” He continued: “These soldiers looked about 20 years old. This means they were 12 when the war in Donbas started. They’ve grown up listening to Russian propaganda. They’re totally brainwashed.”

For now, though, the Russians have gone. Ukrainian soldiers walk through the streets of Bucha once more. The city is liberated, but the fear remains. “Don’t use my real name for the article,” Dmitry tells me as he says goodbye. “Just in case the Russians come back.”

For the “post-Pacifist” German mainstream, the most bitter paradox of all is that the Russians might not have attacked Ukraine had they foreseen Germany’s response: that the Bundestag would cancel the new Russian gas pipeline, invest in regasification terminals, send weapons to Ukraine, reaffirm its fealty to Nato, and move to drastically upgrade its armed forces with a €100 billion injection.

The Russians could not possibly have known these things. The day before Putin launched his invasion, the German government declared that the new Russian gas pipeline would be inaugurated no matter what, and that they would send no weapons to Ukraine; it even affirmed it would prevent Estonia’s delivery of 122mm howitzers to Kyiv because those guns had briefly belonged to Germany when the West German army absorbed East Germany’s. Yet more egregiously, Germany also denied overflight permission for British transports delivering weapons to Ukraine. As for Nato, Germany reiterated its refusal to spend 2% or even 1% of its GDP for defence. If there were to be collective defence at all, let it be European, and directed by the decidedly civilian European Commission.

In that remote past of a month ago, those were all decidedly mainstream preferences throughout Europe, albeit with a north-south divide. Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden had all resurrected their ancient Baltic connections and therefore viewed Russia as a live threat. But in Italy and Spain such attitudes were rare, and declared Putin admirers could become ministers in coalition governments. As for France, Macron did not oppose the effectively pro-Russian stance of the German government because he also wanted a European defence, led by France, of course, as the only European nuclear power.

All this has now slipped into oblivion in today’s Europe, where Nato’s centrality and its US leadership are largely uncontested. The Russians assessed Nato as weak because it was weak, and therefore attacked Ukraine. Yet because they attacked, Nato is stronger than it has been for decades.

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In every country’s military, the equally abrupt reversals are causing no end of trouble for the staff officers and civil servants working on next year’s budgets. The infantry is once again the queen of the battlefield, empowered as it is by anti-tank missiles that pursue armoured vehicles until they destroy them, and by portable anti-aircraft missiles that are the doom of helicopters, even if they cannot intercept much faster jets. This means that current combat helicopter and armoured vehicle purchases should be cancelled until they can be redesigned with much better protection; that is active defences that detect and intercept the incoming missiles — a process that might take years. (So far only Israel has active defence systems for its armoured vehicles )

By contrast, killer drones that can reliably destroy armoured vehicles and anything else beyond the horizon are grotesquely underfunded given their demonstrated combat value, largely because they are captive to air force priorities, set by pilots and ex-pilot senior officers. Only with political intervention can the stranglehold of the flying fraternity be overcome — they are today’s reactionary horse cavalry that resisted tanks in the Twenties. But the main thing, of course, is to have more infantry and to train it very well, and that raises the need for compulsory military service which only Sweden has confronted so far — by re-instituting it.

Because Nato has not instituted a no-flight zone, for the excellent reason that it would lead to air combat that the loser might try to nullify by escalation, and with everything happening much too fast for adult supervision, no new air combat lessons have been learned. While the heroism of Ukrainian pilots flying older models of Russian aircraft against newer models is highly admirable, it adds nothing that is not already written in The Iliad.

At the level of grand strategy, the largest and by far most consequential discovery is that in spite of decades of talk about the “diffusion of power”, particularly with the rise of China but also of Turkey, Iran, Brazil and South Africa, it is still the same old G7 countries that hold the keys of the world. Once the US, Canada, Japan, the United Kingdom and the European Union make a decision, any country can be cut off from world finance and most of world commerce. Russia’s Aeroflot, for instance, had to stop flying abroad because its aircraft are leased from Western companies, and the money-transfer sanctions blocked its payments to them, leading to the confiscation of its aircraft if they land outside Russia.

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That would not bother the Chinese, whose airlines do not depend on foreign lessors. But by the second day of the Ukraine war, Beijing realised that China also lives in a G7 world, with its economy utterly dependent on the daily arrival of bulk carriers loaded with animal and human food from the US, Canada, Australia, Brazil and a slew of other countries. China’s economy was self-sufficient if miserably poor in 1976 when I first visited, with a population on the edge of malnutrition. But today’s citizens will not grin and bear it without their meat, eggs, or milk. Last year, Xi Jinping’s naval groupies, including the jovial retired Admiral Luo Yuan, suggested that the US could be scared off from defending Taiwan against a Chinese invasion by sinking a US warship or two, perhaps even an aircraft carrier. Now Xi must realise that if a US warship is sunk, the supply of animal feed would end.

Finally for the United States, the greatest lesson of immediate importance is that its foreign and defence policies are drastically degraded by the lack of basic intelligence about foreign countries — not because the CIA fails to steal their war plans, but because it cannot acquire elementary situational awareness. This is an inevitable consequence of a cultural collapse: in the old days, a CIA officer appointed to serve in a foreign country whose language he did not know would apply himself furiously to learn as much of it as possible. But now, very few CIA officers speak any foreign language. Their superiors do not demand that they learn them, and they themselves are too busy chatting with each other to talk with the locals — other than with English-speaking local counterparts who mostly tell them what they want to hear.

This is why Biden paid a high political price for the effortless Taliban conquest of Afghanistan and the rapid fall of Kabul: the CIA told the White House that the Afghan army would hold out on its own for much more than a decent interval, for years perhaps, and said nothing at all to suggest that it might crumble without a fight. Not knowing Tajik, Uzbek, or any Pathan dialect, the CIA officers who uselessly served in Kabul from their offices did not overhear the jokes on the street about the Afghan army, or hilarious accounts of how incompetent fools could become instant officers by paying a modest bribe.

Because American generals, including media-star David Petraeus, flatly refused to call upon the regiments of Pathans, Tadjiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras who might fight out of ethnic solidarity, instead creating a mythical national “Afghan” army, the result was a fraud from day one. When the time came, they did not fight or even flee: they handed over their US-supplied weapons to the Taliban.

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In Kyiv, exactly the same thing happened, but in reverse. Just as in Kabul, we had CIA officers with no situational awareness. They did not listen, or understand, or even speak Ukrainian — they proclaimed it unnecessary “because everyone speaks Russian”, before sheepishly admitting that they themselves did not. Hence the CIA told the White House that Zelenskyy would flee, that the government would dissolve, that the Ukrainian army would not fight, and that the Russians would control Kyiv in 24 hours.

Since the White House still gave credence to the CIA in spite of its long history of incompetence, it ordered the urgent, even panicked evacuation of the US diplomatic mission to Lviv. Had they had any idea at all, they might have noticed that the Russians proposed to invade Europe’s largest country with very few troops — 150,000 compared to the 800,000 sent into far smaller Czechoslovakia in 1968 — and told the White House that with a bit of help the Ukrainians would contain the invasion.

But the CIA is highly professional in its press relations, and sure enough the New York Times promptly published an article that featured “former intelligence officers” highlighting the impossibility of ascertaining “fighting spirit”. It was as neat an illustration as any of why Kabul fell, and why Kyiv could too. Unless the US remedies its CIA problem by emptying out and fumigating the place, before restaffing it with people who care enough about the world to learn its languages, the US will continue to fly blind — and crash into the next Ukraine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By Aris Roussinos

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

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

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

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Europe must prepare for war

By Aris Roussinos

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

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

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

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

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A Putin puppet government will fail

By Vladislav Davidzon

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Magic Mountain will consume you

By Ben Judah

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

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

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

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

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This is how despotism ends

By Will Lloyd

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ukraine is winning the online war

By David Patrikarakos

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

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

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

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

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By Ayaan Hirsi Ali

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

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

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

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

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

The Government has announced new measures to “flush out the oligarchs, criminals and kleptocrats who think they can use UK property to hide their illicitly obtained wealth”. But let’s be honest: these people don’t “think” they can use UK property in this way — they know they can, which is why they’ve been doing so on a massive scale.

According to the anti-corruption campaigners, Transparency International, £6.7 billion in “questionable funds” have been invested in UK property since 2016 — £1.5 billion of which was bought by Russians accused of corruption or links to the Kremlin. No wonder that London is a described as a “laundromat” for “suspicious wealth”.

Boris Johnson may claim that “there is no place for dirty money in the UK” but, quite obviously, the UK has been — and still is — a place for dirty money. And the Government is now struggling to do anything about it. Yesterday, Keir Starmer confronted the Prime Minister: “Why are we giving Putin’s cronies 18 months to quietly launder their money out of UK property?”

Good question. Back in 2016, the Government hosted a “landmark” anti-corruption summit at Lancaster House in London. David Cameron, Prime Minister at the time, was very clear about what Britain would do: “First, we will expose corruption so there is nowhere to hide.”

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His specific pledge was to create a “new public register of beneficial ownership” for foreign companies operating in the UK. Instead of hiding behind shell companies and other legal smokescreens, “everyone in the world will be able to see who really owns and controls each and every company”. An accompanying press release promised that this “will include companies who already own property in the UK, not just those wishing to buy”. And to emphasise Britain’s leadership on this matter, it was stated that “this will be the first register of its kind anywhere in the world”.

Well, it might have been had ministers got on with the job; but they dawdled. This week, Boris Johnson finally committed his government to the necessary measures. “We are going faster and harder to tear back the façade,” he said. Let’s hope so — because it’s been almost six years since the Tories promised the property register and it hasn’t happened yet.

In 1085, William the Conqueror ordered a Great Survey, which covered every county of England and named over 13,000 places. Yet William’s surveyors completed their work — which became the Domesday Book — in 1086.

It seems ridiculous that its modern-day equivalent should take so much longer. Admittedly, there are nearly 100,000 properties owned by foreign companies in the UK. Establishing their true ownership is no small task. But that’s all the more reason why the effort should have started years ago. Why then was it delayed?

We can’t really blame David Cameron. Hosting the corruption summit was one of his last acts as PM. Can we blame his successor? Did Theresa May drop the idea when she took over? No, it continued as official policy under her administration — and also Boris Johnson’s. Rather, the problem was the glacial pace of implementation. 

There was a consultation 2017, followed by a draft bill — and yet more consultation. In 2018, the Government expressed its intention for the register to be operational by 2021. That deadline was missed. In fact, until the events of last week, the necessary legislation hadn’t even been scheduled. When pressed to do so, ministers just answered that “we will legislate when parliamentary time allows”. 

This week, a panicked Government pulled its finger out and by Tuesday, the Economic Crime (Transparency and Enforcement) Bill made its long overdue appearance. It’s as if it were already drafted, ready-and-waiting to go — so why did it take Putin’s bloody war to prompt ministers to act?

Some might suspect undue influence, but there’s no need for conspiracy theories. The Government’s inactions are consistent with this country’s general lack of transparency over property ownership. 

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For instance, it should be possible to go to an official website and freely access a map showing exactly who owns every piece of land in the country. But you can’t. For a fee, the Land Registry does provide limited information on individual plots. However, to get this data for the whole of England and Wales would be extortionately expensive. Guy Shrubsole — author of Who Owns England? — puts the cost at £72 million. 

Even then, about a sixth of the land in this country isn’t registered at all. There is no requirement that it has to be, unless sold or inherited. The Government could put this right if wanted to — for instance by requiring registration as a condition of receiving farm subsidies — but it hasn’t. Indeed, far from empowering the Land Registry, there were two attempts (while George Osborne was Chancellor) to flog it off to the highest bidder. Fortunately, the privatisation was cancelled by Osborne’s successor, Philip Hammond.

True transparency isn’t just about who owns the land, but also about who controls it. In particular, we need a public register of land options — legal agreements which give property developers an exclusive right to purchase potential building sites. The urgency is that options enable land-banking — the practice of sewing up the supply of potential building sites so that property developers can ration the supply of new housing to the market.  

In 2016, one Cabinet minister, Sajid Javid, had the guts to condemn the land-bankers. Measures to improve transparency were subsequently proposed. But, true to form, the Government has yet to follow through. In fact, it hasn’t even responded to the public consultation which closed in October 2020. 

It’s as if ministers don’t want to blow the lid on the murky world of British property. And no wonder. Government policy still operates on the basis that escalating property prices are a good thing. And nothing can be allowed to get in the way. For instance, Rishi Sunak wasted billions of pounds on propping up the housing market during the pandemic — when it clearly didn’t need any help.

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By Aris Roussinos

Encouraging overseas investment in British property is an integral part of this insane, inflationary obsession. The Tier 1 Investor Visa scheme is a prime example. Introduced under Gordon Brown in 2008, the idea was to dish out visas on the condition that the recipient invested at least a million pounds in the UK economy. Needless to say, no distinction was drawn between job-creating investment and property speculation which only pushes up the cost of housing. 

Last month, after years of criticism, the scheme was finally shut down with “immediate effect”. Apparently, the Government was concerned that the route was being exploited by money launderers and other criminals. Nothing gets past the Home Office.

Of course, I’m not saying that the London property market is entirely sustained by foreign corruption and criminality. Most of the money that flows into it — including overseas sources — is above board.

Yet this is an under-taxed and under-regulated industry that provides an ideal environment for the world’s worst people. And for what? Inflating land values enriches the wealthy, while those without property — especially the young — pay the price. Our economy is weakened and our democracy damaged.

When William I ordered his Great Survey, it was an act of domination — of taking control of a conquered land. A modern-day Domesday Book would be the precise opposite: a means by which we take back control of our own country.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But now Batu Khan’s army had arrived in force, and the longed-for Hungarians were nowhere to be seen. On 28 November 1240, the besiegers set up their siege machines at the Polish Gate. The bombardment began immediately, day after day of shock and awe. On the eighth day the walls gave way, and the Mongols poured into the city, looting, raping and killing.

For hours the Kyivans fought to defend their capital, house by house, hand to hand. By the next morning hundreds of civilians had taken refuge in the Church of the Dormition of the Virgin, resting place of Kyivan princes since the days of Volodymyr the Great. So many people stampeded up the stairs towards the dome that the structure collapsed beneath their weight. There was no escape from the horror.

Nobody knows how many Kyivans died in the next few hours, though the total probably ran into the tens of thousands. Medieval chroniclers estimated that of 50,000 residents, only 2,000 survived. Formerly one of the largest cities in Europe, Kyiv was reduced to ashes. When a papal envoy visited the site six years later, he found it a post-apocalyptic wasteland. Of dozens of large buildings before the siege, just six still stood, and there were “countless skulls and bones of dead men lying about on the ground”. Kyiv, he reported, had “been reduced almost to nothing”.

Yet Kyiv endured, and Kyiv rose again.

That has been the story of Ukraine and its people since the beginning: a story of appalling suffering and indomitable courage, terrible cruelty and extraordinary resilience. Writing amid the news of Russian strikes on the Ukrainian capital, with apartment blocks in flames and civilians taking refuge in underground stations, it’s hard not to think of the resonances with the past. The gathering sense of doom, the desperate hopes for Western intervention, the unleashing of the terrible storm. Kyiv fell, and its people endured Mongol rule for more than a century. But their descendants never forgot who they were. They endured, and they rose again.

History is at the heart of today’s horrific slaughter. Vladimir Putin believes in history, apparently to the point of near-madness. He believes in his own importance as a great man, in his country’s unique nature and exceptional destiny. He is driven by a seething resentment at the ebbing of Russian power, his fury at its supposed encirclement by Nato conspiracies, his outrage at the collapse of the Soviet empire, which he believes “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century”.

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But Putin is also driven by his sense of Ukrainian history. To put it simply, he believes there is no such thing; or rather, that Ukrainian history is Russian history. Last summer, in an explicit warning the West utterly failed to heed, he published a 7,000-word essay entitled ‘On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians’. In the very first line he wrote that “Russians and Ukrainians were one people — a single whole”. He traced their shared origins back to the state of Kyivan Rus, founded by the Vikings in the ninth century. Again and again he insisted that Ukrainians were not really Ukrainians, but “western Russians”. Modern Ukraine, he concluded, was a fiction, “entirely the product of the Soviet era”, artificially established “on the lands of historical Russia”.

Does anybody doubt that Putin means what he says? Just listen to his chilling speech on Monday evening, his declaration of war on his beleaguered neighbour. The message was exactly the same. “Since time immemorial,” Putin said, “the people living in the south-west of what has historically been Russian land have called themselves Russians and Orthodox Christians.” Ukraine’s very existence, he insisted, was a mistake, an aberration by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in the early Twenties.

So why do the Ukrainians persist in believing otherwise? Again Putin’s answer was simple. They have been tricked by the West and misled by their masters, a gang of “nationalists and neo-Nazis”. His operation, he says, is designed to bring the “demilitarisation and de-Nazification of Ukraine”. Never mind that Ukraine’s president, the former actor Volodymyr Zelenskyy, looks nothing like a Nazi. Far from being a Ukrainian ultra-nationalist, he comes from a Russian-speaking family. His grandfather joined the Red Army to fight the Nazis. His great-grandfather was killed in the Holocaust. Volodymyr Zelenskyy is Jewish.

That tells you all you need to know about Vladimir Putin’s command of history. For he is wrong: comprehensively, utterly, inarguably wrong. It is true that Russians and Ukrainians have complicated family relations and shared historical roots. But they are not the same people, and Ukraine is not Russia.

Yes, both peoples are East Slavic, both are largely Orthodox and both look back to the ninth and tenth centuries, when the Vikings established the realm they called Garðaríki — the “kingdom of cities” — in what we now call Ukraine, Belarus and western Russia. But their paths diverged after the Mongol invasion, which is why the siege of 1240 matters so much. Imperial Russia grew out of the Grand Duchy of Moscow, one of Kyiv’s regional rivals, which flourished as a Mongol vassal.

But the lands of modern Ukraine did not belong to Moscow. To cut an incredibly contentious story short, they were eventually divided three ways. In the south, Crimea and its hinterland became an independent khanate, run by the Mongols’ Golden Horde and its successors. In the far east, the wide steppes known as the Wild Fields became the lands of the Cossacks — exiles, outlaws and adventurers, who take their name from the Turkish word kazak, “a free man”. But most of today’s Ukraine fell beneath the sway of the vast Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, one of the largest, most populous, most cosmopolitan and most tolerant countries in early modern Europe. And if you want to know why, in the last few days, Poland and Lithuania have been Ukraine’s staunchest champions, there’s your answer.

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Every detail of this story is bitterly contested; to leave anything out invites fierce criticism. But here’s a foolhardy attempt at a summary. For centuries, most of Ukraine’s largely peasant people were governed by the Poles, and had much in common with their Russian neighbours. But they were not Poles, and they were not Russians. At the time people called them “Ruthenians” — a word derived from that original Viking state of Kyivan Rus. But the word Україна, Ukraine, is old, dating from at least the 12th century. It probably means “the edge, the borderland”. And that pretty much sums Ukraine up. It was the land in between.

It’s perfectly true that over time, Ukraine turned to look eastwards. By the early 19th century Poland had been destroyed, while most of modern Ukraine, including the lands of the Cossacks and the capital Kyiv, had been absorbed by the empire of the Tsars. Not the far west, though: it was taken by Austria-Hungary, which is why L’viv looks so much like Krakow or Prague. Meanwhile, in the east, in the coal basin of the river Don, Russian workers poured into the newly built mines and steelworks, which is why so many eastern Ukrainians still speak Russian.

But that’s not an unusual story. At exactly the same time, a very similar thing happened here in Britain, where English workers moved into the mines and steelworks of South Wales. Today their descendants still speak English; you don’t often hear Welsh on the streets of Cardiff. But an anglophone Welshman is still Welsh. Like his childhood friends in the steel-making city of Kryvyi Rih, Volodymyr Zelenskyy was brought up speaking Russian. But he’s not Russian. He’s Ukrainian.

So was Ukraine invented by the Bolsheviks, as Putin says? No. Just look at its cities and universities in the late 19th century, when the Ukrainian idea flourished as never before. Intellectuals, poets, historians and folklorists became fascinated by their unique past and distinctive culture, just like their counterparts elsewhere. All over Europe, from Ireland, Germany and Italy to the lands of the Czechs, the Bulgarians, the Serbs and the Poles, people were part-uncovering, part-inventing their own national stories. So too in Ukraine, where the national poet Taras Shevchenko, the son of a serf, wrote verses celebrating the peasants, rebels and outlaws of days gone by.

But of course that didn’t fit with the Russian story. Under Tsars Nicholas I and Alexander II, the Ukrainian ideal seemed a threat to the unity of the Russian Empire. Shevchenko was arrested and exiled, his poems suppressed. In 1876 the Ukrainian language was effectively banned. You couldn’t write Ukrainian books, put on Ukrainian plays or give Ukrainian recitals; you couldn’t even teach your children in Ukrainian.

Yet Ukraine endured. By the outbreak of the First World War, the national idea was probably stronger than ever. At first the Russians invaded the Austrian-held west, in Galicia, and tried to stamp out all traces of a distinct Ukrainian identity. Then they were driven back. The Russian Revolution and civil war brought chaos, and Kyiv changed hands 16 times in two years. But every rival contender — the Ukrainian People’s Republic, the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Hetmanate, the Directorate, even the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic — believed there was such a thing as Ukraine. That was why, when Lenin and Stalin created the Soviet Union in 1922, Ukraine joined as a separate republic. Everybody knew it wasn’t Russia.

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In the century that followed, Ukraine’s history was so awful, so horribly stained with sorrow, that it feels almost indecent to write it down. A famine in the early Twenties, then another horrific famine — the Holodomor, caused by Stalin’s collectivisation policies — in the early Thirties. Occupation by the Nazis in the Second World War, then the charnel house of the Holocaust, in which some Ukrainian nationalists actively took part. Reconquest by the Red Army; years of suppression and stagnation; the nuclear accident at Chernobyl. Then the collapse of the Soviet Union, the implosion of Ukraine’s economy in the decade that followed, the Orange Revolution, the Maidan and the annexation of Crimea.

Yet amid all this, Ukraine endured. In his speech on Monday night, Putin failed to mention that in the late Eighties thousands of people took to the streets of L’viv and Kyiv to demand language rights, greater autonomy and, in the end, independence. Nor did he mention that when the Ukrainians were given the chance to go their own way, in a free and fair referendum in December 1991, a staggering 92% voted for independence. Every single oblast, even Donetsk, even Luhansk, even Crimea, said yes. Even Russian-speakers voted for it. And no wonder. They were, after all, Ukrainian.

A complicated story, then. But in a European context, it’s not so unusual. Yes, Ukraine’s borders have been fluid; but whose haven’t? Just look at a map of Germany over time; or Italy, or Poland. Yes, many Ukrainians speak Russian. But that’s not unusual either. Some Finns speak Swedish. Some Germans speak Danish. Some Italians speak German. Do the Swiss all speak the same language?

And yes, Ukraine’s history is deeply, inevitably intertwined with that of its overbearing neighbour. It always has been, and always will be. But you could say exactly the same of Spain and Portugal, Germany and Austria, Britain and Ireland. Most people in Ireland speak English. Many read English newspapers. Many even support English football teams. But Ireland isn’t England. Ukraine isn’t Russia.

For Ukraine, doomed to what appears to be unending suffering, the future seems grim. When I began this essay, opening with those lines on the fall of Kyiv in 1240, the BBC headlines talked of overnight air attacks on the city. Now, while I have been writing, Russian tanks are rolling into the suburbs. Historians love to quote Mark Twain’s quip that history doesn’t repeat itself, it rhymes. They rarely admit that sometimes it rhymes in dreadful, unbearable, heart-rending ways.

But the story of Ukrainian history isn’t just a story of endless defeat. It’s a story of endless resilience. It’s the story of a people trapped between mighty neighbours, who have always been themselves, with their own land, their own identity, their own history. You can bomb them and kill them, smash their cities and tear down their buildings, burn their books and suppress their language. But you can’t make them something they aren’t, and you can’t destroy their belief in themselves. That’s the story of the siege in 1240, and it’s the same story now. Kyiv fell. But Kyiv endured, and Kyiv will rise again.

*

Dominic Sandbrook and Tom Holland discuss the history of Ukraine in the latest episode of The Rest is History.

Last week, I wrote that the idea of an all-out invasion of Ukraine and a march on Kyiv, touted so often by Joe Biden, made no sense. As it stood, the world hung on Putin’s every move: Russia had cemented its superpower status — and all this was achieved without the need to fire a single shot. Putin had won gold; he had leverage without cost. That would change with a full invasion — and what would be the point of that?

But I did caveat all this: “It may well be that after 20 years of acting like a Tsar, he has gone mad, like so many before him, and something crazy is coming.”

Judging by his speech on Monday, he may well have gone mad, and the crazy may well be coming. It was as if Putin was finally able to say what he’d been thinking for 20 years. What most concerned me, beyond the content, was the tone. It was a combination of self-pity with a sense of utter superiority; a toxic mix which always, always leads to violence. “You didn’t want us to be friends,” he told the West, “but you didn’t have to make an enemy of us.”

Three things became clear from his controlled and detailed rant. Firstly, that he is obsessed with the idea that the West is determined to “Keep Russia Down”; and secondly, that he does not even accept the idea of Ukraine. He claimed, falsely, that it had never really been an independent state; he also said it was “madness” that republics were allowed to leave the Russian Empire. Thirdly, and perhaps most disturbingly, it became clear that this is no longer just about Ukraine (if indeed it ever was). Every former Soviet state is, by implication, now in the firing line.

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This was the performance of a man who has been the Tsar of Russia for two decades. A man surrounded only by flatterers and “yes men”, who now seems to use even his inner circle as little more than a rubber stamp for his delusions. But it was also the performance of a man who had weathered the pandemic locked away from other humans, with his head buried in dodgy Soviet books on Ukraine history.

The climax of the speech was, of course, the decision — accompanied by an official signing of the relevant documents, no less — to recognise the “separatist republics” of Donetsk and Luhansk, the two areas of the Donbas region in eastern Ukraine that Russia de facto carved out in 2014 when it sent troops across the border to aid a nominally spontaneous separatist uprising that emerged in response to the Maidan Revolution.

I was there on the ground as pro-Russian separatists aided by the Russian military seized municipal buildings and took control of key cities. There was very little that was spontaneous about it all, and it was clear even then that they were taking orders from Moscow. Soon the Russian hardware began to roll across the border. The Ukrainians duly rolled out an anti-terror operation in response, and the fighting began. A peace of sorts was eventually signed in Minsk and an uneasy stasis held for almost eight years.

But on Monday, Putin blew all that up. The regions will now be recognised as autonomous states. Ukraine has been officially sundered. Now Russia plans to send troops across the border for “peacekeeping” purposes, though Putin clarified yesterday that they would not necessarily go in “right now”.

The morning after the night before is fraught. I spent Monday night speaking to friends in Ukraine. “Tired,” said Viktoria when I asked her how she felt. “Just tired of this never-ending stress.” She continued: “I don’t want to think about the economic crisis that will follow, my possible death, my destroyed country… But I don’t want to run away in panic because it’s my land. Few of the people I know here are frightened. We are irate — you can feel a sense of unity everywhere.”

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My friend, Dmitri, is less sanguine. “I was sceptical about talk of an invasion,” he told me. “But after hearing about the annexation in Donbas, I started to panic. I read Putin’s tweets. He is a high functioning psychopath. Any scenario now is bad, isn’t it? We might be trapped.” And yet it’s not just my many Ukrainian friends I now fear for. I also fear for my Russian ones. Russia is going to become an even darker and more repressive place. And they will pay, as surely as Ukrainians will, for Putin’s creeping madness.

So, what next? Well, Putin has telegraphed his next move; now we must, too. Already the talk from the EU and Washington is of sanctions. Yesterday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson came out and announced a new package: he has sanctioned five banks and three Russian oligarchs with ties to Putin. Germany, meanwhile, has said Nord Stream 2, the gas pipeline on which so much of Russia’s energy leverage over Europe relies, is to be put on hold. All of which sounds like it could be a game-changer, but don’t be fooled. I’ll believe it when I see it. I’d wager the Kremlin feels the same.

Of course, it’s a start — and amid the chaos we must remain calm. Right now, it’s important to remember that nothing has changed on the ground. Even in Donetsk, the centre of global attention, the influx of more soldiers does not actually alter the status quo. It may prove to be the launching point for something larger, but right now what was in Russian control remains so. Yes, it looks like that’s going to change — perhaps irretrievably. And like everyone who cares about geopolitics and, more immediately, who cares about Ukraine, I am angry. But for now, we must eschew hysteria.

For no matter how repulsed we are by his behaviour, if Putin wants a war we must do whatever we can not to give it to him. On Monday, I watched him look into the camera and say of the Ukrainians that he could “break their bones”, and I knew he meant it. He could and he would. That man would shell cities, would send a million to camps — and he would do it without hesitation and without pity.

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We must not push him into it. Instead, we should do what we should have done years ago: we enable Putin’s kleptocracy and it’s time to stop being Russia’s butler. This means no more London laundromat, no more friendly banks, no more cosying up from Eton; no more nice lawyers and art galleries and big houses. Enough is enough. We were told that we left the EU for reasons of national sovereignty. Well, if that were really the case then there has never been a better time to take back control — from Russia.

Perhaps the greatest tragedy is that all this and more could have been achieved years ago. We could have stopped him in Georgia. We could have stopped him in Syria. We could have stopped him in Crimea. We could have stopped him in Eastern Ukraine. But we did nothing. And here we are.

But for the people of Russia and Ukraine, Poltava is a place of legend. For it was here, on 8 July 1709, that the armies of the Swedish and Russian Empires clashed in the climactic battle of the Great Northern War.

“Soldiers! The hour has struck when the fate of the whole motherland lies in your hands! Either Russia will perish or she will be reborn!” So ran the proclamation of Peter the Great, Tsar of All the Russias, the day before the decisive showdown. For almost a decade he had led a coalition against the Swedish Empire of his rival Charles XII. This was his chance to overturn the balance of power in the Baltic and confirm Russia’s emergence as the new colossus of Northern Europe.

The fighting started before dawn, and for a time the result hung in the balance. Three times Peter was hit by Swedish fire: one musket ball knocked off his hat, another lodged in his saddle, a third was deflected by a silver icon he wore around his neck. But by lunchtime it was all over. Perhaps 10,000 Swedish troops had been killed or wounded, Charles was in flight and the Scandinavians’ power had been broken forever.

“In a single morning,” writes Peter’s biographer Robert K. Massie, the battle had “permanently shifted the political axis of Europe … Poltava was the first thunderous announcement to the world that a new Russia was being born.”

There’s a grim geopolitical symmetry in the fact that today Poltava stands directly in the path of Vladimir Putin’s potential invasion of Ukraine. (It’s closer to the Russian border than it is to Kyiv, and just two hours from Ukraine’s second city of Kharkiv, a probable early target for the Russian army.) For the battle at Poltava wasn’t just a foundational moment in Russia’s ascent to empire. It was a colossal moment in Ukrainian history, too.

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Why Biden has sacrificed Ukraine

By DAVID PATRIKARAKOS

Since the mid-seventeenth century, the Cossacks of the Zaporizhian Host, in what is now central Ukraine, had been vassals of their Russian neighbours to the north. But only months before the clash at Poltava, the Cossack leader Ivan Mazepa had decided to switch sides, abandoning Peter and throwing in his lot with the Swedes. He was fighting, he said, “for the common good of our mother, my fatherland, poor Ukraine”. His gamble backfired horribly, though. Defeat at Poltava destroyed his dream of Cossack independence and shattered his health; he fled across the border into Ottoman Moldavia and died that autumn.

In the years that followed, with central and eastern Ukraine becoming part of the Russian Empire, Mazepa was cast as an anti-Russian traitor. Every year, on the first Sunday of Lent, he was ritually cursed in Orthodox churches. Even in the Soviet Union he was condemned as a “Ukrainian bourgeois nationalist”. But now many Ukrainians see him as a national hero. Just six years ago the last president, Petro Poroshenko, unveiled a statue of Mazepa in the centre of Poltava. Today his face adorns Ukraine’s 10 hryvnia note.

Fixated on their own modernity, obsessed with the here and now, many Western politicians seem unable to grasp that at the eastern edge of Europe, history really matters. Go to Putin’s official government website, and you can read his 5,000-word essay, “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians”, published last summer. Did he really write it himself? It hardly matters. The important thing is that he clearly believes it.

Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians, Putin says, are one people, “descendants of Ancient Rus”. He admits that they later became fragmented, but insists that “Moscow became the centre of reunification, continuing the tradition of ancient Russian statehood”. The idea of the “Ukrainian people as a nation separate from the Russians”, he says, has “no historical basis”. And as evidence, he points to the Great Northern War. “Only a small portion of the Cossacks supported Mazepa’s rebellion,” Putin insists. “People of all orders and degrees considered themselves Russian and Orthodox.”

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There’s plenty to disagree with in Putin’s essay. Britain’s Defence Secretary, Ben Wallace, has even published a long historical rebuttal of his own, pointing out that “Ukraine has been separate from Russia for far longer in its history than it was ever united”. But the revealing thing is that the Kremlin’s top man bothered publishing it at all.

Analysts have spilled oceans of ink speculating about the motives of this most elusive of world leaders. An opportunistic gambler or a supreme strategist? A nationalist or an imperialist? A moderniser or a reactionary? But it’s surely when you see Putin as a historian — that is to say, as somebody shaped by and aware of Russia’s long history, and conscious of his own role as an actor in a vast historical drama — that you see him most clearly.

Today it’s very common to regard Putin as a kind of anomaly. We think of the Western-dominated, rules-based international system as the norm. The West represents order, and Putin represents disorder. We stand for continuity; he represents change and chaos.

But as unpalatable as it might be to admit it, a very long view suggests that it’s Putin who looks normal, and we who look peculiar. After all, if you walk around most European cities you can see plenty of statues of people who were very like Vladimir Putin — pragmatic, ruthless, authoritarian rulers who governed with an iron hand at home and believed might made right abroad. The emperors who sat in Rome, Constantinople or indeed St Petersburg, the kings and commanders who shaped so much European history, would have scoffed at our belief in progress, our disapproval of violence, our idealistic faith in human nature and disdain for our own ancestors.

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To take an obvious example, Peter the Great, often seen in the West as a beacon of enlightened leadership, ruled with a savagery that would horrify us today. When the Streltsy army units mutinied in Moscow in 1698, he had some of them whipped to death, others stretched until their limbs snapped, still others roasted alive or torn apart with red-hot pincers. The victor of Poltava fought war after war after war, against the Swedes, the Poles, the Turks, the Kazakhs, the Persians. And it worked. He won. When Peter died in 1725, he ruled the strongest, richest, largest and most stable regime the Russian people had ever known.

In a way, you can tell the story of the last four centuries as an attempt to cope with Peter’s legacy. In the West we’ve become accustomed to seeing Germany as the great “problem” of European history, to quote A. J. P. Taylor. But for most of the last 400 years, it was Russia that was the real problem. It was Russia, not France or Germany, that haunted the nightmares of Victorian Britain’s politicians and generals — Russia, expanding every year into Central Asia, coming ever closer to India, too dynamic to hold back, too big to hold down. It was fear of Russia, the fastest industrialising country in the world, building factories and railways at a breakneck pace, that pushed Germany into the First World War. Fear of Russia lay at the heart of Nazism; it was fear of Russia, too, that persuaded Harry Truman and Clement Attlee to set up NATO and commit so many American and British troops to the defence of Europe.

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You can, of course, see the Russian threat to Ukraine in a moral light. The embattled underdog and the overbearing bully; the youthful, stumbling democracy and the cold, ruthless autocrat — it’s not just a good story, it contains a considerable element of truth. But one reason the West’s response has been so pitifully weak is that we refuse to see the world clearly.

Nations have competing interests; we can’t all be friends, and it’s sheer naivety to pretend otherwise. We didn’t “lose” Russia in the Nineties, because Russia was never ours to win. The Russians are an intensely proud and patriotic people, with their own ambitions. They were never going to join NATO any more than they were ever going to line up to become meek, dutiful members of the democratic West.

And although Vladimir Putin is undoubtedly haunted by memories of what happened in the dying days of the Cold War, it’s too crude to see him simply as a Soviet revivalist. As repressive and autocratic as he is, he’s the product of centuries of history. And when he denies that Ukraine is really a country — as he infamously told George W. Bush in 2008 — the plain fact is that millions of Russians agree with him.

None of this, by the way, means we should abandon Ukraine. Quite the reverse. But perhaps it might make us think a bit more carefully about the kind of world we live in — competitive, dangerous, potentially very violent — and the kind of people we choose to lead us through it. For whatever we might have told ourselves after 1989, history didn’t end with the fall of the Berlin Wall. We still live in a world of great powers, competing interests, gnawing anxieties and strategic ambitions. Perhaps above all, we still live in a world of war.

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In polite society, people frown awkwardly when you point that out; but as the historian Margaret MacMillan observed in 2018, “war is an integral part of human experience”. Peter the Great would have agreed with her, and almost certainly Vladimir Putin does too. After all, he established himself in power with Russia’s crushing victory in the Second Chechen War (which rather punctures Liz Truss’s ill-judged warning that a Russian attack on Ukraine would be a new Chechnya, since the Russians see that second war as a triumph). Faced with a Georgian bid to join NATO in 2008, he sent in his tanks and won that war too. Then, six years later, his “little green men” went into Crimea. Another war. Another victory. And all the time we in the West stayed at home, and congratulated ourselves on our principles.

So the pages of history turn. Putin’s tanks stream towards the Ukrainian border. In the Kremlin, their canny, cynical, supremely unsentimental master weighs up the odds. If he gets it wrong, he risks humiliation in the eyes of his people. If he gets it right, he has a chance of rebuilding the empire of the Tsars, splintering the Western alliance and leaving Russia in a stronger strategic position than at any time, arguably, since 1945.

He mulls over his options. He reads that the Germans have offered to send the Ukrainians 5,000 helmets, that the British Prime Minister may be toppled by a birthday cake, that the US President wouldn’t be too upset about a “minor incursion” into Ukrainian territory. Then he makes up his mind.

What does he do? Well, ask yourself this: against that background, faced with such opposition, what would you do?

On the night of the 20th, a special guest from the European Parliament got up on stage: Guy Verhofstadt, the arch-federalist and former Prime Minister of Belgium. Addressing the cheering throng he was full of praise: “you are defending European values and European principles.” 

Two days later, the pro-Moscow Yanukovych government was forced from office. The protesters had won — and so, it seemed, had the European Union. Who needs an army and a navy when you’ve got “values” and “principles”?

Fast forward to the present day and the Russian military is massed on Ukraine’s borders, poised to complete a conquest that began with the annexation of Crimea. I suppose Mr Verhofstadt could be deployed to stand in Moscow’s way, but on this occasion I doubt it would do much good.

However, Brussels could focus on something else he said back in 2014: “we as the European Union have one obligation… that’s to stay behind your cause.” In that regard, the EU might not have any military power of its own — but it does have diplomatic power. 

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Indeed, the EU has a fully-fledged foreign policy apparatus. It has a High Representative (currently Josep Borrell) to act as the EU’s foreign minister; it has embassies and consulates around the world; and it has direct representation on powerful bodies like the G7 and G20. Its diplomacy is also backed with the clout that comes from being the world’s biggest trade block.

So given that capacity, one might expect the EU to be leading the effort to save Ukraine. But instead its diplomats are on the sidelines — much to the frustration of Emmanuel Macron, among others. Instead, the future of Ukraine — and by extension Europe — is being hammered out between Washington and Moscow. Even Britain, supposedly isolated by Brexit, has made a bigger impact than Brussels. 

The Russians, meanwhile, are laughing. Commenting on the EU’s lack of involvement, Sergei Lavrov — the country’s Foreign Minister — expressed mock sympathy: “We can see that the European Union feels somewhat disadvantaged.” As to the possibility of a separate EU-Russia dialogue Lavrov observed that “the US needs to be asked if it is willing to let [the EU] take any independent action.”

He was making mischief, of course. It’s not the US stopping the EU from taking a leading role — but the EU itself. The Ukraine crisis is the greatest test that the Common Foreign and Security Policy has ever faced, and so far the failure is comprehensive. Beyond the usual empty words and token gestures, the 27 member states of the European Union have been unable to present a united front. 

There’s no doubt as to which of the 27 is most to blame. As I have argued before, Germany was warned years ago that its collaboration with Russia on energy supplies would undermine the security of Russia’s neighbours. Now that these fears have been realised, the new German government has a chance to make amends. But far from showing leadership, the German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, has weakened Europe’s resolve — for instance by blocking defence exports to Ukraine. 

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The EU is Russia’s biggest trading partner — accounting for more than a third of its imports and exports. Comprehensive economic sanctions could therefore act as a serious deterrent to war. However, the threat has to be credible. There was fighting talk this week from the Danish foreign minister, who said the EU is ready to impose “never seen before” sanctions. However, that doesn’t match Scholz’s less-than-resolute language: “no one should harbour the illusion that there is any step that has no consequences for us.”

It also didn’t help when Vice Admiral Kay-Achim Schönbach, the German naval chief, had to resign after some unguarded comments about the current crisis. “What [Putin] really wants is respect,” he was reported as saying, “and, my God, giving someone respect is low cost, even no cost… It is easy to give him the respect he really demands — and probably also deserves.” No doubt Putin was left wiping away the tears.

So is the EU’s problem actually a German problem? Up to a point, but the blame must be shared by other member states for tolerating it. If they won’t stand up to German flakiness on foreign and defence policy, then what chance do they have against Russian aggression?

Unfortunately, EU governments are under very little pressure from their voters to take the continent’s defence seriously. Consider the core principle of NATO — the Article 5 obligation that every member of the organisation should come to the military aid of any member that is attacked. In other words, one for all and all for one. According to this 2020 Pew report, there was majority support for this principle in some EU countries, but not others. Asked whether their own country should respond militarily to a Russian attack on a fellow NATO member, 64% of those asked said yes in the Netherlands, but only 41% in France and Spain, 34% in Germany and just 25% in Italy. This compares to 60% in the US and 55% in Britain. 

Somewhat hypocritically, much higher percentages expect that the United States would respond to a Russian attack: 75% of Italians thought so as did 63% of Germans. Clearly, many Europeans assume that they will be defended — even if they aren’t prepared to contribute to the defence of their neighbours. 

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Ukraine, of course, is not a NATO member. And perhaps that’s why the EU isn’t doing all it can to deter Russia. The assumption is that Kyiv represents an endpoint for Moscow’s ambitions — not a pit stop on the way to Vilnius or Warsaw or Berlin. Let’s hope that theory is never tested. 

What makes the EU’s irresponsibility harder to take is the very nature of the “European project”. On the 1st January, 1999 the euro came into being — and changed the character of the European Union forever. From that moment, it became a fundamentally inward-looking enterprise devoted to the survival of the single currency at any cost. The alternative path that the EU could have taken: a looser association of nations — but one that doesn’t stop halfway across the continent — was forever closed off. 

Well, so be it. Every empire has to have a frontier. But when the line is drawn, one has to be ready to guard it. One cannot exclude unless one is prepared to defend. The EU seems oblivious to this — and that is its greatest failure.