On 28 June 1919, at a railway halt called Balyn, a firing squad of Ukrainian soldiers was ordered to execute a Ukrainian colonel. They refused to raise their rifles against him, so the sentence was carried out instead by the head of the army’s counter-intelligence, a man closer to the politics than to the front. That is how Petro Bolbochan died: condemned by his own state, spared by his own soldiers, killed by his own security service.

But only a year and two months earlier, the same colonel had done something that should have made him an untouchable national hero.

The man

In April 1918 the Bolsheviks held Crimea, and the only ways onto the peninsula ran through a handful of narrow throats of land guarded by the Syvash, the shallow, brackish lagoon system the Ukrainians call the Rotten Sea. It is near impossible to cross by boat or foot, and so for centuries it funnelled every army into the same killing grounds: the Perekop isthmus, five kilometres wide and soaked in the blood of failed frontal assaults, or the single railway crossing at Chonhar, where the line ran over the marsh on an embankment a defender could mine and blow in seconds.

With a strike group of around nine thousand men, he raced for Chonhar rather than Perekop, and when he found the bridge wired to detonate, he did not wait. His scouts went forward on handcars, ferrying men and weapons across the rotten water faster than the Bolsheviks could react, and the surprise meant they had no time to blow the bridge. As the Bolsheviks retreated, armoured trains, artillery and infantry poured through in pursuit. Dzhankoi fell on 22 April, Simferopol on the 24th, Bakhchysarai on the 25th, in a lightning advance with almost no losses. By the 29th, ships of the Black Sea Fleet were raising Ukrainian flags at Sevastopol.

Earlier that year in March, Bolbochan had already been the first into Kyiv, reaching it ahead of the German army. The Crimean dash was a race against that same ally. His orders were to seize the peninsula and its Black Sea Fleet before the Germans, who wanted both as a prize of war, and he beat them into Simferopol by hours. He had conquered a near-island in under a fortnight by reading terrain that had broken better-resourced forces. He relied on locals, especially Crimean Tatars, among his men, and understood that you beat an impassable barrier not by force but by tempo, deception, and the nerve to act before the enemy anticipates your options.

But the triumph did not hold. The Germans, who had their own designs on Crimea, surrounded Bolbochan’s group in Simferopol and issued an ultimatum: lay down your arms and leave. Unwilling to provoke its ally, his own government, the Ukrainian National Republic (1917-1920), ordered him to comply. After tense negotiations his men withdrew armed and in good order, and the military triumph was handed back across the table as a diplomatic courtesy. It would not be the last time politics undid what Bolbochan had won.

The myths

Two countries remember Bolbochan, and neither remembers the man.

In Russian memory he is a sadist. He enters the cultural bloodstream through Mikhail Bulgakov, who put a brutal Petliurist cavalry commander named Bolbotun into The White Guard, the name plainly filed down from Bolbochan. The character is a vehicle for the novel’s scenes of antisemitic street violence as Petliura’s forces take Kyiv. Bulgakov never met Bolbochan; “Bolbotun” is a composite nightmare assembled from a Russian writer’s view of the whole Ukrainian threat, not a portrait. But the image set hard, and it is still reheated today, including in recent Russian television adaptations, in polemics that brand him a pogromist and quietly fold him in with men like Semesenko, who actually slaughtered Jews at Proskuriv. There is no documented evidence tying Bolbochan personally to the pogroms. It does not matter to Russian myth-making, of course, which has for centuries tried to portray Ukrainians as wild, uncivilised, in need of firm Russian rule.

In Ukrainian memory, Bolbochan is more often a martyr: the brilliant patriot, removed on trumped-up charges, framed and shot by a frightened, faction-ridden leadership that could not tolerate a soldier more popular than itself. In 1934, veterans of his old corps held a second trial in Prague and cleared his name. Streets and squares carry it now. The arc of genius destroyed by envy is clean and, in my reading at least, largely true.

But a martyr is as flattened a thing as a monster. Both myths exist to spare us the harder figure underneath: a man who was neither saint nor sadist but something more useful and more uncomfortable, a brilliant soldier with bad political judgement, killed by men with even worse judgement. Those two failures are not equal, and I will not pretend they are. The leadership’s was the graver by far: it held the power of life and death and used it to destroy its best soldier. Bolbochan’s was the lesser and the more human. But each was real, and the smaller one does not cancel the larger.

The mutiny

By the summer of 1919 Bolbochan had been pushed out. After the Left Bank collapsed under the Bolshevik offensive that winter, he was stripped of command and, that January, he was arrested on the orders of a fellow Petliurite officer, Otaman Omelian Volokh. There was a long list of charges, and Bolbochan was held responsible for losing Kharkiv and Poltava, repressing workers and peasants, and plotting to defect to Denikin’s Whites. When some of the Zaporozhians under his command got ready to attack to free him, Bolbochan ordered them to stand down; he knew that strife within the army would only serve the Bolsheviks. In that, he showed wisdom, but the wisdom was not reciprocated.

Bolbochan was a conservative in a government of socialists, a man who wanted a regular professional army and a functioning state apparatus while the Directory wanted a force of “workers and peasants.” Bolbochan certainly had his doubts about the leadership and believed quite a few of them cared more for Lenin than for Ukraine. His own soldiers got him released in May, and the UNR leadership suggested he go to Italy to train soldiers in exile. He should have gone abroad and waited.

Instead, in June, he tried to take the Zaporozhian Corps. There was some legality in the effort that complicates calling it an outright ‘coup’. The corps’ military inspector, a man with emergency authority to replace officers, signed a directive installing Bolbochan over the sitting commander, Otaman Volodymyr Salsky. On 9 June, Bolbochan arrived to claim the corps and told Salsky to his face that the government was made of traitors and had to go, and asked him to hand over his command. Salsky refused.

Ironically, Salsky himself was of a similar mould to Bolbochan. He was no socialist; he was a career General Staff officer who would later become the exiled republic’s minister of defence. But he would not join what he perceived to be a coup against the lawful government in the middle of a war. He asked to telephone Petliura, and Bolbochan, incomprehensibly, let him. Salsky used the call to report the attempt, and within days Bolbochan was arrested by a regiment that had stayed loyal. He was court-martialled and sentenced to death.

Whatever way you want to read this, it is uncomfortable. The republic’s two finest conservative officers spent the decisive week of a war pointing pistols at each other instead of at the Bolsheviks.

The lesson, which cuts twice

Bolbochan had a special connection to Kharkiv. His Zaporozhians were based there, and he had helped liberate the city from the Bolsheviks. As someone who has adopted Kharkiv as a second home, I am inclined to romanticise him. But the more I read about this story, the more I understand that Bolbochan is worth more than a hagiography. The temptation is to tell it as a story about one side’s failure, the leadership’s, especially because that failure is real and grotesque. At the height of an existential war with Soviet Russia, the Ukrainian state took its most gifted general, ignored every plea for clemency, and shot him. Bolbochan, awaiting death, wrote begging to be sent to the front “even as a rank-and-file Cossack”, offering the one thing the republic needed most, his ability to win battles, in exchange for his life. Petliura insisted he be shot because he seemingly preferred Bolbochan dead. That is the triumph of the political short term over the nation’s existential long term, in its purest and most self-destructive form. A national leadership so consumed by the question of who commands that it threw away the man who had the most chance of ensuring they won.

Yet the lesson only matures when seen from both sides. Bolbochan was not merely a victim of bad politics; he committed a political sin of his own, and it was probably the same sin. Faced with a government he despised and judged illegitimate, he let his certainty that he was right override the discipline the national cause demanded. To install himself by directive and confront a loyal commander was to gamble civil war inside the army against an advancing enemy, and to put the settling of an internal argument above survival. He was correct about the leadership’s mediocrity, and probably correct about much of the politics. But being correct is not the same as being wise. A more disciplined man would have swallowed the injustice, gone to Italy, and lived to command again. It would have been better for the country he loved if he had been able to do that.

So the real lesson is not “they murdered a hero,” though they did. It is that a movement fighting for its existence cannot afford the luxury of being right at each other’s expense. Both the Directory and Bolbochan understood the existential stakes perfectly well, but both, at the decisive moment, let a political reckoning, who has the power, who dictates to and punishes whom, take precedence over the only thing that mattered, which was not losing the war. The leadership needed the maturity to keep a dangerous, insubordinate genius alive because the nation needed his talents. Bolbochan needed the maturity to remain subordinate to a government he held in contempt because the nation needed its army whole. Neither found it. But these were not failures of the same weight. The state’s was the unforgivable one: it killed. Bolbochan’s was the tragic one: he overreached and let himself be killed. I hold them in the same frame because both betray the same confusion of the political with the existential, not because they balance. The republic was gone within the year.

Coda

There is a coda to Bolbochan’s first January arrest that belongs beside the execution, although the histories rarely set them together. The officer who arrested Bolbochan, Volokh, was actually manoeuvring to take the corps for a rising of his own against the “bourgeois” Directory (a Soviet crime that also encompassed nationalism). He was not court-martialled, and he kept his command. Then, that December, he mutinied in earnest, emptied the army’s treasury, and went over to the Bolsheviks. So the ledger of the republic’s final year reads like this: the disciplined patriot who refused to let his men fight their own brothers was shot; the freelancing schemer whose loyalties already pointed toward the enemy was left in place until he could inflict maximum damage. The state destroyed the man it could least afford to lose and sheltered the one it could least afford to keep.

This is the shape the failure tends to take, and as chaotic as 1919 was, nothing about the lesson is confined to that period. A nation fighting for its survival is perpetually tempted by three errors that wear the costume of strength and are in truth the same weakness. The first is to centralise: to read every gifted, popular, inconvenient subordinate as a rival to be removed, and to mistake the removing of rivals for the exercise of command. The second is its mirror: to keep close those whose interests are quietly braided with the adversary’s, because they are pliant, or useful, or simply already inside the room. A state that manages both at once, discarding its most capable for being difficult while protecting its most compromised for being convenient, is not consolidating power. It is hollowing itself, and naming the hollow “unity”. The enemy at the gate rarely has to do as much damage as a leadership that has confused its own authority with the survival of the thing it governs.

The third error is of a different kind, and it belongs to a different party. The first two are pathologies of the state. This one is not the state’s at all but the dissenter’s: the error of those who see the state’s failures clearly and conclude that being right entitles them to stand apart. It is the failure to grasp that in wartime it is better to be part of a flawed solution than to be right and unable to influence anything, or worse, to let oneself be used to weaken the national cause that the state, for good or ill, represents. I set it apart, and last, because it is not the equal of the other two. The state holds the power of life and death; the dissenter usually holds only himself. But Bolbochan’s story is exactly where that smaller failure turns lethal, which is why it earns a place beside the others.

As far as Bolbochan is concerned, the task is to hold the conqueror of Crimea and the author of an unwise (sort of) coup in the same hand, and to draw from his story not a grievance but a discipline: that the internal argument, however righteous, must never be allowed to win at the cost of the war. There is more than one rotten sea, sadly.

Ultimately, the wise heroes of the story are the soldiers at Balyn, who refused to shoot one of their own.

Sources and further reading

V. Sidak, T. Ostashko, T. Vronska, Полковник Петро Болбочан: трагедія українського державника [Colonel Petro Bolbochan: The Tragedy of a Ukrainian Statesman] (Kyiv: Tempora, 2009).

Serhii Hromenko, Забута перемога. Кримська операція Петра Болбочана 1918 року [The Forgotten Victory: Petro Bolbochan’s Crimean Operation of 1918] (Kyiv, 2018).

Borys Monkevych, Слідами новітніх запорожців: Похід Болбочана на Крим [In the Footsteps of the Newest Zaporozhians: Bolbochan’s March on Crimea], a participant’s memoir (Lviv, 1928; repr. New York, 1956). Full text online at chtyvo.org.ua and diasporiana.org.ua.

Tetiana Ostashko, “Болбочан Петро Федорович,” Енциклопедія історії України [Encyclopedia of the History of Ukraine], vol. 1 (Kyiv, 2003).

Mikhail Bulgakov, The White Guard (1925), the novel whose “Bolbotun” is the literary source of the Russian “monster” myth.

“Bolbochan, Petro,” Internet Encyclopedia of Ukraine(encyclopediaofukraine.com), an English-language overview.

Since 2022 it has been difficult to avoid the pull of an inverse question: if you understood how the Kremlin’s dictionary was built and why it worked, could you use the same understanding to work against it? That question has found little appetite in the West, sometimes for ideological reasons, more often simply because the field has been overwhelmingly focused on defence. How do we protect ourselves from Russian disinformation? How do we identify it, label it, counter it?

I think we are getting even that defensive fight wrong. And I want to try to explain why, albeit with the caveat that Western-facing Russian information operations are not primarily my domain. My work has focussed on Russian domestic propaganda and, in more recent years, on information ecosystems in occupied Ukrainian territories. What follows is a first attempt to apply a framework developed in that context to a problem I have watched from the side.

That framework, which I have been developing under the working name of dictionary theory, starts from a simple and far from original premise: that Russia’s information confrontation is not primarily about the content of what is communicated, but about the reference frame through which all content is interpreted. The shared definitions, connotations, and narrative rules that determine what reality means.

For over a decade, Western governments, tech platforms, and think tanks have waged war on Russian disinformation. They built fact-checking units, trained citizens in media literacy, pressured social media companies to remove false content, and monitored Kremlin-linked accounts and mapped troll farms.

None of it has been harmful but none of it has really solved the problem at hand, because we are fighting in the rear and ignoring the real battle. We have been focussed on the false words Russia introduces while Russia is busy rewriting the dictionary.

Graffiti in Kharkiv by Hamlet. ‘Reality reminds me of a film I haven’t watched’

Look it up

When you don’t know what a word means, you look it up in a dictionary. You trust what it tells you. Russia wants to rewrite that dictionary, so that when you look up “invasion” it says “liberation,” when you look up “sovereignty” it says “the right to defend your civilisation against Western destruction,” when you look up “Nazi” it says “anyone who resists Russian power.” This is about lies but it is also about something much larger, more expansive, than lying. Ultimately, you are being given definitions and definitions often feel like facts.

But a dictionary alone is not enough to construct a version of reality. You also need grammar, or the rules for how words combine into meaning. Grammar tells you who acts and who is acted upon. Who can be a victim and who cannot. What causes what. What is natural and what is aberrant. Russian ‘information confrontation’ is thus not just about rewriting individual definitions but also about rewriting the rules for how those definitions fit together into a picture of the world.

This is why our counter-measures fail. Those who work to identify Russian disinformation and label it false are using their own established dictionary and grammar to do so, their own categories of truth and falsehood, their own narrative frameworks for what counts as legitimate and what counts as propaganda. They are checking Russia’s words against their definitions and finding them wrong.

But Russia is not trying to win an argument using our definitions. It is trying to replace the terms. While we are busy demonstrating that specific Russian claims fail our tests, Russia is quietly rewriting the tests. It is like correcting the typos in a nonsense verse: fluent, careful, and entirely beside the point.

Russia understands information as an environment, rather than a product that is true and false. I think the Russian understanding is superior to our own. As such, in the Russian approach, the lies are not the primary element, changing the dictionary is. That is how to alter the shared stock of meanings, connotations, and narrative rules through which we interpret everything we read, see, and hear. Once the dictionary is changed, true information produces false conclusions. The target’s own mind does the work. You cannot fact-check a dictionary.

How We Process Information

We can map this onto what happens when information enters your mind.

First, perception. Something happens. Your grandfather dies in front of you. That is a fact. You register it. Russia does sometimes work at this level, including seeding doubt about whether events occurred at all, or whether what was directly witnessed can be trusted. MH17. Bucha. The maternity hospital. This is real, and it matters. But it is also the most fragile part of the operation and the part our existing defences handle best. Flat denial requires constant maintenance and tends to fail when evidence accumulates. The more important and more durable work happens on what comes after perception.

Second, categorisation. Instantly, automatically, without thinking. Is this a threat or an opportunity? Is this person a friend or an enemy? Is this event justice or aggression? Is your grandad’s death suspicious or expected? A tragedy or a relief? You are not consciously deciding. You are using categories you already have, built up over years of experience, culture, education, and the stories you were told about how the world works.

Third, narrative. Isolated facts are unstable. The mind wants a story, something that explains where this event came from, what it means, and what comes next. You reach for the nearest available story that makes sense of what you have seen.

Fourth, moral judgement. Good or bad. Deserved or outrageous. Worth fighting or worth ignoring. This follows automatically from the category and the narrative.

Your grandfather dies. That is the fact; you have perceived it, registered it, the death is not in dispute. But how he died, why he died, what his death means, what death itself means, all of that depends on the interpretive layers that follow. On culture, values, religion, the stories your community tells about suffering and loss and who is responsible. Russia does not need to tell you your grandfather is still alive. It needs to control what his death means.

Russia is not primarily operating on the facts you receive. It is working on the categories and the narrative rules, the dictionary and the grammar through which all facts are processed. If it can shape those, it does not need to lie to you. It feeds you real (albeit perhaps partial) information, and your own mind, using a corrupted interpretive structure, reaches the conclusion Russia wants or at least a conclusion amenable to Kremlin interests.

This Is Not New.

What I am describing is not a novel discovery, nor is it improvisation. It is doctrine with a lineage stretching back decades.

The Soviet mathematician and psychologist Vladimir Lefebvre developed the foundations of what would become known as reflexive control between 1963 and 1967. Put simply, reflexive control is the art of causing an adversary to make the decision you want using their own rational faculties. You do not override their reasoning. You shape the inputs to their reasoning (so the premises, the categories, the available narratives) so that their own cognition produces your preferred output. The most powerful operation is invisible to its target, because it works through their own mind rather than against it. Lefebvre’s formal mathematical model had its critics. For a start, it assumed rational actors and required detailed knowledge of the opponent. For years the concept was too unorthodox to be named openly in Soviet military publications, with officers writing around it using phrases like “control of the enemy.” It was not formally adopted by the Soviet military until the late 1970s. But the underlying insight survived the critique of the model and outlasted the Soviet Union itself. Contemporary Russian information doctrine is recognisably built on the same foundation: shape the inputs, and the target’s own mind delivers the output you want.

The Soviet active measures tradition shared the same underlying logic, though it developed more through practice than theory. It explicitly distinguished between disinformation (tactical falsehoods for specific purposes) and the deeper strategic operation: shaping the ideological correlation of forces, the conceptual environment in which all information lands. The forgeries and planted stories were almost secondary. The real work was cultivating what felt natural, inevitable, and common-sense across foreign audiences, working on their dictionary from the outside, over time.

As Jānis Bērziņš and other contemporary analysts of Russian military doctrine have documented, information confrontation occupies a central place in Russian thinking about modern warfare; there is a (messy) thread running from Slipchenko’s theorisation of sixth generation and no-contact warfare through to current doctrine. The objective is to shape how reality is perceived and interpreted, and through that, to shape what actions feel possible, legitimate, or necessary.

Nataliya Bugayova and Kateryna Stepanenko at the Institute for the Study of War put it directly: the ultimate target of Russian cognitive warfare is not belief but will. Russia does not need you to believe it. It needs you to doubt yourself, doubt your institutions, doubt whether action is possible or worthwhile. Once will is degraded, physical capability becomes irrelevant. The West can outspend Russia ten to one and still be paralysed.

But reading this through the lens of my research into the Russian domestic information space, I suspect that paralysis is not Russia’s desired end state but perhaps rather the precondition for something more ambitious. You cannot install a new dictionary into a space that already has a functioning one. First you have to discredit the existing dictionary, making it feel contradictory, exhausted, or corrupt. Once the shared vocabulary of liberal democracy feels hollow, the space opens for alternatives. Not necessarily Russia’s own dictionary wholesale, but dictionaries more amenable to Russian interests, more sceptical of Western institutions, more sympathetic to sovereignty as a trump card, more willing to see Western power as the primary aggressor in the world.

Surkov’s domestic operation illustrates what this clearing process looks like before the alternative is offered. His management of Russian political space in the 2000s was not primarily about propaganda; it was about managed ontological confusion. By simultaneously funding and undermining every political tendency, by making irony and cynicism the dominant register of public life, by ensuring that no stable shared reality could form, he guaranteed that the Kremlin remained the only available source of coherence. Paralysis was not the end state so much as it was the clearing operation that made the Kremlin the only reliable dictionary, the only actor with a grammar coherent enough to be adopted wholesale.

Three Similar Wars

In my reading, Russia is running the same approach in multiple environments simultaneously but at very different stages of completion, and with very different degrees of freedom. The method is the same: discredit or exhaust the existing dictionary, create the conditions in which an alternative feels necessary, and promote dictionaries more amenable to Kremlin interests into that space. What differs is how much of that work is already done, and how freely Russia can operate.

At home, the operation is about maintenance. The Putin regime has controlled dictionary formation for decades, through curriculum, commemorative culture, state media, and the architecture of public memory. The dictionary does not need to be installed. It needs to be kept in good repair, reinforced by periodic crisis moments, like wars, Western sanctions, or terrorist attacks, that make it feel validated by events. The operation is remarkably light-touch, or it could be, if the Kremlin were not so very paranoid. You do not need to constantly lie to a population whose interpretive infrastructure reliably produces the conclusions you want.

In Europe, the operation is different. Russia cannot control dictionary formation here. It does not usually try. What it tries to do instead is corrupt the existing shared dictionary just enough that it stops functioning. The key targets are the foundational words of liberal democratic vocabulary: sovereignty, legitimacy, freedom, rules-based order. Not to replace them with Russian alternatives, but to make them feel hollow, contested, and hypocritical. To produce not belief in Russia, but disbelief in the shared framework. The goal is paralysis, again not as an end state but as a clearing operation. A population whose shared vocabulary has been sufficiently degraded cannot organise coherent resistance. It is in that condition that alternative frameworks begin to feel coherent and attractive.

Elsewhere, across the Global South, in post-colonial states with long memories of Western intervention, or among sympathetic communities in the West, the operation is different again. Here Russia offers a genuinely competitive alternative dictionary: sovereignty as the supreme value, multipolarity as liberation, the West (or elites) as exploitative or aggressors. This finds real purchase not because Russia created the vulnerability, but because Western conduct did. Russia is working with raw material it did not manufacture and the populations it is targeting often already possess grammars and meanings that partially align with its own.

Russia Is Not the Only Author

Russia did not invent the fractures it exploits in Western societies. The distrust of institutions, the economic grievances, the cultural dislocations are all real, and they were produced by Western conditions, Western choices, Western failures.

This matters for two reasons. First, it means we cannot attribute every dictionary disruption to Russia. To do so is analytically wrong and politically counterproductive; it renders every social grievance as enemy action and every domestic critic a Kremlin asset.

Second, and more important: it means Western societies have agency here. The conditions that make populations vulnerable to dictionary corruption are substantially within our power to address. If institutional trust is the immune system, then rebuilding it is a defence policy as much as a social one. Janis Bērziņš has argued precisely this: that addressing the social conditions which create openings for Russian information operations is not a soft optional extra but a strategic requirement.

Russia is also not the only actor producing alternative dictionaries. Across Europe and North America, domestic far-right movements have independently developed interpretive frameworks that converge substantially with Russia’s preferred vocabulary: anti-liberal, sovereigntist, civilisationally anxious. Russia did not build these movements but where their dictionary overlaps with its own, amplification is sufficient. No installation is required and the operation can run on convergence as much as coordination.

This means the disinformation paradigm has no answer for a large portion of the actual problem. Where there are no Russian fingerprints, there is no Russian operation to counter. But the dictionary corruption proceeds regardless.

The Acceleration

Everything above describes a slow operation. Dictionary corruption, historically, is resource-intensive. Shaping the interpretive infrastructure of a society takes decades. The Soviet active measures apparatus was enormous, involving thousands of officers and decades of patient cultivation, precisely because this work is hard and slow.

Artificial intelligence is ending that constraint. Content that works on this metaphorical dictionary and grammar, or that introduces and normalises particular connotations, narrative frames, and category structures, can now be produced at industrial scale across languages, platforms, and communities simultaneously.

Perhaps the deeper problem is not the volume so much as what volume does to the shared conditions under which dictionaries are maintained and corrected. Dictionaries are not fixed. They are continuously negotiated by communities, through journalism, conversation, cultural production, public argument. When something happens, we talk about what it means, and through that talking, shared meaning is either confirmed or adjusted, or maybe even neologisms emerge. This is how healthy interpretive communities function.

AI-generated content at scale introduces corrupted vocabulary and degrades the process of interpretation itself. When the information environment is sufficiently polluted, and Russian operations like the Pravda network work on exactly that, or when volume alone overwhelms processing capacity, when synthetic and authentic voices become indistinguishable, when the sheer density of competing interpretations makes negotiating shared meaning feel impossible, communities lose the ability to maintain and correct their dictionaries through normal social processes. Our shared vocabulary fragments. The spell-check stops working not because the dictionary was changed, but because the dictionary can no longer be updated at all. And people will start looking for and co-creating their own dictionaries, with connotations offered by Russian-inflected if not outright Russian tools.

This is the clearing operation Russia has historically needed to conduct slowly and expensively. AI does it automatically, continuously, and on the cheap.

We are entering a period in which the pace of dictionary corruption will outrun any counter-measure operating at the content level. Fact-checking, platform moderation, media literacy programmes were all inadequate before. Against AI-accelerated dictionary pollution they may well become essentially irrelevant. Not wrong, just operating at the wrong level, too slowly, on too small a surface area.

What Might Actually Help

The framework implies its own counter-strategy, even if the details are complex.

You cannot address dictionary corruption by working on content. You have to work on the same level as the attack, namely on the interpretive infrastructure itself.

That means investing in the conditions under which healthy shared dictionaries are maintained. Not just media literacy (the ability to identify false claims) but something harder: the cultivation of what we might call frame awareness, the capacity to notice that you are interpreting rather than simply perceiving. Communities with high frame awareness will not become immune to dictionary corruption, but they may become more resilient to it.

It means taking seriously the domestic conditions (inequality, institutional failure, cultural displacement) that make populations search for alternative dictionaries. These are not soft problems separate from security.

And perhaps most controversially, I think it means developing what I will euphemistically call ‘counter-dictionary operations’: not fact correction, but active work on the shared vocabulary of our own countries and of other countries, including Russia. Understanding which words have been most successfully corrupted. Building interventions that work at the level of connotation and narrative frame, not claim and counter-claim. This is what genuine strategic communication would look like if it were designed for the actual threat rather than the threat we find it easier to measure.

What this looks like in practice is still being developed. In my own (closed) work on Russian information space I have used a concept I describe as the ‘mythscape’, or the distinctive architecture of myths, historical grievances, and narrative frames through which various Russian audiences interpret reality. I have been testing a methodology built on a simple premise: that messages designed to reach Russian audiences must first be fluent in the Russian dictionary and grammar for interpreting the world. Not to endorse that grammar, but to speak from within it. Messages that arrive in foreign grammar are blocked at the door, via a phenomenon psychologists call psychological reactance, the automatic resistance triggered when a message feels alien or threatening to one’s interpretive framework. Messages that are fluent in the existing grammar get through. Once inside, they can do work that externally framed counter-messaging cannot. The dictionary does not have to be replaced all at once. It can be worked on from within.

Finally, we need a frank reckoning with AI. Not primarily as a tool for generating disinformation (that framing is too narrow) but as an accelerant for the structural degradation of shared epistemic conditions, of shared reality itself. The policy question is not just how do we label AI-generated content but how do we preserve the social processes through which communities maintain shared meaning in a high-volume synthetic environment. We do not yet have a serious answer to that question.

The Lesson From Orwell

George Orwell is responsible for me teaching myself Russian at the age of twelve, and so I return to his essays and his fiction in the hope that he will help me work my way out of this mess (studying Russia). Thinking about his writing on the Soviet Union, on language, on propaganda, and above all about Nineteen Eighty-Four, what he is writing about is not primarily lies. It is the destruction of language. The systematic reduction of vocabulary until certain thoughts become literally unthinkable. Newspeak removes the words you would need to believe something different.

Russia’s operation is not Newspeak, certainly not in the West. It arguably already is in Russia but in the West it does not reduce the dictionary, it just corrupts it through the selective cultivation of certain connotations, certain narrative frames, certain categories and the emotions attached to them. The dictionary still looks full, the spell-check still runs. Everything comes back correct.

That is why we have struggled to say precisely what is happening, even as we see something bigger than just disinformation is happening. It is why we cannot find the right words. And why, until we start working on the dictionary rather than the words, we will keep shooting in the dark while more and more of our own side join the enemy.

The Battle of Hogland (Gogland) was fought in its waters in 1788 as Russian and Swedish fleets contested dominance of the Baltic approaches. It changed hands again after Finnish independence and again after World War Two. Since that point, it has belonged to the Soviet Union and then Russia. History kept returning to it because geography kept making it relevant.

In 2014 Russia began building a radar station on Gogland and constructing helipads. Paratrooper and special forces exercises increased in the area. More recently there are signs the Russians are laying fibre optic cable from Vyborg to the island, connecting a militarised forward node to the mainland with hardened, jam-resistant communications infrastructure.

In December 2025 Russia formally expanded its 336th Naval Infantry Brigade, based in Baltiysk in Kaliningrad, into a full division and the ninth new manoeuvre division it has formed since 2022. The Leningrad Military District was reconstituted, officially in response to Finnish and Swedish NATO accession.

The conversation Russian activities ought to generate is about what this trajectory means and what Europe’s actual capacity to respond to it is. The conversation we are having instead is whether Narva is next.

Admittedly, I have a vested interest here. I am very fond of Narva, of its abandoned House of Culture, of the beautiful sea vistas to the north, and even of its familiar (to me) roll call of khrushchevka apartment blocks. But ‘is Narva next’ is the wrong question and the way that it dominates so much commentary tells us quite a lot about how much people are, even as they attempt to address a potential risk, still trying to avoid the core problem.

Twelve years ago, it was just Crimea. Then it was just Donbas. Then it was just Ukraine, not quite real Europe, not quite us, the threat always small enough to be someone else’s. Narva is the latest version of that habit. Whether or not Narva specifically is next matters far less than the pattern, which is consistent and observable: Russia is reconstituting offensive capacity on its western flank, and Europe’s ability to respond to the environment this war has already created is, in theory adequate and in practice not.

Two weeks ago I was in London at a series of small closed talks with senior Western military figures. One gave me genuine hope, though it felt too slow. The others left me close to tears of frustration. There is something particularly enraging about hearing British military personnel explain, with calm authority, why they could not possibly do this or that, when Ukraine is doing all of it. Ukraine is doing it without being a major economy, without nuclear capability, without the geographical cushion of being an island.

The reluctance is not entirely cynical. Most of the people making these decisions, military and civilian, do not have a clear picture of how exposed we actually are. If drone warfare came to European territory tomorrow, the kind of persistent, low-cost attritional pressure Ukraine has lived under for three years, most European countries could not respond coherently. The systems are not in place. The protocols do not exist. The trained collective reflexes are absent. We saw all that with the attack on Galați and some of the weird psychological defence mechanisms that tried to blame a Russian drone hitting a Romanian apartment block on Ukrainian jammers. I guess because if it is Ukrainian jammers, there is the option to talk to the Ukrainians, use leverage, etc. much less scary than facing the reality that Russia is attacking Ukraine and pretty interested in seeing what it can get away with in the rest of Europe too. It is Trumpian reasoning: blame the person you can (or hope to) bully rather than the person who is to blame.

Ukrainian commentators have suggested one of the reasons the Romanians were unable to intercept the incoming drone was because some of the land is privately owned and permission has not been given for military activity in this airspace. Peacetime regulations meet Shaheds and the Shahed wins. And this is just in isolated cases. What about if there are 50 drones? Or 950 ?

During my meetings in London, it was very clear that the basic procedural architecture for deciding who goes after which drone, how fast, on whose authority, has not been built in allied militaries. The technology is largely available. The knowledge of how to use it under pressure, distributed across units that have practiced it until it is automatic, is not.

Across Europe the pattern holds. The obstacle is not money or even, up to a point, political will in any simple sense. It is the learned helplessness of institutions that have not had to fight for their survival in a very long time, combined with a genuine failure to grasp how far behind we already are.

Under lethal selection pressure, Ukraine has had to build what we might call an epistemic infrastructure for modern warfare: the collective cognitive architecture that allows units to operate in a fully surveilled, fully contested battlespace. The drone is the most visible part of this and consequently absorbs most of the attention. But the drone is not the point. The point is everything that has grown up around it. Who calls which intercept. How decision authority moves when the threat picture changes in minutes. What signature management looks like at the level of an individual soldier. How a unit reads an airspace and decides collectively, fast, whether to move or freeze. How operational coherence is maintained when every action is visible and the margin for hesitation is zero.

None of that can be manufactured via a wonder weapon. It lives in people who survived by learning it and in units that developed the right reflexes through contact with the actual threat. It was built mostly from the bottom up, through volunteer formations under genuine selection pressure. Groups that developed bad collective cognition for this environment failed. Groups that developed good collective cognition survived, attracted better people, and iterated faster. The flat, decentralised, fast organisational logic that resulted was not designed. It was selected for, in the most direct sense of that phrase.

European defence establishments have watched this happen. They have often taken briefings, commissioned reports, visited Ukrainian units, and returned home to announce procurement frameworks and capability reviews that will theoretically deliver results sometime around the end of the decade. Some of the people giving those briefings know exactly what is being missed. Some of the people receiving them know it too. What follows is performance of learning rather than learning itself, because the institutional incentives point elsewhere. Long procurement cycles, high-end platforms, relationships between ministries and large contractors that are politically durable regardless of battlefield relevance: these are what European defence bureaucracies are built around. A Leopard or an F-35 is legible as serious defence spending in a parliamentary debate. Investment in the distributed, fast, cheap, iterative capability this war has shown to be decisive is harder to present on a slide and serves fewer institutional interests.

The cultural problem runs deeper than procurement. European military institutions are still organised, in their bones, around the idea that uncertainty should be resolved before action is taken. Ukrainian tactical culture has been forced into the opposite. Decisions get made fast, under incomplete information, because waiting for clarity is its own form of defeat. That adaptation cannot be trained into existence in an exercise environment. The consequence structure is different. People attend differently when inattention kills them. The knowledge is in the body as much as the mind, and it accumulates through contact with the real thing.

The most direct way to begin closing this gap would be to get large numbers of European military personnel into Ukrainian units as participants rather than observers, and to bring that knowledge back distributed through the institutions in people whose intuitions have been recalibrated by the actual war. Nobody with an official position will say this in public. The political reasons are not trivial. But the cost of not doing it is real and it compounds every month.

Russia is reconstituting offensive capacity on its western flank. It is hardening forward infrastructure, expanding its Baltic Fleet ground forces, and building the communications architecture for sustained operations in the Gulf of Finland corridor. The pace is constrained by Ukraine, which means time remains. The trajectory is not ambiguous.

Europe is rearming. It is spending more, meeting targets, announcing commitments. It is also rearming for a version of war that no longer fully exists, on procurement timelines too slow for the rate at which this conflict is evolving, and without the epistemic infrastructure that fighting in this environment actually demands. The gap is institutional, cultural, and cognitive, and it is not closing at anything like the required speed.

The serial containment habit, it is just Crimea, it is just Donbas, it is just Ukraine, it is just Narva, has never been analysis. It has been permission. Permission to treat the problem as bounded, as someone else’s, as not quite real enough to require waking up. That permit ran out, years ago. Gogland in the Gulf of Finland has a radar station, helipads, and perhaps soon a new fibre optic cable running to the mainland. It is high time for Europe to get out of bed and open the curtains. We are already late for work.

January

I began contributing fortnightly (Friday) segments on Ukraine: The Latest, focusing on Ukrainian resistance in the occupied territories.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLJnf_DDTfIVCYlsANGtNkzMeM9Fdmqzxr

Gave a talk at Ireland’s IEAA on ‘patriotic policy critics or nationalist opposition?’.

February

Spoke at YES conference on a panel with politicians and military leaders about how Ukraine should respond to U.S. changes of approach. I seemed to upset Boris Johnson but he got over it quite quickly when he realised I am indeed humourless.

Spoke at the Crimea Platform’s Day of Resistance to the Occupation of Crimea

March

Together with Lesia Orobets and military experts, I co-authored a SkyShield plan that was largely incorporated into the Coalition of the Willing’s post-ceasefire planning, though not its pre-ceasefire posture, where it would have been most valuable as a deterrent signal. Also, I am not sure what the Coalition of the Willing is actually willing to do before a ceasefire (which isn’t coming). In any case, I spent time co-authoring it.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/06/european-led-ukraine-air-protection-plan-could-halt-russian-missile-attacks

Was one of the leaders of a ‘Women in Cyber’ networking programme organised by Germany at the CDTO.

April

I delivered a workshop based on a long report I authored analysing Russian security forces across seven border regions and how they are reallocated in response to different threat types. The work was funded by RSI.

I also completed a series of Spotlight papers addressing major foreign policy issues. These papers will be made available on the forthcoming webpage for my Ukraine and Russia programme at the Centre for Statecraft and National Security (CSNS), King’s College London.

https://csns.uk/

May 

I spoke at the Lennart Meri Conference on the need for diplomatic reciprocity toward Russia. If Russia exploits societal fissures in other states, it is reasonable to respond in kind. While the intervention was not public, it is fair to say that it was well received by Baltic and Ukrainian participants, as well as some European attendees, but less so by the Russian and American participants in the room.

June

Together with the excellent Chris Pool (who is also my PhD student, despite being far more accomplished than I am), I co-authored a CSNS brief on repairing Ukraine’s mobilisation system. At the time, the topic was highly sensitive and the brief was not made public. Circumstances have since changed: while there are now newer mobilisation papers that I cannot or will not share due to sensitivity, this earlier brief is no longer restricted.

Mcglynn Pool Repairing Ukraine’s Mobilisation System

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July

I conducted a study for CSNS on Russian official discourse concerning the UK. It confirmed that Russian authorities hold the UK in deep hostility, a sentiment that is largely reciprocated in the UK. An exception is a subset of right-wing “patriots” whose patriotism does not extend to restraining their admiration for dictators—even when those dictators deploy Novichok on our streets or kill British citizens. And some odd types on the far-far-left.

Csnsmcglynn The Uk In Russian Discourse Copy

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August

I joined CSIS’s Russian Roulette podcast to discuss my visits to eastern Ukraine and research on the occupied territories.
https://www.csis.org/podcasts/russian-roulette/jade-mcglynn-update-ukraine

I also spoke at the Lutsk Frontier Festival. I was travelling directly from the east and had spent a significant amount of time with soldiers; while speaking Ukrainian, I accidentally referred to Russia as Русня. That is largely all I remember of the event, as it was interrupted by an air raid siren and we moved to the basement.

In addition, I took part in a Ukrainian-language discussion of Maryna Starodubska’s excellent How to Understand Ukrainians.

https://booklya.shop/products/book-how-to-understand-ukrainians-a-cross-cultural-view-marina

September 

I spoke at ABCD in Tallinn and gave a talk in Paris at Coruscant on forms of entrapment in the occupied territories, arguing for a more nuanced, observational approach to understanding identity under conditions of total occupation.

Spoke at the YES 2025 annual meeting in Kyiv Is Russiа Winning or Collapsing?

October 

Together with Ukrainian software developers at Trypillian, I began developing a programme to measure the impact of information campaigns on target audiences. As of December, it is in testing mode, with more to come.

November

I wrote my first piece for the relaunched Kennan Institute, where I am honoured to be a non-resident fellow. Inevitably, it focused on Kharkiv:

https://www.kennaninstitute.org/articles/memorial-of-glory 

I delivered a keynote at a conference in Oslo on how Russian memory politics forms an integral part of the ideas and ideology driving Russia’s war in Ukraine.

I also spoke at Matt Hefler’s Intelligence Studies conference on sovereignty and civil–military intelligence in the occupied territories.

December

I published a paper for CSNS with Scott Martin on civilians detained by Russia in the occupied territories, arguing that illegal detentions and enforced disappearances constitute seven interlocking crimes against humanity.

Csns Russia's Pipeline Of Persecution Ukraine

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I also authored three academic book chapters, largely focused on the occupied territories; co-authored an academic article under review; delivered a range of lectures; and briefed a wide array of senior government officials, diplomats, military personnel, and politicians across Europe and the United States. Alongside this, I spent inordinate amounts of time in my favourite cafés in Kharkiv developing plans that almost never came to pass but, on the rare ocassion they did, they achieved something I will feel proud of when I am old and finally get to catch up on sleep.

Next year, I will begin writing my next book in earnest, focusing on the occupied territories, and will continue travelling to and supporting Ukraine. This support will primarily take the form of developing and advancing ways to undermine Russia’s efforts to destroy Ukraine and to dismantle a European way of life that, while imperfect and in need of significant reform, remains vastly preferable to anything Russia—or the current US administration—would seek to impose. I also hope to organise my time more effectively in order to expand my public-facing work, particularly through my new Ukraine and Russia programme at CSNS, and in order to sleep.

From a European perspective, the substance of what passes for “negotiations” is not an effort to reach a settlement that ends the war. Instead, it is a political mechanism primarily useful for managing Western domestic politics and reducing the harm to Ukraine posed by shifts in U.S. policy.

The Kremlin’s own rhetoric underscores this reality. Putin talks frequently (and unreliably) of how easily Russia is destroying Ukrainian elite formations on the battlefield. In a wide-ranging interview with TASS Sergei Naryshkin, head of the SVR, delivered a pretty standard line:

Настанет тот день, когда Вооруженные силы Украины потеряют способность организованно вести оборону и вынуждены будут сдаться. И тогда уже никто не сможет помешать мирному урегулированию украинского конфликта

The day will come when the Ukrainian Armed Forces lose the ability to defend themselves in an organised way and will be forced to surrender. And then nobody will be able to hinder the peaceful regulation of the Ukraine conflict any longer

Source: https://tass.ru/politika/25951187

(In other parts of the interview he describes a really awkward party with representatives of MI6, CIA and 42 other agencies to celebrate the 105th anniversary of the founding of the SVR. Armando Iannucci needs to make a film of this: https://tass.ru/politika/25954169)

Essentially, Russia thinks Ukraine will collapse first and then negotiations can begin. Until then, I would say that we have talks but not negotiations. These discussions may serve a purpose, including limiting how much harm a change in U.S. policy could bring to Ukraine and how much advantage they give to Russia. But they are not negotiations designed to produce a real peace agreement.

For Ukrainians, I imagine this is a difficult reality to navigate. Many correctly discount diplomatic statements as performative, yet Ukraine genuinely needs a ceasefire and a pause in fighting to regroup militarily, preserve lives, and stabilise. Given Merz, Von der Leyen and others’ impressive, if rather ugly, success in ensuring 90 billion euros in financial support for Ukraine, Europe is clearly committed to not letting Ukraine collapse. But that won’t be enough.

The core question is this: who will impose conditions that compel Russia to the table in earnest? Will anyone? Unless such conditions are imposed, whether through proper enforcement of sanctions, decisive military setbacks, or through unified, credible deterrent postures by Europe these talks will continue to revolve around managing external audiences rather than resolving the war.

In the meantime, the effort must remain focussed on ensuring the symbolic aspect of these talks does not lead to concrete harm for Ukraine. Right now, the only way they would bring the war closer to an end is if they created conditions to force Ukraine to surrender and even that is still very unlikely, given Ukraine’s ferocity in defending its right to exist and not live as an enslaved people under occupation.

Success in this phase should be judged modestly: by whether European states can avoid sudden systemic catastrophe on the continent and create space to take bolder action. Absent a coherent political will, the process will continue as a ritual of engagement without strategic progress.

Peace-making requires agency over outcomes and it requires realism, not Realism. I have no idea what the next year will hold but unless European strategy towards imposing costs on Russia changes considerably, I don’t think it will bring even an imperfect peace for the people who actually deserve it: Ukrainians.

The original Dmitriev proposal read like a boorishly obvious trap designed to weaken Ukraine and prepare for a future war. Yet even that awfulness wasn’t enough to garner ringing endorsements from the Kremlin. Putin eventually mustered up a bit of unconvincing enthusiasm. Russian telegram muttered about betrayal and ‘goals of the SMO’. Since then, Ukraine and the US Secretary of State have decidedly altered the plan. So I imagine the next step is for Russia to reject it.

All of which is useful insofar as it solves the immediate problem of this dreadful plan. But it still leaves us with an ever more pressing issue: how to agree a ceasefire that Ukraine really does need. Instead of seriously engaging with that question, the Europeans produced a counter proposal so weightless it might as well have been crowdsourced on social media. Although that is unfair, “Russia should just leave Ukraine though” is at least internally consistent as a position. Insisting on Ukrainian sovereignty and then saying Russia should be able to impose an ‘800,000’ troops limit and not ‘600,000’ is just bizarre. Europe is not behaving like a serious geopolitical actor.

By the middle of 2023, the signs were already clear that the war was developing according to a difficult trajectory. I remember privately raising questions about what a Ukrainian defeat would mean for Europe. Admittedly, I was doing it because I hoped that by examining the consequences, European leaders would change their approach. I still hope that.

Back then, those conversations were often dismissed or treated as a kind of political contamination. Policymakers preferred to congratulate themselves for proving Russia wrong about Western fickleness. But Russia was right: Western resolve was exactly as fragile as Moscow believed. Bluntly, even in 2022 we only supported Ukrainians because they fought like heroes from Norse myth and got results. We didn’t support them because it was the morally right thing to do.

In the interim, I have struggled to find any deep and serious internal government work on what happens if Ukraine loses. Instead, everyone is busy playing fantasy ceasefire, sometimes with even more absurd questions about ‘post-Ukraine Russia’.

Like me, European officials are very good at complaining. They complain about Washington. They complain about Kyiv. They complain about each other. But complaint is not policy. Action is.

Europe refuses to use frozen Russian assets. It refuses to commit to sustained mass-scale financing for Ukrainian defence production. It refuses to engage with viable plans like even a partial SkyShield. It refuses to confront the political costs of real support. The so-called coalition of the willing is willing to do absolutely nothing of any importance. Defence budgets rise in theory and get spent on nonsense we can only pray will work. Meanwhile, Ukrainian factories - or those unlucky enough not to be fuelling the rampant corruption around the Office of the President - live hand to mouth. There is continual battlefield innovation that is never scaled, or is scaled only in Russia. Europe needs to deliver massive R&D investments into the only country that knows how to fight: Ukraine.

Unfortunately, wars aren’t won by issuing statements of concern.

Europe is a spectator to its own security

Ukraine desperately needs a ceasefire, but not the ones Russia (via Witkoff or not) is offering. The country is exhausted; manpower is worryingly low; trust in military administration (as opposed to the heroes fighting) is thin. Everyone hates the Territorial Recruitment Centres that take men from the street. Kyiv’s internal problems, including serious alleged and proven corruption around the Office of the President, make the situation harder. These are all the more reason Europe must step up and apply some muscle, not step back.

Meanwhile, Washington is an embarrassing circus. Nobody knows what is going on and Floridian realtors rewrite treaties and thirty-year-long security architectures via the Google Translate function. I have had sympathy for European efforts to court Trump on the assumption that they were buying much-needed time (admittedly after a good decade and a half of ignoring U.S. presidents telling us they were pivoting from Europe) to develop and implement a strategy. In fairness, there are sprouting signs of strategy but that isn’t enough. Too much, including PURL has largely been reactive to the U.S.’ whims. Nobody believes in their own charm as much as a Western European diplomat so perhaps some officials really thought they might win the U.S. around. For the rest, it is probably a more basic case of avoidance dressed up as diplomacy.

In their talks with Secretary Rubio, the Ukrainians didn’t bother discussing the European counter plan. And why should they? Europe has allowed itself to be sidelined to the point where its own security is now being negotiated without it.

A better plan is possible, of course, one that protects Ukrainian sovereignty and European security. But it requires Europe to pay actual costs, political, financial, and strategic, and Europe is not willing to do that, or not enough European leaders are. Too many European governments still behave as if losing Ukraine would be unfortunate but manageable. This is fantasy. The destruction of Ukraine would reshape Europe’s security architecture for decades, and not in Europe’s favour.

Nothing about Europe’s position today was inevitable. It is the product of decisions not taken, responsibilities avoided, and illusions clung to for too long. It is the product of arrogance, of not realising Ukraine is the only security guarantee this continent has, and of a bizarre teleological liberalism that sees liberal democracy has somehow feted to win out according to the laws of history.

If Europe continues down this path, a settlement will eventually be imposed that reflects the interests of Putin and whichever Americans happen to be influential at that moment. Europe will then complain loudly and indignantly, as if it played no part in the outcome.

We do not need more European complaints. Europe’s problem is not that it lacks options. It is that it refuses to use them.

The text of the speech below has been lightly edited for clarity.

Memory Traps. Russian historical propaganda at home and abroad

“For our country, it is a matter of life and death, a matter of our historical future as a nation. This is not an exaggeration” With these words on the morning of his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, President Vladimir Putin framed the invasion of Ukraine as a civilizational struggle, a battle for history itself. Its stakes are visible daily in Ukraine, from the bombing of children’s hospitals in Kherson to the dismantling of Holodomor memorials across occupied territories.

This special issue makes a major contribution to understanding lesser studied contours of that battle. It offers one of the most detailed portraits yet of how the Putinist memory regime operates: centralised yet locally adaptive, built on interplay between federal directives, regional actors, and transborder partners. Russia’s memory regime is metamorphic, its narratives mutate as they travel, absorbing regional symbols and emotions without losing strategic purpose. This flexibility is what makes the system so effective: its narratives ensnare local actors in memory traps, frameworks that may appear diplomatic or patriotic but ultimately bind them to Kremlin-defined history.

The case studies trace how the Great Patriotic War narrative is localised through youth movements like Yunarmiia, embedded in schools and libraries, and exported through commemorations in Norway. They reveal a dual dynamic: the Kremlin’s drive to securitise history and its dependence on local and foreign partners to make that project emotionally persuasive. In doing so, the collection moves beyond a Kremlin-centric lens, showing memory politics as a multilevel system linking indoctrination, occupation policy, and foreign influence into one authoritarian mechanism of historical governance.

In my talk today, I build on this foundation to examine how these mnemonic mechanisms operate under conditions of war and occupation. Drawing on the collection’s mapping of institutional architecture, I focus on operational logic: the way narratives, rituals, and emotional cues are deployed as instruments of cognitive warfare (that is, warfare targeting perception, emotion and reasoning, rather than physical destruction), shaping how people perceive reality and legitimising violence as historical continuity. To show how historical narratives are being operationalised as tools of strategy - to mould domestic opinion, assimilate occupied lands, influence foreign societies, and justify a brutal war as the continuation of a sacred past—I want to trace how Russia’s “memory war” is structured and why it matters, following its trajectory from the Kremlin’s domestic memory regime to the battlefields of Ukraine, and, of course, via Norway.

The Domestic Memory Regime in Putin’s Russia

Inside Russia, the state has institutionalised a preferred past. The Great Patriotic War sits at the centre—elevated to the level of civic religion with its own rituals and reenactments.

Replica Reichstag at the Moscow Victory Museum (own photo, 2018)

In 2014, state media and officials reframed the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbas as a second liberation struggle, as Russia once again saving the world from fascism. Nowhere was this clearer than in the St George’s Ribbon, originally a tsarist symbol, repurposed in the early 2000s into commemoration, or rather celebration, of the Great Patriotic War. In 2014, it became a portable sign of allegiance to Putin’s narrative: wearing it meant standing with “our grandfathers who defeated Nazism,” and therefore with Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine. By linking present conflict to sacred wartime memory, the Kremlin collapsed distinctions between past and present, turning remembrance into mobilisation. These rituals function as memory traps, converting remembrance into obedience: to honour one’s ancestors is to accept the Kremlin’s version of the past. This conflation was undergirded by changes already underway to sacralise Kremlin views of the past and delegitimise others’.

In 2020, constitutional amendments enshrined the duty to “protect historical truth” and prohibited “denigrating” the Soviet victory in the Second World War. These measures were backed by laws that punish “false” interpretations of history, effectively turning deviation from the official narrative into an act of disloyalty, even treason.

Education has been a central arena for this memory politics. Russian school textbooks and curricula now advance a single, patriotic storyline that culminates in the victory of 1945 and flows seamlessly into the present-day Russian state. Post-2022 textbooks deliver a tightly curated narrative of national greatness and grievance. Yet, as Helge Blakkisrud observes in his article Teaching the Great Patriotic War, this process began long before 2022.

The state’s historical narrative extends well beyond the classroom. Popular culture—state-funded films, novels, and television dramas about the war—reinforces this mythic version of history, often featuring “treacherous Banderites” as the eternal enemy. Youth movements play a similar role. From The Movement of the First, which instils political loyalty in the youngest citizens, to Voin camps where children are taught to shoot at images of Kyiv, the cultivation of militarized patriotism is pervasive. At the top of this pyramid stands Yunarmiia, the “Young Army” movement launched in 2016, which now claims nearly 1.85 million members. With its uniforms, drills, oaths, and memorial pilgrimages, it braids local pride into the national story, as explored in the article “The Little Motherland”.

Since 2022, these long-standing initiatives have been folded into a broader restructuring of education under the banner of vospitanie, or the moral and civic “upbringing” of youth. The introduction of school “curators,” the weekly “Lessons About the Important,” and a network of state-sponsored cultural foundations mark this intensified effort to align education with state ideology. Yet it is important to remember that before 2022, this was often a process of co-optation as much as coercion. In my DPhil fieldwork on the co-construction of memory narratives, community historians and reenactors, even those wary of state monopolies on the past, accepted government grants, honorary titles, and jobs, falling into traps.

Where they resisted, state-backed “memory GONGOs” (government-organized NGOs) stepped in to take over their initiatives. The Immortal Regiment exemplifies the coercive muscle applied. The regime quickly grasped the power of this grassroots ritual—originally launched in 2012 by opposition journalists as an apolitical act of ancestor remembrance—and by 2015 had absorbed it into a state-run spectacle of patriotic devotion. The ritual’s emotional intimacy, grounded in the near-universal experience of family loss during the war, made it a potent tool for national mobilization.

Alternative memories, however, are systematically suppressed. The Sandarmokh mass grave in Karelia—analysed in the article Contested Memories of the Violent Past in a Border Region: The Memory Politics of Stalinist Terror and Finnish Occupation in Post-Soviet Karelia—is emblematic. Once recognized as a site of Stalinist executions, including many members of Ukraine’s prewar intelligentsia, Sandarmokh has been reinterpreted in official discourse as a Nazi atrocity. Soviet crimes are thus inverted into a narrative of eternal Russian victimhood and heroism, a historicisation of what might be called the “Bucha tactic.”

From the classroom to the parade ground and television screen, the regime advances a single, sacred myth: Russia as righteous victor, forever engaged in the continuation of its “Great Patriotic” struggle. This myth provides both the moral engine and the ideological ammunition for the ongoing war against Ukraine.

Imposing the Memory Regime in Occupied Ukraine

When Russia seized territories (Crimea, parts of Donbas, and, since 2022, far more), it exported its memory regime to overwrite Ukrainian identity. Education was targeted first: Ukrainian curricula purged; Russian textbooks imposed; libraries “cleansed.” Since 2025, Ukrainian-language classes are effectively banned. Teachers, academics, and librarians are sent to Moscow and St Petersburg for re-training in an imperial storyline. Under occupation, deviations are treated as “extremism” or “terrorism” and any competing narrative as an IPSO. But bluntly, nobody pays much attention to the destruction of the past in the occupied territories - indeed nobody pays much attention to the destruction of the present, to the estimated 20,000 deported children, 15,250 civilians detained, to the 203 black sites where they are held (OHCHR). There are no journalists able to work in the occupied territories, no journalists to tell us of how the past is destroyed, how the present is destroyed, and how the future is being destroyed.

The militarisation of childhood is an even more intense version of the Russian example. As well as local offshoots of Yunarmiia and the Movement of the First, there are separate entities like “Youth of the South” and special initiatives aimed at deukrainianising pupils. Children march, learn first aid and weapons assembly, salute flags, are drilled in tactics and drones. Joining becomes de facto mandatory; parents resisting face threats that their children may be taken as “social orphans” or sent to boarding schools. Large swathes of the occupied territories are living through total collapse of the water infrastructure but resources for indoctrinating children can always be found. For anyone unclear as to why, I would recommend the words of Retired Lt Colonel Vorontsov, head of the Volgograd VOIN military club for children (Vanguard):“If you want to defeat your enemy, raise his children.” There are 1.5 million children in the occupied territories. Russia is raising them for an army to be used against Ukraine, and against those of us lucky enough to live further West.

Occupation shifts the earlier dynamic of “interplay” into domination. What metamorphosised under pressure at home is mimicked by force in Ukraine. The aim is erasure and replacement. Holodomor memorials are vandalised or removed; Revolution of Dignity symbols stripped; street names revert to imperial or Soviet figures or honour contemporary loyalists. In Melitopol, a monument to Taras Shevchenko was torn out; in Mariupol, after the city’s destruction, a Pushkin bust appeared near mass graves. Sites of Ukrainian mourning are co-opted for Soviet-style ceremonies, even as commemorations of Ukrainian tragedies are forbidden.

Removal of the Holodomor Memorial in Mariupol (Photo from Petro Andryushchenko, 2022).

As in the Soviet period, carriers of memory and identity, local historians, museum curators, clergy, community leaders, were are the first to face intimidation, arrest, deportation, torture, execution. I find it distressing to visit memorials and museums in honour of those tortured, murdered or imprisoned by the Soviets across eastern Europe. It is distressing not just because of the horror of the past but because I know of people going through exactly the same ordeal today, right now. Professionals who stayed under occupation to look after their patients, sentenced to fifteen years for reading pro-Ukrainian Telegram channels, the middle aged ladies disappeared for posting pictures stating a legal fact: their city is in Ukraine. Russia’s goal is to erase everything Ukrainian that cannot be folded into “Malorossiya”, Russia’s simulacrum of what it will allow Ukraine to be, a simulacrum it has been trying to impose on Ukraine for centuries, consuming and appropriating Ukraine’s history so it can embellish its own legacy and insist Ukrainians and Russians are “one people.”

Chapel of the Archangel Michael (Own photo, 2025)

The story of the occupation is reduced in the media to a war over territory, but it is about identity and controlling – not respecting – history. The shrapnel scars on the chapel of the Archangel Michael, in Kharkiv’s monument to glory, a huge WWII memorial complex inaugurated in 1977, testify to that. In 2022, the Russians bombed this complex, and several other memorials to the Great Patriotic War and Holocaust, happy to destroy history in pursuit of owning its meaning.

Exporting the Narrative: Memory as a Tool of Foreign Influence (with Norway)

But of course, the Putinist regime cannot simply destroy memory in countries or areas it does not occupy, control, or bomb night after night after night. And this brings us to the profound value of the special issue we have gathered to discuss. In foreign countries, those it perceives as truly foreign rather than ‘the near abroad’, Russia adapts its memory toolkit to influence foreign societies. It can be conciliatory or confrontational, but the aim is constant: narrative dominance and borrowed moral authority. Abroad, Moscow sets new memory traps, inviting others into shared commemoration that masks manipulation—an emotional snare disguised as gratitude. Moreover the aggressiveness of its ‘outreach’ tracks the aggressiveness of its own literal militarisation of historical narratives, as the article on Empowering Memories of Liberation: The Kirkenes Red Army Liberation Commemorations in Norwegian–Russian Relations (1994–2019) sets out.

Focussed on Kirkenes/Finnmark where in October 1944, the Red Army liberated the northeast, the authors show how commemorations shifted after 2014. Long modest and confidence-building, after 2014 the tone and scale shifted: larger Russian delegations, patriotic memory tours from Murmansk (veterans, Yunarmiia, reenactors). On Norwegian soil, they displayed St George’s ribbons, Soviet flags, sometimes portraits of Stalin. Messaging folded WWII into the present: warnings about “neo-Nazis” from Ukraine and the Baltics; pleas to resist the “falsification of history.”

The operation sought a memory alliance with northern communities, playing subtly on regional feelings of neglect by Oslo, while implying that scepticism toward Moscow betrays shared memory. The Russian officials sought to use emotionally loaded symbols and repurpose wartime gratitude to soften resistance to Russia and to its geopolitical agenda.

Similar patterns can be seen in the politicisation of graves and monuments abroad. Modern Russian officials have reframed the bleak history of Soviet POWs in Norway, representing them in exhibitions within Russia to fit the martyrdom-for-Victory template and downplaying complexities like Stalin’s indifference to, and often outright suspicion of, returning POWs. This process is detailed in the article Militarizing Soviet POW Memories. Elsewhere, when Soviet statues are moved or renamed—Tallinn 2007 is the point at which memory assumed a physical role as an instrument or justification of acts of war - Moscow presents outrage as defence of “historical truth.” In fact, it is a defence of their right to wage memory wars on the rest of us, to export whatever they can of their domestic, criminal, approach to academic freedom and investigation. Even on Svalbard, official “Immortal Regiment” events have deliberately blurred remembrance with current war propaganda.

Across contexts, Russia toggles between bonding (“shared sacrifice, shared memory”) and browbeating (“you are ungrateful fascist revisionists”). The constant thread is their understanding of history as a political instrument and never as a scholarly pursuit of what happened in the past. As the Project Nordland Railroad article explores – and so many more examples from across the continent confirm - it has long been difficult to build any form of institutional study of history with Russian institutions; because this is not about the past but about politics in the present.

Memory as Cognitive Warfare

Why memory? Because historical narratives tied to identity and trauma are processed viscerally—they come pre-loaded with moral valence. For many Russians raised on tales of the Great Patriotic War, the word “Nazi” will trigger an instant reflex of revulsion and resolve. This is what psychologist Daniel Kahneman calls System 1 thinking: fast, automatic, emotional. Its counterpart, System 2, is slower and deliberate but often defers to System 1. Propaganda works best when it keeps people in System 1, flooding them with feeling before reason can intervene. In this sense, the Kremlin’s narratives are not just information operations but cognitive memory traps, designed to capture reflexes before reflection can occur.(I have many issues with the term cognitive warfare but that can wait for a different post).

The Kremlin has long cultivated this reflex, spiking “Nazi” mentions in state media at key moments—2014 and 24 February 2022. Repeated analogies between Ukraine and WWII primed the public’s intuition so that when Putin promised “denazification,” many Russians accepted it without question. The claim felt true because it fit a familiar emotional frame. This is the essence of cognitive warfare (as we define it in Western doctrine): shaping perception so that even falsehoods appear plausible and instinctive. Decades of state-curated memory created that lens. As Karen-Anna Eggen observes, Russia’s information confrontation is “a strategy for the weak,” achieving results brute power cannot.

Domestically, unresolved traumas, spanning the Soviet collapse, the chaos of the 1990s, and the silence over Stalinist crimes, left an identity vacuum. Putin’s regime filled it with an imperial narrative of pride, grievance, and collective narcissism: you are the descendants of victors; the world fears you for your strength; critics of your past seek to destroy your future. This taps classic System 1 drivers—pride, fear, anger—creating an interpretive prism through which millions now view reality. It leaves “no space for the future, only a reproducible past” that shelters people from the present. Faced with complexity, many revert to a moral script: Ukraine is run by fascists/Russia’s enemies.

Cognitive psychology shows that identity and emotion often trump facts. Persuasion succeeds through resonance, not evidence. The Kremlin exploits this brilliantly, amplifying themes such as “Russia the besieged fortress” or “gratitude to our grandfathers,” then letting emotional alignment do the work. Once a story feels right, people rationalise contradictions through motivated reasoning. Russian media thus functions as co-creation, testing and amplifying what resonates, mapping the population’s psyche and sowing compliant instincts.

Abroad, Russia applies the same memory tropes. Branding Ukrainians “Nazis” stirs old anxieties in Europe; invoking the Red Army’s liberation of camps or guilt-trips German audiences. These messages bypass analysis by appealing to inherited memory and identity. They also offer cognitive closure, or simple moral order amid uncertainty. For citizens unsettled by war or hardship, it is easier to believe in a grand patriotic struggle than confront moral dissonance. Cognitivedissonance theory explains the appeal: it’s less painful to adjust perception than core belief. In other words, forced to choose between changing your prejudices or ignoring reality, most people will ignore reality. The memory frame turns casualties and isolation into “sacrifices for a just cause.” Abroad, non-Russians fixated on Western hypocrisy or war crimes find in Russia’s narratives a ready excuse to avoid moral complexity; Russia doesn’t persuade them it was really about NATO, it just offers enough of a story to license their inertia, providing a cognitive firewall for their intellectual and moral cowardice.

Memory also binds groups. It forges in-groups (“we Russians, victors over Nazism”) and out-groups (“Ukrainians are Nazis; Westerners are Russophobes”). When politics fuses with identity, dissent feels like betrayal. Propaganda links today’s citizens to heroic ancestors, delivering pride (“we honour their victory”) and fear (“if we don’t fight, fascism returns”). It is a potent psychological lock-in against dissent and a lure toward conformity.

In sum, Russia’s memory war functions as a form of cognitive warfare, or at least as what NATO doctrine understands by this term. By continually activating emotional touchstones—WWII grief, pride, fear, love of motherland, it aligns instinct with policy. Once instincts are engaged, counter-narratives face an uphill battle against conviction. Memory thus becomes a weapon to bypass deliberation, secure consent, and prepare the ground for kinetic war, as witnessed in Ukraine.

Ukraine: The Decisive Test of Russia’s Memory War

In Ukraine, every strand converges. From the start, the Russian propagandists described the invasions in 2014 and in 2022 in the language of the Great Patriotic War: “denazification,” “liberation,” “Banderites”. This script shapes conduct. If opponents are “Nazis,” brutality becomes duty. Russian soldiers behave as if they are fighting “Nazis” and “liberating” Ukrainian cities just as the Red Army liberated Eastern Europe from the Third Reich. Think of the Soviet ‘Victory’ flags the Russian invading forces hang up over the quiet Donetsk towns they have obliterated. If you are convinced your enemy is a “Nazi” subhuman, committing atrocities against them or against civilians accused of supporting them becomes easier to stomach. If your enemy has no culture to destroy, what does it matter if you destroy it?

Community cultural centre, Derhachi (Kharkiv Region), 2025.

Yet the officials and propagandists cannot take all the blame. Some must be left for what is de facto the Russian state ministry for religion, but is known as the Russian Orthodox Church. The Russian narrative of a righteous war was enabled by what Dima Adamsky calls “nuclear orthodoxy,” where the fusion of church and the army, especially nuclear forces, works to sacralise national defence and lend metaphysical justification to brutal, terrifying, even world-destroying, violence. This has fed a sense of impunity and zeal among soldiers and paramilitaries, some of whom are, ironically, openly neo-nazi (Rusich, RIM).

The ferocity of Ukrainian resistance – both military and cultural – has so far signalled the limits to Russia’s effort to use memory politics to rewrite the future of our continent. But Ukraine is fighting alone and they are too often alone in understanding the mindset of their invaders. Too many otherwise serious-minded Westerners continue to forlornly search for ways to find common rational ground with Putin and his coterie, unable to accept those in charge of Russia are more interested in misremembered ghosts promising long lost treasure.

The JSPPS special issue I’ve drawn upon provides a broad roadmap to the mechanisms and consequences of this memory war as it will be directly waged upon us. Increasingly, Russia’s most brutal memory war is impacting us directly too. The special issue shows how Russian memory tropes manifest far beyond the Kremlin’s walls. Ukraine is just the most violent theatre of a larger confrontation over the history, identity, and future of our continent.

What Memory Clarifies

This war is rightly analysed through military and geopolitical lenses, yet memory and identity sit at its core. They explain why the conflict began in 2014 and why it will not end quickly. For Russia, control of the past is treated as a precondition for control of the future. The Kremlin’s memory politics are not simply manipulative: they are entrapments. They ensnare publics, elites, and even foreign observers in a web where emotion substitutes for fact and loyalty - perhaps to a proxy rather than directly to the Kremlin - for truth.

What does this demand of us? First, we cannot treat the Kremlin’s historical claims as decorative rhetoric. They are policy. The invasion flowed from a belief — or at least a performed conviction — that Ukraine is an illegitimate state whose very existence threatens Russia’s sacred historical narrative. The methods used, from mass bombardments of civilians to child deportations, consciously echo earlier imperial and wartime campaigns, as if reenacting chapters of Soviet and Russian conquest. This is not incidental. Putin has elevated the stakes to existential and historical terms: if Russia “loses” Ukraine, it loses itself. Under such conditions, traditional “compromise” solutions are structurally incompatible with the regime’s all-or-nothing civilizational framing.

Secondly, recognising the centrality of memory clarifies the international stakes. This is not only about NATO or resources; it is a contest over history and truth in Europe. A Russian victory would validate its imperial narrative, rewrite the history of Eastern Europe, downplay Soviet crimes, and deny agency to smaller nations. It would embolden further memory offensives, already visible toward the Baltic states, Kazakhstan, and Poland. Conversely, Ukrainian success would puncture the Kremlin’s myth. Battlefield outcomes will decide narrative outcomes.

For Ukraine and other states in Moscow’s shadow, this has underscored the importance of memory sovereignty. Since 2014, Ukraine has worked to globalise remembrance of the Holodomor, honour fighters against both Nazism and Communism, and anchor itself in a European rather than post-Soviet memory space. But the results are strategic, not symbolic: a society grounded in its real past is harder to subjugate through a false one. The same holds for us. We must insist on historical fact — that Ukrainians and other Soviet peoples suffered under Moscow, that WWII was an Allied victory not a solely “Russian” one, and that Soviet “liberation” was followed by decades of domination. Uttering the words Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact every once in a while will not help. No country has a pure past and no country has the right to dictate how another country – especially a former colony - should remember their own history.

This special issue of JSPPS is therefore invaluable. Its studies on youth militarisation, cross-border commemorations, the reframing of Soviet POWs, and community pushback show how memory has been securitised across domestic, regional, and foreign arenas. They demonstrate that Moscow’s warnings about “falsification” and “Nazism” were not stray propaganda, but expressions of the same ideology that led to invasion. What began as memory wars over statues, textbooks and anniversaries became kinetic war. Had we treated those early battles over history more seriously perhaps the warning signs would have been clearer.

Peace will remain impossible while the Russian historical narrative denies Ukraine’s existence. Russia’s memory politics are a core component of its neo-imperial project. This project can only be defeated or contained, not appeased.

The guys in 3rd Regiment SOF now have three Mavics, photographed below. They pass on their thanks and appreciation to everyone who donated and everyone who cares about their fight in Pokrovsk direction

For anyone who sent money after 14th August, that will also go directly to the troops although this time heading to Zaporizhzhia direction, where the Russians appear to be diverting more forces in the Polohi direction. Photos and ‘receipts’ will follow.

Thank you so much, the guys and I were really touched!

Ps. Someone has deleted my account on LinkedIn so I guess I won’t be active there for a while)

The money will go towards a fundraising drive I have for DJI Mavic drones, which are desperately needed. They are made in China and China won’t sell them to Ukraine, or makes it as difficult as possible, for reasons that should be obvious. Ukraine has to buy them via Poland, the Baltic states, or other friendly countries. At the moment stocks are running low, which leaves the soldiers severely lacking in situational awareness.

A Mavic 3T

As a friend fighting there told me on Thursday night ‘the guys are basically blind without them. They have no idea what is going on if they don’t have Mavics. You are so vulnerable.’

No drones means no clear picture of what is going on.

Maybe some people expect comments on the Trump–Putin meeting in Alaska. I don’t have anything new to add. Russian propaganda thrives on any sign that Russia is a respected great power that can do what it likes. It’s like Raskolnikov in the early part of Crime and Punishment - convinced he is special, able to cross moral lines without consequence, killing the moneylender and barely noticing the murder of her innocent sister. Her death only features briefly in the novel through Sonia’s sadness and grief. In Russia’s worldview, there are Raskolnikovs who can kill the moneylenders in order to take their undeserved gains for themselves, killing the weak if needed in service of this goal. And then there is the antheap that has to follow the rules.

Collective narcissism is the psychology behind this. It’s a belief that your group is special and morally superior, mixed with a constant sense of being disrespected. That combination creates justification, even need, for aggression to right these perceived injustices. Russia’s version is fragile, grievance-driven, and obsessed with getting “respect” by humiliating others. Military action is how they think they earn that respect: now everyone will finally give us the respect we crave. The Alaska meeting feeds that worldview but nothing will ever sate it. Russia’s collective narcissism is a diseased and dangerous illusion that must be shattered, not indulged - at least if you are interested in peace in any form.

Meanwhile, Ukrainians are abused by the moneylender and killed by Russians. I can’t put up a strong case for the moneylender - or Western hegemony - except in so far as it is in my interest as a Westerner. But I will put up a case for the Ukrainians fighting without the resources they need. Unlike those in power in the west, they are courageous and clear-eyed, make sacrifices for their homes and loved ones, and act on conviction rather than perform and virtue-signal to win whatever passes as political debate these days.

Ukrainian defenders lack Mavics and other resources not because there’s no money coming from Europe (or previously from US), but because too much of the military aid provided by the west is vanity donations - spent on what we want to give Ukraine, or what it is easier to give Ukraine, as opposed to what Ukraine actually needs; eg., overpriced Western-made drones that don’t work, or deliveries that tick boxes regardless of whether they’re needed. You don’t need to be a military expert to work out what’s required, you just need to talk to soldiers and actually want to help them more than you want to help yourself while looking like you are ‘supporting Ukraine’.

The Mavics are a perfect example. There is still no Western analogue, three years into this war, even though the technology isn’t particularly complex. If only all the complicated and intelligent analysis on Trump-Putin could be diverted into solving this far more pressing problem. Ultimately, all the analysis in the world, no matter how well-informed or argued, about Alaska won’t change two truths:

1. Russia wants to destroy Ukraine and will keep trying, as part of its push to restore “great power” status, which will reshape European security in ways that are bad for almost all Europeans. Russia’s methods may adapt (political versus military, etc.), but its aims won’t. That doesn’t mean ‘continue the war’, it means: Russia is the obstacle to stopping the war.

2. The guys fighting in Pokrovsk need Mavics to hold the city or at least greatly improve their individual chances of staying alive.

So today, I spend another birthday with Ukraine and Russia at war (actually almost all my adult birthdays have been spent with Russia and Ukraine at war), and if anyone would like to wish me a happy birthday, please make it happy by donating to Mavics for Pokrovsk defenders. Sparkly dress donations (for me, not the defenders) can wait for another year.

If you want to help: PayPal to Jade.s.mcglynn(at)outlook.com.

And thank you to everyone who subscribes to the paid version of this Substack. Your subscriptions go towards funding things in Ukraine that I can’t raise money for publicly.

A happy picture of people punting down the river in the sunshine in Kharkiv, July 2025.

There is a Britain that exists only in Russian minds and media. This Britain is decadent, dangerous, arrogant, imperialist, and fundamentally anti-Russian. It is not just a rival but a symbol of civilisational enmity, constructed deliberately and relentlessly as a target.

This symbolic Britain isn’t real. But it serves real strategic purposes: It lowers the threshold for attacks - cyber, informational, even kinetic. And while our National Security Strategy (NSS) and Strategic Defence Review (SDR) do reflect this threat, I worry that too many in British politics and public life still don’t see it for what it is: hostile statecraft, aimed directly at us. The purpose of originally writing the full paper (in my role at KCL’s Centre for Statecraft and National Security) was not to engender paranoia but to help explain what and how Russians say or hear about Britain. How the image and actions of Britain are formed in Russian understandings.

I think that the British public needs to understand the narrative possibilities against which Russians will form their opinions and attitudes towards us. Not to obsess about it or disprove it but just so we can take it on board when assessing related decisions on why the government is investing in defence, why it is helping Ukraine, and so on.

The Research

I used the War of Words software to look at media coverage of Britain in Russian state media, state-aligned media and all Telegram across February 2022 to May 2025. After some cleaning of the data, I analysed 2,570 Russian-language items—state media, Telegram channels, news reports, TV talk shows—containing references to Britain. Being a long-term watcher of Russian propaganda the overall narratives were not new to me, but the rise of open hostility and insistence on Ukraine as the UK’s proxy war were alarming for me all the same. In particular the way Russia blames the UK for its own war crimes against Ukraine was deeply troubling.

Russian information actors do not refer to us with a single name. They use four distinct terms, each doing a different bit of rhetorical work:

• Anglosaxons (англосаксы): Britain as a civilisational and spiritual enemy.

• United Kingdom (Соединённое Королевство): Britain as a legalistic, policy-level threat.

• Great Britain (Великобритания): Britain as a faded empire and moral hypocrite.

• England (Англия): The emotional enemy, evoking Cold War and Crimean War tropes.

Each term carries specific themes—mockery, fear, historical grievance, or open threat.

This narrative construction is about preparing the psychological conditions for confrontation.

Ten Narratives Russia Uses About Britain

Across these references, ten major themes recur:

One. Civilisational Conflict: Britain is portrayed as the cultural source of global degeneracy, liberalism, secularism, moral relativism, and as a metaphysical enemy of “Russian Orthodox civilisation.” This narrative is central to references using “Anglosaxons.”

Two. Historical Enmity: Britain is cast as having plotted against Russia for centuries—from the Crimean War to the Cold War. These aren’t comparisons; they are used as evidence.

Three. Military Interference: Britain is shown as orchestrating war in Ukraine—not as a helper, but as a manipulator using Ukrainians as proxies to bleed Russia. This is how they justify attacks on British-linked infrastructure.

Four. Disinformation and Propaganda: The BBC, human rights NGOs, even The Guardian are described as fronts for British intelligence and narrative warfare. In this view, we stage atrocities, fabricate news, and weaponise morality.

Five. Decay and Collapse: Britain is mocked as a broken society—plagued by knife crime, royal scandals, low birth rates, poverty, etc. The theme extends beyond material collapse into what is described as spiritual and cultural disintegration. British society is mocked as feminised, atheistic, obsessed with identity politics, and disconnected from tradition.

Six. Proxy War Framing: It frames Britain not as an ally of Ukraine but as the principal driver of the war—a state that uses Ukraine as a proxy to damage Russia at minimal cost to itself. According to this narrative, the UK sustains the conflict deliberately, motivated by historical resentment and geopolitical self-interest. Ukrainian lives are depicted as expendable cannon fodder for British aims. The narrative denies Ukrainian agency and sovereignty, portraying the country as a battlefield chosen by Britain rather than a state defending itself.

Seven. Imperialism: Our development work, aid, and diplomacy are depicted as modern colonialism. Britain is seen as an empire in denial—still extracting, still controlling.

Eight. Hypocrisy: Our entire foreign policy is dismissed as duplicitous. Russian media constantly asks: Who are we to talk about war, democracy, or rule of law?

Nine. Covert Operations: Britain is accused of everything from sabotaging Nord Stream to fomenting unrest in Georgia and Moldova. This theme is central to the UK’s portrayal as a subversive enemy.

Ten. Open Hostility: At the most extreme end of Russian strategic rhetoric, Britain is not only criticised or mocked, but openly threatened with destruction. Calls for nuclear strikes on London, the erasure of the UK from the map, and direct punitive measures are now a recurring feature in both state-aligned and pro-war media.

We’ve seen the pattern before, for Ukraine, Moldova, the Baltic States, upcycling and intensification of long-held prejudices and myths to stir up hate, flooding the media space with narratives of grievance, moral superiority, and external threat. That architecture is also consistently directed at the United Kingdom.

Public opinion

Most British citizens remain unaware of the depth and persistence of Russian hostility toward the United Kingdom. Within Russian strategic culture and popular culture alike, Britain is increasingly portrayed not merely as a geopolitical rival but as the ideological architect of Ukraine’s resistance and a centuries-old antagonist committed to weakening, if not destroying, Russia.

A long-term Levada Center time series (2006–2025) shows that the UK has consistently ranked among the top countries seen as unfriendly or hostile to Russia since 2014. After the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and the Skripal poisoning in 2018, perceptions of Britain as a hostile state increased. By 2023, 51% of Russian respondents identified the UK (dark blue in the image below) as one of the most unfriendly countries, up from under 20% before 2014 and placing it just behind the United States (72%) as Russia’s primary enemy. In 2025, the USA (light blue in the image below) predictably dropped in the ratings while Germany (orange) overtook the UK.

The Institute for Contemporary Analysis of Russia (IKAR) provides further corroboration. In late 2022 polling, the UK ranked behind both the U.S. and Poland among NATO countries seen as hostile to Russia. However, by January 2025, this had shifted: 29% of respondents identified the UK as the most hostile NATO country toward Russia, second only to the aggregated “all NATO countries” category (32%).

At the same time, Ukraine itself is seen as less unfriendly than in previous years. In Levada’s 2023 polling, only 26% of Russians identified Ukraine as among the top five hostile states—down from higher percentages in 2014–2022 (see Levada table above, Ukraine is yellow). This is likely a consequence of Russian propaganda portraying Ukraine as a “brother nation” hijacked by Western puppeteers. The below is a good example of how Russians project blame for their own war crimes onto others:

[…]во что Украину превратили эти англосаксы. Они будут этим англосаксам мстить, безжалостно мстить. За погибших родных, за разрушенные города, поля и так далее будут украинские батальоны. И вот все это будет стоять у дверей Европы, и Европа будет без танков, без всего остального. Еще ПВО пускай привезут, чтобы у них ПВО поменьше. Но ПВО они не отдают.

Look at what the Anglosaxons have turned Ukraine into. The Ukrainians will take revenge on them—ruthless, unforgiving revenge. For the dead, for their shattered cities and scorched fields—it’ll be Ukrainian battalions delivering that payback. And all of it will be right on Europe’s doorstep, while Europe stands there without tanks, without anything. Let them send over their air defences too—so they’re even more defenceless themselves. But no, they won’t give those up, will they?

These perceptions are not without consequence. As Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shown, consistent rhetorical rage can escalate into violence. Britain should expect ongoing cyberattacks, targeted disinformation campaigns, and small-scale kinetic actions (e.g. sabotage, arson, or proxy acts) to intensify. The UK’s Strategic Defence Review rightly identifies the need for a “whole-of-society” approach and for “widening participation in national resilience.” But for this strategy to work, the British public must be aware of the intensity and persistence of Russian hostility. Awareness does not mean alarmism, it means clarity, especially since such hostility is likely to persevere beyond Putin.

The United Kingdom is viewed as a core strategic adversary. This hostility is structural, not circumstantial, and it manifests across military, cyber, cognitive, and symbolic domains.

Here is what I think we should do:

1. Support Ukraine Relentlessly Because It Makes Us Safer

The most effective way to weaken Russia’s ability to harm the UK is to ensure it fails in Ukraine. A militarily and economically degraded Russia is less dangerous, regardless of its intent.

· Understand this will not make Russia like us—it may even increase hostile messaging—but it will constrain what Russia can do;

· Helping Ukraine is not benevolence; it is national defence - helping the country fighting the biggest threat to the UK is obviously a good idea.

2. Engage in Asymmetric Reciprocity

We should not try to out-lie the Kremlin because that is a tall order. But we can and should use truthful messaging to destabilise its control over information inside Russia and among its global sympathisers.

Recommendation: Design a sustained offensive information campaign built on disruptive truths tailored to audience beliefs and sensibilities - in Russia, at home, and abroad.

· For left-leaning audiences in Russia and beyond: focus on Russian racism, repression, and extreme wealth gaps;

· For right-leaning or illiberal audiences: in Russia and beyond highlight uncontrolled migration, family collapse, drug use, and military desertion.

This is not about changing minds (we will fail in any such endeavour). It is about disorienting the Kremlin’s own efforts to use emotional beliefs and responses against us.

3. Close the Information Gap: Public Awareness as a National Security Priority

At a time of fiscal pressure and political scrutiny over foreign aid, the government must clearly communicate why defending Ukraine and undermining Russian aggression directly serves the UK’s national interest. While Russia is the most significant hostile threat to Britain, the scale and intensity of the threat is not widely understood by the public. Most citizens remain unaware of the intensity of anti-British sentiment embedded in Russian elite and popular discourse or of the scale of hybrid threats already targeting the UK.

Recommendation: Launch a serious public education and deterrence initiative, led by national security—not public relations.

· Educate the public, especially parents, about Russian hybrid and cognitive tactics, including recruitment via encrypted apps, gamified “tasks,” sabotage, and the manipulation of vulnerable individuals, especially youth;

· Publicise the real consequences of complicity, using the Ukrainian model: highlight sentencing for sabotage and espionage, warn parents, and make clear the risks behind “easy money” offers;

· Promote digital hygiene and critical media literacy through accessible toolkits, drawing on Finland’s multiliteracy model and adapting it for UK audiences;

· Establish clear and secure public reporting channels for suspicious recruitment efforts, sabotage planning, or disinformation incidents.

· Public awareness is a democratic obligation. In an era where war is waged across cognitive, digital, and social terrain, the British public must not be the last to know they are already on the battlefield.

4. Unify Counter-Disinformation Efforts

The UK’s current handling of disinformation can at times underestimate its strategic function. Russian cognitive operations are not soft-power nuisances; they are a key operational capability within hostile statecraft, designed to shape the information environment, degrade institutional legitimacy, and prepare the battlespace ahead of cyber or kinetic acts.

Recommendation: Form a dedicated cross-HMG Counter-Cognitive Operations Unit under the Home Office’s State Threats Systems leadership.

5. Develop Our Understanding of Russia’s Threat Ecosystem in the UK

Current UK understanding of Russian hostile activity is heavily weighted toward cyber, kinetic, and diplomatic domains. Yet many of the Kremlin’s most effective operations operate through sociological vectors: identity, trust, grievance, and fear. To understand and counter these threats, the UK needs targeted, academically grounded research that maps how these influence structures operate within British society, including:

· Mechanisms of recruitment and tasking;

· Diaspora dynamics: What roles do different segments of the Russian-speaking diaspora in the UK play in either facilitating or resisting hostile state activity? How do fear, family ties, or media consumption shape their responses?

· Comparative exposure: Which other Western states are targeted in similar ways? Are there shared vulnerabilities, or lessons?

· Perceptions of Russia in the UK: What do British citizens believe about Russia and Russians?

· Grievance amplification and narrative uptake: How are Russian narratives received, modified, or resisted within different UK communities?

Understanding the human terrain of Russian threat operations is essential for credible policy.

Conclusion

Britain must accept that it is a permanent Russian target. So long as the UK supports NATO, Ukraine, and a rules-based European order, the Kremlin will view it as an obstacle to be undermined. This will not change unless Russia itself changes.

We need measures for an age in which war and peace are no longer binary and in which Britain is already under attack across that spectrum. Russia does not need to like us. But it must learn to fear the cost of targeting us.

Donations:

Please donate to these unmanned on the ground vehicles that save wounded Ukrainian defenders and can also be mounted with machine guns to kill Russian invaders and occupiers. Better for technology to fight and suffer than Ukrainians.

https://send.monobank.ua/jar/3dh33n2YpP?fbclid=IwQ0xDSwL2wXFjbGNrAvbBaWV4dG4DYWVtAjExAAEe1ooqdUhwj7J7ZD-oTrPeegpnwCOZbWW2z_ZaAUh_DA9Z1a0RhJSlOspD6jc_aem_U_mpuUg2cvp1I6mfHWk-Ew

While this may appear to be a signal of diplomatic movement, it is not a development. It is a manoeuvre: designed to fracture (what remains of) Western consensus, delay meaningful action, and recast Russia as a reasonable actor seeking peace. But the core reality has not changed: there are no underlying conditions for peace. That isn’t to say Ukraine can and will fight on forever, come what may. I am too close to the fighting to indulge in romanticism. It is more that the conditions for a peace that is not capitulation (and Ukraine is too strong to accept that) still need to be created.

Moreover, even if Putin were to seek peace, it is far from clear that the Russian state, economy, or social fabric could withstand it.

Over the past two years, the Russian economy has become militarised and sanctioned into dependency on war. Military production now drives GDP. Defence-sector employment, direct budget subsidies, and sanctioned parallel markets all hinge on continued conflict. A halt in military spending would risk mass unemployment, inflationary collapse, and the exposure of long-suppressed structural vulnerabilities in banking, logistics, and industrial supply chains.

The Russian security apparatus, already expanded and emboldened, would have no credible peacetime role. Hundreds of thousands of demobilised soldiers—many traumatised, others radicalised—would return to a society that neither values nor accommodates them. Veterans are not treated as heroes by a society that has tried its hardest to ignore the horror of a war conducted in their name and with their acquiescence. For many Russian soldiers, continued war would offer more meaning, stability, and income than any peacetime future.

Put simply, Russia is not ready for peace—economically, politically, or psychologically. Any ceasefire would be used not to end the war, but to reconstitute the means to continue it.

Western Policy Should Focus on Shaping Conditions, Not Chasing Signals

Given that there are no structural conditions for peace, the policy of Ukraine’s allies must focus on altering the underlying balance of power. This means denying Russia the tools it is using to generate leverage—especially in the air.

Russia’s current strategy relies on three pillars:

1. Persistent infantry attacks with heavy casualties but strategic pressure.

2. Gliding bombs that devastate frontline towns and trench networks.

3. Long-range missile and drone attacks targeting civilian infrastructure to create humanitarian crises and pressure migration.

The third pillar is where the West can intervene most directly and effectively—without crossing into escalation or offensive warfare. A coalition-imposed safe haven inside Ukraine, via a Sky Shield over uncontested Ukrainian airspace offers a way to neutralise Russia’s long-range strike advantage and reduce the downstream effects of infrastructure degradation, refugee displacement, and nuclear risk.

What SkyShield Achieves

1. Infrastructure Stabilisation and Civilian Protection

By intercepting cruise missiles and drones over Ukraine’s west and centre, SkyShield would preserve energy, water, and transport systems that are critical to survival and governance. It would prevent additional blackouts and reduce the pressure that drives forced displacement.

2. Nuclear Security

Ukraine’s three operational nuclear power plants generate about half the country’s electricity. Several have come under Russian attack. This would reduce the risk of radiological disaster—not only for Ukraine but for the European continent.

3. Refugee Pressure Reduction

Current projections estimate hundreds of thousands, if not millions, more refugees in 2025–2026 if Russia’s aerial campaign continues unchecked. Using SkyShield to create a safe haven would allow millions to remain in place, reducing both humanitarian cost and political pressure on frontline EU states.

4. Rebalancing Ukraine’s Military Resources

Ukrainian air forces currently divert scarce capacity to defensive missions. Having a safe haven would allow them to refocus on countering Russian glide bomb platforms, supporting infantry, and reinforcing tactical flexibility.

5. Strategic Signalling Without Escalation

By conducting all operations from NATO territory, using defensive rules of engagement, and operating over non-contested Ukrainian airspace, the initiative avoids direct confrontation with Russian forces. Precedent from Syria and the Baltic states shows such arrangements are sustainable and stabilising.

There Is No Peace to Preserve — But There Is a War to Contain

When looking to resolve an eleven-year-war as multifaceted as Russia’s war on Ukraine and with centuries of violent, imperial history of occupation and conquest, we cannot assume that peace is the default and that military support delays its arrival. In reality, there is no peace to delay. What Western inaction preserves is not stability, but strategic advantage for Russia.

A Safe Haven does not end the war. It does not force Russia to negotiate. But it does change the calculus: it reduces Ukraine’s vulnerability, preserves its territorial resilience, and signals that the airspace—and by extension, the state—is not fully up for destruction. In other words, it creates conditions and a landscape in which meaningful negotiations can emerge.

There are no conditions for peace because Russia has no incentive, no capability, and no structural readiness for peace. It has built a war economy, a war society, and a war justification system.

SkyShield is not a maximalist solution. It is a pragmatic response to this reality. It preserves what is salvageable, protects what is critical, and creates space—physical, strategic, and psychological—for Ukraine to survive and eventually shape its own terms.

We cannot end this war yet. But we can limit its most destructive tools. And we can prepare for a time when a durable pause (if not total end) to the war becomes thinkable and realistic. Talking won’t achieve that until the facts on the ground change. When the facts change, Putin might change his mind. But not before.

Soviet war memorial. Kamyanka. March 2025. Own Photo.

Kamyanka, in Ukraine’s Kharkiv region, no longer exists in any meaningful sense. What stands in its place is a shell—rusted and dusted ruins, cratered soil, broken homes. Not one house was left undamaged during its Russian occupation in 2022.

At the centre of this wreckage stands a Soviet-era memorial to the Second World War: a stone soldier atop a platform of crumbling dates, “19__ – 1945.” The “41” has been chiselled off. Not in an act of vandalism or historical desecration but as a defence of historical truth —it’s a correction. For Ukraine, World War II began in 1939 with the Nazi invasion of the west of country (then part of the Polish Second Republic). In late September, western Ukraine was occupied by the Soviet Union under the terms of the Molotov Ribbentrop Pact. The Soviet ‘Great Patriotic War’, beginning in 1941, conveniently omits the part where the USSR helped start World War II.

This is not a local dispute over dates—it’s the front line of a broader conflict over history itself. Russia has turned its memory of the Second World War into a strategic doctrine. Since the early 2000s, the Kremlin has elevated the Great Patriotic War into the sacred core of state identity. It supplies moral legitimacy to foreign policy, domestic and transnational repression, torture. Victory in WWII is not just a story from the past—it’s a system of thought. One that defines Russia as perpetually righteous, perpetually besieged, and perpetually entitled to reshape the present through its version of the past.

Like all mythologies of the past, the Russian one is aggressively selective. As noted, it begins in 1941, omitting Stalin’s earlier alliance with Hitler. It casts “Russia” as the lone victor, who has the exclusive right to decide whether the millions of Ukrainians, Belarusians, Tatars, and others who fought and died should have that sacrifice recognised. And it ends in triumph, bypassing the mass desertions, gulags, forced deportations, and a reassertion of empire. It is history rendered in greyscale—except where its sharp edges can be weaponised.

Mine warning sign. Kamyanka. March 2025. Own photo.

The Immortal Regiment exemplifies this mobilisation. Originally a grassroots memorial march, it was co-opted by the state in 2015. Citizens march through streets—both in Russia and in Western cities—carrying portraits of WWII relatives, sometimes genuine, sometimes invented. The message is not remembrance but mobilisation. The dead are summoned into formation once again to lend legitimacy to the present. You marched with your grandfather in Berlin; now your children will do the same in Bakhmut. To question this is to betray your lineage.

Russia does not commit violence despite history, but through it. The occupation of Mariupol is likened to the liberation of Berlin. Filtration camps for civilians are rationalised as “denazification.” The mass graves and torture chambers of Izium and Olenivka are buried under the moral residue of 1945. Memory, in this system, is not an ethical act. It is a tool of impunity.

But Russia is not alone in its distortions. Western societies indulge in their own selective mythologies. Germany’s postwar identity rests on its confrontation with history, yet that confrontation has often privileged Russian suffering while sidelining Ukraine’s. The result? Strategic paralysis. Tanks delayed not out of pacifism but out of a hierarchy of remembered pain. Ukraine—ravaged under Nazi occupation—is treated as a footnote to a history Russia has successfully monopolised.

Britain and the U.S. lean on a different kind of myth: the idea of WWII as a moral war. One fought to save the Jews and defeat fascism. That version simplifies a far more complex reality—hesitant interventions, cynical diplomacy, closed borders to refugees, and geopolitical calculations that often (if not always) had little to do with moral clarity. These myths still shape policy. They offer a comforting lens through which to interpret new wars—especially ones we are reluctant to fight.

In both cases, memory flatters rather than instructs. It makes liberal societies poor students of history—drawn to analogy over analysis, commemoration over confrontation. It is easier to light candles for past victims than to reckon with the realities of new ones. Easier to speak of “never again” than to recognise “again” when it comes.

The blue tarpaulin of UNHCR. Kamyanka. February 2025. Own photo.

Kamyanka’s scarred monument tells a different story. Chiselling away “1941” is not about erasure. It is about asserting the right to one’s own past. To demand that history be honest, even when inconvenient. That is precisely what makes it dangerous—not to Ukrainians, but to the Russian identity that is so invested in controlling Ukraine and the Great Patriotic War.

Russia, for all its brutality, understands something that much of the West has forgotten: memory shapes ontology. It shapes how people see the world, what they believe they are owed, and what they are willing to sacrifice. Russia has an ontology. A bleak one, rooted in imperial grievance and historical exceptionalism—but it acts on it. It believes history justifies conquest, that borders are provisional, and that identity is to be imposed, not chosen.

Much of Western Europe, by contrast, mistakes its teleology for a strategy. Liberal democracy is still, inexplicably, presumed to be the endpoint of history—inevitable, universal, self-reinforcing - rather than a stale belief reinforced by political correctness. Some politicians still even speak of the “rules-based order” as if it were natural law, rather than a project requiring defence, discipline, and conviction. Rules do not enforce themselves. And history does not bend toward justice without pressure.

Liberalism is not a law of gravity. It is a choice. A fragile one. And right now, it is losing to systems that know exactly what they are.

In war, ontology beats optimism. Russia rewrites history because it knows where it wants the past to lead. Until we stop pretending we stand outside of history—and start recognising our own ontology—our ill-defined future will remain vulnerable to missiles and to the myths in which they are wrapped.

This world is no longer speculative. It is reality. The Trump administration is gleefully dismantling the last scaffolding of U.S. global leadership. Europe is fragmented, fatigued, and fearful. Many pretend that American leadership is merely going through a rough patch. It isn’t. A new world order is upon us. And we can either fight for the right to live as we choose—or prepare to live under the terms of a new, illiberal order. Since Western Europe appears unwilling to do the former, what follows may prove useful: a guide to the world we now inhabit, through the lens of the Russian doctrine that foresaw it.

These strategic texts present a coherent vision for a post-Western order, constructed around five foundational pillars: civilisational pluralism instead of universal norms; absolute sovereignty instead of supranational governance; traditional values over liberal pluralism; balance-of-power politics over universal rights; and the prioritisation of force over law. Taken together, these pillars form the ideological backbone of Russia’s strategic ambition—and an indictment of a liberal world order in retreat.

If civilisational pluralism is the cornerstone of Russia’s imagined future, then civilisational equality is its legitimising logic. Russia rejects the concept of universal norms or values, particularly those shaped by the West. Instead, it promotes a Huntingdonian world in which distinct civilisations —Eurasian, Islamic, Western, Asian—exist on equal footing.

“Russia… is a unique country-civilisation and a vast Eurasian and Euro-Pacific power.” (FPC §4)

“The Russian Federation considers it legitimate to increase its role in the world as one of the sovereign centres of global development, performing a historically unique mission.” (FPC §5)

“The cultural and civilisational diversity and other objective factors accelerate the process of shifting… geopolitical influence and promote the democratisation of international relations.” (FPC §7)

This is not a defence of cultural diversity—it is a rejection of liberal universalism itself. Russia’s civilisational pluralism is packaged, somewhat deceptively, to undermine the West’s claim to define “progress,” “democracy,” or “freedom” for others. Instead, Russia sells a world in which no culture may impose itself on another—and where the West is cast as the chief ideological aggressor. Of course, Russia delivers a final product rather different from the one you originally bought.

Central Kharkiv. April 2025. Own photo.

If civilisational equality is the principle, then sovereignty is the mechanism. Russia’s worldview is structured around absolute sovereignty—not as legal independence alone, but as a shield of cultural and ideological autonomy. It opposes any supranational authority—such as the EU, NATO, or international courts—that could constrain a state’s internal affairs or values.

“The sovereign equality of states… is the basis of a just world order.” (FPC §6)

“Strengthening state sovereignty is a condition for the stable development of the Russian Federation.” (NSS §12)

“Any attempts to impose alien ideals and values on a country—especially through interference in domestic affairs—are unacceptable.” (NSS §47)

In practice, this means rejecting international law when inconvenient, ignoring court rulings, and treating multilateral treaties as tools of Western domination. Sovereignty becomes a kind of moral immunity—a license to act without regard for international norms, so long as one is strong enough to enforce it. In this system, sovereignty is not a universal right; it is a privilege conferred by power.

From this foundation of power-bound sovereignty emerges a third pillar: traditional values, defined explicitly in moral and spiritual terms, and cast as an existential alternative to liberal pluralism. Russia claims to be the final stronghold of a moral order under siege by the West.

“Russia is a stronghold of traditional values that are the foundation of all mankind.” (NSS §87)

“There is a need to protect and preserve traditional Russian spiritual and moral values… which are under threat from foreign ideological and information influence.” (NSS §86)

“The imposition of destructive neoliberal ideological attitudes… runs counter to traditional spiritual and moral values.” (FPC §8)

These values are closely tied to patriotism, religion, family, and historical identity. Liberal ideals—such as gender equality, LGBTQ rights, secularism, and multiculturalism—are not just viewed as policy disagreements, but as threats to civilisational integrity. Yet the reality behind this rhetoric is deeply contradictory. Just as Donald Trump—so often cast as a defender of Christian America—is far removed from the Christian values he claims to uphold, Russia’s invocation of traditionalism is hollow. Divorce and abortion rates remain among the highest in the world. The Russian Orthodox Church, far from being a moral guide, glorifies war and incites murder. Minority faiths, particularly Protestants, are harassed and repressed.

Church destroyed by Russia in Staryi Saltyv. Own photo. April 2024.

Russia’s so-called values are not principles—they are instruments. They serve as political weapons, used to stir up illiberal sentiment among those fearful of modernity and globalism. This moral framing is not about shaping Russia’s domestic future; it is about presenting an alternative global pole to liberalism, designed to appeal to like-minded governments and disillusioned publics. It is not moral renewal, but ideological realignment, grounded in authoritarian control.

All of this leads naturally to the rejection of universal rights in favour of power-based legitimacy. Russia explicitly opposes the liberal conception of human rights as defined by the UN and Western democracies. Instead, it calls for a return to the Westphalian model: a world in which states set their own rules, and legitimacy is derived not from moral claims, but from strength.

“Russia supports the establishment of a system of international relations based on a fair balance of power.” (FPC §6)

“The culture of dialogue in international affairs is degrading… there is an acute lack of trust.” (FPC §9)

“The Western countries are attempting to replace the international legal system… with a rules-based order created without equitable participation.” (FPC §9)

In this model, human rights are seen as instruments of Western interference. The very notion of universalism is framed as a form of soft empire—ideological colonialism dressed up as diplomacy. Russia claims to be defending an alternative system, one rooted in negotiated spheres of influence, pragmatic deal-making, and an unashamed realism that does not pretend to moral superiority.

But I would rather live in a world of hypocrites than nihilists. If norms and law are stripped of moral weight, then force becomes the final arbiter. At its core, Russia’s doctrine is unapologetically militarised. It sees power—not treaties—as the guarantor of sovereignty, identity, and survival.

“The role of the power factor in international relations is increasing.” (FPC §11)

“The destruction of the arms control treaty system… increases the risk of collisions between major states, including nuclear powers.” (FPC §11)

“Russia will defend its right to existence and freedom of development using all means available.” (FPC §14)

This is a concept that legitimises pre-emptive war, hybrid operations, cyber attacks, and nuclear threats. It views legal frameworks like the Geneva Conventions or the UN Charter as hypocritical instruments of Western dominance, and therefore not binding. In the emerging order Russia envisions, law is a function of power. Peace is what the strong impose. War is not a failure of diplomacy—it is diplomacy by other means.

Russia as Moral and Strategic Leader

Taken together, these pillars form the basis of Russia’s claim not just to autonomy, but to global leadership. It presents itself as more than a participant in this emerging order—it claims to be its architect.

“Russia… has a decisive influence on the formation of a new architecture of international relations.” (FPC §5)

“It performs a historically unique mission aimed at… ensuring peaceful progressive development of humanity on the basis of a unifying and constructive agenda.” (FPC §5)

“Russia’s civilizational identity… is a source of moral leadership.” (NSS §88)

Moscow casts itself as the guardian of a post-liberal world, the patron of an order built not on alliances or values, but on civilisational destiny. It offers no blueprint for better governance—only a pole of opposition. Its power lies not in what it creates, but in what it defies. In this vision, Russia’s leadership is not earned through legitimacy or inspiration, but through resilience, tradition, and confrontation. It is not an alternative system—it is the end of systems.

If Russia’s strategic doctrines lay out the pillars of a post-liberal world order, then the concept of civilisational sovereignty is the architecture that ties them together. The term may sound benign—even inclusive—evoking ideas of cultural pluralism and national independence. But as Russia uses it, civilisational sovereignty means something quite different. It is not a celebration of diversity. It is a rationale for hierarchy and domination that shapes our new world order.

This is the most disturbing—and revealing—aspect of Russia’s foreign policy doctrine: its predictive power. Russia did not force this world into being; it understood its direction. As the liberal international order weakened, Moscow articulated a coherent alternative—not as a utopia, but as a diagnosis. It foresaw the breakdown of universalism, the return of spheres of influence, and the reassertion of hard power as the ultimate arbiter of legitimacy. What once seemed ideologically radical now looks like cold, clear-eyed realism.

At the heart of this vision lies a simple idea: not all sovereignty is equal. While the UN Charter enshrines the equal sovereignty of all nations, Russia’s doctrine implies a stratified international order in which power and civilisational identity determine status. In this world, Russia is not a nation-state—it is a civilisational pole, a unique cultural-geopolitical entity with a historic mission. As the Foreign Policy Concept declares:

“Russia… is a unique country-civilisation… one of the sovereign centres of global development.” (FPC §4–5)

This framing means that only a handful of actors—Russia, China, India, etc. —qualify as full civilisations, capable of shaping global affairs on their own terms. All others are expected to affiliate with one of these poles. States like Ukraine, in this worldview, are not sovereign peers. They are seen as subordinate entities whose legitimacy depends on remaining within their assigned civilisational domain. Ukraine’s westward shift is not understood as self-determination; it is viewed as civilisational betrayal. Its very assertion of independence becomes an existential threat to Russia’s imagined sphere.

Civilisational sovereignty, then, is not about the autonomy of all nations. It is about reinforcing the authority of dominant powers over what they define as their cultural zones. In practical terms, this leads to the remapping of global politics as a collection of spheres of privileged influence. The post-Soviet space is treated as Russia’s natural domain, a region not merely within its historic orbit but integral to its identity. This extends across Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia, where the sovereignty of smaller states is consistently denied or undermined.

“Russia… is fulfilling a historically unique mission aimed at maintaining global balance and ensuring peaceful development… on the basis of a unifying and constructive agenda.” (FPC §5)

That “mission” has been used to justify military intervention, occupation, and the political destabilisation of neighbouring countries. In this vision, NATO and EU presence in these regions is not legitimate, even if democratically chosen. It is instead interpreted as neo-colonial encroachment by the West—an intrusion not just on territory, but on Russia’s civilisational integrity.

Here lies the core contradiction of civilisational sovereignty: it does not extend self-determination to all. It denies it to those who refuse the gravitational pull of a dominant power. Ukrainians are told they have no right to define their future outside Russia’s sphere. Ukraine cannot choose NATO. Its sovereignty is conditional. Its independence is tolerated only when it aligns with Moscow’s interests.

What Russia promotes is not multipolar equality, but regional authoritarianism. Each civilisational “core” is expected to dominate its surrounding space without external interference. International law becomes secondary to cultural entitlement. Regional dominance is naturalised. And liberal institutions are recast not as instruments of peace and cooperation, but as threats to local order.

“The establishment of regional and trans-regional mechanisms… [is] a logical response to the crisis of the world order.” (FPC §12)

That “crisis” is not war, famine, or climate change. It is the perceived erosion of traditional authority by liberal norms and universal institutions. In response, Russia calls for the world to be reorganised—not around shared values—but around inherited civilisational boundaries. This is empire, wrapped in the language of authenticity.

Civilisational sovereignty redefines legitimacy around power, not principle. It justifies the invasion of neighbours as reunification, the occupation of foreign territory as historical correction, and the suppression of dissent as cultural preservation. It treats alliances like NATO and the EU as illegitimate when they exist within Russia’s claimed sphere. It promotes authoritarianism not as a necessary evil, but as a natural expression of traditional values. It casts liberalism, multiculturalism, and human rights not as universal aspirations, but as subversive tools of the West.

Kharkiv, March 2025. The sign reads: Kharkiv is unbreakable. Own photo.

This vision has already produced war, annexation, deportations, and war crimes. In the end, civilisational sovereignty is not a doctrine of freedom. It is a doctrine of domination. It reimagines the world not as a community of sovereign equals, but as a constellation of great powers and subordinate states. In this order, civilisations —not nations—are the building blocks of global politics. And only a few actors are deemed worthy of that title. Everyone else is expected to submit to the gravitational pull of their local hegemon. Legitimacy flows not from law, or rights, or mutual consent—but from cultural identity and brute power.

“The imbalanced model of world development… ensured the advanced growth of colonial powers through the appropriation of resources of dependent territories… [but] is irrevocably fading into the past.” (FPC §7)

“Russia… is one of the sovereign centres of global development performing a historically unique mission aimed at maintaining global balance of power.” (FPC §5)

It is tempting to dismiss this as grandiose posturing. But the world is decisively moving in the very direction Russia predicted. The liberal order is fractured. Universalism is contested. Sovereignty is increasingly defined by identity and force, not law and cooperation. And as Western democracies falter, Russia’s ideological map is no fantasy. It is the reality we failed to prevent.

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine is not a deviation from its doctrine. It is the doctrine made real.

The war is often framed in Western capitals as a tragic aberration, a madman’s gamble, or - most stupidly - an unfortunate consequence of NATO expansion. But this misses the point. Russia’s strategic doctrine explains the invasion not as a conquest, but as a civilisational correction. Ukraine’s independent trajectory—its pursuit of NATO and EU membership, its growing liberal democratic institutions, its rejection of post-Soviet authoritarianism—is framed by the Kremlin not as a national choice, but as a betrayal of cultural destiny.

“The USA and their satellites… used the measures taken by the Russian Federation as regards Ukraine… as a pretext to aggravate the longstanding anti-Russian policy and unleashed a new type of hybrid war.” (FPC §13)

Russia does not see Ukraine as a sovereign nation. It sees it as a fragment of the “Russian world”—a cultural and historical territory that has been manipulated into false independence by hostile Western forces. In this narrative, the West is not helping Ukraine, but “manipulating consciousness” and turning Ukraine into a geopolitical weapon. And Russia, far from being an aggressor, is framed as defending its sovereignty, its values, and its civilisational integrity from foreign ideological and military encroachment.

“Ukraine is part of the Russian world.” (NSS §44)

The West is “manipulating consciousness.” (FPC §8)

Russia is “protecting its sovereignty and values.” (NSS §40–45)

This is not a war about lines on a map. It is a war about what those lines mean. It is a war to erase Ukraine not just territorially, but ideologically—to make the denial of Ukraine’s nationhood not a radical declaration, but a fact. The atrocities committed—Bucha, Izyum, Mariupol, bombing playgrounds, mass deportations—are not accidents. They are the logic of a worldview that sees Ukraine’s very existence as a provocation. To destroy Ukraine is to affirm Russia’s civilisational vision. To let Ukraine survive as a sovereign democracy is to expose the hollowness of that vision.

What is most damning, however, is not just Russia’s ambition—it is the world’s indifference. In the early days of the invasion, horror and solidarity surged. But now that outrage has curdled into cynicism - especially in the USA where an Ambassador who once decried Russian barbarism now looks at the dead body of a child in a Ukrainian playground and cynically types, “This is why the war must end.” As if the war itself—not a deliberate Russian missile, not a soldier’s order, not a state ideology—killed that child. As if violence simply materialised, absent of choice. This is not moral reasoning. It is moral retreat. It is the quiet abandonment of one’s own humanity disguised as peace-seeking.

This war, like the Spanish Civil War before it, is a litmus test. Then, too, liberal democracies claimed neutrality while fascism rallied its forces. Then, too, Europe’s major democratic powers convinced themselves that staying out meant staying above. It did not. It meant ceding the future. Ukraine is our test—and we are failing it. Russia, by contrast, feels vindicated. Its strategic doctrines predicted not only its own actions but the world’s refusal to stop them. Under the Trump administration, the USA is not only refusing to stop Russia, not only withdrawing from the old world order —it is dismantling it.

Recent decisions in Washington signal a collapse of democratic ambition and international responsibility. This is not strategic realism. It is strategic entropy. While Russia pursues a brutal vision coherent with the post-liberal order described above, Trump’s America offers nothing but vengeful nihilism—setting fire to the institutions, norms, and alliances that once structured the global order. There is no countervailing vision. No liberal strategy. Only retreat.

And as this retreat continues, the world begins to look more and more like the one Russia predicted. That prediction is now reality—not because Russia imposed it on us, but because we refused to confront it.

Blueprint for the Future

The first step in this blueprint is the replacement of unipolarity with multipolarity. Russia argued in 2021 we would soon see a world no longer led by a single hegemon, but divided among several competing power centres. Its Foreign Policy Concept declared that the sovereignty and influence of non-Western states—such as China, India, Iran, and Russia itself—are growing, while the Western order is in decline. In this world, there will be no global arbiter. No shared rules. No universal norms. Only strong states negotiating their place, protecting their interests, and managing their regions through power.

“The sovereignty and competitive opportunities of non-Western world powers and regional leading countries are being strengthened.” (FPC §7)

This is not a vision of cooperative multipolarity. It is a balance of threats, where deterrence replaces diplomacy and stability is maintained by fear rather than agreement.

Alongside this geopolitical shift is a steady collapse of global institutions. In Russian doctrine, multilateral bodies—such as the United Nations, WTO, and IMF—are no longer meaningful arbiters of international legitimacy. They are described as compromised, co-opted by a narrow group of Western states seeking to impose a so-called “rules-based order” on the rest of the world. Russia does not challenge the power of these institutions by reforming them—it simply ignores them.

“A small group of states is trying to replace the international legal system with the concept of a rules-based order.” (FPC §9)

Diplomacy, once central to conflict prevention and resolution, is presented as obsolete. The Foreign Policy Concept lamented the “acute lack of trust in international affairs” and the declining effectiveness of diplomacy. In this view, international law is no longer a shared structure of mutual restraint—it is an instrument of dominance wielded by the West, and therefore unworthy of respect. The global system, in this telling, is collapsing not because of conflict, but because the very idea of consensus has been abandoned.

“The effectiveness of diplomacy as a means of peaceful dispute settlement is decreasing… There is an acute lack of trust in international affairs.” (FPC §9)

While institutions falter, traditional values rise as the new ideological core. Russia presents itself as the custodian of humanity’s moral heritage—championing religion, family, patriotism, and cultural authenticity. These values are projected globally, as a strategic alternative to liberalism.

“Russia is a stronghold of the traditional values that are the foundation of all mankind.” (NSS §87)

In contrast, liberal values—such as gender equality, LGBTQ rights, secularism, and pluralism—are portrayed as corrosive and destabilising. Russia explicitly identifies the “imposition of destructive neoliberal ideological attitudes” as a central threat. Russia’s war on Ukraine, censorship of dissent at home, and the alliance-building with authoritarian regimes abroad are not deviations from this ideology. They are expressions of it.

“A widespread form of interference… has become the imposition of destructive neoliberal ideological attitudes.” (FPC §8)

In this worldview, culture and identity are not passive features of society. They are weapons. Russia believes the West has already waged war through the manipulation of information, the distortion of cultural narratives, and the destruction of historical memory. In turn, Russia claims the right to defend its own information space—and to strike pre-emptively.

“Manipulation of the consciousness of certain social groups and entire nations” is named as one of the West’s tools of war. (FPC §8)

This doctrine justifies everything from domestic propaganda to foreign cognitive warfare campaigns, from the censorship of independent media to the deliberate destruction of cultural heritage and institutions in Ukraine. For Russia, information is not a marketplace of ideas. It is a battlefield. And in this war of narratives, controlling memory is as important as controlling territory.

The fifth element in Russia’s vision is a commitment to sovereignty and militarised self-reliance. Russian doctrine does not disguise its intent to use force as a political tool—it proclaims it openly. It declares Russia’s right to defend its development and existence “using all means available.”

“Russia intends to defend its right to existence and freedom of development using all means available.” (FPC §14)

This is a green light for war, cyberattacks, disinformation, and even nuclear threats. The National Security Strategy reinforced this commitment, identifying the preservation of national sovereignty, territorial integrity, and strategic autonomy as vital interests. Russia has made it clear that it does not intend to be constrained by verdicts from international courts or bound by economic interdependence. Sovereignty, in this worldview, is not only the right to act—it is the right to act without consequence.

“Preserving national sovereignty, territorial integrity, and strategic autonomy is a vital national interest.” (NSS §23–30)

Finally, this blueprint anticipates economic fragmentation. Russia sees the crisis of globalization not as a failure to be fixed, but as an opportunity to be exploited. Its doctrines predict—and promote—a shift away from dollar-based systems and Western financial instruments. In their place, Russia envisions a world of regionalised economies, where great powers form their own trading blocs and financial networks. Russia’s war in Ukraine, and the sanctions that followed, are not seen as economic disasters, but as tests of endurance.

“The crisis of economic globalization is deepening… There is a growing interest in new international reserve currencies.” (FPC §10)

Moscow bet that it could outlast the West—that its autocratic resilience will withstand sanctions better than liberal democracies can withstand political and economic strain. In this view, the future belongs to those who can decouple, diversify, and dominate their local resource ecosystems. The West may have launched the sanctions, but Russia believed it would outlast the storm. It looks like Russia was right.

All of this was written down. It was published, promoted, and widely dismissed. But we now live in the world it described. Not because Russia imposed it, but because the West failed to offer a meaningful alternative. The invasion of Ukraine could have been the moment to redraw the lines—to reassert liberal principles, to reaffirm strategic commitments, to defend not just a country, but an idea. But that moment passed.

As in the 1930s, the democracies wavered. The test came. And we didn’t even turn up.

The question is no longer whether we believe Russia’s worldview will become a reality. The question is: now that we are living in it, what—if anything—are we prepared to do?

The Convergence of Trump and Putin: Structural Alignment, Not Conspiracy

The alignment between Russia’s foreign policy and the posture of a second Trump administration has affirmed this reality such that it is no longer deniable - unless you really do just want to stick your fingers in your ears. Discussions of this convergence so often focus on collusion: either back-channel deals or ideological collusion. But we would do better to focus on the structural convergence. Two very different actors, for different reasons, have arrived at a similar vision of the world. Both reject the foundational premises of the liberal international order. Both see rules as optional, institutions as obsolete, values as hypocrisy, and alliances as burdens to be shed.

We do not have the time to ponder intent. We should focus on effect. Even without coordination, Trump and Putin are building the same world.

At the core of both systems is a redefinition of international relations as transactional. Russia and Trumpism share a disdain for principled alliances and global norms. In their place, they favour bilateral deals, power-based negotiations, and immediate material gain.

Trump’s approach to foreign policy strips away the language of shared democratic values. NATO is no longer a security alliance—it is a cost centre. The UN is not a forum for diplomacy—it is a drain. Commitments are evaluated not by strategic coherence but by short-term returns. Foreign relations become a business portfolio, where loyalty is purchased and protection is conditional.

Russia’s doctrine articulates a similar logic. Its call for a “multipolar world” is not a plea for inclusion but a justification for bargaining. In this vision, major powers divide up the globe and manage their regions. Norms are replaced with deals. Sovereignty is reinterpreted not as legal equality, but as dominance legitimised by tradition and strength. There is no pretence of universality—only transaction and hierarchy.

From this shared transactionalism flows a hierarchical vision of global order. For Russia, the doctrine of “civilisational sovereignty” imagines a world where powerful civilisations rule over culturally defined zones. Ukraine, Georgia, and Belarus are not real sovereign actors in this model. They are satellites whose independence is tolerated only if it does not contradict Moscow’s sense of destiny.

“Russia… is one of the sovereign centres of global development.” (FPC §5)

Trumpism echoes this in form, if not in language. By undermining NATO, questioning Article 5, and demanding payment for defence commitments, the Trump administration recasts U.S. power as a service to be purchased. Allies are no longer partners; they are clients. Collective security becomes conditional. This is not a retreat from empire—it is empire in a new key. Like Russia, Trumpism replaces mutual obligation with power-based patronage. In both cases, smaller states are expected to obey—or be abandoned.

Both systems also share a deep rejection of multilateral institutions and normative constraint. Russia describes the current international legal system as a sham, imposed by a small group of Western states to serve their own interests. Its solution is disengagement: to ignore treaties, undermine institutions, and forge alternatives through regional blocs and bilateral coercion.

Trumpism’s version is more chaotic but equally corrosive. It does not seek to replace global institutions—it simply stops funding them, stops attending, and stops caring. Withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, abandonment of arms control treaties, and defunding of UN agencies all serve the same purpose: to decentre the United States from any structure it cannot dominate unilaterally. What Russia rejects through ideology, Trumpism dismisses through indifference and strategic ignorance. The effect is the same: a hollowing out of the multilateral order.

At the heart of this convergence is a shared retreat from universalism. Russia promotes “traditional values” rooted in national culture, Orthodox Christianity, and a nostalgic mythos of pre-liberal moral order. It identifies liberalism as a civilisational threat—foreign, decadent, and destabilising. Its National Security Strategy warns of “moral decay,” “permissiveness,” and “foreign ideological influence.”

Trumpism does not articulate a fully-fledged alternative ideology. But its actions serve the same ends. It dismantles the rhetorical and moral framework that once underpinned U.S. foreign policy: democracy promotion, human rights, support for civil society. These ideas are discarded, mocked, or replaced by slogans of grievance and nationalism. U.S. foreign policy becomes purely instrumental. If a government is useful, its repression is ignored. If an alliance is inconvenient, it is denounced. The world is no longer a community of values—it is a marketplace of transactions.

Together, these trends point to the emergence of a neo-Westphalian international system—but one with 21st-century tools of enforcement. States are the primary actors. Power determines outcomes. Internal affairs are off-limits. Weak states must align with strong ones or be pushed aside. But unlike the 18th century, this world is enhanced by cyberwarfare, financial coercion, disinformation, and surveillance capitalism.

Russia becomes the enforcer of stability in its region—not through diplomacy, but through coercion. The U.S., under Trump, abandons its normative leadership and becomes a large, unpredictable actor, interested only in advantage. Together, they preside over a world without shared ethics. Not chaos, but control. Not order, but obedience.

And yet, in the public debate, a different question continues to dominate: Is Trump a Russian agent? This question is dangerously beside the point. The obsession with espionage, kompromat, or secret allegiances distracts from what actually matters: the outcomes. Whether or not he is an agent, Trump’s policies repeatedly advance Russia’s interests. Undermining NATO credibility, discrediting elections, disengaging from international law—these are not conspiracies. They are actions. And they have consequences.

This focus on intrigue also fosters a deeper moral failure: it becomes a way to avoid responsibility. Blaming Russia for the collapse of liberal confidence allows the West to avoid the harder truth—that these fractures are largely self-inflicted. As John Lechner writes in his excellent new book on Wagner (Death is our Business), mercenaries do not start wars—they exploit them. Russia, on the global stage, is a political mercenary. It moves into the cracks left by Western indecision. It deepens fractures already forming. But in western (as opposed to eastern) Europe, it did not create those cracks. We did.

It exploits political decay. It is not the infection—it is the opportunistic parasite. The real illness is inequality, aimlessness, polarisation, lack of agency and hope, and the collapse of democratic faith. Russia merely feeds on it.

Understanding the US-Russia convergence demands more than outrage. It requires self-examination and action. This alignment between Trump’s worldview and Russia’s doctrine is not a historical accident. It is the logical outcome of a world in which multilateralism is ridiculed, institutions are hollowed out, values are dismissed as propaganda - because they were for so long employed without any tangible meaning by politicians - and legitimacy flows not from consensus, but from strength. The result is a fragmented, hierarchical, amoral order—defined by regional dominance and transactional relationships.

In this world, the question is no longer what is right? The question is who decides?

Russia predicted this world. Trump accelerated its arrival. And Western democracies—by failing to confront either—have enabled it. These were not fantasies. These were predictions. And we let them come true.

Russia did not conjure this world into being. It saw what the West refused to admit—that the foundations of liberal democracy were already weakening, and that the so-called guardians of the rules-based order had lost the will—and perhaps even the belief—to defend it.

Donetsk Oblast, March 2025. Own photo.

None of this was inevitable. It was a series of choices. We could have acted. We could have defended Ukraine long before the tanks rolled across its borders—before Bucha, before Mariupol was turned to rubble, before the destruction of towns, lives, and memory became routine. We could have treated Ukraine not as a victim to be pitied or managed, but as a sovereign partner to be protected, armed, and integrated. Not out of charity—but because its survival is a test of whether the West still believes in its own ideals.

Americans could have elected a leader who valued truth over grievance, law over impulse, alliances over applause lines. They could have chosen a statesperson. Instead, they chose someone who mocks the very concept of principled leadership and who governs by resentment and spectacle.

Europe could have used the past three years to rebuild its defense industry, reassert its strategic autonomy, and decisively end its dependence on hostile energy sources. Instead, it has spent more money on Russian fossil fuels than on Ukrainian military aid. The continent that claims to stand for peace helped fund the war it claimed to oppose.

We had choices. We could have used pressure over patience. We could have disrupted instead of appeased. We could have destabilised Russia, challenged it, contained it—before it destabilised us. We could have understood that Putin’s regime was not in transition to democracy, but in active revolt against it. We could have abandoned the fantasy that liberalism is history’s endpoint, that every society will eventually want to look like ours—even as large swathes of our own society screamed at us that they wanted something different.

Even now, we could act. We could rearm. We could recommit to the institutions and alliances we took for granted. We could draw real red lines—and mean them. We could begin to defend the future by being willing to sacrifice something in the present.

But we won’t.

Not in this Europe. Not in this America. Not now.

And that is why Russia’s doctrines matter—not because they reveal anything profound about Russia but because they reveal something profoundly devastating about us and the world we now live in.

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The ceasefire talks in Jeddah are no exception. Ukraine has signalled it is willing to accept an American proposal for a 30-day truce. Washington, in turn, has promised to resume intelligence sharing and military aid (promised by Biden - not new aid).

At first glance, this is a triumph of diplomacy. And it is. But on deeper exploration, the diplomacy is somewhat more crooked. The new U.S. administration clearly interprets reality in a different way to the majority of Europe, including and especially Ukraine. The White House appears to believe that diplomacy with Russia is possible in good faith - without employing considerable leverage - something that made Ukrainians incredulous. I think the Ukrainians are right to be incredulous but clearly the White House needs to learn this itself. As I see it, this ceasefire is a gambit—a test not just of Russia’s intentions but of whether the US can still recognise reality when it unfolds in front of them.

The Gambit: Forcing Reality into the Open

Ukraine’s ceasefire offer is not so much concession as invitation:

• If Russia refuses the truce, the White House sees, unequivocally, who is blocking peace.

• If Russia accepts, the war enters a new phase—one shaped not just by military strategy but by how that ceasefire is interpreted.

Because there is little doubt about what comes next: Russia will break the ceasefire.

It has done so in Ukraine before. It will almost certainly do so again. It will manufacture an excuse, stage an attack, and flood the information space with fabricated “evidence” that Ukraine is the one violating the deal. It will claim victimhood, weaponise diplomacy, and attempt to force Western policymakers into another round of self-doubt, which some will be very grateful to accept. We all remember 2014.

And when that happens, the real question will not be whether Russia is lying (they will be) but whether the White House/America chooses to believe them.

The Risks of Playing the Best Card Available

This is the best card Ukraine has to play in the current situation. But like any gambit, it carries risk.

There is a real possibility that Russia accepts the ceasefire. If in good faith - wonderful. Ukrainians need genuine peacefulness in their lives and they are not in a position to militarily retake the occupied territories in any case at the moment. More energy for diplomatic focus on the occupied territories would also be welcome. But I cannot see an option where the Kremlin agrees to a truce, respects it, and then leaves Ukraine to live in peace.

Instead, the truce will more likely be another stage in a war of interpretations that many in Europe presumed had already been won (ie Russia invaded Ukraine, Russia is the aggressor, Russia is the block to peace).

While there is discontent from war-adjacent Russian nationalists over the ceasefire, a pause in fighting (given the sanctions relief being promised) would ease economic pressure on Russia, giving the Kremlin time to manage growing discontent and internal fractures. It would allow Moscow to consolidate power in occupied territories, further entrenching its grip. And it would provide time to regroup, rebuild, and prepare for the next offensive by learning lessons.

And then, when the war inevitably resumes, Russia will claim it is merely responding to Ukrainian aggression.

We have seen this pattern before. The question is whether Western policymakers will recognise it when it happens—or whether they will allow themselves to be deceived, again.

At its core, these ceasefire talks are not just about a pause in fighting. They are about how people perceive the war itself. Ukraine is offering people who still, somehow, don’t get it, a chance to see reality: Russia pursues this war, Ukraine defends itself.

That is clever, unless Russia accepts the truce and then breaks the ceasefire claiming retaliation to a Ukrainian attack. In such a case, I have very little confidence as to whom the White House would believe.

I have studied this war since 2014, in particular in relation to propaganda and myth, and it has always been to me a war of ‘to be or to seem’. To fight against the modern day equivalent of fascism, or to spend millions on propaganda convincing gullible types and captive audiences that you aren’t invading your neighbour - you are the ones fighting fascism. To actually be sovereign, or to just pretend to be, like Belarus. To decide one’s own fate and take charge of your country, or to shun all accountability and responsibility for your people, your fellow countrymen, and your representatives. Ukraine is not perfect or ideal - no country is - but it is real. Its successes and mistakes are committed as part of its striving towards authentic independence, of refusing to live in a world where nothing is fixed, where facts are negotiable, where any event can be rewritten, reversed, or denied outright.

America appears to have made a different choice. Hopefully Ukraine’s ceasefire acceptance can help to readjust their consciousness (defined here as how one interprets reality), since it will not overwrite the fundamental nature of this war. To think it will is not reality but a chosen interpretation of reality.

Ukraine’s ceasefire gambit is designed to force a moment of clarity.

If Russia refuses, the illusion of diplomacy collapses.

If Russia accepts, the real test begins: will Washington recognise when Moscow inevitably violates the ceasefire? Or will it, once again, allow Russia to dictate the terms of reality?

Because in war, as in history, reality is not just what happens—it is what those in power choose to see.

Written in Kharkiv. 24 Feb, 2024

In Kharkiv, ordinary people didn’t do much to mark the two year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion. ‘There isn’t much to celebrate in barely surviving’, my neighbour explained. Russia’s first strike in the ‘big war’, as people here call it, was on Kharkiv. The missiles took out most of the city’s air defences. Later that day, 24 February 2022, Russian special forces drove along Sumskaya Street, the city’s main thoroughfare, in Tiger armoured vehicles. They drove calmly, hardly expecting to meet the fierce civilian-led resistance that would soon drive them out of the city and eventually out of the region almost entirely.

The bravery of ordinary men and women, who became warriors overnight, has kept Kharkiv free. It is why, instead of FSB torture chambers, Sumskaya Street boasts beautiful cafés, where I can sit, savouring macarons and the overwhelming tiredness of this battered city. In one such café, exactly two years on from the full-scale invasion, everyone is doing their best to ignore the war. Two tables away sits a strikingly disfigured soldier. The unnatural mechanised horror of this war is scarred onto his face. Everyone sees the horror, everyone knows how this happened to him, and everyone tries hard to look away.

Beyond the city’s fragile bubble of normalcy, the fight rages on. In Kupiansk, Kharkiv region, exhausted men are fighting wave upon wave of Russian assault battalions. Their equipment is running out, their friends are dying, and all roads seem to lead to death. Russia’s insistent offensive in Kupiansk is part of a wider strategic objective to seize the administrative borders of Luhansk and Donetsk Oblast, the commander of Ukraine’s 32^nd Brigade, responsible for defending this area, tells me. Kupiansk is a major railway hub and its capture would allow the Russians to better supply their troops for assaults further south in east Ukraine. Eyeing up the city of Sloviansk, which they have never fully taken, the Russians are pushing from all directions.

Two years on, this is what it feels like here in Kharkiv. Pressure from all directions. Phone calls with requests to find donors to buy phones for the resistance in the occupied territories. News clips of Polish farmers blocking goods transit and playing air raid sirens to distress Ukrainians. Nights filled with alarms that rouse you to check the air raid app. There are no missiles setting off from Belgorod, over the border, they are probably flying somewhere else. So you go back to sleep.

Nobody here paid much attention to the politicians and dignitaries making their way to Kyiv to mark the two-year anniversary. Across social media, a thousand posts bloomed: ‘We are so proud to stand with Ukraine.’ But where exactly do these politicians stand? It isn’t always clear. Some of the foreign visitors are as bold in their statements as they are meek in action. Are they in Kyiv to pay homage to Ukrainian bravery or to bask in a glory paid for in blood? Maybe, like me, they do it so they can sleep easier at night, feeling like they have helped somehow.

Yet the people of Kharkiv still don’t sleep at night, no matter how beautiful the rhetoric.

Sometimes, when they are not sleeping, my friends send messages tortured with confused desperation about why America isn’t providing more aid, why the West isn’t doing more to help. They say that the West’s cowardice is leading to dead babies and that the Russians will come for our babies next.

My first instinct is to reply that it isn’t that simple, but maybe it is: Britain, the EU, the US would do more, much more, if our babies were being incinerated by Russian missiles. When I visit Cemetery No. 18 in Kharkiv, it feels unbearably simple. I walk among the flags that mark the gravestones of heroes, prematurely buried under snow and earth. Their eyes stare at you from the portraits that adorn their graves. I can’t meet their gaze.

When I look up, I am alone among the flags. My soldier companions have dispersed to visit their many friends scattered around this graveyard. They easily meet their fallen friends’ eyes because they also know death, and live with it every day.

Many of my companions have PTSD. Sometimes, unexpectedly, they become angry, even scary. In many cases, their marriages and relationships have broken down because the men their wives sent to war came back as different people. They came back with a sadness in their eyes that penetrates even the happiest moments. I like to imagine all the different things that could happen to them for that sadness to be vanquished.

Later, in the same restaurant where they once designed Kharkiv’s would-be resistance movement, should the city fall to the Russians, Dmytro and Yevhen ask me whether the US Congress will approve the next aid package. They ask me when the war will end, when will the West do what it takes to stop him (Putin, they refuse to utter his name). They ask me ‘why don’t you (the West) see that our loved ones and friends are dying like flies’. Someone brings up the Budapest Memorandum, the shallowness of the EU, NATO’s refusal to offer Ukraine membership. Their questions land like cries of anguish into the dark, a darkness illuminated sporadically by the artificial lighting of a Western politician’s photoshoot.

Sometimes I feel upset by these questions. I want to argue that their accusations are unfair, that Britain has done more than other countries, that the vast majority of Europeans are on Ukraine’s side. I want to list the details of recent Swedish and Norwegian military aid packages. I know, though, that such answers are coldly bureaucratic insults when pronounced to people who have lost so much and will lose so much more – their limbs, their minds, their loved ones, their lives – before this war is over.

Meanwhile, in the West, the taxpayers who contribute to these military aid packages feel a lesser but still persistent sense of disorientation. When will this war end? What will it take to stop the killing and the pain, to protect Ukrainian civilians, to save Ukrainian lives? Some in the West even try to convince themselves that Ukraine’s capitulation will bring peace. The reality is that it will bring only further child deportations, torture, assassinations, and edge the war ever closer to their own homes. Among Ukraine’s allies, the populations engage in wishful thinking, searching for political leaders who have the courage to tell the truth, as ugly as it is – and it is truly ugly – and devise a plan of action.

There are no such leaders right now. Instead, there is just this question, raised in dozens of different languages, in anguished voices: When will the war end? The Ukrainian voice is more anguished and more persistent than the others but it makes no difference to my answer because I don’t have one. I don’t know when the war will end. Nobody does.

Ukraine, exhausted and battered, still retains outsize agency over its fate given its small economic and geopolitical stature. Europe, despite all its resources, has demonstrated its inability to act independently in matters of war and peace. If sovereignty means the ability to defend one’s way of life, then Europe has abdicated its sovereignty.

The Meaning of Sovereignty in War

Over time, this war has become a test of competing definitions of sovereignty. The traditional understanding is that sovereignty means supreme authority within a defined territory, the power to make and enforce laws without external interference, and recognition by other states as an independent entity. By this standard, Ukraine as an independent state remains sovereign insofar as it continues to govern itself, negotiate treaties, and exercise political authority over the land it controls. Russia does not govern Ukraine, nor has Ukraine surrendered its independence.

But sovereignty is more than just legal recognition. It is the ability to enforce one’s own sovereignty, rather than relying on others to maintain it. In many ways, Ukraine has relied on the West, especially the USA, but it fought off the Russians in the beginning on its own and only then began to receive major support. Moreover, aware of this risk, Ukraine is developing an industrial military complex at breakneck speed.

For Vladimir Putin, sovereignty is not just about international law or political autonomy but about raw power. A sovereign state, in his view, must be militarily self-sufficient and independent of foreign influence. It must be able to act unilaterally, without needing permission from global institutions, and "A sovereign state must be able to defend itself, its citizens, and its national interests."If a country cannot do this, it is, his view, a vassal or a colony, regardless of what its legal status might say.

The European Union, by contrast, has developed a model of sovereignty that is based on pooling resources and sharing power. Member states cede some authority to supranational institutions in exchange for economic stability and collective security. This has created a system where sovereignty is not absolute but shared, with the assumption that strategic alliances can provide the protection once guaranteed by national military strength. In peacetime, this model appeared to work. But the Russo-Ukrainian war has exposed its limitations. Europe has the economy, the industry, and the population to outmatch Russia militarily, yet it has shown that it cannot act decisively without U.S. leadership. Why is a continent of 550 million people begging a country of 350 million to defend it?

Ukraine has defended itself as best as it could against a much larger enemy - and continues to do so. Europe cannot say the same.

The Battle for Political Sovereignty

Who knows what will come out of the talks between the US and Russia. Since Russia still insists on taking four Ukrainian territories that it does not fully control, I think a deal remains unlikely. Of course, perhaps Trump will insist these territories and people are handed over to Russia, we cannot rule that out. Maybe European troops will be sent to manage the handover, like the American flunkies Putin thinks we are. Even then, it won’t be a peace deal as Russia will not rest while Ukraine is sovereign. There will be a hot war again, unless Russia in its current guise is destroyed, or unless Russia manages to destroy Ukrainian sovereignty through political means, preying on the societal rifts and traumas that undoubtedly plague any country after three years of brutal full-scale war suspended in an unfair and inconclusive manner.

However, even if an unfair deal is enforced and Ukraine, through the cessation of military aid from the US and European uselessness, is forced to accept the terms, it will not mean Ukraine has lost. Evidently, it won’t have won, but whether is loses will depend on whether it keeps its political sovereignty. Russia understands that it does not necessarily need to achieve a clear military victory to weaken Ukraine’s sovereignty. If Moscow can force an agreement that cements its territorial gains and limits Ukraine’s ability to defend itself in the future, it will have achieved some of its strategic objectives but not its ultimate goal. It will then use economic leverage, propaganda, and internal divisions to weaken Ukraine from within. The battle for sovereignty does not end with the signing of a deal; it continues in the political struggles that follow.

The reality is that Ukraine’s political sovereignty is still in its own hands, but that does not mean it is secure. The country is exhausted, its population traumatised beyond anything most Europeans can comprehend. Russia is counting on this exhaustion, hoping that over time, it will turn Ukrainians against each other, buy them off, together with the West make them cynical about the point of hoping or believing in anything. Whether it succeeds in doing so will determine whether Ukraine’s sovereignty is sustained or eroded. If Ukraine has to accept an unfair deal, the country will have to decide whether to continue to fight for its sovereignty in other ways, by continuing its defence industry, by preserving its democractic identity, by maintaining its unity, and by working to improve and strengthen the country against its maniacal neighbour. It will have to try as a society to turn its rage against Russia and against the West - both fully justified - into self-righteous anger that will never let anyone do this to Ukraine again, most likely including by developing nuclear weapons. There will be a role for every foreigner who supports Ukraine here too, to contribute to this and to not allow the anger at the unfairness to overwhelm them/us.

Europe’s Strategic Failure

If Europe had treated Russia’s war on Ukraine as an existential threat, it had many options at its disposal. The continent has much more wealth than Russia, a larger population than the United States, and hundreds of advanced fighter jets, modern defence systems, and the industrial capacity to ramp up military production. Yet, it has failed to defend Ukraine in any meaningful military capacity without the U.S.

There are still solutions now, beyond the ignoble option of ‘keeping’ a shameful ersatz ‘peace’ that I expect Russian soldiers to undermine at every turn (although I think PM Starmer’s statement of UK readiness to send peacekeepers was admirable in its determination to provide some leadership). Willing European nations could, from bases in Poland and Romania, set up an integrated air protection zone over Ukrainian airspace, where European aircraft would intercept Russian missile and drone attacks. This would reduce pressure on Ukraine’s air defences, allow Ukrainian pilots to focus on frontline combat, and demonstrate that Europe was capable of taking responsibility for its own security. But Europe will let this idea die most likely, just as it did to other legally and strategically sound air defence plans, despite having the resources to implement it. Many will say it isn’t feasible without US support (it is, in certain guises) but ironically the best way to ensure US security support is to demonstrate willingness to do something for our own continent’s security.

Rich European nations could also redirect funding towards mass Ukrainian weapons production. The Danish model, which funds Ukraine to manufacture its own arms, has proven highly effective. Ukrainian drones and artillery cost a fraction of their Western counterparts, yet most countries have been slow to embrace this approach. Instead, most European nations are more concerned with their own national defence industries and continue to focus on slow, bureaucratic arms deliveries rather than scaling up Ukraine’s war economy to match the demands of the war.

Finally, Joe Biden may not have wanted Russia to lose, but it isn’t clear why European countries wouldn’t desire the defeat of Putin. Why don’t European countries try to destabilise Russian society rather than merely reacting to Russian actions, ‘defending’ against disinformation, or promoting ‘democratic values’ among dissident communities who are already democratic anyway? Russia is a very sick society with deep social cleavages, if our intelligence agencies are worth their budgets, they should be able to do something with those ailments. Some will say, “Oh, but that isn’t who we are.” But the uncomfortable truth is that sovereignty is not defined by moral ideals but by the ability to defend one’s interests. And Europe no longer decides the rules of the game. The world is operating in a harsher paradigm—one where might equals right, and where sovereignty is not a theoretical concept but the ability to enforce one’s will. Europe can choose not to play by those rules, but the game will continue regardless.

Ukraine still has agency. Even if an unjust settlement is imposed, Ukraine will decide how to respond to any imposed peace, whether to resist, and how to rebuild. Europe, meanwhile, has already surrendered its agency. It refuses to defend itself without U.S. leadership, refuses to acknowledge its own capacities and responsibilities, and thus renounces its right to a senior role in shaping global security. Amputated and traumatised, Ukraine will still have every chance to preserve its sovereignty. Whether Europe will recover its own seems less promising.

Clearly, I was wrong to laugh. The full-scale invasion made it obvious that underestimating Moscow’s delusions was a mistake. It didn’t matter whether Tsaryov made sense as a candidate—what mattered was that the Kremlin thought he did. Russia wasn’t operating on reality; it was operating on its own logic of force, intimidation, and fantasy. And in that logic, Tsaryov’s appointment was a possibility. Increasingly, we all need to get used to living in such logic.

This week, the conversation in the West has revolved around Trump-Putin dialogue, speeches from J.D. Vance and Pete Hegseth, and what all this means for NATO and Ukraine. I have plenty of opinions, but none are particularly novel, partly because the writing has been on the wall (albeit perhaps not quite so terrifyingly) for some time.

The reality is simple: Europe is living in a post-NATO-as-we-knew-it world. The question is not whether Western Europe should wake up to this fact—it is whether, upon waking, it will do something tangible to save Ukraine and, by extension, the continent’s security. If you want a deeper analysis, read Keir Giles. All I have for you is musings on Kremlin collaborators and what they tell us about the current situation.

Overpaid and undermandated: the Kremlin’s men in Ukraine

For those unfamiliar, Oleg Tsaryov was once a Ukrainian MP, but by 2014 he had firmly aligned himself with Moscow’s interests. After Russia’s invasion of Crimea and the start of the war in Donbas, he became a key figure in the Kremlin’s attempt to manufacture legitimacy for its proxy forces. At one point, he was even declared the “Speaker” of the so-called “Novorossiya” project—Moscow’s short-lived attempt to unify its puppet entities in eastern Ukraine. But the project fizzled out, and Tsaryov faded into obscurity, making his 2022 reappearance as a potential leader of occupied Ukraine all the more bizarre.

Vitaliy Ganchev is cut from the same cloth, though his role is even more ridiculous. In Russian state media, he is treated as the “Head of the Kharkiv Oblast Administration,” a title that implies some degree of governance. In reality, he has no mandate, controls almost no territory, and commands no real authority. Yet he continues to be paraded through official channels, attending ceremonies, issuing proclamations, and making grand statements about Kharkiv’s “inevitable return” to Russia.

A plaque commemorating the spot in Kharkiv where Ukrainian patriots fought off (pro)Russian militants in March 2014, proving that ‘Kharkiv is a Ukrainian city’.

The Importance of Looking the Part

Moscow understands that, sometimes, appearances are all that matter. You just have to give people what they want to see.

In 2014, Russia gave the world a handful of gangsters with Kalashnikovs and called them “separatists.” This allowed Western policymakers to pretend the conflict in Donbas was an internal Ukrainian issue rather than a Russian military operation. By presenting a few locals as leaders, Moscow gave the West just enough ambiguity to avoid confronting the reality of its aggression.

Likewise, Russia has given the world endless discussions about NATO expansion, allowing some in the West to frame the war as a reaction to Western policy rather than an expression of Russian imperialism. Never mind that Russia didn’t care enough about NATO to stop Finland from joining, or that it moved nearly all its troops away from the 1,300km Finnish border to Ukraine. The NATO argument is convenient—it lets people focus on NATO as the problem rather than acknowledging that Russia’s real issue is Ukraine’s sovereignty.

And then there’s the question of peace. The Kremlin has done just enough—through off-the-record rumours, vague statements, and diplomatic theatrics—to convince some that it is open to negotiations. Never mind that its actions tell a different story. Never mind that Russia has militarised its economy, continues bombing civilians daily, and insists on the same bizarre war aims as in March 2022. Moscow doesn’t need to actually pursue peace—it just needs to provide enough words for people to write the story they want to read.

Why Ganchev Still Matters

This is where Ganchev fits in. His official role is absurd, but that absurdity serves a function. He exists to keep the illusion of Russian control in Kharkiv alive. Even though his “administration” barely governs anything, his presence allows Moscow to maintain the appearance of governance (even if only to domestic audiences).By giving Ganchev a title and a platform, Russia can pretend it has a legitimate political structure in place.

What the actual Kharkiv Regional Administration looks like (from the back) thanks to Ganchev’s paymasters’ efforts to ‘protect and liberate’ Kharkiv.

This can then be used to justify and legitimise future territorial claims. If Moscow ever regains military momentum in the northeast (and it is fighting on three fronts in Kharkiv region), it will point to Ganchev’s administration as proof that Kharkiv was always meant to be Russian. And at the very least, it functions as a tool of destabilisation. Even in areas it doesn’t control, Moscow fosters instability by maintaining parallel institutions and figures like Ganchev.

This isn’t speculation; it’s a tactic Russia has used before. The so-called “Donetsk People’s Republic” and “Luhansk People’s Republic” operated under similar logic for eight years before their formal annexation in 2022. Judging by the location of Russian force concentrations, Kharkiv isn’t an immediate priority for Moscow right now, yet clearly it sees value in keeping a placeholder local government in waiting.

The Joke Isn’t Funny Anymore

The presence of figures like Tsaryov and Ganchev should serve as a warning. Tsaryov was funny—until he wasn’t. Ganchev is funny now—but he won’t be if Russia advances much further in Kharkiv. The Kremlin’s game is one of incremental normalisation: first, a joke of a politician, then an established presence, then a justification for further action.

Europe, meanwhile, risks playing a different game—one of willful self-delusion. The idea that Western European security was a given used to be self-evident. Now it is questioned. The idea that NATO’s role in deterring Russia was unshakable was taken for granted. Now it is up for debate. These were once foundational beliefs. Today, they are contested. Soon, if action isn’t taken, they will become absurd.

Moscow does not need to be militarily stronger than the West—it simply needs the West to hesitate long enough for its ambitions to become reality. And if history has shown anything, it is that Moscow is willing to wait for its moment. It waited in Donbas. It is waiting for Kharkiv.

Now it is up to Europe’s main powers to decide how long they plan to keep waiting, too. Hopefully not too long, or who knows if anything will be funny by then.

This narrative is insidious—not just because it is false, but because it shapes international perceptions of the war. I’ve written many times against the myth that there is no resistance in occupied Ukraine. In reality, resistance is widespread, violent, and highly creative. If Russians resisted Putin’s rule on the same scale that Ukrainians resist occupation, there would certainly be more media coverage. But perhaps not a huge amount more. In the West, we prefer to romanticise protest as a spectacle—artistic defiance, dramatic arrests—rather than political action that truly changes things. This preference for performance over impact is one reason why violent resistance in both occupied Ukraine and Russia is largely ignored.

But beyond the issue of resistance, the broader myth of Russian “normality” is deeply damaging. It obscures what the occupation actually is: not a project of governance, but of genocide, wealth extraction, and militarisation. Russia is not there to build new amenities, provide for people, or create stability. It is there to erase Ukrainian identity, loot resources, establish patronage networks for collaborators, and turn Ukrainian land into a buffer zone for future wars.

Together with my research assistant, Illia Riepin—a writer and PhD candidate originally from Mariupol—I want to start making these reports a regular feature. We will document the failures of Russian occupation, not just for the sake of recording them, but to understand what these failures reveal about the Kremlin’s real aims.

Infrastructure: Decay and Corruption

Russia’s inability—or refusal—to provide basic infrastructure is one of the starkest signs of its failure as an occupying force. In Donetsk, people don’t even have enough water to flush their toilets. Residents have been sharing online their lifehacks for dealing with this, with one just throwing his waste outside into the courtyard in plastic bags. This is the same Donetsk that hosted the Euros in 2012. The same Donetsk where Beyoncé performed. Proud Donetsk with its once tidy streets and a once hopeful future.

Euro 2012 exhibition at the Kharkiv Palace Hotel. This picture is from 2023. The hotel has since been bombed and is partially destroyed.

The water crisis is not unique to Donetsk. Across occupied territories, essential services are collapsing. This week, parts of Crimea were left on the verge of a total heating collapse due to burst pipes—pipes that remain unfixed because of underfunding and a lack of skilled workers. Over 700 kilometres of heating networks in Crimea are in urgent need of repair. Money is sometimes allocated but it then disappears into corruption schemes, never to be seen again – or at least not in the form of a public service or good. Indeed, any money made off the occupation – and there is a lot of it – goes to Russia or its friends, including China, which is receiving stolen granite aggregate from Donetsk region in return for supplies to Karanskii Karer LLC, owned by Russian ‘businessman’ Vadim Morozov. This isn’t the first or only example of China stealing Ukraine’s natural and mineral wealth. Perhaps the White House should hurry up before China takes all the best bits…

In Mariupol, the occupation administration recently announced its supposed achievements in rebuilding the city. But even their own numbers tell a different story. Officials claim to have built 64 new apartment buildings, offering 4,778 compensation apartments for those whose homes were destroyed. Yet 800 promised apartments from 2023 have never materialised. Some have been quietly gobbled up by the Russian occupation authorities and security forces. Others have been removed from the compensation list and placed in the mortgage system, meaning that displaced residents must now pay for what they were promised as compensation.

Meanwhile, the real scale of destruction in Mariupol remains staggering. Around 530 high-rise buildings, containing 37,000 apartments, have been demolished since 2022. So, in reality, Russia has replaced fewer than 15% of the homes they destroyed in the first place.

Even for those with a roof over their heads, there are few prospects. Officially, Mariupol has 56,355 employed residents—just 17% of the population. There are over 10,000 registered businesses, but the average number of employees per company is just five. Most of these businesses are small shops or market stalls. The city’s industrial sector – Azovstal - is effectively dead. Yet the local Employment Centre has only 3,703 people registered as jobless. The numbers don’t add up: either there are far fewer people in Mariupol than is claimed, people are not registering, or the employment centre’s numbers, as usual, are nonsense.

What is clear is that Mariupol is not being rebuilt. It is being stripped bare, left without homes, jobs, or a future. The city is a symbol of Russian destruction and propaganda. As befitting for a city marked by Empress Catherine I, it is a Potemkin.

Forced Mobilisation and Repression

While the occupation authorities apparently lack the resources to repair infrastructure, they have no trouble finding money for repression. In the past week alone, new checkpoints have been set up on the borders of occupied Luhansk region, staffed by Russian military police and the National Guard (FSVNG). Officially, these checkpoints are for “security” and to “monitor movement of goods.” In reality, they exist to hunt down men of conscription age, detain them, and send them to the front with no training and barely any equipment.

Alongside forced mobilization, the Russian occupation administration has now formally legalised the redistribution of confiscated Ukrainian homes in Luhansk. Under the new system, according to the local occupation authorities:

• 35% of stolen housing will go to the Russian federal government.

• 30% will be controlled by the so-called “Luhansk People’s Republic” administration.

• 35% will be handed to local occupation officials.

This isn’t just theft—it’s also about demographic engineering and ethnic cleansing. A recent report by the Eastern Human Rights Group, titled Confiscation, documents in detail how Russians seize homes and businesses from anyone suspected of patriotic (i.e. pro-Ukrainian) views. Some displaced residents have even risked returning from occupation to occupied areas, through the purgatory of filtration, in order to reclaim their homes—only to be denied or forcibly expelled again.

Education as a Weapon

While adults face forced mobilization and repression, children are being systematically indoctrinated. In Skadovsk, kindergartners were subjected to a lesson called Our Beloved Army, where they were made to draw pictures of Russian soldiers and military vehicles. Schools have been stripped of the Ukrainian language and curriculum, replaced with Russian nationalist propaganda. In Mariupol, occupation authorities have turned schools into indoctrination centres (e.g. ‘Model School No 34’). Russian soldiers—who bombed the city and killed the children’s playmates two years ago—now visit schools as honoured guests, presented as liberators.

In Kherson, Russia has ramped up recruitment of Ukrainian children into Yunarmiya, a paramilitary organization training children for future military service. In Henichesk, occupation forces recently held a “masterclass” at School No. 3, where students were taught how to assemble and disassemble Kalashnikov rifles. Schools are pressuring children to join, while parents who resist face threats—including the risk of having their children taken away, disappeared into Russia (together with Anastasia Romaniuk of Opora, I have just finished an academic article with research into this topic and will share here once it is out).

These children are being raised to be the next generation of cannon fodder. Anyone advocating for peace should ask themselves: if Russia is planning for, or even open to, peace, why is it preparing children for war on such an industrialised scale?

The Fate of Collaborators

Residents of the occupied territories live their lives at the whim of the occupation authorities. Even those who willingly collaborate with Russia to inflict misery on their neighbours are not safe. Over the past few weeks, Moscow has intensified efforts to purge local officials from occupation administration structures. At least six high-ranking collaborators have been dismissed, and a further twelve arrested or placed under investigation. This is part of a broader process of replacing local collaborators with Russians. It serves two purposes: eliminating potential defectors and advancing the Kremlin’s long-term strategy of settler colonialism and demographic engineering. Mariupol’s local workforce is being replaced with Russian settlers. Occupation police and security services are being purged of locals and staffed with Russians.

The Kremlin’s message is clear: Ukrainian collaborators are useful only for as long as they are needed. Once their purpose is served, they are disposable. Ukrainians are second-rate Russians, in their view. And it isn’t as if they even treat ‘first-rate Russians’ all that humanely anyway.

In summary, this is what Russian “normality” looks like in occupied Ukraine. Ruined cities, stolen homes, the systematic erasure of Ukrainian identity. Not peace, not stability—just occupation, repression and extraction that benefits the occupiers and their friends. I find the discussion of using Ukraine’s mineral wealth in exchange for US military support morally grim. But perhaps it is just a choice: do Russia (and China) take it, or does the US?

Jade McGlynn and Illia Repin

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I know both the producers of the Lynx over ground robots and the guys who need them. You can mount guns on the body and send to the frontline and evacuate the wounded. They were used at Avdiivka (and many other places) to save men. You can watch a video about them here:

We are raising money for 4 Lynxes for Kraken. If you can donate even a small amount, please use the following link 🙏🏻

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In February 2022, Russia’s full-scale invasion was seen as an existential crisis for Europe and a defining moment for the international order. But in January 2025, it is increasingly treated as routine—a tragic but unremarkable conflict playing out on the continent’s periphery. Ukraine’s supporters push back against this normalisation, arguing for continued military, economic, and political support, warning that complacency will have devastating consequences. They are right to do so.

Pathways carved through the Kyiv memorial to Ukrainian soldiers who died fighting Russia. It is a spontaneous, and supposedly temporary, memorial, that is now an established site to pay one’s respects. January 2025.

But I wonder if, in fighting against this normalisation, we are missing something more fundamental—myself included. Because normalisation is happening against the backdrop of something even more destabilising: the abnormalisation of our own political, economic, and institutional systems. It is obvious in the U.S., where political dysfunction, institutional decay, and the collapse of shared reality have been playing out in plain sight. But in Europe, too many of us—especially those who want to see liberal democracy endure—refuse to accept that we are on a similar trajectory.

This makes the fight against normalisation far more difficult because when something becomes normal in a period of abnormality, the solution cannot simply be to "return to normal." The institutions, structures, and political will that once upheld that normal no longer function as they did. Fighting the normalisation of Ukraine’s war while ignoring the deeper process of Western abnormalisation is like trying to restore a building while its foundations are crumbling. If institutions continue to weaken, political will fractures, and public trust erodes further, Ukraine’s war—and its outcome—will not just be ignored but will cease to be something we are even capable of addressing.

Fighting against the normalisation of Ukraine’s war while failing to recognise our own abnormalisation is a losing battle. If our institutions continue to weaken, if our political will fractures, if we become indifferent to the erosion of democratic norms, then our ability to support Ukraine will inevitably decline. Already, in the UK, it feels as though Ukraine’s war—and its outcome—is becoming irrelevant to more and more people, swallowed up by our own dysfunction.

What is Normalisation?

Normalisation, in a sociopolitical context, is the process by which ideas, behaviours, policies, or political conditions become widely accepted as standard, unremarkable, or legitimate. It happens in different ways.

Political normalisation occurs when a regime, ideology, or policy once considered extreme or abnormal becomes widely accepted. In Russia, the destruction of political opposition and the entrenchment of a permanent wartime economy have made the war an indefinite state of affairs—no longer perceived as an extraordinary crisis. In the West, Ukraine’s resistance is increasingly framed as just another long-running conflict rather than an urgent crisis demanding intervention.

Diplomatic normalisation is visible in the quiet resumption of formal relations with Russia. Putin’s visit to Mongolia—despite Mongolia being a signatory to the ICC—demonstrates this, as does the open support of Hungary and Slovakia’s leaders for the Kremlin. Many European countries continue economic and political ties with Russia, to say nothing of nations beyond Europe. Ukraine’s economy, too, has normalised war, adapting to bombardment and instability. Meanwhile, Western sanctions against Russia have transitioned from emergency measures designed to force withdrawal into a permanent fixture, with little urgency to close the many loopholes that allow them to be circumvented.

Social and cultural normalisation happens when societies adapt to new realities, no matter how extreme. In Russia, mass mobilisation and conscription are now framed as both patriotic duty and a shrewd financial choice. In Ukraine, war-related trauma has been absorbed into daily life. The absurdity of adaptation is something I notice constantly. When foreigners in Kharkiv ask if I’m going to an air raid shelter because a siren is going off, I laugh. A year ago, that reaction would have horrified me.

Central Kharkiv. January 2025.

Media and discursive normalisation shape public perceptions. The West’s declining coverage of Ukraine—especially of frontline developments and the situation in occupied territories—has helped create the illusion that the war has "stabilised." The reality is far from that. The most frustrating moment of any trip back from Ukraine is always the taxi ride home. The driver inevitably asks, “That war is still happening? But surely there aren’t bombs?” They stare blankly when I describe firsthand missile and drone attacks on a city of one million people.

And of course historical normalisation is well underway. The Kremlin constantly finds new ways - and new textbooks - to rewrite history to frame its invasion as a continuation of the Soviet Union’s fight against Nazis. In occupied Ukrainian territories, Russian imperialism is presented as the rightful historical norm. In the West, it is also common even among educated people to hear historical absurdities like ‘Well, Kyiv was the first capital of Russia’ or ‘Crimea has always been Russian’.

The way war is normalised—or resisted—has profound implications for policy, public perception, and long-term support. Ukraine’s supporters are right to push back against it. But the deeper issue is that this normalisation is tolerated because the institutions that once upheld a different world order are widely seen as discredited—rightly or wrongly.

Abnormalisation: When the World Unravels

While much of the focus is on the normalisation of war, the West is also grappling with something even more dangerous: abnormalisation. This is the opposite of normalisation—the process by which political, economic, and social conditions become unmoored from accepted norms, leading to systemic dysfunction, the erosion of accountability, and the breakdown of democratic structures. It is not just instability. It is a fundamental loss of order, where institutions fail, and no single actor can reverse the decline.

Normal life amid boarded up and bombed out houses. Kharkiv. January 2025.

In many Western countries, institutional decay is no longer hypothetical. Many government institutions function in part or deeply ineffectively — the civil service, the prison systems, the policy, the health systems, the ministries for foreign affairs are either overwhelmed, captured, or irrelevant. Policy responses are erratic or nonexistent, not because of a lack of expertise (although that plays its role too) but because these institutions rarely have the power or legitimacy to implement any informed policies anyway.

No one takes responsibility for crises. Everyone laments the state of the world, but failure is always someone else’s fault—blamed on “the system,” external actors, or historical inevitability. This creates bureaucratic inertia: procedures are followed, but nothing is addressed. Over time, a culture of learned helplessness takes hold. Consequently, democracy still exists, but it is hollowed out. Liberal democracy was once a balance between majority rule and institutional constraints that protected individual rights, the rule of law, and pluralism. That balance is eroding and will only erode further with the rise of illiberal leaders and parties determined to dismantle institutions from within – especially when those institutions have no will or even mechanism to reject illiberal saboteurs – I am thinking specifically of the EU and Orban’s Hungary now.

The rise of illiberalism also talks to a much more difficult philosophical problem: in many democratic countries, people are uncomfortable with the post-millennium form liberalism has taken. We can decry that if we wish but it won’t convince anyone, any more than the Democrats convinced Trump voters or ardent Remainers convinced Brexiteers. Telling people they are wrong or bad rarely changes their mind. Moreover, the erosion of shared reality accelerates abnormalisation. Competing media narratives, digital platforms, and state propaganda have created irreconcilable versions of truth. In many cases, revisionism has gone from being an intellectual debate to an active policy tool. Our societies oscillate between frenetic outrage and complete disengagement.

Where Does This Lead?

Thankfully, we are not yet in total abnormalisation, but I cannot shake the sense that is where we are headed: either (most likely) to permanent dysfunction in which the system limps along indefinitely, failing in slow motion, much like the late USSR. Or, less likely, to crisis and collapse where a shock event like war, financial crash, or mass unrest triggers a sudden breakdown (like Tsarist Russia).

There are enough key warning signs to be worried: policy paralysis, the absence of accountability, institutional decay, erosion of shared reality. I know people find this bleak. I find it bleak. But ignoring reality does not make it go away. How can we resist the normalisation of the abnormal (Russia’s war on Ukraine) when we are already in a period of abnormalisation?

The obvious answer is that we desperately need new political actors to emerge—ones with legitimacy outside the broken system. The narrative of inevitability must be shattered—people need to believe change is possible. Institutions must be rebuilt or replaced. If the system fails, we have to look outside the system. Unfortunately, I cannot see many appealing political figures outside the system yet.

In the meantime, the "old normal" continues limping along.

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The USAID stop-work order has had a terrible impact on Ukrainian media, which has been left without funding in the cases of local and specialised media. I support Eastern Variant and Bihus with regular donations and therefore feel comfortable recommending them to anyone else who would like, and is in a position, to support these excellent media outlets. Eastern Variant are focussed on Donetsk and Luhansk regions and provide much more than just media, also offering hotlines to people on the occupied territories of Ukraine. Bihus, meanwhile, do an excellent job of calling out and holding accountable corrupt officials, with excellent and time-consuming investigations.

The Western understanding of Ukraine’s cultural response to this war has at times been shockingly shallow. I too strongly dislike it when my Russian-speaking east Ukrainian friends face catty comments in western Ukraine. I don’t understand the point of complaining about someone in a foreign country reading Dostoevsky when Yuryi Boyko is still a sitting deputy in the Rada.

But to try to draw these examples into a wider narrative about Ukrainians ‘cancelling’ Russian culture is utterly perverse when Ukraine is in a war against an imperial power that uses its—Russian—culture to justify and obscure acts of genocide. There are many, many points I could explore here, from Russia’s appropriation of Ukrainian cultural legacy, the various Moscow-led mass murders of Ukraine’s cultural elites over the centuries, or even the hybridity of certain colonial contexts, but what I want to focus on here is the question of prioritisation and context.

The Context of Russification and Cultural Genocide

Russia’s cultural policies in the occupied territories of Ukraine are an inextricable part of the power dynamics between occupier and occupied. Libraries have been systematically ‘cleansed’ of Ukrainian books, replaced with Russian texts designed to indoctrinate rather than educate. School curricula are rewritten to present a distorted view of history, one that denies Ukraine’s sovereignty and glorifies Russian imperial narratives. Symbols of Ukrainian culture—and historical memory—are destroyed, while monuments to Russian literary figures—Pushkin being the most prominent—are erected as markers of occupation and control. Children are kidnapped, given new Russian identities and re-educated to hate Ukraine. Children lucky enough to stay with their parents at home are still re-educated. The price of avoiding deportation is becoming culturally Russian—at least outwardly.

We aren’t talking about cultural exchange here; it is an aggressive policy aimed at the annihilation of Ukrainian national and cultural identity as it is, to be replaced by a Russian imaginary of the provincial Little Russian identity. For those who live through this erasure, the trauma is profound. The Kremlin does not erect Pushkin statues because they are mega-fans of the Onegin stanza; they erect them as a symbol of Russian cultural supremacy and domination. This is the context that must be understood when considering the cultural backlash against Russian symbols in the rest of Ukraine.

Misrepresentation of “Cancelling”

As such, the term “cancelling” Russian culture in Ukraine is a misrepresentation. Ukraine is not engaged in cultural erasure; it is responding to cultural erasure. In many cases, this response is about protection—of Ukrainian identity, language, and cultural expression. In some other cases, it reflects (an understandable, if not always ideal) backlash against a power that has used and is currently using its cultural products to justify and whitewash war and genocide.

To frame the debate as “cancellation” misses the broader dynamics of power at play. Russian culture has been wielded by the Kremlin as a tool of imperialism. Its literature, music, and historical narratives are actively used to legitimise territorial expansion, whitewash atrocities, and undermine Ukrainian sovereignty. Enjoyment of Pushkin’s poems has little to nothing to do with a Pushkin statue in the current context. The former is verse; the latter is a marker of occupation, placed deliberately to reinforce the narrative that Ukrainian identity is secondary, even non-existent, in its own lands—lands Russia claims are its own.

A Personal Reflection

As someone who studied and taught Russian literature at Oxford University, I am indebted to the many lessons it taught me. Writers like Dostoevsky, Pilnyak, and Saltykov-Shchedrin have had a formative impact on my intellectual life and my identity. Yet, I cannot engage with their works at present—not because I disavow their artistic merit, but because I see how their cultural legacy is being exploited, and it makes it too painful, on a personal level. I know there are some for whom the ‘imperial nature’ of the literature itself is an issue, but I don’t really understand that argument. Yes, Russian literature often reflects the imperial nature of the times and society in which it was written. But I think that, like most people, I can read Dostoevsky without having to hate all the things Dostoevsky hated: Catholics, Jews, the Crystal Palace, Turgenev, Ukrainians, Poles, the English, trains, etc., etc.

What bothers me much more is that the literature I love is weaponised as evidence of Russian “greatness,” used to obscure the brutal realities of war, and justify the killing of Ukrainians. But my reaction to this would never be to focus my empathy on the dead writers and literature (especially given that nobody has banned anyone from reading Blok or Tyutchev) when there are living human beings being massacred, and then those massacres are disguised with statues of ‘great cultural figures’.

The Weaponisation of Culture

All of this brings us back to the main culprit: Russia. If you want to save Russian literature—save it from the Kremlin’s misuse of it. Russia’s weaponisation of its cultural heritage is evident in its propaganda. Since February 2022, the Kremlin has ever more increasingly invoked Russian literature and history to soften its image and distract from its militaristic and oppressive actions. For example, before 2022, any cultural or historical tweets from the Russian embassy in the UK tended to focus on the Arctic Convoys or WWII cooperation. Since 24th February, they have focussed on great Russian culture: ballet, literature, composers. Regardless of any debate as to how great the culture is (and I think some of the greatest literature, ballet, and classical music was produced in the Russian Empire and early Soviet Union), that is not the issue. The issue is that it has become a prop to whitewash and distract from Russia’s horrific destruction of Ukraine.

The Kremlin’s use of culture as a political tool impedes efforts to separate art from the actions of the state. When Pushkin’s image is used to obscure mass graves or justify Russification policies, it ceases to be a neutral symbol. It becomes an active participant in the erasure of Ukrainian identity. Any discussion of Ukraine’s cultural debates around the removal of Pushkin statues is really but a footnote in a much longer and more tangible story of cultural erasure. Or at least it should be. We can regret the Kremlin’s merging of historic talented Russian writers with the war without criticising those surviving through its consequences.

None of this is to argue either way about Pushkin statues in and of themselves. In Kharkiv, the main statue of Pushkin was removed and will be stored until after the war, when its placement and meaning can be reassessed in a context free from the constant threat of impending invasion, occupation, and (yet more) Russification. I like this approach, but, again, it hardly matters because I am not Ukrainian. All that is needed from me is empathy and support, or at least not twisting the complicated cultural legacy in a partly-occupied country at war into a story about cancel culture or, worse yet, a story that gives succour to Russian propaganda myths.

The backlash against Russian culture in Ukraine must be understood as a reaction to the Kremlin’s (and its predecessors’) deliberate association of that culture with acts of imperialism and genocide. The trauma experienced by Ukrainians is not abstract; it is deeply personal and immediate. In this context, prioritising the needs of those affected over abstract debates about cultural heritage is not only understandable but necessary.

As the late Ukrainian poet Viktoria Amelina (like so many talented Ukrainian writers, she was killed by Russians) wrote, “Russian manuscripts don’t burn, but Ukrainian ones do.” In my view, now is the time to report on and resist the destruction of Ukrainian culture, rather than ponder the perseverance (good and bad) of Russian culture.