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Escape from Ukraine

Escape from Ukraine

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Note: In order to safeguard the privacy and security of the individuals involved, certain details and identifying information in this article have been altered or withheld. Names, locations and specific personal circumstances have been modified to ensure anonymity and protect the identities of those who have shared their stories. Despite these changes, the core elements and experiences depicted in this account remain intact. It is our sincere intention to respect the privacy and protect the wellbeing of those who have entrusted us with their narratives.

At the time of the Russian attack, my family and I were living in Kyiv. We woke up to explosions that shook our house. The next day I went to the draft board, because I read that they were giving weapons to volunteers. I didn’t want to become a soldier, I have never held a weapon, but I was hoping to get a machine gun to keep it in the flat and protect my family from marauders.

The situation in Kyiv was extremely worrying. On the second day of the war, the Territorial Defence Force authorities began distributing weapons to the townspeople. There was a long queue. While I was standing in this queue, I saw people coming out who had received weapons. Some of them appeared drunk. The atmosphere was unstable and quite tense. In the end, I didn’t get a weapon because the TDF had run out of machine guns; also, the military registration office had begun to actively issue papers for mobilisation. Therefore, instead of getting your own machine gun, there was a risk of being called up to serve in the army. I didn’t want to go to the front, so when I couldn’t get a weapon, I worked as a volunteer for a couple of days instead, delivering clothes and food for the Ukrainian military at checkpoints.

I’m just over 40 years old. People like me are not allowed to leave Ukraine.

The next day in my area, I saw volunteers with machine guns trying to shoot at a drone hovering over residential buildings. This happened close to the civil flats. A man from the military commissariat ran up and started yelling to stop shooting, that they couldn’t shoot in the middle of a residential area. His speech was full of expletives. 

It was this moment that I realised I wanted to leave the country with my family. In Kyiv, food shops and pharmacies were not operating. The city was turning into a fortress.

EP 14 Escape from Ukraine
Editor & Ringmaster of Circus Bazaar Magazine, Shane Alexander Caldwell, speaks with researcher t…

by Shane Alexander Caldwell

Ep. 13 Matthew Blackburn For Ever We Stand with Ukraine
Editor & Ringmaster of Circus Bazaar Magazine, Shane Alexander Caldwell, speaks with researcher M…

by The Ringmaster

Ep 12 Michael Soussan Who is the leader of the free world
Editor & Ringmaster of Circus Bazaar Magazine, Shane Alexander Caldwell, speaks with whistleblowe…

by The Ringmaster

I was prepared to cross the border by any way possible. I understood that most likely it would be a one-way trip for me, because I would be violating the exit ban. We were left with two flats in Kyiv and a lot of goods, which we left behind. I never regretted it for a minute. At that time I didn’t think much; instinct for self-preservation guided me. I was running away from the war.

First we went from Kyiv to the south, a trip that cost us $700. Because there was a rush of people fleeing Kyiv, getting a ride in a passing car was very expensive. I already knew that it was possible to cross the border for a bribe and had prepared three thousand dollars accordingly, but I had no idea who I was going to give it to. I had some extra money with me, so I bought an old car for $2500. The plan was to go straight to the checkpoint at the border, talk to the people in line to cross and try to find out who could carry the bribes, although I suspected that even a bribe would not give us any guarantees. Fraudsters could take my money only to deceive me or, even worse, hand me over to the police.

But there was almost no queue at the border where we arrived, and nobody to talk to. The border guards looked stern, and I decided not even to ask about bribes. The very atmosphere seemed somehow unfavourable. I had hoped to meet some men who would go around the border and give money to the border guards, but I did not encounter any such persons there.

I decided to get out of the car and talk to the local shepherd, who was a very simple and candid person. When I asked him where I should cross the border, the shepherd asked for some money for cigarettes. I gave him some hryvnia, the equivalent of about four American dollars. The shepherd pointed to a hill and said there was a path.

On the other side of the border there was a settlement, a small village. My wife and I looked at the road on the map and decided whereabouts in the village to meet. Then she got behind the wheel with the children to drive across the border. Meanwhile, I went on foot to try my luck. Of course, I switched off my mobile phone first, thinking that it could easily track my movements. I decided to wait until dark before attempting to cross. In the meantime, I walked up to the hill that the shepherd had pointed out. The weather must have been cold, but all I felt was a rush of adrenaline. I tried to calm myself and sat down to rest on the hill for about two hours, away from prying eyes.

As dusk fell, I went into a meditative state. I looked at the sky for a long time, listening to the nature around me, as though I had become an animal in harmony with my surroundings. My fear had vanished. As I started walking towards my destiny, I felt physically that I was changing my life with every step.

The whole trip across was only a few hundred metres. I had to go up, then down the hill and across the border strip. Walking at a normal pace, it would take fifteen minutes, but I wasn’t walking that fast. I stopped and looked ahead; the border strip was dark, but a soft natural light emanated from the sky. I saw nothing in the darkness to threaten me, and I walked on carefully. As I came down the hill, I saw the border strip close up. If up to that moment I might have been considered a simple lost tourist by officials, now I had become a border violator.

There was a deep ditch below, with what seemed like barbed wire or something metallic lying at the bottom. The crucial moment had come. I did not think for long, because the more you hesitate, trying to gather your strength, the more terrible it becomes. I just jumped over this ditch and grabbed some bushes on the edge of the ravine with my hands to keep from falling down. Next was the control strip: a length of soft earth that had been levelled by a tractor. All the tracks were clearly visible. I decided not to walk on it so as not to leave any footprints; I just lay on my side and rolled over the soft earth, turning over several times. Of course, there were traces of my rolling on the control strip. But after a few seconds, I was in another country.

I got up and walked towards the nearest houses that could be seen in the distance. After ten minutes I went out into the street and soon found the car with my wife and children. They had crossed the border quickly and had been waiting for me for several hours.

If the Ukrainian border guards had caught me, I would have offered them money to avoid arrest and prayed that they would take it. However, everything went off without a hitch and I left Ukraine without paying any bribes, practically for free. Actually, I did not want to spend the money, because I had earned it through honest work, I paid taxes in Ukraine and this money had not been easy to come by. That is why I am very glad that I did not owe anyone a debt. I like to rely on myself. When you go alone, you are your own musician. If you rely on an intermediary, you pay him money in advance and then you can only hope that he does not cheat you.

Having crossed the border in this way, we headed to the West. We wanted to get at least as far as Germany and then see where we could settle and get refugee status.

Now I am living and working in a new place. It is unlikely that I will be able to return to Ukraine in the next few years. Maybe I never will.

Notes from the source:

The drone shooting took place at one of the checkpoints in Kyiv with Territorial Defence Force recruits who clearly had no previous experience with firearms.

At that time, explosions could be heard constantly from the outskirts of the city, and from our area we could hear fighting.

We passed many checkpoints on our way south. By the time we reached our destination, it was the start of curfew. At the final checkpoint, a group of drunk young men with machine guns stopped us and told us to get out of the car. They pointed guns at us and began to ‘interrogate’ us. Of course, this interrogation was informal. The problem was that our drivers previously lived in Donetsk. They had Donetsk residence stamps in their passports. In 2014, these guys went to Kyiv to escape the war; in 2022, they fled from Kyiv to the south, to their friends. Their documents aroused the suspicion of the TDF recruits at the checkpoint, who asked them some very unpleasant questions and insinuated that they had connections with Russia. But in the end, they let us through into the city. We drove through the city streets at night, despite the curfew; doing so was a risk, yet nobody apprehended us. Everywhere was empty, as though the city itself were dead.

The Russian Cesspit

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The metro train swayed slowly through the Moscow suburbs. A drunken young Russian started making fun of two Ukrainians sitting opposite. ‘Khokhly, you fucking khokhly!’ he guffawed, using a racist slur that refers to a traditional Ukrainian hairstyle. After a few minutes, one of the men stood up, walked over to the Russian and punched him hard in the face. 

In microcosm, this incident captures what happened in Ukraine in the immediate aftermath of Russia’s invasion last year. That confrontation in the metro took place in spring, 1996. I had arrived in Moscow five years before, on the day the Kremlin sent tanks into Vilnius in a bid to crush Lithuania’s mass independence movement. It was the year that the Soviet Union burst apart under the pressure of popular national movements, ending with its formal dissolution in December.

I was a naïve young lefty, brought up in the British political tradition of ‘socialism good, USSR bad’, mixing the romance of Shelley, Wilde, Tressell and Orwell with grassroots activism and a dollop of Trotsky. Bliss it was in that dawn to be naïve: no amount of reading could have prepared me for the surreal world of Russian politics. It was Alice in Wonderland meets A Clockwork Orange. But to understand what is happening in Ukraine and Russia today, we need to make some sense of it. 

Bliss it was in that dawn to be naïve: no amount of reading could have prepared me for the surreal world of Russian politics. It was Alice in Wonderland meets A Clockwork Orange.

David Crouch

Going gonzo

By 1991, Russia’s democratic upsurge had already peaked. When free market fundamentalists let hyperinflation rip through post-Soviet Russia the following year, the optimism of the late Gorbachev period popped like a balloon. Taking its place came a politics of despair. As the Soviet dictatorship crumbled, concepts and institutions that we take for granted in western societies – social democracy, liberalism, civil society, human rights, democracy itself – had not had time to take root. Now the simultaneous collapse of ideology and economy saw ideas like these turned on their heads. 

A big winner from the chaos was something called the Liberal Democratic Party. It was led by unashamed and self-proclaimed neo-Nazis, who peppered the party’s publications with references to national socialism, anti-Semitism and white supremacy. When Russians went to the polls in 1993 for their first multiparty elections in 75 years, these Liberal Democrats won nearly a quarter of the vote — the largest share of any party. 

So much for them liberals. I soon learned that anyone calling themselves a communist was nailed-on to be an anti-Semite with nostalgia for both Stalin and the tsars. It was common to see participants in communist demonstrations carrying placards with images of Stalin and Tsar Nicolai II alongside symbols of the Russian Orthodox Church. The orange and black striped ribbon of Saint George – the highest military decoration of the tsarist empire, today so prevalent at pro-Putin events – was everywhere. 

When the government split in 1993 and one side sent tanks to shoot up the other in central Moscow, killing hundreds, the side without the tanks turned to swastika-wearing neo-Nazis to lead their resistance. As civil war raged in the capital, these sieg-heiling scum stormed the city hall and the television centre, armed with machine guns. The following year, they united with an outfit called the National Bolshevik Party, whose symbol was the 1930s German Nazi flag but with a hammer and sickle in place of the swastika.

Confused? You should be. The fallout from the collapse of the Soviet empire makes the far-right assault on the Capitol in Washington DC look like a picnic in the park. Moscow’s uniformed Nazis would have died laughing at the semi-naked QAnon shaman and his horned headdress. Scared of Trump? Just think of the cesspit that Putin crawled out of. 

Making sense of this was no easy task. Take Matt Taibbi, for example, who later made a name for himself in US journalism – most famously for describing Goldman Sachs as a vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity. From 1997 he co-edited a bi-weekly Moscow newspaper in English called The eXile. This published relentless, extreme misogyny, including a regular column by the ageing leader of the National Bolshevik Party, Eduard Limonov, who combined anti-Semitic filth with boasts about sex with very young women which make Jeffrey Epstein look modest by comparison. This parody of gonzo journalism reflected the dominance of ideas like this in the circles where Western men hung out – nightclubs full of women desperate for a way out of the country, and Russian men who hated women for having that option. Surfing the wave was more fun than thinking critically about it. 

Hold your nose

When I first met my future father-in-law, he produced a bottle of vodka with a picture of Stalin on it and proposed a toast to him. (I refused.) His political views were vile – among other things, he was a bitter anti-Semite. He and his wife regularly joined the mass protests against the government which were led by the Communist party. 

The pair were typical of that milieu: both retired, she the daughter of a Communist Party apparatchik (a nice one, actually), while he had been a well-paid engineer in oil and gas. With half a million members, the Communist Party was by far the biggest political force. Its leader, Gennady Zyuganov, also led an umbrella organisation uniting the Communist Party with Nazi, monarchist and extreme nationalist groupings. A cesspit, indeed. Hold your nose, we’re going to plunge in.

These apparently diverse forces were agreed on their demands for an end to democracy, a state of emergency, a strong military, and restoring Russia as a superpower. The ideological cement of the movement was Russian nationalism. Zyuganov’s book Derzhava (Great Power) set out the central aspects of his party’s politics. For him, Moscow was the Third Rome, the centre of Holy Rus, destined to fulfil the tsarist trinity of autocracy, Orthodoxy and nation. 

Russia must now fight the cosmopolitan forces of the world oligarchy to resurrect the USSR, the historical inheritor of the Russian empire, Zyuganov wrote. It must expand its borders to include Belarus and the ‘little Russians’ – the Ukrainians. He considered the Communists a party of patriots who had rejected class struggle and would unite the nation:

The most powerful means of undermining Russian national consciousness, the main tool for splitting it … are the endless attempts to antagonistically juxtapose in people’s minds the white [counter-revolutionary] and red [revolutionary] national ideas … By re-uniting the red ideal with the white ideal … Russia will at last attain its craved for social, cross-class consensus and imperial might, bequeathed by generations of our ancestors, achieved through the courage and holy suffering of the heroic history of the Fatherland!

Gennady Zyuganov

Now it’s a little clearer why Zyuganov could share a platform with Nazis and monarchists. What is more, he represented the moderate wing of the Communists, competing with a number of other currents laying claim to the Stalinist heritage. All of them agreed, however, that Stalin had restored continuity between the regimes that preceded and followed the 1917 revolutions. 

The Communist Party was the engine of the Soviet dictatorship. Faced with economic decline, the leadership tried to turn the party supertanker around, but instead the mass membership took the wheel, clinging on to the nationalist, racist and imperialist ideology that had pervaded the organisation since the late 1920s. The Soviet Union was the Russian empire, staffed by Russians and inspired by a messianic Russian nationalism, the great majority of them members of the Communist Party.

All hail to the cesspit

One of the wonders of life in Moscow for foreigners in the early 1990s was that the exchange rate of the dollar to the rouble was insane. I could do a minimal amount of work and still survive, which left lots of time for reading, reading, reading. The democratic upsurge had left a residue in the form of excellent books either liberated from the archives or translated from English. I immersed myself in these, all the time measuring the evidence of my eyes – I was devouring several newspapers every day – against academic research and autobiographies. Here is what I learned.

The collapse of tsarism after World War I turned out to only be a brief hiatus for the Russian empire, which Stalin resurrected. Throughout the 1920s, Russian nationalist tendencies in the state, literature and art intensified. This was what émigré sociologist Nikolai Timasheff called Stalin’s ‘Great Retreat’ from the original aims of the revolution, a retreat that in the course of a few years transformed Russia into a country with a much more fervent nationalism than she had ever possessed before the attempt of international transfiguration. Russian nationalists who had fled abroad recognised this dramatic reversal in official attitudes.

From the mid-1930s onwards, Russian history reappeared as a sequence of magnificent deeds performed by Russia’s national heroes. Symbols of Russian medieval barbarism, such as Peter the Great, entered the gallery of national heroes. In 1938, Eisenstein’s film Alexander Nevsky celebrated the life of this medieval prince. Then came the tsarist general Suvorov, who was likewise honoured in a film, and Kutuzov, who was glorified in a book. Later still came the rehabilitation of the leaders of Russia’s World War I campaigns, and in the early 1940s, Alexei Tolstoy, the most acclaimed Russian author of the time, was given the honour of writing a play to glorify Ivan the Terrible. 

Russian nationalism reached its apogee during World War II. In the words of Alexander Solzhenitsyn, whose views were situated on the far right, ‘From the very first days of the war Stalin refused to rely on the putrid decaying prop of ideology. He wisely discarded it and unfurled instead the old Russian banner – sometimes, indeed, the standards of Orthodoxy – and we conquered!’ Glorification of Russian history played a major role in mobilising the war effort. In 1941, anti-religious organisations and publications were closed down and the Orthodox church was rehabilitated. Tsarist uniforms were restored in the army, and elite military schools were renamed after tsarist generals. The Internationale, the USSR’s anthem since 1918, was replaced by a new, nationalist hymn. 

The postwar years until Stalin’s death saw a fearsome nationalist campaign, cracking down on ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ in culture and the arts. Almost all the wars waged by tsarist Russia were proclaimed just and progressive, including the expansionist policies of the pre-revolutionary empire. Classical Russian opera was officially proclaimed the best in the world, and all Western art from the Impressionists onwards classified as decadent. The Soviet press published systematic claims that Russians were leaders in all fields: it wasn’t Edison who invented the electric light, but Lodygin; the Cherepanovs built a steam engine before Stephenson; the telegraph was in use in Russia before Morse in America; Chernov invented steel; penicillin was declared a Russian discovery. 

As described in detail by John Dunlop and historian Alexander Yanov, in the 1960s nationalists were free to an astonishing degree to air their views in the official media. The strength of the Soviet Writers Union as a bastion of Russian nationalism in the late Soviet period is an indication of the extent to which nationalist writers were encouraged, their books published in their hundreds of thousands. Throughout the 1970s, these writers attempted to weld a common ideology integrating the Communist period into the credo of the nationalist right. 

While the revolution had elevated Jews such as Trotsky, Zinoviev and Sverdlov to the status of national leaders, the Great Retreat saw the gangrene grip the patient harder than ever. When Vasily Shulgin, the tsarist politician whose anti-Semitic tirades plumbed the depths, made a secret visit to Russia in 1926, he was delighted to find anti-Semitism widespread: ‘I thought I was going to a dead country, but I saw the awakening of a great country … The Communists will give power to the fascists … [Russia] has eliminated the dreadful socialist rubbish in the course of just a few years. Of course, they’ll soon liquidate the Yids.’ 

The purges of the mid-1930s saw organised Jewish life almost completely paralysed. During the years of the Nazi–Soviet pact (1939–41), the Soviet press ceased to report on Hitler’s persecution of the Jews. Only Stalin’s death may have prevented plans to deport the entire Jewish population to Siberia, just like the Balts, Poles, Tatars and Caucasus peoples before and during the war. Khrushchev told the author Ilya Ehrenburg of a conversation with Stalin in which the latter voiced this intention. There is evidence that cattle trucks were prepared in 1953 and that lists of victims were drawn up. As historian Walter Laqueur comments, by the early 1980s it was legitimate to argue that there had never been anti-Jewish pogroms in tsarist Russia, but merely legitimate acts of self-defence against Jewish provocations.

In sum, six decades of Stalinism provided fertile soil in which extreme ideas could take root. Small wonder that Konstantin Rodzayevsky, leader of the Russian Fascist Party in exile after World War II, could write, ‘Stalinism is exactly what we mistakenly called “Russian fascism”. It is our Russian fascism cleansed of extremes, illusions and errors.’ 

In this light, the statement by The Guardian’s former Russia expert, Jonathan Steele, in 1994, that ‘for the Communists [Russian nationalism] was impossible, given the long tradition of Soviet internationalism and the desire to preserve the USSR’, seems like an exercise in self-delusion.*

* For detailed sources, see my article ‘The crisis in Russia and the rise of the right’, International Socialism 2:66, 1995

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‘Finish them in the toilet’ 

On the night of December 10, 1994, I was glued to my radio. Russian troops and tanks were massed on the border of Chechnya, the tiny nation in the foothills of the north Caucasus mountains which had declared independence from Moscow. Early the following morning, those tanks started to roll towards the capital of Grozny, commencing a full-scale invasion and igniting a decade of the bloodiest, most brutal and most unequal conflict imaginable. 

The following Saturday, I stood outside a Moscow metro station with some anti-war friends, collecting signatures on a petition against the invasion. People queued up to sign it. Russians were sick of war. In 1989, the last Soviet troops had fled Afghanistan after a bloody decade of failing to subdue the local population. Limbless Russian soldiers, abandoned by their army, now begged for roubles on the streets. The Afghan defeat was a signal to the non-Russian parts of the Soviet empire that the army was weak. Despite the use of troops by Gorbachev to put down uprisings in Yerevan, Tbilisi and the Baltics, two years later the empire disintegrated.

But it was only a partial disintegration – the ‘republics’ that had made up the Soviet Union were now independent, at least politically. Russia itself remained a multinational entity, the Russian Federation, with a population consisting of more than 130 national minorities, 21 of which had their own ‘autonomous’ republics and all of which had a history of repression at the hands of the Russian-dominated Soviet state. Would Russia itself now fall apart? 

Chechnya was the first to declare independence, having suffered most brutally at the hands of Stalin. The response from Moscow was rapid. In November 1991, Russia sent tanks into Grozny. This quickly turned into a fiasco; the army was a mess and the troops returned home after just three days. But the Kremlin’s intention was already clear. Any moves towards independence within Russia would be opposed, by force if necessary, while the independence of the former non-Russian republics would be undermined wherever possible. 

Incredibly, the 1994 invasion of Chechnya ended in defeat for Russia. After two years spent trying to defeat the Chechen resistance, the Russian troops pulled out. But it remained unfinished business. When Putin took over, his first priority was Chechnya. Commenting on the subsequent bombardment of Grozny, he said of the Chechen resistance, ‘If we catch them in the toilet, we will finish them in the toilet.’ This is perhaps his most famous quote – oddly appropriate for the leader of the Russian cesspit. 

Putin was successful, at the cost of tens of thousands of Chechen lives and the razing of Grozny to the ground. If you are shocked by photos of the city of Mariupol after the Russian attack on Ukraine last year, you ought to look at what they did to Grozny, which the UN called ‘the most destroyed city on Earth’. At the same time, this was a popular war in Russia. Overnight, former friends of mine turned from cheerful liberals or lefties into warmongering nationalists. 

If crushing the Chechens effectively put an end to demands for independence among the non-Russian minorities within the Federation, Moscow also had its sights fixed on the empire it had lost beyond its borders. As early as August 1991, the mayor of Moscow spoke on TV about annexing the Crimea, eastern Ukraine, and virtually the entire Black Sea coast – demands that were then repeated year after year from within the Kremlin and the Russian parliament. In subsequent years, Moscow weaponised its primitive version of the Russian national identity, exploiting local conflicts to intervene militarily, reclaim territory, prop up Moscow-friendly governments and re-establish permanent military bases in Armenia, Georgia, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova and Tajikistan. 

In 2014, Putin exploited political upheaval in Kyiv to invade Crimea and support armed separatists in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine. Over the next eight years, Putin’s pliant media pumped out anti-Ukrainian propaganda, building on the racist and colonialist tropes that went all the way back via Stalin to the tsars. Thus was the ground prepared for last year’s invasion. The Kremlin’s intention, however, had been there from the earliest days of the post-Soviet period.

The Ukraine tragedy

My first insight into the Ukrainian national identity came in March 1981, when I was a student delegate to a conference on nuclear spectroscopy in Kyiv. During a pause, a Ukrainian physicist ushered me into the shadowy alcove under a staircase and gave me a whispered, five-minute lecture on resistance. That moment – and how it was interrupted by my angry Russian tutor – is seared into my brain. His message boiled down to this: Russians run everything; they make us speak Russian; Russians are bastards.

Lenin makes a necessary distinction between the nationalism of the oppressor and the nationalism of the oppressed. Ukrainian nationalism is the latter, shaped by centuries of oppression at Russian hands and stoked by memories of the terror famine that was the Holodomor. It is this liberatory, progressive, democratic nationalism (with all its faults) that has inspired some 18,000 Ukrainians so far to give their lives in the war against Russia. It is inspiring, these sacrifices being made by civilians in the face of Russian shells, missiles and bombs.

But the tragedy of Ukraine is being multiplied by the NATO powers’ exploitation of Ukrainian nationalism. The US made its war aims very clear early in the conflict. The West has contributed $80 billion to the war effort – roughly equivalent to Russia’s entire military spending last year. More war means more dead Ukrainians. At the time of writing, the mood in Ukraine seems to be in favour of continuing the fighting. But wartime Ukraine is very far from democratic, and anyone who questions the leadership is accused of being a Putin stooge. 

The tragedy is further amplified by the hypocrisy of Western leaders in prosecuting this war. Iraq is still fresh in the memory – a similarly unprovoked invasion that has visited untold misery on the Middle East. Western leaders, notably Britain’s Tony Blair, backed Putin’s invasion of Chechnya. Palestine, Tigray, Yemen – forgotten slaughter fuelled by Western arms sales. Ukraine today is as much a failure of Western leadership as a fulfilment of Putin’s imperial dream. 

As the fighting drags on, divisions within Ukraine will grow and the illusion of unity will fall apart. Calls for a negotiated peace will grow louder. Where then will Western leaders stand? There is no military solution to Putin. With each zinc coffin that returns to Russia containing a conscript’s body, Putin’s power will wane. Ukraine needs peace to heal its wounds and rebuild its society. The world can leave the Russians to clean out their cesspit themselves. 

For Ever We Stand with Ukraine

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Around the world in 2022 and 2023, I have met a broad range of Westerners absolutely committed to the cause of standing with Ukraine against Putin ‘for as long as it takes’. This includes a remarkable spectrum, from extreme-left anti-fascists, environmentalists and ‘woke’ activists to ‘based’ conservatives, populists and libertarians. Their unity is founded on a simple, black and white moral position that has proven durable. 

Marching in step and repeating the same discourses, whether within academia, think tanks, government or the parliamentary opposition, the pattern is clear. Zelenskyy is exalted as a new Churchill, the valour of the Ukrainians is celebrated, and calls are made for more weapons to be sent. The corollary to celebrating Ukrainian victories is a strong condemnation for Putin as a ‘new Hitler’, along with the view that Russia is the bête noire of not only the Western countries but the whole world. 

The ceremonial hugging of Zelenskyy and ending of speeches with ‘Slava Ukraini’ is a regular event in European capitals. What is fascinating is how EU leaders such as Josep Borrell and Ursula von der Leyen combine pro-Ukraine sentiment with the message that supporting Kyiv ensures the future of Europe. Zelenskyy has demanded more weapons to fight off ‘the most anti-European force of the modern world’. The imagery of Russia as the dark and cruel barbarian and Ukraine the shining beacon of light provides a basis not only for healing polarised and divided Western polities but also for regenerating the very notion of the West. 

The West’s proxy patriotism and enthusiastic militarism 

In due course, we will all discover whether this vision of Western regeneration can be sustained as the Russo–Ukraine war unfolds. However, a year into the war, it can be seen that Ukraine and Russia, the two combatants, differ from the West in how each of them instrumentalises identity. In Ukraine, nationalist sentiment has long been stirred, producing radical revisionist memory politics and the rejection of Russia’s ‘imperial domination’. In Russia, the traumatic experience of the Soviet collapse and its negative reaction to US ‘unipolar dominance’ have led to its demand for recognition as a great power, along with a corresponding surge in great-power patriotism. Since 2014, Ukrainian nationalism and Russian great-power patriotism have fed off each other in a toxic manner, with the former becoming intensely anti-Russian and the latter venomously anti-Western and anti-Ukrainian.

In the West, a very different scenario appears to exist, comprising a proxy patriotism for Ukraine – experienced at a safe distance without the death of one’s own citizens – and amilitaristic enthusiasm for Ukraine’s coming victory which does not take seriously the dangers of escalation. Meanwhile, in an absence of deep cultural or historical ties to either country, Western audiences are not influenced by memory politics, nationalist sentiment or securitised patriotism the way Russians and Ukrainians are.

A dogmatic chain of causality predicts that if the West unites to defeat Putin, their victory will herald a new dawn for civilisation. Alternatively, if the West is to buckle or surrender, it will lose everything. This view lacks nuance and shades of grey, and fails to consider how the war connects to other global developments. Naturally, the latter approach facilitates an understanding of the broader risks, benefits and costs to the whole world, while the binary logic of the former approach narrows its scope to a moral and messianic quest simply ‘to save the world from Putin’s aggression’. 

In my understanding, the bulk of Western media reporting of the war’s first year has consistently reinforced this dogmatic moralism. Such moralistic thinking is amplified on social media, repeated on mainstream mass media and then accepted by public figures and corporations. This process helps explain the sharp response to the outbreak of open hostilities between Russia and Ukraine after years of fragile and uncertain ceasefire. Interestingly, many of those who would usually self-identify as ‘progressive’, ‘liberal’ or ‘left-wing’ were also swept away in a remarkable wave of ‘Slava Ukraini’ fervour. This is despite the fact that such people would usually profess scepticism towards patriotism or the notion of sacrificing one’s life for one’s nation.

In a similar unprecedented shift, progressives and liberals also embraced massive increases in military spending, disregarding the risks of escalation and direct war with Russia. In a flash, most of the left became explicitly pro-NATO and cheered Ukraine on; those who questioned the military–industrial complex or expressed concerns about nuclear war were generally marginalised or shouted down, if they were allowed to express their views in the media at all. It is hard to escape the impression that social media groupthink and saturated 24-7 mainstream media coverage have sustained both stances of proxy patriotism and enthusiastic militarism. 

Ep. 13 Matthew Blackburn For Ever We Stand with Ukraine
Editor & Ringmaster of Circus Bazaar Magazine, Shane Alexander Caldwell, speaks with researcher M…

by The Ringmaster

Ep 12 Michael Soussan Who is the leader of the free world
Editor & Ringmaster of Circus Bazaar Magazine, Shane Alexander Caldwell, speaks with whistleblowe…

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Ep 11. Sanyo Fylyppov S2 It tolls for thee Act 2
Editor & Ringmaster of Circus Bazaar Magazine, Shane Alexander Caldwell, speaks with Ukrainian Jo…

by The Ringmaster

The doublethink behind the groupthink

There are three areas of irrational cognitive dissonance – what Orwell called ‘doublethink’ – evident in the Western media’s coverage of the war. The first is the portrayal of Russia as simultaneously an existential threat to Europe but also a weak military power that Ukraine can expel from its territories, with the right amount of support. The second is how the expressed absolute unwillingness to fight a full-scale war against Russia (with all its potential for a nuclear Armageddon) is combined with a willingness to be de facto combatants by conducting economic warfare against Russia while providing the intelligence and military support without which Ukraine could not fight the war. The third is the call to stand with Ukrainians in a bloody war of attrition in which one does not send one’s own citizens to die in the ‘meatgrinders’ in the Donbas. 

The Western media’s emotive, moralistic rhetoric and unambiguous friend–enemy presentation of the war comprise what is essentially a wartime propaganda model, which suggests that an information war has been waged within the West for the purpose of mobilising pro-Ukraine sentiment across the political spectrum. One wonders about the extent to which mass media bosses are consciously on board with this information campaign, or if they lack an understanding of contrary perspectives or simply avoid investigating inconvenient facts, as doing so would complicate their reporting work. Whatever the reason for the lack of media coverage, these inconvenient facts are worth summarising. 

The distortion of the basic political issues behind the conflict 
Western audiences have been steadily bombarded with the repeated insistence that Russia’s actions were unprovoked and that Putin could have no valid reason to invade Ukraine. President Biden set the tone for this on the day Putin launched his invasion, claiming that it had nothing to do with security concerns and was simply an act of ‘naked aggression’ reflecting ‘Putin’s desire for empire’. This message has been repeated ad nauseam in the media for over a year while omitting to discuss three critical factors central to understanding why Russia would choose military force over diplomacy. 

The first of these factors deals with a basic principle of the United Nations: namely, that no country can enhance its own security at the expense of another’s. Russia previously made it clear that it viewed NATO expansion and Western powers’ training and arming of Ukraine’s military precisely in these terms. Over the course of 2021, Russia made repeated attempts to reach an agreement with the USA, NATO and the EU over a common security architecture in Europe that would include Russia. As these diplomatic efforts failed and the media covered Russia’s reported intention to invade Ukraine, there was far less emphasis placed on how to avoid war than on admonitions not to appease Putin. This established a pattern of explaining the conflict solely in terms of Putin’s motivations and ambitions, which simplified the issue down to one person with evil intent. The idea that Russia had legitimate concerns about how Western engagement in a neighbouring state would affect its national security was waved away with the answer that Ukraine was a free country and could choose its own partners. If only America had been so generous to Fidel Castro, the Cuban Missile Crisis and sixty-five years of US sanctions against the island nation of Cuba might well have been avoided. 


The second factor not given serious coverage is the dysfunctionality of the Minsk Accords, to which neither the Ukrainians nor the Russians fully adhered. Reporting by OSCE indicated that the more serious violations, such as shelling and kidnapping, were perpetrated by the Ukrainian side. Furthermore, Kyiv initiated the military build-up in April 2021. Instead of pressuring Kyiv to pull back, Western governments did the opposite: they indicated strong support for Kyiv by sending more weapons and advisers and holding various bilateral and group meetings across 2021. The subsequent admissions of Angela Merkel, François Hollande and Petro Poroshenko in 2022 that the Minsk Accords were signed not in earnest for peace but only to ‘buy Ukraine time’, only underline why the Russians lost faith in further negotiations with the West and Ukraine.

The third factor is how Ukrainian politics changed after Biden entered office. A language law mandating the use of Ukrainian language in the service industry passed in January 2021, several months before the arrest of opposition leader Viktor Medvedchuk in May; the following month, the Ukrainian president stated a new determination to retake Crimea.Zelenskyy thus shifted to a more explicitly anti-Moscow stance, began the open repression of the so-called ‘pro-Russian opposition’, and gave up his efforts to achieve a lasting peace in the Donbas, breaking his election promise of 2019. No criticism of this can be found in UK media – whether in terms of stoking conflict or of damaging Ukraine’s democracy. In the same period, the repressive actions of the Russian state received wide media coverage in 2021, while a documentary feature film on jailed oppositionist Alexey Navalny won numerous awards. 

Given the way that these critical issues were ignored across 2021, it is easy to perceive why Russian tanks crossing the border on 24 February came as an absolute shock, even though the basic reasons for Moscow’s decision to abandon further diplomacy with the West and Ukraine as fruitless were in plain sight for anyone with an understanding of the Russian perspective. 

Spinning the course of the war: Ukraine can win! 

The second key feature of the coverage has been to cheer on Ukraine’s military efforts while jeering at Russia’s incompetence. This began with the so-called ‘Battle of Kyiv’, which was presented as an inept Russian attempt to decapitate Ukraine and end the war in one week which failed miserably. Part of the propaganda emphasises that Russia launched a ‘full-scale invasion’ of Ukraine, a term that implies throwing maximum force to invest and occupy a country. From February to September 2022, Russia’s offensive forces comprised less than 200,000 troops (which was fewer than the number of Ukrainian defenders) and did not employ a US-style shock and awe bombing campaign. Indeed, only with the subsequent escalation of the conflict has Russia edged closer to a larger standing army and a full-war footing. 

A crucial thread ignored in Western media is the peace negotiations that began within a week of the war starting. The existence of these talks suggests that part of Moscow’s strategy was to use limited military force to impel Kyiv to agree to a new deal in place of the now defunct Minsk Accords. While former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, who was part of the negotiations, claimed that a deal was basically agreed upon, very little was made of this in Western coverage. When Kyiv withdrew from these negotiations, they did so with Western encouragement and the promise of more aid to inflict a serious defeat upon Russia. If the Russians were serious about a peace deal and the West refused, this undermines the Western narrative of singular Russian aggression and imperialism. 

Instead of covering peace talks and a way out of the bloodshed, the media focus was on Russian military incompetence around Kyiv, selling their withdrawal from Kyiv as a great defeat while playing up Ukraine’s chances of full victory. When the Russians shifted their military activity to a steady war of attrition to take Luhansk Oblast in May, the media provided a preview of the destructive means Russia would use to prosecute the war. Instead of taking pause to think about what this war of attrition could mean for Ukraine against a nuclear-armed opponent with more than three times the population and a self-sufficient munitions industry, the media went in the opposite direction: it would be Russia that would collapse from the strain of the war as its economy failed, political elites defected and military morale evaporated. To sustain this picture, Russian military victories (such as the fall of Mariupol) were presented as pyrrhic, while any Ukrainian successes (such as the sinking of the Moskva or the recapture of Snake Island) were portrayed as heroic and crucial triumphs, indicating that Ukraine could win the war.

Throughout 2022, military developments all pointed to an escalation of the conflict, in which Russia would use more and more of its arsenal to destroy Ukraine and inflict losses while NATO countries would become more deeply involved. While media coverage sustained triumphalism around Ukraine’s victories, no broader analysis of the risks and costs of continuing the war in this fashion was shown; instead, there was only the repetition of the claim that more sanctions against Russia and more weapons sent to Ukraine would ensure Putin’s complete defeat. 

Ignoring Ukrainian wrongdoing; amplifying Russian wrongdoing 

Another classic feature of the coverage has been to present Ukrainians as both ‘worthy victims’ (civilians caught in war, or refugees whose lives have been upturned) and brave heroes (soldiers at the front, or Ukraine’s resolute leaders making speeches). The valorised Ukrainians are then connected directly to national and EU figures, who are shown meeting them in various contexts or simply promising more support to them in speeches and meetings. A key element to this has been an unspoken ban on any negative reporting of Ukraine’s actions. The reckless Ukrainian shelling of the Zaphorizhzhia power plant was not condemned, but rather presented as if the Russians, who held the facility, were bombing themselves. An Amnesty International report that exposed Ukrainian military atrocities was discussed in the media not in terms of its content but as a secondary focus to the angry reactions of Ukrainian officials, which led the Ukrainian head of Amnesty to resign.

The other side of this informational warfare is to present Russia in the darkest terms possible, as a perpetrator of war crimes that must be held to account in a new Nuremburg process. These accusations began at Bucha in April 2022, during a Russian withdrawal that was actually part of the abovementioned peace negotiations. They reached a new level in the autumn, when Kyiv demanded that the Russian leadership be denounced as war criminals and Russia labelled a ‘terrorist state’. The European Parliament complied and named Russia ‘a state sponsor of terrorism’. The International Criminal Court followed suit by issuing an outlandish arrest warrant for Putin and other Russian leaders.

Finally, Russia’s offensive operations in the war were characterised as ‘brutal’, involving human wave attacks in which massive numbers of Russians apparently died. It is worth noting that in a war so highly documented through video and drone footage, there is little evidence of these ‘human wave’ attacks. Indeed, a recent RUSI report accepts that Russian infantry and artillery tactics were significantly adapted in 2022, blowing up the media claim of repeated mindless frontal assaults. Nonetheless, the Russians were presented as having cruel and incompetent commanders who pushed their soldiers into frontal assaults with huge losses. At the centre of such coverage was the infamous Wagner Private Military Company and its recruitment of prisoners, who were treated as expendable and encouraged to commit atrocities. Such reporting usually regurgitated Ukrainian propaganda, lacked any verification from independent frontline correspondents and had the result of de-humanising the Russian enemy. 

Sustaining black and white morality: the future of the pro-Ukraine consensus 

Some remain tempted to regard the Western publics’ united support of Ukraine as an indicator of some wider ideological transformation that will somehow save the global liberal order and rejuvenate the West. At this point, it is more likely that these sentiments are paper thin, and that media coverage plays a far more important role than any sea change within public opinion. Most Westerners are not transforming into Ukrainian nationalists or committed pro-NATO liberal interventionists ready to commit more resources to an open-ended crusade against authoritarianism. Instead, their stances reflect a black and white moral conviction sustained by informational warfare, which forestalls any debate or cost–risk–benefit-style analysis. 

On the other hand, an element of Western identity politics is certainly at work here, in the way that the war has helped generate the feeling that the West stands up for what is right, and that the West is morally good. There is a certain hubris in this vision of saving Ukraine, ruining Russia, and bringing about a new dawn of Western progress and civilisation. While much of the non-West may scoff at what they regard as self-serving neo-colonial pretensions, the insular and self-regarding Western media see only themselves – while the narcissistic pond into which they gaze reflects only beautiful images. Western media spaces have largely recast this deadly and ruinous war as a fantastical recreation of the West’s finest hour, World War Two. This time Zelenskyy is the triumphant new Churchill and Putin will soon blow his brains out in a bunker, his country utterly vanquished. 

Today’s ideological simplicity contrasts with the more nuanced balance of the Cold War, even though the world was more divided and less interconnected back then. Meanwhile, the West’s realistic objective in Ukraine is not clear. Perhaps this is absent, as it was in the various recent wars in the Middle East. While debacles in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya ended or were forgotten without incurring a huge cost to the West, when it comes to the Russo–Ukraine war, it may be that we stand perched on the precipice of something altogether more unpredictably destructive.

It tolls for thee

by

Dear audience,

Let us conceive a condition culled of concepts, categories, conventions and cordialities. There is no need to constrain our cleverly curated collective to the rigid realm of reality. Is there? We must free ourselves from the hubris that is the shackling of one’s self to the orbit of old obligations. Forget the nostalgia for nouns which hurts the nervous ears of a progress of which we fear so to be negligent. 

Is there no ladies, no gentleman, no child or individual of any variety that could suffer an untimely death without it not affecting the whole of the crooked timber that is our little Circus? 

I think not. Would you not agree? 

‘No man is an island, entire of itself;, wrote the judiciously jolly John Donne in Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (1624). Three hundred years later, those words would find their way into the fantabulous first line of Ernest Hemingway’s 1940 novel For Whom the Bell Tolls.

No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

John Donne 1624

Although contrarian, born Catholic and coming complete with courtesans and kids, John Donne was a man of his time, writing his delightful devotions under the long shadow of the clergy that captivated him as a cleric and during the catastrophe of the Thirty Years’ War. Never likely to be mistaken for an anthropocentrist, he was in fact a devout monotheist whose worldview was shaped before the age of righteous reason and rationality that came with the enlightenment. 

His poetic proclamation that ‘any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde’ is an early indication of the values of religious tolerance that emerged from the most bloody conflict in European history. Values of religious tolerance that later appeared in enlightenment thought, and today form a cornerstone of modern liberalism and its self-identity as an ideology. However, is tolerance, as we regard it through the lens of liberal ideology, better understood as a peace treaty between warring factions of Christian monotheism, rather than as an innate feature? 

Circus Bazaar Magazine Edition 02 | 2023 | 02


It tolls for thee: Identity politics and the battle for Ukranian national sovereignty.

PURCHASE NOW

Dear audience, it behooves us to ask whether the worldviews that duly dominated Judeo-Christian understanding in the times of John Donne were really so different from those which prevail in our precarious present. Was the time before Galileo gobsmacked us with the crazy Copernican truth that the sun was the centripetal centre of the solar system any more anthropocentric than modern notions of collective human agency? Are our great secular festivals of atonement and a lazy liberalism that has outlived the loony Hit-larians and Leninists any less monotheistic? Maybe, just maybe our dashing deity survived the great decapitation and now exists in exile as an expert in escapology. 

People, the great Russo-Ukraine war is upon us—a merry microcosm of a global conflict with the capacity for catastrophe. It is performative, pernicious, and notably un-peculiar. As such, monotheistic notions of liberal identity now reign sovereign over all that it casts its gaze upon, both at home and abroad.

Never before have these eyes seen so far and wide! 

Do not speak its name. 

Do not look it in the eye. 

For those now standing before the face of this disseminated deity of death-defying historical deeds, will see two faces staring back: one demanding the acceptance of an ideal; the other beseeching tolerance of conflicting ideals. Yet now, the latter sadly and solemnly shies away, for fear of its overzealous sibling. With not a hand of time past, which has learned that it may swing freely until another’s nose is left bloodied—but instead, an invisible hand left unshackled from sensible sentiments and swinging deeper into realms once occupied by rival but related gods of a polytheist past. 

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Shall we be forgiven for thinking, with the intolerable scourge of a worrisome war once again intruding upon us, that it is in our very nature to seek to avoid identification with the unidentifiable? That we shall wash away the spilt blood of our fellow man with the cloth of good conscience? Is it not good? Is it not right and just that we shall improve one’s own continent, country, or county with the deadly defeat of a foe? That we are not lessened by the deaths of men who are not of our own ilk? But that we are made better?

And has not this capacity for cognitive clowning and conspicuous conquering caused a crowd of courageous characters to create the most colourful of carnivals? Dashing democratic dominions that chastise the chains and actualise the sovereignty of self? Science and civilisations that lengthen our lifespans and liberate love from the land of lords? Who are we to cheekily challenge the ​​titleholder of telos when the totality of its triumphs trends towards such a tremendous techtopia? 

Dear audience, in this era of exculpation of ecclesiastical epistemologies, have we flippantly failed to hear the judiciously jolly John Donne’s bell? Does it still toll for thee and who exactly represents thee today? 

Recall the tumultuous truth, that we are created before life, just as we are destroyed after death. That despite poetic rhymes by clever clerics, in life we are in fact islands. Islands that inhabit a larger world but always remain one and unto ourselves. For in life, above all else we are bestowed with a self. To speak and act and represent one’s own identity independent of any ideology that may act to dull our animal senses. Even a slave possesses a natural capacity to act upon his or her own desires, despite the risk of great danger. I know of no death that was not the result of life, and no peace that was not the result of war. As such, life is war and it is only in death that we are returned, not only to the earth from whence we came but also to thee, who will fight to be custodian of all that we were. Death is a peace in which we will all one day rest. It tolls for thee. 

What of the collective agency that a merry monotheism of any anthropocentric flavour bestows upon us? What product, what spectacle of the sciences, what climax, crescendo or grand finale will signal our yearning for peace and rest? What bell is big enough to deliver us the right to speak for so many dead with the bias of the living? Will it take hundreds, thousands or millions of bells to be tolled at once for us to hear it from within the embrace of our digital daemons? A Cannae, Gettysburg, Lützen, Somme or Stalingrad? A Hiroshima or Nagasaki in order to explain to us all what punishable sins led to our collective salvation? 

Are we not devising devilishly new and innovative ways to toll that bell? To explain its use to ourselves? Has that bell not grown smaller yet larger and louder with time and knowledge? Have we not invented elaborate new rituals and shields, dial-a-yields and even autonomous campanologists to make it fit for tolling?

Dear audience, every man’s death diminishes us all … unless it does not. But the death of us all is the death of us all. 

Therefore, never send to know for whom the bell tolls. 

It may toll for no one at all.

◆ ◆ ◆

Ladies and Gentlemen, Children of all Ages, we are honored to present to you the second edition of Circus Bazaar Magazine. It tolls for thee: Identity politics and the battle for Ukrainian national sovereignty.

As always, penned from the crooked timber of humanity.

Enjoy the show!

Who’s The Leader of the Free World?

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When I co-wrote and edited a book of essays during my university days in 1994, called Security of Eastern Europe: The Case of Ukraine, I could not possibly have imagined that the individual around whom the democratic world would ultimately unite, in a clear stance against the global advance of tyranny, would come from Ukraine. In fact, the question was barely up for debate: The leader of the free world was the President of the United States, of course! But we are no longer living in 1991, when the United States emerged from the Cold War as the undisputed leader of what we took to calling a ‘unipolar world.’ 

Soon after the collapse of the Soviet Empire, America’s full military might was put on display in the Persian Gulf, where it decimated the (formerly feared) ‘one-million-man army’ of Saddam Hussein. President Bush Senior even went so far as to proclaim a ‘New World Order.’ The subtext was clear: America would use its hegemonic position to enforce greater respect for international law. The underlying hope was that capitalism, under US global hegemony, would automatically lead to an expansion of democracy, as long as the United States and its allies could put out ‘regional fires’ where possible, and maintain what would in effect be a Pax Americana. 

The epilogue to this climax of confidence reads like a series of blows to America’s military, economic and even moral claims to leadership, when it comes to advancing, or defending, democracy supporters around the world, to the extent that, today, we are forced to answer the question with another question:

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By what measure?

By what measure can the United States and, by implication, its president, be called the ‘leader of the free world’ today?

After seeing America’s own democracy nearly fail its voters, under the weight of an organised campaign of blatant lies culminating in the storming of the US Capitol on January sixth, 2021, and witnessing the incredibly embarrassing lengths to which a defeated President Trump tried to cling to power, it could emphatically not be said that this man, who departed the White House without ever conceding defeat in an election that saw him lose by six million votes, even believed in the merits of freedom, much less democracy, to begin with.

In the book I Alone Can Fix It: Donald J Trump’s Catastrophic Final Year by Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Gen. Mark Milley states that Trump had worked methodically toward creating a “Reichstag moment”, in which, like Adolf Hitler in 1933, he would manufacture a crisis in order to swoop in and rescue the nation from it.’ When Trump famously declared, in advance of the elections, that he would only recognise its results if he was acknowledged as its winner, Milley was preparing for the worst. The highest-ranking US military leader spoke to associates about the threat of a coup. ‘They may try, but they’re not going to fucking succeed,’ Milley told his deputies, according to Leonnig and Rucker. ‘You can’t do this without the military. You can’t do this without the CIA and the FBI. We’re the guys with the guns.’ 

Okay … but ‘We’re the guys with the guns’ is a bit of a stretch from the motto that is imprinted on every symbol of the American republic: E pluribus unum, Latin for ‘Out of many, one.’ Nevertheless, in 2020, it simply had to do.

The incoming Biden administration tried its best to calm the democratic world’s nerves. ‘America is back’ he proclaimed. However, his declared desire to re-join the Paris Climate Accords was quickly obfuscated by the complete fiasco that was America’s incompetently planned withdrawal from Afghanistan. The longest war in American history came to an abrupt, humiliating end, prompting an essay in the influential magazine The New Yorker: ‘Does the Great Retreat from Afghanistan Mark the End of the American Era?’ While this landmark piece by Robin Wright may have been hyperbolically titled, it nonetheless struck a nerve. As Wright argued, ‘The humiliating U.S. retreat from Afghanistan is now part of an unnerving American pattern.’

In fact, predictions of a more chaotic world that would put US leadership to the test had already begun to emerge by the time of the Balkan wars in the mid-1990s. We were indeed looking at new fault lines, and entirely different types of conflicts than we had grown used to. It was no longer about Communism versus Capitalism, which we already knew. Having supported capitalist despots across the world during the Cold War, we had seen that autocrats were not the least bit hindered by capitalism per se, as long as they could corrupt it to their benefit. So, what was driving global conflicts and the new pattern of alliances that emerged along with it? It is as though political scientists felt useless without the ability to come up with a ‘global paradigm’. 

Articles like Samuel P. Huntington’s ‘The Clash of Civilizations’ were hotly debated, but in the elite academic world of political science (in which this author spent his formative years) a consensus began to emerge. While the wording ‘clash of civilisations’ was unnecessarily provocative (and possibly self-fulfilling), we understood that the conflicts we were looking at were increasingly sectarian, rooted in ethnic and religious identity politics that had long laid dormant, as if frozen by the Cold War. In contrast to Bush’s vision of a ‘New World Order’, an increasing range of observers warned instead of a new world disorder, which would pose challenges that America was ill prepared to control. 

“What made this episode in our collective history possible was not so much the lies we told one another, but the lies we told ourselves.” 

– Michael Soussan

The frightening thing about sectarian conflicts is that they follow the same logic that ignited World War II, where the entire legitimacy of the Third Reich rested on the (fabulist but effective) self-proclaimed superiority of the German ‘Aryan’ race. It justified war, and genocide, on an unprecedented scale. An example is the conflict in the former Yugoslavia, in which the UN was utterly humiliated, crushing leaders’ hopes of relying on the world organisation as an effective multilateral institution to preserve international peace. The massacre of 8000 men and boys, which occurred inside a ‘UN declared Safe Haven’, sealed the question of whether the world was witnessing genocidal ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia. It was 1995. I personally interviewed General Philippe Morillon, who was in charge of UN peacekeepers in the former Yugoslavia at the time of the massacre. Because of Russian influence at the UN Security Council, and lethargic bureaucrats at UN Headquarters, his troops did not have clear rules of engagement. They were supposed to fire only if fired upon; at the same time, they were also supposed to protect civilians. The problem with that dual mission was that they could not actually defend civilians with force when necessary. ‘No soldier should ever be sent into an active warzone with such orders,’ General Morillon complained to me. He was disgusted by the UN, which he felt had morally betrayed him and his men by sending them in to keep a peace that did not exist on the ground, and then denying them the operational authority to engage in peace-enforcement. Upon returning home to the Netherlands, the Dutch detachment of UN peacekeepers, who were forced to sit idly by while the very civilians they were sent to protect were massacred right under their noses, were so ashamed that they ceremoniously ripped apart their blue berets. 

The world turned to the United States. Even though the Balkans unrest was primarily a European problem, and Europe’s largest democracies were sufficiently well armed to be able to intervene with the force necessary to strong-arm all sides to the negotiating table, a serious rift between France and Germany made EU leadership impossible. Leadership requires clear unity of purpose. We shall see, when we wrap up the analysis, how the ability to articulate and embolden such unity of purpose may in fact be the most critical measure by which to identify where true leadership rests at a given time and situation. 

As in both the world wars of the twentieth century, ultimately the United States was obliged to intervene, injecting the potential use of overwhelming force into the equation, and finally settling what had begun as a complicated conflict rooted in historical grudges that predated America’s own birth as a nation. Nonetheless, US intervention was critical to ending the Balkan conflict, which might otherwise have continued for years. Then-US President Bill Clinton appointed Richard Holbrooke, a forceful negotiator who, through a combination of air power and special operations, finally brought all sides to the table. This meeting took place at a US Air Force base, which symbolically gave its name to the Dayton Peace Accords of 1995. Like them or not, one must still acknowledge that Presidents Bush Senior and Clinton were ‘leaders of the free world’ in their time.

The title is not without its blemishes. While laudable in its intent, America’s intervention in Mogadishu, Somalia, ended in disaster; its withdrawal was equally traumatising, and is often cited when analysts look for ‘patterns’ in the rise or fall of America’s power. Many Somalis were simply left to starve. With the subsequent genocide in Rwanda, which resulted in 800,000 people hacked to death while foreign peacekeepers scrambled to evacuate, it became increasingly clear that the world’s democracies would only intervene selectively, in defence of their national interest, which typically favours access to oil rather than the expansion of democracy or the protection of human rights.

American leadership under Clinton included two additional efforts, which, while hailed as successes in their time, proved to be in vain. Using the credible threat of force, Clinton had halted North Korea’s efforts to nuclearise; however, across subsequent administrations, North Korea finally succeeded in acquiring nuclear weapons. Furthermore, the much-hailed ‘Oslo Peace Accord’ did not stop the Israeli Arab conflict from degenerating repeatedly into violent conflagrations.

Still, the idea that the US President remained the undisputed title of ‘leader of the free world’ endured, in part because of the unprecedented global force projection that followed the attacks of September 11, 2001. However, the reaction to this mass-scale terrorist attack, that of a traumatised nation led by an equally traumatised President, led to the over-extension of American power. In addition, the Bush administration’s understandable but nonetheless brash approach to diplomacy put serious rifts between leading European powers like France and Germany on public display in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq.

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Moreover, the incredible boost in military spending, including on private mercenary groups like Blackwater (which still exists under a variety of confusing and ever-changing names) brought to mind the fateful warning of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who warned that any president not familiar with the military might easily be manipulated into decisions that would enrich arms dealers at the expense of servicemen and quite possibly the interest of democracy itself.

President Bush Jr. came to power unable even to pronounce the word nuclear properly (so it became ‘newkillar’) – and while he had served in the National Guard, he had no experience of complex command and control. In his farewell address to the nation, on January 17, 1961, Eisenhower warned that the nation should ‘guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence … by the military–industrial complex.’ He went on to offer an ominous prediction: ‘The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.’ It is telling that the man who had served as Supreme Allied Commander, overseeing ‘D-Day’, waited until his last day in office to raise this subject with the American public. Had it just been an oversight? Or was the great Eisenhower conscious that certain truths are dangerous to speak aloud, even for the ‘leader of the free world’? If anything, Ike’s prophetic words remind us that the question at stake – the question of what true leadership of the free world actually means, and where it rests – cannot be analysed through the simplistic prism of partisan politics (which tend to paint Democrats as ‘doves’ and republican as ‘hawks’ in matters of foreign policy). 

Advisors guided Bush, including vice-president Dick Cheney and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, who came back to politics fresh from generously paid stints at companies like Halliburton and Texaco. Thus, initially the Pentagon conceived the Iraq war. Soon enough Bush found himself trying to arbitrate an internal power struggle between the Pentagon on the one hand and an alliance composed of the CIA and the State Department on the other. All these institutions jousted for position; this ‘war within the war’ left America completely unprepared for the arduous task of nation building, which was implied in the final articulation of its war missions. Talk of spreading democracy came without a realistic plan to achieve such an aim within a foreseeable timeframe.

Bush’s successor, President Barack Obama, had campaigned on the need to ‘get the boys home’ from what had (inevitably) become intractable wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan. The measure of success had become unclear to the politicians, the generals, and the public alike. Ideally, America would have left behind sustainable democracies in both countries. Today, only Iraq still stands a chance of democratic survival, on the condition that its neighbours Iran and Syria are weakened to the point where they can no longer sabotage the very real democratic aspirations of civilians in Iraq, a country I worked with closely and visited three times, before and after the war. 

While popular at home and abroad, President Obama inherited two wars that offered no easy way out, short of complete humiliation. Obama was a charismatic leader, but the direction of his leadership did not reassure US allies and certainly not the governments in Iraq and Kabul. The starkest test of Obama’s Foreign Policy chops came in 2013, when Syrian president Bashar al-Assad ignored Obama’s publicly vaunted ‘red line’ and began using chemical weapons against civilians in contested urban zones. Obama had already been very tepid in his support for democracy activists who rallied across the Middle East during the so-called Arab Spring. He was even less supportive of Iranian street protesters during the so-called ‘Green Revolution’, a failed uprising that was met with viciously violent suppression in Iran. By the time of the second Iranian uprising in 2023, sparked by the brutality of Iran’s despised ‘Morality Police’, Obama finally expressed some regret for not having been more supportive of Iranian protesters during his own presidency. His aloof and unconcerned appearance with regard to the street-struggle for democracy in the Muslim world was not his proudest moment.

In his defence, Obama did (this year) finally offer an explanation on this score, suggesting, in self-criticism, that his administration might well have been ‘overthinking’ its response to the popular uprising against Iran’s extremist, terrorising regime, because his advisors were more interested in reaching a nuclear deal with that country’s leadership than with expressing support for the fundamental rights of its citizens. On balance, this smells more of calculated realism than of Wilsonian idealism.

The Syrian government’s use of chemical weapons forced Obama to act, but he did so reluctantly, authorising only symbolic ‘pinprick’ air strikes that were meant to ‘send a message’ rather than rain down dissuasive punishment on the Syrian despot. In the very same speech in which he announced these insignificant strikes, he declared loud and clear that America ‘[was] not the world’s policeman’ and would no longer seek to oust dictators, for fear that it would inherit only intractable civil wars.

Obama’s speech on the symbolic date of September 11, 2013, was paradoxical. It projected a lack of clarity of purpose, ending in a statement that can hardly be called clear or resolute: ‘… when, with modest effort and risk, we can stop children from being gassed to death and thereby make our own children safer over the long run, I believe we should act.’

Having made it absolutely clear that the US would not send ‘boots on the ground’, the US intelligence community went on to ensure that America did exactly that, because it would have been too costly for America to be absent where Russia and the most radical of Islamic extremists were dominant. That being said, America’s only intervention consisted of supplying the only competent (and democratically inclined) Kurdish Peshmerga forces with air support in what came to be known as ‘over the horizon force projection’ (why use a short expression when a longer one can do) – a token act that obfuscated the fact that, even in retreat, the US was forced to go back on its word or risk alienating the only reliable allies it had left in the area, namely the Kurds, who were the sole organised force both capable of defeating ISIS in street-to-street combat and willing to incur the losses … because they were fighting for their very survival in the territory of their ancestors.

Fast forward to today: running on fumes of hope, the Biden administration is seizing on a completely unforeseen opportunity to strengthen not only NATO in the ‘West’ but its core alliances in the Eastern theatre as well – proving Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy right in stating that his people were fighting for more than their own freedom, indeed for the cause of freedom ‘across the world.’

Zelenskyy’s steadfastness transformed what might well have been Ukraine’s – and Europe’s – ‘darkest hour’ in decades, when he turned down a last-ditch American offer to flee his country and set up a government in exile. In his now famous reply to the American offer to exfiltrate him at a time when, according to intelligence sources, his own person was the target of at least five assassination plots, Zelenskyy reportedly said, quite simply, ‘I need ammunition, not a ride.’ The quote went around the world faster than Russian tanks could move toward Kyiv; a year later, NATO members and the United States have slowly but surely given in to almost every demand coming out of Zelenskyy’s mouth.

Today, even his image rouses world parliaments to raucous bi-partisan applause. World leaders appear to elbow each other out the way for a selfie with the man in the green shirt. However, Zelenskyy is not one to be swayed by ceremony. Without being particularly eloquent in English, Zelenskyy manages to call out the hypocrisy of nations and institutions that fail to choose sides in what is, admittedly, a critical turning point for the democratic world.

Only a few years before, the newly elected Zelenskyy had found himself the subject of what can only be called an attempt at extortion by a sitting US President. It is hard to deny the joint US intelligence finding that Vladimir Putin actively influenced the outcome of the 2016 election in favour of Trump. While President, Trump rewarded his good ‘friend’ in the Kremlin a thousand times over, including, most alarmingly for Europe, during his visit to NATO in May 2017, when he famously refused to re-affirm Article V of the NATO treaty, which stipulates that other NATO allies must come to the aid of an ally under attack if the article is invoked. Ironically, the only country to date that has ever invoked Article V was the United States itself, after the 9/11 attacks.

Trump was everything but the leader of the free world. And while we cannot in good conscience use Biden’s advanced age to question his firmly rooted belief in democracy, his administration appears to be playing catch-up on many fronts, including the Ukrainian one. The Biden government accedes to Zelenskyy’s demands for ‘enough arms to win the war’ with a trickle that increases and expands only reluctantly, in tandem not with a clear policy but with Zelenskyy’s viral popularity, which most world leaders hope will rub off on their own poll numbers if they are seen to be at his side.

This dynamic reflects clearly on who, today, is the leading force in cementing the resolve of the democratic world across its many alliances. Sometimes the most reluctant warriors are the best democracies can hope for, and former comedian Volodymyr Zelenskyy embodies that role, today.

The accession of Sweden and Finland to the NATO alliance was unthinkable before Ukraine made a stand against Russia and called out the hypocrisy of the UN as a credible institution to advance or defend the cause of democracy. This year on April 1st, when it was Russia’s turn to take the presidency of the UN Security Council, Zelenskyy called out the moment as ‘the worst April Fool’s Joke in History.’ The Ukrainian leader’s words will continue to reverberate through time no matter what happens next. He is, in this author’s opinion, at the time of this writing, the uncontested leader of the free world (even if he remains the most vulnerable to physical attack). Courage and democracy appear to go hand in hand. 

So does forward thinking. When looking at the architecture of the international system today, by Zelenskyy’s measure, we lack a global organisation that is truly dedicated to democracy. Interestingly, Senator John McCain proposed one in 2007, but it was immediately dismissed by the world’s diplomatic elite at the time, and went nowhere. The late Senator McCain, a former war prisoner whom Trump deemed wise to call a ‘loser’, had included in his campaign a call to create a global organisation that included only democracies among its members, and could therefore credibly be depended on to advance the cause, when and where possible.

In proposing to formalise a global democratic alliance, Senator McCain did not offer an entirely new idea. Nor was the idea a product of ‘Wilsonian idealism.’ In truth, McCain’s proposal was first suggested back in 1795 by Immanuel Kant in his pamphlet ‘On Perpetual Peace’. His very first condition for a reliable international system required, in the language of his day, that ‘The civil constitution of each state shall be republican.’ By this, he meant that only governments that represented the will of their people could conceivably form an effective international organisation to keep the peace. Back in Kant’s era, there were hardly any democracies around. The French Revolution had taken an extremist turn and the Napoleonic Wars would soon result in the declaration of an empire in its stead. So, Kant stressed that the next best thing to a global organisation would be a system of alliances between republics that represented the will of the people.

That is very much the conclusion one draws from Zelenskyy’s outspoken criticism of the UN as an organisation. Diplomats need not take it personally – he is simply pointing out the obvious. If the UN actually worked, Russia’s attack would lead to that country’s expulsion. There are provisions in the UN charter to expel a state that breaks the rules; unfortunately, in practice, it is very hard to expel a permanent member of the Security Council, especially without the support of China. The fact that the Ukrainian leader is the only outspoken critic of the inherent hypocrisy that fuels our existing UN-centred global disorder will go down in history, not just as an act of bravery but as an act of intellectual and political leadership that will no doubt influence the future of the free world.

All of those who argued that the prospect of NATO expansion is to blame for the war should logically conclude today that the same argument applies to Finland. To be sure, during the Cold War, Russia intimidated Finland’s aspirations to independence and freedom, to the extent that a name was coined for Finland’s awkward predicament: ‘Finlandisation’ described the de-facto reality that Finland did everything it could to avoid alienating the USSR, including not joining NATO and only engaging seriously with the EU after the fall of the Soviet Union.

If Zelenskyy had folded … if he had accepted that his country should remain at the (corrupt) mercy of Russia’s despot, it is unlikely that we would have seen Finland and Sweden rush to join NATO, thereby reinforcing the alliance of democracies, with ripple effects reaching as far as Korea, Taiwan and Japan, all which have insisted on strengthening their own democratic alliances with the US and Europe.

If China is even hinting at the possibility of brokering a peace between Putin and Ukraine (we would say ‘Russia and Ukraine’ if the Russian people verifiably shared their un-chosen leader’s appetite for war), it may be because Xi Jinping is seeing the effect this war is having on democratic alliances across the globe. This is inconvenient for China because it interferes with its own hegemonic ambitions and ultimately threatens its own system with a pro-democracy uprising. 

From a geopolitical point of view, in 2022–23, one unflinching and clear voice has made a measurable impact in strengthening democratic alliances across the globe. The bittersweet reality is that the man who most merits the title of ‘leader of the free world’ has little to promise his own people in the foreseeable future other than blood, sweat and tears.

If these words sound familiar, perhaps they can remind us that, short of a decisive effort to help Ukraine defeat and repel Russia, Western democracies may come to regret dragging their feet when the call for help came, from a country that desperately wants to live in freedom and in peace, in our time.

West World

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The Kremlin has been burning for an anti-western global project for decades. Before coming to the current and relatively strong concept of a multipolar world order, the Russian state actively experimented with different ideas and brands. The revival of the Russian Empire, BRICS (Brazil–Russia–India–China–South Africa), USSR 2.0, the Russian World, the Union with Belarus, and the Eurasian Economic Union: these ideas have been implemented with varying success by the Kremlin’s technologists.

Some of these projects, despite their volatile representations, were mundane, like the concepts of second-rate products on Kickstarter, which offer a virtual model but no industrial design. In some cases, it became ridiculous: contradictory ideas were implemented in parallel. Paradoxical innovations, such as the revival of the position of the Tsar and the glorification of Stalin, could literally take place at the same time. But the fact is that the political–technological laboratories of the Kremlin were constantly working to create something grandiose that would transcend the official borders of Russia and contrast against liberal expansionism.

Ukraine, with its shifting of poverty, claims to democracy, orientation to the West and its two Maidans, certainly didn’t fit into any of these ideas. Of course, the Kremlin could not allow the Ukrainian solo project to succeed. In none of its geopolitical ideas has the Kremlin considered Ukraine as a partner. In the Kremlin’s plans, Ukraine has always been somewhere on the sidelines: a transit country for moving gas to Europe and nothing more. Even Belarus now plays a more important role.

Ukraine’s entry into the global liberal project was nothing more than a matter of time and opportunity. The Russian attacks have only accelerated this integration. In Ukraine, the judicial system has not been fully built, corruption has not been defeated, and the roots of the Orthodox Church are still strong. But the flags of the US and Europe are already flying on the country’s facade, welcoming investors and international banking capital. The country is now receiving all the West’s support as an advance on participation in future development. Such a sudden change has inevitably led to a cargo cult-like phenomena among many Ukrainians.

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After the collapse of the USSR, the first reforms in Ukraine were carried out by members of the Communist Party. Next, the clans of local oligarchs seized the reform initiative. Neither were able to provide the long-awaited breakthrough needed in both ideology and economics. The inevitable competition between these puppet political groups could well have ended in anarchy and the collapse of the state if Ukraine had not surrendered to the mercy of the global liberal project. This happened after the second Maidan, at which point people with foreign citizenship began to occupy government posts, and concessions for the development of Ukrainian oil and gas fields were openly transferred to global corporations.

The fact that the West now controls Ukraine is well known among its citizens and is freely discussed in taxis and BAZAARS across the country. This is why Ukraine is looking to the West for its salvation. Having become a Western colony, Ukraine has a strong right to expect such protection. Look at Ukrainian leaders. They do not only ask for help, but confidently demand the support of ‘Western partners’, asking for arms and loans on an unprecedented scale. At the same time, Russia, as if in punishment, annexed Ukrainian territories during the first wave of aggression, which logically proceeded the current and altogether more bloody wave of aggression.

The courage of the Ukrainians who bravely resist Putin’s army is admirable. But without the help of the West, this resistance would not have been possible. It means that Ukraine is now dependent on the future geopolitical ambitions of the West and is obliged to be subservient in order to receive weapons and new loans. It is necessary to understand what the West wants if we are to understand the many possible futures that await Ukraine.

Fundamentally, the West wants to rid the world of Putin’s ability to project power. It is no wonder that Putin has already been convicted by the International Criminal Court. The more crimes the Kremlin commits on the territory of Ukraine, the more likely that western commentators will declare Putin to be the ‘Adolf Hitler’ of modern times. Until February 2022, Putin was just a schemer and a bluffing swindler. Now, after all the war crimes in Ukraine, he is practically the devil incarnate; Satan in the flesh. But the West has systematically lured Putin into this trap. And with the publication of his arrest warrant, the first part of the game has been played. However, the end of the war in Ukraine and the restoration of justice may take decades.

Now, the coalition that supports Ukraine comprises almost 90 states. Among them, only the ‘collective West’ is involved in the supply of weapons: the United States and the leading countries of Europe. However, no matter how many weapons arrive in Ukraine, common sense and the concept of nuclear parity suggest that this war is unlikely to have a ‘Hollywood ending’. As was remarked on Twitter, ‘The Hague Tribunal is good, but for the generation that grew up on 80s action movies, it is important that Putin falls off the cliff at the end.’

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Fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian is a bad plan. Putin’s job is to spread out the war in its current form for decades, literally until he dies of old age. Putin no longer cares how many victims there will be in this story: tens or hundreds of thousands. The main task of the Russian dictatorship is to keep its new tsar. In fact, Putin has already mocked the idea of free elections to his heart’s content. The latest amendments to the Russian constitution, which allow Putin to ‘zero out’ his presidential terms and stay in power until 2036, were more of a caricature. Then, under the pretext of quarantine restrictions, the election commission simply drew the results that the Kremlin needed. There is no doubt that similar results will be drawn during the next elections. Today, Putin’s power apparatus is well protected from any external attack. For Putin and company, the ‘nuclear shield’ is their personal armour. The only chance to win the war is to break the Russian defence from within. This seems to be the plan of the West.

Western media’s depictions of Putin are not enough to overthrow the government in Russia. To undermine the autocracy from within, a revolutionary situation must develop from the inside. That is why sanctions will never be enough. The collapse of the USSR was greatly facilitated by the Iron Curtain. Soviet citizens began to seriously doubt the ideas of communism when they were paying two monthly salaries for a pair of secondhand jeans. But Russia has been actively preparing for the current sanctions for the past decade. Moreover, the Kremlin now officially supports the illegal import of goods and even encourages the piracy of movies, music and software. Thus it is not yet possible to create the kind of hunger for goods in Russia that existed in the USSR.

That the war has the potential to directly affect Russians within their own homes is what will help the Russians doubt the wisdom of its ruling party. Given this, it is no wonder that Ukraine announces counterattacks with such loudness. Neither is it a surprise that the West, which at first didn’t agree to the delivery of its aircraft and tanks, is now opening the overton window and discussing the export of long-range weapons to Ukraine. Until recently, the West did not advise that Ukraine attack Russian territory, but now the Russian border regions are appearing more often in combat reports. It is not for nothing that there are fears of this mobilisation in Russia itself. The risk to Putin is that Russians understand that the war can potentially cost them their lives.

The success of this plan may also depend on Ukraine not only keeping its existing territories, but also liberating the occupied lands. This would be to the shame of Putin, which perhaps the Russian people will not be able to understand. If you can’t defeat old problems, let’s create new ones. As such, a pyramid is now built within the Kremlin. After the failure that was ‘capturing Kyiv in three days’, it is necessary to explain why the war is still going on. The explanation appeared literally immediately after the failure of the Russian blitzkrieg. In the Kremlin’s view, Ukraine is just a proxy for the West, and official propaganda quickly shifted the focus from ‘fighting the Ukrainian Nazis’ to fighting the West. ‘If we hadn’t attacked, the West and NATO would have been the first to attack Russia from the territory of Ukraine.’ the heads of Russian TV shows repeat as a means to justify the invasion. But Russia’s 2024 presidential election is approaching and, as planned by the Kremlin, Putin should show record results there. But it’s somehow uncool to come to the elections without the bravado of an unconquered and constantly counterattacking Ukraine.

There is much talk in Russia about a new multipolar world order. The Kremlin declares through its media that it’s not only fighting for Russian’s interests in Ukraine but also fighting for the concept of this new world. So, in pointing weapons towards Ukraine, Russians are pointing to the hegemony of the dollar, to the ‘colour revolutions’ inspired by the capitalists, pointing to the politics of tolerance, to globalisation and to corporations. In this sense, the departure of major brands from Russia is potentially a gift for the regime if seen within the lens of Kremlin propaganda.

It was once said ‘it is OK that Russians do not have sausages in their stores because in the West, black people are lynched’. This message helped prolong the existence of the Soviet Union for several decades. In an adapted form, the slogan now reads, ‘Without parmesan and champagne, but without [George] Soros and in a heterosexual family’ (the level of sex education in Russia is still extremely low).

Thus, the narrative of the Russian world, which began with the theft of Crimea and Donbass, turned into the idea of creating an anti-Western centre of influence. Needless to say, this idea has the potential to reach billions of people in China, India, Brazil, Syria, Turkey and North Korea. With the threat of such ideological ambitions potentially translating into geopolitical expansion, the West simply can’t afford to lose in Ukraine. Therefore, Ukraine has no right to withdraw from this war. The script must be fulfilled. ‘A football match takes place in any weather,’ as Soviet sports commentators used to say.

Meanwhile, people are dying in Ukraine; civilians are suffering. Even the West now realises that defeating Russia in the classical sense – that is, raising the Ukrainian flag over the Kremlin, which is the dream of any Ukrainian patriot – is not yet possible in any realistic scenario. Is Ukraine now fighting without a chance to realise ‘the victory’? Zelenskyy has stated the goal: to liberate all the occupied territories, including Crimea. Ukraine will not agree to any lesser result. (In response to this, Russia again threatened to use nuclear weapons.)

Of course, Putin doesn’t want to repeat the fate of Hussein or Gaddafi. But what to do with Ukraine, what will be better for her: a terrible defeat, or lasting horrors without end? Is the West prepared to accept the prospect that the war in its present form will drag on for years? The Vietnam War lasted twenty years. The invasion of Iraq began twenty years ago and lasted for eight, although the War on Terror continues as an ongoing campaign. The Nazi attack on the USSR, often mentioned in Russia, lasted ‘only’ four years. The war between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals is generally stated to have lasted 100,000 years!

The plot of this story unfolds in such a way that a Black Swan is bound to appear. The beauty of this concept is that the Black Swan is, by its very definition, unpredictable. Of course, in the political system being constructed in Russia today, the death of Putin should not cause its collapse. The even more militant Ramzan Kadyrov or the defence minister Sergei Shoigu are ready to replace Putin. And how many clones of Putin do the Russians have in stock? It must be the Black Swan that will completely change the paradigm, turn everything upside down.

Their increasingly regular occurrence refutes the general notion that a Black Swan is a rare event; Bitcoin, the coronavirus, and the progress of AI are just the most prominent examples. It is logical to assume that the emergence of a new Black Swan is only a matter of time. However, the essence of the Black Swan is that its arrival cannot be predicted, accelerated or delayed. You can only believe that it will happen. Ukrainians are waiting for a rather specific Black Swan: one that will completely change the situation in Russia while at the same time avoid doing further harm to Ukraine. Such is the inherent unpredictability of war and the tendency for conflict to escalate, however, that the more likely outcome is that any unexpected events will result in prolongation of the conflict for an indefinite period, literally speaking, for decades.

So far, Western aid to Ukraine has only fuelled Russian people’s responsiveness to the propaganda of the Kremlin, inspiring Russian dreams of ‘hitting NATO with all guns blazing.’ The current school of Russian propaganda is the successor to Soviet propaganda and has a long history of creating an alternative reality. This great Russian monster will not react to a frontal attack; it is too colossal and too ancient. A force of such vast redundancy is best left to fight with itself.

Russia needs new soldiers? Great, let’s announce a total mobilisation. Putin signals to deal with some troublesome journalists? Okay, let’s put famous journalists in jail by the hundreds. Russia is under sanctions and corporations do not want to sell chips and semiconductors to Russia? Let’s start telling people that Russian car brands are better than Tesla and Mercedes. Putin wants to look positive on the screens? Praise him 24/7. Hawks they may seem, yet their task is to push everything to absurd limits. ‘The worse, the better’ is their motto.

A vivid example of how the desperate execution of Putin’s orders can undermine the entire structure of the Kremlin’s power vertical is the behaviour of the head of the Wagner private military company, Yevgeny Prigozhin, who claims to be the modern-day Marshal Georgy Zhukov of Russia. Zhukov was a historic figure, not only for his victories over the Nazis but also for his lack of mercy towards his own fighters. Prigozhin proclaims the same, and sits upon the loss of contract soldiers in vast amounts in the effort to achieve what some would deem dubious goals; the most recent case in point involved the loss of at least 20,000 Wagner mercenaries in a single attack on Bakhmut.


At first glance, Prigozhin is an ultra-patriot and a war hawk. In fact, he is sending tens of thousands of Russian fighters right under the HIMARs and Abrams. Yet Prigozhin shows no hesitation in scolding the Russian defence ministry, screeching about the lack of ammunition. In a filmed interview, he said that the military campaign is more suggestive of a meat grinder than of a carefully planned special operation. Saying such things demoralises Russian recruits, although for now, Prigozhin is the only Russian action figure who is criticising government powers.

Recall the irony of the Western movie The Death of Stalin (2017), where the singularly brutal Zhukov provides the soldiers for the execution of Lavrentiy Beria (head of the secret police), then cremates the body of this once all-powerful Kremlin torturer. Prigozhin may not be the one to pull off a palace coup, but as far as press quotes are concerned, he has outstripped any official sources in Russia in terms of influence and political standing. On the other hand, one can recall the example of Igor Strelkov, who was the main media face of separatism in eastern Ukraine during the first wave of the 2014 Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea, but whose star faded very quickly after the shooting down of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 over Donbass.

Perhaps we’ll see how the system in Russia will begin to devour itself. Indeed, very soon Moscow will defeat the last agents of the West on its territory, at which stage this huge and hawk-driven apparatus designed to find and destroy dissent will not be able to slow its inertia and will begin to harvest ‘enemies of the nation’ from within the current elite. This is precisely what happened under Stalin, who was consequently declared an enemy of the people after his death.

These very war hawks, strangely enough, may turn out to be the West’s best friends. With or without consent, they are corrupting from within the idea of Russian greatness. According to rumours, this is how the Soviet Union collapsed.

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