In “How Fascist is Putinism?“, German political scientist and veteran Ukraine watcher Andreas Umland thoroughly examines and assesses the arguments and counter-arguments for considering Putinism to be a form of fascism. If there’s a single scholarly article to recommend on this topic, it is probably this one.
Umland shows that while it’s still quite possible to argue that Putinism is not fascism, this requires either a rather strict definition of what fascism is (and an eagerness to highlight the ways it still fails that definition), or a nuanced empirical eye that sees Putinism not as one thing but a hodgepodge, and therefore not only fascist. To argue that it is not fascist at all, however, seems to be stretching credulity. The answer is, at best, a matter of degree.
Among his conclusions:
“Russia’s armed forces and occupational administration in Ukraine behave, especially since 2022, in a manifestly terroristic, genocidal, ecocidal, and sometimes even sadist manner. Against this dreadful background, it seems strange to insist that Russia’s policies and the ideas behind them are clearly, absolutely and unquestionably non-fascist.”
On the other hand,
“An exclusive explanation of Russia’s motivation for its policies in Ukraine and elsewhere with ultra-nationalist maximalism limits understanding of the motivations behind the so-called ‘Special Military Operation’ in Ukraine. [. . .] The initial impulse for the full-scale invasion was, nevertheless, less growing ultra-nationalist fanaticism than misinformed power-political cynicism within Putin’s regime.”
More to the point, however:
“The longer and the more successful Russia’s war against Ukraine is, the more prominent and influential fascist Russian actors, ideas and networks will become in Russia as well as beyond.”
The book features the work of 30+ Ukrainian authors and artists that together articulate “what in the world is worth fighting for” — a world in which, in the face of history’s repetitions and the future’s uncertainties, we nevertheless persist, in Katya Buchatska’s words, in “plant[ing] a garden so that we have something to lose.”
Political philosopher Slavoj Žižek writes about it:
“Urgently needed, Terra Invicta focuses on the catastrophic environmental impact of the Russian aggression on Ukraine. It demonstrates how the genocidal Russian attack systematically destroys natural resources, renders large domains uninhabitable, and endangers nuclear power plants. New habitats are emerging where old forms of life were destroyed. Ivakhiv’s volume makes it clear that there is no choice between ecological concerns and struggle against military aggression: in Ukraine, they are the two moments of the same struggle. For this reason alone, Terra Invicta deserves to become an instant classic, a volume that everyone who wants to grasp the contours of our global crisis should read.”
And Andrey Kurkov, leading Ukrainian novelist and essayist, writes:
“The war in Ukraine affects the ecology of nature and the ecology of consciousness throughout the world. This book is the best way to understand today’s Ukraine and the impact of Russian aggression on your life, no matter what country you live in.”
Below is a brief description followed by a list of the contents and ordering information (which includes a 25% discount). In addition, the full-colour book features art by Katya Buchatska, Nikita Kadan, Kateryna Aliinyk, Arsen Savadov, Anna Zvyagintseva, Zhanna Kadyrova, Kateryna Lysovenko, and some of the authors listed. Deep gratitude to all of the authors and artists involved, and to the wonderful sprites at McGill-Queen’s University Press. Royalties will go to Ukraine’s defense for as long as the war continues.
Historian and left-wing activist Vladyslav Starodubtsev is becoming a prominent spokesperson for Ukraine’s “left-republican tradition,” a tradition he identifies with some of the leaders of Ukraine’s national awakening in the late 1800s, and with those that led the efforts to create a social-democratic Ukrainian state in the years 1917 through about 1922 or so, a period that ended with the consolidation of Soviet control over Ukraine.
Suzi Weissman recently interviewed Starodubtsev for Jacobin Radio, and the two spent more time — almost an hour — discussing the 1917-1922 years than most people have ever spent thinking about those years at all, let alone what they looked like in Ukraine. As the web site puts it, the interview examines “the Ukrainian People’s Republic of 1917-1923, born in the revolutionary upheavals of 1905, WWI, and the February 1917 Russian Revolution. Built on grassroots power from peasants, workers, soldiers, and cooperatives, the Ukrainian People’s Republic legislated sweeping land reform, gender equality, national-personal autonomy for ethnic minorities, and a cooperative economy. It did not last.”
Please note that this is an old entry, drafted in early 2024 but left unpublished until now. It is being added to UKR-TAZ in order to be readable as an archived piece. That said, very little has changed in the global situation since the interview was conducted — which says something in itself.
The Belgian analytical review Politique has published an excellent and wide-ranging interview with Ukrainian historian and left-wing activist Hanna Perekhoda. The interview covers many of the angles on the Russo-Ukrainian war that UKR-TAZ has covered over the last few years. It’s in French. Here are some excerpts, in translation. (The translation is mostly Google’s, with occasional corrections of my own.)
On the shared interests of the anti-authoritarian left in Ukraine and Russia:
The three “possible explanations” closely parallel the three hypotheses that I had written about last week, except that they fail to mention the one I spent much of that article discussing.
My first two hypotheses, which I called the “conspiratorial” (that Putin “has something on him,” in Coyne’s words) and the “psychoanalytical” (that Trump’s particular form of pathological narcissism lends him to looking up to certain kinds of men) are covered by Coyne, though the latter becomes a little vague: Coyne writes that, in this rendition, Trump
has simply been rolled by him, over and over – whether because he has some sort of inexplicable man-crush on him, or because of Mr. Putin’s adroit application of flattery to the suppurating wounds of Mr. Trump’s ego, or because of Mr. Trump’s peculiar susceptibility to the kind of simple-minded, lumpen-left ‘when you think about it, the West are really the bad guys’ arguments favoured by your stoner roommate in first year.
Coyne’s third explanation, however, merely repeats a variation of the second: “that Mr. Trump just happens to agree with him. Mr. Putin is a dictator. Mr. Trump would like to be one.” Coyne misses the all-important “realist” explanation I had written about, which is rooted in a particular constellation of political-economic relations, especially those of fossil fuels.
Now, Rolling Stone’s star writer on these topics, Antonia Juhasz, has penned a piece that provides many more details to support the contention that the Putin-Trump meeting in Alaska was largely about joint fossil fuel dealmaking (“Inside Putin’s Fossil-Fueled Victory Lap in Alaska,“ August 23, 2025).
There are three main hypotheses explaining Donald Trump’s eagerness to please Vladimir Putin.
The first is “conspiratorial”: that Putin has something over Trump, related perhaps to the Steele dossier, Trump’s real estate shenanigans, the KGB’s long-term efforts to cultivate Trump as a “Russian asset,” or maybe even the Epstein files (Trump and Putin do, after all, connect within the ranks of the uber-rich masculinist jet set, where sexist pedophilia seems readily appeasable).
The second is psychoanalytical: that Trump is a pathological narcissist with a fragile father-damaged ego, and that he only looks up to other, more “successfully” imperial father figures. Putin is one of the few who fit his criteria.
The third is “realist,” which acknowledges that there are benefits, from Trump’s perspective, to a cozier relationship with Russia. Allying with Russia could, for instance, steer the latter away from China. More importantly, and more specifically these days, is that Russia is a fossil fuel superpower — and Trump’s authority is also reliant on a perpetuation of the global power of fossil fuels. Rehabilitating Putin will enable Trump to “make deals” around Russia’s only assets, which are its oil and gas deposits. When other prices are rising all around Trump, he could at least keep gas prices down by dealing directly with Putin.
Ukraine may be the only country in the world where black-and-red flags can signify either anarcho-syndicalism — which they mostly do in the photos below, from David Chichkan’s funeral ceremony in Kyïv yesterday — or the right-wing nationalism associated with the world war two era OUN and UPA partisan armies. (Those armies and their followers today are commonly known as “Banderites” in honor of ultranationalist leader Stepan Bandera, who’s become a symbol of all things anti-Russian, though the flag long pre-dates Bandera and has been used well beyond the paramilitary legacy associated with him.)
In some cases they can even be both, as with Ukraine’s national anarchists or anarcho-nationalists. (On anarchism and the Russo-Ukrainian war, see here, here, here, and here.) Sometimes, the “Banderite” flag features red over black horizontal bands, while the anarchist flag features the two in diagonal bands, but that’s not always the case.
As Russia continues its bombing campaign, having launched more than 14 times as many drones and missiles in July (well over 6,000) as it did over the same month last year, President Trump gave war criminal Vladimir Putin the red carpet treatment in the former Russian colonial territory, now U.S. state, of Alaska.
The meaning of this meeting might be analyzed for years, but that it signified a capitulation — if only to Russia’s desire for neo-imperial status — should be clear. It was, as Ruth Ben-Ghiat puts it, a summit to legitimize Kremlin geopolitics — the “make Russia great again ‘summit’,” a “summit” that was primarily “about the breaking of taboos, in this case, the welcoming onto American territory of Putin, who has an International Criminal Court arrest warrant out for him for war crimes in Ukraine.”
Or, as Bill King puts it, “For Putin, it was the dream package: red carpet rolled out, a fighter jet flyover, and an American president who treats the job like a time-share pitch. For Trump, it was just another stop in his travelling scam carnival, where the prizes are for him, the bill is for you, and the game is always rigged.”
Despite the protests that made it into some of the media coverage (alongside pro-Trump counter-demonstrations), it also reflects a capitulation of democracy to the kind of multipolar imperialrealignment both men desire. That’s perhaps what made it worthwhile for Trump, but much more of a success for Putin. (The body language analyses are also always entertaining.)
Right around the time that Trump was on the tarmac, clapping for the butcher of Bucha, his fund-raising team sent out the following e-mail:
Attention please, I’m meeting with Putin in Alaska! It’s a little chilly. THIS MEETING IS VERY HIGH STAKES for the world. The Democrats would love nothing more than for ME TO FAIL. No one in the world knows how to make deals like me!
The backdrop for this uniquely Trumpian combination of braggadocio and toxic partisanship was, of course, anything but a master class in successful deal-making; rather, the impetus for the summit was the President’s increasing urgency to produce a result after six months of failure to end the war in Ukraine—a task he once said was so easy that it would be done before he even returned to office in January. Leading up to the Alaska summit, nothing worked: Not berating Ukraine’s President, Volodymyr Zelensky, in the Oval Office. Not begging Putin to “STOP” his bombing. Not even a U.S.-floated proposal to essentially give Putin much of what he had demanded. Trump gave Putin multiple deadlines—fifty days, two weeks, “ten or twelve days”—to agree to a ceasefire and come to the table, then did nothing when Putin balked. When his latest ultimatum expired, on August 8th, instead of imposing tough new sanctions, as he had threatened, Trump announced that he would meet Putin in Alaska a week later, minus Zelensky, in effect ending the Russian’s global isolation in exchange for no apparent concessions aimed at ending the war that Putin himself had unleashed.
In the end, the war will continue because Russia will continue to pursue its goals, which it showed no desire to temper. And Ukrainians will continue to die.
Juxtaposing this one man dying for the freedom of his countrymen and women against the two wannabe emperors meeting in Alaska is perhaps the best way to show what is at stake in this struggle of grassroots democracy against imperialist autocracy.
That struggle is now clearly global.
“Anti-authoritarian defenders of Ukraine,” 2022. Size A4, liner and watercolor on paper. (David Chichkan/Facebook)
David Chichkan, a Ukrainian artist and anarchist known for his political art, who was killed while serving on the front line in Zaporizhzhia Oblast, Ukraine, in August 2025, in an undated photo. (Anton Parambul/Facebook)
VoxEurop has a nice piece about Ukraine’s Solidarity Collectives (anti-authoritarian brigades defending Ukraine from Russian aggression). Entitled “Anarchists in Wartime: The Experience of Ukraine’s Solidarity Collectives in Ukraine,” it covers the decimation of left-wing alternatives (to the Communist Party) in the Soviet Union and the revival of alternatives since 1991, as well as reflections on the 2014 Revolution of Dignity and what’s happened since then.
