This is intended as the first in a series of more in-depth posts discussing scholarly perspectives on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It reflects thinking-in-progress, shared for the sake of open discussion and not for scholarly exactitude. (I practice the latter elsewhere.) Responses and corrections are welcome.
The mixed response to Ishchenko’s recent New Left Review article “Ukrainian Voices?” caps what appears to be a growing rift between Ishchenko and some others on the Ukrainian academic Left, which I attempt to make sense of in this post, as I see important issues at stake in it. (For a few examples of that rift, see here, here, here, and here.)
In “Maidan or anti-Maidan? The Ukraine situation requires more nuance,” sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko attempts to carve out a progressive socialist position on the Ukraine conflict, one that would “support progressive wings of both Maidan and anti-Maidan, and try to unite them against the Ukrainian ruling class and against all nationalisms and imperialisms on shared demands for social justice.”
Of all the political analysts I trust in Ukraine, Volodymyr Ishchenko has been the most critical of the Maidan and the new government. While his views should be contextualized among others (some of which I have shared on this blog), he expresses concerns that should be taken seriously. The following is his summary of the “new order.”
“Writing from a critical position is not something to be widely appreciated in turmoil times. For some hysterical idiots I’ve succumbed to the fascists, for others–betrayed the Fatherland. Time is now precious and to be used efficiently. This is why I respond to all in a single post.
A new issue of the London Ukrainian Review examines culture as a matter of national security in the context of the Russo-Ukrainian war. The Review, which is an open-access publication of the Ukrainian Institute London partnering with the Vienna-based Institute for Human Sciences (IWM), Academic Studies Press, and INDEX: Institute for Documentation and Exchange, has been publishing excellent work since 2021. Editor-in-chief Sasha Dovzhyk explains that this issue “highlight[s] the voices of cultural figures who defend Ukraine with arms” and “examines culture as a tool of Russia’s imperialist expansion, all the while insisting on a bond between cultural familiarity and political solidarity.”
Had the long history of Russian colonial violence against Ukraine been better understood by a public familiar with the canon of Ukrainian culture, Ukraine and Crimea might not have been perceived by so many in the West as obscure parts of Russia’s ‘backyard’ in 2014. Ukraine, of course, is not alone in this sense: how different might our reactions to events in Gaza or Sudan be if we all read novels by Palestinian and Sudanese writers in our schools and universities?
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).
By now it should be clear that the Ukrainian struggle against Russia is an anti-authoritarian and, frankly, anti-imperialist struggle. It is a struggle for collective political agency against an invading force that denies that agency. It is consistent with the series of revolutions that have marked the last 35 years of Ukrainian history: the Granite Revolution of 1991, the Orange Revolution of 2004, and the Revolution of Dignity of 2014. And while there’s been plenty of debate around how satisfactorily those three revolutions ended (Volodymyr Ishchenko’s term “deficient revolutions” is not entirely off the mark, despite my critiques of his position), they have given millions of Ukrainians a real sense that their own actions matter in the making of a better society.
The only social change worth fighting for, to my mind, is the kind that establishes a wider and more satisfying circulation of agency — a sense of “self-determination” of each among many, within a larger world for which that self-determination is suitable, sensible, and socially and ecologically appropriate. As most political philosophies recognize (libertarianism, at least in its right-wing variant, being an exception), the self cannot exist without the relations and differences that enable it to function.
Ukrainians’ gravitation toward Europe results from the perception that European institutions, in stark contrast to Russian or “Eurasian” ones, provide the mechanisms of mutual recognition that allow democratically organized national collectivities to function best. This gravitation has a history that goes back centuries, both at elite levels (as with philosophers like Hryhoriy Skovoroda, Mykhailo Drahomanov, and their latter-day followers and interpreters) and in popular discourse (for instance, surrounding the Cossacks).
Unfortunately, it’s that European drift, along with the perception of the West’s — and especially the U.S.’s — support for Ukraine, that has weakened most of the potential support for Ukraine’s position in the Global South. That, of course, is because of the history of relations between “the West” and “the rest.” As anti-colonial thinkers have long recognized, the U.S., despite its rhetoric, has not been a genuine friend to democracy in the Global South. Its history of military interventions around the world is a long one, and the current bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities is easily interpreted as just another in that line. In Iran, of course, it’s continuous with the CIA-arranged coup in 1953 that ousted democratically elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh.
As for the rest of “the West,” the history of British, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and other colonialisms are all too well known in the non-European world. The history of Russian colonialism, by contrast, is only (“only”) known directly in eastern Europe, Central Asia, and the vast expanses of northern Asia (all the way to Alaska). And it’s obscured by the duplicitous role, at once anti-colonial (in its rhetorical support for anti-Western movements around the world) and colonial (in its relations to Eastern Europe and the entirety of the Russian colonial world), played by the USSR for 70 years.
As I’ve argued here repeatedly, U.S.-led Western imperialism is no longer the only imperialism (if it ever was). In an increasingly “multipolar world disorder,” anti-imperial struggles must at times rely on support from forces perceived to be imperial by someone or other. This has been the case with the Kurds in Rojava, and it is the case in Ukraine. The Budapest Memorandum that guaranteed Ukrainian security in exchange for its nukes was, after all, signed by the U.S. and U.K., so the latter have a direct responsibility to protect Ukraine from its invader, the fourth signatory (Russia).
Ultimately, of course, that reliance — perceived by some to be a “cozying up” to unworthy powers — will never be entirely reliable, as Trump is demonstrating daily. To be true to its own anti-imperialism, it can only ever be a reliance on democratic institutions, not on rulers, and certainly not on kings or dictators. In that sense, Bill Brown’s wonderful poster, designed for No Kings Day, is a perfectly apt summation of where many Ukrainians, and supporters of Ukraine, stand (or should stand) on the question of authority.
After about 24 hours of Yevgeny Prigozhin’s 24-hour abortive mutiny (judging by the major media, we haven’t even figured out what to call it yet), I posted the following list of uncertainties, intended to answer the common question “WTF is going on in Russia?”, on social media:
1) If this was an attempted coup, it didn’t end convincingly.
2) If this was an egomaniacal outburst within a long simmering battle of wills, it was bizarrely theatrical and not very smart.
3) If this was a spectacular false-flag operation, it didn’t go according to plan (and it’s not very evident who was in the know and who wasn’t, except that most or all of the Russian media was not).
4) If this was simply another day in the workings of an authoritarian kleptocratic-mafia state, it was a spectacularly entertaining one.
5) If this was the beginning of the implosion of Putinist Russia, all bets are off on what that implosion will look like. (But, honestly, I can’t wait to see.)
6) If this was a dress rehearsal, the real performance will be wild.
Since then, a consensus seems to be emerging among Russia observers (in the West) that, if we don’t know what exactly to call it yet (“armed rebellion,” “march on Moscow,” “abortive coup,” et al.), we know it was not a good thing for the Putin regime.
It revealed, and proclaimed, military weakness, as well as genuine brittleness at the top, challenged longstanding narratives of the “special military operation,” and showed the inability of state media to do much of anything when they aren’t given precise instructions. Its ending was anti-climactic — as the Columbia Journalism Review put it, “Putin, a man who punishes journalists and peaceful domestic opponents as if they were traitors, had apparently agreed to give an actual traitor no punishment at all. If only for now.” But it left wide open the possibility that this was no ending, just a temporary stopping point. As CJR puts it, “most observers seem to agree that the last shoe has yet to drop in this story.”
Both the Russian state itself and Prigozhin’s mercenary firm Wagner are extractive regimes with large public relations and military arms.
The Putin regime exists, and the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg are relatively wealthy, thanks to the colonial exploitation of hydrocarbon resources in Siberia. The wealth is held by a very few people, and the Russian population is treated to a regular spectacle of otherwise pointless war — Ukraine, Syria, Ukraine again — to distract attention from this basic state of affairs, and to convince them that there is some kind of external enemy that justifies it (hint: there really isn’t).
Wagner functioned as a kind of intensification of the Russian state, doing the dirtiest work beyond Russia, not only in Syria and Ukraine but also in Africa. It was subsidized by the Russian state, but made its real money by extracting mineral resources on its own, especially in Africa. Unlike most of its other ventures, Wagner’s war in Ukraine was a losing proposition. Prigozhin leveraged the desperation of Russia’s propaganda for a victory by taking credit for victory at Bakhmut. That minor city was completely destroyed and abandoned by the time Wagner took it, at the cost of tens of thousands of Russian lives.
But because it was the only gain in Russia’s horrifyingly costly but strategically senseless 2023 offensive, Bakhmut had to be portrayed by Putin’s media as some kind of Stalingrad or Berlin. Prigozhin took advantage of this. He was able to direct the false glory to himself even as he then withdrew Wagner from Ukraine. Meanwhile he criticized the military commanders of the Russian Federation in increasingly vulgar terms, thereby preventing the Russian state (and Putin) from gaining much from the bloody spectacle of invaded Ukraine. In sum: Wagner was able to make the Putin regime work for it.
Snyder disputes the “realist” explanations for Russia’s war on Ukraine in ways that add to what’s already been said on this blog (e.g., here), and offers another kind of realism — one that sees Russia as a protection racket:
You can think of the Russian state as a protection racket. No one is really safe, but everyone has to accept “protection” in the knowledge that this is less risky than rebellion. A protection racket is always vulnerable to another protection racket. In marching from Rostov-on-Don to Moscow, Prigozhin was breaking one protection racket and proposing another. On this logic, we can imagine Prigozhin’s proposal to Putin as follows: I am deploying the greater force, and I am now demanding protection money from you. If you want to continue your own protection racket, pay me off before I reach Moscow.
Since Timothy Snyder is such a key figure in today’s debates over the Russian invasion of Ukraine (and over the larger global context in which they figure), and since I had intended to write something about him and his critics but have not done that yet, I was happy to see Robert Baird’s long-form article about him, which appeared in today’s Guardian. In “Putin, Trump, Ukraine: how Timothy Snyder became the leading interpreter of our dark times,” Baird covers all these things and more.
This emphasis on ideas has led Snyder to be criticised by some in the realist school of international relations. Emma Ashford, a senior fellow at the Stimson Center, a thinktank, counts herself an admirer of Snyder’s historical work, but she also says that his “understanding of world affairs is almost indelibly shaped by what he thinks are the big important ideas, whereas I would say that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was motivated as much by trying to prop up its falling security in the region”. The dispute is not academic. If you believe, as Ashford does, that Russia is motivated by strategic fears, then every additional degree of western involvement risks exacerbating the original causes of the war and prolonging the conflict. By contrast, if you believe with Snyder that the war’s roots lie in Putin’s fascist worldview, then victory on the battlefield becomes imperative. “A lot of smart people have said it before me, but fascism was never discredited. It was only defeated,” he says. “The Russians have to be defeated, just like the Germans were defeated.”
The article provides an intellectual biography of Snyder including his work as a historian of Eastern Europe and of the Holocaust, as well as his writings as a “public intellectual” analyzing Trumpism, Putinism, and much more.
Reading about how almost all Ukrainian presidential candidates are social democrats (in their rhetoric), I came across some nifty political hat collections. Which of them fits best?
On those Ukrainian politicians, political sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko explains this phenomenon (and disavows them all) in his interview with Jacobin.
