In his article “Is Putin a new Hitler (in the making)?“, political scientist and far right watcher Anton Shekhovtsov outlines the many connections between Vladimir Putin’s Eurasianist ideologues and the European far right.
It may be one-sided, but it should be read alongside the defenses of Putin promoted by Stephen Cohen and others in the western left. It also demonstrates how the uses of the term “fascism” in this Ukraine debate need more analysis.
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.”
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)
As an independent voice who follows Russian media very closely, I am well acquainted with what Putin and his propagandists “actually say.” The major TV channels are full of commentators recommending that countries like Poland, Germany, or the United Kingdom be nuked. The Chechen warlord Ramzan Kadyrov, one of Putin’s closes allies, now openly calls for “the fight against Satanism [to] continue throughout Europe and, first of all, on the territory of Poland.”
Indeed, the official Kremlin line describes the war as a “special operation” for the de-Nazification and de-demonization of Ukraine. Among Ukraine’s “provocations” is that it has permitted Pride parades and allowed LGBTQ+ rights to undermine traditional sexual norms and gender roles. Kremlin-aligned commentators speak of “liberal totalitarianism,” even going so far as to argue that George Orwell’s 1984 was a critique not of fascism or Stalinism but of liberalism.
[. . .]
Those who would claim neutrality forfeit their standing to complain about the horrors of colonization anywhere. […] It is obscene to blame Ukraine for Russian acts of destruction, or to mischaracterize the Ukrainians’ heroic resistance as a rejection of peace. Those, like Waters, who call for “an immediate ceasefire” would have Ukrainians respond to redoubled Russian aggression by abandoning their own self-defense. That is a formula not for peace, but for pacification.
The collaborative New Fascism Syllabus, which provides scholarly perspectives on 20th and 21st century fascism, authoritarianism, and populism, has been publishing analyses relevant to the Russian invasion of Ukraine since that invasion began on February 24.
Omer Bartov’s bittersweet reminiscence of the beauty of Ukraine, its deeply troubled history (he is a historian of the Holocaust), and its recent “heroic efforts to reforge itself,” entitled “My Ukraine is Not Yet Lost,” is particularly moving. Bartov writes:
The war, the genocide of the Jews, the ethnic cleansing of the Poles, and the imposition of an oppressive and vengeful Soviet regime, seemed to have put an end to the world of the borderlands that lasted for centuries and, despite its many warps, prejudices, vast inequality, grinding poverty, and occasional bursts of horrific violence, was also the birthplace of much beauty and creativity, precisely because of its mix of cultures, religions, and ethnicities.
Like several of the authors, Bartov worries that all of the progress made in recent years will be undone by Russia’s violent attempt to turn back the clock to a world ruled by imperial fiat.
Two of the articles dwell on the “irrationality” of the invasion. In Andrea Chandler’s case, it is Putin’s irrationality, which she sees in full evidence in the recent events, despite her best efforts to find reason.
The only way that I can make any sense of Putin’s actions in Ukraine is to imagine a secret-police frame of decision-making in which the strategic value of territory is detached from its inhabitants. This frame exaggerates the threat that a self-reliant Ukraine poses to Russian sovereignty: if we “lose” Ukraine, we lose our “krai” – so where will our new “krai” be?
In Russian, krai (край) suggests “borderland” or “edge” (окраина), while in Ukrainian it is commonly understood as “our country,” “our land,” “in-land,” or “within-land” (україна).
In Alexander Reid Ross and Shane Burley’s “Into the Irrational Core of Pure Violence,” the irrationality is found in the “convergence” between Aleksandr Dugin‘s “neo-Eurasianism” and the war being waged by the Kremlin. While there is debate around the level of continuing influence Dugin’s neo-fascist geopolitics has on Putin’s own thinking, and so the authors may err slightly in overemphasizing it, there is no doubt that Putinism has been shaped by a broad swath of Russian ultranationalist, neo-imperialist (to the point of being messianic), Orthodox theocratic, and other far-right ideologists including Dugin, Ivan Ilyin, Lev Gumilev, Konstantin Leontiev, and cronies in the Russian media-political sphere such as Kiselyov, Malofeev, Prokhanov, and others.
The authors write:
the hypocrisy of the supposed “de-Nazification” of Ukraine can be found in the fact that the invasion has been, since 2014, the project of fascists, Orthodox ultranationalists, and Dugin’s own network of self-described “neo-Eurasianists.” From the start, the aggression against Ukraine was bankrolled by Dugin’s patron, Russia’s “Orthodox Oligarch,” Konstantin Malofeev. During the first years, on-the-ground efforts were led by Malofeev’s associates Alexander Borodai and Igor Girkin, an ultranationalist who participated in the Bosnian Genocide before becoming Malofeev’s security chief. Girkin and Dugin are listed together as among Russia’s “authentic high-principled Hitlerites, true Aryans” in a mordant article by Russian dissident Andrey Piontkovsky.
An influential figure amongst the alt-right and Europe’s fascist “identitarian” movement. Dugin’s ideology is somewhat more syncretic and convoluted than traditional Nazism: he believes in the total destruction of the modern world and the liberalism he feels it represents. This radical upheaval of the world would be followed by the rebirth of patriarchal blood-and-soil communities distinguished by a caste system ruled by warrior-priests, which he calls “political soldiers.” Dugin desires to see Moscow presiding over a Eurasian empire stretching from Dublin to Vladivostok in which Istanbul will return to Constantinople (or “Tsargrad”). For Dugin, the invasion of Ukraine represents merely the first step in this “Great Slavic Reconquista.”
With its apocalyptic struggle and “palingenetic” rebirth, Dugin’s program clearly falls into the “consensus” definition of fascism that historians like Roger Griffin have established. In 2015, Griffin himself demured from describing Putin as a fascist, and just last year referred to Putinism as a form of “resentment politics.” But seven years later, with the military invasion and the reasoning that led to it (and justifications provided for it), most of Griffin’s reservations no longer appear to hold.
Dugin’s projected alignment between Russia, Iran, India, and China appears to be incipient as Russia’s violent invasion of Ukraine solidifies its own alienation from the “liberal-globalist” West.
The authors conclude:
Here, we have the irrational core of pure violence: the anti-European Europe, the anti-imperialist empire, the antifascist fascism, the anti-nationalist ultranationalism, and the defense against genocide through the obliteration of a nation’s existence and concomitant shelling of civilian targets. Without recourse to reason, Russia must resort to raw coercion, power politics, to exert its sovereignty, all while presenting its alternative to the unipolarity of the U.S. empire as the de facto liberatory choice. By offering itself as an enemy of the U.S., it hopes to court a new class of friends. Russian nationalism acts as part of the vanguard of far-right movements, helping to re-align geopolitics away from cooperation and toward a binary, illiberal opposition.
Reid Ross and Burley see the Ukrainian resistance as a struggle against imperialism that “must be universalized on the level of a struggle for freedom and equality everywhere.”
Fascism, as defined by those who study it, typically includes three key elements: a perception of deep historical grievance and/or a belief that the modern world is in some way irredeemably decadent; a desire for vengeance and/or national, collective, and/or historical ‘rebirth’ (‘palingenesis’ is the scholarly word for that); and submission of individual will to collective will, often though not always embodied in a cult of the leader or ruler. Modern fascism, as we saw last century, is also industrialized and technological; it mass produces its victims.
The first two elements have become more and more obvious in Putinist Russia. Putin has built on a deep sense of historical grievance, and his desire to rebuild Russia in all its former “glory” has been often articulated, not least in his speeches this past week. Up until yesterday, however, Putin’s fascism (like Trump’s) has been debated, but generally not admitted.
Fascism’s presence, since the end of the second world war, has seemed mostly individual — with lone killers committing mass murder in Oslo, Christchurch, El Paso, and elsewhere — or small-scale and cellular, with neo-Nazis found everywhere, from the US to Germany, France, Ukraine, and beyond, but nowhere near attaining power. (Whether ISIS and its kin in the Muslim world qualify as forms of fascism has also been debated, without clear resolution.)
Putin’s decision to use the second largest military in the world to achieve his palingenetic goals in ways that threaten millions of people has, I believe, changed the landscape of contemporary fascism. Many fascists and ultra-rightists have looked to Putin as a potential savior of the world against liberalism, globalism, and western “decadence.” The war in Ukraine can now be seen as Putin’s decisive response. That he claims he is “denazifying” Ukraine is, of course, completely consistent with fascism’s predilection for the “big lie.”
We now see the face of 21st century fascism: deeply aggrieved, cold and calculating, and starkly technological. This is our new world.
In “Is Ukraine fascist?” Rutgers University political scientist Alexander Motyl examines the case for finding fascism in Ukraine as opposed to Russia.
He’s pretty fair, despite his overstated conclusion. (I don’t think Russia has conclusively become fascist, even if many of the elements of that process are well in play.)
Articles posted on this blog have refererred repeatedly to Eurasianist ideologue and “conservative revolutionary” Aleksandr Dugin and his connection to Vladimir Putin’s expansionist strategy in Crimea. This article in the Council on Foreign Relations’ journal Foreign Affairs puts the Putin-Dugin relationship into some historical and political context.
While the article doesn’t discuss this in any detail, the Dugin-led Eurasianist Youth Movement has been influential in fueling opposition to Ukraine’s interim government in areas of southern and eastern Ukraine.Read the rest of this entry »
My time in Kyïv1 last week was both enlightening and reassuring, even as it featured some of the most dramatic events of the 3+ year full-scale war — Operation Spider Web being one of them (see my previous post on that), the ramping up of Russian drone and missile attacks being the other. The latter — sometimes reaching up to 500 drones and ballistic or cruise missiles in a 24-hour period — reflects the utter vacuousness of Donald Trump’s oft-stated goal of a peaceful end to the conflict. (For an astute recent analysis of the reasons behind Trump’s favoritism toward Russia, see Arthur Snell’s recent piece “Let’s Talk About Krasnov.“)
I have tried to make a habit of visiting Kyïv every 4 to 5 years or so on average, since my year spent as a youthful Canada-USSR Scholar in 1989-90, when everything was beginning to come apart (the USSR, at least) and to seem very much up for grabs. Over that 35 year time period, the city has changed dramatically, not always for the better (uncontrolled development being a problem), but certainly for the more colorful, dynamic, and lively.
My impressions this time were that the city remains as vibrant as ever, its music, arts, and cultural scenes remaining quite active, and plenty of reading and informal discussion adding to the edginess of wartime to make it feel rather more alive than most places. Kyïv, in fact, seems to have more bookstores and bookstore-cafés per capita than almost any city I’ve been to — despite the fact that you can get 30 to 60 rides on the metro (8 UAH per ride) for the price of a single book. For anyone considering visiting, I especially recommend seeing the Pinchuk Art Centre’s current exhibition, which features a few of the artists in my forthcoming book, Terra Invicta: Ukrainian Wartime Reimaginings for a Habitable Earth (they include Kateryna Aliinyk, Kateryna Lysovenko, and Yuri Yefanov), and the remarkable exhibition “ProZori” at the Ukrainian House (former Lenin Museum), which is the first exhibition to adequately feature the work of five of the most fascinating late Soviet era Ukrainian artists, all “futurists” or “cosmists” of a sort that’s quite different from the Russia-based movement known by that name.
One thing that has changed, probably more since the full-scale invasion of 2022 than during any of my other between-visit intervals, is that the city’s background hum, its thought processes, now take place largely in Ukrainian, not in the Russian that had been the dominant language back in 1989. This has been a remarkable shift, all but entirely creditable to Putin’s onslaught, which has made Russian the language not of “high culture” (virtually guaranteed by the Russian empire’s and then the USSR’s Russification policies), but of the senseless barbarian invader.
Admittedly, my impression of the city was shaped in part by my own activities attending and participating in the Knyzhkovyi Arsenal (International Book Arsenal Festival), held at the country’s largest museum-gallery complex. The festival featured over 200 events and was attended by nearly 30,000 visitors, including by President Zelensky, whom I apparently walked by at one point (I was told), though I was too busy talking to notice. (See photo below.) I found the number of Ukrainian book publishers to be remarkable, and some of the panels and conversations I heard, as well as the ones I participated in — one on the war’s impact on cultural and ecological landscapes, the other on decoloniality and art, with a focus on Kateryna Botanova’s excellent anthology Reclaiming History, which I’ve got a chapter in — were enlightening.
Historian Marci Shore, recent relocatee from Yale University to the University to Toronto alongside her partner Timothy Snyder and fellow fascism scholar Jason Stanley, commented that in contrast to her experiences traveling around North America, she was finding visiting Kyïv a profoundly “uplifting” experience. That despite the daily and especially nightly air raids — which many Kyïvans ignore because they have to in order to sleep and live their lives, but which visitors like me were hardly able to ignore. I lost a few nights of sound sleep, but lucked out in that my visit followed Russia’s massive three-night bombing campaign of the previous weekend and preceded its recent, even more massive “response” to Operation Spider Web. All of that is nothing compared to what other Ukrainians have faced for over three years now, and in some places for over a decade.
For all the difficulties posed by the continuing military aggression, Ukrainians, or at least the Kyïvans, Lvivans (I spent a few days there), and displaced others that I met, seem to be holding up well in spirit, in ways consistent with what I describe in Terra Invicta, which will be coming out later this year. That’s not to say that Ukrainians aren’t also exhausted by the war, its viciousness, and the loss of faith in getting the kind of support they need from the West anytime soon. That they continue to broadly support the war effort, and Zelensky’s leadership (irrespective of whether they’re Ukrainian- or Russian-speaking), speaks volumes.
Here’s a photo of Zelensky posing alongside Marci Shore (second from the right) at the Arsenal Book Festival:
And here’s Canada’s former ambassador to Ukraine Roman Waschuk (an old friend of mine from Toronto days) posting about the festival’s “Canadian content”:
On why I spell Kyïv the way I do: Following the Ukrainian spelling of “Kиїв” rather than the Russian “Киев,” the customary spelling has now become “Kyiv,” but that too often ends up sounding as a monosyllabic “Keev.” The double-dotted diaeresis over “i” is available in English, as in the word “naïve” — The New Yorker even uses the same diaeresis to separate syllables in words like “coöperate” — and it enables a closer approximation to the bisyllabic Ukrainian pronunciation, which sounds more like “Ki-” as in “kit,” followed by “yeev.” Similarly, the writer Леся Українка is best spelled Lesia Ukraïnka. ↩︎
“So in a nutshell, Russian strategy is take whatever you can now, no matter how small an area and no matter how much it costs, on the assumption Trump wins, and you get to keep it. You then have four years to basically recover and come again when you are ready. The strategy is based around the longer term degradation of Ukraine as a power, the friendship of Trump, and the weakness of Europe.”
Meanwhile, “Ukrainian strategy at present has settled into a pattern of trying to maximize Russian losses, to lead to a steady degradation of Russian fighting capabilities for 2025.”
Longer term, so much depends on whether the Trump-Orban-Putin (and techbro?) axis wins the U.S. election. O’Brien’s quote of a long rambling passage from Trump’s acceptance speech provides the justification for how and why that intersection of interests (of at least the first three) can rightfully be called an axis – a case also made by Byline Supplement, co-authored by the team at the investigative media site Byline Times. Anne Applebaum correctly notes that “axis” is too strong a word; she prefers “network of convenience.” I agree with her caution and will share my own thoughts on her new book soon.
I would go further than O’Brien does in his piece, however, and would say that every significant national election today, especially in a country like the U.S., is an international election involving external players – in this case Russia, China, and other countries and transnational groups (corporate-industrial lobbies, among others) exercising influence via media and other channels (just as U.S. interests play a role in foreign elections when those interests are at stake). When Americans vote for authoritarians like Trump, they are also voting for authoritarians like Putin — and for a carve-up of international power among neo-empires still largely driven by old-energy plus new-tech interests. The opening up of the Arctic, for instance, is also opening up geopolitical competition over the Arctic and its resources, which are particularly attractive to old-energy (fossil fuel) interests, as they may keep them afloat for a significant time longer.
And voting is just the tip of the iceberg of political action – still an essential step, in countries like the U.S., but also just a cog in a much larger set of wheels. That said, the very likely emergence of Kamala Harris as the Democrats’ presidential nominee has certainly invigorated U.S. politics, with the differences between the two candidates — in style now (as she differs little from Biden in policy) — being exactly the kind of thing the Democrats needed to whip up some enthusiasm. We’ll soon see how ugly things get as the racism of Trump’s far-right supporters (and their international backers — tech, fossil fuel, and media moguls — and autocrat/info-war facilitators) goes into high gear.
