Putin/Trump vs. Chichkan: what’s at stake

16 08 2025

The full horror of what is happening, and what has been happening for at least six months, may be starting to sink in for a few more people around the world.

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 imperial realignment 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.)

In “Trump’s Self-Own Summit with Putin,” The New Yorker‘s Susan Glasser breaks down the background to this meeting:

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.

Among the more notable ones that died this past week, from injuries sustained on the front lines, were artist, anarchist, and Ukrainian freedom fighter David Chichkan. In “‘For Him Russia Exemplified Modern Fascism’,” The Kyiv Independent‘s Kate Tsurkan has penned a beautiful obituary to Chichkan (also spelled Chychkan). Another nice tribute, with examples of Chichkan’s art, is Amira Barkhush’s “Russia Looted Ukrainian Artist’s Masterpieces and Then Killed His Great-grandson.”

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)

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Pomerantsev: Toward a world ‘where everybody’s knives come out’

27 05 2025

In “Play Putin at his own game by ‘nightmaring’ his world order,” Peter Pomerantsev is as astute as ever in his analysis of Russia’s potential weaknesses, which he enumerates lucidly. They include inflation, polarization between regions and ethnic groups, reliance on unreliable partners and unstable supply chains, a botched mobilization, unceasing paranoia, and the constant need to pretend to a strength that isn’t there.

He then presents an absolutely sensible approach to containing Putin’s imperial ambitions:

None of Putin’s issues are in themselves a silver bullet to knock out the Kremlin. The trick would be to apply pressure on them simultaneously to stop the President misbehaving. Hit him by seizing frozen Russian assets in the West or undermining Russian oil sales, then follow with a campaign to sow dissent among Russian soldiers, depress his domestic popularity rating, launch military exercises in the Baltics, undermine Russian mercenaries in Mali, give the Ukrainians the right to hit deep inside Russia, make the cost of doing business with Russia higher for the Chinese, cut vital supply chains for the Russian military to signal that we know every front company they use. Pile on the dilemmas until the Kremlin feels it runs the risk of not being in control. Raise the specter of 1991 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union to get the Kremlin to recalculate the level of belligerence it can afford. Some of the moves can be smaller, others larger. Destabilizing the Kremlin is about the rate and pace of those moves.

And then he brings reality to bear on the situation:

This is something that, so far, has not been tried. Instead the opposite is happening. As Putin looks at how America is alienating allies, damaging its own economy and retreating from global leadership, he must wonder whether it’s going through a self-imposed breakdown. Even as Putin engages in friendly phone calls with Trump, he’s strengthening military exercises with Iran and China.

Russia is also able to sweet-talk America while secretly stabbing at it. In his war on the “Deep State,” Trump has disbanded some of the entities that deal with Russian cyberattacks and covert campaigns in the US. It’s easier than ever to hit America using proxies. Dark Storm, the cyber-criminals who recently took down X to express their support for Palestine, have previously aligned their hacks with Russia as well as Iran. Similar groups have taken out the websites of American water companies and hospitals. Russia’s secret services aren’t likely to have seen an America this vulnerable.

Putin’s dream of destroying the world order America upheld is so close he must feel he cannot fail to grasp it.

In the end, he offers up an olive branch, though it turns out to be a rather tainted one:

But there may be a twist in the tail for Russia. As we enter a world of global lawlessness, countries and coalitions will be thinking about turning the Kremlin’s hybrid toolkit of economic and information war, cyber and sabotage back on Russia.

Up until now, with America guaranteeing security, many showed restraint. With the “international-rules based order” gone, everyone can try the hooligan role Russia has so far played unimpeded. Moscow yearns to carve up the world. But it will be a world where everybody’s knives come out.

The full article can be read here.


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2 years of “this sadistic violence of destruction”

24 02 2024

On the two-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, what more can be said except that the invasion needs to end. For that, Ukraine needs more support. Negotiation cannot happen with someone who wants to eliminate you.

There are many excellent films that have been made to document the Russian war on Ukraine. Among the better post-invasion documentaries are Vitaliy Manskiy and Yevhen Titarenko’s Eastern Front, Oksana Karpovych’s Intercepted, Albina Kovalyova’s Occupied, Simon Lereng Wilmont’s A House Made of Splinters, and the ones described here.

Perhaps the most riveting is Mstyslav Chernov‘s Academy Award nominated 20 Days in Mariupol, currently showing online at the PBS Frontline web site. The line quoted above is taken from the film. In perhaps the film’s climatic scene, Chernov, who wrote, narrated, directed, and produced the film, says, “If someday my daughters ask me ‘What did you do to stop this madness, this sadistic virus of destruction?‘ I want to be able to give them an answer.”

He’s able to give an answer because, against all odds, he survived to tell the tale, staying behind with a small Associated Press crew when all other international film crews had left Mariupol, and successfully getting out of the surrounded city on day 20. The city capitulated on day 86, but 20 days is sufficient for gauging the full horror of the experience for those who stayed behind. (The fall of Azovstal is another story, yet to be told in a suitable feature-length documentary. The same can be said of the bombing of the Mariupol Theatre, though Forensic Architecture’s and the Center for Spatial Technologies’ work on documenting the event has been incredibly valuable.)

The truth is that Chernov could easily have been killed, as other photographers, journalists, and filmmakers have been in the course of documenting this and other wars. Despite his previous experience as a war correspondent, the odds at the time of the filming were better that he wouldn’t have made it out alive, and that his daughters would have asked him, “Why did you leave us? What heroic urge were you pursuing against any odds of surviving the effort?” It’s our collective gain (and not just his daughters’) that Chernov survived to tell this tale.

What all these documentaries have in common is that they activate feelings of empathy and compassion for those who suffer in this war. In some cases they activate anger at those responsible for the suffering. They activate a sense of justice, according to which humans might get angry, might get into conflicts, but would never unleash mass murder on this scale — because it goes against the possibility of building a common world together.

War cheapens human life. It renders us into meat. War for sheer territorial gain cheapens it all the more.

The Putin government is counting on our society — the one that values human life and strives to follow norms that enable coexistence — not outlasting his society: the one in which a single group of people, an ethno-civilizational collectivity (in his twisted imagination) following a top-heavy, imperial script, gets to define what is right and what is wrong, and what story will be told to future generations.

Just as Hitler envisioned a future in which he would be messiah and the Nordic race would rule over humanity’s lesser classes, Putin has envisioned a story of the Russian race (or civilization, in his telling) in a similar position — not ruling over all humanity perhaps, just over its own domain, its “Russkii mir,” yet leading the entire world toward something known only to Putin himself.

Both are abominations — hysterical visions of worlds cleansed of otherness, purified and ordered so that only a certain image of humanity can endure and all others be ground into dust.

Modernity, Enlightenment humanism, cosmopolitan liberalism, or whatever it is that has spread over the planet in the last few centuries, has a very mixed track record of accomplishments. Some of them — colonialism, imperialism, extractive capitalism — have left behind deep scars on the earth and its people. Others — humanism and liberal democracy, for all their flaws — follow the best inclinations of our nature insofar as they see humans as alike and as equally worthy of life and of dignity. (We can continue debating the details, for instance, the virtues of liberalism as opposed to socialism, communitarianism, libertarianism, and so on, without disagreeing on these basic grounding principles.)

Putin’s war negates human dignity. It crushes difference, even — and perhaps all the more — the difference that is closest to one’s own perception of self. The “Russian soul,” so lauded by Russian poets and Russophilic western dreamers, is a dead one in Putin’s grip.

Two years of this full-scale war (and ten years of the war itself) is two years (and ten years) too many.


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Zygar & Gladstone on Tucker’s Putin

14 02 2024

WNYC’s (NPR’s) On the Media has created a wonderful 17-minute segment examining the historical claims reiterated by Vladimir Putin in his recent interview (/monologue) with Tucker Carlson. The conversation between host Brooke Gladstone and Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar is well worth listening to. (I should probably specify “dissident journalist,” since “Russia” and “journalism” does not make for a persuasive combo these days. Zygar was the founding editor-in-chief of now banned Russian news channel TV Rain/Dozhd, which continues to broadcast from abroad.)

The conversation covers only a few of the 14 “tales” or “myths” related to the historical relationship between Russia and Ukraine that Zygar describes in his recent book War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine. Zygar’s book is one of the first serious efforts by a Russian journalist or historian to begin the process of decolonizing Russian history. (And perhaps the first time U.S. public radio has compared Taras Shevchenko to African-American abolitionist Frederick Douglass, but it’s an apt comparison.)

The full radio segment can be listened to here.


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Explaining Russia

23 11 2022

It’s trite to call Russia’s actions in Ukraine these days evil. In their goal of bringing an entire country to its knees through military firepower, battered infrastructure, and a decimated power grid (in time for the cold winter ahead), they are certainly that. But they are an evil that calls for analysis and explanation.

That analysis, however, would have to cover a great deal.

For starters, it would have to explain how it is that Russians allowed their country to succumb to the belligerent authoritarianism of Putinism, and how enough of them came to either support Putin or to consider it imprudent or too costly to resist him. And how Putin himself transformed from the (seeming) pragmatic realism of his early presidency to the neo-imperial fantasies of today. And how the late Soviet power elite finessed its way into an oligarchic capitalism amenable to the consolidation of Putin’s power vertykal (and, conversely, how Putin coldly disemboweled any rival sources of power). And how his rise was built, from the get go, on the creation of external threats (Chechens, Georgians, “Nazis,” the “liberal” West) and assertive displays of disciplinary power to eliminate or neuter them.

And how Russians who were poised to follow in the footsteps of their fellow East Europeans by threading the needle (challenging as it was everywhere) between democracy and neoliberal entrepreneurialism on the one side, and the social safety net of socialism on the other, came to lose all faith in the former two and accept what scraps of the third were offered them. And how decades of Sovietization, the economic traumas of the 1990s, and the creeping authoritarianism of Putinism exorcised away any capacity among Russians to act collectively and politically in the face of any challenge (so unlike Ukrainians in that).

And of how Russia’s essential conservatism bounced back after 1990 with a vengeance, led by an apocalyptic church beholden both to its own hierarchic religiosity and to its deep historical entanglement with power (in this case, Putin’s). And of the unquestioned imperialism and colonialism at the heart of the Russian imaginary, in which Ukraine functioned only as a lesser, weaker brother liable to forget his allegiance to the imperial center and needing to thereby be reined in, repeatedly and by force if necessary. And of how the West, with its wealth, its progress, and its freedoms, became the ultimate foil for the Russian project and the ultimate object of its ressentiment.

And of how challenging the liberal West has become Russia’s modus operandi on the world stage, allowing it to find supporters (tacit or otherwise) in nearly every country in the world, and to repurpose its Soviet era security apparatus toward global informational warfare. And of how Russia’s oil and gas reserves — its only source of economic strength — has made it an attractive partner to other states with reason to distrust the U.S.-led West (such as Iran, Syria, and North Korea these days, but also China and India).

And of how all this leads to a situation where colossal miscalculations — such as the dubious assumption of a three-day military victory and an overwhelmingly welcoming Ukrainian population — will naturally arise, and where the internal logic of strongman authoritarianism, with its blinded judgment and its to-the-death dependence on victory, can only lead to the gory intensification of military might that we are seeing now, people’s lives be damned.

That’s for starters.


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Budraitskis: The “fascistization” of Russia

5 11 2022

Writing in the Marxist journal Spectre, Moscow-based historian, political theorist, and cultural activist Ilya Budraitskis considers whether and how the term “fascism” is an appropriate descriptor for Putinist Russia. His article “Putinism: A New Form of Fascism?” draws on Karl Polanyi, Hannah Arendt, and other leftist thinkers to argue that Putinism is not an aberration, but is an outgrowth of the market rationality and “social atomization” of neoliberal capitalism in its “late” crisis phase.

In attempting to impose order on a crisis-ridden world, he argues, Putinism is a form — the clearest and most intensified to date — of a new “fascism from above.” Where in the first decade of this century, Putin’s “neoliberal authoritarianism” relied on technocratic management and “mass depoliticization, associated with increased consumption, enjoyment of ‘stability,’ and a focus on private life,” from 2011 it “began the process of ‘fascistization,'” by which the leader transformed himself into the defender of the “traditional family,” the “silent conservative majority,” and the “besieged fortress” of Christian Russia. Finally, with the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the regime took “only weeks to establish a new political order,” which it did “with the utmost ferocity” and brutality.

Budraitskis concludes:

This is the “normality” and familiarity of Putin’s regime: it oversees the passivity and atomization of society, the reactionary anti-universalism of its rhetoric, multiplied by the utmost cynical rationality of its elites. And it is worth explicitly calling it fascist, not only because it fits that definition, but also so that the emancipatory movements of the present can understand the scale of the global threat to our common future.

The entire article can be read here.


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Understanding Russia

10 07 2022

Understanding how things got to this point — with a full-scale war waged on a country of 45 million and threats of nuclear escalation toward a possible third world war — requires understanding how Russia got to this point. This post aims to introduce a short set of recent readings that help us understand Russian attitudes today and their deeper history.

State propaganda

Perhaps the best place to start is with a flavor of the state propaganda machine. Julia Davis’s “Putin’s Stooges: He May Nuke Us All, But We Are Ready to Die” (Daily Beast, April 28) captures many of the dominant voices in Russian state media articulating the message the Kremlin intended for its audience of 145 million part-way through the current invasion. A few quotes should be sufficient to give the flavor here (in case the article is paywalled for you):

“World War III, no longer just a special operation, with 40 countries against us. They declared a war.” (Olga Skabeeva, host, 60 Minutes)

“The representatives of those 40 different countries are today’s collective Hitler.” (Mikhail Markelov, 60 Minutes)

“Personally, I think that the most realistic way is the way of World War III, based on knowing us and our leader, Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin, knowing how everything works around here, it’s impossible—there is no chance—that we will give up” [. . .] “That everything will end with a nuclear strike, to me, is more probable than the other outcome. This is to my horror, on one hand, but on the other hand, with the understanding that it is what it is.” (RT director Margarita Simonyan, on The Evening with Vladimir Solovyov)

“But we will go to heaven, while they will simply croak.” (Solovyov responding to Simonyan)

“If we decide to strike the U.K., we should rather decide to strike the United States… Final decisions are being made not in London, but in Washington. If we want to hit the real center of the West, then we need to strike Washington.” (Andrey Sidorov, deputy dean of world politics at Moscow State University, same TV program) 

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Is Russia fascist?

8 06 2022

The question of whether or not to call Putinism “fascism” has popped up repeatedly in recent writing. Historian Timothy Snyder recently presented the case in an op-ed for the New York Times, concluding,

A time traveler from the 1930s would have no difficulty identifying the Putin regime as fascist. The symbol Z, the rallies, the propaganda, the war as a cleansing act of violence and the death pits around Ukrainian towns make it all very plain. The war against Ukraine is not only a return to the traditional fascist battleground, but also a return to traditional fascist language and practice. Other people are there to be colonized. Russia is innocent because of its ancient past. The existence of Ukraine is an international conspiracy. War is the answer.

Others — including political scientists (Taras Kuzio, Alexander Motyl), philosophers (Jason Stanley and Eliyahu Stern), economists (Vladislav Inozemtsev), defense secretaries (Ben Wallace), and other commentators (Tomasz Kamusella) — have agreed, while some (cited here) have so far demured from that characterization.

Most recently, Kyiv’s Visual Culture Research Center director Vasyl Cherepanin has admonished the West for its unwillingness to see the creeping fascism in Putinism, writing:

But it was not the West’s far right or far left that helped to bolster Russia’s fascist regime. It was liberal democracies’ political centrists and financial elites who pumped assets into the Kremlin’s mafia-capitalist system – and became corrupted by it. Even as Putin turned Russian politics into a “special operation” and authorized political assassinations, state censorship, electoral manipulation, systematic repression, and military invasions of other countries, the Western liberal establishment, despite the “values” it claims to uphold, normalized him.

The question will be taken up by a panel, including at least two of the world’s leading experts on the topic (Roger Griffin and Marlene Laruelle) at an online seminar entitled “Rashism/Ruscism: Is Russia Fascist?” organized by the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies and the Deutsche-Ukrainische Historikerkommission (DUHK) on June 23. (On the use of the term “Rashism” see here.)

Register for the free event here.

https://m.facebook.com/events/1198343214300865/

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Galeev: 3 scenarios for Russia

2 04 2022

Among the more interesting Twitter analysts these days (as I’ve mentioned before) is Kamil Galeev. In a new series of threads, he examines three possible scenarios for Russia’s future.

The first is a North Korean scenario, in which Putin stays in power and all of Russia effectively becomes Donbass, i.e., a “hypermilitarized kleptocracy.” Galeev notes that “Russia has been lowkey drifting to the Donbass state for years. It’s an oil exporter that is running out of cheap oil and wants to stay highly militarised. Thus it must reduce life standards and personal freedoms.”

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Laruelle on Putin’s ideological pasturelands

16 03 2022

Historian and political scientist Marlene Laruelle is unquestionably one of the leading western experts on Russian political thought. She has authored and edited numerous volumes including Russian Nationalism: Imaginaries, Doctrines and Political Battlefields (2018, and available in open-access), Understanding Russia: The Challenges of Transformation (2018), Entangled Far Rights: A Russian-European Intellectual Romance in the 20th Century (2018), and Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire (2008).

In her new essay for UnHerd, “The brains behind the Russian invasion,” Laruelle takes on what for some is the all-important question, “Who is the President’s Rasputin?” She examines several key candidates for such an ideological whisperer — Ivan Ilyin, Lev Gumilev, Alexander Dugin, Konstantin Malofeev, the Russian Orthodox Church’s Bishop Tikhon, the Moscow Patriarchate itself, and Putin’s close friend Yuri Kovalchuk — but argues instead that

The reality is more complex: there are multiple ideological sources who have blended to cause the disastrous invasion, all mediated through his “court” of  trusted people and group of military advisers, and many of whom unite in their vision of Ukraine as a country that needs to be brought back by force into Russia’s orbit.

More complex, then, but in some ways also more banal, in that the sources of Putin’s impulses may be much more broadly cultural:

Like many of his fellow citizens, [Putin is] probably saturated by political talk shows cultivating anti-Ukrainian feelings, as well as by patriotic movies celebrating the Russian Empire’s greatness and its territorial conquests. There may be no need then to look for a doctrinal text that would have inspired him, as the memory of Russia’s empire and the subordinated role of Ukrainians in it permeates so many components of Russian cultural life.

Putin’s worldview has been built up over many years, and is more shaped by his personal resentment toward the West than by any ideological influence. Readings of the classic works of Russian philosophy which insist on Russia’s historical struggle with the West, emphasise the role of Ukraine as a civilizational borderland between both, have simply reinforced his own lived experience. [emphasis added]

Why, then, such a seemingly disastrous decision to invade a country that will fight tooth-and-nail against the invasion? She blames this on “low-level intelligence-gathering.”

And it is here that the President’s mask slips. It becomes clear that Putin is an aging and isolated authoritarian leader surrounded by advisers afraid of bringing him a realistic assessment of the likelihood of victory, thereby accelerating Russia dragging a sovereign Ukraine along with the rest of Europe towards the worst catastrophe since the Second World War.

The entire article is worth reading. It’s accompanied by a video interview with Laruelle carried out by UnHerd‘s Freddie Sayers.

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