Ukrainian author and translator Artem Chapeye (Артем Чапай), whose books include the dystopian The Red Zone and the sardonically titled The Ukraine(article intended), has been a perceptive commentator on the Russian war on Ukraine, a war he volunteered to fight in after deciding his previous pacifism didn’t fit the situation. His latest book, Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns, combines memoir, history, philosophy, and frontline observation in a way that takes on the logic of war whilst rethinking the logic of the pacifism that’s often proposed as war’s only alternative.
Chapeye describes himself as an avowed leftist, feminist, and atheist (as well as a follower of sorts of Ukrainian philosopher Hryhoriy Skovoroda, after whom he coined the word “skovoroduvaty” — “literally ‘to skovoroda’ — to go walking along random routes, typically through villages and preferably at a distance from well-known locales, conversing with the people you encounter, but listening more than talking”). His son is named after Emiliano Zapata. Among the works he has translated into Ukrainian are Edward Said’s “Humanism and Democratic Criticism,” Gandhi’s writings on Satyagraha in South Africa, and Noam Chomsky’s “The Responsibility of Intellectuals.”
In Ordinary People Don’t Carry Machine Guns, Chapeye reprints a short response he wrote to Chomsky in which he expressed his feeling of being “aghast” at the latter’s crude analysis of the Russo-Ukrainian war. (I’ve written about the flaws in Chomsky’s analysis here and especially here.) Questioning further, Chapeye writes, “Isn’t interpreting reality through predetermined theoretical constructs,” as Chomsky and others were doing, “an ‘irresponsibility of intellectuals’?” He concludes:
“I can’t shake off the following impression: Western intellectuals, including Chomsky, are really talking about themselves and their loved ones and their own self-interest. [. . .] Calling on Ukrainians to capitulate to Russia right now would be the same as calling on Vietnam not to resist the US in the 1960s because their war of independence was being fought with weaponry from the USSR and China. Maybe it was true at the time that China and the USSR wanted to weaken the US militarily in Vietnam, but for the Vietnamese it was always a war of independence.”
While it clearly oversimplifies things (as newspaper op-eds tend to do), Phillips’s main claim captures the obsessions of certain key people within the MAGA movement’s post-QAnon “Woke Right” rather well. I’m thinking especially of Tucker Carlson, but also of Laura Loomer, Alex Jones, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and others influential in MAGA world.
Phillips argues that the twin pillars of MAGA ideology for the last few years have been “Epstein” and “Ukraine” — not the person and the nation, but what they have come to stand for. And so, with Donald Trump’s recent denial that there’s anything at all to be seen there, the whole house of cards is at risk of coming down.
As I prepare to give a talk on Ukraine (my first after my recent visit there), I’m also preparing some simple answers to two questions that I expect to get.
Since the talk is in the United States, the question “What should the U.S. do?” will likely come up, even if the questioner knows it’s a virtually inoperable question in the context of a Trump presidency. The second question, about NATO, is really just rhetorical, but I can be virtually guaranteed that someone will raise something about it. I answer both below.
What should the U.S. do?
We should begin with what it should not do, and that’s to withdraw support from Ukraine. As we’ve already seen, that only encourages Putin to think he can “win” this war and achieve his goals. He’s made clear repeatedly that his main goal is to subordinate as much of Ukraine as possible to Russian control. Achieving that will not be possible without sending more Russian men to their deaths in the effort to kill more Ukrainians, resulting in more bloodshed, more bombing, more trauma all around, and ultimately more police-state machinations once the goal would be (hypothetically) attained. This should therefore be a non-starter (though we know it’s exactly what Trump has been doing).
As for what it should do:
The U.S. should support Ukraineboth rhetorically and militarily, for reasons that include its obligations to guarantee Ukrainian security under the 1994 Budapest Memorandum. (That the Trump administration recently “disappeared” the Budapest Memorandum from U.S. government web sites is a telling indicator that it never plans to do this.)
The U.S. should work with other countries to apply greater economic pressure not only on Russia, but alsoon countries that do business with Russia. Economic sanctions by the EU have turned Russia — quite successfully — to other countries (China, India, Iran, et al.) for the oil and gas revenues that sustain it. If business with Russia were turned into an instrument of negotiation with other countries (as Trump’s infamous tariffs are intended to do), then this could become useful leverage.
Economic pressure should also make more use of the Russian financial assets — numbering in the hundreds of billions of dollars — that have been temporarily “frozen” as part of the sanctions regime. How to make use of these is complicated, but any genuine leverage requires the possibility of directing these funds toward the defense and post-war reconstruction of Ukraine.
The U.S. should apply diplomatic pressure toward a resolution that respects international agreements, and it should do this in the context of a foreign policy that does that everywhere. (That means in Israel and Gaza, in Iran, and elsewhere around the world.) While the Biden administration fell rather short of this goal, the Trump administration is falling far, far shorter.
What about NATO?
I phrase this indirectly, since the question is almost always a rhetorical one. But answering it requires identifying first principles, which for me are two:
NATO should be expected to fulfill its mission as a defense alliance protecting its members and devoted to safeguarding “the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.” To the extent that its member countries remain democratic, their voice in NATO should be respected. If some fall away from those principles (I’m looking at Hungary, Slovakia, and a few others), their role should be diminished or they should be pressured to withdraw from the alliance. Of course, that’s complicated, but remembering the organization’s founding principles is important.
NATO should not be guided by the self-serving goals of the military-industrial complex. (That’s where I agree with many others on the political left.) Defense should be defense for the sake of democracy, rule of law, etc., and not for the sake of the defense industry. That said, keeping in mind the neo-imperializingstate of the world means that the path toward peace is more complicated today than it might have appeared a few decades ago. If it were still the early 1990s, we could dream of a world without military alliances like NATO. It no longer is that time.
Darya Tsymbalyuk’s Ecocide in Ukraine: The Environmental Cost of Russia’s War (Polity Books, 2025) is the most important book to come out on the topic of the environmental consequences of the Russo-Ukrainian war, and the first English-language volume to examine the topic comprehensively.
The Ukraine War Environmental Consequences Work Group recently published a review of it by Bern University geographer Alexander Vorbrugg. I recommend reading the review, then buying the book. (For full disclosure, Darya authored one of the chapters in Terra Invicta, the anthology I’ve edited which will be coming out in a few months.)
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.
This forum, happening today and tomorrow in Moscow and organized by the Tsargrad Institute, led by Russian far-right ideologues Aleksandr Dugin and Konstantin Malofeev, is like a fever dream of the worst Putinist enablers and propagandists: Malofeev, Putin mouthpieces Sergei Lavrov and Ekaterina Andreeva, and many others of their ilk… plus: Infowars’ Alex Jones, Jeffrey Sachs (no kidding), Max Blumenthal, Elon Musk’s father Errol (characterized as abusive by both Elon’s mother and Elon’s biographers), et al.
Wicked-ass liars and genocide-enablers, all feeling free (with Trump’s tacit approval) to pursue their dream of a reinvigorated Great Russia and a re-imperialized world.
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. ↩︎
Recall that Ukraine disarmed in 1994 in exchange for security assurances by Russia, the US, and the UK, assurances that ultimately weren’t kept. By reportedly damaging about a third of Russia’s strategic cruise missile carriers, Sunday’s Operation Spider’s Web (Павутина) began the process of disarming Russia. (Follow-up analyses can be read here, here, here, and here.)
Memes circulating about the event — such as Zelensky showing Trump the hand of cards he actually had up his sleeve, or asking Trump and Vance (or Big and Little TACO, as some are calling them) for a “thank you” — can easily be found. (Here’s a good sample.)
Roman Sheremeta, writing on Facebook, notes insightfully about why Ukraine disclosed the information as rapidly as it did:
By revealing how the operation was executed — including the use of concealed drones inside decoy trucks driven across 5,000 kilometers of russian territory — Ukraine isn’t just celebrating a tactical success. It’s imposing a psychological and economic cost on russia.
Now, every russian cargo truck becomes a potential threat. Every driver is suspect. As a result, russian authorities will be forced to:
Divert resources to inspect and monitor domestic transport routes.
Increase surveillance and internal security along tens of thousands of kilometers of highways.
Slow down military and civilian logistics across the entire country.
Mistrust their own citizens — especially private drivers and contractors — creating paranoia and bottlenecks.
This will drive up the cost of russian supply chains, strain already stretched infrastructure, and potentially cause internal friction. Ukraine didn’t just destroy aircraft — it weaponized uncertainty within the russian system.
This is how modern asymmetric warfare works: you don’t need to match your enemy plane-for-plane. You just need to make their whole system start doubting itself.
The last point deserves more consideration, as it holds a lesson for the U.S. and everyone else. As Noah Smith writes, Chinese drones could bring down America in a similar way.
As you read this, military planners all over the world are scrambling to come up with defenses against the kind of raid that Ukraine just carried out. Dozens of container ships arrive in American ports from China every day, each with thousands of containers. The containers on the ships then get unloaded and sent by road and rail to destinations all over the country. Imagine a hundred of those containers suddenly blossoming into swarms of drones, taking out huge chunks of America’s multi-trillion-dollar air force and navy in a few minutes.
Assessing the military significance of Operation Spider’s Web will take some time. Calling it a “Pearl Harbor moment” for Russia, however, as some have been doing, plays into the hands of their anticipated propaganda.
A more appropriate analogy than the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor might be Kyïvan Grand Princess (Kniahynia) Olha’s revenge against the Derevliany, a story Russians and Ukrainians should both know well. In particular, one might think of the brilliant tactic of sending back “tribute” homing pigeons to their houses carrying sulfur, which subsequently burned the homes of their owners (pigeons coming home to roost, indeed). You can read the full version of the story in English here: https://museumhack.com/olga-of-kiev/ (I’m describing “phase four”).
That, combined with a David-vs.-Goliath switch in expectations.
For now, I’m happy to share my sentiment through Odilon Redon’s 1887 lithograph “Smiling Spider” (L’Araignée):
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.
I’ve been negligent on this blog, again, as I travel (in Ukraine right now; I’ll be at the Knyzhkovyi Arsenal book festival in Kyïv this coming weekend).
Meanwhile, three of the worst nights of bombardment just passed this last weekend, with a total of 903 drones and 92 ballistic missiles raining down on Ukrainian cities from Friday through Sunday nights. (These are figures provided by the Air Force Command of the Armed Forces of Ukraine, which are pretty verifiable, including by the physical experience of Ukrainians.)
Kyïv experienced a total of 20 hours and 42 minutes of air raid alerts over those three nights. I have to admit that the thought of bombs and drone débris raining down on people, who’ve become so numbed to the air raid alerts that many now sleep through them, remind me of the scenes of the comic-futurist television series Max Headroom when people would wear metal umbrellas to protect themselves from the periodic satellite débris showers that would rain down on them from the stratosphere. You can get used to anything.
Of course, the Ukrainian reality is hardly the stuff of comedy. Ukrainian-American artist and translator Larissa Babij has been keeping a Substack diary of her visceral experience of living in Ukraine at a Kind of Refugee; her latest piece, “This is War,” is worth reading.
Meanwhile, I still sometimes get curmudgeonly responses from leftist friends about NATO blah blah blah. The Kyiv Independent’s Andrea Januta summarizes the wrongness of those responses in her piece of yesterday, “Why did Russia invade Ukraine? Debunking Putin’s ‘root causes’ claims.”
Essentially, the argument is that anyone claiming that NATO’s expansion was the, or an important, cause of the Russian war on Ukraine should be reminded that (1) Putin said almost nothing about the Baltic countries joining NATO in 2004, or about Finland, its next largest bordering European country, joining it in 2023; and that (2) before Russia’s 2014 invasion, less than 20% of Ukrainians wanted to join NATO; today that number is 85%.
The root cause is simply Russia’s desire to maintain control over Ukraine. That root cause should be eliminated at its root, which is Russian imperialism, an imperialism with centuries of barely questioned history (barely questioned by Russians or most westerners) backed by the world’s second largest nuclear arsenal, and by a geographically massive klepto-capitalist authoritarian petro-state regime, which today spouts ethno-fascist rhetoric to keep its Russian population in tow behind it (and that continues to subject its non-Russian peoples the way it has for centuries). Repeating its claims is indeed nothing but “useful idiotism” for imperialism.
More in the coming days.
Quick update: It seems the Max Headroom scenes were actually of a “Sky Clearance Festival,” so a bit more celebratory and less predictable than I had recalled… Here’s a clip (others have been taken down by the copyright holders, so I’ll leave a screen-shot below it in case this comes down, too):
