Four years ago, we made a commitment to document the state of reality as seen and experienced by our contributors for the duration of the war. It was impossible to imagine then that it would last this long, with no obvious resolution in sight. We publish these reflections not to provide a singular narrative, but to keep a record of this moment and to begin to untangle what has occurred. In many ways, all our work at Pushkin House since February 2022 has been about that: How do we continue to operate – as institutions and as individuals – when the conditions that once predetermined us are shattered? What is the role of an institution when everything is polarised? Is it still possible to maintain a dialogue while remaining true to our values? We are constantly asking ourselves how to go beyond binaries, how to address frictions, and how to find a way to speak about complexities without falling into easy simplifications.
As the only independent cultural organisation in the West whose mission is to deepen understanding of Russia, we stand witness to the fragmentation of communities conflicted about their heritage. At the same time, we are inspired by the many artists, writers, and scholars who have found a way to channel their experience into a new purpose, continuing to examine the complicated, multiple reasons that led to where we are now.
But not everyone can afford the luxury of speaking out. As the years go on, there is a distinct hardening of the lines and a growing disillusionment among those who can. Nevertheless, we remain aware of those in Russia who continue to maintain civil, cultural, and intellectual integrity in their own way – often invisible to outsiders and distanced from international platforms.
You will read a breadth of testaments ranging from political overviews to the harsh realities of LGBTQ communities; some personal, others more analytical, some still hopeful and others uncompromising. What is different from four years ago is an overwhelming sense of collapse – of the shared myths we once held about the power of culture to act as a universal ‘deterrent’. Yet, the need to keep asking these questions remains. If culture cannot act as a deterrent, it can still act as a witness. We publish these voices not to find an easy answer, but to acknowledge that even in a state of rupture, the impulse to think, to create, and to speak persists. It is with this persistence in mind that we look toward the work ahead, examining how we can function in a world where the old rules no longer apply, and how to build something durable from the fragments left behind.
Elena Sudakova, Director of Pushkin House
One of the most stomach-turning things in this war is the way Orthodox clerics have dressed up violence as righteousness. I was never naïve about Patriarch Kirill – he had always struck me as a politician and businessman rather than a man of faith.
Take his obsequious assertion in 2012 that Putin’s leadership was “a miracle of God”. Yet four years ago, many people – myself included – still hoped the head of the Russian church would denounce the bloodshed between Orthodox brethren. On the first day, Kirill did urge both parties to do “everything possible to avoid civilian casualties”. But he was soon describing Ukrainians defending their territory as “evil forces.” Two weeks later, on Forgiveness Sunday, marking the start of Lent, he expressed no regrets about the hundreds killed or the carpet bombing of Mariupol. He did not call for an end to the invasion. Instead, he blamed gay pride parades in Europe for inciting it.
Since then, his rhetoric has hardened as he champions the twin causes of Orthodox unity and Russian imperialism. His proclamations of a ‘Holy War’ and his cold-blooded aggression towards Ukraine flouts Christ’s commandment, to love thy neighbour as thyself. Like his president, he also holds the lives of his own countrymen in contempt. Eight months into the war, when more Russians were sent to the front as cannon fodder, Kirill told them not to fear death on the battlefield because “sacrifice in the course of carrying out your military duty washes away all sins”. Leaving morality aside, Kirill’s stance violates Orthodox teaching. Back in the 4th century, the church father, bishop of Caesarea and theologian St Basil the Great required soldiers who killed in war to repent and even abstain from communion. Yet Kirill preaches an Orthodox jihad, promising a clean conscience and joyful afterlife in exchange for martyrdom. Nevermind if the enemy cannot even be classed as infidels since they are Russia’s co-religionists.
The Patriarch marked Christmas on January 7th this year with a chilling TV interview in which he said that anyone opposing the war should be treated as a “traitor to the Motherland,” with full legal consequences. By branding dissent as treason, he openly sided with Russia’s security services. Chaplains have been sent to the front lines, not just to provide spiritual support but to act as enforcers. Like political commissars in Soviet times, they coax reluctant soldiers into battle. In a speech to the Duma last year, Father Dmitry Vasilenkov, Russia’s chief military priest, said 700 conscripts, including 46 deserters, in the Kursk region returned to fight after just two days of priestly persuasion. One prominent bishop, in charge of the Moscow Patriarchate’s parishes in Western Europe and currently based in Paris, has no time for his compatriots who left the country in 2022. He called them a “generation of parasites” alien to the interests of the nation, who were raised in the “garbage dump of the entertainment industry.”
For antiwar clerics inside Russia these are lonely and dangerous times. One priest who conducts funerals for soldiers killed in Ukraine, struggles to comfort bereaved families. “I can’t say your son or husband died for a noble cause”, he told me. “So, I tell them to put their trust in God.” Many clerics live in fear of being denounced by their parishioners if they fail to read Kirill’s victory prayer.
At the other end of the scale there are the Z-priests who fervently back the war. One of them recently encouraged teenagers to run around his church with assault rifles to the sound of rock music. The video of boys pointing Kalashnikovs at the iconostasis was a little too much for the local bishop, even though he actively supports Russian troops and has been to occupied Luhansk. Last week the archpriest from Obukhovo east of Moscow was suspended from his duties as rector.
But as the exiled journalist Ksenia Luchenko points out in her Telegram channel Orthozombies, he is far from alone in using his church as a showcase for military hardware. “Are we in God’s temple or a shooting range?”, asked one bewildered parishioner at the Transfiguration Church in the village of Savvino. Archpriest Vitaly Kuleshov, wearing full vestments, interrupted one service to put a bulletproof vest on the sexton. On other occasions he brought military helmets and combat knives to the Pulpit.
All this is dystopian and grotesque, but what can be done about it? Apart from supporting independent Russian media, helping anti-war priests through initiatives such as МИР ВСЕМ (Peace to All) and NGOs devoted to non-violent resistance like Идите лесом (Get Lost) which help people to evade conscription, I feel it is vital to debunk the propaganda being fed to American politicians. Even as Russian troops destroy churches, murder and torture clerics across Ukraine, Kirill is falsely claiming that Volodymyr Zelenksy’s government is persecuting Christians. The Patriarchate and the Kremlin are weaponising the split between two rival churches in Ukraine – one historically linked to Moscow, the other under the Patriarch of Constantinople. It may sound marginal, but it could influence U.S. Congress decisions on military aid – with serious consequences for Ukraine and the rest of Europe.
In early 2025, the Kremlin appeared to have high hopes for Donald Trump’s second term. But a year later, Ukraine keeps on fighting and receiving weapons and intelligence from the United States. Meanwhile other Russian interests are being threatened by Trump’s actions, from Latin America all the way to the former USSR.
In January, the US operation to seize Nicolás Maduro removed Russia’s key partner in Latin America, while Washington secured control over Venezuelan oil. Moscow is now unlikely to recover the billions of dollars it had lent to Caracas after previously writing off vast debts.
“It seems those Russian air defences didn't quite work so well, did they?”, gloated the US Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth about the failure of Russian-made air defence systems protecting Caracas. Now the future of Russia’s two other allies in the region – Cuba’s communist government and Daniel Ortega’s authoritarian regime in Nicaragua – could also be in jeopardy.
In the Middle East, Russia’s key partner Iran faces unprecedented pressure from Donald Trump. And in Syria, only recently considered a Russian protectorate, the new government that overthrew Bashar al-Assad now prioritises relations with the US and Europe.
The fall of some Moscow-friendly regimes and the vulnerability of others has exposed Russia’s inability to project power beyond what it calls its “near abroad.”
But it is the post-Soviet space where attitudes towards Russia are changing most rapidly. In the South Caucasus, the Kremlin found itself sidelined when Trump hosted the leaders of Armenia and Azerbaijan at the White House in August 2025. They announced an end to their decades-long conflict, with both leaders crediting the US president’s “historic role” in brokering the agreement.
The Central Asian nations, too, have recently stepped up engagement with the US. In November, Trump hosted the presidents of all five – Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan – at the White House. Before and after the summit, American companies secured billion-dollars mining and critical minerals exploration contracts in the region.
Moreover, American plans for the Caucasus and Central Asia are interconnected. Washington backs the Middle Corridor project that aims to link Europe to Central Asia and China while bypassing Russia and Iran.
All this makes the fourth anniversary of the Russian invasion different from the previous ones. The Kremlin is now reaping what it has sown, and it is a meager harvest. If the war on Ukraine was triggered by Moscow’s insecurity about its waning international influence, then it only accelerated the process.
The start of the war also marks four years of married life for me. The first morning of our honeymoon, we woke up to tanks rolling into Ukraine and the shattering of the world as we knew it. Our wedding anniversary is so interlinked with the invasion that it is hard to feel cheerful about it.
The war is now almost as long as the First World War, with no realistic end in sight.
Memories of Moscow cling to me and come at the most unexpected times. I see Sivstev Vrazhek as I get into my car, the corner of Novy Arbat and Novokuznetskaya Naberezhnaya as I cut up oranges for marmalade; a glass fronted bookcase in a Moscow apartment as I put my contact lenses in.
I accept that the Russians who have left Russia are truly emigrés. It is not temporary. Words like razluki, rasstoyanie come into my mind.
War is a constant state of waiting. Ukrainian soldiers 100 days in their fox holes; Russians waiting to see if they can ever go home again; people like me waiting to see if they will ever visit friends in Moscow again. Muscovites waiting to see if prices will go down (and they only go up). I’m having to learn patience – something I’ve read about in Russian books all these years. And to keep the faith that things will change, because they always do.
A few months ago, while taking part in a BBC Radio 4 poetry programme, I met a remarkable man, General Tim Hodgetts, former Surgeon General to the UK Armed Forces. He had served several times in Iraq and Afghanistan and been in charge of military hospitals in war zones. It was often impossible to communicate with his family by phone or email, and – as the senior medic present – he could not afford to risk demoralising his juniors when he himself felt overwhelmed by what he had witnessed. Writing poetry was his only emotional outlet, his only way of coming to terms with his experiences. His poems (published in the collection Frontlines and Lifelines) are clear and factual. Here are 3 stanzas from “Dressing the Dead.”
Two bodies lie before me
Who they are I cannot tell.
Flesh charred by an explosion
Gives off a sickly smell. […]
Their limbs have all contracted
Twisted postures fixed in death.
As we force their legs out straight,
Exhaled bubbles mimic breath. […]
Two medics are affected
By what they’ve seen and done.
I counsel them though also numbed
By wounds from bomb and gun.
For Tim Hodgetts, writing poetry was a psychic necessity. And the urgency of the situation allowed him only the most absolute directness.
Hearing him speak was a valuable reminder of the importance of poetry at moments of crisis. This short poem by Vera Pavlova (translated by Andrei Burago and published in the bilingual anthology of anti-war poetry titled Disbelief) has a similar no-nonsense quality – a clarity we all need.
Don’t say that you shoot in the air.
The bullet will find its purpose.
Aim high and you murder a cherub,
Aim low and you slaughter a corpse.
A bird, a rabbit, a mole.
The bullet will find its prey.
Listen to mama, hide in a hole,
Toss your rifle away.
The Ukraine war is proving to be the litmus test for assessing how nation states are lining up in the new world order. The old hostility between the Soviet Union and the so-called western world is being replaced by one in which the USA and Russia stand more or less together against Europe. (The question of China adds a major complication, but that is beyond our scope here.) The strange relationship of the US under President Donald Trump towards the war is key to understanding what is happening, through a series of related questions.
Can one really assert that Trump’s US stands alongside Putin’s Russia?
On a superficial view, Trump’s stand has been one of studied ambiguity and changeableness. He has at times seemed sympathetic to Ukraine’s position. He permits European countries to send arms. He has not banned Musk from providing the Starlink satellite-based internet service to Ukraine. He shows an interest in mineral exploitation deals with the Ukrainian government. He occasionally has very friendly talks with President Volodymyr Zelensky. But these measures have to be weighed in the balance against various, stronger, opposite actions. His plan for ending the war was identical to the Russian government’s interests, especially the demand that Ukraine cede territory that Russia has not managed to conquer in hostilities. The US itself has stopped providing arms to Ukraine, but merely permits European countries to send them after they have bought them from US firms – more a policy of aid to the US arms industry than help to Ukraine. Minerals deals are about securing commercial gains for Trump’s family and allies; and they are deals that could be just as easily made with a Russia that had conquered the relevant parts of Ukraine. Not least, there was that disgraceful reception of Zelensky at the White House.
There is more. The Trump regime is openly supporting extreme right-wing parties in several European countries. Apart from these being outrageous instances of political interference in other countries’ national politics, all the parties concerned have close links with President Vladimir Putin, and either directly support Russia or at least oppose other parties’ support for Ukraine. This is the case with Fidesz in Hungary, SMER in Slovakia, Rassemblement National in France, Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, ReformUK in Britain.
Trump’s ambiguity is not balanced; the pro-Russian elements are stronger.
Why then does Trump bother with being ambiguous and changeable?
There are three reasons, probably all valid. First, he is notoriously inconsistent, making statements designed more to attract publicity than to establish policy. Second, inconsistency and unpredictability are essential weapons for all would-be autocrats. If one can predict how a ruler will respond, one can work out how to take up a position in relation to him. If this is impossible, one has no choice but to obey whatever was the latest command. Finally, and most importantly, European leaders are nearly all grovelling before Trump. They do this for two reasons. First, they are reluctant to accept that they must start completely reconfiguring their relationship with the US. Second, and more immediately, they fear that if they do not bow before him, he will abandon Ukraine entirely. If he were to make it clear that he has already done this, they would lose much of their incentive to grovel.
But why has this extraordinary volte face in the US’s relationship to Europe and Russia occurred?
We have to understand that Russia and the Trumpian US have shared interests in relation to Europe. Both have economies increasingly dominated by extremely rich oligarchs with strong, often corrupt, links to the ruling political elite. Both Putin and Trump are hostile to liberal ideas and have links to very conservative Christian groups. Both societies are highly unequal and have poorly developed welfare states. Although many European countries have started to develop some of these characteristics, they still stand as attractive alternatives to qualities deeply entrenched in Russia and starting to develop in the USA.
Both Trump and Putin have a strong incentive to see Europe weakened and disunited, as a Europe strongly organised around the European Union is – or would be – a major rival. So far the major attacks on European unity have been at its eastern and western extremes. In the east, Ukraine is suffering a cruel and vicious war, partly to prevent it joining the EU – remember the Euromaidan protests of 2013. In the west, in the UK, we were treated far more gently: we were persuaded to vote to leave the EU, in a campaign where both the Russian state and billionaires around Trump funded the campaign to leave.
*****
The fight to save Ukraine has two vital goals: to save its people from suffering and violent death; and to save European civilisation, including Ukraine, from being weakened by hostile forces to its east and west.
I know I am not alone among Russianists when I say that the war in Ukraine is the worst thing to have happened in my life.
All things Russian fascinated me from a very early age. At school I had the chance to start learning the Russian language. I knew very quickly that I had found my path. My whole life, personal and professional, has been tied to Russia.
I first visited the Soviet Union post-‘O’ level in 1974. After two further trips, I won a British Council scholarship to the USSR for 1979-80. After graduating in Russian Studies from Leeds University I became a Soviet military analyst; then, for BBC World Service, I broadcast on the last days of the Soviet Union, the crazy ’nineties and the start of the Putin era; and I ran the Russo-British Chamber of Commerce for five years. But then the cracks began to show.
In 2015 I had an article published in The Moscow Times, which I called, ‘Why My Love Affair With Russia Has Gone Sour’. A year after the illegal seizure of Crimea and the start of the war in Eastern Ukraine, I was saddened by long-time Russian friends who suddenly were saying things like, ‘there’s no such country as Ukraine’. I recalled the words of the wonderful academician, Dmitry Likhachev, whom I interviewed in 1988, who made the distinction between ‘patriot’ and ‘nationalist’:
‘A patriot loves their nation and their family, and this engenders in them love and respect for other nations and cultures. “Nationalism” is a weakness which goes hand in hand with hatred of other nations.’
Sadly – not only in Russia – that distinction is frequently lost.
When I was woken by a ’phone call in the early hours of 24 February 2022 with the news that Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine had begun it felt like a sickening blow to the stomach. Suddenly, all the years of trying to understand Russia, to work with Russians, and to explain the country and its people and culture to millions across the globe via the BBC World Service seemed to count for nought.
And in the weeks and months that followed, the true horror of Russia’s invasion came to light. Not just millions of innocent Ukrainians being made to flee their homes, but the cruel brutality of the Russian invaders. Parents being raped and murdered in front of their children – and vice-versa. Civilians being shot ‘for fun’ by Russian soldiers. Unspeakable tales of barbarity by the Russians. And these were representatives of a country I had grown to love deeply. I even used to describe myself as ‘British, but with a Russian soul’. Not any more.
However the war ends, it will be a tragedy not only for Ukraine, but for Russia, too. Every death, every refugee, every family torn apart in Ukraine, is the result of one man’s mad belief that Russia is still a great empire. Yet all the while Russia itself is slipping into ever greater poverty: ballistic missiles which rain down on Ukraine cost between $2 million and $15 million. How much could be done for the welfare of the Russian people with this money?
And Russia is becoming an increasingly violent society. Soldiers – many of them freed convicts – are already committing ghastly crimes back in Russia. More than a million young Russians have been killed or seriously wounded in the war. Over a million of the country’s brightest young people have fled the country, and are unlikely to return any time soon. Russians are going to pay a heavy price for this war in the years to come. But it is terrible that in what may well be his country’s death throes, Putin has dragged innocent Ukrainians into the mire with him.
The only thing worse than marking the fourth anniversary of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine is witnessing the cynicism penetrating the efforts to end it.
Maybe that contempt was always there, hiding in plain sight behind fantasy presidential campaign promises. Maybe it’s just easier to see now, after a year of theatrical negotiations failed to deliver on even the slimmest of prospects. But it has become glaringly obvious that US negotiators are more interested in cutting business deals than they are in cutting Ukrainian deaths on the battlefield. Their logic, if there is any, is that good business leads to improved politics.
This is not the model for authoritarian regimes, where regard for private property comes after regard for the leader and the interests of a select elite. More to the point, it has never been the model for Russia. In the 1990s, private sector interests captured and then destroyed Russian politics. Starting in 2000, President Putin’s years in office were marked by his contempt for private property. More recent Russian politics are the 1990s turned on their head. Russian politics have destroyed the private sector.
The truth, to everyone who is willing to see it, is that Putin is not interested in settling his war on Ukraine. And the United States continues to send two businessmen – a property developer and a private equity executive – to negotiate an end to this century’s most bloody conflict. What’s worse, on the Russian side they meet with another executive who has no authority to make firm or productive commitments. He has been recently joined by someone even less suited to diplomacy and more inclined to deliver history lectures.
We are told over and over that the negotiations are down to the final details. We are led to believe that we are inches from the finish line. That is precisely the problem.
Negotiations as they are currently structured will never cross that line. We hear more about potential transactions than we do about potential cease-fires or security Guarantees.
There are, of course, more than two parties to these discussions. While the Americans and the Russians talk dollars and roubles, Ukraine and the rest of Europe are talking about weapons and financial support. Neither of these has come in the quantities promised or required. European efforts now seem to be directed at talking sense to Americans who don’t want to hear it.
And so it will go for the foreseeable future, however desperately we want this forecast to be wrong. We express surprise, grief and outrage at every anniversary of this senseless war of deepest brutality.
Only a small group of people thought this war would ever start. Many more of us may need to prepare for another anniversary.
Four years after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the economic war between Russia and the West continues to rage – and although his administration has been far more willing to engage in negotiations, Donald Trump’s return to the US presidency thirteen months ago has not been enough of a catalyst to reverse the steady wear on Russia’s economy.
Today, Russia’s economy is dependent on the war machine, with the military and defense industries the sole area of growth. That shows no meaningful sign of changing as Vladimir Putin shows no sign of placing economic concerns over his military aims. International oil benchmark pricing averaging below US$70 per barrel over the last year has weighed on Russia’s macro-fundamentals as well, with the relative strength of the Russian rouble compared to the previous three years ironically further harming the Kremlin’s position given the decreased rouble value of receipts from oil sales as well. And the West’s sanctioning of Russia’s two largest oil companies, Rosneft and Lukoil, has again re-instituted a significant discount for Russian oil compared to competitors while also significantly reducing the Kremlin’s geo-economic leverage as the firm’s foreign operations are facing forced sales and in some cases have already been de facto taken over by local authorities.
However, Western leaders remain unable to bring themselves to enact sanctions or embargoes that would significantly decrease the volume of Russian oil reaching international markets. That is the hammer blow remaining to them in terms of further escalating the economic war, but fears of blowback both kinetically from the Kremlin and in terms of the increased oil price environment it would trigger continue to weigh heavily. The European Union has proposed sanctions that would potentially increase the discount for Russian oil further still but Hungary’s refusal to back these thus far has meant they have not yet been enacted.
Budapest also threatens to throw a major spanner in the works for the West’s continued funding for Ukraine, which since Trump’s return has shifted almost entirely to Western Europe. In December 2025, the European Union announced a plan for a €90 billion loan to Ukraine that would have sustained Kyiv for the next two years but avoided seizing Russia’ frozen assets to do so, instead pledging to do so via joint borrowing. Hungary has blocked this from proceeding thus far and while it has reversed itself on such refusals repeatedly previously, the fact is the issue has become a defining point for Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s government ahead of elections scheduled for 12 April in the country. That vote may well be contested and result in new divides between the Euro-Atlantic alliance given Trump’s closeness to Orban and the EU establishment’s deep desire to see him defeated at the ballot box. But even if or when Budapest agrees to allow the loan to proceed as currently structured, the topic of seizing Russia’s frozen funds is almost certain to arise again regardless of the potential progress in US-led negotiations around achieving a Ceasefire.
Ukrainians continue to suffer devastation and Russians, even those for whom the war is a route to enrichment, face an economic outlook bleaker than at any point since the first months to the war. The Kremlin knows it can entice the Trump Administration by dangling offers of economic cooperation and opportunity in the event of a ceasefire, but an offer that can realistically bring Brussels or Kyiv on board remains out of reach. Hope springs eternal, but the economic war rages on just as fighting does, and likely will still even if progress on a ceasefire does advance.
It’s possible in 2026, perhaps more than ever, to read American militarism through the lens of Russia. Indeed, in doing so we might learn something about how to resist the new forms of authoritarianism, nativism and populism that faces the world in the second quarter of the 21st century – by understanding the unfinished histories in play.
Barack Obama was still president when the Crimean peninsula was annexed twelve years ago. That attack was framed by Putin’s administration as a defence, as if it were part of a campaign that reached back to both the first and second sieges of Sevastopol in the 1850s and 1940s respectively — as if, in other words, the Crimean War and the fight against Nazi Germany were both part of Russian resistance against Western aggression which was resurfacing in the 2010s.
Something was resurfacing, that’s for sure. In the four years since Russia’s war on Ukraine opened its new fronts on 24 February 2022, the language has hardened as the violence has intensified. There have been attempts to justify the forced deportation of children, the bombing of hospitals and power stations, the mass slaughter of untold thousands of civilians with talk of denazification, anti-fascism, anti-imperialism and even demilitarisation.
You could call it an ideology, this propaganda and how people come to be taken in by it. It relies on a rhetorical framing that twists the facts, turns things upside-down to depict an attack as righteous defence, an invasion as a necessary return to the status quo, the violence as simply taking back control of what is rightfully possessed. There have even been comparisons of the invasion of Ukraine with resistance against European colonisation of Africa and the Opium Wars.
As an ideology, this flipping of the facts has a history. In writing my last two books – The Brutish Museums: the Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (Pluto 2020) and Every Monument Will Fall: a story of remembering and forgetting (Penguin 2025) — I learned that this history reaches back to 19th-century militarism. Today, look at the USA under Donald Trump’s second term and you can see this old ideology unfolding in real time into plain sight.
It’s the ideology of the punitive expedition, of course: the framing of so-called ‘small wars’ like the Benin Expedition as if they were necessary and justified attacks where terror, intimidation, the slaughter of non-combatants, and attacks on culture as well as civic infrastructure were part of the soldiers’ tactics. But it’s not simply that Putin’s attacks on Ukraine are a classic colonial expedition: look at Venezuela, at Iran, at Gaza and consider the enduring framings of disproportionate violence, collective punishment and the idea of conflict that will teach a lesson.
Then look at attacks on immigrants framed as defending against civilisational erasure. Or look at the murderous violence of ICE agents on the streets of America and consider the ideology of the so-called Lost Cause, and the monuments erected across the American South to warp the truth and promote the idea that the American Civil War isn’t over. The monuments are important because they were part of how this ideology was made to last. As for Putin and the Crimean War – arguably the first great imperial war, between the British, French, Ottoman and Russian Empires – so it is for Trump and the Lost Cause: these are conflicts of supremacism for which the battlelines are being redrawn as if the victory were not ceded. Wars of culture as well as of bullets and bombs.
And here the response of the left to America’s new ongoing war on culture risks misunderstanding the history. Some see it as a revival of fascism and say men like Musk and Trump should be called out as Nazis. Others imagine it is a revival of feudalism, so the slogan becomes ‘No Kings’. What I learned in writing those two books is that a third historical framing is possible. Neither feudalism nor fascism, from Caracas to Minneapolis this is surely the ongoing process of the corporate-militarist-colonialism that emerged in the second half of the 19th century, and is still with us today: wars of extractivism that employed both indiscriminate violence and ideas of culture in their armouries. The same can be said of Putin.
The logic of the punitive expedition was always to blame the victim: the toxic-masculinist logic of every abuser: “look at what you made me do”. So, in opposing the militarism today, in campaigning to stop the wars, let’s be sure we understand what kinds of war these are – neither feudalism nor fascism exactly, but an ongoing form of corporate-militarist colonialism. As I argue in Every Monument Will Fall, understanding this history begs an urgent question about these old ideologies of corporate-militarist colonialism as they return: How are they made to endure?
The fourth year of Russia’s war against Ukraine has been marked by a dramatic increase of the number of victims among Ukrainian civilians. Having failed to make much progress on the ground, Russian troops made up for it with air attacks. Apart from killing 35% more people this year than in any previous year of the war, Russia has also deliberately targeted Ukrainian power infrastructure, hoping that the absence of light and heating in freezing winter temperatures below minus 20°C will make Ukrainians surrender.
It is difficult to dismiss the thought that this is a direct result of President Trump’s attempts to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine without even approaching any understanding of the nature of their conflict – yet expecting to be rewarded with the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts. His diplomatic endeavours ranged from the invitation to Anchorage he extended to Putin to the constant snubbing of Zelensky. The summit in Alaska in particular was read by Putin’s Russia as an expression, if not of approval, then of respect, which in the gangster-like spirit of contemporary Russia is inevitably explained by fear: “They respect us because they are afraid of us and they will never dare to stop us!” It is this feeling of impunity that emboldens Putin, his generals and his supporters.
Unfortunately, this balance of strength between the US and Russia was confirmed at the end of January by Trump’s feeble request to Putin to halt strikes on the Ukrainian energy system for a week because of the extreme cold. Trump seemed to be pleased with his conversation with the Russian leader: “I personally asked President Putin not to fire into Kyiv and the various towns for a week, and he agreed to do that, and I have to tell you it was very nice,” said the American president. “Nice” it may have been but the week that started on 1 February ended on the 4th, with the cold unrelenting…
Over the past four years, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine has not only redrawn geopolitical borders and moral vocabularies; it has profoundly reshaped the architecture of repression inside Russia. Among those most acutely affected have been queer communities, whose already precarious legal position has hardened into something far more punitive, systematic, and ideologically charged.
In the first year of the war, the state moved swiftly to recalibrate its internal frontiers. The long-standing “gay propaganda” law – first introduced in 2013 as a prohibition on disseminating information about “non-traditional sexual relations” to minors – was dramatically expanded in 2022 to cover all age groups. What had once been framed, however disingenuously, as child protection became a blanket censorship regime. Any public mention, representation, or even neutral discussion of LGBTQ+ identities could now be construed as unlawful. The shift was not merely technical; it signalled a transition from paternalistic moralism to totalising erasure.
Soon after, a further escalation followed. In late 2023, the so-called “international LGBT movement” was designated as extremist. The move was legally surreal: no formal organisation, membership structure, or charter was identified, yet the label carried the full weight of Russia’s extremism legislation. Symbols, community spaces, online platforms, and forms of association that had once existed in a grey zone were abruptly pulled into the orbit of criminal law. What had been administrative offences – punishable by fines – were now shadowed by the threat of prosecution, searches, and imprisonment. The language of “extremism,” long used to silence political opposition, was extended to queer existence itself.
The years that followed have witnessed a sharp acceleration in enforcement. Court cases multiplied. Fines increased in frequency and scope. Independent bookshops, cultural venues, and online communities faced raids and inspections. Individuals were prosecuted for social-media posts, rainbow imagery, or participation in support networks. Enforcement patterns suggest not sporadic overreach but coordinated intensification: a widening net cast across regions, platforms, and generations. If the early years of the “propaganda” regime were characterised by selective application, the post-invasion period has marked a move toward routinised persecution.
This trajectory reflects more than moral conservatism. It reveals how wartime politics has fused with a project of ideological purification. The state’s narrative of civilisational struggle – against the West, against “decadence,” against imagined internal enemies – has positioned queer people as emblematic of external threat and internal decay. In this framing, repression is not an aberration but a patriotic act; censorship becomes sovereignty; prosecution becomes defence.
The cumulative effect is a climate of intensified queer injustice. Legal ambiguity has given way to expansive criminalisation. Social stigma has been reinforced by juridical condemnation. Spaces of visibility have narrowed; risks have deepened. For many, survival now depends on silence, exile, or the fragile solidarity of underground networks.
Four years on, the war’s reverberations are not only heard at the front lines. They are inscribed in court rulings, administrative protocols, and the everyday calculus of fear. The persecution of queer people has become both a symbol and a mechanism of a broader authoritarian consolidation – one in which identity itself is rendered suspect, and dignity is recast as defiance.
Thinking about that day four years ago… So much has happened and changed since then, except one thing: the war in Ukraine has not ended. Hundreds of books have been published about it, thousands of events organized, but more and more Ukrainian lives are still being lost. Do we still believe in the power of books to save lives? How will these four years transform our concept of literature, or have they already? The questions are age-old and cliché. But they do come alive once you think, or remember to think, of yet another death of a Ukrainian soldier or a civilian, making it impossible, for four years on, to read books on this war from a “historical perspective,” that is, from a distance. May victory for Ukraine be the goal, and may the distance be shorter.
The Soviet phase of the Second World War lasted four years; four years now define Russia’s war in Ukraine. Everyone who comments on the conflict has made that comparison – except for Putin, who finds himself in the role not of Stalin but Hitler. Yet four years feels wrong. Russia has been at war with Ukraine for nine hundred years. While writing a history of Moscow for Knopf, I combed the chronicles (letopisi) commissioned by the princes and archbishops in the principalities of Kyivan Rus and Muscovy. I learned, from the clipped cant of the scribes, that Moscow committed an immense amount of violence against neighboring towns, regional Slavic centers, and all of Ukraine. The so-called founder of Moscow, Yuri Dolgoruky, came from Kyiv and died there, presumably from poisoning plotted by his foes, who were tired of paying tribute to him. After his death, townspeople robbed his house and his grave. Dolgoruky’s descendants developed a seething resentment of Kyiv and rejoiced when it was sacked by Mongols in 1240. From that moment on, Moscow intentionally ignored Ukraine, although of course it had inherited its religion and culture – including music.
Cue the tyrants: the Ivans, Boris, Peter, and the Romanovs. In the 18th century, Prussian-born Catherine the Great absorbed Ukraine, Siberia, Alaska, and Northern California into her empire. Ukraine remained part of the imperial landmass, then of the Soviet Union after Vladimir Lenin sparked a revolution. In the 1930s, Stalin requisitioned harvests to finance his plans for rapid industrialisation, causing a famine so hideous that people ate tree bark and resorted to cannibalism.
Putin uses this history to justify his present actions. His is a Russian history without reckoning, a pattern of behavior that threatens to end the entire world if Putin, who models himself on recent and long-ago despots, doesn’t get his way. And Russian music has been pressed into political service, yet again. This past season, Valery Gergiev directed a sumptuous production of Sergey Prokofiev’s Stalin-era opera Semyon Kotko at the Bolshoi Theater. Composed in 1938, it premiered just before the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. The opera is set in Ukraine, but everyone speaks Russian – even the German fascists conspiring with Ukrainian nationalists against the Bolsheviks. The plot is full of bad stuff, but the hero ultimately reunites with his mother and girlfriend in the Donbass. How long has Semyon been away fighting all of Russia’s enemies all at once? Four years. But finally, he is home, in a Ukraine without Ukrainians, soon to be married and father a family, soon to till the virgin soil.
Void.
As we mark another year of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, I find myself reflecting on the evolution of our collective war poetry translation project, Kopilka – a journey that has mirrored the shifting internal geography of war poetry.
Working alongside Maria Bloshteyn (Canada), Andrei Burago (US), Richard Coombes (UK), Yana Kané-Esrig (US), Anna Krushelnitskaya (US), Dmitri Manin (US), Christine Zeytounian-Belouss (FR), Josephine von Zitzewitz (UK), and Olga Zvereva (NL)), Larry Bogoslaw (US), the project has moved through three distinct phases, each defined by a different emotional and intellectual necessity, resulting in an anthology of poetic responses to the war:
Disbelief (2023, Smokestack Books): In the immediate wake of February 2022, our first anthology, Disbelief, was born from raw anger and horror. At that stage, language felt shattered; the poems we translated were visceral, immediate responses to an unthinkable reality. Poets had to find a way to deal with the emotional distress, find a community, and counter the flood of government-sponsored, pro-war "Z-poetry" with an unprecedented outpouring of protest verse.
Dislocation (2024, Slavica): As the horrors of war became a daily reality, we moved toward Dislocation. Here, we began organising the vast poetic response into conceptual clusters, attempting to create a more academic volume for today’s aggrieved reader as well as for future readers and scholars.
Solastalgia (Work-in Progress): Our current work-in-progress, Solastalgia: Landscapes and Mindscapes in the Wake of Russia's Aggression in Ukraine, represents a new turn. The term "solastalgia" – distress caused by environmental change impacting people while they are still directly connected to their home environment – describes the majority of new poems coming from Russophone poets in Ukraine, Russia, and the diaspora. The ongoing war has shattered countless lives, landscapes, and communities, forcing millions into exile, internal displacement, or existential estrangement within their own countries. Like in a dream where a familiar environment becomes alien, poets are trying to orient themselves, understand, and give voice to this new reality. Translating and compiling this poetry gives us a way to process this alienation in ourselves and find strength and hope at a time of continuous devastation.
Four years into this war, there is a gloomy consensus among many serious scholars and practitioners that a durable negotiated peace is not possible – neither now nor in the foreseeable future. Negotiations may intensify. There may be short-term ceasefires. Documents may even be signed. But negotiations – especially on the Russian side – often appear more tactical than genuine. A ceasefire concluded on that basis would not constitute a settlement, only an intermission – entrenching a protracted conflict that risks further bloodshed in Ukraine and renewed instability across the continent.
The question is how to respond. Bolstering deterrence against Russia is indispensable. Strengthened military capabilities, cyber defence, and strategic resilience are not optional; they are the foundation of European security in the present moment. Without credible deterrence, there is no stability.
But military means alone will not solve this problem. They will not, by themselves, make Russia stop. The sources of this war are more complex and manifold than expansionism or historical nostalgia alone, however real those elements may be. If, at the most obvious level, Ukraine is the target of Russian aggression, rooted (in part) in Moscow’s imperial claims and Russo-Ukrainian history, at the next level Ukraine has become the tragic focal point of a broader architecture of Russian grievances that have accumulated over three decades against the United States and the Euro-Atlantic world. At that level, the war represents Russia’s attempt to secure what it considers a more recognised and authoritative role in Europe’s security order – one commensurate with its self-understood great-power status – and to accelerate the erosion of US primacy in the international order. Moscow has framed this ambition as the advance of genuine multipolarity, a configuration it has long assumed would enhance Russia’s leverage and standing, though that assumption has not borne out as expected over the last four years.
At the deepest – and perhaps most consequential – level, Russian behaviour is driven by entrenched distrust of Western intentions and by a conviction, widely shared across the political class and much of society, that the United States, together with Europe, seeks Russia’s “strategic defeat”. The war is framed not as a discretionary policy choice but as an existential struggle synonymous with the survival of the Russian state itself. Until that perception shifts, any peace will be provisional at best. The origins of this conviction can be traced through three decades of Russian foreign-policy debate, in which grievances toward the United States and the European Union steadily accumulated and narratives of encirclement and exclusion gained traction. Over time, these arguments moved from contested positions to organising assumptions within Russia’s strategic thinking. Whether judged instrumental or sincerely held, these assumptions had hardened into organising principles by 2014 and continue to shape Kremlin policy today, amplifying its most coercive instincts.
That is why deterrence must be accompanied by intellectual and diplomatic engagement – about Russia and with Russia. We need a more complex understanding of the deeper drivers of Russian behaviour and clearer insight into Moscow’s intentions. Such clarity is neither empathy nor sympathy; it is a prerequisite for greater accuracy and, therefore, for informed policies that are effective rather than merely reactive.
Cold War history offers a sobering precedent. The United States and the Soviet Union remained adversaries; deterrence was robust and often perilous. Yet dialogue with Moscow – especially at moments of acute tension – proved essential in clarifying intentions, signalling red lines, and reducing the risk of catastrophic miscalculation. Pressure alone did not produce stability. When strategic competition was coupled with sustained diplomatic engagement and structured negotiation, rivalry did not disappear – but it became more predictable and, crucially, more manageable. Today, however, the appetite for engagement has narrowed sharply. Dialogue with Russia is increasingly equated with appeasement. This reaction is understandable in light of Russia’s aggression and documented atrocities. Yet refusing to engage does not strengthen Europe’s position; it entrenches the cycle of distrust that fuels confrontation.
Deterrence and dialogue are not mutually exclusive. Europe must strengthen its capabilities and credibility. But deterrence without engagement risks hardening the spiral of hostility to a point where miscalculation becomes more likely. During the Cold War, the world was fortunate at moments such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and Able Archer 83. We should not assume we will always be as fortunate. A serious shift in Russian behaviour will require sustained Western pressure, in which the United States remains the indispensable actor. But the question is not pressure alone; it is whether Europe is prepared to exercise strategic agency of its own within that broader framework. That, in turn, presupposes clarity about what “Europe” means as a strategic actor – whether it speaks through the European Union, through NATO’s European members, through ad hoc coalitions, or through a looser and more fragmented configuration. If American reliability can no longer be assumed at previous levels, Europe must take responsibility for strengthening its own defence while also preserving and gradually rebuilding the diplomatic instruments necessary to manage confrontation. To remain a bystander in a US–Russia dynamic is to accept strategic irrelevance. Managed competition demands European initiative alongside American leadership.
Four years on, there are no easy answers. But one lesson is clear: deterrence without dialogue deepens insecurity; dialogue without deterrence invites exploitation. The task is to hold both together. Principled dialogue – among Western partners and with Russia – is not weakness but disciplined statecraft. It remains the most responsible way of reckoning with a nuclear-armed adversary, whoever holds power in Moscow.
Last year, walking through Berlin, I kept encountering traces of that terrible war that had ended there eighty years ago. For some reason, I kept recalling rare colour footage from the summer of 1945: long chains of people clearing rubble in the city centre. Bright sunlight. Many young women. Some of them smiling.
I watched that footage many times. The people seemed happy. I found myself wanting to stand beside them, and work with them. It felt as if they had a peaceful future ahead – as if they could build a better, more just, fairer world.
I understand that this is just an illusion. What those people had endured was unbearable: dictatorship, propaganda, intoxication by ideology, repression, the loss of loved ones, deprivation, national humiliation, hunger, violence, and a lingering sense of shame. And yes, possibly they still had more to go through. Tanks in 1953, Berlin wall, Stasi...
Yet in that moment they were alive. And they had a Future!
I find myself longing for that sense of future for us as well – I use the plural “us” deliberately, without separating Russian-speaking people from others. I want us to have that future too.
Let them even build totalitarian housing blocks on Karl-Marx-Allee from those very bricks. Let many of their hopes remain unfulfilled. Still, I long for that sunlit day of hope.
Last year I completed my projects: Acting Out (2022), Hometown (2024), A Child in Time (2025) – in which I reflected on how such a catastrophe became possible. And I feel that I can’t bear it anymore. Now I have begun a very new project, Estates: Fragile Utopia, devoted to British post-war utopias and the history of social housing – because it is a history of building a future. A better future for all.
Even if utopia turns into dystopia, it must still be built! And I feel an urgent desire to begin building now.
Sometime in early 2023, a year into the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, I received a “friend” request on social media from a Ukrainian woman whose name I’d seen a few times. She must have read one of my translations, or perhaps one of my anguished posts about a war in which I have friends and colleagues in both countries. It was writer Victoria Amelina, who had been specially trained to document war crimes by interviewing victims with sensitivity and respect. Although we never met, I felt I knew Amelina a little as I followed her social media posts; I was grief-stricken when she was killed that summer by a Russian missile in Kramatorsk. As the full-scale war enters it fifth – fifth! – year, I am thinking particularly about the ever-increasing number of victims of torture and sexual abuse whose stories Amelina helped document. Atrocities are committed in all wars by all sides, of course; it is the physical and emotional bravery of those who recount them and those who record that testimony, those who openly discuss uncomfortable truths, those who blaze the trail for the slow, cumbersome, often painfully inept organisations humans rely on to mete out justice that seems especially heroic to me now. And though I write from the United States, a country where we know all too well how to ignore the voices of victims – particularly the voices of women and children – I am heartened knowing that others in Ukraine are continuing the mission for which Amelina gave her life: to tell these stories. To record these testimonies. To believe in justice, even when it feels as if justice will never come. In fact, justice may never truly come for far too many who have suffered in Ukraine – but without the testimony of victims and faithful documentation by people like Amelina, there is no hope of it. May this year finally bring a reckoning for those who have done wrong.
On this fourth anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine I can’t think of any new expression of horror, disbelief, fear or frustration that could make an impact. Instead, I’d like to share a conversation I had with a close friend in Lviv less than two weeks ago. We were chatting on Telegram about mundane things just seconds before.
M: Damn, air raid alert. It’s possible they launched an “Oreshnik” missile. That’s the largest ballistic missile, intercontinental.
J: Do you have a basement?
M: Our basement won’t be of any use; it’s small and shallow. We can go out into the corridor in case of shrapnel, but if a bomb actually hits, the only thing that would help is a deep bomb shelter, like the Metro, but we don’t have it here. But then, they usually shoot these expensive missiles at specific targets, not just like that. So it’s unlikely it will hit us directly.
[….]
M: Wow. That was a really loud explosion!
J: Dear God. These ****.
M: Can’t have been that close. I can’t see anything, I just heard the explosion.
J: It’s horrible that missiles fly at all. But I’m glad it’s not nearby.
M: Yesterday we had another blast here, a “Kinzhal” missile, also really nasty, but it was apparently shot down, and there were no casualties. How stupid to shoot intercontinental missiles at us. Intimidation tactics…
J: Am I right to think that ballistic missiles are impossible to shoot down?
M: Depends what kind of missile and what it’s aimed at, but the “Oreshnik” is indeed very difficult to shoot down. Unlikely they used it right now. It’s only been launched twice before; it's a rare “guest” here. “Kinzhal” missiles are hard to shoot down too, but it’s achievable.
M: Now they’re writing that another one could hit in 5 minutes.
J: I’m praying hard.
[…]
M: Nothing. They’re writing that apparently this last one was a false alarm.
Translated from Russian.
This is life in Ukraine far away from any frontline. Every day. Russia must be stopped.
A pseudo-patriotic approval by the majority of the Russian people – whether tacit or Explicit – of death and destruction in Ukraine has also destroyed the old Russian myth: the messianic and enlightening role of Russian literature. It turns out that Solzhenitsyn, Shalamov, and all the anti-Stalinist, anti-authoritarian writers of the world who were published, distributed, interpreted, and taught in schools and universities in post-Soviet Russia had no effect whatsoever on the minds of either Russian leaders or the population as a whole. Easily brainwashed, they have once again surrendered absolutely to the will of absolute power.
Paradoxically, this has also exposed the falsity of the stale hierarchy of Russia’s intellectual elite. The literary establishment is in disarray. Creative artists now realise that their aim is primarily personal: to liberate themselves, to transform their inner Chaos – moral, mental, religious, or political – into a work of beauty, into a new consciousness understood by the world outside.
This new Russian expressionism is becoming increasingly established beyond Russia’s state borders in the form of independent publishers, broadcasts and podcasts, online periodicals, and live performances. Will this unexpected revolution in Russian literature and the arts indirectly contribute to the liberation of Ukraine from the Kremlin barbarians?