By Brian McDonald, Substack, 6/23/26

I went back to former US Ambassador to Moscow Michael McFaul’s 2018 book From Cold War to Hot Peace after an exchange on X, last week, with the French philosopher Philippe Lemoine about Russia’s 1996 presidential election, which hits the big three-oh anniversary this week. Lemoine’s point was simple enough: that the election that Western officials hailed as a victory for Russian democracy was, in fact, a grubby, over-funded, heavily manipulated, and essentially unfair, rescue operation for Boris Yeltsin.

Yeltsin broke campaign spending limits by a distance visible from space while public money was used to settle wage arrears and hand out electoral sweeteners. The IMF, under pressure from Washington, loosened the tap at just the moment when the Yeltsin campaign needed the state to look solvent again and the media landscape, already falling under the shadow of the new oligarchs, was turned into a great anti-communist siren. Meanwhile, when Yeltsin, ill and exhausted, was dragged across the line, the whole thing was presented in the West as the salvation of democracy.

McFaul called it a “tremendous victory for democracy” and that phrase alone is worth keeping in a glass case, like one of those Soviet medals that tells you more about the system that awarded it than the heroism it claims to commemorate.

I had reviewed McFaul’s Moscow memoir years ago and remembered it as 483 pages of a former US ambassador venting his agitation over unfulfilled potential, but re-reading it now, with 1996 in mind, makes the book more interesting and more revealing. Not better, exactly, but more useful, because it’s less a personal account of diplomacy than a confession of a certain American faith that democracy is holy, provided it advances the right side.

McFaul is a professional scholar, so it’s highly likely that he’s familiar with George Berkeley. The philosopher from Kilkenny gave us subjective idealism and the famous formula esse est percipi (to be is to be perceived). McFaul, whether he knows it or not, has spent much of his career practising a geopolitical version of the same creed in which what’s important isn’t democracy as lived by a country, in all its history, mess, fear, habit and contradiction, but how democracy is perceived from Washington.

In that vision, Russia was democratic when it was weak, pro-Western, dependent, ashamed of itself, and governed by men who understood the correct hierarchy of the post-Cold War world, but it began to become “authoritarian” in earnest when it stopped moving in that direction.

This is the selective idealism running through McFaul’s book. He’s not interested in democracy in the broad sense, the rule of voters, parties, institutions, mandates and national preferences. Instead, he’s interested in a particular species of democracy that’s liberal, pro-American, elite-approved, NGO-friendly, and geopolitically obedient. If a country votes the right way, its imperfections are growing pains, but if it votes the wrong way, its politics become pathology.

That’s why the silences in the book are as significant as the arguments. McFaul has a great deal to say about Putin’s Russia, and some of it is valuable and his insider accounts of Obama-Putin meetings are worth reading. His recollection that Putin insisted Dmitry Medvedev was in charge of foreign policy during his 2008-2012 presidency is interesting, especially given the later fury in Moscow over Libya, and the observation that Putin declined a White House visit in 2012 also matters because it suggests the break with the West had happened in Putin’s head before the West fully understood it had lost him.

But when the story turns to Russia’s 1990s, McFaul’s moral intensity becomes oddly selective.

Take 1993, when Yeltsin shelled his own parliament with tanks, which meant the post-Soviet constitutional order was born in blood and executive violence, the result of which was the hyper-presidential system that later made Putin so powerful. A serious account of Russia’s democratic failure would have to linger there, in the rubble of the Moscow White House, asking what kind of republic was being built when the elected president could fire on the elected legislature and still be declared the man on the “right side of history.” But McFaul, surprise, surprise, doesn’t linger and quickly moves on.

Then comes 1996, which is the great wound under the plaster because this was the election Western liberals had to believe in, given the alternative was too inconvenient. Indeed, the famous July 1996 Time cover, “Yanks to the Rescue,” which openly celebrated the role of American political consultants in helping Yeltsin secure re-election, looks extraordinary three decades later in its total lack of self-awareness. Not to mention downright hypocritical when you remember that McFaul later became one of the loudest American voices condemning the far, far lighter and less effective Russian interference in the 2016 US election. Yet the 1996 Russian vote, with American advisers assisting Yeltsin, Western institutions helping steady the Russian state and Washington openly invested in the outcome, rarely inspires the same moral outrage. The asymmetry is revealing.

And that’s why his ambassadorship in Moscow was doomed from the first week. He arrived in January 2012, just as liberal protests were convulsing Moscow and shortly after Hillary Clinton had appeared to encourage the demonstrators from afar, and it so happened that his first public meeting as ambassador was with opposition figures. He says this wasn’t his preferred idea and perhaps he’s being truthful, but politics is made of optics as much as intentions, and in Moscow the optics were spectacularly bad. A man who had written on promoting regime change in the Soviet Union and Russia arrived in the Russian capital and immediately met the opposition during anti-government protests and you didn’t need to be a Kremlin paranoiac to notice the red rag.

Russian television then did what Russian television does, it mauled him, crudely and often dishonestly. McFaul complained of anti-American hysteria, not without reason, but his later comfort on American cable television, where anti-Russian hysteria is also manufactured with a straight face and a lavish studio budget, makes the complaint look rather hypocritical.

The deeper problem is that McFaul never seemed especially interested in Russia as Russians actually live it because his Russians are the Russians of a narrow Moscow circle, dissidents, liberals, refuseniks, black-market types, the disappointed children of the Soviet elite, and the people who speak the language of Western seminars and embassy receptions. These people can’t be totally dismissed, of course, because they’re real and some are brave and some are even admirable, but they’re definitely not Russia entire, or even usefully indicative of it. Meanwhile, the provinces, the conservative middle, the industrial towns, the military families, the voters who didn’t see the 1990s as liberation but as humiliation, remain distant shapes in the snow. But the problem is that those people elect Russian leaders too, and there’s simply far more of them than there are of the well-heeled internationalists who are more comfortable in the cosmopolitanism of London or Paris than the grind of Volgograd or Irkutsk.

This is where McFaul’s Berkeleyan problem returns in that the Russia that counted was the Russia visible to Washington, urban, liberal, English-speaking, Western-facing, and morally legible. At the same time, the bigger Russia beyond that niche was a problem to be either modernised or overcome, and wasn’t assigned any agency as a political subject.

Re-reading From Cold War to Hot Peace now, it’s easier to see why McFaul was so poorly received in Moscow but it’s important to concede that not every Russian attack on him was fair, and many were not, and also that it wasn’t because the Kremlin’s suspicions were pure, because they weren’t. It’s really because he embodied, almost too perfectly, the American assumption that Russia’s proper destiny was to become a lesser version of America’s idea of itself.

Putin ended that project, whether we like it or not, and that’s long been McFaul’s real grievance because his gripe isn’t merely that Russia became authoritarian, though that is his stated case, but that Russia stopped travelling toward the destination he believed history had assigned it. There’s very little doubt that he’d have been happy enough with a pro-American Pinochet, which, incidentally, is what Western elites appeared to think they were getting when Putin was chosen as Yeltsin’s successor in December 1999.

The book is therefore valuable, but not always in the way its author intended. It tells us something about Obama, Putin, Medvedev, Libya, the failed reset and the psychological weather of US-Russia relations, but above all, it tells us how American democracy promotion looks from inside its own church, which is sincere, learned, energetic, blind, and astonishingly forgiving of its own side.

After Lemoine’s nudging about 1996, McFaul’s old phrase, a “tremendous victory for democracy,” rings differently. Was it really, or rather instead was it the moment Russian democracy was saved from the voters by money, fear, oligarchic scheming, media discipline, failure to recognize Yeltsin as a train wreck, and foreign approval of that myopia?

That’s the question McFaul’s book never really answers and it may be the question it was written to avoid.

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By Fred Weir, Christian Science Monitor, 6/30/26

Alexei Mukhin says he was vacationing at a Black Sea resort near Sochi in late June when an incoming Ukrainian drone was shot down by Russian air defenses, with a loud explosion, in full sight of a beach crowded with people.

“The thing is, no one looked particularly surprised. Many people didn’t even seem to notice,” says Mr. Mukhin, head of the Center for Political Information, a Moscow-based independent consultancy. “It’s a near-daily occurrence around there, and people are getting used to it. I felt like the most nervous person on that beach.”

Ukrainian drone strikes deep into Russia’s heartland – including a wave on Monday night – are causing fuel shortages and long lines at gas stations, even in Moscow. The attacks are dampening the mood of average Russians more visibly than at any time since the war in Ukraine began 4 1/2 years ago.

For many Russians, particularly in the capital, it’s the first time the war has struck so close to home. People have been irritated by internet and cellphone disruptions that authorities say are war-related, and small businesses have been hit with tax increases due to the rising costs of the war, but spending hours trying to fill the gas tank is a new level of inconvenience.

“The increase in drone attacks is putting pressure on the economy, civil infrastructure, and it’s certainly affecting the public mood,” says Sergei Strokan, an independent political analyst. “Social tension is rising. People are worried. Things are obviously not going on as before.”

But experts such as Mr. Strokan and Mr. Mukhin say the idea that Russians are likely to panic, even as the pressure ramps up, is misguided. Though public exhaustion with the war is growing, and the number of people who favor peace talks is high, experts say the voices calling for tougher prosecution of the war against Ukraine are also becoming louder and more persuasive.

“Public opinion is changing,” says Mr. Strokan, “but not necessarily in the direction that people in the West seem to expect.”

Creating problems, but not critical?

Russian President Vladimir Putin made a rare admission of the difficulties during an interview with state TV journalist Pavel Zarubin on Sunday, conceding that stepped-up Ukrainian attacks against bridges, oil refineries, and fuel trucks are creating “problems … [and] certain shortages.” According to Russian media, those include restrictions on gasoline sales in at least 20 Russian regions, and price hikes and supply disruptions in several more.

The hardest-hit region is the Black Sea peninsula of Crimea, annexed by Russia in 2014, where strikes against bridges and other infrastructure have severely reduced fuel supplies, ruined the summer tourist season, and led authorities to declare a state of emergency.

A mid-June attack badly damaged the Kapotnya oil refinery, which supplies about 40% of the gasoline for the Moscow region, leading to the first serious shortages in the capital in many years. A taxi driver, who declined to be named, said several gas stations near his home in northwestern Moscow were closed Monday, and he waited for almost two hours at another before filling his tank – albeit at the regular price of 74 rubles per liter (about $3.60 per gallon).

During his interview, Mr. Putin insisted the problems were “not critical,” the damage would be quickly repaired, and that Russian air-defense forces were developing new weaponry and tactics to counter the Ukrainian assault.

Viktor Litovkin, a military expert with the official RIA news agency, says Russian air defenses are mostly coping with the surge in Ukrainian attacks, and only a few incoming drones actually get through – especially around big cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg.

“The attacks are becoming more intensive. The drones fly in swarms, which is technically difficult to deal with,” Mr. Litovkin says. But war always involves a steep learning curve, he adds. “On the whole, our defense forces are well-equipped, well-trained, and are operating effectively. Our air defenses are getting better at it every day, and I’m pretty sure they’ll handle whatever the Ukrainians are going to throw at them.”

Speaking to state TV, Mr. Putin said the Ukrainian tactic of launching strikes deep into Russia, increasingly hitting civilian targets, has largely psychological aims. “Its purpose is to undermine our confidence in ourselves and our capabilities and, ideally, to create divisions within Russian society, force Russia to suspend, even temporarily, the advance of our forces along the line of contact, and create conditions for launching negotiations on terms favorable to our adversary,” he said.

Not the response Ukraine was looking for?

Lev Gudkov, scientific director of Russia’s only independent [western backed] polling agency, the Levada Center, says anxieties are indeed spiking, with more than half of Russians indicating that they pay close attention to war news. While 74% of Russians say they support their troops in Ukraine, more than 60% favor peace talks. Only about one-third say they want the war to continue, though Mr. Gudkov says that percentage has been rising over the past three months.

“The threat of drone attacks has been coming to the fore in public opinion lately, pushing aside other developments in the war zone,” he says. “The general tendency is for people to mentally separate the attacks on us from what’s going on in Ukraine. The number of people who support talks with Ukraine is decreasing, while there are more and more people who feel that Russia should take decisive actions to destroy Ukraine.”

From the other side, Volodymyr Paniotto, director of the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology, reached via Facebook, says Ukrainians are generally pleased with their forces’ improved ability to strike deeper and harder into Russia’s heartland.

“Ukrainians perceive such actions not as escalation, but as part of defense and as a way to make the aggressor feel the price of war,” he says. “In addition, at a time when Russia is systematically attacking Ukrainian cities and energy, most Ukrainians consider it unfair that Russian society can live as if the war does not concern it.”

But some Russian analysts warn that hard-liners who advocate strikes against European targets involved in producing and supplying weapons to Ukraine, perhaps even staging a nuclear explosion to demonstrate Russia’s resolve, are growing in influence. The idea of a nuclear strike to warn Europeans to stop helping Ukraine was first put forward by senior Russian foreign policy veteran Sergey Karaganov, who voiced it directly to Mr. Putin at a conference three years ago. Mr. Putin firmly rejected it at the time.

The idea is gaining fresh currency amid Ukraine’s stepped-up drone assault, says Igor Korotchenko, editor of the Moscow-based National Defense magazine.

“The Russian expert community is actively considering a scenario involving possible tactical nuclear weapon strikes against key points on Ukrainian territory, along the borders with Romania and Poland, to interdict the supplies of weaponry to Ukraine,” he says. “This is needed to definitively choke NATO arms supplies to Ukraine, and it might compel the Zelenskyy regime to sit down and negotiate on Russia’s terms.”

By Dan Storyev, The Nation, 6/22/26

Dan Storyev is a human rights expert who fled Russia.

“Russia is finished,” cheerfully proclaimed The Atlantic on its May 2001 cover. The headline was wrong, but it proved to be really catchy. It has been echoed for over two decades by a host of experts, academics, and writers, with regular frequency. All the while, Russia, spiteful as ever, does not heed the experts’ opinions and does not seem to be collapsing anytime soon.

Instead, if anything is collapsing today, it is America’s ability to understand Russia, which was never great to begin with. The self-delusion of the foreign-policy “Blob,” coupled with the anti-intellectualism of the second Trump administration, joined by wartime cancel culture, and accompanied by dishonest sources—all created a cocktail of groupthink that posits that Russia is on the brink of collapse.

This cocktail is poison to Washington’s policy vis-à-vis Russia and Russians. It already led to wasteful spending, misguided diplomacy, and even attacks on free speech on US soil.

The sanctions did not manage to permanently reduce “the ruble to rubble,” as then-President Biden prematurely boasted. The combined might of the United States and its allies could not isolate “collapsing” Russia from the rest of the world. In the meantime, voices that could offer a more rational explanation of Russia to the public and policymakers are shunned. Even the most anti-Putin Russian intellectuals are canceled in American forums, while experts who try to argue for more nuance in America’s approach to Russia are branded as Kremlin stooges by the commentariat.

Some of “Russia is finished” fortune-telling is motivated by wishful thinking. There is no doubt that Russia, which has been waging a war of aggression on European soil since 2014, is easily painted as an eternal enemy of the West. Historian Yuri Slezkine even argued that the West still mainly defines itself through othering and fearing Russia. The Kremlin is also all too happy to present itself as a threat to what its propagandists call “the rotting West.”

But there is also no doubt that this wishful thinking is misled at best. Russia is nowhere close to collapsing. The “Russia is finished” articles, books, and video essays often point out genuine faults in the bizarre structure of Russia’s economy, the Kremlin’s politics, rampant corruption, and inexorable population decline. They then make vague predictions about a return to the mayhem of the 1990s, a breakup of Russia along ethnic lines, total economic collapse, or a brewing popular uprising.

The temptation to mock the collapse clairvoyance is strong. One could easily list all the objective reasons why Russia isn’t collapsing any time soon. The country’s economy has proven surprisingly resilient, able to withstand sanctions of historic proportions. While the Russian military is stuck in the blood and mud in Ukraine, it has repeatedly shown an ability to adapt rather than collapse.

Russia’s diplomacy, which is traditionally seen in the West as not much more than incoherent gopnik yelps, is making headway in the Global South where Russian state–affiliated media are important players and student exchange programs are in full swing.

Inside Russia, civilians live relatively normal lives and are likely not thinking of rising up with pitchforks against the Kremlin. Many of them enjoy new Hollywood releases, chic cafés, and exhibitions. Yes, life goes on, even as Russian cities are bombed and the economy is slowing down.

There is a feedback loop here: Russia keeps chugging along and pundits keep churning out doomsayings. It is tempting, when producing propaganda, to paint your elected enemy as on the brink of an abyss, needing only a little push to tip over and disappear. This is what Italian philosopher Umberto Eco described in his essay “Ur-Fascism,” writing that propaganda presents an enemy as both “too strong and too weak.” For the foreign-policy Blob, there is nothing better than an eternal weak-strong enemy, in opposition to which the military-industrial complex and its associated content factories can eternally justify their own existence.

As Russians say ironically, “Whatever we try to engineer, we always end up making a Kalashnikov rifle.” A similar ailment befalls the American field of Russia studies, which is riddled with military and intelligence interest. Owing to a robust Cold War heritage, key Russia studies programs and projects in the US are either linked to the Department of Defense or downright funded by it.

A securitized view of Russia is bound to produce a lopsided analysis that ignores or misunderstands Russian society. It already led to some odd investments under the Biden administration. Consider the “decolonization” boom of 2022–23, when many pages of good repute—including the aforementioned Atlantic—posited that the United States must go abroad to destroy the monster of Russian imperialism by breaking Russia apart along its ethnic lines. It would be easy, argued the newly minted anti-colonial activists, because Russia is already on the brink of collapse.

Decolonization forums were hosted at platforms like the Hudson Institute; foundations and pundits popped up all over the marketplace of ideas. Many were eager to take advantage of the robust grant-making system—like the late USAID—built to advance US power around the world. Unlike the anti-colonial movements of the 1970s, the decolonizers were excited to work with the US security services, openly seeking out funding and support.

The US support, however, did not result in much. Russia did not fall apart. In retrospect, it was probably odd to expect concrete results from groups who were trying to win Western support by promoting Manchurian separatists during an event in Kyoto; or at an event in Washington calling for a formation of an independent Novgorod (currently a city tucked within western Russia), with an economy based on “trade with the Hanseatic League”—which has been defunct since 1669.

Any anthropologist or sociologist focused on Russia could probably explain the patent absurdity of trying to break Russia apart. They could point out that the decolonizers have little to no support inside of the country, and that ethnic Russians make up the majority in most of the supposedly “ethnic minority” regions, while minority elites are tightly dependent on the Kremlin. They could say that, for example, Russia’s defense minister comes from the ethnically Turkic Tuva region, where his family long enjoyed elite status. That many in Russia’s ethnic minorities are profiting off the Kremlin’s war. But who wants to listen to anthropologists?

The second coming of Trump and the ensuing collapse of USAID with other grantmaking institutions did not improve the situation. The money might have stopped flowing toward clearly bizarre initiatives—but it stopped flowing toward rigorous study also, owing to the new administration’s apparent anti-intellectual bent.

In the age of unprecedented geopolitical competition, it would be sensible for Washington to invest in serious Russia studies departments at think tanks and universities. Yet American expertise on Russia is in its sundown hour now, as many such departments are shutting down or getting defunded, while think tanks are plagued by financial issues. Some of the leading centers of knowledge on Russia—like the Wilson Center—were shuttered by DOGE. In particular, the administration cut the FLAS funding, prompting even elite Ivies to scale back their Russia research.

Russia itself also became increasingly more isolated from Western researchers, a trend that began in 2014 and only got worse in 2022. Institutions on both sides broke contact: Russian institutions came out in support of Putin’s invasion of Ukraine (whether willingly or not), which Western institutions could not let slide.

This resulted in the status quo where many Western Russianists were de facto (and often officially) banned from the country they study. Russia even banned the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, the chief US conference for such research. Very few American experts nowadays can safely travel to Russia. Moscow discourages Russian officials and experts from speaking to Americans. Unless, of course, these Americans are alt-right influencers like Candace Owens or Andrew Tate.

American institutions—such as Yale University or even the Wild Salmon Studies Center (yes)— have been designated as “undesirable.” This means that any interaction with them could lead to criminal prosecution. A knowledge iron curtain is actively being constructed by Moscow.

This is not to say that the Western political atmosphere is conducive to free and open discourse. Those who advocate studying Russia more thoroughly run the risk of being branded as Kremlin mouthpieces for not demonstrating a sufficiently hawkish position. Meanwhile, the exiled Russian academics who manage to make it to the West are often deplatformed and ostracized not necessarily for their political stance as much as for being Russian.

This form of wartime cancel culture is of course more prominent in the EU, and especially the Baltic States. Take Estonia, which wantonly deported a respected Russian-Australian historian—apparently, for giving a Russian-language talk on North Korea. The idea of automatically rejecting even the most anti-war Russians occasionally rears its head in the US too, like at 2023 PEN America, where a panel of exiled Russian writers was canceled due to fears of Ukrainian boycott, prompting American journalist M. Gessen to quit the PEN board in protest.

As a result, the Russianists American public and policymakers might still see are not just underfunded but are feeling politically constrained by a groupthink that excludes anyone Russian, or even anyone with a nuanced position on Russia. The “politically correct” sources of Russia knowledge are thus reduced to an ever-shrinking group of hawkish exiles or even more hawkish Eastern Europeans, who are willing to perfectly toe the party line and espouse maximalist positions on Russia mixed with hopes of near-collapse.

Eastern European experts, like Ukrainians or Balts, often claim to have a unique expertise on Russia due to their having been on the receiving end of the Kremlin’s imperialism for many years. They are not hiding their default (and perhaps understandable) desire to see Russia collapse. The Russia studies approach popular in Eastern Europe nowadays is aimed at “decentering” Russians, and a popular refrain heard there is that to understand Russia one must listen not to Russians but to Ukrainians or other victims of Russia. To what extent this approach is analytically sound is questionable—after all, we don’t expect Vietnamese or Iranians to have the best insights into American domestic affairs.

The actual Russians who are sometimes listened to in this context are a specific brand of exiles. These experts that might have the ear of Western politicians are often outright anti-Kremlin activists. No wonder, since they saw their country being trampled into authoritarianism by Putin and his posse.

But their careers, in many cases, effectively depend on a collapse of Putinism—and perhaps Russia with it—within their lifetimes. They know that they have little to no support inside Russia. As exiled politician Ilya Ponomarev said, they can only return to Russia “through bayonets,” meaning a Western military intervention. As the bayonets are not coming anytime soon, not much is left for the underfunded, disunited, and depressed Russian opposition in exile except hope, which, as Russians say, “dies last.”

This hope leads to assertions about the inevitable collapse of Putin’s regime. In reality, of course, the exiles’ plans for an end to Putin’s regime are limited to finding a window of opportunity. Rational analysis is tainted by political objectives.

The US is thus discouraged from learning about Russia, while Russian intellectuals are discouraged from helping the US learn about Russia. This creates fertile ground for baseless speculations and wishful thinking about a nearing collapse.

Lastly, the cottage industry of predicting Russia’s collapse is also emblematic of a key vulnerability of the Western intellectual scene—a general inability and unwillingness to conceive of a sustainable alternative model to capitalist liberal democracy, what British philosopher Mark Fisher called Capitalist Realism.

That is not to say that Putin’s Russia is somehow anti-capitalist or even that it is philosophically antithetical to the West. Russia’s war is now driven primarily by hyper-capitalist mechanics of huge payouts and debt forgiveness for frontline soldiers, supplemented by an economy that rewards investments into the ever-expanding military-industrial complex. Contemporary Russian intellectuals, even the pro-Kremlin ones like Alexander Dugin, ultimately see themselves as a part of a European intellectual tradition.

To add insult to injury, while the United States maintains the largest economy on the planet, it sure does not feel like this to an average American. Amid decaying infrastructure, skyrocketing prices and overall anxiety, it is easy for Americans to get hypnotized by the shiny façade Moscow can offer. MAGA influencers like Tucker Carlson or Candace Owens are perfectly willing to eat it up when they fawningly visit Russia grocery stores or churches.

Seen from Washington, Russia’s very existence outside of a US-led liberal world order is tantamount to resistance to this order. To those who still like to think that they live at the End of History, the continuing existence of Moscow is anathema because it threatens the very core of their worldview.

And if Russia can manage to not just exist but present a thriving image in comparison to the United States or the broader West—that is offense of the highest order. To accept that Russia can exist and even occasionally punch above its weight in challenging the West, whether through black ops in Africa or political meddling in Europe, is to contend with the idea that the liberal democratic model is not the only logical conclusion for every regime in the world.

And at the non-happening end of history, the US is thus left with a pool of Russia experts and policymakers who are given in to wishful thinking about Russia collapsing on its own, who don’t understand Russia and don’t want to in the first place. They are, as the Russians say, “dividing a hide of an uncaptured bear.” Whether they are doing so because of their lack of imagination or curiosity or they are impelled by some ulterior motives, the result is the same: misguided policies and intellectual decline.

By Uriel Araujo, InfoBrics, 7/2/26

An influential Ukrainian military officer has delivered a warning that risks pushing already strained relations with Poland into dangerous territory. Chief Sergeant Yury Syrotyuk (of the Unmanned Systems Battalion of the 5th Separate Assault Kyiv Brigade) recently delivered an interview on the topic of “Poland and Ukraine”: he accused Warsaw (in a segment from roughly 36:00 to 36:50 in the video) of waging a historical war over narratives involving the Volhynia massacres. He then bluntly suggested that the dispute could escalate into a military confrontation – in which case Kyiv would deploy drones against Polish cities, killing civilians. And he advised Warsaw not to cross that line.

This violent rhetoric came days after Syrotyuk shared a video on Facebook in which he described himself as the grandson and nephew of UPA (Ukrainian Insurgent Army) veterans “who defended their homes from all the occupiers in Volhynia,” a clear reference to the mass killings of Poles there. He also accused the Polish authorities in Warsaw of seeking regional hegemony and conspiring with Moscow to partition Ukraine (a claim that has no factual basis).

This episode in fact fits into a broader pattern of rising Ukrainian-Polish friction. As I recently wrote, Polish President Karol Nawrocki even revoked the Order of the White Eagle (the country’s highest honor) from Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, This was after Kyiv’s decision to rebury Nazi collaborator Andriy Melnyk with state honors – and to grant an elite unit the title “Heroes of the UPA.”

Zelensky and Ukrainian officials responded with coordinated information campaigns on social media that in turn inflamed anti-Polish sentiment. One Polish PiS party MP, Kazimierz Smoliński, noted that comments under Zelensky’s posts revealed staggering hatred toward Poles, sometimes appearing stronger than toward Russians.

In any case, the aforementioned Yury Syrotyuk is no fringe voice. A 2014 Master Thesis by Nika Palaguta’s (on the Svoboda far-right ultra-nationalist party) mentions him as the party’s press secretary. His grandfather was a UPA member killed by the NKVD in 1944. The thesis also quotes him defending Svoboda’s commemorations of OUN/UPA leader Stepan Bandera, the controversial Nazi collaborator. Today’s chief sergeant Syrotyuk has actually been giving talks about “what to do with Poland” since at least 2018. If Bandera’s views on the matter are to be the model, then the answer to that question could be troublesome.

Moreover, a 2023 Russian Foreign Ministry report on human rights in Ukraine mentioned Syrotyuk presiding over the 9th Bandera Readings in Kyiv, dedicated to the 80th anniversary of the UPA’s creation. The event featured ultra-right figures, including neo-Fascist Yevgeniy Karas of the S14 group, who spoke openly about nationalists “having fun fighting and killing” and warned of potential strikes against European countries.

In November 2023, Syrotyuk, then described as a politician, journalist, public figure, and junior sergeant, wrote that the current conflict represents only the first phase of a longer struggle. For Moscow, he argued, the end of the war means the destruction of Ukraine (another unfounded claim); for Kyiv, it requires the collapse of Russia. He also criticized Kyiv for missing opportunities to support “national liberation movements” in the Caucasus. One could say his worldview has remained quite consistent, and he has a large platform to convey it.

One may recall that Polish concerns predate the current war. The President of the Roman Dmowski National Foundation, Przemysław Piasta, has warned that post-conflict Ukraine could pose a serious threat to Poland, historical memory remaining the Achilles’ heel of bilateral ties. Ukrainian glorification of OUN-UPA figures (responsible for the deaths of approximately 100,000 Polish civilians in Volhynia between 1943 and 1945) continues to poison relations, after all.

As I wrote earlier, the reburial of Andriy Melnyk and related decisions have exposed fragile foundations pertaining to the Polish-Ukrainian partnership, with Poland and Israel condemning these moves. Geopolitical necessity has thus far kept Warsaw supportive of Kyiv, but nationalism remains on the rise on both sides.

No wonder tensions extend beyond Poland. In February 2025, drawing on warnings from Ukrainian politician Spiridon Kilinkarov, I addressed how a post-war scenario where Hungary and Poland may claim territories of Ukraine is not absurd at all.

The truth is that Ukrainian refusal to adequately protect minority rights angers its neighbors, amplifying ethnopolitical friction. For one thing, Romanian and Hungarian communities in Ukraine have reported harassment, while similar issues affect relations with Romania and even with Greece. Ukrainian ultra-nationalism, often of a far-right and occasionally neo-Fascist or neo-Nazi persuasion (as seen with groups like Azov) has after all been a source of regional tensions since the 2014 Maidan Revolution.

This strand of nationalism alienates minorities and neighbors alike as Kyiv’s chauvinistic policies and glorification of controversial WWII-era figures create perceptions of threat. Underreported in much Western coverage as they are, these dynamics show that Ukrainian ultra-nationalism generates instability beyond the issue of the Russian-Ukrainian conflict.

Rhetoric aside, a Poland-Ukraine conflict, again, is not so far-fetched in a post-war scenario. Syrotyuk’s drone threats are therefore credible given Kyiv’s demonstrated strike capabilities against Russia.

Historical grievances and ultra-nationalist influence could thus undermine the Polish-Ukrainian partnership. Geopolitics can delay confrontation, but it cannot erase deep ethnopolitical fissures, especially when influential actors fuel them with inflammatory speech. Kyiv’s post-Maidan project has created multiple fronts of tension, well beyond Russia.

By Matthew Blackburn, Responsible Statecraft, 6/25/26

As Western leaders departed the G7 summit in Évian talking of a “strategic awakening in support of Ukraine,” the night sky over Moscow was illuminated by the fires of a burning oil refinery just nine miles from the Kremlin. This unprecedented Ukrainian drone strike on Russian territory was met in Western capitals with quiet endorsement rather than anxiety.

During the tensest moments of the Cold War, Western statecraft was anchored by a healthy fear of the unknown. Today, that prudence has been replaced by confidence that conflict can be precisely managed. When Franklin D. Roosevelt famously declared that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he was addressing panic during an economic collapse. In contemporary Europe, however, this maxim has been carelessly transposed onto the realm of nuclear redlines.

The prevailing consensus in Europe treats deep strikes into the Russian heartland as a low-cost method of pressuring Moscow into a ceasefire. Assuming Russia is under unsustainable strain, experts continue to argue that Europe can safely coordinate the war, so long as taxpayers accept the costs.

Such a view ignores the risks inherent to a broader unravelling of the global security architecture. Unlike during the Cold War, in which superpowers respected defined chains of command and established redlines, today’s historical guardrails have eroded. The European coalition lacks both coherent leadership and escalation control mechanisms. This makes the conflict far more prone to spiraling into a broader war than commonly acknowledged.

This is keeping with the conflict’s trajectory since 2022 of creeping escalation dressed up as controlled policy. As European states take the primary responsibility for supporting Ukraine, this conflict is reaching a new, more dangerous stage.

Europe’s strategy in Ukraine during Trump 2.0

The Western coalition behind Ukraine fragmented after President Donald Trump’s return to the White House. Throughout 2025, European leaders proposed a “coalition of the willing” to deploy forces and integrate Ukraine into an emergent European Union security space following a ceasefire. They essentially demanded that Russia agree to an unconditional ceasefire while holding the upper hand on the battlefield.

When Trump’s Alaska summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin made it clear Washington would not enforce these demands, Europe switched gears. Its leaders agreed to cover the costs of U.S.-made weapons, ramp up domestic military production, tighten sanctions, and keep the pressure on Moscow to agree to a ceasefire.

Lacking the capacity for large-scale ground offensives, Ukraine’s strategy shifted to defending its frontlines while increasing costs on Russia through deep strikes. These attacks grew in scale and scope even after Trump’s inauguration signaled a U.S. pivot to a negotiated settlement. The most dramatic case was Operation Spiderweb, during which Ukrainian drones struck Russian airbases, damaging strategic bombers tied to Russia’s nuclear deterrence triad. While Kyiv denied targeting Putin’s Valdai residence in December 2025, President Zelensky’s recent open letter defiantly warned the Russian leadership it could not be “comfortable” given Ukraine’s ability to strike state parades and executive residences.

A war without clear guardrails

Striking a nuclear power’s strategic assets and leadership lacks any Cold War precedent. From the British seizure of the Russian shadow-fleet tanker Smyrtos to Zelensky’s recent warning that “Moscow will burn,” the erosion of guardrails continues in real-time. To make matters worse, Western decision-making is now fragmented across a variety of actors; it is reported Kyiv requests approvals for deep strikes from the Pentagon and individual European defense ministries on a case-by-case basis.

Current European strategy assumes an overextended and weak Moscow fears a wider conflict and will keep the war within current parameters. This supports the view that gradual, qualitative shifts in military support can compel Moscow into a ceasefire. Key to this is relocating Ukrainian drone production into Europe, where it is shielded from Russian air strikes. More sophisticated European-made drones are already available to Kyiv; NATO long-range missiles are also now being licensed for production directly in European and Ukrainian manufacturing sites. Kyiv has brilliantly exploited this framework, operating under the assumption that Russia’s hands are tied.

But deep strikes put the Kremlin in a tough spot. Thus far, Moscow has been visibly reluctant to execute wider drone and missile deep strikes with the aim of devastating Ukraine’s critical infrastructure. This restraint is born not of military incapacity but of a calculated political logic: If Russia intensifies deep strikes on Ukraine’s energy grid and water supply, it could trigger a humanitarian catastrophe and an irreversible public relations disaster that is fundamentally in conflict with the Kremlin’s claim it is liberating a “brotherly people.” It would also likely rally Western public opinion behind the war. Thus, unlike Israel’s unrestricted, high-intensity air campaign in Gaza, Russia has operated with restraint to preserve its political narrative.

Yet herein lies the danger. If Moscow concludes that its restraint inside Ukraine is being weaponized by Kyiv to inflict deep, humiliating costs on the Russian heartland, its calculus will shift. Instead of going for Ukrainian infrastructure, Moscow may seek to redress the asymmetry in deep strikes and restore deterrence by targeting the true source of Ukraine’s new capacities: European logistical hubs and the manufacturing facilities.

Even a limited Russian reprisal strike on European soil would severely test its collective political will. European air defence and missile stockpiles would come under severe strain in a rapid tit-for-tat strike exchange scenario. Striking European states would be Putin’s ultimate gamble to turn the tables. Instead of a weak Russia making hollow threats, Europe would be gripped by panic as its leaders scrambled to respond without crossing the nuclear threshold.

This scenario is not imminent. Deep strikes would have to intensify further. In the meantime, we should not expect Putin to sue for peace under the pressure of increasingly disruptive but localized deep strikes. The Kremlin will praise the work of its air defenses and play down the scale of the damage. Yet the more strikes that hit Moscow, the more likely a Russian reprisal strike on Europe becomes. To avoid this harrowing scenario, European leaders must return to the basics of conflict management, investing in diplomacy aimed at the urgent rebuilding of strategic guardrails.

Restoring the balance

The paralysis of the diplomatic track leaves Europe exposed. The E3’s five-point plan, agreed in London last week, illustrates the problem: by demanding an unconditional ceasefire alongside foreign troop deployments for security guarantees, it effectively foreclosed near-term negotiations. Diplomatic inertia means the war may progress to the point an exhausted or exasperated Russia is forced to choose between abandoning its war aims or taking a drastic kinetic step to curb European enthusiasm for continuing the war.

Breaking this policy inertia requires rejecting the myth that Europe can safely manage an unprecedented standoff without statecraft. A fundamental reset is needed: European leaders must agree on explicit escalation controls, communicate them to Moscow, and open a viable diplomatic track. While basing negotiations on the current frontline offers a positive foundation for talks, the core challenge remains striking a compromise between Moscow’s demand for Ukrainian neutrality and Europe’s integration plans for Ukraine.

Developing a diplomatic off-ramp and building a new security architecture are not capitulation, nor do they mean reducing support for Ukraine’s defense. Deterrence and diplomacy are partners. A defined diplomatic track is the only mechanism capable of anchoring Europe’s security to a stable, predictable outcome, rather than gambling on fluid redlines.

Nonetheless, engineering this kind of pivot requires a level of strategic vision and political courage not observable in Europe’s current leadership. Without a fundamental reset, Europe risks learning the hard way that running a war without guardrails is not statecraft – it is brinkmanship without a safety net.