Russia's move to proclaim the annexation of four Ukrainian provinces has drawn prompt rebuttals by Western countries.

The US is imposing what it describes as "swift and severe costs" on Russia, including sanctions on a figure the Biden administration says is key to Russia's economy, after President Vladimir Putin announced the annexation of regions of Ukraine following what the West casts as "sham referenda."

Vladimir Putin today announced his annexation of four provinces of Ukraine—four provinces that he does not fully control, that did not vote to join Russia, that have been the site of mass murder and mass deportation since Russia invaded Ukraine in February. With this statement, the Russian president is also declaring war. But this is not merely a war on Ukraine.

Putin’s war—Russia’s war—is also a war on a particular idea of world order, and of international law, an idea upheld not just by Europeans and North Americans, but by most of the rest of the world, indeed by the United Nations itself. One core principle of this world order is that larger countries should not be able to grab parts of smaller countries, that mass slaughter of whole populations is unacceptable, that borders have international significance and cannot be changed through violence or on one dictator’s whim. Putin already challenged this idea in 2014, when he annexed Crimea. At the time he also held a sham referendum, but he convinced many outsiders that it had some validity. Although some sanctions followed, the world largely gave him a pass. Commerce and diplomacy with Russia continued.

This time, Putin is no longer able even to pretend that the farcical votes he has staged in Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson have any validity, and no one, anywhere, believes that they do. The simulation was played out: Armed men went house to house collecting so-called ballots, and some people, left destitute by the war, were bribed in exchange for showing up to vote. But in regions where hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian citizens have been evacuated, deported, or murdered, where violent conflict continues and where an active resistance is raging, nothing remotely like an actual vote could ever have taken place. Even as Putin was speaking in Moscow, the Ukrainians announced that they were surrounding and cutting off a large group of Russian soldiers in Lyman, a strategically significant city in Donetsk province.

Russia’s actions under these circumstances show contempt not only for international lawyers in European capitals, but also for Chinese politicians who like to talk about sovereignty and African diplomats who have agreed that borders matter, even when they are arbitrary. In the upside-down reality that Putin has created, he will now claim that Ukrainians, by defending their own land and their own people, are somehow attacking Russia. He will even raise the stakes, will try to frighten Ukraine and the West by calling Ukraine’s self-defense an existential threat to Russia that requires an extraordinary response—perhaps even a nuclear response, echoing a threat he has made repeatedly since he began his invasion.

[Tom Nichols: The Russian clocks are all ticking]

This annexation is also more specifically a declaration of war against the democratic world, a statement of contempt for democracy itself. Putin has been treating democracy as a tool for decades, using fake parties, creating fake opponents, and rigging elections. For a long time, he and his spin doctors promoted a form of “managed democracy,” a system that allowed some space for public opinion, while at the same time ensuring that he always remained in power. With today’s announcement, he no longer pretends or plays games. This deliberate farce mocks the very idea of referenda, of voting, of popular opinion. Nothing about this act has any legitimacy, and that is also part of the point. In his world, there is no such thing as legitimacy. Only brutality matters.

Finally, this annexation marks the culmination of a two-decade war against any Russians whose vision of their country differs from his. Some of those Russians belong to ethnic minority groups—Dagestanis, Buryat, Tuvans, Crimean Tatars, all of whom have been subject to vigorous mobilization drives, as if Putin wants to use his genocidal war against Ukraine to eliminate them as well. Some simply want to live in a country governed by different rules, a country that does not have murderous designs on its neighbors, a country that is not a menace to the world. Although thousands of such people have fled the country over the past decade, the invasion deliberately sparked a new exodus. Putin’s propagandists have celebrated the departure of anti-war Russians as a form of cleansing; Putin himself has said that the nation should “spit them out like a midge that accidentally flew into their mouths.”

Since the war began, the crackdown at home has also accelerated, because the war provides the context in which dissent can be portrayed as treason, and because any criticism of the war is a crime. Newspapers, websites, social-media channels, and civic groups of all kinds have been shut down. More than 16,400 Russians have been detained in prison for protesting. In the past few days, some protesters have received draft notices after being taken to jail. Others are now the focus of special efforts to undermine and destroy them. Alexei Navalny, the Russian politician who came the closest to creating a grassroots, anti-Putin, prodemocracy movement, received a nine-year jail sentence in May and is now locked in a maximum-security prison. He has spent most of the past several weeks in an isolation cell, as punishment for tiny (or invented) infractions of jailhouse rules. Other inmates are forbidden to speak with him and even to look at him. But his anti-corruption foundation continues to function in exile (I am an unpaid member of its advisory board). And when he was allowed to speak in an internal prison court last week, Navalny responded to Putin’s call for the mobilization of military reservists without mincing words: “It is already clear that the criminal war that is going on is getting worse and deeper, and Putin is trying to involve as many people as possible in this. He wants to smear hundreds of thousands of people in this blood.”

Vladimir Kara-Murza, another opposition politician who has played an important role in campaigning for individual sanctions, is also in prison, where he remains equally defiant. “It continues to amaze me,” he told an interviewer via smuggled messages, “how many serious Western analysts buy the Kremlin’s propaganda on the ‘overwhelming popularity’ of Putin and of the war. If this were true, the authorities wouldn’t need to rig elections, muzzle the media, or imprison and murder their opponents. The Kremlin knows the real situation—and the only thing it has left in the toolbox to prevent protests in Russia is fear.”

Today’s annexation, along with the mobilization that has been launched to defend these occupied territories, has also been designed to increase that fear. The battle against independent thinkers is now expanding beyond Putin’s opponents and is reaching even Russians who felt too distant, too apathetic, or too afraid to protest in the past. If, once upon a time, the threat of the gulag was used to keep all Soviet citizens in a state of permanent fear, the threat of the war in Ukraine is now being used in exactly the same way against Putin’s subjects. The regime is now treating ordinary citizens exactly as if they were expendable prisoners, throwing untrained, poorly equipped men into the battlefield, where some are rumored to have already died. New draftees are being driven to empty fields with no shelter and no food, just as new prisoners were once abandoned in the 1930s to build their own labor camps. Putin, like Stalin, believes that his sinister, unbalanced idea of collective glory matters more than the prosperity, well-being, happiness, and even physical existence of ordinary Russians.

[Brian Klaas: Putin didn’t think he would fool anyone]

But nothing lasts forever: “Your time will pass,” Navalny told his jailers last week. Kara-Murza, in a prison interview published this week, said the same thing: “None of us knows exactly how and when the Putin regime will end—but we know that it will.”

And they are right. We don’t know how and when it will end. Nor do we know what kind of regime will follow. But there is nothing predestined about Putinism or his form of kleptocratic autocracy. There is nothing “forever” about the annexation of territories that aren’t even under full Russian control, and none of the people who were at the annexation ceremony today will live forever either. Russia’s sham annexation of Ukrainian land will end, whatever false words are spoken this week.

One common way of viewing Björk’s career is as a long descent into the bizarre. After the eclectic earworms of her first three solo albums (Debut in 1993, Post in 1995, and Homogenic in 1997), she moved through surprising phases, ranging from soft murmuring (2001’s Vespertine) to splattering noise (2017’s Utopia). These days, her work can seem less like pop than, as The Guardian’s Chal Ravens recently put it, “surreal opera.”

Björk doesn’t think in these terms. When I met with the 56-year-old musician in Iceland for The Atlantic’s recent profile of her, she expressed mystification at people who say her ’90s stuff was more fun. “Maybe they remember themselves in some club doing ecstasy and there were three remixes in a row,” she said. “Overall, the BPM, or the amount of chill, or the amount of experimental, or the amount of pop sugar, or the amount of self-reflective, serious moments—I think it’s actually sort of been the same throughout my albums.”

That interpretation makes some sense once you’ve tuned your ears to Björk’s frequency and absorbed her intentions. Fossora, her tenth solo album (out today), certainly takes some getting used to. That’s not just because it features clarinets, brass, and strings juxtaposed with the stormy electronic dance style known as gabber. Björk’s defining instrument, her voice, remains a challenge—and a wonder. She wails and exhales in meters and melodies of unpredictable shape. But, and this is crucial, they do have a shape.

Created over five years in Iceland, Fossora reveals itself, with repeated listens, as warm, satisfying, and even addictive: an invitation to stomp around and sing along. Part singer-songwriter memoir, part philosophical treatise, and part danceable adventure, it ranks among her most rewarding works. In Iceland, we discussed most of the album’s songs, which are dissected below.

1. “Atopos”

A high-drama protest song that eventually explodes into a rave, the opening track is designed to, as Björk illustrates in the music video, get people pumping their fists. Written during Donald Trump’s presidency, Björk’s lyrics preach about the psychology of moderation and compromise. Extremism—“pursuing the light too hard,” she sings—doesn’t just prevent unity. It is also, the lyrics say, “a form of hiding”: a defense mechanism, an avoidance of intimacy.

On a yet-deeper level, the song distills what makes Björk’s music unique. Philosophers use the term atopos to refer to something “unclassifiable, of a ceaselessly unforeseen originality,” as Roland Barthes wrote in the book that informed this song. Trying to honor the shared ineffability of life—the way that we all have our individuality in common—is a means of creating connection. It also leads to utterly distinct art. “Each song is a coordinate, an emotional coordinate,” Björk told me. “Several things are on that coordinate. Some of it is personal, some of it is universal, some of it is me, some of it is my friends. It’s all of it, in one.”

2. “Ovule”

The strangest and best song on Fossora is built around a trickily timed beat that braids brass, vocal wisps, and a trap-ish low end. The musical wobbling reflects Björk’s lyrics about love being a balancing act—one that life has taught her how to perform. After a stark passage about “deadly, demonic divorces,” the song’s push and pull seems to resolve into a feeling of rebirth: the possibility of an ovule.

“In a way, it’s a sibling to ‘Atopos,’” Björk said. “‘Ovule’ is the feminine, open, loving, forgiving, unconditional, zero, no baggage, sensual, erotic. And ‘Atopos’ is … the masculine, the baggage, the problematic. I have to give it to both songs, though: The second half of them, there is a transformation in the middle, and they come out the other end.”

3. “Mycelia”

An interlude woven of Björk’s chopped-up vocals, “Mycelia” is named for the rootlike networks created by mushrooms. It also evokes feminine work of crafting and connecting. “I used to do a lot of knitting and sewing and crocheting, especially as a kid,” she said. “I think a lot of my editing on my laptop comes from that. It almost becomes a meditation.”

4. “Sorrowful Soil”

Of the two songs on the album addressing the death of Björk’s mother in 2018, the hymnlike “Sorrowful Soil” is the sadder one, capturing the moment when Björk and her brother began to realize there wasn’t much time left for their ailing parent. The lyrics, written in a stream of consciousness, present what she called a “biological obituary” of her mom. “In a woman’s lifetime / she gets 400 eggs / But only two or three nests,” goes one line. Björk explained, “You look at a girl, they’re one day old, and they have 400 eggs inside of them. It’s really exciting. And two of them became children.”

The intricate way that Björk’s voice twines with Iceland’s famous Hamrahlíð Choir, which Björk sang in when she was a child, calls to mind a flickering bulb. Perhaps that is because the choir’s longtime conductor, Þorgerður Ingólfsdóttir, “absolutely insists that every single person in the room, emotionally, goes to the light,” Björk said. “So after a choir session, everyone is euphoric.”

5. “Ancestress”

With gong, bells, and strings, “Ancestress” ritualistically honors Björk’s mother’s life—though it has its wrenching moments, as well as hints of conflict between mother and daughter. “The balance between [‘Sorrowful Soil’ and ‘Ancestress’], one sad one and one celebration, it’s not a coincidence,” she said. “I'm nudging the volume and the weight on every color.”

At one point, the instruments fade away, and Björk sketches the moment of death: “The machine of her breathed all night / While she rested / Revealed her resilience / And then it didn’t.” The next verse is warm, almost relaxed, reflecting an epiphany she had: Living people have relationships ruled by ego, “but when they pass away, they become a spirit, and there’s no conflict. It’s element air, as opposed to element flesh.”

6. “Fagurt Er í Fjörðum”

A haunting keyboard line accompanies Björk’s recitation of words by Látra-Björg, an 18th-century fisherwoman who, according to myth, cast spells with her poems. The first verse celebrates the beauty of Iceland’s fjords; the second one, translated, says that when the winter winds blow, “I know no worse place / In this worldly place: / Man and creature then die.”

Björk noted that although foreigners often associate nature with childhood and naivete, “in Iceland, it’s actually the other way around. Nature is really dangerous; you could very easily die if you go in the wrong shoes, walk to the volcano, walk a glacier. It’s more the adult, mature people who take it on.”

7. “Victimhood”

A recent fascination with Carl Jung’s psychological theories led Björk to write this creepy epic about self-pity. She arranged “long bass notes” to feel “like slime in every footstep, going kilometers down,” fitting the sense of misery she sings about. The calming choral coda represents the moment when you “find the solution, and you own your own victimhood,” she said. “If you call it its right name, it just”—she made a poof noise—“evaporates.”

Björk said she’d been fascinated by the way that the right-wing, conspiracy-minded movements rising in the West have been fueled by a feeling of persecution. Yet when I asked whether the politically charged idea of “victimhood culture” was on her mind when she was writing this song, she said no. But “we’ve all got a part of us that is a victim, and we have to own it,” she said.

8. “Allow”

Flutes dart about in this lovely leftover from the sessions for Björk’s previous album, Utopia, and Björk felt that the song fit on Fossora because of its percussive weight. With multiple scores by 12 flutists edited together, the Afrobeats-influenced “Allow” features “basically 60 flutes doing rhythmical patterns,” she said. She thought up the hopeful lyrics while hiking in the Caribbean. “It’s almost like yoga, sort of meditational—just me talking to myself to be in the moment,” she said.

9. “Fungal City”

The music of the children’s-book author Thorbjørn Egner—a Norwegian analogue to Dr. Seuss, Björk said—partly inspired the merry woodwinds on tracks such as “Fungal City.” But Björk wanted her sextet of clarinetists to do an “adult” and “erotic” take on that style befitting the intimacy of her lyrics: “His body calligraphs the space above my bed / Horizontal signatures on my skin.”

Such lyrics may make listeners curious about who she is dating, but Björk is keeping that info quiet. When she became a celebrity in the ’90s, “there were moments where I went with the flow and overshared. And I learned very quickly, nobody’s happy. The press, they don’t get what they want. You don’t get what you want. The person you love, they’re fucked up.” But now, “I’ve learned where I can be very, very vulnerable in sharing, like a lot of these lyrics already are,” she said. “But I choose the sentences well.”

“Fungal City” features the experimental soul singer Serpentwithfeet, who is an example of Björk’s influence on a rising class of queer artists. For LGBTQ listeners, she speculated, “there’s not a lot of mirrors you can see yourself in, especially in some societies. But then, when you see a matriarchal thing”—such as Björk’s music—“it’s probably reassuring.”

10. “Trölla-Gabba”

This giddy techno interlude, assisted by the Indonesian beatmaker Kasimyn, offers the listener “a little break, or sorbet,” Björk said.

11. “Freefall”

The dreamy strings of “Freefall,” recorded at an Icelandic church, remind Björk of Sigmund Freud smoking a pipe in the Alps. “It’s not a coincidence that Western civilization discovered psychology at the same time that string quartets became huge,” she said. “People who are in string quartets for, like, 30 years together [say] it’s like a marriage of four. It’s human communication in the most intense form, both positive and negative.”

That sense of almost-uncomfortable closeness complements Björk’s wish to “amalgamate” with another person—a long-running desire in her music. “Sometimes, when people think I’m convincing someone to merge [in a song], I’m actually talking to myself,” she said. “I’m saying, ‘Be more open.’” Trying to bond, she said, “really is the theme of our life, isn’t it?”

12. “Fossora”

Fossora’s title track distills the album’s motifs—mushrooms, clarinets, slamming beats—into a raucous festival. “At last / We stayed / In one place long enough,” Björk gasps during the song’s absolutely bonkers closing section, acknowledging the period of pandemic-mandated stasis that inspired the album. Fossora is all about “shooting down roots and getting very cozy with your friends,” she said. “It is [a] celebration that all you need is in that hole.”

13. “Her Mother’s House”

The oboe-related instrument known as the cor anglais sighs throughout this gentle duet between Björk and her 19-year-old daughter, Ísadóra Bjarkardóttir Barney. The song—like, in a way, the earlier tracks about Björk’s mom—is an intergenerational farewell, though Ísadóra hasn’t actually left Björk’s life. “What I understand about U.S. culture is it’s such a rite of passage: 18 years old, the kid’s just gone,” Björk said. “In Iceland … it’s more like what you had 150 years ago, where the generations are hanging out together.”

Björk’s lyrics suggest that being protective and loving is a way of ensuring her child’s eventual independence. Then, in a verse Ísadóra wrote, her daughter describes a balloon covered with clay, still able to float: an image tying together the album’s themes—maternal, earthy, and hopeful.

• Analysis: Putin's new land grab is dangerous for Ukraine -- and the world • LIVE UPDATES: Moscow-installed official in Kherson region killed in strike, says state media

If the West gives in to Putin's nuclear blackmail and allows him to claim Ukrainian lands and declare victory in the war, then the world ...

West Bromwich Albion women will wear navy shorts because of concerns about having to wear white while on their periods.

In 1942, answering a pacifist opponent of British involvement in the Second World War, George Orwell replied that “pacifism is objectively pro-fascist.” There have of course been many times in human history when opposition to war has been morally justified, intellectually coherent, and, in the end, vindicated. But the war to defeat fascism during the middle part of the past century was simply not one of them. “This is elementary common sense,” Orwell wrote at the time. “If you hamper the war effort of one side you automatically help that of the other.”

Eight decades later, as a fascistic Russian regime wages war against Ukraine, a motley collection of voices from across the political spectrum has called upon the United States and its allies to adopt neutrality as their position. Ranging from anti-imperialists on the left to isolationists on the right and more respectable “realists” in between, these critics are not pacifists in the strict sense of the term. Few if any oppose the use of force as a matter of principle. But nor are they neutral. It is not sufficient, they say, for the West to cut off its supply of defensive weaponry to Ukraine. It must also atone for “provoking” Russia to attack its smaller, peaceful, democratic neighbor, and work at finding a resolution that satisfies what Moscow calls its “legitimate security interests.” In this, today’s anti-war caucus is objectively pro-fascist.

To appreciate the bizarrely kaleidoscopic nature of this caucus, consider the career of a catchphrase. “Is Washington Fighting Russia Down to the Last Ukrainian?” asked the headline of a column self-published in March by Ron Paul, the former Republican congressman and presidential candidate. It was a strange question for Paul to be posing just three weeks into President Vladimir Putin’s unjustifiable and unforgivable invasion, especially considering the extraordinary lengths to which the Biden administration had gone to avoid “fighting Russia.”

[Tom Nichols: Two battles for democracy]

Even stranger than Paul’s assertion that the U.S. was goading Ukrainians into sacrificing themselves on the altar of its Russophobic bloodlust, though, has been the proliferation of his specious talking point across the ideological spectrum.

Ten days after Paul accused his country of treating Ukrainians as cannon fodder, the retired American diplomat Chas Freeman repeated the quip. “We will fight to the last Ukrainian for Ukrainian independence,” Freeman declared sarcastically—even as he excused Russia’s “special military operation” as an understandable reaction to being “stiff-armed” by the West on the “28-year-old demands that NATO stop enlarging in the direction of Russia.” Freeman, a former U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia and a senior fellow at Brown University’s Watson Institute, made these remarks in an interview with The GrayZone, a self-described “independent news website dedicated to original investigative journalism and analysis on politics and empire.”

Although The GrayZone would characterize itself as an “anti-imperialist” news source, the opaquely financed publication is highly selective in the empires it chooses to scrutinize; it is difficult to find criticism of Russia or China—or any other American adversary—on its site. A more accurate descriptor of its ideological outlook is “campist,” denoting a segment of the sectarian far left that sees the world as divided into two camps: the imperialist West and the anti-imperialist rest.

Freeman, who served as Richard Nixon’s interpreter during his 1972 visit to China, seemed to feel at home in The GrayZone. In that Manichaean domain—one that lacks, naturally, any shades of gray—no anti-Western tyrant is too brutal for fawning adulation, and America is always to blame. A Republican foreign-policy hand in conversation with a fringe leftist website might seem like an odd pairing, but Freeman has a fondness for dictators.

[Dominic Tierney: The rise of the liberal hawks]

In 2009, when Freeman was appointed to serve on the National Intelligence Council during the first year of the Obama administration, a series of leaked emails revealed a window into his worldview. Observing the 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, Freeman praised the Chinese Communist Party for its bloody crackdown on peaceful student demonstrators; his only criticism of its dispersal of this “mob scene” was that it had been “overly cautious” in displaying “ill-conceived restraint.” It is quite something to read a retired American diplomat criticizing the Chinese regime for being too soft during the Tiananmen massacre, but such views are not as aberrational as they sound. Within the school of foreign-policy “realism,” notions of morality are seen as quaint distractions from the real business of great-power politics.

In April, it was Noam Chomsky’s turn to recite the Pauline mantra in a podcast with the editor of Current Affairs, a leftist magazine. Going out of his way to praise Freeman as “one of the most astute and respected figures in current U.S. diplomatic circles,” the world’s most famous radical intellectual endorsed the crusty veteran of realist GOP administrations for characterizing American policy in Eastern Europe as “fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian.”

From Chomsky’s mouth to Putin’s ears.

“A great deal is being said about the United States’ intention to fight against Russia ‘to the last Ukrainian’—they say it there and they say it here,” the Russian president mused the following week, prefacing his mention of the gibe with his own version of that Trumpian rhetorical flourish, “A lot of people are saying.” That same month, an American Conservative article by Doug Bandow of the libertarian Cato Institute was headlined “Washington Will Fight Russia to the Last Ukrainian,” denying Ukrainians any agency in their own struggle by answering the question Paul had rhetorically asked.

Soon after, the dean of realist international-relations theorists, the University of Chicago scholar  John Mearsheimer, used the line as though he’d just thought of it. By then, the argument that America was “fighting Russia to the last Ukrainian” had ping-ponged between both ends of the ideological spectrum an astonishing number of times. The point for the anti-imperialist left and the isolationist right, as well as the realist fellow travelers hitched to each side, was that blame for the conflict lies mainly with the U.S., which is using Ukraine as a proxy for its nefarious interventionism in Moscow’s backyard.

That the fringe left would blame America—which it views as the source of all capitalist exploitation, military aggression, and imperialist evil in the world—for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is predictable. It blames America for everything. When, two days after the Russian invasion began on February 24, the Democratic Socialists of America called upon “the US to withdraw from NATO and to end the imperialist expansionism that set the stage for this conflict,” mainstream Democrats condemned the statement. More significant has been the position taken by mainstream realists, who similarly fault the West for somehow “provoking” Russia into waging war on its neighbor. These politically disparate forces share more than a talking point. They also have a worldview in common.

Consider America’s leading realist think tank, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft. This “transpartisan” group enjoyed great fanfare upon its founding, in 2019, with seed funding from the libertarian Charles Koch and the left-wing George Soros. After two decades of “forever wars,” here at last was an ideologically diverse assortment of reasonable, sober-minded experts committed to pursuing a “foreign policy of restraint.” But counseling inaction as a rapacious, revisionist dictatorship wages total war on its smaller, democratic neighbor had a whiff of appeasement for at least one of Quincy’s fellows, leading to a split within the organization.

[From the May 2022 issue: There is no liberal world order]

“The institute is ignoring the dangers and the horrors of Russia’s invasion and occupation,” Joe Cirincione, a nuclear non-proliferation expert and one of the group’s leading left-of-center scholars, said upon his resignation this summer, adding that Quincy “focuses almost exclusively on criticism of the United States, NATO, and Ukraine. They excuse Russia’s military threats and actions because they believe that they have been provoked by U.S. policies.”

The moral myopia Cirincione identifies is an essential trait of the new online magazine Compact, where self-styled anti-woke Marxists and Catholic theocrats unite in their loathing of classical liberal values at home and their opposition to defending those values abroad. In an article titled “Fueling Zelensky’s War Hurts America,” the left-wing writer Batya Ungar-Sargon took issue with the U.S. supplying defensive weaponry to Kyiv, arguing that resources devoted to supporting Ukrainians would be better spent helping economically disadvantaged Americans.

Pushing the United States to prioritize the needs of its poorest citizens, even if that means forgoing its responsibilities for maintaining the European security order, is at least an intellectually defensible position (if a shortsighted and reductive one). But Ungar-Sargon also went out of her way to give credence to Russia’s specious territorial claims.

“If Ukraine’s territorial integrity were of such immense national interest,” she wrote, “surely we would have climbed the rapid-escalation ladder back in 2014, when Moscow invaded and annexed Crimea—a move that a referendum found was popular among Crimeans.” The plebiscite Ungar-Sargon endorsed was held under Russian gunpoint to provide a legal fig leaf for the first armed annexation of territory on the European continent since World War II. She also identified Donetsk and Luhansk—the two Russian-backed separatist enclaves in Eastern Ukraine that Putin recognized as puppet states on the eve of his invasion and where he is now threatening to hold similarly meaningless referenda annexing them to Russia—as “independent republics,” conferring a legitimacy that was in marked contrast to the way she referred dismissively to “the United States and its European satrapies.”  

Many commentators have likened Volodymyr Zelensky to Winston Churchill for his charismatic resistance to foreign invaders and his ability to raise the morale of his people. In light of this popular association, the headline that the editors of Compact devised for Ungar-Sargon’s apologia—“Zelensky’s War”—is nauseating, blaming the victim while seeming to evoke the title of a notorious book by the Holocaust-denying historian David Irving, Churchill’s War.

Condemning the U.S. and its allies for the unfolding tragedy in Ukraine requires one to ignore or downplay a great deal of Russian misbehavior. This is a characteristic that unites left-wing anti-imperialists, right-wing isolationists, and the ostensibly more respectable “realists.”

“Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet Empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine as well as other countries in Eastern Europe,” Mearsheimer wrote in a 2014 essay titled “Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault.” “But this account is wrong.” Eight years on, as Russian forces marched toward Kyiv and Putin issued vague threats of nuclear escalation, Mearsheimer made no acknowledgment of how very wrong his own earlier, sanguine assessment of Putin’s intentions had been.

[James Kirchick: Being gay was the gravest sin in Washington]

“We invented this story that Putin is highly aggressive and he’s principally responsible for this crisis in Ukraine,” he told The New Yorker a week into the invasion. Putin’s apparent goal of overthrowing Zelensky and installing a puppet regime would not be an example of “imperialism,” Mearsheimer argued, and was meaningfully different from “conquering and holding onto Kyiv.” All of this linguistic legerdemain would surely come as news to the Czechs, Poles, Slovaks, and other peoples of the region who once suffered under the Russian imperial yoke.

As evidence of Russian war crimes against Ukrainian civilians mounts, Mearsheimer has cleaved to his position that NATO enlargement is to blame for the war. “I think all the trouble in this case really started in April, 2008, at the NATO Summit in Bucharest, where afterward NATO issued a statement that said Ukraine and Georgia would become part of NATO,” he also told The New Yorker. Although the NATO communiqué did express the alliance’s hope that the two former Soviet republics would become members at some indefinite point in the future, it came after France and Germany had successfully blocked a proposal by the Bush administration to offer Ukraine and Georgia an actual path to membership. But even if the U.S. had made such a promise, how would that justify the invasion and occupation of Ukraine? Mearsheimer also ignores the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, according to which the United States, Britain, and Russia guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for Ukraine surrendering its nuclear weapons. This concord lasted for 20 years, until Putin abrogated it by invading and occupying Crimea.

Even more obtuse are the excuses for Russian aggression made by Mearsheimer’s fellow academic realist, the Columbia University professor Jeffrey Sachs. Sachs has worked as an adviser to a host of international institutions, such as the World Health Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Bank, as a development economist. Unlike Mearsheimer, he has no particular expertise in foreign political affairs, but this has not stopped him from pronouncing on geopolitical issues. Last December, as Russia was amassing its forces on Ukraine’s border, Sachs suggested that “NATO should take Ukraine’s membership off the table, and Russia should forswear any invasion.” This ignored the fact that Russia had already invaded the country in 2014.

Seeking to explain “the West’s false narrative” about Ukraine after the war began, Sachs noted, “Since 1980 the US has been in at least 15 overseas wars of choice (Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Panama, Serbia, Syria and Yemen to name just a few), while China has been in none, and Russia only in one (Syria) beyond the former Soviet Union.” This sentence contains two significant qualifications. First, Sachs’s counting only those “wars of choice” that Russia waged “beyond the former Soviet Union” implies that its invasion of Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 were permissible through some sort of Cold War–continuity droit de seigneur. Second, Sachs’s selection of 1980 as the starting point for his comparison conveniently excludes the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, which began in December 1979 and became the Red Army’s own forever war, lasting almost 10 years and playing a crucial role in the Soviet Union’s demise.

Russia’s war against Ukraine has exposed the incompetence of the Russian military and the hubris of President Putin. It has also revealed the bravery and resilience of the Ukrainian people, who, contrary to Ron Paul’s ambulatory talking point, had no need of any American to prod or gull them into defending their homeland. Here in the U.S., the war has also exposed the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of an ideologically diverse set of foreign-policy commentators: the “anti-imperialists” who routinely justify blatant acts of imperial conquest, and the “realists” who make arguments unmoored from reality.

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