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After occupying Kherson for eight months and pledging to keep it forever, Russia’s army abandoned the city in southern Ukraine in November and retreated south and east across the Dnipro River. With them, Russian soldiers took truckloads of cultural treasures looted from the region’s museums.

Most of Kherson’s art collection, which is worth millions of dollars, has ended up on the nearby Crimean peninsula, which Russia annexed from Ukraine in 2014; there, the director of a local gallery confirmed to Radio Free Europe’s Ukrainian service that the stolen art was “in storage” in his museum. But thousands of pieces from Kherson’s folklore museum, including ancient artifacts from the Scythians, Sarmatians, Goths, and Greeks—peoples who settled the area near the Black and Azov Seas centuries before the Russian empire—have disappeared without a trace, as have hundreds of valuable books from the city’s science library.

The Ukrainian archivists and curators who are busy trying to account for their losses compare Russia’s art theft to that of the Nazis, who looted Kherson’s museums during the nearly three years of German occupation, from 1941 to 1944. If anything, they say, this time is worse—not least because they feel betrayed: by the Russians, yes, but more so by informers and collaborators within their own ranks. “Russians told us they were our brothers,” Kherson Art Museum’s longtime director, Alina Dotsenko, told me when I interviewed her in Kyiv. But more hurtful was that “our own colleagues helped the looters to rob our museums”—even if, for every instance of collaboration, there was also an opposite act of courageous resistance by someone who worked to frustrate the enemy’s plans and save items and records from the collections.

[Read: Celebrations as Ukraine retakes Kherson]

Nevertheless, when Dotsenko entered the pillaged archives on November 11, soon after Kherson’s liberation, her heart stopped. “At least 10,000 works out of more than 14,000 art pieces were gone,” she said.

At first, after Russian invaders had captured the city in early March, Dotsenko and her loyal manager, Hanna Skrypka, managed to protect the collection. They told Russian officials that it had all been removed from Kherson during renovation work. The museum’s walls were indeed covered in scaffolding, but in fact the art had been taken down and stored in the building’s basement. The precious silver and gold frames of ancient icons in the collection were locked in a safe, for which Skrypka had the key.

The ruse worked for almost three months, and Dotsenko, Skrypka, and their like-minded colleagues began to hope that the Russians would never discover their subterfuge. But they were betrayed. Two former employees informed the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) that the art was still inside the building, Dotsenko explained.

On May 5, Russian prosecutors summoned Dotsenko for interrogation. “They said they would teach me to respect the new Russian power, which was going to stay in Kherson for good,” Dotsenko told me. “So rather than wait to be arrested, I left for Odesa and took the entire digital archive of our art with me, hidden on my body.”

After she fled, Russian authorities appointed a new director, Natalia Desyatova, who was reportedly a former singer at a local café, and, as both Dotsenko and Skrypka told me, made the remaining museum workers promise in writing that they would not communicate with the collection managers and workers who’d remained loyal to Ukraine and left the museum. But even then, the head of the museum’s book archives, an elderly woman named Galina Aksyutina, took a personal risk and smuggled out a valuable 1840 first edition of Kobzar, a collection of poems by one of Ukraine’s most beloved writers, Taras Shevchenko. The Russian guards, presumably not suspecting anything so daring from an old woman, neglected to search her.

[Read: ‘I just wanted the whole thing to be over’]

A similar drama played out at the science library. “In the first days of the occupation, we tried to hide the most valuable books in the basement,” Nadezhda Korotun, the library’s director, told me. “But armed FSB officers came to our library several times a week. They demanded we find and show them detailed maps of Kherson and the region, and they broke locked doors.” Korotun also encouraged her employees to take home as many rare, old books as they could and try to smuggle them out of the occupation zone. This was a dangerous enterprise because the Russian military was searching vehicles at every checkpoint on the road from Kherson to Odesa.

When Ukrainian forces were moving to retake Kherson in late October, the organized looting began, Skrypka told me. Desyatova told Skrypka to come into work on November 1. The moment she stepped into the museum, she regretted it. The building was full of Russians. Two armed Chechens in uniform said they were FSB officers. “They looked as if they had killed a lot of people,” Skrypka told me. “My skin froze under their stare.”

Over the next 48 hours, Skrypka was effectively held captive. Desyatova ordered her to type up a list of the art being taken for an official from Moscow who introduced himself as a representative of the Russian Ministry of Culture. “Even the collaborators working at the museum asked him to stop at 8,000, but he insisted,” Skrypka told me. “He said his bosses would be mad at him if he did not take enough.” The looters forced her to open the safe with the treasured silver and golden icon frames and emptied it. Powerless to prevent the pillaging, she resolved to at least be a witness—“I decided to be the eyes and ears,” she said.

The Museum of Fine Arts, as it was originally called, opened in 1912, displaying works by the major Ukrainian and Russian artists of the day, including Vasily Perov, Mykola Pymonenko, Vasily Polenov, Ivan Aivazovsky, Ivan Shishkin, and Ilya Repin. During the Nazi occupation, the city’s archaeological and art collections both were looted, and it took years for Kherson’s museums to track down the stolen items—even then, they could only “partly recover” the prewar collections, Dotsenko told me.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: Ukraine pulled off a masterstroke]

But then, in the late 1960s, the art museum had a stroke of luck—if a morally murky one. A passionate art collector named Maria Kornilovskaya, who lived in Leningrad, decided to donate hundreds of paintings to the collection in her birthplace of Kherson. The way Kornilovskaya had built up her art collection was questionable to say the least, a form of looting itself—though she had preserved the work of dozens of world-famous artists that might otherwise have been destroyed during the Second World War.

Kornilovskaya covertly collected her masterpieces from the homes of people who’d been killed, many of them by starvation, during the 1941–44 siege of Leningrad, and she hid the paintings in her apartment. Art collectors offered her good deals, but Kornilovskaya preferred to go hungry herself rather than sell any of her treasures. In all, Kherson received more than 500 paintings through Kornilovskaya.

In 1978, the city’s art collection moved into a new home, a graceful 19th-century building with a tall tower in one corner. Over the following decades, the art museum expanded its collection with thousands of paintings from dozens of countries, as well as sculptures, graphics, and decorative work.

Moscow’s order to loot art from Ukraine did not surprise the 82-year-old art historian Dmytro Gorbachev. In 1938, he told me, Moscow took some of the historical mosaics from Kyiv’s St. Michael’s Monastery and installed them in Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery. “Twenty-five years later,” he said, “I requested that Moscow return the borrowed mosaics to Kyiv and I received the most humiliating answer: They claimed it was their property.

“Russians treat Ukraine’s art as their own but, sorry, since the U.S.S.R. fell apart, everything on our land has been ours, so this is theft,” Gorbachev went on. “And they won’t be able to prove that any of this art is their property at an art auction.”

[Eliot A. Cohen: Western aid to Ukraine is still not enough]

Several days before they cleaned out the art museum, the Russians were emptying the shelves and cases of the Museum of Local Lore across the street. Before the war, the folklore collection comprised more than 180,000 items, including at least 8,000 coins from the pre-Christian era that had been found in the area. “When I entered the museum together with the Security Service of Ukraine on November 17, I saw broken displays, ruined expositions,” the museum’s director, Olga Goncharova, told me. “The looters clearly had nothing to do with culture; they were barbarians.”

A historian and scientist, Goncharova has spent four decades researching at the museum. Her specialty is the World War II period, and when the Russian invasion began, she was busy cataloging Soviet soldiers’ letters home. She told me how, in March, a passerby on the street had yelled a warning to her: “Russian tanks are coming!” “How strange, I thought,” she said, reflecting on the moment in 1944 she had just been immersed in, when Soviet tanks had liberated Kherson from Nazi occupation. “Once upon a time, it was the happiest news.”

Grieving the looted collection, including the ancient Scythian gold, Goncharova mused on how this land had changed hands so many times over the centuries. She could not say what the stolen artifacts were worth. “Some things are priceless,” she told me. And yet, the very history she has studied—of the destruction wrought by armies moving back and forth across the country, always followed by the painstaking business of recording the past and restoring its cultural treasures—gives her renewed hope.

According to the art museum, of the 13 employees it had before the war, seven ended up collaborating with Russian occupiers to help loot it. “We can confirm that six out of seven of our former museum workers have left Kherson for Crimea … and one of them is still in Kherson,” Dotsenko told me. The former acting director, Desyatova, was among those who left Kherson with the retreating Russians, and is now a suspect in the Ukrainian police’s investigations.

But the circumstances around the city’s cultural inheritance and its betrayal are a microcosm of the reckoning taking place across the territory that Ukraine has recaptured from the Russian invaders: As early as mid-August, the police reported some 1,200 criminal investigations of collaboration. Meanwhile, the work of trying to recover some of the collection—as curators in Kherson first did decades ago—has begun anew.

“We’re getting calls of support from all over the world, and we feel optimistic,” Goncharova said. “Our art collections will grow again—and, in a way, the place feels more pure now, after all the traitors and looters have gone.”

On the morning of December 5, 2022, a large explosion occurred at Engels Air Base, about 500 miles southeast of Moscow. The airfield is one of the two principal bases in Russia that host long-range strategic bombers. TU-160 Blackjacks have been taking off from Engels for the past 10 months, carrying cruise missiles and firing them at cities in Ukraine. The explosion was caused by a Ukrainian drone, and it reportedly damaged two TU-95 Bears, enormous turbo-prop bombers that have been a symbol of the Kremlin’s airpower since the early 1950s. Most of the reporting on the drone attack focused on the boldness of it, the failure of Russian air defenses, and the impact on Russian morale. But the attack had a broader significance that went largely unnoticed.

About four miles from the runway at Engels where the explosion occurred, a pair of underground bunkers is likely to contain nuclear warheads, with a capacity to store hundreds of them. Blackjacks and Bears were designed during the Cold War for nuclear strikes on NATO countries, and they still play that role in Russian war plans. The drone attack on Engels was a milestone in military history: the world’s first aerial assault on a nuclear base. There was little chance of a nuclear detonation, even from a direct hit on the heavily fortified bunkers. Nevertheless, the presence of nuclear warheads at a base routinely used by Russian bombers for attacks on Ukraine is a reminder of how dangerous this war remains. On December 26, Engels was struck by another Ukrainian drone, which killed three servicemen.

The invasion of Ukraine has been accompanied from the outset by Russian threats to use nuclear weapons. A few days after the war began, President Vladimir Putin complained that “NATO countries are making aggressive statements about our country” and warned that, as a result, Russia’s nuclear forces would be moved to “a special regime of combat duty.” No apparent change in operational readiness followed that warning. But in state-controlled news media, the almost-daily threats to use nuclear weapons have become central to Russian propaganda, seeking to inspire fear in NATO countries, discourage NATO forces from entering the war, and limit the supply of military assistance to Ukraine.

[Eric Schlosser: What if Russia uses nuclear weapons in Ukraine?]

This Russian propaganda has been amplified and endorsed by an unusual assortment of people in the United States, including the Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Democratic Socialists of America, and the Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs. The propaganda absolves Russia, blames the United States for the war, and has four main tenets: first, that a long-standing American effort to bring Ukraine into NATO poses a grave threat to Russian security. Second, that American shipments of weapons to Ukraine have prolonged the fighting and caused needless suffering among civilians. Third, that American support for Ukraine is just a pretext for seeking the destruction of Russia. And, finally, that American policies could soon prove responsible for causing an all-out nuclear war.

Those arguments are based on lies. They are being spread to justify Russia’s unprecedented use of nuclear blackmail to seize territory from a neighboring state. Concerns about a possible nuclear exchange have thus far deterred the United States and NATO from providing Ukraine with the tanks, aircraft, and long-range missiles that might change the course of the war. If nuclear threats or the actual use of nuclear weapons leads to the defeat of Ukraine, Russia may use them to coerce other states. Tactics once considered immoral and unthinkable might become commonplace. Nuclear weapons would no longer be regarded solely as a deterrent of last resort; the nine countries that possess them would gain even greater influence; countries that lack them would seek to obtain them; and the global risk of devastating wars would increase exponentially.

That is why the greatest nuclear threat we face is a Russian victory in Ukraine.

Russia has about 6,000 nuclear weapons, more than any other country, and for years Putin has portrayed them as a source of national pride. His warnings about their possible use during the war in Ukraine have been coy and often contradictory. “If the territorial integrity of our country is threatened,” Putin said in September, “we will without doubt use all available means to protect Russia and our people—this is not a bluff.” His vow to rely on nuclear weapons only as a defensive measure conveys an underlying threat: An attempt to regain Ukrainian land annexed by Russia and deemed by Putin to be part of “our country” might prompt a nuclear response. He also asserted that the United States and NATO are the ones engaging in “nuclear blackmail,” and that “those who try to blackmail us with nuclear weapons should know that the weathervane can turn and point towards them.” In October, he claimed that Ukraine was planning to launch a nuclear strike on itself—by detonating a warhead filled with radioactive waste—as part of a false-flag operation to make Russia seem responsible. In December, Putin said that the risk of a nuclear war was increasing but suggested once again that the real danger did not come from Russia. “We have not gone crazy,” he said. “We are aware what nuclear weapons are … We are not going to brandish these weapons like a razor, running around the world.”

Although Putin’s comments have been subtle and open to multiple interpretations, the propaganda outlets that he controls have been neither. For almost a year, they have continually threatened and celebrated the possibility of nuclear war. This division of labor allows Putin to appear statesmanlike while his underlings stoke fear and normalize the idea of using nuclear weapons to commit the mass murder of civilians. Julia Davis, a columnist for The Daily Beast, and Francis Scarr, a BBC correspondent, have performed an immense public service: supplying translations of the vicious, apocalyptic, often unhinged rants that have become the norm on Russian television. “Either we lose in Ukraine, or the Third World War starts,” Margarita Simonyan, the editor in chief of Russia Today and a close ally of Putin’s, said in April. “I think World War III is more realistic, knowing us, knowing our leader … That all this will end with a nuclear strike seems more probable to me.” At various times, Simonyan has discussed nuclear attacks on Ukraine, Poland, the United Kingdom, and the United States, arguing that death would be better than succumbing to “the monstrous organism known as the collective Western world.”

Vladimir Solovyov, another popular broadcaster who is close to Putin, routinely expresses a preference for nuclear annihilation over a Russian defeat. The invitation of Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, to the White House and the U.S. Capitol in December made Solovyov especially angry. “We’ll either win, or humanity will cease to exist, because the Lord won’t stand for the triumph of warriors of the Antichrist,” he said, repeating the new propaganda line that Ukrainians aren’t just Nazis; they’re satanists. “We are Russians. God is with us,” he concluded. Despite his professed hatred for ungodly Western decadence, before the invasion of Ukraine Solovyov owned villas overlooking Lake Como, in Italy.

Russia’s popular culture is now marked by a level of nuclear fanaticism previously associated with North Korea. Nothing like it existed during the Cold War. At a November rally, staged with Kremlin approval, demonstrators marched through the streets of central Moscow, led by a mock-up of an RS-28 Sarmat intercontinental ballistic missile, and sang the Queen song “We Will Rock You” with new lyrics calling for the destruction of Washington, D.C. Denis Maidenov, a popular singer-songwriter who serves in the State Duma, the lower house of Russia’s Parliament, released a slick music video on December 17 featuring a military choir, footage of the Sarmat, and adulatory lyrics about the missile’s prowess: “It’ll scatter our enemies into dust in an instant / It’s ready to carry out the sentence … For the Sarmat there’s only pleasure / To trouble NATO’s dreams!”

[Phillips Payson O’Brien: What Trump and Musk don’t get about Russia’s nuclear threats]

As well as encouraging public reverence for nuclear weapons, Putin has promoted the worship of such weapons within Russia’s military. In a deeply unsettling book, Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy (2019), Dimitry Adamsky, a professor at the Lauder School of Government, Diplomacy and Strategy at Reichman University, in Israel, describes Putin’s multiyear effort to spread the mystical teachings of the Russian Orthodox Church among the personnel who handle nuclear weapons, as a means of fostering patriotism, discipline, and obedience. “Each leg of the nuclear triad has its patron saint,” Adamsky notes, “and their icons hang on the walls of the consecrated headquarters and command posts.” Putin’s linkage of Russian Orthodoxy with Russian nuclear strategy helps legitimize plans to slaughter the nation’s enemies. In 2018, Putin declared that Russia would not start a nuclear war against NATO but would ultimately win if one began: “We as martyrs would go to paradise, while they will simply perish because they won’t even have time to repent their sins.”

Getty; Anthony Gerace

According to Kremlin propaganda, the expansion of NATO poses a serious military threat that justifies both the modernization of Russia’s nuclear arsenal and the invasion of Ukraine. When the Soviet Union came apart, in December 1991, NATO was composed of 16 member states. Today it has 30—almost half of them former Soviet allies or republics—and two more states, Sweden and Finland, are awaiting final approval for membership. The psychological impact upon the Kremlin of new lines on the map, shifting alliances, and the loss of empire is understandable. But the argument that, for the past three decades, NATO has been expanding in order to attack or invade Russia is absurd.

[Anne Applebaum: Fear of nuclear war has warped the West’s Ukraine strategy]

During the autumn of 1991, as the Soviet Union neared collapse, President George H. W. Bush sought to reduce the danger of nuclear war and assure Moscow that NATO was a purely defensive alliance. Bush declared that the United States would not only remove all of its short-range, ground-launched nuclear weapons from Europe but would bring them back to the United States and destroy them. These “tactical” weapons were intended for use on the battlefield. In addition, Bush promised that all nuclear weapons would be removed from American warships and attack submarines. These major reductions would be made unilaterally by the United States, without any requirement that Moscow do the same. The Bush administration announced further unilateral cuts to NATO’s nuclear arsenal a few months later. One scholar has called President Bush’s efforts to reassure Moscow “the most sweeping nuclear arms reductions in history.”

In 1991, NATO forces had more than 3,000 tactical nuclear weapons. Today NATO has about 100, all of them gravity bombs that would take many hours, if not days, to be fitted into aircraft. Although the Kremlin promised in 1991 to make similar cuts, it never did. Today Russia has about 2,000 tactical nuclear weapons, a great many of them recently modernized and carried by cruise missiles.

The reductions in NATO’s conventional forces since the end of the Cold War have been even more dramatic. In 1990, the United States had about 5,000 tanks based in Germany. Today it has none. The last 22 American tanks were withdrawn from Germany in 2013. The German army had more than 7,000 tanks at the end of the Cold War; today it has about 225—hardly a fearsome invading force. (Russia has already lost perhaps 10 times that number of tanks in Ukraine.) Although the Baltic States are members of NATO, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia pose even less of a threat to Russia. Their armies don’t possess a single tank.

NATO countries have not been secretly plotting for decades to invade and destroy Russia. On the contrary, they have provided Russia with trillions of dollars in direct investment, technology transfers, and payments for oil, gas, and other natural resources. Thanks mainly to expanded trade with the West, Russia now has a large middle class for the first time in its history, and average monthly income has increased since 1992 from about $25 to $1,206. But Kremlin policies have also created in Russia the world’s most unequal economy, with some 500 oligarchs controlling more wealth than the total assets of about 99 percent of the adult population there. Russia’s renewed imperial ambitions and glorification of nuclear weapons are useful to the Kremlin as a distraction from persistent economic hardships. According to a 2018 study by Russia’s Federal State Statistics Service, about one-fifth of the nation’s households still lack indoor plumbing. About one-quarter don’t have indoor toilets. In rural areas of Russia, things are even worse: Perhaps two-thirds of the households lack indoor toilets and about half still must use outhouses.

After the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in 1945, J. Robert Oppenheimer, known as the father of the atomic bomb, warned that nuclear weapons were “not too hard to make” and “very cheap if anyone wants to make them.” Oppenheimer feared that many countries might build them and that nuclear warfare would endanger the future of humanity. In 1963, President John F. Kennedy worried that the following decade might see the emergence of as many as 15 to 25 countries with nuclear weapons. In a nationally televised speech, he said:  “I ask you to stop and think for a moment what it would mean to have nuclear weapons in so many hands, in the hands of countries large and small, stable and unstable, responsible and irresponsible, scattered throughout the world.”

With strong support from the United States and the Soviet Union, the Treaty on the Non-proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) was introduced in 1968 and took effect two years later.  The NPT has been signed by 191 countries. The treaty allows five of them—the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, China, and France—to possess nuclear weapons. But it also requires those five to pursue full nuclear disarmament. In return for access to peaceful nuclear energy, the NPT’s other signatories have agreed not to obtain nuclear weapons. Three countries (India, Pakistan, North Korea) have openly built nuclear weapons in defiance of the treaty’s spirit; one has covertly done so (Israel); four have surrendered their nuclear weapons (South Africa, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Ukraine)l; and 15 have started, then discontinued, nuclear-weapons programs.  Through some extraordinary mix of skillful diplomacy and sheer luck, the worst fears of Oppenheimer and Kennedy have not yet come to pass.  All of that could swiftly change, however, if nuclear threats, attacks, or blackmail enable Russia to gain any benefit from invading Ukraine.

Japan has tons of bomb-grade plutonium, left over from its atomic-energy program, and could build a small nuclear arsenal within a year. South Korea could do the same in perhaps two years, and on January 11, its president raised the possibility that his country might need to “possess its own nukes.” Japan and South Korea now face nuclear threats from North Korea and China. More than 70 percent of South Koreans think their country should obtain nuclear weapons, and Japan has decided to double the size of its military budget. Taiwan could have its own nuclear weapons within a few years of deciding to build them. Saudi Arabia could also obtain them quickly. At a conference in Abu Dhabi this December, the Saudi foreign minister made clear that “if Iran gets an operational nuclear weapon, all bets are off.” And if Saudi Arabia gets nuclear weapons, Turkey, Egypt, and Algeria might build them soon too.

On a number of occasions during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union came perilously close to a nuclear conflict that neither side wanted—a conflict that could have killed hundreds of millions of people. It is remarkable that no city has been destroyed by an atomic blast since Nagasaki in 1945. The spread of nuclear weapons to more countries, amid today’s rising nationalism and bitter ethnic hatreds, would no doubt increase the likelihood of mushroom clouds rising over the rubble of cities.

[From the December 2022 issue: The Russian Empire must die]

A Russian defeat in Ukraine would strengthen the nonproliferation treaty. Ukrainian success on the battlefield has been achieved with conventional weapons aimed at military targets—not with nuclear weapons causing mass civilian casualties. If the nation possessing the most nuclear weapons in the world is unable to gain victory, the importance of having nuclear weapons will be greatly diminished. And the need to abolish nuclear weapons will be even more obvious. Theories of nuclear deterrence are based on the behavior of rational actors; they offer little protection against leaders who are delusional, suicidal, or religious fanatics. The threat of nuclear annihilation will never vanish until the day when nuclear weapons are stigmatized and abolished.

You don’t have to look far from Russia to find a clear-eyed view of Putin’s intentions. While isolationists and academic socialists in the United States blame the invasion of Ukraine on America’s hegemonic desire for NATO expansion, the social-democratic government of Finland holds a different view. The Finns have a unique, firsthand perspective on Russian imperialism and colonialism. Finland was ruled by Sweden until 1809, when it was conquered by Russia and became part of the Russian empire. Efforts to “Russify” the Finns proved unsuccessful, a strong national identity emerged, and Finland gained independence in 1917. “The Great Patriotic War,” as World War II is called in Russia, began not with the Soviet Union heroically leading the fight against Nazi Germany but with the Kremlin supplying oil to Hitler’s war machine and the Red Army invading Poland and then Finland. Despite being vastly outnumbered and outgunned, the Finns imposed heavy casualties on the Soviets, gained international support, and managed to end the conflict retaining almost all of their territory. Finland remained neutral during the Cold War and built up a formidable army purely for self-defense. It can now mobilize about 1 million soldiers and reservists—nearly one-fifth of the population.

Sauli Niinisto, the president of Finland, maintained a cordial relationship with Putin until recently, speaking with him more than 40 times in person or over the phone during the past decade. And Finland long served as a discreet intermediary between the White House and the Kremlin. But the invasion of Ukraine shattered any illusion that Russia could be a trustworthy neighbor. Finland’s break from its tradition of neutrality and its application to join NATO mark a radical turn in the nation’s history. And it has more military significance than Ukraine’s potential membership in NATO. Russia and Finland share a border that’s almost 800 miles long. St. Petersburg is closer to the Finnish border than it is to Moscow. Finland’s membership in NATO will help the alliance dominate the Baltic Sea, threaten Russia’s crucial nuclear bases on the Kola Peninsula, and transform the strategic balance in the Arctic. And yet Russia hasn’t described Finland’s desire to join NATO as an existential threat that merits nuclear annihilation. The Finns know the Russians too well to be intimidated by that bluff.

A proper conclusion of the war in Ukraine will require many complex issues to be resolved: war crimes, reparations, prisoner-of-war exchanges, the return of children kidnapped by Russia. The Ukrainian government, not the United States or NATO, will have to decide how to proceed. But the basis of a just settlement is simple. When a reporter asked Sanna Marin, the prime minister of Finland, whether Russia should be given an “off-ramp” to avoid its humiliation and prevent nuclear war, she didn’t fully understand the question at first. The term “off-ramp” seemed unfamiliar to Marin. A way out of the conflict, the reporter explained. “A way out of the conflict?” Marin asked. “The way out of the conflict is for Russia to leave Ukraine. That’s the way out of the conflict. Thank you.” Then she turned, smiled, and walked away.

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Over the holiday weekend, the Russians fired a wave of missiles at Ukraine—all of which Ukraine claims to have stopped in the first complete defeat of such an attack in this war. Meanwhile, a Ukrainian strike killed scores of Russians at a makeshift military headquarters. But first, here are three new stories from The Atlantic.

Kevin McCarthy’s loyalty to Trump got him nothing. The Republican majority’s opening debacle You’ll miss gerontocracy when it’s gone. New Year, New Depths

The Russians, according to the Ukrainian government, fired more than 80 weapons (mostly, it seems, Iranian-made drones) at Ukraine since the start of the new year, and the Ukrainians claim they intercepted every one of them. But the attack is more evidence that Russia’s war on Ukraine is, at this point, an attempt to murder civilians and torment the survivors enough to press their government to capitulate. The Russians, of course, have misjudged their enemy: The Ukrainians have no intention of surrendering and are fighting back with great effectiveness. The Russian high command learned this yet again over the holiday weekend, when the Ukrainians scored a direct hit on a makeshift Russian barracks, killing at least 89 soldiers.

I write “at least” 89 because that is the number the Russians admit were killed, and therefore it is almost certainly a lie meant to hide larger casualties. Igor Girkin, once a separatist commander in eastern Ukraine, has become a constant critic of Vladmir Putin’s war effort; he claims that the soldiers were bunked in the same building as ammunition, and that the ensuing conflagration killed and wounded “hundreds,” which is likely closer to the truth. Dara Massicot, an analyst at the RAND corporation (and, I’m pleased to note, one of my students when I taught at the Naval War College), told me today that given the “nature of the destruction at that facility, the official Russian numbers are likely significantly undercounting casualties,” and that reports from Russian social-media channels (often more reliable than official communications) suggest that 200 to 300 men could have been lost.

The successful Ukrainian defense and the Russian losses are good news for Ukraine. Every bit of optimism, however, must be tempered by two realities. First, Ukraine remains outnumbered and potentially outgunned by a much larger Russian Federation. The Ukrainians have survived this far through a combination of excellent strategy, the resilience of its people and their leaders, an infusion of highly lethal Western weapons, the courage of the men and women on the front lines, and a mind-boggling amount of Russian incompetence and stupidity.

The second reality, however, is that the Russians don’t really care about losses. They are willing to sacrifice their own men by the truckload. We are all rightly appalled by the damage the Kremlin is willing to inflict on Ukraine and its people in its unprovoked aggression, but Putin’s cruelty extends to his fellow citizens: He is sending untrained, under-provisioned, and poorly armed men to their death literally to try to plug the holes in his lines with human meat—which is what one of their own commanders has reportedly called them. The Russian president hates Ukrainians, but he and his senior officers seem to hate their own men nearly as much.

Meanwhile, on New Year’s Eve—with so many Russian soldiers only hours from being killed in their bunks—Putin’s minions hosted a televised party that defies description. Performers put on cheesy song-and-dance numbers seemingly lifted from 1970s Soviet pop culture while Russian officers (whose gaudy dress uniforms looked like they were stolen from the palace guards of a James Bond villain) looked on with forced smiles. Parts of the telecast looked as if they had been shot elsewhere and then chroma-keyed into the production, adding a shiny gloss of unreality to the whole mess. One of the hosts, decked out in a red velvet tux, even chortled a cartoonishly evil threat into the camera: “Like it or not, Russia is enlarging!”

That’s a pretty daring claim to make while Russian forces are on the defensive and men are being buried in the rubble of their base. The whole event, like so much of what’s broadcast on Russian television now, seemed like a mash-up of a Soviet variety show, the dystopian news and TV ads from Robocop, and the galas for the rich elites from The Hunger Games, with hosts as creepy as, if less polished than, Caesar Flickerman and Effie Trinket.

This tacky, over-the-top Russian decadence is all the more striking when we think back to Putin’s ostensible reasons for launching this war. He and his lieutenants promised to save the Ukrainians from Nazis, and then from the immoral West and its rich overlords and sexual deviants. He would gather his fellow Slavs under the protective wings of the Russian eagle. Instead, Putin and his Kremlin toadies are blowing those same Slavs to pieces while they themselves swan around wearing fantastically expensive designer clothes and jewelry, dancing and laughing it up while they send Russian boys to their doom.

I still do not know how this all ends. Putin’s barbarism means that it is impossible, even once the war is over, for Russia to reenter the ranks of the civilized world. As I said recently in a discussion with Ian Bremmer and Anne-Marie Slaughter, Russia is now a nuclear-armed rogue state with a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council. I disagreed with President Joe Biden’s gaffe back in March about how Putin “cannot remain in power,” but I understood the frustration that led to Biden’s outburst. Even if Putin is somehow removed, however, why would anyone give a new Russian regime the benefit of the doubt, at least without war-crimes trials of the “leaders” who launched this blood-soaked misadventure?

Ukraine will survive, recover, and be rebuilt with aid from around the world. But Russia, willing to watch its own men burn in their bunkers for the sake of a dictator’s ego, will have a long way to go before it can again lay claim to being part of a community of nations.

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Ukraine unplugged Sudden Russian death syndrome Today’s News Itamar Ben-Gvir, Israel’s new minister of national security, visited a Jerusalem holy site despite condemnation from Arab leadership and threats by Hamas. The former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried pleaded not guilty to charges of fraud and other crimes. Bloggers and other prominent Russian critics criticized Russia’s military operations following Ukraine’s deadly New Year’s Day strike on Russian forces. Dispatches Up For Debate: Conor Friedersdorf shares readers’ predictions for the future of artificial intelligence. Humans Being: Movies need more than reviews, argues Jordan Calhoun in the final edition of his newsletter.

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Evening Read (Gregory Halpern / Magnun)

The Quiet Profundity of Everyday Awe

By Dacher Keltner

What gives you a sense of awe? That word, awe—the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world—is often associated with the extraordinary. You might imagine standing next to a 350-foot-tall tree or on a wide-open plain with a storm approaching, or hearing an electric guitar fill the space of an arena, or holding the tiny finger of a newborn baby. Awe blows us away: It reminds us that there are forces bigger than ourselves, and it reveals that our current knowledge is not up to the task of making sense of what we have encountered.

But you don’t need remarkable circumstances to encounter awe. When my colleagues and I asked research participants to track experiences of awe in a daily diary, we found, to our surprise, that people felt it a bit more than two times a week on average. And they found it in the ordinary: a friend’s generosity, a leafy tree’s play of light and shadow on a sidewalk, a song that transported them back to a first love.

Read the full article.

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P.S.

That bizarre Russian New Year’s Eve party reminded me of the weird alternative universe created in the first Robocop movie. Released in 1987, Robocop envisioned an early 21st-century world (specifically, Detroit) overtaken by urban rot and excessive consumerism. Some of the movie’s predictions, which famously included Detroit declaring bankruptcy, seemed silly in the 1980s but turned out to be a little too on the nose: Detroit went broke in 2013. The movie also foresaw the shimmery shallowness of cable news, which was still a novelty at that time. Peter Weller was terrific in the title role (and I still say this movie should have made him first choice for the role of Batman, which went to Michael Keaton in 1989).

But the fictional ads scattered throughout the film really shine. The “Family Heart Center” invitation to come and check out the new line of artificial hearts is prescient, even if it seems less funny now that we are deluged with pharmaceutical ads (which I think should be outlawed); the ad for the new “6000 SUX” sedan was a stinging tribute to gigantic and inefficient American cars, but it seems quaint in an era when Americans have skipped right over big cars and now prize huge trucks as some sort of personal statement. I am also rather nostalgic for Nukem!, the family game of nuclear-arms racing that ends with the sore loser blowing everyone else up. Very violent, Robocop is not a movie for everyone, but if you can take the bloodshed, there’s a clever critique of late-20th-century America embedded in a darn good science-fiction romp.

— Tom

Kelli María Korducki contributed to this newsletter.