G7 leaders at the summit in Hiroshima announce new sanctions on Moscow while Putin accuses the West of trying to divide the people of Russian whose 'diversity is their strength'

The United States has suffered from a deliberate fuzziness in formulating its objectives in the Russian war in Ukraine. Flaccid phrases like “helping Ukraine defend itself” or, even worse, “putting Ukraine in the best possible position for negotiations” are either meaningless or insipid. Bureaucratic mental fog is masquerading as artful policy, and it is dangerous. Strategy is the matching of means to ends. In war it is easy to become obsessed with action rather than purpose, and thereby to fall into Nietzsche’s famous description of the most common human stupidity: forgetting what one intended to do in the first place.

Ukraine knows how it defines victory: the pre-2014 borders cleansed of the invader, its exiles and refugees returned, its society and economy rebuilt, membership in the European Union and NATO attained, and some measure of justice for Russian rapists, torturers, and murderers secured. Similarly, we know how the Russians define victory: a Ukraine broken and severed from the West, much of its territory annexed; a Europe in disarray that resumes its addiction to cheap natural resources and business opportunities in Moscow; and the reconstruction of much of the old Russian imperial state.

We should want victory as Ukraine defines it. But to achieve it, the West must not only aid in the defeat of Russia—it must convince Russia that it has been defeated.

[From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive]

A Russia that prevails would be a Russia even further empowered to meddle in Europe and to expand its influence with unlimited violence; a Russia that will have learned that it can commit slaughter and atrocities with impunity; a Russia whose ambitions will grow with success. A Russian victory would, as well, teach the world that the West—including the United States—lacks the resolve, despite its wealth, to follow through on its commitments, offering Beijing an encouraging lesson.

Conversely, Russian defeat would put Beijing—already somewhat nervous about its partner’s incompetence and wild statements—on the defensive, consolidate the Western alliance, and help preserve some of the essential norms of decent behavior in those parts of the world most important to us. Above all, it would block the Russian imperial project for good, because without Ukraine, as the historian Dominic Lieven has noted, Russia cannot be an empire.

Russian defeat does not require a march on Moscow (rarely a good idea in the past), and it does not require a Russia that is defenseless and devastated (impossible without World War III). Rather, it will be achieved inside the heads of Russia’s leaders and population. Russia must be convinced that the military instrument, and its deployment in large-scale war, will inevitably fail, and it must realize that Ukraine is permanently and completely lost.

Such things have happened before. Israel did not occupy Arab capitals in 1967, but that war caused the Arab states to abandon the notion that they could annihilate the Jewish state through conventional means. The 1973 war forced the conclusion that even limited conventional conflict was too hazardous to attempt.

In Vietnam and Afghanistan, the United States was defeated without losing a single battle. We became convinced that fighting was both futile and painful, that our enemies were implacable and unbeatable, and that the price paid in blood, treasure, and attention was in no way worth the cost and never would be.

Carl von Clausewitz, the German philosopher of war, said that war is a trial of moral and physical forces through the medium of the latter. Ukraine must not only achieve battlefield success in its upcoming counteroffensives; it must secure more than orderly Russian withdrawals following cease-fire negotiations. To be brutal about it, we need to see masses of Russians fleeing, deserting, shooting their officers, taken captive, or dead. The Russian defeat must be an unmistakably big, bloody shambles.

[Hein Goemans and Branislav Slantchev: Why Ukraine shouldn’t talk to Russia—yet]

Russia’s theories of victory in Ukraine have collapsed one by one. Putin began by believing that the country would fall in a week; then that it would succumb to a month or two of hard fighting; then that Europe would abandon it during a cold winter without Russian gas; then that Ukraine could be bludgeoned into submission by attacking its cities. The final theory of victory—that the West does not have the heart to pour vast resources into Ukraine indefinitely—needs to be disproved as well, because there is nothing beyond that.

To that end, with the utmost urgency, the West should give everything that Ukraine could possibly use, including long-range missiles to break for good the 11-mile Kerch bridge between the mainland and Crimea, and cluster munitions to devastate Russian fighting vehicles and infantry. Breaking the Russian army, as we have, by spending only a small fraction of our defense budget and none of our blood is an astounding strategic bargain.

Russians must, moreover, conclude that Ukraine—formerly, in their view, a pseudo-state containing “cousins” or “little brothers”—is gone forever. That means speedy accession to the EU and NATO, but also a deep Western commitment to rebuilding Ukraine economically and, most important, arming it to the teeth for years to come.

The paltering of the administration about giving our superabundant F-16s to Ukraine is foolish and shortsighted. These jets might not make a difference on the battlefield two months from now, but the knowledge that several hundred of them are in the pipeline for the next five years would have profound symbolic importance. We should be talking about how we will rebuild Ukraine’s armed forces, the West’s largest, most combat-tested, and in some ways most determined army.

The West needs an aggressive information campaign to drive home the reality of Russian defeat. Russians need to be reminded that their faltering economy is only a tenth the size of the EU’s; that they cannot build and deploy a modern tank; that their latest high-performance jet, the Su-57, will be outnumbered by the F-35s of the four small Nordic states; that their generals are superannuated and incompetent; that their high command is indifferent to their men’s lives; that their equipment is inferior to that of Ukraine; and that their logistics are rotted by graft and corruption.

Information warfare should be reinforced by continued sanctions, whose aim is not so much to win the war as to cripple Russian war-making potential for the long run by depressing the economy and forcing Russia to make do with inferior components and spare parts.

Russia must be isolated politically and psychologically as well, thereby playing on the country’s historical ambivalence about the West, represented in its two capitals: St. Petersburg, facing Europe, and Moscow, facing Asia. But Russian literature, art, culture, and political practice are rooted in its relationship with Europe. The time may come—years or, more likely, decades from now—when a postimperial Russia will turn westward again.

This is all doable. In fact, it has happened on a smaller scale before. Russian leaders became convinced in the late 1970s and early ’80s that they could not keep up with advances in Western military technology, even as they fought and lost the war in Afghanistan. The Gorbachev upheaval was in part the result of this realization.

[David J. Kramer, John Herbst, and William Taylor: The only realistic answer to Putin]

But our expectations today should be measured. Unfortunately, a defeated Russia will still be malevolent, angry, and vengeful; it will probably still be ruled by the “vertical of power,” the hard men from the security ministries; it will be suffused with lawlessness and murder; and it will engage in subversion, political warfare, and malicious behavior of all kinds. But who would not prefer to deal with a thousand troll farms and front organizations than one Mariupol? And this Russia would be far less dangerous to us, far less useful to China, far less likely to raise monstrous new threats in the years to come.

The key to this strategy is courage. We must conquer our fears of Russian threats and escalation, of its nuclear bravado, and even of Russian collapse. We must be strategic and shrewd, but nothing can be accomplished without courage. In the words of John Paul II—the unarmed, lone old man who did so much to bring Soviet communism to its knees—“Never doubt, never tire, and never become discouraged. Be not afraid.”

This article was adapted from a speech given to the Polish Institute of International Affairs’s Strategic Ark conference on May 17, 2023.

Since its invasion of Ukraine, Russia has become increasingly reliant on China for economic and diplomatic support.

Widespread perceptions of Russian army weakness are in some cases either out of date or misconceived.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the paramilitary Wagner Group, has turned the war in Ukraine into his own show since early May. From the trenches of Bakhmut, on Telegram and other social-media channels, he’s decried the Russian military command as worthless and corrupt, particularly claiming that it has deprived his forces of ammunition. At a time of extraordinary top-down control in Russian media and politics, Prigozhin’s outbursts have left a lot of observers perplexed about just what kind of political or military tug-of-war is playing out in front of the international public.

In a video posted on May 4, Prigozhin showed himself surrounded by the bodies of dead Wagner fighters, hurling expletives at Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s defense minister, and Valery Gerasimov, the chief of the general staff. In another video days later, he threatened to withdraw his troops from Bakhmut if not provided with more ammunition. In still another, Prigozhin referred to a “grandfather” who prefers to store ammunition instead of supplying it to the front: “And what if this grandfather is a complete asshole?” he demanded.

Russians on social media often refer to Vladimir Putin as “ded” or “dedushka,” which means “grandfather,” leading many people to speculate that Prigozhin’s rant was a direct attack on Putin. But most likely it was not. In his videos, Prigozhin refers to Putin as the supreme commander in chief who understands the Wagner Group’s needs and gives orders that would fulfill them. These orders are then sabotaged by the military command.

In other words, Prigozhin is sticking with the lifesaving formula known in Russia as the “good tsar surrounded by bad boyars.” To turn on Putin would be suicide for him: He is waging an unequal fight with the Russian military leadership that has come to look like a fight for his own survival, and in which Putin is his only cover.

[Phillips Payson O’Brien and Mykola Bielieskov: What the battle in Bakhmut has done for Ukraine]

Legally, the Wagner Group shouldn’t exist. Russian law holds mercenary activities to be punishable by years in prison. And yet, with Putin’s blessing, the Wagner Group has evolved into a powerful private army with its own heavy weaponry and even its own air force. Its prominence in the current conflict dates to last summer, when the Russian military had suffered disastrous defeats and more fighters were needed on the battlefield. The Kremlin gave Prigozhin access to Russian prisons, where he started recruiting inmates by the thousands. He had no legal basis whatsoever for this recruitment, but the access was a sign of Putin’s supreme trust in him, as well as an example of the Russian president’s signature style of running affairs noninstitutionally, through shadowy informal schemes.

For those prosecuting Putin’s assault on Ukraine, prison inmates have become a valuable commodity and an expendable supply—fuel for an under-equipped war that disdains human life. Starting in 2022, firsthand accounts have emerged detailing the execution of inmates in the Wagner barracks for defection or even for questioning orders. On the battlefield, inmates are sent to their death as cannon fodder. According to Olga Romanova, the head of Russia Behind Bars, a charity advocating for prisoners’ rights, out of 50,000 recruited inmates, only 10,000 were still fighting as of January 2023, on account of mass casualties. The majority of the losses were suffered at the Battle of Bakhmut.

The military leadership has never cared for Prigozhin, certainly not since he has started repeatedly and publicly questioning its management of the war. For the FSB, Russia’s principal intelligence agency, as the owner of a private army, Prigozhin is necessarily an enemy of the state. But these enmities couldn’t touch him so long as he had direct access to and support from Putin himself.

Prigozhin’s position has grown less secure since the end of 2022, however. By that point, Putin understood that Russians would accept the mobilization he had announced in late September, and that he had no shortage of manpower to prosecute his war. High-ranking generals seized the opportunity to sideline Prigozhin bureaucratically. Wagner lost access to the prisons, and the Defense Ministry took control of sending convicts to the battlefield (this time, the Kremlin pushed through the necessary legislation to legalize the recruitment).

Prigozhin has responded by stepping up his criticism of the military. He accused Gerasimov of intentionally refusing to supply his troops with munitions. And he has started to cross the boundaries of his designated domain—warfare—and engage in politics.

This spring, Prigozhin hardly seems like the same zealot who, just a few months ago, bragged about executing defectors with sledgehammers and inspired terror in the Russian elite. He has stood up for Alexey Moskalev, the father who was handed a two-year jail term for his 12-year-old daughter’s anti-war drawing. He speaks with respect about Volodymyr Zelensky—a leader whom top Russian officials will refer to only as a “needle freak” or “Ukronazi.” He mocks officials and parliamentarians who urge nuclear strikes on Ukraine.

The irony is profound: A ruthless warlord, who in Soviet times spent years in prison for street robberies and violence, has somehow styled himself as a voice of common sense against an official Russian war narrative that is so grotesque in its hatred that it resembles B-movie villainy. Prigozhin’s common sense is heavily mixed with prison slang and outward aggression, however. Just this week, a member of Parliament noted that the Wagner Group is illegal under Russian law, and Prigozhin’s social networks responded with a video in which Wagner members threaten to come to Moscow’s Red Square and “fuck him and those like him in the ass.”  

[Tom Nichols: The case for increasing aid to Ukraine]

Prigozhin’s popularity is hard to measure, given Russia’s heavily censored commons. But his rise to prominence as a public figure tracks with a growing understanding that Putin’s war with Ukraine has failed and, to an even greater degree, that the military command has proved impotent. That deficiency is now common knowledge across the Russian elite. The retreat from Kherson last fall—led by General Sergei Surovikin, who was dismissed as the head of the military operation afterward and whom Prigozhin treats with meaningful respect—was the war’s only successful military operation, to the extent that it was thoroughly organized and most of the troops and weaponry were preserved.

Putin favors loyalty over achievement. He never wanted his war in Ukraine to produce war heroes; he reserves that status for himself. But now Prigozhin is filling the gap, styling himself as the “people’s commander”: a good soldier, open and straightforward, who has the courage to tell it like it is while the self-indulgent commanders chill in luxury mansions and posh restaurants in Moscow. In one of his latest videos from Bakhmut, Prigozhin is shown addressing his soldiers: “Okay, guys, let’s hope we will finish off these bureaucrats. Our enemy is not the Ukrainian military, but a Russian bureaucrat.”

Defeat is an orphan. The worse the situation at the front, the more appealing Prigozhin’s message becomes to Russians. The question is: Why does Putin allow it? Why does he tolerate a paramilitary warlord exposing the blunders of his military campaign and feeding off the failures of his generals?  

One reason may be practical: Prigozhin’s troops have proved their military efficiency, and they are still needed on the battlefield. Another could be personal. Putin has relied on Prigozhin’s assistance and advice on sensitive matters for a long time, and he has developed a habit of trusting him. Last October, The Washington Post reported that Prigozhin criticized the military command in direct conversation with Putin. One cannot conceive of anyone else allowed in Putin’s chambers who would dare to tell the Russian leader at least some part of the truth about the war.

No trust is indestructible, however. The latest U.S. intelligence leaks suggest that Prigozhin has contacted the Ukrainian intelligence directorate and offered to reveal Russian-troop positions in exchange for a Ukrainian withdrawal from Bakhmut. Will Putin now cast Prigozhin as a traitor and destroy him?

Not necessarily: He can treat the back-channel diplomacy as a legitimate activity. He could even be convinced that Prigozhin was luring the Ukrainians into a trap. Still, Prigozhin is playing with fire. Putin might well tolerate Prigozhin’s attacks on the military command, but as soon as he considers them an assault on the state itself, he will crush him.

Russian forces strike at Kyiv again, while Wagner's leader said Ukrainian forces won't be able to take Bakhmut in the next two days.

Pashinian announced that he had accepted Russia's offer to hold a trilateral meeting with President Putin and President Ilham Aliyev in the Russian capital amid tensions over the Nagorno-Karabakh region.

The Institute for the Study of War says Ukrainian forces have seized the 'tactical initiative' in Bakhmut.

The group aims to close off evasion loopholes, reduce the reliance on Russian energy and keep key assets frozen until the war is halted.

This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.

Republican lawmakers in several states have begun the process of rolling back tenure at their public institutions of higher education on the grounds that no one should have a lifetime job. And yet, many national conservatives seem determined to defend Justice Clarence Thomas on those very grounds.

First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:

The only career advice you’ll ever need Why so many conservatives feel like losers The most jarring—and revealing—moment from Trump’s CNN town hall Something weird is going on with Melatonin. Dancing Bears

Conservatives, in general, hate the idea of academic tenure. I say this not only as an impression after 35 years in academia (most of them while I was a Republican), but also because conservative officials are taking concrete action against tenure now in states such as Florida, North Carolina, and Texas. (Republicans have engaged in similar attempts over the past several years in North Dakota, Tennessee, Arkansas, Wisconsin, and several other states.)

Decades ago, when conservatives were more consistent in their views, their position on tenure proceeded from their worship of markets. They argued that no other business would protect employees from the consequences of poor performance or even misconduct with an unbreakable contract. A coherent position, perhaps, but one rife with incorrect assumptions, as I’ll explain below.

Full disclosure: I have been denied tenure twice, and granted tenure twice. I’ve chaired a tenure committee, and been on both sides of the tenure process. Often, it’s not a pretty business, but it is essential to higher education.

With some variations between small colleges and big professional schools, the tenure process mostly looks like this: A new teacher with a Ph.D. holds the rank of assistant professor for three years, at which time they face a contract renewal for another three years. During that next contract, they will “come up for tenure,” an up-or-out decision, much like the cut the U.S. military makes after certain ranks, or when a professional firm makes decisions about partnerships.

The applicant submits a package of accumulated work, and his or her department will also ask senior faculty at other institutions to review the entire file and submit letters with their recommendations. (I have been asked to write such letters myself.) The entire package then gets a recommendation from the department and is sent up to a higher body, drawn from other departments and usually convened by an academic dean. A final recommendation is then sent to the school president. At any point in this process, the candidate’s application can fail.

There are multiple layers of review here, and sure, there are many opportunities for mischief. (A classic move, for example, is for committee members to solicit letters from reviewers they know will either support or torpedo a candidate’s application.) Candidates who succeed become an associate professor; the title of full “professor” comes years later and requires another complete review in most places. After tenure, faculty are insulated from firing for just about anything except gross misconduct or financial exigencies—say, if a department is eliminated or cut back.

But “misconduct” covers a lot of ground, and tenured faculty are far from unfireable. Falsifying research, engaging in sex with with students (at least, at those schools where such relationships are forbidden), nonperformance of duties (like not showing up for class), and criminal behavior can all count. My first tenure contract was with a Catholic school that had a “moral turpitude” clause, which as you could imagine can mean many things.

Tenured faculty, however, cannot be fired for having unorthodox or unpopular views, for being liberals or conservatives, for failing your kid no matter how smart you think Poopsie really is, or for being jerks in general. This is as it should be: Some opinions will always be controversial; some teaching styles rub people the wrong way; some classes are harder than others. There are, to be sure, cases where professors are so wildly offensive that they functionally destroy the classroom environment—but such cases are rare and should be adjudicated by the institution, not by the state.

The alternative to tenure is to keep faculty on short-term contracts and to abandon the important democratic principle of academic freedom. If faculty can be fired—or their contracts quietly “non-renewed”—for any reason, they will self-censor. If they think the students are unhappy, they will pander. If you want faculty who are confident, will say what they think, and will deal honestly with students, tenure is essential. If you want faculty who will become timid clock-punchers, then contracts are the way to go. The contract system eventually grinds down even the most well-intentioned academics, and, as I once warned one of my own institutions, it turns many of them into dancing bears for student and administration applause.

Dancing bears are exactly what today’s Republicans want. Some of the market-oriented GOP attacks on hidebound faculty many years ago had merit; during my career I saw colleges wrestle with that very problem. The current GOP assault on tenure, however, is about culture, not economics or even education. The GOP base doesn’t like that universities are full of liberals, and so Republican elected officials attack higher education for the rush of approval they’ll get, much of it from people who no longer have kids anywhere near college age. As FiveThirtyEight’s Monica Potts noted, there’s a reason that Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed his tenure-review bill in a ceremony at The Villages, Florida’s noted retirement community.

Meanwhile, New York’s Representative Elise Stefanik proudly sponsored a legislative attack on academic freedom, charging that leftism “has pervaded” the State University of New York system and asserting that she was going to do something about it. Elise Stefanik, of course, went to Harvard. But like DeSantis (a graduate of Harvard and Yale), she was going to make sure that the commoners weren’t exposed to any dangerous ideas at the schools reserved for the proles, the rabble whose names are not Elise Stefanik or Ron DeSantis.

Nowhere, however, is the hatred of a guaranteed lifetime job more hypocritical than in the continued right-wing defenses of Justice Clarence Thomas.

The litany of Thomas’s ethical issues is far beyond anything that required poor Abe Fortas to step down from the Supreme Court in 1969. Thomas’s behavior cannot adequately be captured by so gentle a phrase as the appearance of impropriety, the standard set for other U.S. judges. But despite Thomas being utterly insulated from consequences, conservatives deny even that Thomas should face criticism. As Justice Samuel Alito whined recently: “We are being hammered daily, and I think quite unfairly in a lot of instances. And nobody, practically nobody, is defending us.”

(Alito is plenty angry about criticism of the members of his own club, but he seems less concerned about attacks on other government employees—especially far less powerful people such as teachers, election officials, and civil servants. But I digress.)

What’s really going on, of course, is that Republicans have given up on persuading their fellow citizens to support them at the ballot box, and so they’ve decided to get what they want by using a tactic for which they once excoriated the left: appealing to judges who have lifetime appointments. Professors with secure jobs are a threat to the republic, apparently, but judges who can throw the country into turmoil with one poorly reasoned opinion must be defended at all costs.

I support lifetime tenure for federal judges and Supreme Court justices, not least because I do not want them to try to time their judgments against impending deadlines for retirement. But Republicans across the country who are railing against ostensibly unfireable elites on campuses might consider being a bit more consistent about one sitting in regal isolation on First Street in Washington, D.C.

Today’s News The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Google and Twitter in a victory for Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects social-media platforms from liability over content posted by users. An 8-year-old girl died in a detention facility in Texas, as the death toll at the southern border continues to rise. Disney canceled its construction plans for a roughly $1 billion office complex in Orlando. Dispatches Up for Debate: Conor Friedersdorf weighs in on the problem with state bans on gender care.

Explore all of our newsletters here.

Evening Read Photo-illustration by Joanne Imperio / The Atlantic. Sources: Ellen Graham / Getty; Harrington Collection / Getty.

How to Have a Realistic Conversation About Beauty With Your Kids

By Elise Hu

Talking to my three elementary-school-age daughters about beauty can be hard. No matter how much I insist that their looks don’t matter, that their character is what truly counts in life, they don’t believe me. About a year ago, I was tiptoeing down the hallway after tucking my 9- and 6-year-olds into their bunk bed when I overheard the younger one. “Momma says it doesn’t matter if you’re beautiful; it matters if you’re clever,” she said to her sister. The eldest replied, “She only says that because she’s already pretty.”

As I recount in my book, Flawless: Lessons in Looks and Culture From the K-Beauty Capital, that moment stopped me cold. But my children were right to be skeptical of my advice. Study after study confirms that prettiness can be a privilege.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

A flash of recognition in a lonely universe

Ja Morant flunks the common-sense test.

American food will never look natural again.

Here’s how AI will come for your job.

Culture Break Phil Caruso/HBO

Read. Douglas Rushkoff’s Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, which delves into the weird mindset of doomsday preppers.

Watch. HBO’s new limited series White House Plumbers explores the banal oafishness behind the Watergate scandal.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

I wrote a few days ago about the infighting among Russian elites, who are all keen to blame one another for Russia’s miserable military performance. The Ukrainians are soon to launch a counteroffensive, and the reporter Anna Nemtsova wrote today that she’s never seen the Kremlin so rattled. And rightly so: Russian casualties are mind-boggling. By most estimates, in the battle for Bakhmut, 20,000 Russian men have been killed and 80,000 more wounded. One hundred thousand casualties in six months and mostly in the fight for one city is why both the Russian Ministry of Defense and the Wagner Group, the privately run army of mercenaries, are now populating their ranks with men dredged out of Russia’s prisons.

Life inside Russia’s prisons is a mystery to most Westerners, but it is actually a very structured hierarchy, based on rules and castes. I want to point readers toward this excellent explainer on Russian prison culture, and why that culture all but guarantees that the prisoners would be an almost ungovernable military force. The decision to use convicted criminals might seem, to Westerners, a sign of brutal resolve, but it was an extreme, even strategically insane move that has hurt Russian operations more than it helped—and produced few advances but plenty of Russian corpses.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.