When you collect statues of Lenin, Harlan Crow told me, “you get to be a bit of a snob.” The first Lenin I had seen that morning was a brass likeness in the entryway to Crow’s Dallas mansion—a house that capitalism built, if ever there was one. Lenin was in his Finland Station pose, but with his head replaced by Mickey Mouse’s. Crow’s office had at least one more Lenin. Now we were outside, pelted by rain in Crow’s Garden of Evil, admiring the fourth in a series of Lenins, an 18-footer harvested from western Ukraine. “There’s so many statues of Lenin,” Crow said, educating me on dictator-statue appreciation the way another rich guy might introduce a friend to the world of fine wine. Having a good story was crucial. “You don’t want a Lenin From Factory 107. You want Politburo.”

The many Lenins joined dozens of other petrified tyrants and world leaders, among them Communist revolutionaries (Ho Chi Minh, Mao Zedong, Che Guevara), a few secular autocrats (Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak), and a few hunched babushkas, in remembrance of communism’s victims. “Most are Communist,” Crow said, but he acknowledged that he hadn’t sorted the statues perfectly according to gradations of evil. Some had been moved years ago, not because of a historical reevaluation but during renovations when he built a batting cage for his kids, who are now grown. When they were little, he said, “the kids used to be scared of them.”

The garden is really a mishmash of 20th-century evil, evil-lite, and a few of Crow’s heroes (in the last category: Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Winston Churchill). “I have a number of people who are [just] dictators, like Pinochet and Juan Perón,” Crow said. “You can argue about Juan Perón, whether he was a force for good or a force for bad … You can argue about Mubarak.” He noted that Yugoslav President Josip Tito was preferable to Stalin, and Zhou Enlai (“one of my favorites”) was a big step up from Chairman Mao. “There are probably a few more guys in storage that I’ll eventually put out,” he said. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk: “Probably more for good than bad,” he said. “But it’s complicated.”

Last month, Crow’s eccentric hobby became a side drama in a broader scandal over his friendship and financial relationship with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. Critics of that relationship drew attention to Crow’s garden statues as well as a small hoard of Third Reich memorabilia inside Crow’s enormous home library and museum. He owns a signed Mein Kampf, paintings by Hitler, and (reportedly) a Third Reich–era tea service. Crow said he hadn’t felt the need to sort the interior collection by level of evil, either. In the garden, he said, “I like these guys”—he motioned to Thatcher and Reagan, then to Che Guevara and Fidel Castro—“and I don’t like those guys. In my world, that’s blindingly obvious … But one thing I have learned from this is that I must not assume that things are obvious.”

“This is my era. I was born in 1949,” Crow said. “Communism was the great threat to the world.” The choice between capitalism and communism, freedom and serfdom, was a “big philosophical argument.” The Greatest Generation, he said, had a dramatic, existential shooting war. The Baby Boomers did not (“thankfully,” he added). “In my lifetime and your parents’ lifetime … we didn’t have the Battle of the Bulge or the storming of the beaches of Normandy.” But the big argument was worth memorializing. “I want us to remember it. I want us to learn from it,” he said. “And it’s pretty damn important that we remember it.”

“Sometimes I wonder if I should just get rid of it all,” he said. He knows that strangers have doubts about him, and about anyone who associates with him. “I’m not looking to be odd.” But the oddness was a colorful part of the case against his friend Thomas. “If you said, ‘Are you glad you did this?’ I would say, ‘I’m not sure.’”

Koba at rest. (Photograph by Bill McCullough for The Atlantic)

When the twin Thomas and Third Reich scandals broke, I wrote that Crow is not a Nazi, and that to smear him as one is an offense against victims of actual Nazis, and against Crow himself. A week later, a public-relations firm representing Crow wrote to me to offer their client for an interview. When we met, Crow said he had read my article when it came out, and that very morning had reread the first couple of paragraphs, before hitting the Atlantic paywall. Even to be defended from this charge, he said, stung. “‘Harlan Crow Is Not a Nazi,’” he paraphrased the headline. “A bit too much like ‘Good News! Harlan Crow Stopped Beating His Wife.’”

Crow made clear that his preference would be not to talk at all about the current scandal—which had made him introspective about his relationship to politics, if not repentant. “My hope is that this is the last conversation I have on this topic in public,” he said. “I’m not the private person I was. I’m sad about that, but there’s nothing I can do. I just still kind of hope that it’ll all fade from memory, and I can go back to being just an old guy.”

[Graeme Wood: Clarence Thomas’s billionaire friend is no Nazi]

He surely knows deep down that the desire to be “just an old guy” is somewhere between delusional and a forlorn dream. Crow is not even a normal old ultrarich guy.

His statue garden and in-home museum are nothing compared with the living friends and politicians he has collected: ex-presidents (George W. Bush and the late Gerald Ford are especially beloved), scholars and writers (Charles Murray, David Brooks), and foreign dignitaries (the socialist British Prime Minister James Callaghan was an early guest on his yacht, on a cruise with Ford up the Dnipro River to Kyiv in the 1990s). His patronage of the American Enterprise Institute—to name just one of the venerable conservative institutions that take his money—has placed him near the center of the conservative movement for decades.

And his relationship with Thomas is irregular to the point of suspicion. ProPublica’s investigation revealed that Thomas accepted various goodies from Crow, including luxury vacations on Crow’s yacht and jet, private tuition for Thomas’s grand-nephew, and a real-estate deal with fishy particulars. Crow bought a house owned by Thomas. Thomas’s mother lives there rent-free. Thomas’s failure to report these gifts and transactions has led to accusations that the most conservative justice on the Supreme Court votes according to the wishes of his wealthy friend, a prolific donor to right-leaning political candidates and think tanks. Even if Thomas votes autonomously, they say, for the sake of transparency and the Court’s integrity, he should have reported the gifts, hospitality, and transactions.

Rules and norms apply to justices with integrity and to justices without it, to free the former from suspicion and to expose the latter. Thomas has resisted these rules more aggressively than any other justice. His critics have enjoyed a feast of cynicism at his expense. “We should all have friends like Clarence Thomas’s,” Eric Levitz of New York magazine wrote. At Slate, Dahlia Lithwick and Lisa Graves described this behavior as “stunning” and “astonishing,” because of the “appearance of impropriety,” and because even if Crow has no business before the Court, he certainly knows people who do, and he supports think tanks that have submitted amicus briefs. (Although I agree that the transparency standard for justices should be a full monty—nothing less than total disclosure of financial arrangements—the accusation of corruption is different. Justices with connections to Harvard or its myriad donors, supporters, and alumni are not automatically corrupted by these connections. And Harvard, unlike Crow’s think tanks, is a respondent in the most prominent case currently pending before the Court.)

But even if justices are bound by strict rules, their unbound friends are still subject to speculation, reasonable and unreasonable, about the nature of their relationship to those in power. Crow is like most people, in that he feels he has acted with the purest and most honorable intentions. He is unlike many, though, in thinking that the world should take his word for it—and that if it does not, that’s the world’s fault, and not his.

“I probably have more influence than the ordinary Joe,” Crow told me. “But I still don’t think of myself as a center of influence. I think of myself as a real-estate guy that lives in Texas.”

One common feature of the rich and powerful is that they do not feel rich and powerful. Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia, who is an absolute monarch, told me he couldn’t just rule by fiat. He listed all the ways in which he was constrained by history, by family, by tribal interests. Last month Joe Biden told a group of visitors to the White House that “the one thing I thought when I got to be president, I’d get to give orders. But I take more orders than I ever did.”

With Crow, the psychology is similar. The liberal world thinks he orchestrates a vast right-wing conspiracy, because he is in fact surrounded by huge numbers of influential people, some who want his money and access to power, and some who are just friends. But Crow kept insisting that he has little power over the American political scene. Even with his fantastic wealth, he was incapable of preventing the rise of the politicians he most abhors, in particular Donald Trump.

And although he often says he wants to go back to being just a normal guy, it is not obvious that a man is normal when he is standing with you in his house next to a life-size mannequin of Winston Churchill and makes no comment about it until prompted. In the one-minute walk to his home office we passed perhaps a hundred objects—paintings, death masks, statues, swords, and other curios—whose presence in any normal guy’s home would have merited a proud explanation. He said he stopped giving tours long ago, after realizing that “most people just want to see a rich man’s house.” Crow happily acted as docent on request, but on our first pass through the collection, the only object that he flagged for special interest was a small ziggurat of foil-wrapped breakfast burritos and a tray of doughnuts, to which The Atlantic’s photographer and I were welcome.

Clarence Thomas and his family “have been dear friends for almost 30 years,” Crow said, denying that their friendship was political in any way. “It’s an ironic friendship, in the sense that I came from a world of silver spoons, and he came from a very difficult upbringing.” (Crow’s father, Trammell, who died in 2009, was at one point described in the press as the largest private landowner in the United States. Thomas did not see an indoor toilet until late in childhood.) Crow has taken Thomas on his yacht in Indonesia; he has hosted him at his resort in the Adirondacks.

I asked if he ever talked about law with Thomas. “I have never, nor would I ever, think about talking about matters that relate to the judiciary with Justice Clarence Thomas,” Crow said. He added that they “talk about the kind of things friends talk about,” such as weather and sports. In an email, he told me that “it’s not like we haven’t talked about work-related issues,” but that those conversations were casual and unrelated to jurisprudence. “It’s not realistic [for] two people [to] be friends and not talk about their jobs from time to time.” Thomas has spoken to him of his fondness for his clerks, or about bumping into Justice Stephen Breyer at Target. But Crow wrote that “it would be wrong” for him to talk about Court cases. “From my point of view, that is off limits. He and I don’t go there.”

[Adam Serwer: Clarence Thomas is winning his war on transparency]

Crow said he wasn’t a “law guy” and professed ignorance about any details of constitutional law. (The closest Crow has come to a Supreme Court case was in the early 2000s, when an architecture firm asked the Court to adjudicate a dispute with a firm in which Crow had a minority interest. The Court declined to hear the case.) “It would be absurd to me to talk to Justice Thomas about Supreme Court cases, because that’s not my world,” he told me at his house. “I could probably name maybe five or six cases. Brown v. Board of Education. Marbury v. Madison.” He thought for a bit and stopped at two. “We talk about life. We’re two guys who are the same age and grew up in the same era. We share a love of Motown.”

Harlan Crow at Old Parkland Campus in Dallas, Texas (Photograph by Bill McCullough for The Atlantic)

He wanted to be normal, he said. But I noted that Thomas is not a normal friend, and friendships with Supreme Court justices are laden with responsibilities that normal friendships are not. Singing Diana Ross together on the deck of a yacht in Bali would be wholesome fun with a non-justice. But with Thomas it raised all sorts of issues. Between choruses of “Baby Love,” did Thomas wonder whether his next trip to Bali depended on his continuing to vote a certain way? What guarantee did Americans have that their friendship transcended such doubts?

“I’m not trying to say I’m this moral paragon, because I’m not. I’m just a guy that made lots of mistakes in my life,” Crow said. “But I do believe that I’m on the right side of right, morally and legally.” He said that it was “kind of weird to think that if you’re a justice on the Supreme Court, you can’t have friends. That’s not healthy. Should I have changed my life in order to have these friends? Or should I behave differently around them because of who they are?” He said if the billionaire and patron of leftist causes George Soros were hunting buddies with the chair of the Federal Reserve, he would not particularly care. “If they are genuine friends and people of good character”—he said his friends’ interactions with Soros suggest that he is—“I don’t think it’s up to me to decide.”

“I’m not saying you’re wrong with your questions,” Crow told me. He recognized that character is “one of those highly subjective things.” But ultimately it is all that matters. “And I believe Justice Thomas to be a person of the highest character.”

For Crow, much hinged on this question of “good character.” In discussion of politicians, he often defaulted, in a way I found almost inspiringly optimistic, to analyzing them not by their policies but by their integrity. Integrity, he seemed to think, would isolate a politician or judge from influence, and would naturally incline that person toward a moderate, decent position. We discussed his nostalgia for a “good America,” whose politics existed on the spectrum between Reagan and Roosevelt, or better yet, between Romney and Obama (“an honorable man”), with his personal preference toward the Romney side. Thomas, he said, is “one of the most amazing and admirable people I know,” and it was as blindingly obvious that Thomas would not sell his soul for a series of vacations as it was that Harlan Crow was not a supporter of Adolf Hitler.

Moreover, the hospitality he offered to Thomas was not unusual. “For a long time, I’ve lived a certain lifestyle,” Crow said, sounding like he was about to confess to a kink. But the lifestyle he described was simply that of an extremely wealthy guy who likes to travel and host friends on holidays. “I’ve been successful. I have lived a comfortable life. I have a really big house,” he said. At his home in the Adirondacks, he said, a typical summer means 150 guests—work associates, parents of his children’s friends, a few wonks and political types. His yacht, too, is best understood as a floating extension of his hospitality. The only reason to have a yacht, he said, is to go places where one cannot go any other way—hopping around guano islands in the South Pacific, visiting the grave of a favorite Antarctic explorer on a tundra island in the South Atlantic, following the Northwest Passage. He likes to fill the staterooms with guests, both when he’s aboard and when he’s elsewhere.

“That’s the life I’ve lived. I don’t think there’s anything bad about it,” Crow said. He sees no reason to exclude Thomas from it. “I didn’t want to change my life.”

The ado over Thomas’s mother’s house seemed to baffle Crow completely. He said he considers Thomas’s rise “the kind of American story you dream about,” and he’d donated money in Thomas’s hometown of Savannah, Georgia, that would memorialize both his bootstrapped success and the Gullah-Geechee culture that produced him. Crow sent money to the Carnegie Library there; he bought the dilapidated former cannery where Thomas’s mother had worked (and gave the former owners a “life estate”—the right to remain living there until their deaths).

He said he’d had dinner at Thomas’s mother’s house “several times.” “She was a great cook, and probably still is at 94.” He’d asked Thomas if he could buy the house, at fair market value, and develop the area with the aim of eventually opening the house to the public to “honor” him. “I’m a real-estate guy,” Crow added modestly, and he figured that the neighborhood would improve if he bought and razed the drug dens and brothel on the same block, then sold the lots on the condition that the buyers build new houses. Thomas’s mother received a life estate as part of the transaction, which he said was “very common” in real-estate deals involving the elderly, and an “insignificant” expense in comparison to the cost of the deal as a whole.

“One day, I walked down that street with Justice Thomas, and there were mixed-race families living in the neighborhood,” he said. “The brothel and the crack houses were gone. There were kids riding bikes in the streets, families planning and working in their gardens. It was a neighborhood. And I’m very proud of that.”

Surely, I suggested, he could have structured the deal in a way that would not have involved writing a personal check to a Supreme Court justice. Create a foundation for public education, put impartial trustees on its board, and let it buy the house. Crow said he had done many deals in his life, and every one could, in retrospect, have been done a little better. This one wasn’t even a bad one, let alone corrupt. “It was a fair-market transaction, and I had a purpose,” Crow said. “I don’t see the foot fault.” But the idea that he had secretly corrupted his friend left him aghast. (I asked him whether he had any other financial relationships with Thomas or anyone related to Thomas, and he declined to answer, saying he doesn’t keep track of the hospitality extended to friends.)

[Brooke Harrington: Mob justice]

Crow is aware that being denounced in the press is an occupational hazard of being absurdly rich, and that one of the unwritten rules of the billionaire life is that one must not complain about being a billionaire. (As Anthony Hopkins said, playing a billionaire in The Edge: “Never feel sorry for a man who owns a plane.”) But Crow certainly feels embattled. “If I go out and help an old lady across the street this afternoon, there’ll be something written about my diabolical purpose and evil intent.”

Crow’s sensibility is bound in the local culture of Dallas. I grew up there and recognized it instantly. It is not familiar to most Americans. Austin is proud of its bumper sticker KEEP AUSTIN WEIRD. But Dallas’s weirdness is so deep that it perpetuates itself unintentionally, without noticing it. An auto-insurance agent specifies on his sign that he is named Ross but prefers to be addressed as “Pistol.” At the most famous historic site, you can have a picnic and watch tourists drive by and mimic the way John F. Kennedy’s head jerked “back and to the left” as it exploded. Crow has statues of fallen dictators in his yard, and those baffle outsiders. But I remember that Goff’s, the burger joint down the street from my house, had a statue of Lenin out front, salvaged in the 1990s from an Odesa, Ukraine, crane factory and outfitted with a plaque that said AMERICA WON. It was all very Dallas, and even without the plaque everyone would have known that its owner planted it there to mock rather than revere the Soviet Union, much as a high-school student might steal and display his crosstown rival’s mascot.

Heroes (Photographs by Bill McCullough for The Atlantic)

Crow’s emphasis on integrity is also vintage Dallas. Dallas’s citizens may not have more integrity than anyone else, but they surely do talk about it more. A classicist friend told me he was asked to translate a Dallas family’s made-up motto, “Do the right thing,” into Latin. (His suggestion, Fac Rectum, was not accepted.) Dallas is an honor society, like much of the South. And it is no surprise that a wealthy Dallasite who aspires to be a good citizen would revile the politician who more than any other has obliterated the idea that integrity is a requirement for office.

The figure of Donald Trump looms over conversations with Crow, perhaps especially when his name hasn’t been uttered for some time. Crow’s loathing for Trump and Trumpian politics is well known. “Countries don’t survive forever,” he told me, and he thought “reasonably small groups” on the right and left in America were sowing discord. Without Trump, he said, “we wouldn’t have gone as nuts on the right as we have.” He said he had proudly self-diagnosed himself with “Trump derangement syndrome” and preferred not to sidetrack our conversation about Thomas by going on an “anti-Trump jihad,” although he was tempted to do so. He was morose and reluctant for much of our conversation but lit up when he noted how the country had “repudiated” extremists of the right and left in the 2022 elections. The extremists of the right were the Trumpists. “I don’t think the left has a Trump equivalent,” Crow wrote to me later. “Thank God.” But he does consider the “progressive wing of the Democrat party” extreme, and he said he wished it had even less power than it does.

Crow describes himself as “center right,” and he deviates from the Republican Party not only in his refusal to genuflect to Trump but also in other ways, such as his support for legal access to abortion. He is a backer of the No Labels movement, which is a quixotic—some say foolhardy—attempt to vanquish extremists by fielding a presidential ticket across party lines. He spends a great deal of energy cultivating politicians who might be bipartisan-curious. (I told him I wondered if that sort of grooming by rich donors had empowered Trump in the first place. Many voters don’t want their politics determined through backroom dealing. He acknowledged that he did not understand reactionary politics, and he committed himself to listening more to the views of those enraged by the power of people like him.)

But for Trump himself, his distaste is permanent and unalterable. Part of this animus comes from the stunning 2016 repudiation of Crow’s political causes, into which he has poured millions. But the animus is even deeper, I suspect. Crow’s view of politics, and the viability of his argument that a rich man and a Supreme Court justice can just be friends with yachting benefits, depends on voters’ and elites’ voting out people of bad character. “Trump is a man without any principles at all,” Crow wrote in an email. “Bernie Sanders has principles; I just think they’re wrong. Trump doesn’t have any.”

In superficial ways, the two men are similar. Like Trump, Crow is a real-estate developer with political interests and assets that require the use of scientific notation to estimate. Both men grew up rich, then took over his father’s empire. In almost every other respect, they are total opposites. Trump cratered the empire he inherited, while investing in the sleaziest possible ventures; under Crow’s stewardship, the family fortune increased. Crow is appalled at the accusation that he used a shady real-estate deal to funnel money to a crony—which is, frankly, the kind of thing Trump would do. Trump commands attention and bellows; Crow speaks in a reluctant mumble. Trump inflates his net worth; Crow does not. Trump contemplates pulling out of NATO. Crow says he has no time for any politician who wavers in supporting Ukraine. (“The Ukrainians’ courage is unique in recent history,” he wrote to me. “I believe they’ve earned the right to their own independence.”) Crow begs to be assessed on whether he is a person of “good character.” Not even Trump’s most loyal fans could keep a straight face if their leader asked the same.

And then there is the matter of the two men’s hobbies. The poet Clive James once observed that wealth and culture do not go together. As a rule, he said, “the bigger the yacht, the smaller the library.” Crow’s yacht, the Michaela Rose, could sleep every Supreme Court justice and still have room for Crow and the solicitor general. His library, which is a wing of his home, is not correspondingly small. It would be a jewel in the collection of any Ivy League school. He opens it more than 100 times a year for events and visits from schoolchildren and researchers.

Does Trump own any books? I browsed randomly on a few shelves in Crow’s library and found an early edition of Montesquieu’s L’esprit des Lois. Crow has a full-time archivist and librarian. At one point I asked Crow if he had in fact collected the signatures of every Supreme Court justice in American history. He paused, opened a small side door, and poked his head in to confirm with the librarian that the collection was complete. The librarian, who presumably sits there all day just waiting for such an inquiry, said they still lacked signatures from a handful of recent justices. (“Thanks!” Crow said, before closing the door.)

It is impossible to imagine Trump sailing for days in howling austral winds to reach the grave of Ernest Shackleton on South Georgia Island. Trump has no known friendships with Supreme Court justices, or indeed any friendships, period. Crow has many friends, and many acquaintances who have been his guests. One of his problems after the ProPublica exposé was that many possible character witnesses in his defense had been disqualified due to having accepted Crow’s hospitality. This includes Atlantic contributors who are employed, or have been employed, by think tanks he and his wife, Kathy, have funded, among them Arthur C. Brooks, a former president of the American Enterprise Institute, and Reihan Salam, the president of the Manhattan Institute as well as those who have dined or stayed at his homes, including the Atlantic contributing writer and New York Times columnist David Brooks.

Crow stands in his library. (Photograph by Bill McCullough for The Atlantic)

“What about the Hitler paintings?” I asked before leaving. He must have known the question was coming, but he took five full seconds before he gathered the courage to answer. “They’re put away,” he said.

“Permanently?”

He didn’t answer directly. He recalled a 2015 incident when he planned a fundraiser for Marco Rubio, and Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz called his display of Hitler’s paintings “the height of insensitivity and indifference.” “So I took them down, and I put them in storage,” he said. But he sees nothing inherently wrong with displaying them. “Three World War II leaders—Churchill, Eisenhower, and Hitler— all being artists is in itself an interesting story,” he told me. “And I think it would be reasonable at some point to show pictures of all three of them together … But in the current environment, I’m going to say permanently—until I change my mind.”

He said he understood that certain objects mean different things to different people, and even though it was obvious to him that Nazis were bad, others might misread his intentions. “In a sensible world, people would be interested in things like that. But right now we’re not there,” he said. And the outrage over his Hitler paintings had shown him that he should consider how others feel. (This willingness to consider others’ feelings is itself a sign of his anti-Trumpishness.) “The idea that I might offend somebody, particularly somebody I care about, one of my friends, with this stuff—that hurts. I would never want to do that.”

“How about Hitler’s teapot and table linens?”

“Oh, they’re still upstairs,” he said. He admitted that Kathy had urged him to just put them away. “I’ve felt that right now it would be kind of deceptive to do that.” He said I could see the items but could not take photos.

We walked to a small room, away from the main floor of the library. “Kind of a catchall,” he said—a room with random items that didn’t fit elsewhere in his collection. Here was a sword owned by Douglas MacArthur, and another by a Japanese general present at the surrender. Then he turned, looking tense, to a display case with a rectangular leather cover, and opened it up, expecting to reveal the Nazi tableware within.

The case was empty, except for a sign that read NOT TO COMMEMORATE, BUT TO REMEMBER, IN HOPES THAT IT MAY NEVER HAPPEN AGAIN.

It was an awkward moment, and he seemed agitated at having misled me, even in this bizarre manner. “What I just said to you was wrong,” he said. “Somebody did something I didn’t know about.” He checked elsewhere in the room and found another empty case. “I didn’t know that. I’m not happy about it … I apologize.”

Crow looked ruffled. Even weirder than having Nazi memorabilia in your house is having it in your house but somehow losing track of it.

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.

Question of the Week

Today I invite emails debating any of the following subjects: war, civil liberties, emerging science, demographic change, corporate power, or natural resources. Read on for more context.

Send your responses to conor@theatlantic.com or simply reply to this email.

Conversations of Note

After the television host Tucker Carlson was fired by Fox News, he posted a video message to Twitter that quickly went viral. In it, he noted that, in his newfound “time off” he has observed that “most of the debates you see on television” are so stupid and irrelevant that, in five years, we won’t even remember we had them. “Trust me, as someone who's participated,” he added, which squares with my impression of his show––an assessment I feel comfortable making only because I have carefully documented its shoddy reasoning.

But then Carlson added: “The undeniably big topics, the ones that will define our future, get virtually no discussion at all. War. Civil liberties. Emerging science. Demographic change. Corporate power. Natural resources. When was the last time you heard a legitimate debate about any of those issues? It’s been a long time. Debates like that are not permitted in American media.” I disagree, and not just because I intend to air your perspectives on those very subjects.

Last March, this newsletter invited debate about the war in Ukraine and ran your responses. On the whole, The Atlantic––and most of the mainstream media––has published a lot more total articles from people who are supportive of Western aid for Ukraine, as I am, than contrary perspectives. But as you can see, this newsletter has made it a point to highlight the smartest writing I could find from different perspectives. If you look, you can find additional examples of contrasting perspectives from across the U.S. media: in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Nation, National Review, Vox, and beyond. There are all sorts of plausible critiques of the way the American news media has covered Ukraine. But “debate is not permitted” is demonstrably false.

On civil liberties, which I’ve championed on scores of occasions in The Atlantic, the notion that debate isn’t permitted is likewise preposterous. Few issues are debated more than the parameters of free speech, abortion rights, gun rights, transgender rights, pandemic rights and restrictions, and more. “Emerging science” is a bit vague, but surely debates about mRNA-vaccine mandates and artificial intelligence count. The Atlantic has repeatedly published entries in ongoing debates about demographic change. I understand corporate power to be a perennial topic of debate in journalistic organizations. As for natural resources, I’ve recently read about subjects including climate change, gas stoves, Colorado River water supply, oil drilling and pipelines, and plastics pollution.

Again, there are all sorts of critiques of the media that are plausible, on those subjects and others, but the particular critique that Carlson actually prepared and uttered is demonstrably false, so I find it strange that so many people reacted to it by treating Carlson as if he is a truth-teller. Lots of people in the American media work much harder at avoiding the utterance of falsehoods.

How to Mark May 1?

The law professor Ilya Somin commemorates it every year in a highly nontraditional fashion, arguing that we all ought to treat the traditional workers holiday as Victims of Communism Day.

Here’s his case:

Since 2007, I have advocated using this date as an international Victims of Communism Day. I outlined the rationale for this proposal (which was not my original idea) in my very first post on the subject: May Day began as a holiday for socialists and labor union activists, not just communists. But over time, the date was taken over by the Soviet Union and other communist regimes and used as a propaganda tool to prop up their [authority]. I suggest that we instead use it as a day to commemorate those regimes' millions of victims. The authoritative Black Book of Communism estimates the total at 80 to 100 million dead, greater than that caused by all other twentieth century tyrannies combined. We appropriately have a Holocaust Memorial Day. It is equally appropriate to commemorate the victims of the twentieth century’s other great totalitarian tyranny. And May Day is the most fitting day to do so …

Our comparative neglect of communist crimes has serious costs. Victims of Communism Day can serve the dual purpose of appropriately commemorating the millions of victims, and diminishing the likelihood that such atrocities will recur. Just as Holocaust Memorial Day and other similar events promote awareness of the dangers of racism, anti-Semitism, and radical nationalism, so Victims of Communism Day can increase awareness of the dangers of left-wing forms of totalitarianism, and government domination of the economy and civil society.

Meanwhile, at the World Socialist Web Site, David North published the speech he gave to open the International May Day Online Rally. His remarks included provocative statements about the war in Ukraine:

The present war in Ukraine and the escalating conflict with China are the manifestations, though on a much more advanced and complex level, of the global contradictions analyzed by Lenin more than a century ago. Far from being the sudden and unexpected outcome of Putin’s “unprovoked” invasion—as if the expansion of NATO 800 miles eastward since 1991 did not constitute a provocation against Russia—the war in Ukraine is the continuation and escalation of 30 years of continuous war waged by the United States. The essential aim of the unending series of conflicts has been to offset the protracted economic decline of US imperialism and to secure its global hegemony through military conquest.

In 1934, Leon Trotsky wrote that while German imperialism sought to “organize Europe,” it was the ambition of US imperialism to “organize the world.” Using language that seemed intended to confirm Trotsky’s analysis, Joe Biden, then a candidate for the presidency, wrote in April 2020: “The Biden foreign policy will place the United States back at the head of the table … the world does not organize itself.” But the United States confronts a world that does not necessarily want to be organized by the United States. The role of the dollar as the world reserve currency, the financial underpinning of American geo-political supremacy, is being increasingly challenged. The growing role of China as an economic and military competitor is viewed by Washington as an existential threat to American dominance.

Imperialism is objectionable but to me that premise leads to a starkly different conclusion: that the imperial ambitions of Russia and China ought to be resisted and that insofar as NATO or the United States helps Ukraine or Taiwan, we are reducing the likelihood of imperial conquest, not engaging in it.

More to Come on Trans Issues

Another batch of responses from readers should be coming soon. (If you missed the first batch, they’re here.) In the meantime, here’s a question from the Up for Debate reader Paul, who writes:

I have come to understand and accept that the concept of “gender” is largely a social construct, is not synonymous with “sex,” and indeed is not dependent upon or related to sex in any objective way. This notion—that gender and sex are independent attributes—is, I think, one of the ideas that is fundamental to understanding and accepting transgender people. For many young people, this idea seems simple and self-evident. Yet, for anyone who has lived any length of time in a culture where, for centuries, these two words held virtually identical meanings, separating them can be a real struggle.

It is with that thought in mind—the acceptance of the fundamental difference between gender and sex—that I approach the issue of transgender people participating in competitive sport with the following sincere question: Are sports competitions divided by gender or are they divided by sex? If sports are divided by sex, then it follows logically that gender should have nothing to do with the discussion. That is, it follows that transgender people should only participate in sports along with those of their same birth sex. On the other hand, if sports participation is divided along gender lines, then everyone of the same gender (obviously, by definition this must include transgender people) should be invited to participate, regardless of sex. Is there more evidence that sports are arranged as a competition between those of the same sex, or those of the same gender?

Provocation of the Week

At Hold That Thought, Sarah Haider writes that for a long time, she assumed that “with no material incentives in one direction or another, people will think more freely. A world in which no one has to worry about where their paycheck will come will be a world in which people are more likely to be courageous, and tell the truth more openly. And of course, it is obvious how financial incentives can distort truth-telling. This is, of course, the justification for academic tenure.”

Now she wonders if tenure may actually pave the way for more conformity. She explains:

First and foremost, it is not the case that free people will necessarily speak truthfully. No matter the romantic notions we like to hold about ourselves, humans do not deeply desire to “speak the truth”. There are more beautiful things to say, things that make us feel good about ourselves and our respective tribes, things that grant us hope and moral strength and personal significance—truth, meanwhile, is insufferably inconvenient, occasionally ugly, and insensitive to our feelings. But lies, by their very nature, can be as beautiful and emotionally satisfying as our imaginations will allow them.

Unfortunately, some degree of fidelity to reality is often required to prosper, and so occasionally we must choose truth. But that degree is dependent on our environments: lies are a luxury which some can afford more than others. Material freedom isn’t just the freedom to tell the truth, it is the freedom to tell lies and get away with it. As I’ve noted before, the lack of economic pressures can clear the way for independent thinking, but they can also remove crucial “skin in the game” that might keep one tethered to reality.

I suspect that on the whole, tenure might simply make more room for social pressures to pull with fewer impediments. If keeping your job is no longer a concern, you will not be “concern-free”. Your mind will be more occupied instead by luxury concerns, like winning and maintaining the esteem of your peers. (And in fact, we do see this playing out at universities. Professors are more protected from the pressures of the outside world due to tenure, yet they are uniquely subservient to the politics within their local university environment.) …

Academics actively shape their own environments. They grant students their doctorates, they help hire other faculty, they elect their department chairs. When an idea becomes prominent in academia, the structure of the environment selects for more of the same … When you are forced to coexist with the enemy, you develop norms which allow both parties to function with as much freedom and fairness as possible. Ideologically mixed groups will, in other words, tend to emphasize objective process because they do not agree on ends. This environment is fairly conducive to the pursuit of truth.

More uniform groups, on the other hand, will tend to abandon process—rushing instead towards the end they are predisposed to believe is true and willing to use dubious means to get there. This creates a hostile environment for dissenting members, and over time, there will be less of them and more uniformity, which will inevitably lead to an even more hostile environment for dissent. When a majority ideology develops, it is likely only to increase in influence, and when it is sufficiently powerful, it can begin competing with reality itself.

I retain hope that tenure does more good than harm but encourage faculty members who enjoy it to exhibit more courage to dissent from any orthodoxies of thought they regard as questionable.

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Two drones struck inside the Kremlin complex early this morning. We don’t know exactly what happened, but the Russian claims of a Ukrainian attack are doubtful. Russia may now have a domestic-terrorist problem—but it’s more likely that Vladimir Putin’s regime is preparing an excuse for a new escalation.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The costs of Brexit are undeniable now. Can you have a fun vacation on Ozempic? How Tom Hanks became Tom Hanks

A Possible False Flag

Here’s what we know: Early this morning, two drones struck inside the Kremlin (which is actually a walled complex that surrounds several government buildings and ancient churches and palaces). The New York Times has verified three videos, two of which appear to show “a drone flying toward and exploding over the Kremlin Senate,” which houses the president’s executive office, and the other showing the dome of the Senate building on fire.

That’s as much as we know. The Russians, of course, are blaming the Ukrainians, and claiming that the strike was an attempt to kill Russian President Vladimir Putin, who at the time was at his compound in the Moscow suburb of Novo-Ogarevo, Russian officials said. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky denied this charge and specifically denied targeting Putin: “We don’t attack Putin or Moscow,” he said during his visit to Finland. “We fight on our territory.”

But who would (or could) launch such an attack? I see four possibilities in ascending order of likelihood—with the caveat that I am drawing on jumbled and partial information, so treat this as a preliminary and tentative list.

First, it is possible that the Ukrainians or some Ukrainian team in Moscow could have used drones. But it is unlikely, because it doesn’t make much sense. An attack on the Kremlin might be an obvious symbolic move, but a demonstrative strike on an empty building at night would be a waste of already strained Ukrainian intelligence resources, and would likely annoy the Americans and NATO in the bargain. (Also, as one former U.S. defense official noted, the Ukrainians are pretty good at tracking Putin, and if reports of the event are accurate, they likely knew he wasn’t in the building.)

A second possibility is that Russian intelligence and military authorities got wind of a plot by some group to strike the Kremlin, and then let it happen as a way to goad Putin into using even more force in Ukraine. My friend Nick Gvosdev, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, reminded me today that Russian spooks are not exactly averse to such cold-blooded moves: In 2002, terrorists took hostages at a theater in downtown Moscow, and he noted that there have been accusations over the years that the intelligence services knew it was coming and yet let it happen, as a means of strengthening possible demands for more power to deal with such events.

Still, this seems like an overly complicated explanation. The Russian army needs more “cannon meat,” to use the Russian expression, but even the Defense Ministry probably realizes that their campaigns to dragoon more men are reaching their limit. The intelligence services have been in hot water ever since they misled Putin about the chances of success in Ukraine, and they might want to use a bomb hitting the Kremlin to press their claims for more resources and power—but they also run the risk that a drone strike in the heart of the city would look like yet more evidence of their incompetence.

It is also possible that the strike on the Kremlin came from Russian dissidents, especially if it was done with some sort of crude, jerry-rigged device. Again, unlikely but not impossible, especially with social anger rising over waves of conscription that were supposed to take place out in the Russian boondocks and never touch Moscow and St. Petersburg. In this case, the intelligence services would have every incentive to blame Kyiv, because the only thing worse for them than failing to stop a hit from a Ukrainian commando team would be an assassination attempt by Russians right under their noses. Russia is already functionally a fascist state, and a plot to bomb the Kremlin and kill the president might well be the spur for the kind of iron-fisted mass repression Putin and his advisers have avoided until now.

But the most disturbing possibility is that this is a Russian government put-up job from start to finish. There are several reasons this makes more sense than other explanations.

First, an attack on the Kremlin would give Putin the rationalization he’s been seeking for some kind of dramatic and murderous action that might not make much military sense, but that would destabilize Ukraine and unsettle the world on the eve of a major Ukrainian counteroffensive. The Russians, I believe, are dreading this coming operation, and want to change the narrative at home and abroad. I have no idea what Putin has up his sleeve, but even on his better days, he is prone to strategically idiotic moves. He might try to drag Belarus into the war, he could make more nuclear threats, or he could even order redoubled efforts to kill Zelensky.

In any case, faking a drone attack would fit into the long-standing Russian affinity for “false flag” operations. Though conspiracy theorists in the United States often trumpet unfounded claims of false flags, professional intelligence services do conduct such operations, and Moscow has been particularly fond of them all the way back to the Soviet period. The series of apartment bombings in Russia in 1999, for example, that became the pretext for escalation in Chechnya, were almost certainly orchestrated by the secret services (a possibility so disturbing that I and other Russia experts were loath to accept it—but which is now, in my view, undeniable). And in the past year, the Russians warned that the Ukrainians were going to unleash a “dirty bomb,” a ludicrous claim that even led China to give the Kremlin some stink eye for playing around with nuclear threats.

This drone strike looks like the same play, only without nuclear materials. A terrorist attack in the capital would be a pretext for the Russians to warn the world that this time, they’re really going to take the gloves off. Ukrainian officials are worried that this is exactly the Russian plan. Mykhailo Podolyak, an adviser to Zelensky, told the BBC that the incident indicated Russia could be "preparing a large-scale terrorist provocation" in Ukraine. That’s a pretty chilling possibility, considering that the Russian campaign plan at this point already consists of indiscriminate war crimes.

"Something is happening” over the skies of the Russian Federation, Podolyak said, “but definitely without Ukraine’s drones over the Kremlin.” At this point, I agree, but we’ll soon know more—and we should brace for what’s coming from Russia’s desperate dictator.

Related:

Cover story: the counteroffensive Incompetence and torture in occupied Ukraine

Today’s News

Francisco Oropeza, the man accused of shooting five people in Texas, was apprehended in Montgomery County. Sources close to the defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News revealed the contents of a text message from Tucker Carlson, which is part of redacted court filings and shows his private views on race, to The New York Times. The discovery of the message by the Fox board of directors reportedly contributed to his firing. Representative Colin Allred, a Dallas-area Democrat, will challenge Ted Cruz for his Senate seat next year.

Dispatches:

The Weekly Planet: Climate change is pumping the air with pollen, Yasmin Tayag writes. It’s a problem even for people who don’t think they’re allergic.

Evening Read

Jelka von Langen for The Atlantic

Among Europe’s Ex-Royals

One peculiarity of European aristocrats is that their names pile up, like snowdrifts. It’s lunchtime in Tirana, the capital of Albania, and I am about to meet Leka Anwar Zog Reza Baudouin Msiziwe Zogu, crown prince of the Albanians.

The Albanian royal residence is easy to miss, tucked away on a quiet side street behind the national art museum. While Buckingham Palace has 775 rooms, including 188 staff bedrooms, 19 staterooms, and 78 bathrooms, the Albanian residence would be among the smaller, more understated houses in a wealthy American suburb. Its front gate opens onto a yard where the country stores its unwanted Soviet statues: Lenin, Stalin, and the Albanian Communist leader Enver Hoxha all gaze with stony fortitude at a generic Stakhanovite maiden. Lenin has no arms. Hoxha’s nose is missing. The gate is guarded by an elderly manservant for whom the term faithful retainer might have been invented. Because I am British, his thinly disguised irritation at my presence makes me feel right at home.

Read the full article.

More From The Atlantic

Biden is making a Trumplike mistake at the border. Do overdoses look different now? Embrace the awkward silence.

Culture Break

Disney

Read. “Nostrand and Lincoln,” a new poem by Janelle Tan.

“my friend who lives in a basement apartment / with no windows and no light / tells me it is all worth it / because of the people she’s met in this city.”

Watch. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 (in theaters this week). It features probably the only Marvel characters that staff writer David Sims still truly cares about.

Play our daily crossword.

P.S.

One of the most agonizing questions for those of us who began our careers as students of the old Soviet Union—and who were hopeful that Russia could become a normal country after 1991—is whether the whole project of Russian democracy was cursed and virtually impossible from the start. I have always resisted that conclusion; I think Russia was, in fact, a democracy, however flawed, even into Putin’s first term in office from 2000 to 2004. But by the time Putin returned to reclaim his throne for a third time after a short break (mandated at that point by the Russian constitution), Russia was already in something like democratic free fall. Did Putin change, or was he always just a gangster?

I remain unconvinced that everything that happened in Moscow was just a huge plot to doom democracy right from the early days of Russian independence, but good scholars should find the most convincing arguments against their own biases. The best case for the idea that Putin was always an authoritarian who intended to wreck Russian democracy can be found in a highly detailed book by the late Karen Dawisha titled Putin’s Kleptocracy, and I would recommend it to readers who want a history of Putin’s attack on Russian institutions. It is a work that has forced me—uncomfortably—to rethink many of my views, as dispiriting as that can sometimes be.

— Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

Photographs by Paolo Pellegrin

In March 1774, Prince Grigory Potemkin, the favorite general and sometime lover of Catherine the Great, took control of the anarchic southern frontier of her empire, a region previously ruled by the Mongol Khans, the Cossack hosts, and the Ottoman Turks, among others. As viceroy, Potemkin waged war and founded cities, among them Kherson, the first home of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. In 1783, he annexed Crimea and became an avatar of imperial glory. To Vladimir Putin in particular, Potemkin is the Russian nationalist who subdued territory now impudently and illegitimately claimed by Ukraine, a nation that Putin believes does not exist.

The rest of the world remembers Potemkin differently, for something that we would now call a disinformation campaign. In 1787, Catherine paid a six-month visit to Crimea and the land then known as New Russia. The story goes that Potemkin built fake villages along her route, populated with fake villagers exuding fake prosperity. These villages probably never existed, but the story has endured for a reason: The sycophantic courtier, creating false images for the empress, is a figure we know from other times and other places. The tale also evokes something we recognize to be true, not just of imperial Russia but of Putin’s Russia, where mind-boggling efforts are made to please the leader—efforts that these days include telling him he is winning a war that he is most definitely not winning.

In a bid to restore Potemkin’s cities to Russian suzerainty, Russia occupied Kherson in early March of 2022, at the outset of a campaign to annihilate both Ukraine and the idea of Ukraine. Russian soldiers kidnapped the mayor, tortured city employees, murdered civilians, and stole children. In September, Putin held a ceremony in the Kremlin declaring Kherson and other occupied territories to be part of Russia. But Kherson did not become Russia. Partisans fought back inside the city, with car bombs and sabotage. Even as the occupiers held a ludicrous referendum, designed to show that Ukrainians had chosen Russia, the Russian army was quietly preparing to flee. By October, this new Potemkin village was collapsing, and the resurgent Ukrainian army was approaching the outskirts of Kherson. It was then that the Russians did something particularly strange: They kidnapped the bones of Grigory Potemkin.

Potemkin died in 1791. His skull and at least several other bones—which ones, exactly, is a mystery—were eventually brought to St. Catherine’s Cathedral, in Kherson, built by Potemkin himself. The bones were kept in a crypt beneath the cathedral nave. On a cloudy Sunday this past March, we visited the cathedral, which sits just a few streets away from the Dnipro River—now the front line—to try to understand why the Russian army, in the chaotic final days of its occupation of Kherson, had paused to rob a grave.

We arrived during a short break between services. The worshippers were mainly elderly, with a few younger people, even children, mixed in. The streets outside were empty; the city has been depopulated by the invasion, by the counterinvasion, and by ongoing, erratic fire from Russian soldiers, known to the Ukrainians as “Rashists” or “orcs.” On one of the days we visited, a missile hit a supermarket parking lot. Three people were killed in this attack, and three people wounded, including an elderly woman. The shelling sounded far away to us, except when it didn’t.

At the cathedral, a young priest rolled back a rug in the nave and opened a trapdoor. We descended narrow stairs. Potemkin’s bones once rested in a wooden coffin on a stone platform at the center of the dark, claustrophobic room. Father Vitaly—who spoke in Ukrainian, the language of Kherson’s modern rulers, not in Russian, the language of Potemkin—described the day of the theft. “Russian vehicles surrounded the church,” he said. “Then soldiers came in and asked to open the crypt. They seemed very uneasy. Six of them came down the stairs and took the bones. They took them outside, to a van that was waiting. Then they were gone.”

We asked him what he made of it. “I’m grateful to Potemkin for building this church,” he said carefully. Then he shrugged. Potemkin’s historic connection to the city didn’t interest him as much as it interested us. His flock had more important concerns.

Plane wreckage at the Chornobaivka air base, outside Kherson, March 6, 2023. The Russian military seized the airport in the first month of the invasion, but the Ukrainians took it back in November. (Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum)

Afterward, on a long drive to Ukrainian artillery positions along the river, we debated the meaning of the theft. Perhaps Russia had given up on Kherson and taken Potemkin home, away from wretched and ungrateful Ukraine. Or maybe Potemkin’s skull was resting not on Putin’s desk in the Kremlin, but rather in a safe house across the river, waiting to be brought back after a Russian reinvasion.

[In Focus: Photos of celebrations as Ukraine retakes Kherson]

A week later, in Kyiv, we had the opportunity to ask one of Ukraine’s leading experts on Russian imperialist behavior why a squad of Russian soldiers, presumably busy planning the retreat from Kherson, had stolen Potemkin’s bones. “I’m not sure that they know who Potemkin is,” Volodymyr Zelensky said. The Ukrainian president waved away the question: “I think for them, it doesn’t matter what they’ve stolen.” When the Russians left Kherson they took everything: paintings, furniture, dishwashers, the raccoons from the zoo, the skull of Catherine’s lover. The long legacy of Prince Potemkin, the neoclassical stone cathedral, the extraordinary weight of the past—none of that matters, he reckoned, to the men who fled Kherson.

“When they run, they take everything they see,” Zelensky told us. “You know what they took from the Kyiv region? Urinals. They stole urinals!”

On a previous visit to see Zelensky, in April of 2022, the scale of Putin’s delusion was just becoming clear. That meeting felt improvised, almost accidental; it was arranged on the fly, via a mad series of text messages, in the days immediately following the chaotic Russian withdrawal from the northern part of the country. We took a train to Kyiv that wasn’t listed on any timetable; in the blacked-out town center, only one restaurant was open. In Bucha, the Kyiv suburb that had been occupied by Russian troops, we watched soldiers and technicians exhume bodies from a mass grave behind a church. At that moment, the war was turning: The Russians, having failed to take Kyiv from the north in the first month of fighting, were preparing to attack from the east. After our meeting, a Zelensky aide texted us a list of weapons that the Ukrainian army needed in order to repel that offensive, hoping that we would carry the message back to Washington.

[Read: Anne Applebaum and Jeffrey Goldberg interview Volodymyr Zelensky in April 2022 ]

When we visited again a few weeks ago, the lights were on, the restaurants were open, and the trains ran on predictable schedules. A coffee shop in the station was serving oat-milk lattes. Bucha is a construction site, with a brand-new hardware store for anyone repairing war damage themselves. A conversation with Zelensky is now a more formal affair, with simultaneous translation, a videographer, and an array of English-speaking aides in attendance. Zelensky himself spoke English much of the time—he has had, he said, a lot more practice. But behind the more polished presentation, the tension and uncertainty persist, fueled by the sense that we are once again at a turning point, once again at a moment when key decisions will be made, in Kyiv, of course, but especially in Washington.

For although the war is not lost, it is also not won. Kherson is free, but it is under constant attack. Kyiv’s restaurants are open, but refugees have not yet returned home. Russia’s winter offensive has petered out, but as of this writing, in mid-April, it is unclear when Ukraine’s summer offensive will begin. Until it begins, or rather, until it ends, negotiations—about the future of Ukraine and its borders, Ukraine’s relationship to Russia and to Europe, the final status of the Crimean Peninsula—cannot begin either. Right now Putin still seems to believe that a long, drawn-out war of attrition will eventually bring him back his empire: Ukraine’s feckless Western allies will grow tired and give up; maybe Donald Trump will win reelection and align with the Kremlin; Ukraine will retreat; Ukrainians will be overwhelmed by the sheer number of Russian soldiers, however poorly armed and trained they may be.

Uniquely, the United States has the power to determine how, and how quickly, the war of attrition turns into something quite different. The Ukrainian defense minister, Oleksii Reznikov, spoke with us about the “Ramstein Club,” named after the American air base in Germany where the group, which consists of the defense officials of 54 countries, first convened. Still, his most important relationship is with U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin (“we communicate very, very often”), and everyone knows that this club is organized by Americans, led by Americans, galvanized by Americans. Andriy Yermak, Zelensky’s chief of staff, told us that Ukrainians now feel they are “strategic partners and friends” with America, something that might not have felt so true a few years ago, when Donald Trump was impeached on charges of seeking to extort Zelensky.

In our interview with Zelensky, which we conducted with the chair of The Atlantic’s board of directors, Laurene Powell Jobs, we asked him how he would justify this unusual relationship to a skeptical American: Why should Americans donate weapons to a distant war? He was clear in stating that the outcome of the war will determine the future of Europe. “If we will not have enough weapons,” he said, “that means we will be weak. If we will be weak, they will occupy us. If they occupy us, they will be on the borders of Moldova, and they will occupy Moldova. When they have occupied Moldova, they will [travel through] Belarus, and they will occupy Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. That’s three Baltic countries which are members of NATO. They will occupy them. Of course, [the Balts] are brave people, and they will fight. But they are small. And they don’t have nuclear weapons. So they will be attacked by Russians because that is the policy of Russia, to take back all the countries which have been previously part of the Soviet Union.” The fate of NATO, of America’s position in Europe, indeed of America’s position in the world are all at stake.

[Read: Zelensky has an answer for DeSantis]

But something even deeper is at stake as well. As Zelensky put it, this is a war over a fundamental definition of not just democracy but civilization, a battle “to show everybody else, including Russia, to respect sovereignty, human rights, territorial integrity; and to respect people, not to kill people, not to rape women, not to kill animals, not to take that which is not yours.” If a Ukraine that believes in the rule of law and human rights can achieve victory against a much larger, much more autocratic society, and if it can do so while preserving its own freedoms, then similarly open societies and movements around the world can hope for success too. After the Russian invasion, the Venezuelan opposition movement hung a Ukrainian flag on the front of its country’s embassy hall in Washington. The Taiwanese Parliament gave a rapturous welcome to Ukrainian activists last year. Not everyone in the world cares about this war, but for anyone trying to defeat a dictator, it has profound significance.

America is linked to the war in this deeper sense. The civilization that Ukraine defends has been profoundly shaped by American ideas not just about democracy, but about entrepreneurship, liberty, civil society, and the rule of law. When we asked Zelensky about Ukraine’s tech sector, he happily began talking about his dream of building a university devoted to computer science, and about the projects created by his country’s Ministry of Digital Transformation, among them a unique app that allows Ukrainians to store documents on their phones, a godsend for refugees. He talks more readily about Silicon Valley than he does about Potemkin’s bones, and no wonder: The former defines the world he wants to live in.

Zelensky did not share our preoccupation with the history of Russian imperial desire. “I don’t love the past,” he said. “We have to jump forward, not back.”

In a different part of Ukraine, we saw what Zelensky’s “jump forward” looks like in practice. The future is unfolding in a room where glue, wire, bits of metal, and electronic components are strewn across several large tables. A 3‑D printer stands along one wall. A rack of what appear to be Styrofoam model airplanes hangs on another wall. They are drones, and this is a drone workshop, one of two we visited and one of dozens spread all around the country.

The status of this particular drone workshop might confuse Americans who think that “the military” is a unitary institution, or that “defense production” is something that involves billion-dollar companies. The patron of this project is a former Ukrainian-special-forces commander and current member of Parliament, Colonel Roman Kostenko. The “employees” are all engineers, now mobilized into the army as pilots and designers of drones. The financing is private, and the entire enterprise is based on the belief that if Ukraine can’t compete with Russian quantity, it can exceed Russian quality: “The only way we can win is by being smarter,” Kostenko told us. He said he speaks regularly with the military leadership, though he is no longer in the chain of command. “It’s not Lockheed Martin,” he said, surveying the room. But when we pointed out that Lockheed Martin probably started this way too, he agreed.

A Ukrainian soldier reassembles batteries extracted from downed Russian drones in the Donetsk region of eastern Ukraine, which Vladimir Putin has tried to annex for Russia, March 9, 2023. (Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum)

Though we were asked not to disclose precise details of this workshop’s location or activities, we can say that it primarily produces modifications to commercially available drones. Reznikov, the Ukrainian defense minister, later told us that he calls them “wedding-ceremony drones,” by which he means drones normally used to film weddings, now repurposed as lethal weapons. The workshop also modifies existing explosive devices, including Soviet-era ones, for the drones to carry. Along with similar teams around the country, the team here also works on new kinds of drones that can do new things, including carrying out sophisticated electronic warfare and underwater attacks, all at relatively low cost. Kostenko described a drone that he said had destroyed 24 pieces of enemy equipment, including tanks.

But this basement-and-garage-based Ukrainian tech army doesn’t just build drones; it also builds the software that coordinates the work of the drones. Sometimes it does so in partnership with NGOs, not companies; an executive at one of these groups described the software it develops as “an invention, not a product”—and, more important, as an invention that is constantly being redesigned. One widely used program collects information and distributes it to the laptops and tablets of ordinary soldiers up and down the front line, providing the situational awareness that has been one of Ukraine’s unexpected advantages. A tiny command post we visited had a bank of screens, each showing a different view of the battlefield.

Several foreign companies cooperate too. The most advanced, such as Palantir, the U.S.-based software and defense company, have software that can draw on multiple data sources—commercial-satellite images, reports from partisans—to identify and prioritize targets. This form of “algorithmic warfare” isn’t new, but the Ukrainians have the incentive to develop and expand it: Lacking warehouses full of spare ammunition, they have to hit the largest number of enemy vehicles with the smallest number of missiles.

Maxwell Adams, an engineer at Helsing, a European defense-tech company working pro bono in Ukraine, told us that the Ukrainians impressed his team with their ability to use everything available, from simple messaging apps to sophisticated artillery, all in unpredictable conditions. Together with their Ukrainian colleagues, his employees work to “get our software to run right on the edge, meaning on tiny little computer chips on the back of a rusty old vehicle, or in the backpack of a soldier, or on the payload of a drone.” The Ukrainians “absolutely get how to make AI operational,” he said.

They also get the need to use whatever they have. Reznikov described the combination of weaponry that the Ukrainians have received from dozens of different countries as a “zoo,” a menagerie of weapons (“We have approximately 10 systems of artillery,” he said, ticking them off on his fingers), and they all have to be made to work together, under conditions of limited ammunition, limited manpower, and sometimes limited satellite connection.

This high-tech world exists alongside and within an extraordinarily diverse citizens’ army, one that includes NATO-trained officers; grandfathers guarding their own villages; and every conceivable level of training, experience, and equipment in between. Because the front line runs through suburban backyards and working farms, this army lives and works in those places too. In a cottage near another part of the front line, we met a handful of drone operators, along with their chihuahua and a couple of cats. Religious icons, property of a former owner, hung on the wall in the kitchen; muddy boots were lined up in rows in the hallway. In what used to be a living room, “Elephant,” who was a farmer before the war (albeit a farmer who had previously served in Ukrainian intelligence), talked about the need to modernize army education. “Frenchman” acquired his call sign because he’d served in the French Foreign Legion before coming home to run a wine bar in Lviv; he looks less like the tough legionnaire you imagine than the hip restaurateur he had become. Yet another soldier was fiddling with what looked like a video-game console when we arrived; in fact, he was learning to guide a drone. All of them had joined this special-forces group after February 2022.

A couple of hours’ drive away, along a dirt road filled with rocks, mud, and potholes the size of small ponds, we encountered a completely different kind of Ukrainian army, an infantry brigade composed of local men. Their artillery unit deploys weapons that look like they might have been used during the Soviet war in Afghanistan in the 1980s, and keeps them in barns and warehouses. They were cheerful—before we spoke, they insisted that we eat lunch at an army canteen—and showed no sign of the exhaustion that journalists have reported among troops in harsher sections of the front line. But although they can find Russian targets using the software on their tablets, they don’t have much ammunition with which to strike them. Joking, one of them offered us a deal: “If you could give us some more HIMARS now”—the American-made mobile rocket launchers that have been crucial to Ukraine’s defense—“after the war we’ll build you some drones.”

The unusual nature of this grassroots fighting force, along with its even more unusual range of physical and technological capabilities, helps explain why the Ukrainians were underestimated at the beginning of the conflict, and why their abilities are so hard to gauge now. Washington and Brussels thought that the war would feature “a big Soviet army fighting a small Soviet army,” in Reznikov’s words, and that the big Soviet army would of course win. But after the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014, “the first people who became defenders were volunteers from the Maidan,” Reznikov noted, referring to Ukraine’s revolution against its autocratic, Russian-backed president that year. “They took rifles and went to the east.” In that same year, patriotic young Ukrainians also went to work for the defense industry or built the NGOs that still support the military today.

The old Ukrainian army had been shaped by years of negative selection, attracting the least educated and the least ambitious. The new one is now being shaped by the best educated and the most ambitious. In recent months, that army has evolved even further. In training camps in NATO countries, Ukrainian troops are learning to use Western battle tanks, to operate new kinds of artillery, and above all to carry out the combined-arms operations that will be part of the summer offensive—to achieve “interoperability,” as Reznikov put it, at a level the army has never previously attempted.

Sometimes, the war is described as a battle between autocracy and democracy, or between dictatorship and freedom. In truth, the differences between the two opponents are not merely ideological, but also sociological. Ukraine’s struggle against Russia pits a heterarchy against a hierarchy. An open, networked, flexible society—one that is both stronger at the grassroots level and more deeply integrated with Washington, Brussels, and Silicon Valley than anyone realized—is fighting a very large, very corrupt, top-down state. On one side, farmers defend their land and 20‑something engineers build eyes in the sky, using tools that would be familiar to 20‑something engineers anywhere else. On the other side, commanders send waves of poorly armed conscripts to be slaughtered—just as Stalin once sent shtrafbats, penal battalions, against the Nazis—under the leadership of a dictator obsessed with ancient bones. “The choice,” Zelensky told us, “is between freedom and fear.”

Left: A mass burial site in Izium, Ukraine, March 15, 2023. The Russians seized Izium in April 2022. When Ukrainian soldiers liberated it in September, they discovered the graves of more than 400 citizens, many of them killed by shelling and air strikes. Right: A Ukrainian soldier training in the forest, March 3, 2023. (Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum)

Versions of these two civilizations still exist within Ukrainian society too, though the division is not ethnic or linguistic. It is now exceedingly rare to find Ukrainians who describe themselves as “pro-Russian,” even in the Russian-speaking east. The streets in the center of Russian-speaking Odesa are lined with Ukrainian flags; Odesa’s mayor, the Russian-speaking Gennadiy Trukhanov, told us he believes Ukrainians are “the front line of the struggle for the civilized world.” But autocratic, top-down, hierarchical ways of doing things are hard to discard, especially in state institutions. The instinct to control and centralize decision making remains. Citizens’ groups and volunteers have arisen around the military partly to combat the vestiges of Soviet bureaucracy.

But the Ukrainians who want their country to remain part of this new, networked world believe they will win. See you after the victory, they say when parting ways. We’ll rebuild it after the victory, they say when talking about something smashed or destroyed. Trukhanov already dreams of a victory celebration, an enormous dining table spanning the length of Primorskiy Bulvar, Odesa’s famous seaside promenade, currently blocked off by soldiers and barricades: “Everyone is invited.” Even those who are more pessimistic about the immediate future remain optimistic about the longer term: After the victory, we will need to defend the victory. Some of them have an almost mystical faith that it’s their country’s turn on the world stage. Yermak, Zelensky’s chief of staff, told us that victory is “very near,” that you can “feel it in the atmosphere.” Dmytro Kuleba, the Ukrainian foreign minister, talks about “history turning its wheels,” a process that cannot be stopped.

Others put their faith in modernity, in technology, and, yes, in the example of American democracy. “We are living in an open world, in a democratic world,” says Oleksiy Honcharuk, a former prime minister of Ukraine who is now in the tech world too. “And this advantage is huge.” Is that true? Only a Ukrainian victory can prove it.

But what is “victory”? That’s the question asked repeatedly of every American official, of every pundit, at every public debate dedicated to Ukraine, often in a querulous, demanding tone, as if this were a question difficult to answer. In Ukraine itself—in the office of the president, in the defense ministry, in the foreign ministry, in private apartments, on the front line—the question isn’t perceived to be difficult at all.

Victory means, first, that Ukraine retains sovereign control of all of the territory that lies within its internationally recognized borders, including land taken by Russia since 2014: Donetsk, Luhansk, Melitopol, Mariupol, Crimea. “Every centimeter of our 603,550 square kilometers,” Kuleba says. Ukrainians believe that the de facto ceding of territory to Russia in 2014 gave Putin the idea that he could take more, and they don’t want to repeat the error. Instead of ending the conflict, a cease-fire that leaves large chunks of Ukraine under Russian control could give him an incentive to regroup, rearm, and try again. They also point out that territory under Putin’s control is a crime scene, a space where repression, terror, and human-rights violations take place every day. Ukrainians who remain in the occupied territories are at constant risk of losing their property, their identity, and their lives. No Ukrainian leader can give up the idea of saving them.

[Anne Applebaum and Nataliya Gumenyuk: Incompetence and torture in occupied Ukraine]

Victory means, second, that Ukrainians are safe. Safe from terrorist attacks, safe from shelling, safe from missiles lobbed at supermarket parking lots. Zelensky talks about safety “for everything. From schools to technologies, for everything in the education sphere, in medicine, in the streets. That is the idea. For energy. For everything.” Safety means that the airports reopen, the refugees return, foreign investment resumes, and buildings can be rebuilt without fear that another Russian missile will knock them down. To achieve this kind of safety, Ukraine, again, will need more than a cease-fire. The country will have to be embedded in some security structure reliable enough to be trusted, something that resembles NATO, if not NATO itself. Ukraine will also have to reconceive itself as a frontline state like Israel or South Korea, with a world-class defense industry and a large standing army. Deterrence is the most important guarantee of peace.

Victory means, third, some kind of justice. Justice for the victims of the war, for the people who lost their homes or limbs, for the children who have been taken from their parents. Justice might be delivered in different ways: through reparations, through the transfer of captured or sanctioned Russian assets, or through the International Criminal Court, which recently issued an arrest warrant for Putin for the crime of kidnapping Ukrainian children and deporting them to Russia. More important than the means of justice is the perception of justice—neither Putin nor Russia can enjoy impunity. Victims need the acknowledgment that they were unfairly targeted. Until this kind of justice is achieved, millions of people will not feel that the war ended, and will not stop trying to seek reparations or revenge.

Citizens pay their respects during a funeral procession in Lviv, Ukraine, March 2, 2023. Such processions have been a regular, sometimes daily, occurrence since the start of the war. (Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum)

The day after we met him, Frenchman, the young drone operator and French Foreign Legion veteran who used to run a bar in Lviv, was killed in a Russian attack. His given name was Dmytro Pashchuk. “Compared to this war,” he had told us when we asked about his past military experience, “everything is kindergarten.” Nobody who fought with him will ever accept an unjust conclusion to the conflict.

Victory can be defined. But can it be achieved? Part of the answer is military, technical, logistical. Part of the answer, however, is political and even psychological. The Ukrainian theory of victory includes all of these elements.

In Russian history, military victory has often reinforced autocracy. Potemkin’s conquests reinforced Catherine the Great. Stalin’s defeat of Hitler reinforced his own regime. By contrast, military failure has often inspired political change. Russian losses to Germany during World War I helped launch the Russian Revolution. Russian losses in Afghanistan in the 1980s helped trigger the reforms of the Gorbachev years, which in turn led to the breakup of the Soviet Union.

The naval catastrophe that Russia suffered during the Russo-Japanese War is less well known, but it was equally consequential. During the Battle of Tsushima, in 1905, the Japanese demolished the bulk of the Russian fleet and captured two admirals. Russia was a larger and richer country than Japan at that time, and could have kept fighting. But the shock and shame of the defeat was too overwhelming. Although Czar Nicholas II did not lose power, popular discontent with the war helped spark the failed 1905 revolution, and forced him to enact political reforms, including the creation of Russia’s first Parliament and first constitution.

A broken bust of Lenin in Lyman, Ukraine, March 11, 2023. Lyman was occupied by Russian forces last spring and liberated by the Ukrainians in early October. (Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum)

Ukrainians need a military success like that, one with enough symbolic power to force change in Russia. This might not mean a revolution, or even a change of leadership. Zelensky believes the West spends too much time thinking about Putin, worrying about what’s inside his head. “It’s not about him,” he told us. Kuleba, the foreign minister, says he thinks the future of Russia is unknowable, so there is no point in speculating about what it would or should be. “The capacity of the best analysts to foresee the future under these circumstances is largely overestimated,” he told us. “Will it fall apart?” he asked rhetorically. “Will there be a regime change? Will the regime be forced to focus on its internal problems, meaning that the potential for external aggressive policies will decline?”

Only one thing matters: Russia’s leaders must conclude that the war was a mistake, and Russia must acknowledge Ukraine as an independent country with the right to exist. The Russian elite, in other words, must experience an internal shift of the kind that led the French to end their colonial project in Algeria in the early 1960s—a change that was accompanied by the collapse of the French constitutional order, attempted assassinations, and a failed coup d’état. A slower but equally profound shift took place in Britain in the early 20th century, when the British ruling class was forced to stop talking about the Irish as peasants incapable of running their own state, and let them create one. When that happens in Russia, the war will be over. Not suspended, not delayed for a month or a year—over.

No one knows how and when that change will come, whether next week or in the next decade. But the Ukrainians hope they can create the conditions in which political shocks and pivotal developments can occur. Perhaps the modern equivalent of the Battle of Tsushima is another Russian naval catastrophe, or the recapture of the city of Mariupol, whose total destruction by Russian forces in March of last year set a new post–World War II standard for cruelty and horror in Europe.

But the strongest symbol is Crimea. The annexation of Crimea in 1783 inspired Putin’s love of Potemkin. Putin’s own occupation and annexation of Crimea, in 2014, rejuvenated his presidency. The slogan “Krym Nash”—“Crimea Is Ours”—spread across Russia in a burst of imperialist emotion and Soviet nostalgia, reproduced on posters and T‑shirts, inspiring a slew of memes. This year Putin marked the anniversary of the annexation by visiting the peninsula, walking stiffly around a children’s center and an art school in the company of local officials.

Crimea became a symbol for Ukrainians too. The 2014 invasion marked the start of the Russian war on Ukraine; the subsequent annexation warned Ukrainians that the international legal system would not protect them. The history of the Crimean Tatars, a Muslim people who constituted the majority of the peninsula’s population before Potemkin arrived, echoes the history of the rest of the country: The Tatars were the targets of repression, intimidation, and ethnic cleansing under both czarist and Soviet rule. In 1944, Stalin deported all of them, some 200,000 people, to Central Asia. They returned only after 1989.

After 2014, many Tatars once again fled the peninsula; more than 100 of those who remained are political prisoners. The restoration of their rights and their culture is one of Zelensky’s favorite themes. In April of this year, he honored them by hosting iftar, a Ramadan evening meal, with Crimean Tatar political leaders in attendance. The president’s permanent representative to Crimea, Tamila Tasheva, herself a Crimean Tatar, describes the Tatars as a “part of the Ukrainian political nation.”

A Ukrainian artillery unit fires a British-made M777 howitzer near Bakhmut, Ukraine, March 18, 2023. (Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum)

Crimea’s significance is strategic too. In the past nine years, the Putin regime has transformed Crimea from a holiday resort area into something resembling a Russian aircraft carrier attached to the bottom of Ukraine, crisscrossed with trenches and fortifications. The peninsula contains prisons for captured Ukrainians and serves as a hub for the transport of stolen Ukrainian grain. The leader of the occupation administration, Sergey Aksyonov, has called Crimea the “frontline outpost” for the occupation of southern Ukraine.

Knowing that Crimea is being built into a fortress, the Ukrainians talk about the “political military” liberation of Crimea, not a purely military counteroffensive. Once they have cut off the roads, railroads, and waterways to the peninsula, and targeted the military infrastructure with drones, the presumption is that many Russian inhabitants, especially recent immigrants, will become convinced that they would be better off living somewhere else. Some have reportedly fled already, following an explosion on the Kerch Strait Bridge (which connects Crimea to Russia) and other explosions on the peninsula. “Crimea we will take without a fight,” Reznikov told us.

Detailed plans for the de-occupation of Crimea already exist. Tasheva, together with lawyers, educators, and others, has been working on a “Crimea Recovery Strategy” that envisions a greener, cleaner Crimea, a “modern European resort.” Working groups have been set up to consider the fate of property lost or acquired since 2014, of Ukrainians who collaborated, and of the Russians who do not flee. Schools will need to be reformed, independent media restored, and the Ukrainian political system reestablished.

Tasheva pushes back against any idea that Russia and Ukraine could share the peninsula: “There cannot be joint control by both David and Goliath,” she told us. Regarding Crimea, the difference between the two civilizations is stark. For Russia, Crimea is and always will be a military base. For Ukraine, “Crimea is a place of diversity—our bridge to the global South.” Tasheva wants to build better road connections to Europe, restore destroyed Tatar monuments, and revitalize the use of the Ukrainian and Tatar languages on the peninsula. Plans to reverse environmental damage, reduce the use of fossil fuels, and revive cultural festivals have been drawn up, printed out, translated into English. If set into motion, they would undo not just Putin’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, but Potemkin’s annexation in 1783.

Is this a fantasy? Perhaps. But in February 2022, the successful defense of Kyiv also looked like a fantasy. The drone workshops, the artillery on the front line, the software designers in Kyiv—back then they were beyond the realm of anyone’s imagination. To predict what might happen in Ukraine a year from now therefore requires the vision to conjure a world that currently doesn’t exist, and to accept that fantasies sometimes become real.

Do Americans share that vision? It is true that the U.S. has supported Ukraine, not a traditional American ally, at a level that was also once unimaginable, comparable only to the Lend-Lease program of World War II. We have provided Ukraine with intelligence and weapons, taken care of Ukrainian refugees, put strict sanctions on Russia. So far, there has been no secondary disaster. Despite a thousand predictions to the contrary, Europeans did not freeze to death last winter when they were compelled to seek alternatives to Russian gas. World War III did not break out. But over the next few months, as the Ukrainians take their best shot at winning the war, the democratic world will have to decide whether to help them do so. Sovereignty, safety, and justice—shouldn’t Americans want the war to end that way too?

Left: A Ukrainian mortar team fires at Russian positions in the Donetsk region, March 11, 2023. Right: The funeral of a fallen Ukrainian soldier in Kharkiv, March 16, 2023. (Paolo Pellegrin / Magnum)

Of course. That is what any senior official in the Biden administration, any European foreign minister, would say if asked on the record. Privately, answers are less clear. The support the U.S. has given Ukraine so far has been enough to help its army hold off Russia, enough to take back Kherson and some territory in the Kharkiv region. But America has not yet given Ukraine fighter jets or its most advanced long-range missiles. Nor is it clear that everyone in Washington, Brussels, or Paris believes it is either possible or desirable for Ukraine to take back all of the territory lost since February 2022, let alone territory taken in 2014. In April, leaked U.S.-government documents offered a bleak assessment of Ukrainian capabilities, predicting that neither Russia nor Ukraine could achieve anything more than “marginal” territorial gains, as a result of “insufficient troops and supplies.” This could be a self-fulfilling prophecy: If Ukraine is given insufficient supplies, then it will have insufficient supplies. One Western official recently told us that the prospect of Ukraine retaking Crimea is so distant, his country has done no contingency planning for it. If the West doesn’t plan for victory, victory will be hard to achieve.

Evidently some wonder not whether the counteroffensive can succeed, but whether it should succeed. The fear that Putin will use nuclear weapons to defend Crimea lurks just under the surface—but we have told him that the response to this would have “catastrophic consequences” for Russia; this is why deterrence is so important. The urge to preserve the status quo, and the fear of what could follow Putin, is just as strong. French President Emmanuel Macron has said openly that Russia should be defeated but not “crushed.” Yet even the worst successor imaginable, even the bloodiest general or most rabid propagandist, will immediately be preferable to Putin, because he will be weaker than Putin. He will quickly become the focus of an intense power struggle. He will not have grandiose dreams about his place in history. He will not be obsessed with Potemkin. He will not be responsible for starting this war, and he could have an easier time ending it.

In Western capitals, preoccupation with the consequences of a Russian defeat has meant far too little time spent thinking about the consequences of a Ukrainian victory. After all, the Ukrainians aren’t the only ones hoping that their success can support and sustain a civilizational change. Russia, as it is currently governed, is a source of instability not just in Ukraine but around the world. Russian mercenaries prop up dictatorships in Africa; Russian hackers undermine political debate and elections all across the democratic world. The investments of Russian companies keep dictators in power in Minsk, in Caracas, in Tehran. A Ukrainian victory would immediately inspire people fighting for human rights and the rule of law, wherever they are. In a recent conversation in Washington, a Belarusian activist spoke about his organization’s plans to reactivate the Belarusian opposition movement. For the moment, it is still working in secret, underground. “Everyone is waiting for the counteroffensive,” he said.

And he is right. Ukrainians are waiting for the counteroffensive. Europeans, East and West, are waiting for the counteroffensive. Central Asians are waiting for the counteroffensive. Belarusians, Venezuelans, Iranians, and others around the world whose dictatorships are propped up by the Russians—they are all waiting for the counteroffensive too. This spring, this summer, this autumn, Ukraine gets a chance to alter geopolitics for a generation. And so does the United States.

This article appears in the June 2023 print edition with the headline “The Counteroffensive.”