This story contains spoilers through the ninth episode of Succession Season 4.

Roman Roy was ready. He had written his eulogy for his father—a great man, he would say, great despite and because of it all—on hot-pink index cards. He had practiced the speech in front of a mirror. He had “pre-grieved,” he kept telling people, and so could be trusted to fulfill, one last time, the core duty of the family business: to love in a way that moves markets.

But Roman failed. His grief overcame him; trying to speak, he sobbed. The funeral that had been so carefully scripted suddenly broadcast dead air. Kendall, ad-libbing, stepped in to speak. Then Shiv. Their addresses—honest, calculating, and hewing to the talking points—were valedictories for Logan, and for their show. They also returned Succession, in its penultimate episode, to its original premise. The declining monarch, the children who compete for his crown, the rotating cast of lackeys and fools: Succession is King Lear, retold for the age of the media empire. And Logan’s funeral punctuates the translation. It transports Lear’s famous first scene to a cathedral on the Upper East Side. Kendall and Shiv are Goneril and Regan, complying with their father’s demands for flattery. Roman is Cordelia, the youngest and most devoted, unable to turn love into a show. Their performances will carve their kingdom, and this is both a ludicrous circumstance and a logical one: Family, for them, is an endless act of politics.

Lear treats loyalty as a fact so remarkable that its presence doubles as a plot twist. Succession is not alone in finding resonance in that concession. Late last month, having cited Lear’s connection to our “savage and judgmental” political environment, Kenneth Branagh shared his plans to stage it in London and New York. The news followed Al Pacino’s announcement that he, too, would be adapting Shakespeare’s play. Lear has been used as a lens for understanding, among many others, Dianne Feinstein, Elon Musk, Boris Johnson, Rupert Murdoch, Donald Trump, and Trump’s children. (In response to the former president’s indictment in March, the older sons, like Gonerils with Truth Social accounts, offered up theatrical rage; Ivanka’s wan response, meanwhile, had a whiff of both crisis comms and Cordelia.) Maureen Dowd recently treated Lear as a metaphor for American gerontocracy. She was inspired by the fact that, this spring, “the hottest ticket” in Washington, D.C., was the Shakespeare Theater Company’s take on the tragedy—a production channeling the chaos that comes “when madmen lead the blind.”

Lear may be, as the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley called it, “the most perfect specimen of the dramatic art existing in the world”: a five-act ode, sprawling and taut, to the hard work of being human. Aging, selfishness, sacrifice, love, loyalty, grief—the play’s wisdom aches across the centuries. But Lear’s psychological insights are not, I think, what account for its new currency. Its political insights are. Shakespeare’s tragedy is a study of monarchy in crisis—of all that goes wrong when a leader’s problems become everyone else’s emergency. With every new staging, conditions that Americans prefer to think of as relics of an older, sadder time—inherited rule, incompetent despotism, coups—reveal their abiding impact. Lear’s ubiquity, in that sense, is understandable. It is also deeply embarrassing. The play should not translate so well. But here it is, all the same, ancient and acutely familiar. “Was he, maybe … losing it, a little?” Roman Roy asks himself, preparing the eulogy he will not deliver. He is talking about his father but also speaking to us, the audience. We might wonder the same. We, too, are the heirs of kings in decline.

Logan was not supposed to have survived Succession’s first season. The patriarch was originally set to die fairly early in the show, leaving his children to battle in the world he left behind. But the writers changed course. Logan lived. The decision made Succession even more directly Lear-like than it might have been. Succession’s characters speak, at times, with early-modern dudgeon. (“This is the day his reign ends,” Kendall announces as he executes one of many failed plans to usurp his father.) Sandy and Sandi Furness, the Roys’ rivals and sometime collaborators, call back to Horace Howard Furness, the 19th-century Shakespeare scholar, and to the son who shares his name. Connor spends the series living out an extremely Shakespearean joke: Logan’s oldest son, his most obvious heir, plays the role of the illegitimate child.

It is through Logan, though, that Succession transported some of Lear’s most famous iconography to the small screen. He is played by Brian Cox, an actor so famous for performing Lear that he wrote a book about the experience. Logan, the patriarch named for a king, wanders on seaside moors. Ailing, he is confined both to hospital beds and to a body that proves ever more unruly. He rages at his children, and his fury strikes like thunder.

Lear features more references to the natural world than any of Shakespeare’s other plays. Civilization and wildness, the allusions suggest, are never as distant as they might seem. And the two collide, in Lear, in the figure of the king. The monarch is, in the play, nature itself: the natural order exerting its brute continuities. But Lear violates that system. First, he abdicates. Then, he loses control over himself. Both forms of decline lead to destruction for everyone around him. The fragile order crumbles. Among those who seek to take his place, pettiness turns into violence. Bureaucracy gives way to brutality. Humans reveal themselves to be what they have been all along: animals, clawing their way to the top.

Lear’s own fall is both natural—to age, Lear concedes, is to decline—and exceptional. He raves. He acts like a child. Because of that, he is sometimes dubbed the “mad king.” (Performances of the play were banned during the reign of George III, for fear that the fictional monarch might remind audiences of the real one.) The play, though, resists a direct diagnosis for its main character. It treats Lear’s madness less as a conclusion than as an all-consuming question. Has the king lost his temper, or his mind? Where does being mad end and going mad begin? Do the distinctions, in the end, matter?

Succession applies those ambiguities to its own wayward monarchy. The show does not suggest that Logan has lost his sanity. Instead, it asks whether Logan’s brute rationality might be its own form of madness. Succession is, like Lear, preoccupied with the animal world—its hierarchies, its insults, its violence. And the show weaves that dour Darwinism into its treatment of power. Logan is, in every way but the most specific, a king. His health is a market indicator. His body is, like Lear’s, a proxy for nature. Logan makes his own climate. His whims become everybody else’s weather. He is selfish. He is cruel. In him, the assumptions that drive our political systems—market competition, callous individualism, survival of the fittest—come to their logical conclusions.

[Read: The bodily horrors of Succession]

The eulogies delivered at Logan’s funeral, by people who have spent their lives in his storm, are reminders of that. “He had a vitality, a force that could hurt,” Kendall told the crowd. “And it did.”

His pain is eloquent. It is also, in some sense, an answer to the question Roman asked as he rehearsed his eulogy: Had Logan, maybe … lost it? Roman answered that query as he answers most others: noncommittally. (“Who knows?” he shrugged to himself, on the matter of his father’s sanity. “But.”) And his indifference, like Kendall’s acknowledgement of Logan’s abusiveness, is something of a thesis statement for the show. Logan himself is not mad. He spreads madness all the same.

That tension makes for one of Succession’s most jarring, and powerful, tributes to Lear. In the show, as in the play, madness defies definition so insistently that the defiance itself begins to look like the point. Analyze these men however you want; debate their mental states as you will; they’ll keep doing what they do. They will keep inflicting their flaws on everybody else. They will keep seeing themselves not as agents of misfortune but as its victims. The rational mind acknowledges not only the reality of life but also the humility of it: The world does not belong to you; you belong to it. But the unfettered power that both men have enjoyed abets their delusion. Their ravings are arrogance gone awry.

And the delirium, crucially, is contagious. In Succession, it settles on Roman when, finding democracy to be personally inconvenient, he becomes a one-man act of election fraud. Kendall cedes to it when, after his panicked ex-wife tells him that she fears for their children, he dismisses her concerns: “You’re too online,” he tells her. “Okay? You’ve lost context. Everything is fine.” Rava is alive to the world in a way Kendall is not. The violence is spreading. It is violence that the Roys have brought about. But Kendall refuses to see it. He takes refuge in his fantasies. This is madness. It is also his true inheritance.

Succession can be hard to watch. Its satires—insights powered less by ironic distance from the world than by proximity to it—stab and sting and chafe. Logan is most obviously a stand-in for Rupert Murdoch, a man who, like Logan, made billions promising people that the world can be made simpler than it is. But he is also a proxy for Trump. Pundits have spent years analyzing the former president’s mind: Is he a narcissist? Is he gripped by dementia? Are his ravings real or merely extensions of his show? The answer is the same for Logan, and for Lear: It doesn’t matter. Trump does what he does because he can. His mind exerts itself wantonly. His delusions become inescapable.

And then, in short order, they become destructive. Trump is instability incarnate. Institutions pride themselves on minimizing the power of chance over people’s lives. Corporations have boards. Governments have redundancies. Every day, though, Trump lays bare the ease with which the weakness of one man—that addled brain, that cold heart—can settle into a system. The age of Trump is also the age of rampant conspiracism, of misinformation, of, in general, error run amok. Rantings and ravings are no longer exceptional; they are our rule. We live in a world that goes, every day, a little madder.

That is why Lear is so able to reach across the centuries and punch modern audiences in the gut. The typical Shakespearean plot is dense, full of jams and twists; Lear’s, though—teeming with affairs, betrayals, murders, tortures, banishments, poisonings, hangings, blindings—is especially frenzied. Story arcs lead to high-speed collisions; chaos becomes a narrative proposition. The tumult serves one of Lear’s most urgent insights: Power, when it becomes unreasonable, begets nihilism. The critic Harold Bloom has observed Lear’s obsession with absence. (“Nothing will come of nothing,” goes one of the king’s most famous lines.) And the play’s soap operatics abet all the emptiness. They disorient and overwhelm. Even in a play—even with action that is contained, neatly, to a stage—there is only so much chaos we can take before we give up trying to make sense of it all. For Lear’s audience as well as its characters, madness becomes environmental.

[Read: King Lear, from the June 1880 issue]

Shakespeare, in that way, anticipated the discord that shapes, and misshapes, this postmodern political moment. Monarchs, in Shakespeare’s time, rationalized their reigns tautologically: They were proxies for the divine, they claimed, ruling because they were meant to. Their ascendance to the throne, whether achieved through battle or treachery or accident of birth—and the choices they made while in power—were matters of godly will.

Americans, learning that history, typically take pleasure in mocking it. But we defer, too, to dynasties. We structure our society around birthrights. We allow inheritance—familial privilege, educational privilege, generational wealth—to act as a form of destiny. Succession indicts that inclination. The news offers daily reminders of it. “The question is, when Rupert dies, how are the kids aligned?” a former News Corp executive told the reporter Gabriel Sherman about the Murdoch family’s succession drama. This is a throwaway quote that says everything. Inheritance, for the Murdochs, is a game of musical chairs. It is a battle of attrition that will be won or lost in whatever arrangement happens to be there when the music ends. One family’s fortunes will become, in short order, everyone else’s fate.

Succession twists that dynamic, applying the vulnerabilities to its monarchs. At every turn, characters’ grandest plans are waylaid by mundanities. One of Kendall’s early attempts to overthrow his father is stymied by a traffic jam. Another attempt fails—and a man dies—because a deer, at just the wrong moment, leaps into a road. A shareholder meeting that will determine the fate of one of the world’s most powerful conglomerates falls apart because of … a urinary tract infection. (“The piss-mad king,” Roman pronounces the ailing Logan.)

Few would argue that the state of affairs that Succession is highlighting—so much power, concentrated among so few—is optimal. Systems, working well, have redundancies and safeguards, checks and balances. They will not crumble when one person goes rogue. In Succession, as in Lear, the people who will bear the brunt of all the melodrama are largely absent from the stage. That does not mean, though, that they are excluded from the stories. Audiences of Shakespeare’s time, taking in the tale—failing fathers, greedy children, madness, machinations, victors, spoils, chance—would have recognized their own history. And they would have understood, intuitively, the true impact of all the palace intrigue. When kingdoms are divided, the king’s subjects will bear the burdens.

Succession emphasizes the same thing. The show’s first episode closes with a shot of an apartment building in New York City. It is nighttime. The windows are ablaze with the flicker of televisions. The image captures the extent of the Roy family’s power. It also acknowledges the people who live under their rule. It clarifies the stakes of the show’s satire: We believe, still, in the divine right of kings. We merely outsource the old entitlements to newer gods.

A common criticism of Succession, and a fair one, is that the show, over time, has become repetitive. It recycles storylines. It reuses language, themes, and tropes so reliably that the viewer might wonder whether the echoes are resonant or simply redundant. But that recursiveness—Succession’s steady development, over its four seasons, of a sense of no ending—is integral to its messaging. In this universe, despite the appearance of world-shaking drama, very little meaningfully changes. The wealth that gives the Roys their power also gives their show a stifling sense of inertia.

The antics, and the stasis, resonate. We live in the wreckage of consequential absurdity. Succession came from a moment that was similar, in its way, to Lear’s: 1606, the year Shakespeare wrote his tragedy, was a time of relentless crisis. King James had ascended the throne in 1603, with hopes of joining England and Scotland into a unified Britain; he failed. In late 1605, a group of dissident Catholics attempted to destroy Parliament while the king and his family were in attendance. The Gunpowder Plot—“5/11”—was foiled at the last moment. The summer of 1606, in London, brought an outbreak of plague.

Shakespeare channeled the instability into his story of a kingdom fighting for its sanity. His Lear was a telling of another play, the True Chronicle History of King Leir. The original story ended happily, with Cordelia and her father raising an army together and reclaiming their kingdom in triumph. But Shakespeare, a bit like Cordelia herself, chose not to flatter his audience. He changed Leir’s ending, reshaping it to conform to that elemental definition of a Shakespearean tragedy: Pretty much everyone dies. In the process, he created an ageless omen. No redemption will come when the madmen lead the blind. The final tragedy of Lear is not that the king declines. It is that the king declines and takes everyone down with him. His madness spreads. It seeps. It writes itself into every story, and soon enough into history. And then—the greatest tragedy of all—the history repeats.

President Vladimir Putin sustains his power on the promise to Russians that he has, as he put it in 2010, “everything under control.” This week’s attack on the southern Belgorod region, launched from Ukraine, would have been alarming under any circumstances, but Putin’s posture as the man in command makes it particularly hard to explain away.

A string of bad news that began earlier this month suggests to Russians that their security system is crumbling. First came the drone attack on the roof of Putin’s residence in the Kremlin on May 4. Now comes an incursion into Belgorod, demonstrating that a year and a half into the war, the Federal Security Service, or FSB, which is in charge of the borders, does not have the manpower to protect against small units attacking from Ukraine. Russia was not even able to secure a nearby storage site for nuclear-weapons components, known as Belgorod-22—instead it reportedly moved the materiel away.

Russians in the border regions are beginning to realize that the war that has destroyed dozens of towns and villages in Ukraine is coming to their own land. Nobody seemed to be defending Belgorod, so on Tuesday, locals demanded answers from their governor, Vyacheslav Gladkov, in a live chat on Vkontakte, a social-networking site.

Governor Gladkov read the questions aloud: “They said that everything was under control, that fortifications have been built, some pyramids and so on, but the enemy is coming to our regional center by tanks. Why is the border full of holes?” he read from one message. “And we are not mentioning the constant artillery and mortar fire, wounded residents—how come?”

[Eliot A. Cohen: It’s not enough  for Ukraine to win. Russia has to lose.]

The complaint seemed valid enough. And the more information that emerged, the more the episode risked turning the entire nationalist rationale behind Russia’s war in Ukraine back on the Kremlin: The invaders were Russian nationalists serving in the Ukrainian armed forces who claimed that they were liberating Russia from Putin’s regime.

Somebody had to be honest with locals, and Governor Gladkov, surprisingly, was. “I agree with you,” he said, looking tired and grim. “I have many more questions for the Defense Ministry than you.” He called on his listeners to draw their own conclusions “from the mistakes that have been made.”

Russians have been drawing conclusions rather quickly this week. Thousands jumped into their vehicles and left their villages in the Belgorod region, without waiting for further explanation or assistance from the security services. One video shows local residents trying to break into an old Soviet bomb shelter, screaming at the top of their lungs.

Ilya Ponomarev is a former member of Russia’s Parliament now in exile. He acts as a spokesperson for the Freedom of Russia Legion, the anti-Kremlin group that crossed into the Belgorod region. Ponomarev told me that the legion’s soldiers were “just four kilometers away” from the Belgorod-22 nuclear-storage site, and that the group’s goal was to demonstrate to Russians that their border was unprotected.

The attack seems to have struck its psychological target. Tsargrad, a nationalist television channel in Russia, headlined a program with the question of whether, after a year of “bombs raining on … Russian regions,” the “special military operation” in Ukraine was coming to resemble the second Chechen war. The comparison jabbed at dark memories of fighting that killed thousands of civilians in the Northern Caucasus and created streams of internal migrants.

Now again, Russians have been internally displaced. “This is just a shock; there is no safe place in the south,” 72-year-old Nina Mikhailova, a pensioner from Russia’s  Krasnodar region, south of Belgorod, told me by phone on Tuesday. “There is no end to this war, to killings, and nobody tells us when or how it will end. The jokes and threats about nuclear mushrooms are not funny. If the only solution is to nuke America, we are all in real trouble.”

Boris Vishnevsky, a city-council member in St. Petersburg, is one of the very few opposition figures left in government in Russia. I spoke with him by phone yesterday. Russia’s generals, he observed, can “promise us to destroy everything alive coming our way”—but then they will come up against the problem that “the FSB, who are actually responsible for protecting the borders, are busy hunting down and imprisoning Russians for their posts on social media.”

This week, some of my Russian friends said they caught themselves walking around with their mouths open in absolute shock. “The border is supposed to be protected by the FSB, but it is not; they just look more and more like some dumb thugs,” a former Russian member of parliament, Gennady Gudkov, himself a veteran of the KGB, told me on Tuesday. Like many of his friends and colleagues in Moscow, he gasped at the news of tanks and armored vehicles rolling from Ukraine to Russia, unstopped. Nothing was under control.

Putin pretends to love history. While his security services were in Belgorod chasing armed invaders from Ukraine, he was staring at a French map, allegedly dated from the mid-17th century, with the word Ukraine on it, but still insisting that Ukraine did not exist before the Soviet times.

[Read: Russia’s rogue commander is playing with fire]

Meanwhile, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the founder of the Wagner mercenary group, is building political capital from every failure of the Russian military. When the attack began from Ukraine, and the legion took over village after village, Prigozhin took aim at the armed forces on his Telegram channel: “Instead of providing security for the state, some of them are dividing cash and the others make fools of themselves. There is no leadership, no desire and no personalities ready to defend their country.”  

Ukraine, however, is only getting stronger, according to Prigozhin:  “Ukraine had 500 tanks in the beginning of our special operation and now they have 5,000. If before, 20,000 of their men knew how to fight, now 400,000 men know how to fight. So it turns out we militarized them in a big way.”

Prigozhin has predicted an apocalyptic ending for Putin’s regime as a result of the attack on Belgorod. “People will come out with pitchforks to the streets,” he told Russian media. When that day arrives, he warns, he will be the one taking the situation under control: “And then we come.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As I arrived for the first day of the National Conservative Conference in London, a protester outside shouted directions to me: “Up the stairs—turn far right.”

That description, unsurprisingly, would have offended many of the speakers gathered this week at the Emmanuel Centre, a 10-minute walk from Big Ben. One of them, the journalist Melanie Phillips, published an article after the conference’s first day headlined: “National Conservatism is not a fascist plot.” Good to have that cleared up. Instead, according to the conference’s organizers, it is about a form of conservatism “inextricably tied to the idea of the nation … an intellectually serious alternative to the excesses of purist libertarianism, and in stark opposition to political theories grounded in race.”

NatCon draws an international group of nationalists (I know) who have also organized events in the United States—Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has been a speaker—as well as in Brussels and Rome. Their favored politicians include Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and their politics are socially conservative, anti-immigration, authoritarian, and heavily invested in an idealized version of “the West.” The most reliable applause line in London was to imply that the left has parted company with reality over gender, as in this quip by Home Secretary Suella Braverman: “100 percent of women do not have a penis.” (Hearty applause.)

The conference takes place at a piquant moment for Britain. The Conservative Party has been in power here since 2010, and seven years ago, the populist right surprised itself by winning the referendum on membership of the European Union. Brexit should have been a moment of great victory for members of this faction, but their mellow was harshed by years of chaotic stasis amid negotiations over the exit deal. From 2010 to 2016, the Tories had a single leader, David Cameron; since Brexit, they have cycled through four. The conventional wisdom is that the party will lose the next election—not on cultural grounds, but on economic ones. Inflation is high, public services are faltering, the young are locked out of buying houses, energy prices are eye-watering, and wage growth has been sluggish since the 2008 financial crisis.

One response to this challenge might be a conference focused on discussing how to promote economic growth, how to build houses in the face of NIMBY opposition, and how much immigration is acceptable to keep the price of goods and services low. Instead, NatCon was a safe space for people who had won a true populist triumph, in the shape of Brexit—and yet still felt like losers. “Why are so many people in Britain today so utterly disillusioned and despondent at the state of the country?” asked Matthew Goodwin, a politics professor at the University of Kent, in a typically doomy speech. “Why do so many of us walk around with a palpable sense that something has gone fundamentally wrong, as though we are trapped in a car with the doors locked being driven to some nightmarish destination?”

[David Frum: The conservative cult of victimhood]

Goodwin then segued into 10 minutes of pure populist beat poetry, shifting from the “glaring cultural problem” caused by immigration, through his parents’ divorce teaching him the value of marriage, and on to the assertion that “our schools have become a Wild West” because they teach children that there are 72 genders. As I wrote in my notebook, riffing on Molly Ivins: This probably sounded better in the original Hungarian.

The first day of the conference was dominated by one subject: babies. In the opening session, Miriam Cates, a Conservative member of Parliament, identified low birth rates as the biggest problem facing the West, attributing the phenomenon both to concrete policy challenges and a liberal individualism that she deemed “completely powerless to resist a cultural Marxism that is systematically destroying our children’s souls.”

Over the next two days, speakers offered a lot of this sort of thing—what George W. Bush might have described as “some weird shit.” Cates’s fellow Tory Danny Kruger devoted part of his speech to condemning a “new religion” of “Marxism and narcissism and paganism.” The historian David Starkey claimed that critical race theorists “do not care about Black lives, they only care about the symbolic destruction of white culture.” I began to keep score of how many speakers asserted that Britain had been through a cultural revolution, the evidence for which was that students are quite left-wing and annoying. Over and over, this was attributed to “indoctrination.”

Cates was followed by Yoram Hazony, the Israeli philosopher widely credited with coining the term national conservatism. (He has done his bit to avert babygeddon by having nine children.) Now, carping sorts might say that any phrase beginning with national and ending with -ism carries unfortunate echoes of the 1930s, and in branding terms should therefore be avoided as a political slogan, along with, say, “We make the trains run on time” or “Work makes you free.” Silence, peon: At NatCon’s invite-only dinner, the British commentator Douglas Murray had a different take. Nationalism is unfairly maligned; the real problem was those rascally Teutons taking everything too far as usual. “I see no reason why every other country in the world should be prevented from feeling pride in itself because the Germans mucked up twice in a century,” he said in a clip released by the official NatCon Twitter feed.

Undeterred by outside criticism, Hazony played the hits, attacking “woke neo-Marxism” and ending with an exhortation that we should all have more children and become more religious. He was in happy company because the next speaker was Jacob Rees-Mogg (six children, the last of whom is named Sixtus). Rees-Mogg, a devout Catholic, started playing a caricature of an English toff in early life and has not stopped yet. His speech took in Saint Thomas Aquinas, Charlemagne, the Treaty of Westphalia, habeas corpus, Edward the Confessor, and occasional snatches of Latin. “Are DeSantis speeches like this?” texted a friend on the other side of the hall. “Slightly less about Aquinas and the French monarchy,” I replied. “Slightly more about Disney.”

This was history as an aesthetic rather than an academic discipline or even a private passion. When Rees-Mogg tried to write a serious book on history, The Victorians, it was almost universally panned, even by fellow anti-woke writers. Still, posing as a pop historian worked for Boris Johnson—whose references were always the most obvious ones you could imagine, such as Shakespeare and Winston Churchill—so I suppose there’s a market for it.

The highlight of Rees-Mogg’s speech came when he attacked his own Conservative Party for insisting before the recent local elections that voters needed to present identification at polling stations. Widespread electoral fraud is simply not an issue in Britain, and so this felt like an extra hurdle imposed on the type of people (students, poor people, racial minorities) who might otherwise vote for Labour. Not so, offered Rees-Mogg in his aristocratic drawl. “Parties that try and gerrymander end up finding their clever scheme comes back to bite them, as dare I say we found by insisting on voter ID for elections,” he said. “We found the people who didn’t have ID were elderly and they by and large voted Conservative, so we made it hard for our own voters, and we upset a system that worked perfectly well.”

For a moment I warmed to Rees-Mogg; it was awfully decent of him to confess to an antidemocratic plot so early in the proceedings.

At lunchtime, I was greeted by a colleague in the subterranean press room. “Hello,” he boomed. “I just popped out to father some children.”

Looking at the program, I noticed that one panel had two men named Sebastian and no women. The audience in the hall was perhaps four-fifths male. Both of these awkward facts underlined a problem with all these paeans to natalism: Most women don’t want to hear them. In countries where women have access to education and the job market, the birth rate falls. In Britain, the demographic that could solve the baby drought, those under 45, is struggling to buy houses after decades of soaring prices, and also declining to vote for right-wing parties. What does national conservatism have to offer these people? They can’t put a crib in a makeshift shelter built from remaindered copies of Jacob Rees-Mogg’s The Victorians. In one of the best speeches of the conference—because it was daringly tethered to empirical reality—the Substack author Ed West observed that “the world’s most effective form of contraception is the London housing market.”

Returning to the hall, we all took our seats early for the afternoon’s main event, the biggest draw of the conference: Suella Braverman. The home secretary is the darling of the Conservative ultra-right, and their best hope of winning the party leadership if Prime Minister Rishi Sunak loses the next election.

[David Frum: “We’re all worse off”]

Her speech was interrupted by a protest against the government’s migration policy—Braverman wants to deport some of those seeking asylum in Britain to Rwanda, which will process their claims instead. (The policy has been framed as a response to high numbers of migrants trying to get to Britain in small boats across the English Channel.) First, one protester was dragged out shouting, “We welcome you, unless you come in a boat, unless you are brown.” The audience settled down, Braverman prepared to restart her speech, and then another protester stood up. I hoped this would last for some time, as it would undoubtedly be more interesting than the speech.

Sadly, that was not to be. “Anyone else?” Braverman offered, brightly. Her speech came in two halves. The first was devoted to an immigrant success story: Her Indian father was displaced from Kenya in the 1960s, around the same time that her mother traveled from Mauritius to Scotland to work as a nurse. This hardworking, loving couple raised a child who would go on to be home secretary, and wasn’t it a real tribute to Britain that it recognized and rewarded her brilliance? The second half of the speech was devoted to explaining why other immigrants should be kept out.

In fairness, her speech galloped around some other issues: grooming gangs that sexually exploit children, Britain’s role in abolishing slavery, women’s aforementioned lack of penises, the left’s perfidy in decolonizing the curriculum and tearing down statues. “White people do not exist in a special state of sin or guilt,” said Braverman. “Ha, that’s what she thinks,” I whispered to the person sitting next to me. “Some of us were raised Catholic.”

And then came one perfect line to encapsulate the difference between national conservatism and the other, more milquetoast, strains. “Conservatism,” said Braverman, “is order or it is nothing.”

After Braverman’s speech, people began to drift away, a migratory herd of navy blazers heading for the exits. I hung around for J. D. Vance, the senator from Ohio who once said Donald Trump might be “America’s Hitler” before trying to pretend he didn’t mean that in a bad way. Vance is too much of a big shot to travel to London for a conference, and so he Zoomed in from what looked like an empty house. I found this intensely distracting: Was he a Zen monk? Had he just moved in? Had he just broken in?

Vance quickly identified a reason national conservatism might struggle to prosper in Britain: This country has a large and successful party of the center-right that the public has repeatedly voted into office. If you want lower taxes, you don’t have to sign up for hard-core natalism too. “You only really have two viable political movements that can contest each other and govern the country,” Vance told the crowd. “And you have on the one side, a political movement that’s dedicated to open borders, that’s sort of ashamed of traditional British culture, and I think is very much of the view that people who live outside major metropolitan areas are to be scorned and looked down on.”

Get ready for it: “And then, of course, on the other side you have the Labour Party.”

The delegates loved it. This was a crowd primed to agree that mainstream Tories were traitors to the conservative cause, and that Sunak—a Brexiteer, a religiously observant Hindu, a hard-liner against drugs—was a wet liberal in disguise. Anger and dismay at the ruling Conservative Party was a repeated theme of the conference, and it squared the obvious contradiction of right-wingers complaining about their marginalization in a country that has been governed by the right for 13 years. “You know, as I do, that the solution is to be found in conservatism,” the Conservative member of Parliament John Hayes said. “But not in the desiccated, hollowed-out, sugar-free conservatism deemed to be just about acceptable by our liberal masters.” This movement cannot ever admit that it has won, because that would involve taking responsibility. Far better to dwell forever in the arcadia of the culture war, a perpetual-motion machine of grievance.

[Helen Lewis: Rishi Sunak, scion of Britain’s new ruling class]

Speaking of which, by the second day I realized that none of the many socially conservative speakers had mentioned homosexuality, which would have been a staple of a similar conference in 1990, or even in 2000. Sorry, gay men, your time as the biggest threat to Western civilization is over; childless women like me are the problem now. Abortion was also absent because it is a settled issue in Britain. Even the punch lines about transgender issues were curiously muted; instead of bloodcurdling Republican invocations of “child mutilation,” we mostly got weary eye rolls about the disputed existence of biological sex.

That tonal difference between the U.S. and Britain was striking, and I think indicative of the two countries’ relative appetites for nationalism. Above all else, British people are suspicious of enthusiasm. This has proved a great defense against fanatics. (In the 1930s, P. G. Wodehouse caricatured Oswald Mosley’s fascists as the “Black Shorts,” while Nancy Mitford wrote an entire novel mocking her sisters’ eager embrace of Hitler.) Too many of the NatCon speakers came off like someone who would harangue you at a party about their pet cause, oblivious to your glazed eyes. Watching Matthew Goodwin work himself into a lather about the fall of civilization made me want to give him a cup of tea and a reassuring biscuit. And Britons like children, sure. But nine? Who likes children that much? To me, the two wittiest and most self-deprecating speakers, Tim Stanley and Ed West, were also the most intellectually interesting; the former criticized the “regrettable miserablism in Conservatism.” Stanley had earlier silenced the hall by asking what John 10:11 said. The answer is “I am the good shepherd: the good shepherd giveth his life for the sheep,” according to the King James Version. But a roomful of people suffused with love for “Judeo-Christian values” turned out to be hazy on their Bible verses.

Eventually, the point of the meeting became clear. This wasn’t a political conference so much as a group-therapy session. Here were people who were obviously, startlingly correct about the evils of the modern world, and yet they weren’t being listened to. There must be some mistake.

In that context, the endless, conspiratorial references to the “elite” began to make sense. The elite is not NatCon chair Christopher DeMuth, who attended Harvard before serving in the Nixon and Reagan administrations. It is not the conference’s British organizer, James Orr, a divinity professor at Cambridge University. It is not Douglas Murray or Father Marcus Walker, who said the prayer before the conference’s private dinner, though both were at Oxford University at the same time I was. It is not Danny Kruger, who told delegates that conservatives had to fight the “intelligentsia, the globalized elite, whose loyalties are to everyone and no one,” and who went to the same boarding school as Prince William. It is not Charlemagne, either, even if he was a literal emperor. The elite is students. The elite is the “woke mind virus.” The elite is a great shadowy Them composed of anyone an inch closer to the political center than the national conservatives are. The elite is whoever is stopping you from getting whatever you want without having to make any compromises.

Throughout the conference, delegates kept returning to one question: Can national conservatism succeed in Britain? The answer has to be no. Just look at Brexit, that great populist triumph now dismissed even by its proponents as an unfulfilled dream, a mere shadow of what they were promised. Whatever happens next, I confidently predict we will discover that true national conservatism has never been tried.

As The Onion repeatedly reminds us, most people most of the time think of the United States as the only place where school shootings and other mass shootings regularly take place. So when two such shootings happened in Serbia in one week, people in both countries understandably asked themselves: Was the United States, deep down, somehow like Serbia? Or was Serbia just now becoming like the United States?

In Serbia, this last question occasioned some soul-searching: What is happening in this society? I have been asking the same questions for the past 30 years as a sociologist researching the region. Serbia is deeply divided, traumatized by the violence of a recent past that different parts of the political culture simultaneously celebrate, condemn, and studiously ignore. It is governed by an elite that operates through informal networks, letting the public in only as much as necessary to maintain the appearance of legitimacy. Its institutions speak about security as incessantly as they foster insecurity. As trite as it may be to say that the violence that happened last week was inevitable, it would not be wrong to say that you could always sense the potential for it to happen.

John J. Donohue: The problem America cannot fix

Does it make sense to point to gun violence and call Serbia a Balkan U.S.A.? The two countries definitely have some similarities, but the differences are just as stark. Consider gun ownership. Everyone knows that the United States is No. 1 in the world in firearms possession. Less remarked-on is the fact that Serbia ranks not far behind, at No. 3. But the gulf between them is pretty big: For every 100 people in the United States, there are 100 to 120 firearms, whereas in Serbia, there are nine to 39, according to data from the University of Sydney’s GunPolicy.org.

The wide range in these estimates shows just how many guns are unregistered and illegal. The long and semiautomatic arms used in last week’s killings are permitted in much of the United States but entirely illegal in Serbia. Serbia doesn’t have anything like the National Rifle Association lobbying politicians to influence gun policy. Nor is there a large constituency in Serbia for the idea that guns are emblematic of personal freedom or embody a basic right. In fact, firearms legislation is pretty restrictive. The guns are out there because the legislation is not enforced.

Because semiautomatic weapons are illegal in Serbia, the state was able to respond quickly. The authorities did make some early blunders. Education Minister Branko Ružić traced the causes of the shootings to “video games” and “so-called Western values,” and was compelled to resign within four days. Police requested that schools in Kikinda and Užice deliver lists of “problematic and asocial” children (a request the schools rightly refused). But it took only a day for President Aleksander Vučić to deliver a speech promising swift action to protect public safety and to reduce ownership of illegal firearms by 90 percent. Confiscation combined with an amnesty program for the surrender of illegal weapons allowed police to collect 3000 guns in mere days.

This early and swift response earned Serbia a lot of international praise—and drew unflattering comparisons with the United States from some observers, including Kris Brown of the Brady campaign. But Vučić’s executive action to enforce existing laws did not satisfy activists in Serbia who saw the root of the horrific events not only in the presence of weapons but also in a cultural and media environment where violence is glorified, and in a political culture where the state uses awful memories of the past, and the fears that derive from them, to justify and promote violence.

Serbia has made no serious public effort to come to terms with its deep complicity in war crimes committed in the 1990s, despite numerous criminal convictions of individuals and the International Court of Justice’s finding it liable for breaching the Genocide Convention. Instead, its political elites and tabloid media continue to promote ethnonationalist resentment and hatred, and those sentiments have been amplified by a widely shared attitude of victimhood. If we trace the origins of Serbian nationalism to Ilija Garašanin's Načertanije, an expansionist manifesto written in 1844 and published in 1906, then the idea of “Greater Serbia” is considerably older than “Make America Great Again.”.

From the January 1913 issue: The Balkan crisis

On Beogradska street in Belgrade, scant blocks from the Vladislav Ribnikar elementary school, where nine people were murdered on May 3, you can find a plaque honoring the memory of Dušan Jovanović, a 13-year-old Roma boy who was beaten to death by racists in 1997. But just a short walk from there, on the corner of Aleksa Nenadović Street, passersby are greeted by a large mural celebrating General Ratko Mladić, who was convicted of genocide for the murder of 8,372 civilians in Srebrenica in 1995. The mural has been there since 2021 and is assiduously protected.

The Mladić mural is an expression—and not the only one of its kind in Serbia—that goes beyond the internationally standard routinization of violence in films and propaganda. That’s because it attaches violence to an ideological purpose, and to ethnic and national hatred that is, at a minimum, tolerated by the state.

Although the constituency of the worst-inclined people is well represented in Serbia, it’s hardly the case that everyone is an ethno-nationalist fanatic inclined to violence. Parents of the victims in the school shooting led a march against violence in which they drew the appropriate connections. Their protest demanded the resignations of responsible officials and demanded a special session of Parliament in which laws promoting everyday security could be passed. They are also demanding strict limits on the promotion of violence and hatred in the media, including violent films and entertainment programs, “print media and tabloids that publish false news items,” and “television stations that mislead citizens, poison minds, and promote violence,” specifically Pink TV and Hepi TV, two broadcasters very close to the ruling elite.

Read: The return of the 1920s

The presiding officer of the Parliament declined to meet with the victims’ parents, although later, Vučić said that he and the prime minister had met with them and “will fulfill all of their demands.“ However, Vučić’s party said that it would meet any new protest with a simultaneous counterprotest, which would be certain to inflame tensions and lead to further violence. A few days later, the president described the protesters as “hyenas and scavengers,” which probably indicates that he is not all that interested in reaching compromises or calming things down.

Why the hostility between the regime and the parents, who at first glance appear to share the same goals? Vučić acted immediately by issuing his executive action on firearms. He was rightly praised from many sides for doing something that people had been requesting for years. But Vučić was able to do this at least in part because of the authoritarian character of his rule. Opposition parties are weak, and he enjoys nearly complete control over the Parliament, the judiciary, and most other relevant decision-making and enforcement institutions. The parents’ protest highlighted the links among the authoritarian character of the state, the destructively ideological nature of the media, and the broad normalization of violence in the culture.

Confiscating a large number of illegal weapons will probably do some good, and it certainly will not do any harm. But Vučić is aware that he cannot address the root causes of violence without putting the foundations of his rule in danger: The informal network of elites that governs the country needs citizens to be confused, fearful, and insecure.

The conclusions that can be drawn from Serbia’s experience might be unwelcome ones for American gun-control advocates, who argue that the basic cause of persistent mass killings in the United States is not cultural or psychological, and stems not from the erosion of values or the evaporation of respect for authority; rather, they say, it can be traced almost entirely to the presence of large numbers of guns. A critical mass in Serbia is arguing to a receptive public that the state can get rid of guns but that eliminating the danger of violence will also require building institutions that are truthful and responsible, and building a culture that is, if not tolerant and understanding, then at least relatively nontoxic.

When we talk about these issues in Serbia, the touchstone is often the wars of the 1990s, out of which the present regime emerged, and the failure of institutions to deal seriously with its legacy. This is an enormously important issue. I wrote a book about it, and so have many other people who were determined to point, with alarm, at the danger that arises from leaving history as a field of open wounds.

But there is another touchstone, which the parents’ protest indicated with tremendous clarity. It has to do with the character of the political culture. Countries such as Serbia whose governments made the promise of security central to their power have come to depend on keeping alive the very fears they pledged to defend their citizens against. The Serbian government has further shored up its authority by shutting down opposition—emptying the public sphere of both genuine confrontation and the capacity to resolve disagreements. Violent ideologies easily gain traction in societies shaped by fear that also lack outlets for constructive dissension. Serbia’s protest against violence is dangerous for the country’s ruling elite, because its demand is to make people more secure by making the culture more democratic and inclusive.

We may be tempted to regard these points about history and culture as unique to the exotic Balkans, but as is almost always the case, they are not. So we shouldn’t be too surprised that in the aftermath of Serbia’s mass shootings, the U.S. and Serbia, with all their differences, are asking themselves what they have in common—and maybe even what Serbia’s experience can teach us about the United States.

I have twice met the man who has just been crowned King Charles III, both times on occasions so unmemorable that I am certain he cannot possibly recall either one. I recall them very well, of course—where we were (once in London, once in Warsaw); what we wore (he, gray pinstripes; I, a black dress); what we said (nothing of consequence). That’s the essence of my relationship to the new king, and also the essence of all of our relationships with royalty. They know nothing whatsoever about us, but we remember absolutely everything about them.

Sometimes, in fact, we know an extraordinary amount about them. Without ever having tried especially hard, I know more details about the relationship between Charles and Queen Camilla than I know about, say, the relationship between my sister and my brother-in-law. Because their phones are tapped and the transcripts are then published, because their courtiers have an enormous incentive to leak gossip, because even their relatives have much to gain by talking and writing about them—because of all this, I know things about them almost by osmosis. Even if I don’t want to know the intimate details, I just do.

Not that this is their fault. Of course they can be criticized for failing to navigate the world of celebrity journalism and for their clumsy attempts to manipulate it. But they didn’t create it, and it isn’t a world they were ever going to inhabit comfortably. This royal family has been singularly unprepared to function as a national soap opera. In its modern incarnation, the British monarchy long succeeded because it was precisely the opposite, and the Windsors would have been happy to continue in that tradition.

[Read: The petulant king]

All they have ever wanted, it seems, was to follow the rules laid out by the Victorian writer Walter Bagehot, whose influential book The English Constitution, published in 1867, argued that the ideal constitutional monarch is unknowable, unreachable. Their personality should be dull; their opinions kept to themselves. A queen is not friendly or relatable; a king is not someone with whom you would like to have a beer. The more he is perceived as a symbol—of the nation, of unity, of history—and the less he seems like an actual human being, the more effective he will be. “Its mystery is its life,” Bagehot wrote of the monarchy. “We must not let in daylight upon magic.”

The Windsors took this idea and ran with it. The late Queen’s rather rigid public persona, her careful avoidance of controversy, even her chilly (by modern standards) methods of raising her children—all of that seems to have been a deliberate attempt to fit into Bagehot’s definition. Throughout her life, she sought to preserve the mystery, to keep out the daylight. Then she taught Charles to do the same.

But during her reign the world changed. Slowly, the royal family agreed to do more public events, to have more contact with ordinary people, even to appear in some prime-time television specials (It’s a Royal Knockout, a kind of game show, was one notable failure). Charles, as Prince of Wales, devoted himself to sustainable farming, walkable towns, environmental causes. He was many years ahead of the curve—he made a speech denouncing the excessive use of plastics, and predicting damage to the environment, as far back as 1970—but got little credit for it. Instead, daylight was let in, the magic disappeared, and it’s not necessary to explain what happened next, because all of us know, whether we want to or not. Eventually we got to where we are now, an era of dueling interviews, staged photographs, and competing best-selling memoirs. And this is now the problem: If there is no magic about the monarch, then what possible constitutional purpose does he serve?

Saturday’s coronation, so carefully planned and orchestrated, was an attempt to fix that problem. The King did not have to be anointed behind a screen. He did not have to put on a crown containing a ruby supposedly worn by Henry V at the Battle of Agincourt. He certainly did not have to travel in a famously uncomfortable golden coach, or encourage his family to dress like characters out of Star Wars. But he chose to do all of these things in an attempt to shroud himself in the same mystery that enveloped his mother. The moment he had the crown fixed on his head, he kept his face expressionless. He showed no joy, no relief after so many decades of waiting. He wanted to look like the image of a monarch on a postage stamp, and he did.

Will his subjects accept this transformation? For some it isn’t necessary; tens of thousands were celebrating along the parade route and outside Buckingham Palace on Saturday, despite the inevitable rain. For others Charles’s attempt to attain mystery and distance doesn’t matter, because even if they don’t accept this change, they can’t do anything about it anyway. A long time ago, a British friend reminded me that when Queen Elizabeth died, there would be no vote or plebiscite on Charles’s worthiness, no moment when the country paused to ask whether they still wanted a monarch. He would just become king, instantaneously: The Queen is dead; long live the King. And so it came to pass. There wasn’t a nanosecond in which it was possible to ask, “Do we really want a king?” or “Do we want this particular king?,” and probably there never will be. Habit is powerful, the pull of old traditions is real. I don’t foresee Charles being ejected from his palaces, and I would also be surprised if his son does not, in due course, become King William.

[Helen Lewis: King Charles’s absurd, awe-inspiring coronation]

But for many other people, the unease will reflect itself in other ways—or maybe it already has. Maybe the decline of the magical part of the British constitution has an echo in the diminishing faith in so many other British institutions, from the judiciary and the Parliament to the National Health Service and the British Broadcasting Corporation. Maybe the excess of daylight inside the monarchy plays a small part in explaining why arguments about the British empire are breaking out now, in the 2020s, decades after most of that empire wound down; or why conservative newspapers that once defended the establishment used phrases like “saboteurs” or “enemies of the people” to describe judges and members of the House of Lords during the bitter debate about Brexit.

Possibly this unease helps explain why more people watched Elizabeth’s funeral last year than Charles’s coronation last weekend. One commemorated the past, the other was meant to look towards the future. But it doesn’t feel like a future in which the monarchy will become stronger or grander, or more expansive, or more powerful—or even more relevant, as the new king so clearly hopes it will be.    

Every time Paula McCartney drives across a bridge to the Belfast neighborhood known as the Markets, she crosses the River Lagan, which she now associates with the deaths of both of her brothers. One died by suicide in 2000. The other was killed in a last gasp of paramilitary violence five years later.

“For a long time, I would just try to avoid driving on the bridges,” Paula told me. “It was all just too painful and too close to home to think how we lost first Gerard and then Robert. The river just always brought it all back.”

[Read: The Good Friday Agreement in the age of Brexit]

The McCartney sisters, all five of them, had gathered in the parlor of a pleasant home with a garden off a suburban cul-de-sac just outside the city, a world away from the menacing, narrow warrens of the Short Strand neighborhood, where they’d grown up amid Northern Ireland’s sectarian violence known as the Troubles. They lived in a predominantly Catholic and republican area on the east bank of the River Lagan, hemmed in by traditionally Protestant loyalist communities of East Belfast, patrolled by British soldiers and bristling with paramilitary organizations. One of the sisters, Catherine, left the Short Strand for this quiet suburb in 2003. Paula eventually moved in across the street, and several others now also live nearby.

The sisters, who range in age from 47 to 59, gathered at Catherine’s house on April 6, just days before a flurry of high-level visits to Ireland would mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement. President Joe Biden planned to tour the country, and the agreement’s original brokers would convene to commemorate it. But the McCartney sisters were not celebrating.

Since the Good Friday Agreement, the violence among paramilitary organizations that took more than 3,500 lives from 1969 to 1998 has largely abated, and the British military presence has all but vanished, but Northern Ireland remains an uneasy place for those who lived on its fault lines. Paula told me that the anniversary of the agreement meant nothing to her. “It is an anniversary of an agreement that has not been honored,” she said. “There’s not the bombs and the shootings and soldiers in the streets, but I would not call what we have peace.”

The McCartney family was never much involved in politics during the Troubles. But like many working-class Catholics in the Short Strand, they sympathized with the republican cause of a united Ireland. They still do.

Robert McCartney, 33 years old and the father of two young boys, certainly did not set out to antagonize the Irish Republican Army on January 30, 2005, when he met an old neighborhood friend at a local bar for a drink. The friend was Brendan Devine, and the rendezvous was at Magennis’s Bar in the Markets. The leader of the IRA unit in the area, Gerard “Jock” Davison, happened to be among the crowd at Magennis’s that night, and a group of republican supporters and IRA members arrived by bus from Derry.

In the suddenly crowded bar, Devine was accused of making an inappropriate comment to a woman who was with one of the local IRA leaders. A fight broke out. Devine was stabbed with a broken bottle and McCartney, a big but gentle man, tried to intervene. The fight spilled into the street, where McCartney was stabbed in the heart and left to die.

By all accounts, the violence had nothing to do with politics. And yet, the sisters say that dozens of people who were in the bar that night have privately shared with them the details of what happened—but that virtually none have had the courage to testify for fear of reprisals by the IRA. The McCartneys’ sources say that IRA leaders told the patrons of the bar that what had happened was “IRA business.” The implication was clear: The patrons should not say a word to the police.

They complied. No one at the bar called the police that night, and no one called an ambulance. The McCartneys’ sources told them that the IRA members in the bar “cleaned” the crime scene, wiping away fingerprints, disposing of the weapons used in the assault, and removing video-surveillance footage outside the bar. The police did question witnesses and eventually arrested three suspects, but no one was convicted. To this day, the case remains unsolved, like most of the other cases involving the victims of paramilitaries during the Troubles and in the years after.

For 17 years, the McCartney sisters have come up against this wall of silence as they’ve agitated for justice on their brother’s behalf. They believe that the IRA is still intimidating witnesses. The group has ceased to operate as a paramilitary organization, but security officials say that it continues to control a lucrative racketeering enterprise and exerts tight control over its community.

Back in 2005, when the McCartney sisters first began speaking out, neighbors they’d known all their lives greeted them with cold, ominous stares. That year, I was at Paula’s home, which was then located in the Short Strand, covering the family’s story for The Boston Globe, when the sisters, who had 20 children among them, received a bomb threat. They went on making sandwiches and changing diapers as the bomb squad swept the house and ultimately found nothing.

At the time, the world press took note of the sisters’ courage in standing up to their community’s violent enforcers. The family was invited to the White House for St. Patrick’s Day just two months after Robert’s murder, and President George W. Bush hailed the sisters as “brave souls” committed to peace. They met with the late Senator Ted Kennedy, who proposed a U.S. Senate resolution condemning the IRA for Robert’s murder and urging the U.S. government to offer “all appropriate assistance to law enforcement authorities in Northern Ireland to see that the murderers of Robert McCartney are brought to justice.”

But the flurry of attention has come and gone, and the McCartney sisters are still haunting gatherings of world leaders and activists, respectfully calling for closure for the families who lost loved ones in the Troubles and in the years of low-level violence that followed.

Robert’s story is the better-known of his family’s twin tragedies. The McCartneys’ other brother, Gerard, died at the age of 28, in December 2000, when he plunged into the frigid waters of the River Lagan. During my April visit, after the dignitaries left town and the news cycle turned away from Northern Ireland, after much thought and some hesitation, the sisters decided to share Gerard’s story publicly for the first time.

Gerard had suffered for many years from severe depression. He worked for a while as a gardener and then at a bakery. But he couldn’t hold down a job, and there wasn’t much in the way of opportunity. He was close with Robert, as they were only a year apart in age. Faded photographs on the wall of their mother’s home show them as children next to each other, smiling, often with their arms around each other.

As they got older, life in Belfast took a toll. Paula, Catherine, and Claire McCartney all work in social services and point to the community’s lack of adequate mental-health services for a generation living with the trauma of the Troubles. Gerard was placed in a mental institution, where he shared a crowded ward with patients who had histories of criminal violence.

“It was terrible, and it made him much worse,” said Catherine, who added that the family brought him home and tried to look after him, but he spiraled downward and attempted suicide once before he actually took his own life. The image of him jumping into the river was captured on CCTV, and his body was found the following day at the base of the Victorian-era stone arches of the Queen’s Bridge.

The McCartney sisters gathered in south Belfast in the home of Catherine McCartney on April 3, 2023. The sisters have campaigned for justice since their brother Robert McCartney was killed in a bar fight in 2005.

When the McCartneys left the Short Strand, they left behind a climate of despair that lingered there and in other so-called interface areas between Catholic and Protestant neighborhoods. These were the flash points of the conflict, places where there is still unrest in the aftermath of the Good Friday Agreement, and where few residents seem to feel that they have benefited from a peace dividend. Instead, many survivors of the Troubles were left without jobs, economic opportunity, or hope.

After Gerard’s death, the youngest sister, Claire McCartney, 47, enrolled in a nursing program. Now she works in a mental-health facility and is committed to serving those who, like her brother, struggle with serious mental illness. “There is just so much need,” she told me. “It can feel overwhelming.”

In the first 20 years after the Good Friday Agreement, Northern Ireland saw more deaths from suicide than it had from sectarian violence during the roughly three decades of conflict. And the number of suicides continues to climb. One of Northern Ireland’s most promising young journalists, Lyra McKee, published an article in The Atlantic in 2016 on the increase in suicides after the Good Friday Agreement. “Peace seems to have claimed more lives than war ever did,” she wrote. Three years later, in 2019, McKee was killed covering a riot in Derry. She was shot by members of the “New IRA,” a fringe paramilitary organization still operating in the area, who were aiming at a row of armored police vehicles near where McKee was standing.

[Lyra McKee: Suicide among the ceasefire babies]

“The cohesion of a collective struggle gives people meaning and purpose,” Siobhan O’Neill, a professor of mental-health sciences at Ulster University who has researched suicide rates in Northern Ireland, told me. During the Troubles, O’Neill said, Northern Ireland’s suicide rates were relatively low, at about 8 deaths per 100,000 people. But 20 years after the Good Friday Agreement effectively ended the fighting, the rate had doubled, climbing to 16 deaths per 100,000. Data released that same year revealed that 4,500 lives had been lost to suicide from 1998 to 2018, compared with some 3,600 lost to violence from 1969 to 1998.

O’Neill says her data trace the spike in suicides most strongly in the neighborhoods where the violence had been most intense. In these neighborhoods, she said, “there have not been investments, and the young people there do not have the hope that we see in other corners of Northern Ireland.”

Since the Good Friday Agreement came into effect, paramilitary groups have largely decommissioned their weapons, and British military posts have vanished. The old Royal Ulster Constabulary, once feared by most Catholics as an arm of British military authority, has been disbanded and reconstituted as the Police Service of Northern Ireland, about one-third of which is now Catholic. A new power-sharing government ensures the representation of all of the country’s constituencies—though at the moment, that government has been temporarily dissolved because of complications stemming from Brexit.

[Conor McCabe: How Brexit threatens peace in Northern Ireland]

The agreement was a crucial step in the process of leaving Northern Ireland’s painful past behind. But the McCartneys are not the only family whose need for resolution remains unmet. Sandra Peake, the CEO of the Belfast-based WAVE Trauma Center, one of Northern Ireland’s largest cross-community support group for victims and survivors, told me she was distressed by legislation before the British Parliament that would offer amnesty to those who cooperate with investigations and prevent future inquests and civil actions regarding murders connected to the Troubles. The nearly 100-page Northern Ireland Troubles (Legacy and Reconciliation) Bill is currently in the House of Lords and seems to be opposed by all sides in Northern Ireland.

“This bill fails to recognize how important it is for these families to hold on to the idea that killers will be held accountable,” Peake said. “There is a terrible intimacy to the violence that people often don’t realize. It surrounds these communities. Imagine going into a shop and seeing someone who you know killed your brother wishing you a good day by name. That is what happens for the McCartney sisters and for so many.”

[From the April 2022 issue: Ireland’s great gamble]

Indeed, the McCartney sisters say they have heard numerous accounts suggesting that Gerard Davison called for the murder of their brother. Davison was considered an “OC,” or “officer commanding” of the Provisional IRA in South Belfast. According to the McCartney sisters, witnesses that night in the bar saw him put a finger across his throat and gesture to Robert. Davison was never charged in the McCartney murder. He was shot dead in the Markets in 2015 for reasons that remain unknown.

For the McCartney sisters, the closest thing to closure would be a verdict in a court of law—one that not only names their brother’s killer but also reveals who in the bar knew what happened but never spoke out, even if they are members of Sinn Féin, the political wing of the IRA and now Northern Ireland’s leading party.

Gerry Adams, who served for 34 years as the president of Sinn Féin and remains a spokesman as one of the signatories of the Good Friday Agreement, attended the ceremonies marking the 25th anniversary. I asked him about the McCartneys and Robert’s unsolved murder on the sidelines of the events. “We’ve done all we can do to help,” he said.

Catherine was incensed by his answer: “If Gerry is at a loss with what to do, I can tell him what to do. He can order members of his party, including a minister who was in the bar that night and never met with police, to tell them what she saw or didn’t see. But he hasn’t done that, and that’s why it feels like they are just going through the motions.”

On that afternoon in April, at Catherine’s suburban home, the sisters yet again reconstructed the night of Robert’s death from the witness accounts they’d heard privately over the years. One in particular has come to haunt them.

After the fight, a patron from the bar found Robert bleeding out on a side street along the River Lagan. This witness never testified to the police, although he was the one to call the ambulance that night. He told the sisters that when he arrived, Robert was barely conscious and mumbled one word several times: “Gerard.”

The sisters are divided on what Robert meant. Was he referencing their brother Gerard, with whom he was very close? Or was he fingering his alleged murderer, the late IRA leader, Gerard “Jock” Davison?

Catherine has her own answer to that question: “I believe Robert was naming our brother Gerard, and knew he’d be seeing him soon.”

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.”