Groups calling themselves the Free Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps have launched raids inside Russia. Drones have flown over Moscow, damaging what may be the homes of Russian intelligence officers and buzzing the Kremlin itself. Unusually intense fighting has been reported this week in several parts of eastern Ukraine, with completely different versions of events provided by Russians and Ukrainians. Conflicts have also been reported between the Russian mercenaries of the Wagner Group and the soldiers of the regular Russian army.

What does it all mean? That the Ukrainian counteroffensive has begun.

In a week that also marks the 79th anniversary of D-Day, we should note the many ways in which this military action does not, and probably will not, resemble the Normandy landing. Perhaps at some point there will be a lot of Ukrainian troops massed in one place, taking huge casualties—or perhaps not. Perhaps there will be a galvanized, coordinated Russian military response—or perhaps the response will look more like it did on Tuesday, when a dam that was under direct Russian control collapsed, leading to the inundation of southern Ukraine. Nor was that the only disaster: A series of smaller man-made floods has also washed over Russian-occupied territories in the past few days.

[From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive]

This counteroffensive will also look different from the D-Day movies, because Ukraine’s goals are not merely military. Yes, Ukrainian troops are probing Russian defenses up and down the 1,000-kilometer front line. Yes, the Ukrainians are conducting “shaping operations,” hitting ammunition dumps and other targets behind Russian lines. Yes, Ukraine wants to take back territory lost since February 2022, as well as territory lost in 2014. Yes, we know the Ukrainians can do it, because they’ve done it before. They fought the Russians out of northern Ukraine at the very beginning of the war. They recaptured Russian-held parts of the Kharkiv district in September, and the city of Kherson a couple of months later.

But in addition to taking back land, they are also conducting a sort of psychological shaping operation: They have to convince the Russian elite that the war was a mistake and that Russia can’t win it, not in the short term and not in the long term, either. Toward this end, they are also seeking to convince ordinary Russians that they aren’t as safe as they thought, that the war is nearer to their own homes than they believed, and that President Vladimir Putin isn’t as wise as they imagined. And the Ukrainians have to do all of this without a full-scale invasion of Russia, without occupying Moscow, and without a spectacular Russian surrender in Red Square.

The anti-Putin Russians fighting in Russia are part of that battle. This group, which seems to contain some authentic Russian extremists and some authentic opponents of Putin (but may also contain Ukrainians pretending to be Russian extremists or opponents of Putin), does have a military purpose. These incursions can help neutralize the immediate border zone, and draw Russian troops away from more important battles. The group’s leaders appear to have killed a senior Russian officer and are said to have taken prisoners.

But they, too, are part of a different game. As one of the group’s members (nickname “Caesar”) told The New York Times, they aim to provide “a demonstration to the people of Russia that it is possible to create resistance and fight against the Putin regime inside Russia.” By their very existence, they prove that apathy is not mandatory, that the Russian nation is not unified, and that no one is secure just because they live inside the borders of Russia.  

[Tom Nichols: The world awaits Ukraine’s counteroffensive]

The drones in Moscow could have the same effect. I don’t know who launched them—Ukrainian special forces, Russian saboteurs, or Ukrainian special forces pretending to be Russian saboteurs. But the effect is the same: They show Muscovites that no one is untouchable, not even the residents of the Kremlin. Maybe they won’t persuade people to “create resistance and fight against the Putin regime,” but they might help persuade people to start thinking about what comes next.

And indeed, some people are clearly thinking about what comes next. Although no evidence indicates that Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenaries, is actively trying to eliminate Putin, he does seem to be part of a competition to replace him, should the Russian president accidentally fall out a window. During an interview Monday, he mocked the luxurious life of Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu’s daughter, implied that Shoigu himself is lazy, and described the chief of the general staff throwing “paranoid tantrums, yelling and squealing at anyone surrounding him.” We are, he said, “two months away from the firing squads”—by which he meant the firing squads that will eliminate these degenerate leaders. One Russian officer who said he had been captured and interrogated by the Wagner group issued a statement claiming that Prigozhin’s men were threatening and humiliating Russian soldiers. Prigozhin, in turn, says the regular Russian army opened fire on his mercenaries and left land mines to obstruct their movement.

In this context, the destruction not just of the big dam on the Dnipro River but of other dams and waterways all across occupied Ukraine has a clear purpose. Floods create chaos, forcing the Ukrainian state to care for evacuees. They put large, unexpected bodies of water between the Ukrainians and Russian forces, making it impossible to move equipment. These actions also send a psychological message: We will do anything—anything—to stop you. We don’t care how it looks. We don’t care who it damages. Confirmed reports say that the Russian occupation regime is not rescuing people stranded on the roof of their house by the flood, and that the Russian army is shelling people engaged in rescue operations. Russian soldiers have also drowned, Ukrainian spokespeople believe. An army that was willing to waste tens of thousands of men in the pointless nine-month battle of Bakhmut is unlikely to care.

Remember that all of this—the weird psyops, the exploded dam, the Russian infighting—has unfolded even before anyone has reliably spotted the Western-trained, Western-equipped Ukrainian brigades that are meant to lead this counteroffensive. On Tuesday, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced with great fanfare that it had destroyed some of this equipment, including a German Leopard 2 tank. Hours later, Russian bloggers examined the video clips they produced. Alas, the objects destroyed seem to be not Leopard tanks but John Deere tractors. Future reports from the Russian ministry should be treated with caution.

Future reports from any source should be treated with caution. What we can see is not the “fog of war,” in the old-fashioned sense; instead it is a kind of swirling tornado, a maelstrom of claims and counterclaims, memes and countermemes, real battles taking place away from television screens and fake ones happening on camera. The Normandy landings were followed by a long, bloody Allied slog through France, which no one back home watched in real time. The certainty that D-Day was a true turning point emerged only in retrospect. This Ukrainian counteroffensive is, so far, disappointing fans of panoramic drama, set-piece battles, and heroic tales. Those might, or might not, come later. In the meantime, remember that the true purpose of the counteroffensive is not your entertainment.

A core component of liberal democracy is that the opposition must have the right to field the candidate of its choice, giving it a fair chance to oust the government at the ballot box. In Poland, which has become one of Europe’s most important economic and military powers, that axiom is under attack.

At the end of May, the governing Law and Justice party instituted a commission to investigate Russian influence on Polish politics. Given the ways in which the Kremlin has tried to wield power over European political parties, including Germany’s Social Democrats and Italy’s Lega (formerly Northern League), a nonpartisan commission to investigate such links in Poland would certainly make sense. A body with the authority to propose formal charges, to be investigated by independent courts, for people who are suspected of breaking existing laws would be perfectly appropriate.

But this new commission is nothing of the sort. It violates the most basic democratic principles; its composition, exclusively of ruling-party members or loyalists, is wholly partisan; it is empowered to punish alleged culprits as it sees fit, turning the commission into prosecutor, judge, and jury, all in one. Perhaps most shockingly, the commission has the right to disbar anyone from public office for up to 10 years.

[Yascha Mounk: After Poland, no democracy is safe]

This last detail suggests the commission’s true purpose. With parliamentary elections coming up in the fall that are expected to be closely contested, the government appears to be using the commission as a cudgel against the leader of the country’s biggest opposition party, Donald Tusk, who was the prime minister from 2007 to 2014, and the president of the European Council from 2014 to 2019. At a minimum, Law and Justice seems set to use its hold over the commission to tarnish Tusk’s standing in the eyes of voters; many observers fear that it could go so far as to make it illegal for him to run.

Poland, in short, may be poised to turn into a Potemkin democracy, an empty simulacrum of genuine self-government. And that once again reveals the alarming brittleness of democracy, with even the most vaunted democratic success stories deeply vulnerable to authoritarian capture.

Poland has long been seen as one of the great success stories of the past 30-plus years. During the Cold War, when the country was effectively a satellite state of the Soviet Union, it maintained a crushingly authoritarian system and suffered from very low living standards, especially in rural areas. Today, Poland enjoys full sovereignty, a status that had largely eluded the country for three centuries. After Poland gained independence from the Warsaw Pact, it made great strides toward freedom and political stability, joining the European Union and affording its citizens expansive social and political rights.

Even more notable is the country’s economic transformation. One of few countries in the world to have enjoyed continuous economic growth for the past three decades, Poland has seen its GDP increase nearly tenfold since the end of Communist rule. Keir Starmer, the leader of the British Labour Party, recently made headlines by warning that Poland is on track to overtake the U.K. in GDP per capita by the end of the decade.

Although Poland has continued to grow richer and more influential, its political development was upended when Law and Justice swept into power in 2015. Under the guidance of Jarosław Kaczyński, the populist party immediately set out to undermine the rule of law.

Kaczyński placed loyalists on the constitutional court by legally dubious means and gave political appointees power over the judicial process. His party turned the state broadcaster into a tool of government propaganda, used public funds to purchase privately owned regional newspapers, and tried to force the owners of independent radio and television stations to sell their rightful possessions.

In other words, this commission is the culmination of democratic backsliding that has been under way for years. If the new body bars Tusk from running in the fall elections, this highly influential EU member state will no longer be a genuine democracy. That would drag the whole bloc into a crisis of legitimacy.

A significant facet of the developments in Poland, one with special resonance for the United States, suggests that the obvious explanations for the rise of authoritarian populism are at best incomplete—with major implications for any hopes of reversing the trend. Standard accounts of the ascendancy of authoritarian populism tend to focus on cultural change and economic stagnation. The debate has usually centered on which of these two factors is more important—but neither fits the Polish case especially well.

Take the economy. In a single generation, Poland has grown much more affluent. Admittedly, this newfound wealth has come with greater inequality; some rural areas have been left behind compared with the gleaming metropoles—and Law and Justice has expertly exploited the resulting resentments. But in some ways, the improvement of living standards has been most striking in the country’s poorer regions, where people now take for granted amenities such as indoor toilets, which many lacked some 35 years ago.

What’s more, support for Law and Justice is hardly limited to the poor or excluded; the party is also popular with social strata that have enjoyed breathtaking upward mobility. As with Donald Trump in the U.S., Law and Justice in Poland appeals to plenty of people who are doing very well.

The notion of a backlash against cultural change does not fit the facts so well either. In 1989, Poland was a deeply conservative and patriarchal country. Today, women enjoy greater equality and autonomy, and, especially in the cities, sexual minorities are a visible part of the country’s social fabric. Law and Justice has played up fear over “LGBT ideology” and used a rejection of secular urban elites as part of its electoral pitch—moves that have made the party popular among those who feel alienated from the country’s new culture, which is much more liberal and cosmopolitan than it once was. Poland’s transformation, however, has been so deep and rapid that such regressive messaging alone would not be enough to keep Law and Justice in power; the party has been able to win a series of elections only because its appeal extends well beyond that reactionary base.

Take the Catholic Church, which has long played a big political role in Poland. In the last years of Communist rule, Poland was one of the most Catholic countries in the world—a majority of the population attended Mass at least once a week. Now that number has fallen to about a quarter of the population. With the hold of the Church declining so rapidly, and its reputation in tatters after a string of sexual-abuse scandals, any explanation for the success of Law and Justice that relies simply on the theory of a backlash against cultural change is inadequate. Deeply devout voters now constitute too small a share of the electorate to keep Law and Justice in business. The same sort of change has affected other realms of Polish society. Attitudes toward gays and lesbians have, for example, dramatically improved, which means that homophobia cannot on its own account for the enduring appeal of Law and Justice.

The upshot should worry those who think that further cultural change will magically make the problem of populism disappear: Neither a greater secularization of Polish society nor a further liberalization of attitudes toward sexual minorities is sure to erode the party’s popularity.

All of these examples should be a warning for other democracies facing authoritarian-populist challenges, including the U.S. Some American pundits argue that populism’s potency derives mainly from the stagnation of living standards. Although that idea has some plausibility, the experience of Poland suggests that rapid economic growth and widespread prosperity do not necessarily reduce support for authoritarian populists.

The other main school of thought insists that the roots of populism lie primarily in cultural grievances. Politicians like Trump, the argument runs, are especially popular among voters who are whiter and older, so as the population diversifies, and members of Gen Z gradually replace Baby Boomers, support for such candidates is sure to dwindle. Here, too, the Polish experience is sobering: Even as Poland’s culture has become more liberal and progressive, the arc of its politics has not bent toward democracy. The young have, in virtually all major democracies, been more progressive than the old for decades—yet, in part because voters’ values change as they grow older, the moment when progressives consistently win commanding electoral majorities has failed to materialize.

Polish democracy is not dead. Hundreds of thousands of people marched in Warsaw over the weekend to defend democratic institutions and fight for their right to vote for the candidate of their choice. The upcoming elections look likely to be close, even if—or perhaps especially if—Tusk is disqualified from running.

[Read: Poland is not ready to accept a new McCarthyism]

To understand the developments in Poland—and similar ones in such countries as Turkey, India, and America—the simple binary of democracy and dictatorship will not do. Poland, like so many other countries, is evolving into an embattled system that political scientists have described by such names as “illiberal democracy” and “competitive authoritarian regime.” The Law and Justice government has skewed the odds, giving it a big advantage over its political rivals. And yet, elections remain meaningful for now, because the opposition still has a real shot at gaining power through the ballot box.

Poland was already a flawed democracy before the new commission was constituted. The opposition will retain some agency, even if Tusk is barred. But the Law and Justice government has taken yet another fateful step toward turning Poland into a Potemkin democracy.