There is no freude like schadenfreude. Friends and admirers of Ukraine and enemies of Russian despotism and brutality have been chuckling this week, even as they scratch their heads about the opéra bouffe that was the Prigozhin putsch. I learned of these events on my way back from Kyiv with some senior Polish foreign-policy experts and practitioners. We shared ingenious theories about what was unfolding, most of which had to be revised drastically the next time we got internet access. I have to confess that it was entertaining.

Many shrewd guesses about what happened are floating about, most of them contradictory: Prigozhin acted alone in a fit of pique about the Wagner Group losing its valuable contracts; Prigozhin acted under the sponsorship of “men in the shadows”; Prigozhin thought he had backers and got out ahead of himself; Prigozhin was staging a bit of theater at Putin’s behest (that one evaporated quickly). Who knows? What is important is what the drama of the weekend means for the war in Ukraine and for the security of Europe and the rest of the world.

Parsing shreds of evidence—The minister of defense is in the newspapers, which means his position is safe! Charges again Prigozhin are still pending!—can only get us so far. Focusing on the three logics that will drive the war long after we figure out what just happened is more productive.

The first and deepest logic remains Russian imperialism, which requires the subjugation of Ukraine not simply as a matter of national ambition, but as a matter of self-understanding. Vladimir Putin is a thug seeking power and wealth, but that does not mean that he and his cronies are insincere in their belief that Ukraine is, in fact, a subordinate element of Russia. The summer before the war, Putin published “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians,” an article pervaded with the falsehoods and myths that inspired his attack. Authors like Ivan Ilyin, the reactionary anti-Communist, laid the groundwork for even wilder Russian fantasies. (Timothy Snyder’s essay “Ivan Ilyin, Putin’s Philosopher of Russian Fascism” provides a useful overview of his thought.)

But imperial fever and fascism only take one so far. The second logic of this war is the logic of any war, and for that we must turn to Carl von Clausewitz, whose depiction of the intangible elements of war—the connection between politics and strategy, the nature and effect of clashing wills, the culmination of offensives in exhaustion, the intrinsic power of the defense—has never been bettered. In many respects, the war in Ukraine is a war like any other, in which tactical competence, training and morale, operational-level design, and above all logistics play key roles in shaping results  on the battlefields of southern and eastern Ukraine.

The third logic, which is now dominant, is that of mafia politics. And here the best guide is unquestionably Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. Indeed, one can imagine Putin pondering the scene in which the aging Don Corleone warns his son and successor, Michael, that one of his trusted lieutenants will offer to broker a peace deal, in order to betray him: "Now listen, whoever comes to you with this Barzini meeting, he’s the traitor. Don't forget that." Is President Lukashenko of Belarus, who negotiated the stand-down with Prigozhin, still Putin’s loyal subordinate? What about anyone who recommended that the Russian president take the deal that let Prigozhin go free? Why are some in Russia suggesting replacing faithful if dull military leaders like Valery Gerasimov with people like Sergey Surovikin who were once close to Prigozhin?

One of the common phrases in The Godfather is “It’s not personal, its business”—a sentiment usually expressed just before another gangster gets rubbed out. Of course, it’s all personal, and that is the point. What is now going on in the Kremlin is a murky and potentially lethal game of guessing who the traitors are, eliminating them before they eliminate you, forming unlikely and unpredicted alliances, and plotting to get in the first blow before your car explodes with you in it, or you take a tumble from a tenth-story window or down a cocktail laced with Novichok.

Putin is probably as uncertain as the rest of us about what just happened, but he has to be fearful, furious, and vengeful. He has to decide whether to get rid of his mediocre defense minister and chief of the general staff to appease the men in the shadows, or whether that would weaken him further. He has to be looking for the traitors in the military, the FSB, and other security services who seemed unable or unwilling to stop Wagner’s march on Moscow. Because he looks weak, he will be desperate to look strong, while others, perhaps tired of this war, will seek to weaken him further. Or maybe they’ll just kill him. Or maybe Putin is no longer really in charge, and there is already an opaque struggle among the men in the shadows to succeed him, because mafias are run by dons, not committees.

For the moment, the mafia logic dominates all others. If forced to choose between survival and either ideology or sound strategy, Putin and the rest of the political and military leadership will unquestionably choose the former. Prigozhin had the nerve to throw a gut punch at the ideas behind the war—even if, perhaps, he did his erstwhile boss a bit of a disservice in saying that the invasion of Ukraine was about loot and nothing else. But now that he has broached the forbidden subject, there will be others, in private and maybe in public, who will take up the refrain.

The impact on the battlefield will be the most interesting. A bloody and extensive Russian civil war would have been good for Ukraine, diverting troops as well as attention from the front lines opposite them. But the pervasiveness of mafia logic will still do Ukraine considerable good. Senior generals in the Russian military cannot be apolitical professionals: They have patrons, and they have clients. They know that there will be witch hunts for traitors, particularly in the special-forces units that did not fight Wagner. Defending against the mounting Ukrainian offensive will be considerably more difficult for officers looking over their shoulders at Moscow. And Putin may still see a need to shift units to the country’s center to forestall another putsch.

Nor can the troops on the front line be sheltered from the brutal truths about their leaders and the war itself that Prigozhin uttered on his abortive march on the Kremlin. Someone at last has said it, and the someone who did, brute though he may be, is the kind of leader who visited the front lines, paid his men and their survivors well, and has a kind of thuggish charisma that Putin lacks. Presumably, Ukrainian psychological-warfare experts are spreading the Prigozhin videos and audio recordings far and wide among their enemies.

It may not be ever thus. The Russian superhawks who want a still more violent war remain in the grip of the first, fascistic logic—and they may resurface after a time. The second logic will still hold as well: Breaching in-depth defenses will remain a difficult and bloody business for Ukraine, and political chaos in Moscow will not deliver 155-mm rounds, HIMARS, or deep-strike munitions to General Zaluzhny’s men and women in their dugouts and bunkers.

The Prigozhin putsch will reverberate for some time to come; it has already shattered illusions about Putin’s grip and even his physical courage. But it should also shatter the illusion that the West can forge a kind of Goldilocks solution to this war, in which Ukraine does well but not too well while Russia is humbled but not shattered. We are spectators to a play in which the actors have decided to rip up their scripts, and are instead improvising an anarchic tragedy, but one that is not without its comic moments.

The Ukrainian counteroffensive now under way is an operation that no advanced military would ever want to have to launch. Last year, Ukraine surprised many Western experts with its ability to defend against Russian invaders and even win back territory from them, exposing flaws in Russia’s strategy, logistics, and military leadership. But Russia has still managed to occupy a slice of Ukraine, and Ukraine is now trying to go on the offensive against a military that has spent months building entrenchments while maintaining considerable stocks of modern weaponry. Starting a counteroffensive under these conditions would be risky for the United States or another NATO power, and the Ukrainians lack the technological and training advantages that a NATO member’s military typically enjoys.

In some ways, what Ukraine is trying to do is unprecedented. When Anglo-American or Red Army forces advanced against the Nazis in World War II, and when Israel pushed its opponents back in the 1967 Six-Day War, the successful offensive side had command of the air. That is, it was able to use air power both to protect its own ground troops as they moved forward and to batter the enemy armies that they would soon encounter.

Ukraine does not have this luxury. The airspace over the battlefield throughout Ukraine is contested fiercely. The Russians have a larger air force, and their fixed-wing aircraft are technologically superior to Ukraine’s (even if the Russians do not always operate theirs as intelligently as the Ukrainians do). Russia can also use large numbers of drones, for both intelligence-gathering and direct action against Ukrainian forces. Russian helicopters, such as the Ka52s, have shown themselves capable of destroying Ukrainian armored vehicles.

A further challenge is that the Russians can also use ground-based systems against the Ukrainians. The Russians still deploy a large number of artillery and rocket-launching systems, have their own handheld anti-vehicle weapons, and have laid extensive minefields across terrain that Ukraine must cross. Indeed, if the two armies were evenly matched in terms of intelligence, motivation, training, and the ability to operate complex systems, the Ukrainians would have only a small chance of success.

[From the June 2023 issue: The counteroffensive]

Yet although the counteroffensive is in its early days, the story so far suggests that Ukraine has the abilities to achieve more than current conditions might indicate—but also that success could take more time than people realize. No one should expect to see an immediate armored break through Russian lines. Pictures are circulating of disabled Ukrainian vehicles, including at least one German-designed Leopard 2 tank and a number of U.S.-built Bradley fighting vehicles.

These are some of the most modern armored vehicles in the Ukrainian arsenal. Yet they were disabled by a range of the different systems that Ukraine will face as it advances. In many areas, Russian minefields have constricted where the Ukrainians can operate, forcing them to bunch their forces together more than they would prefer and contributing to their losses at the start of the counteroffensive. In other areas, Russian artillery fire or attack helicopters have been responsible for blunting the Ukrainian assault.

Because the counteroffensive forces must contend with varied Russian defensive firepower from so many different areas, Ukrainian advances have been modest so far. The Ukrainians have been moving forward a few miles here and a few miles there. Since the withdrawal of Russian forces from around Kyiv in late March 2022 and the hardening of defensive lines, the only major breakthrough occurred in September 2022, when the Ukrainians liberated a large chunk of land near Kharkiv. In this counteroffensive, a force of Ukrainian vehicles rushed forward for many miles a day—but that was possible only because Russian forces in the area were very thin on the ground. Once the Ukrainians pushed their way through the Russian front, there was precious little to stop them.

Ukraine is unlikely to repeat that feat. Over the past six months, Russia has been on the offensive, albeit able to advance only at a glacial pace. From January to May, Russian forces around the city of Bakhmut managed to advance maybe five miles in total (while suffering major casualties that the U.S. estimates at about 100,000 over approximately the same timeframe). By this standard, the Ukrainian counteroffensive, which is slowly pushing the Russians back in a number of locations, already appears more successful.

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

However, Ukraine will want to achieve much more than it has so far, and to do that it will probably have to be content with modest advances as it undertakes the brutal work of weakening Russian forces enough to allow for greater forward movement later. Because they lack control of the air, and the Russians have strong defensive firepower, the Ukrainians have no choice but to wear down the enemy’s ground troops enough to compensate for Russia’s air advantage. President Volodymyr Zelensky acknowledged as much when, in an address this week, he stated that Ukrainians were “destroying” Russian forces in the south and east, a process that would go on for a while.

Instead of trying to rush forward, the Ukrainians have continued and in some ways amplified their efforts to hit Russian forces behind the lines. Recent Ukrainian probing attacks have been useful in prompting the Russians to move their own forces—which creates additional opportunities. Ukraine has been able to strike a number of large targets. Most important, perhaps, it has been able to start hitting Russian ammunition and supply depots that were out of range of High Mobility Artillery Rocket System equipment obtained from the West. Using British-supplied Storm Shadow missiles, the Ukrainians seem to have destroyed a large Russian supply hub at Rykove, just north of Crimea. They also reportedly wiped out a gathering of more than 100 Russian soldiers in Luhansk Oblast who were waiting to hear a rousing speech before being sent into combat.  

Fortunately for Ukraine, it retains the advantage in motivation, intelligence, and strategic high command. It is also receiving better and better weapons from the West. In time, these factors will become evident. But no one should expect immediate results. If the Ukrainians are going to achieve major gains from the counteroffensive, it will be by first destroying so many Russian forces that they can eventually advance. They are doing something audacious, risky, and time-consuming, and they won’t simply steamroller through.

The hall of mirrors that Vladimir Putin has built around himself and within his country is so complex, and so multilayered, that on the eve of a genuine insurrection in Russia, I doubt very much if the Russian president himself believed it could be real.

Certainly the rest of us still can’t know, less than a day after this mutiny began, the true motives of the key players, and especially not of the central figure, Yevgeny Prigozhin, the leader of the Wagner mercenary group. Prigozhin, whose fighters have taken part in brutal conflicts all over Africa and the Middle East—in Syria, Sudan, Libya, Central Africa Republic—claims to command 25,000 men in Ukraine. In a statement on Friday afternoon, he accused the Russian army of killing “an enormous amount” of his mercenaries in a bombing raid on his base. Then he called for an armed rebellion, vowing to topple Russian military leaders.

Prigozhin has been lobbing insults at Russia’s military leadership for many weeks,  mocking Sergei Shoigu, the Russian Minister of Defense, as lazy, and describing the chief of the general staff as prone to “paranoid tantrums.” On Friday, he broke with the official narrative and directly blamed them, and their oligarch friends, for launching the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Ukraine did not provoke Russia on February 24, he said: Instead, Russian elites had been pillaging the territories of Donbas they’ve occupied since 2014, and became greedy for more. His message was clear: The Russian military launched a pointless war, ran it incompetently, and killed tens of thousands of Russian soldiers unnecessarily.  

The “evil brought by the military leadership of the country must be stopped,” Prigozhin declared. He warned the Russian generals not to resist: “Everyone who will try to resist, we will consider them a danger and destroy them immediately, including any checkpoints on our way. And any aviation we see above our heads.” Given the snarling theatricality of Prigozhin’s statement, the baroque language, the very notion that 25,000 mercenaries were going to remove the commanders of the Russian army during an active war—all of that immediately led many to ask: Is this for real?

Up until the moment it started, when actual Wagner vehicles were spotted on the road from Ukraine to Rostov, a Russian city a couple of miles from the border (and actual Wagner soldiers were spotted buying coffee in a Rostov fast food restaurant, formerly known as McDonalds), it seemed impossible. But once they appeared in the city—once Prigozhin posted a video of himself in the courtyard of the Southern Military District headquarters in Rostov—and once they seemed poised to take control of Voronezh, a city between Rostov and Moscow, theories began to multiply.

[Read: A crisis erupts in Russia]

Maybe Prigozhin is collaborating with the Ukrainians, and this is all an elaborate plot to end the war. Maybe the Russian army really had been trying to put an end to Prigozhin’s operations, depriving his soldiers of weapons and ammunition. Maybe this is Prigozhin’s way of fighting not just for his job but for his life. Maybe Prigozhin, a convicted thief who lives by the moral code of Russia’s professional criminal caste, just feels dissed by the Russian military leadership and wants respect. And maybe, just maybe, he has good reason to believe that some Russian soldiers are willing to join him.  

Because Russia no longer has anything resembling “mainstream media”—there is only state propaganda, plus some media in exile—there are no good sources of information right now. All of us now live in a world of information chaos, but this is a more profound sort of vacuum, since so many people are pretending to say things they don’t believe. To understand what is going on (or to guess at it) you have to follow a series of unreliable Russian Telegram accounts, or else read the Western and Ukrainian open-source intelligence bloggers who are reliable but farther from the action: @wartranslated, who captions Russian and Ukrainian video in English, for example; or Aric Toler (@arictoler) of Bellingcat and Christo Grozev (@christogrozev) formerly of Bellingcat, the investigative group that pioneered the use of open source intelligence. Grozev has enhanced credibility because he said that the Wagner group was preparing a coup many months ago. (This morning, I spoke to him and told him he was vindicated. “Yes,” he said, “I am.”)

But the Kremlin may not have very good information either. Only a month ago, Putin was praising Prigozhin and Wagner for the “liberation” of Bakhmut, in eastern Ukraine, after one of the longest, most drawn-out battles in modern military history. Today’s insurrection was, by contrast, better planned and executed: Bakhmut took nearly eleven months, but Prigozihin got to Rostov and Voronezh in less than 11 hours, helped along by commanders and soldiers who appeared to be waiting for him to arrive.

Now Military vehicles are moving around Moscow, apparently putting into force “Operation Fortress” a plan to defend the headquarters of the security services. One Russian military blogger claimed that units of the military, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the FSB, and others had already been put on a counterterrorism alert in Moscow very early Thursday morning, supposedly in preparation for a Ukrainian terrorist attack. Perhaps that was what the Kremlin wanted its supporters to think—though the source of the blogger’s claim is not yet clear.

But the unavoidable clashes at play—Putin’s clash with reality, as well as Putin’s clash with Prigozhin—are now coming to a head. Prigozhin has demanded that the Defense Minister Shoigu come to see him in Rostov, which the Wagner boss must know is impossible. Putin has responded by denouncing Prigozhin, though not by name: “Exorbitant ambitions and personal interests have led to treason,” Putin said in an address to the nation on Saturday morning. A telegram channel that is believed to represent  Wagner has responded: “Soon we will have a new president.” Whether or not that account is really Wagner, some Russian security leaders are acting as if it is, and are declaring their loyalty to Putin. In a slow, unfocused sort of way, Russia is sliding into what can only be described as a civil war.

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

If you are surprised, maybe you shouldn’t be. For months—years, really—Putin has blamed all of his country’s troubles on outsiders: America, Europe, NATO. He concealed the weaknesses of his country and its army behind a façade made of bluster, arrogance, and appeals to a phony “white Christian nationalism” for foreign audiences, and appeals to imperialist patriotism for domestic consumption. Now he is facing a movement that lives according to the true values of the modern Russian military, and indeed of modern Russia.

Prigozhin is cynical, brutal, and violent. He and his men are motivated by money and self-interest. They are angry at the corruption of the top brass, the bad equipment provided to them, the incredible number of lives wasted. They aren’t Christian, and they don’t care about Peter the Great. Prigozhin is offering them a psychologically comfortable explanation for their current predicament: they failed to defeat Ukraine because they were betrayed by their leaders.

There are some precedents for this moment. In 1905, the Russian fleet’s disastrous performance in a war with Japan helped inspire a failed revolution. In 1917, angry soldiers came home from World War I and launched another, more famous revolution. Putin alluded to that moment in his brief television appearance on Saturday morning. At that moment, he said, “arguments behind the army’s back turned out to be the greatest catastrophe [leading to] destruction of the army and the state, loss of huge territories, resulting in a tragedy and a civil war.” What he did not mention was that up until the moment he left power, Czar Nicholas II was having tea with his wife, writing banal notes in his diary, and imagining that the ordinary Russian peasants loved him and would always take his side. He was wrong.  

A simmering political feud in Russia has exploded into a crisis. The head of a Russian mercenary army fighting in Ukraine alongside Moscow’s official military forces has declared war against the Russian ministry of defense, claiming that Russia’s war in Ukraine was all the result of a giant plot by defense bureaucrats to mislead Russian President Vladimir Putin into a pointless conflict.

Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner private military company, also claims that Russian government forces struck his men and inflicted numerous casualties. The Russian defense ministry denies any involvement with the strike, but Prigozhin has gone, literally, on the warpath, claiming that he will march into the southern Russian city of Rostov and onward if necessary to topple the corrupt officials leading the Russian defense ministry and military high command. He is asking Russian police and military forces to stand aside while he gets “justice” for his troops, and then “justice for Russia.”

The Russian government, which has long welcomed Prigozhin’s assistance in conflicts in Syria and Ukraine, has apparently had enough of all this, especially now that Prigozhin is dismantling the Kremlin’s rationalizations for the war—and by extension, making Putin look like a fool or a liar or both. The Russian security services have opened a criminal case against Prigozhin for instigating a coup and issued a warrant for his arrest, something they could only do with Putin’s approval.

That’s as much as we know right now, so take everything that follows with the understanding that at this moment, almost no one—perhaps not even officials in the Kremlin—knows exactly what is happening. Police and some military forces in Rostov and Moscow are reportedly on alert, and the White House says it is monitoring the situation.

Beyond that much, all we have are questions, and some tentative possibilities.

1. Why is this happening, and why is it happening now?

Think of this conflict not as a contest between the Russian state and a mercenary group, but a falling out among gangsters, a kind of Mafia war.

A government doing a lot of bad things in the world can make great use of a cadre of hardened and nasty mercenaries, and Prigozhin has been making his bones for years as a tough guy leading other tough guys, ultranationalist patriots who care more about Mother Russia than the supposedly lazy and corrupt bureaucrats in Moscow. The Ministry of Defense, meanwhile, is led by a political survivor named Sergei Shoigu, who has managed to stay in the Kremlin in one capacity or another since 1991. Shoigu never served in the Soviet or Russian military, yet affects the dress and mannerisms of a martinet.

Prigozhin and Shoigu, both personally close to Putin, have good reason to hate each other. Shoigu’s forces have been humiliated in Ukraine, shown up both by the Ukrainians and Prigozhin’s mercenaries (a point Prigozhin hammers home every chance he gets). Prigozhin claims that Shoigu has withheld ammunition and supplies from Wagner, which is probably true; a defense minister is going to take care of his own forces first. The two men have a lot of bad blood between them, and Prigozhin might have been hoping to displace Shoigu or move up somehow in the Moscow power structure. But Shoigu is no rookie, and a Russian Defense Ministry edict was about to go into force requiring all mercenaries to sign up with the Russian military, which would place them under Shoigu’s control.

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

This order was likely an important part of the conflict we’re seeing now. I do not know why the Russians would hit Wagner’s forces—or whether that is what happened—but the tension between Prigozhin and Shoigu was unsustainable. Prigozhin, however, is a hothead, and this time, he has gone too far, essentially forcing Putin to choose between them. The fact that there is now an arrest warrant out for the Wagner chief means that Putin is siding with his defense minister; meanwhile, the Russian security service, the FSB, called Prigozhin’s actions a “stab in the back” for Russia’s soldiers fighting in Ukraine.

My friend and veteran Russia-watcher Nikolas Gvosdev summed it up to me tonight by saying that Prigozhin might be the better fighter and leader, but Putin is choosing loyalty over competence. As Michael Corleone might say: It’s the smart move.

2. Is this the outbreak of civil war in Russia?

A full-scale civil conflict—for now—seems unlikely, if only because Prigozhin has no institutional base and no major force beyond his fighters, who are a pretty unsavory bunch. He claims that his forces have entered Rostov, but it’s unclear if that’s happened. (If Wagner’s troops gain control of Rostov, they could seize more arms and imperil Russian military supply lines in Ukraine.)  Prigozhin is, in any case, making a dangerous appeal to the anger and desolation of the regular Russian military, the men who’ve been taking a beating in Ukraine, asking them to stand aside as he hunts down the defense minister.

While civil war might not be in the offing, someone in Moscow seems worried. Russian television has reported the story tonight by denouncing Prigozhin’s claims of an attack as lies, and noting the criminal case now open against him. Weirdly, two Russian generals thought it was a good idea to issue grim videos asking the military to ignore Prigozhin’s appeals. One of them is General Sergei Surovikin, the supposedly iron-fisted leader Putin appointed last year to destroy Ukrainian resistance. He failed and Putin fired him.

Surovikin appeared on camera with a rifle in his lap and spoke in a slow and halting voice. “The enemy,” he said, “is just waiting for our internal political situation to deteriorate.” Such appeals from senior military people raise another possibility.

3. If it’s not a civil war, is it a coup—with support in Moscow for removing Putin?

Prigozhin in the past was always careful to avoid criticizing Putin, instead blasting Shoigu and Chief of the Russian General Staff Valery Gerasimov. After a year and a half of disasters in Ukraine, however, a lot of angry officers in Moscow may well agree with Prigozhin and want Shoigu and Gerasimov gone—and might well be holding Putin responsible for not firing them. But Shoigu is Putin’s man, and while that relationship is clearly under a great deal of strain, opposing the minister of defense and threatening the stability of the ruling clique in the Kremlin during wartime are not small things.

Right now, none of this looks organized enough to be a coup. But coups sometimes look ridiculous in the offing—the 1991 coup against Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev was a complete clown show—so the possibility remains that Prigozhin has friends in Moscow who are working with him. Military failure has been known to threaten the stability of Russia’s governments in the past, as Russian imperial leaders endured in 1905 and then again, for the last time, in 1917.

4. Does any of this endanger the United States or NATO?

Instability in a nuclear-armed country is always worrying. For now, although the Kremlin is likely in turmoil, there is no evidence of imminent violence or government crack-up. Russian nuclear control is likely divided among Putin, Shoigu, and Gerasimov, and none of them have vanished or been displaced (as far as we can tell). That’s the good news.

Of more concern is the possibility that Prigozhin’s gambit all along was the leading edge of an effort by hard-right Russian nationalists to push Putin to be even more violent in Ukraine, more confrontational with the West, and perhaps even to provoke a conflict with NATO. So far, tonight’s chaos does not seem to involve the U.S., NATO, or even Ukraine, but a fight among Russian gangsters, in part over whether Russia is being brutal enough in a war of unprovoked aggression, is something to watch.

[Read: The true purpose of Ukraine’s counteroffensive]

For now, with Wagner out of the picture—or perhaps even in open revolt against Russian regular forces—the Ukrainians have caught a break. But there are still a lot of bad things that can happen in Moscow in the next few days, or even hours. As the political scientist and Eurasia Group president, Ian Bremmer, noted tonight: “Putin’s never looked weaker than right now, in the Ukraine war, and at home, which is welcome—and extremely dangerous.”

5. Now what?

The fact that Prigozhin’s threats could make the Kremlin’s teeth clench to the point of issuing alerts and emergency news broadcasts suggests that Prigozhin is not the only angry ultranationalist out there. It’s also possible that none of this is true, that this is not a coup so much as it is a settling of accounts among a group of violent and terrible men. Perhaps Prigozhin is just a hard case who thought he could move to Moscow by stomping on Shoigu’s neck, literally and figuratively, and he overplayed his hand. But no matter how this ends, Prigozhin has shattered Putin’s narrative, torching the war as a needless and even criminal mistake. That’s a problem for Putin that could outlast this rebellion.

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The Ukrainians are making progress in their long-awaited counteroffensive. Meanwhile, the Russian president is talking like a gangster and rattling the nuclear saber—again.

First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The woman who bought a mountain for God Justice comes for Hunter Biden. The failure of affirmative action

A Slow, Bloody Business

While we’re all distracted—understandably—by the spectacle of a former U.S. president under multiple criminal indictments, the war in Europe grinds on, consuming lives, burning cities, and threatening global peace. The Ukrainian counteroffensive is now clearly under way, and Kyiv’s forces are making incremental but concrete gains along the front. The Ukrainians are, for the moment, calm and confident; the Russians less so.

Ukrainian officials have been cautious in their evaluations of this early stage of the counteroffensive because they know it’s going to be a long summer. “Hot battles continue,” according to a statement from Deputy Defense Minister Hanna Maliar, and the situation is “difficult.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has acknowledged Russian counterattacks but said yesterday that no positions have been lost, while other areas have been “liberated.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin, however, is talking tough—which itself is a tell, a sign of how he thinks this war is going.

Putin is trying to turn up the global temperature with some swagger about nuclear weapons. This past March, Putin said that he would base Russian nuclear weapons in Belarus, close to Ukraine. Moscow and Minsk have since signed a formal agreement, and Putin now claims that the first weapons have arrived in Belarus. This may or may not be true; Putin has previously said that storage facilities for Russian warheads wouldn’t be ready until July, and the Russian military is not exactly known for getting things done ahead of time, so it’s unclear how much of this is (at this point) mere bluster. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said a few days ago that the United States does not “see any indications that Russia is preparing to use a nuclear weapon”—which isn’t quite the same thing as saying that the weapons haven’t moved—but also that America has “no reason to adjust our own nuclear posture.”

Putin, meanwhile, said at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum last week that he had no interest in returning to any conversations with the West about arms control. “We have more of these weapons than NATO countries do,” he said in answer to an interviewer’s question. “They know that, and they keep telling us to start negotiations on reductions. Well, you know, fuck ’em. As our people would say.”

CNN tried to render this Russian expression—хрен им—more gently, as “shove it,” but that’s not even close. Putin has often used this kind of gangsterish tone when he’s trying to project strength, especially to his own people in Russia. (He used similarly rough language, much to the Russian public’s delight, when speaking of what he would to do to Chechen terrorists, using a phrase that, in American Mob idiom, would basically translate as a vow “to whack them in their shithouses.”)

The leader of a nuclear-armed power sounding like Tony Soprano is alarming, but Putin is likely emphasizing Russia’s nuclear deterrent because his conventional forces have been repeatedly humiliated in combat. More to the point, although Russia still has a large military, Moscow has lost its best units and most highly trained officers and soldiers after a year of ghastly losses on the ground.

So what should we expect, and how should we think about this new phase in the war?

First, Americans especially should put aside what they know about recent U.S.-led wars such as the campaigns in Iraq: There will be no gathering on a “line of departure” followed by a massive air, armor, and infantry blitz. Nor is this like D-Day, with men storming the beaches and overwhelming enemy pillboxes. The counteroffensive had no real “beginning,” in that sense; the initial phase probably began with some tentative engagements against the Russians on the edges of Bakhmut shortly after Putin’s forces finally took what’s left of the town a few weeks ago.

Sadly, the Ukraine war is now more like World War I: Both sides have settled in along a large, static line. The Russian high command has been dreading this Ukrainian counteroffensive since last winter, and so the Russians have dug in, taking up defensive positions inside fortifications and huddling in trenches that will have to be cleared out one by one. (The Ukrainians have already released footage of their soldiers fighting in Russian trenches.) The Ukrainians must now probe, feint, and strike where they can, while trying to attack and disrupt Russian supply and reinforcements waiting in the rear, farther back from the battlefield.

Second, there will be no official “end” to the counteroffensive, either. (Well, unless Russia sues for peace, I suppose, but Putin has no apparent interest in any of that.) War is an uncertain and contingent thing; as we teach students at our senior military colleges, the enemy gets a vote on your strategy. Luck always gets a say as well. Americans are used to conflicts in which the United States deploys a large force, seizes the initiative, and keeps it for as long as we wish. The Ukrainians have no such luxury.

Although we should keep an eye on those Russian nukes (and whether Putin is really moving them), the real news in the coming weeks will be whether the Ukrainians can break through points along those Russian lines. The Russians are already engaging in savage counterattacks in an effort to blunt Ukrainian operations, and although sudden collapses and dramatic wins and losses on either side are always possible, the more likely story is one of Ukrainian progress measured by the names of small villages and the coordinates of grid squares on a map—a slower and far bloodier business.

As for Putin’s threats, the Russian president seems to be venting and showing off, which is one way to know that we are not yet in a crisis. When national leaders stop appearing in public, and both Moscow and Washington go quiet, that’s a time to worry. Putin is indulging his usual vulgar sense of humor, and though Americans, like Russians, also have some colorful local expressions, it is better for the Americans and NATO to be the resolute adults in the room, as they have been since the beginning of this criminal Russian onslaught.

Related:

The true purpose of Ukraine’s counteroffensive What happens if Russia stashes nukes in Belarus

Today’s News

Rescue crews are continuing the search for a submersible with five people aboard that went missing while traveling to tour the Titanic’s wreckage. As of this afternoon, it has about 40 hours of oxygen left. Hunter Biden, the president’s son, has reached a proposed plea deal with federal prosecutors. He will plead guilty to two minor tax crimes and admit to owning a gun illegally, and will likely avoid jail time. China and Cuba are holding conversations about forming a new joint military-training facility on the island, according to U.S. officials.

Evening Read

Paramount / Everett

The Real Lesson of The Truman Show

By Megan Garber

Truman Burbank, the unwitting star of the world’s most popular TV show, is supposed to be an everyman. The Truman Show is set in an island town, Seahaven, that evokes the prefab conformities of American suburbia. Truman is a brand in a setting that is stridently generic. Since his birth, he has navigated a world manufactured—by Christof, the creator of his show—for lucrative inoffensiveness. Everything around him exists to fulfill the primary mandate of a mass-market TV show: appealing to the widest possible audience.

The Truman Show hits a snag, though, and the problem is Truman. As he grows up, he proves himself to be less a bland everyman than someone who is quirky and restless and, in the best way, kind of a weirdo. Truman is also unusually inquisitive—a great quality for anyone who is not a piece of IP. Christof, consequently, has spent much of the show’s run trying to squelch Truman’s curiosity. He wants to be an explorer, an excited Truman tells a teacher. “You’re too late,” she replies, on cue. “There’s really nothing left to explore.”

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

Illustration by The Atlantic*

Read. Robert Gottlieb, who edited Toni Morrison, Robert Caro, and others, died last week at 92. His memoir, Avid Reader, is an account of his storied career. Check out the book, and read a remembrance of him by Cynthia Ozick.

Listen. Janelle Monáe’s newest album, The Age of Pleasure, in which joy, extremity, and cheesiness are the mood.

Play. Try out Caleb’s Inferno, our new print-edition puzzle. It starts easy but gets devilishly hard as you descend into its depths.

P.S.

Nuclear weapons are always a grim business. But I have long been fascinated by how nuclear arms and fears of nuclear war seeped so deeply into our popular culture during the Cold War. (In fact, I used to teach a course about it at Harvard Extension School.) So if you’re looking for a little light music to accompany your reading about nuclear issues—such as this article by me last year and another here by my colleague Ross Andersen—I have a playlist for you.

This list won’t include all your sentimental favorites—sorry, fans of “99 Red Balloons”; we’ve heard that one enough—but there’s some odd stuff here: Did you know that Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” was actually the flip side of a single about a nuclear war that leaves only one man and 13 women alive? (Bill sounds pretty happy about it.) And there are songs that even I didn’t realize were about nuclear war, such as “I Melt With You,” a favorite from my college days that I thought was about “melting” emotionally but, as it turns out, was about, you know, actually melting. Enjoy!

You’ll see a bit less of me in the next few weeks as I complete my last tour teaching in Harvard’s Summer School—a bittersweet milestone that rounds out 35 years of my previous career as an educator. I will be taking time this summer to work on an updated version of The Death of Expertise, in which I’ll talk about how the rejection of expertise is a problem that has gotten much worse in recent years, even before the coronavirus pandemic. (You’ll get the first peek at that in an excerpt here in The Atlantic sometime in the fall.)

—Tom

Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.

A 28-year-old Ukrainian medic, Helena Popova, traveled from Lutsk to Kherson last Friday to help victims of the flood caused by the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam. She went “just to stay sane,” she told me. Across the Dnipro River, in her hometown of Oleshky, thousands of people, including her parents, younger sister, and grandfather, urgently needed food, evacuation, and medical attention.

There Oleshky was, less than ten miles away from her, across an expanse of river and floodwater. The Dnipro was the front line, and Oleshky sat on the Russian-controlled side. When Ukrainian boats tried to ferry help from the right bank to the left, the Russians opened fire. After a day of work in the Ukrainian-controlled area, Popova was soaking wet in her shorts and T-shirt. Now she stood in the rain, looking desolately across the water to where her loved ones lay beyond reach.

That Ukrainians can’t get help to their friends and family in the Russian-held flood zone is tragic but not surprising. Less explicable is the failure of international aid organizations, including the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross, which have been conspicuously absent from the Dnipro’s left bank. A little more than a week ago, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky expressed his dismay at the agencies’ nonappearance: “They aren’t here; we have not had a response.”

[Anne Applebaum: The true purpose of Ukraine’s counteroffensive]

The trouble, as volunteers like Popova know, is that crossing the Dnipro is manifestly dangerous. On Tuesday, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs explained that Russia had “yet to provide the safety guarantees we need to cross the front line to the left bank of the Dnipro, including to Oleshky.” As a UN representative, Saviano Abreu, said to me, “Our priority is to keep negotiating.” But assurances from Russia are not forthcoming.

For Ukrainian volunteers who have been delivering food and rescuing people and animals for the past week, the UN’s timidity is maddening. Unsafe conditions have not stopped local efforts, at a cost in lives: On Sunday, Russia fired on a Ukrainian rescue boat, killing three people. In the Ukrainian-controlled part of the Kherson region, volunteers supply water and food and have evacuated thousands of victims; still, at least 10 people have died and 40 are missing. Kherson victims told volunteers that their houses filled with water in mere minutes.

At the pace the UN and the ICRC are moving, “it will be too late to rescue people soon,” says Roman Timofeyev, the manager of the Ukrainian Rescue Now foundation, whose 56 social workers and more than 100 volunteers help war victims.

The Russian-controlled side of the river has likely fared worse than the Ukrainian-controlled side. Popova has kept a haunting recording of the last phone call she had with her parents and 12-year-old sister, Vika, on June 6, the day the dam exploded. The family was walking through chest-deep water, and Vika screamed into the phone: “I don’t want to die! I don’t want to sink!” Her 70-year-old grandfather was trapped on an upper floor of a house whose first floor was entirely underwater. Popova’s mother told her: “People were on their roofs, screaming ‘Help, help!’ but nobody came.”

The Khutorishe neighborhood of Oleshky saw water levels rise above 16 feet and completely submerge the roofs of some single-story houses. One witness I spoke with on Saturday said that the current in her street was too powerful for even good swimmers to fight. She saw a neighbor die. Those who have made it out of the flood zone have taken their places in endless lines to collect humanitarian aid, Yulia Gorbunova, a senior researcher for Human Rights Watch, told me on Tuesday. There is not nearly enough to go around. “It is a catastrophe,” Gorbunova told me. “Nobody evacuates these poor people.”

[David Patrikarakos: Inside Ukraine’s nonviolent resistance: chatbots, yellow paint, and payoffs]

The slow work and scant presence of deep-pocketed international aid organizations has become the subject of bitter commentary in Ukraine. In one popular meme, the word useless is superimposed on a photograph of UN SUVs parked in Kyiv. Oleksandr Mosiako, the head of communications for the Ukrainian Rapid Response Group, sent me photographs he had taken himself of six UN SUVs. “These vehicles are prepared to drive in water more than a meter deep. But they have been parked for several months in the center of Kyiv, near a five-star hotel,” he told me. “They are useless.”

Michael Bociurkiw, a Ukraine analyst at the Atlantic Council, says that the international organizations’ response betrays “shameful indifference.” That there has been no rescue mission to the occupied territory in the full week since the dam attack is bad enough; in addition, he told me, “some world players do not dare to come out even with clear and strong statements that would condemn this new Russian war crime.”

Many Ukrainians distrusted the UN and ICRC even before this disaster. They see the agencies as adopting a posture of neutrality that prizes dialogue with Russia over the protection of Ukrainians. In April, UN Secretary General António Guterres visited Moscow to discuss humanitarian concerns in Ukraine with Vladimir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov. The visit played very poorly with the Ukrainian public, as did Lavrov’s subsequent visit to UN headquarters in New York City. Peter Maurer, the president of the ICRC, traveled to Moscow in the midst of the battle for Kyiv last year as a “neutral, impartial humanitarian actor.” Many Ukrainians rejected the suggestion that a humanitarian actor could be impartial in a conflict where one side had invaded its neighbor and was shelling civilians.

[Read: How Can Individual People Most Help Ukraine?]

The International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement has autonomous naitonal organizations across the globe and involves the work of more than 10 million people. The Russian Red Cross, established in 1867, is one such society that could be rescuing victims in flooded areas of the Kherson region. But if it has done so, it has kept its efforts quiet; its website reports no such operation, and its representatives have not responded to requests for comment. A Human Rights Watch report released this week said that Russian authorities started conducting “sporadic evacuations” from Oleshky almost a week after the catastrophe.   

The Ukrainian Red Cross Society has been active in relief efforts since the start of the war, having distributed 8,800,656 kits of humanitarian aid and evacuated 308,338 civilians. But its members often find that ordinary Ukrainians confuse them with the ICRC and misdirect their outrage.

With regard to the flood victims, Anton Dubovyk, a coordinator’s assistant at the Mykolaiv branch of the Ukrainian Red Cross Society, does not think that the criticism of the ICRC’s slow reaction is entirely fair. “The ICRC has no access to Oleshky,” he told me. “They cannot hire tanks, helicopters, or armored boats to storm into Oleshky and rescue people.” His organization is doing what can be done, he said: “We have been providing medical care, humanitarian aid, and transportation for hundreds of evacuees of the Kherson region on this side of the river.”

According to Ukrainian reports, Oleshky, a town of 25,000 people, is currently 90 percent underwater. Other low-lying settlements in the Kherson region are in a similar situation. Every day now, Popova boards rubber boats, or aluminum motorboats that foreign NGOs have provided, and helps dress the wounds of flood victims, many of them farmers.

As the days go by without word from her family, she grows mystified by the purpose of international aid groups that seem so easily stymied by the conditions of war.

“This is a painful matter,” she told me. “Here we all count only on each other.”

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.

Officials said about 22,000 people live in areas at risk of flooding in Russian-controlled areas on the eastern side of the river, while 16,000 live in the most critical zone in Ukrainian-held territory on the western side.

The hardship is familiar to Ukrainians, but many Russians had not expected something similar to happen on their home turf.

Most war correspondents don’t become household names, but as the Second World War raged, every American knew Ernie Pyle. His great subject was not the politics of the war, or its strategy, but rather the men who were fighting it. At the height of his column’s popularity, more than 400 daily newspapers and 300 weeklies syndicated Pyle’s dispatches from the front. His grinning face graced the cover of Time magazine. An early collection of his columns, Here Is Your War, became a best seller. It was followed by Brave Men, rereleased this week by Penguin Classics with an introduction by David Chrisinger, the author of the recent Pyle biography The Soldier’s Truth.

Pyle was one of many journalists who flocked to cover the Second World War. But he was not in search of scoops or special access to power brokers; in fact, he avoided the generals and admirals he called “the brass hats.” What Pyle looked for, and then conveyed, was a sense of what the war was really like. His columns connected those on the home front to the experiences of loved ones on the battlefield in Africa, Europe, and the Pacific. For readers in uniform, Pyle’s columns sanctified their daily sacrifices in the grinding, dirty, bloody business of war. Twelve million Americans would read about what it took for sailors to offload supplies under fire on a beachhead in Anzio, or how gunners could shoot enough artillery rounds to burn through a howitzer’s barrel. Pyle wrote about what he often referred to as “brave men.” And his idea of courage wasn’t a grand gesture but rather the accumulation of mundane, achievable, unglamorous tasks: digging a foxhole, sleeping in the mud, surviving on cold rations for weeks, piloting an aircraft through flak day after day after day.

We’ve become skeptical of heroic narratives. Critics who dismiss Pyle as a real-time hagiographer of the Greatest Generation miss the point. Pyle was a cartographer, meticulously mapping the character of the Americans who chose to fight. If a person’s character becomes their destiny, the destiny of the American war effort depended on the collective character of Americans in uniform. Pyle barely touched on tactics or battle plans in his columns, but he wrote word after word about the plight of the average frontline soldier because he understood that the war would be won, or lost, in their realm of steel, dirt, and blood.

In the following passage, Pyle describes a company of American infantrymen advancing into a French town against German resistance:

They seemed terribly pathetic to me. They weren’t warriors. They were American boys who by mere chance of fate had wound up with guns in their hands, sneaking up a death-laden street in a strange and shattered city in a faraway country in a driving rain. They were afraid, but it was beyond their power to quit. They had no choice. They were good boys. I talked with them all afternoon as we sneaked slowly forward along the mysterious and rubbled street, and I know they were good boys. And even though they weren’t warriors born to the kill, they won their battles. That’s the point.

I imagine that when those words hit the U.S. in 1944, shortly after D-Day, readers found reassurance in the idea that those “good boys” had what it took to win the war, despite being afraid, and despite not really being warriors. However, today Pyle’s words hold a different meaning. They read more like a question, one now being asked about America’s character in an ever more dangerous world.

[Read: Notes from a cematary]

The past two years have delivered a dizzying array of national-security challenges, including the U.S.’s decision to abandon Afghanistan to the Taliban, Russia’s war in Ukraine, and the possibility of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. A rising authoritarian axis threatens the West-led liberal world order birthed after the Second World War. Much like when Pyle wrote 80 years ago, the character of a society—whether it contains “brave men” and “good boys” willing to defend democratic values—will prove determinative to the outcomes of these challenges.

The collapse of Afghanistan’s military and government came as a surprise to many Americans. That result cannot be fully explained by lack of dollars, time, or resources expended. Only someone who understood the human side of war—as Pyle certainly did—could have predicted that collapse, when the majority of Afghan soldiers surrendered to the Taliban. Conversely, in Ukraine, where most experts predicted a speedy Russian victory, the Ukrainians overperformed, defying expectations. The character of the Ukrainian people, one which most didn’t fully recognize, has been the driving factor.

Pyle often wrote in anecdotes, but his writing’s impact was anything but anecdotal. His style of combat realism, which eschews the macro and strategic for the micro and human, can be seen in today’s combat reporting from Ukraine. A new documentary film, Slava Ukraini, made by one of France’s most famous public intellectuals, Bernard-Henri Lévy, takes a Pyle-esque approach to last fall’s Ukrainian counteroffensive against the Russians. The film focuses on everyday Ukrainians and the courage they display for the sake of their cause. “And I’m amazed,” Lévy says, walking through a trench in eastern Ukraine, “that while weapons were not always their craft, these men are transformed into the bravest soldiers.”

Ernie Pyle at the front in 1944.(Bettmann/CORBIS/Getty)

War correspondents such as Thomas Gibbons-Neff at The New York Times and James Marson at The Wall Street Journal take a similar approach, with reporting that’s grounded in those specifics, which must inform any real understanding of strategy. The result is a style that’s indebted to Pyle and his concern with the soldiers’ morale and commitment to the cause, and reveals more than any high-level analyses could.

Pyle wasn’t the first to search for strategic truths about war in the granular reality of individual experiences. Ernest Hemingway, who didn’t cover the First World War as a correspondent but later reflected on it as a novelist, wrote in A Farewell to Arms:

There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of the places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

Pyle took this advice to heart when introducing characters in his columns. He would not only tell you a bit about a soldier, their rank, their job, and what they looked like; he would also make sure to give the reader their home address. “Here are the names of just a few of my company mates in that little escapade that afternoon,” he writes, after describing heavy combat in France. “Sergeant Joseph Palajsa, of 187 I Street, Pittsburgh. Pfc. Arthur Greene, of 618 Oxford Street, Auburn Massachusetts …” He goes on to list more than a half dozen others. Pyle knew that “only the names of the places had dignity.” And sometimes those places were home.

As a combat reporter, Pyle surpassed all others working during the Second World War, outwriting his contemporaries, Hemingway included. This achievement was one of both style and commitment. Was there any reporter who saw more of the war than Pyle? He first shipped overseas in 1940, to cover the Battle of Britain. He returned to the war in 1942, to north Africa, and he went on to Italy, to France, and finally to the Pacific. On April 17, 1945, while on a patrol near Okinawa, a sniper shot Pyle in the head, killing him instantly. His subject, war, finally consumed him.

[Read: The two Stalingrads]

Reading the final chapters of Brave Men, it seems as though Pyle’s subject was consuming him even before he left for Okinawa. “For some of us the war has already gone on too long,” he writes. “Our feelings have been wrung and drained.” Brave Men ends shortly after the liberation of Paris. The invasion of western Europe—which we often forget was an enormous gamble—had paid off. Berlin stood within striking distance. The war in Europe would soon be over. Pyle, however, remains far from sanguine.

“We have won this war because our men are brave, and because of many other things.” He goes on to list the contribution of our allies, the roles played by luck, by geography, and even by the passage of time. He cautions against hubris in victory and warns about the challenges of homecoming for veterans. “And all of us together will have to learn how to reassemble our broken world into a pattern so firm and so fair that another great war cannot soon be possible … Submersion in war does not necessarily qualify a man to be the master of the peace. All we can do is fumble and try once more—try out of the memory of our anguish—and be as tolerant with each other as we can.”