By Zach Battat, The Montreal Review, July 2026

Zach Battat is a Montreal-based historian and foreign policy analyst whose work focuses on international affairs, Cold War history, and the long roots of contemporary conflict. He holds a PhD in Middle Eastern Studies. His scholarship has appeared in The International History Review and other peer-reviewed journals, while his public-facing writing has been featured in The National Interest, Policy Options, La Presse, Le Devoir, and The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Made By History series. His upcoming academic book is under contract with Bloomsbury Academic.

More than a century ago, when the Bolsheviks seized power in Petrograd and began reshaping the vast Russian Empire into a socialist state, Washington made a fateful decision. After a failed intervention on the side of the Whites during the Russian Civil War, the United States refused to recognize the new Soviet government. During the ensuing years, successive American administrations treated the Soviet Union not as a difficult partner to be managed but as an illegitimate regime to be isolated through sanctions, diplomatic cold shoulders, and rhetorical hostility. Thus, what most commentators call a ‘New Cold War’ between the United States and Russia is, in fact, the third phase of a conflict that began in 1917 and has never truly ended.

If we take seriously what a ‘cold war’ actually is—namely, a protracted freeze in relations between two states characterized by deep mistrust, ideological antagonism, and periodic crises short of a full-scale war—then this American posture toward Soviet Russia already contained the seeds of what we now call the Cold War. The roots of today’s confrontation did not suddenly appear in 2014 or 2022 or even 1947; they reach back to 1917.

The canonical Western definition of the Cold War tends to fix it between 1947 and 1987, framed by the Truman Doctrine on one end and the Reagan–Gorbachev détente on the other. In that forty-year span we find the familiar features: proxy wars on several continents, arms races, nuclear brinkmanship, and the fear that a crisis in Berlin, Cuba, or the Middle East might end life on earth in a matter of hours. But if we strip away the mythology and return to basics, a cold war is simply a situation in which relations between two major powers are frozen by deep structural suspicion. It may lead to proxy wars, as it did between the United States and the Soviet Union, but this is not inevitable. The Sino–Soviet split in the 1960s produced a sharp chill in relations between Moscow and Beijing with border clashes, propaganda battles, and a total breakdown of trust yet without the global narrative we attach to the U.S.–Soviet rivalry.

In that sense, what we usually refer to as the Cold War between Washington and Moscow was really only the middle act of a much longer drama. The first act began in the wake of the Russian Revolution, as the American refusal to recognize the Soviet government solidified into a pattern of treatment that cast Moscow as permanent outsider. For roughly a decade and a half, the United States adopted a policy that combined moral disdain for Bolshevism with economic and diplomatic pressure. The new regime in Moscow might have called itself a great power, but Washington treated it as something closer to a pariah. The depth of this early mistrust was reinforced by the information environment that Americans inhabited after 1917. In 1920, Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz published a landmark study, ‘A Test of the News’,1 of the New York Times’ coverage of the Russian Revolution, showing that the paper had repeatedly assured readers that the Bolshevik regime was collapsing and that the White armies were on the verge of victory, when in fact the opposite was true. Lippmann and Merz concluded that the Times had not simply reported events; it had stated what its editors hoped would happen. The effect was to entrench in the American imagination the idea of Soviet power as temporary and illegitimate, helping to solidify the early pattern of treating Moscow as outside the legitimate international order.

It was only in 1933 that this first cold war thawed. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, a far more pragmatic and worldly strategist than many of his contemporaries, made the decision to formally recognize the Soviet Union. On November 16, he took the step that Woodrow Wilson and his successors had refused to take, hoping that Soviet–American relations would, as he put it, ‘forever remain normal and friendly’.2 The decision was not born of naïveté about Stalinism; Roosevelt understood perfectly well that he was dealing with a brutal dictatorship. But he was also realistic about geography and power. The Soviet Union could and should, he believed, be drawn, however slowly and imperfectly, into a cooperative framework with the Western democracies. In a 1928 article in Foreign Affairs, written well before his presidency, Roosevelt spelled out what he thought America’s approach to the world ought to be:

[America] can point the way once more to the reducing of armaments; can cooperate officially and whole-heartedly with every agency that studies and works to relieve the common ills of mankind; and can for all time renounce the practice of arbitrary intervention in the home affairs of [its] neighbors.3

Here was the embryo of what would later become his vision of a ‘Grand Alliance’: a permanent concert of powers—‘The Nations’ as he sometimes called them—which would include the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, and China as guarantors of world peace after the defeat of the Axis. Roosevelt’s strategy toward Stalin was not sentimental. Knowing the Soviet leader’s paranoia and the trauma his country had endured, Roosevelt believed that engagement, reassurance, and careful respect for Soviet security concerns were far more likely to produce stability than open confrontation.

World War II seemed to vindicate that logic. The Soviet Union lost more soldiers than any other Allied power: over 27 million lives, perhaps more if we include those never properly accounted for. Without the Red Army’s brutal, grinding push across Eastern Europe, it is difficult to imagine Nazi Germany’s defeat. The wartime alliance between Washington and Moscow was never harmonious, but it was effective. For a brief moment, it appeared that shared sacrifice might provide a foundation for the cooperative postwar order that Roosevelt envisioned.

However, history turned in another direction. Roosevelt did not live to see the end of the war; he died in April 1945, just weeks before Germany’s final surrender. Roosevelt had insisted on his vice president, Henry Wallace, a progressive internationalist who favoured continued cooperation with the Soviet Union, as his running mate in 1940, but by 1944 conservative Democrats had replaced him with Harry Truman. This quiet political shift proved decisive: Roosevelt’s death handed the presidency to a leader far less committed to engagement with the Soviet Union, and the careful balance he had tried to maintain in dealing with Stalin was abruptly lost. Truman inherited the presidency without sharing Roosevelt’s instinctive preference for engagement over confrontation.

Before Truman met Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin at the Potsdam Conference, he sought advice on how to handle the Soviet leader. He turned to two men with very different readings of Moscow: Joseph E. Davies, a former ambassador to the Soviet Union, and W. Averell Harriman, the sitting ambassador. Davies, recalling a country that was crude, battered, and profoundly scarred by the war, urged Truman to handle Stalin with care, avoid unnecessary provocations, and recognize the depth of Soviet insecurity. If handled carefully, Davies believed, Stalin could be drawn into Roosevelt’s vision of ‘The Nations’, a Soviet Union integrated, however uneasily, into a cooperative postwar system. Harriman, by contrast, painted Stalin as irredeemably paranoid, blunt, and untrustworthy. According to his reading, the only sensible approach was to give nothing, concede nothing, and treat every Soviet move as an aggressive gambit to be countered. Truman, lacking Roosevelt’s intuition for great power politics and confronting an intimidating new strategic landscape, gravitated toward Harriman’s advice.

From that choice grew the second part of the American–Russian cold war. The line of continuity between Roosevelt’s cautious engagement and Truman’s more confrontational posture is often smoothed over in textbooks, but it had important implications. Instead of exploring whether a softer, more patient approach might have brought the Soviet Union into a more stable relationship with the West, Washington hardened its attitude. Within a few years, the rhetoric of partnership had been replaced by talk of containment, ‘iron curtains’, and an existential clash between ‘the free world’ and communism.

This second act, the Cold War proper, stretching from the late 1940s to the late 1980s, contained many chapters: the Berlin airlift, the wars in Korea and Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis, multiple rounds of arms control and arms races, the brutal suppression of uprisings in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, the détente efforts of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and, finally, the remarkable, almost theatrical relationship between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. For all their ideological differences, Reagan and Gorbachev shared one crucial insight: the nuclear arms race had brought both countries to the edge of catastrophe. Their meetings in the mid-1980s, especially the 1986 Reykjavik summit where they briefly contemplated the elimination of their entire nuclear arsenals, were extraordinary. Domestic opposition in both countries forced them to pull back from that radical idea, but they did succeed in abolishing an entire class of nuclear weapons and generated a genuine sense, felt by millions, that the long freeze might finally be ending.

When the Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991, many in Washington and Moscow proclaimed that the Cold War was over. Boris Yeltsin, Leonid Kravchuk, Stanislav Shushkevich, and several other leaders gathered in a hunting lodge in the Belovezh forest and signed the documents that became known as the Belovezha Accords, effectively terminating the Soviet state. The Russian Supreme Soviet then ratified the accords. Later, one of Yeltsin’s own advisers admitted that the process had been ‘neither legitimate nor democratic’.4 The decision was taken over the heads of a populace that, only nine months earlier, had expressed its wishes in a referendum. Gorbachev himself later complained that the men behind Belovezha ‘wanted to get rid of him’.5 Nationalist deputy Sergei Baburin recalled a communist colleague justifying the ratification by saying that by voting yes, ‘we will get rid of Gorbachev and then come together again’.6 Accordingly, many deputies voted less to break up the Union than to be rid of an increasingly discredited centre.

The referendum they overrode, organized by Gorbachev and often forgotten outside the former Soviet Union, had asked citizens whether they wanted to preserve a reformed union. Roughly 76 percent voted yes. In other words, three-quarters of Soviet citizens did not want the country to be broken apart. That vote is better read as evidence of a third position than as nostalgia for the status quo. Many citizens were critical of late Soviet bureaucracy and political repression, yet they were also wary of a market transition that threatened to dissolve social guarantees and transfer public wealth into private hands. They wanted reform without dispossession: political opening alongside a protected, mixed economy rather than either authoritarian continuity or shock-therapy rupture.

To outsiders, the Soviet Union was an ideological adversary or an abstract geopolitical entity. To the people who lived in it, it was their life. They were born there, went to school there, had their first romantic experiences there, built careers, formed families, and buried their parents there. A person cannot remove themselves from their diary any more than they can remove themselves from their own skin. It is not surprising, then, that decades later many Russians as well as Ukrainians, Belarusians, and citizens of Central Asia continue to feel a complicated nostalgia for certain aspects of the Soviet period. They remember not the queues and the shortages but the sense of certainty: guaranteed employment, subsidized prices for basic goods, free education and healthcare, the widespread use of Russian as a common language, and a social safety net that, however frayed by the 1980s, still existed.

Yeltsin’s abrupt decision to dissolve the Union, without preparation and against the clearly expressed will of the majority, shattered a highly integrated economy. Supply chains that had been woven together across fifteen republics were suddenly severed, resulting in a collapse in production, a plunge in living standards, mass poverty, and a surge in social pathologies, such as alcoholism, crime, and demographic decline. At the same time, a new class of oligarchs emerged, enriched by insider access to the privatization of state assets. Wealth that had formally belonged to ‘the people’ was claimed through presidential decrees, often without even a fig leaf of parliamentary participation. Russians memorably dubbed their new ‘democracy’ under Yeltsin a dermokratiya (дерьмократия), a ‘shitocracy’. This was not merely a domestic tragedy; it was an international turning point. In Washington, the collapse of the Soviet Union was read as proof that America had ‘won’ the Cold War. The old commitment to treat the Soviet Union as an equal, ritualized in arms control agreements and diplomatic summits, was replaced by the conviction that the United States was now the world’s sole superpower, licensed to reshape the international system as it saw fit.

This is where the third part of the American–Russian cold war begins. It did not start with Vladimir Putin, the annexation of Crimea in 2014, or the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Its origins lie in the 1990s, when the United States chose to treat post-Soviet Russia not as a potential partner in building a more stable order but as a defeated adversary that could safely be ignored, instructed, or pushed aside. To understand this third phase, it is important to recognize that post-Soviet Russia is not simply a continuation of the Soviet Union. Its political and economic system is no longer communist but a hybrid form of state capitalism with conservative social tendencies, shaped by the chaotic transition of the 1990s. Although many Western commentators have interpreted Moscow’s decision to send troops into Ukraine in February 2022 as evidence of an effort to rebuild the Soviet empire, Russian officials have repeatedly rejected that characterization. Putin himself has often invoked the well-known line that ‘anyone who doesn’t regret the passing of the Soviet Union has no heart; anyone who wants it restored has no brains’7 in order to signal that the Kremlin does not seek a wholesale restoration of Soviet borders. From Moscow’s perspective, the war in Ukraine emerged not from expansionist ideology but from a belief that Russia required a buffer against what it viewed as the steady advance of NATO toward its frontiers. Whether or not one accepts this rationale, the Russia of the twenty-first century operates within a very different institutional and geopolitical framework than its Soviet predecessor, while Washington’s strategic outlook has remained strikingly similar to its late Cold War mindset.

The Clinton administration gave the Yeltsin government what amounted to a carte blanche to ‘reform’ Russia so long as those reforms aligned with the prevailing neoliberal orthodoxy in Washington and the prescriptions of Western economists. The guiding assumption was that a rapid ‘transition’ to a free-market economy, shock therapy, would create democracy, prosperity, and stability. In practice, it destabilized a nuclear-armed state to an extent that, in retrospect, looks reckless.

Contrary to many Western narratives, Russians were not clamouring for unregulated capitalism. Both before and after the Bolshevik revolution, setting aside the extreme statist model of the Stalin era, Russia had generally operated with what its own economists and officials would recognize as a ‘mixed economy’: significant state involvement in strategic sectors combined with private enterprise. When reformers like Mikhail Gorbachev spoke of perestroika (перестройка), or ‘restructuring’, they were imagining something closer to European social democracy than American libertarianism: a system combining market mechanisms with strong social guarantees, regulated prices for essentials, and public ownership of core infrastructure. Russians often described this aspiration as sotsializm s chelovecheskim litsom (социализм с человеческим лицом), or ‘socialism with a human face’.

But the zealots who dominated American foreign policy and economic establishment in the 1990s had little interest in such nuances. They pushed Yeltsin to move as quickly as possible toward privatization, deregulation, and integration into Western financial structures. The result was not a healthy democracy but a fragile, corrupt system in which a small group of insiders seized wealth on a colossal scale while ordinary people saw their savings wiped out and their life expectancy fall.

Meanwhile, the broader strategic relationship between Washington and Moscow remained trapped in Cold War thinking. Officially, the Cold War was over, but the mentality in Washington and in many think tanks had changed very little. NATO, instead of redefining itself or fading into a different kind of security architecture, expanded steadily eastward, incorporating countries that had once been part of the Warsaw Pact and, later, part of the former Soviet Union itself. Each round of enlargement was justified as defensive, but from the Kremlin’s perspective, it eroded the buffer zone that had historically been seen as essential to Russian security.

Under George W. Bush, there was a brief moment of cooperation when, after the September 11 attacks, Russia supported the American campaign in Afghanistan. That moment soon gave way to familiar patterns. In 2002, the Bush administration withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, the bedrock of Moscow’s national security, and launched the invasion of Iraq a year later. In 2006, former Vice President Dick Cheney declared in Lithuania that Russia should no longer be considered ‘a strategic partner and trusted friend’.8 Moscow read these moves as signs that Washington no longer felt bound by great power understandings.

Barack Obama took office in 2009, promising a ‘reset’ with Russia. For a short period, there were indeed gestures in that direction: a new START treaty, some rhetorical softening, and a photo op featuring a symbolic red ‘reset’ button. Yet the underlying structures of distrust remained. NATO increased its rotational deployments, exercises, and infrastructure in Eastern Europe during the Obama years. The intervention in Libya in 2011, justified to Moscow as a limited humanitarian operation but quickly becoming a regime-change war, reinforced the belief that American assurances were not to be trusted. When protests in Ukraine in 2013 and 2014 culminated in the ouster of President Yanukovych and Russia responded by annexing Crimea and supporting separatists in Donbass, the Obama administration led the push for sanctions and for a firmer NATO posture on Russia’s borders. The ‘reset’ was dead, and the third act of the cold war moved into a more confrontational phase.

On top of this came the pattern of American unilateralism more generally: the bombing of Serbia in the late 1990s without a UN mandate, the full-scale invasion of Iraq, and then Libya. To many in Moscow, the so-called ‘colour revolutions’ in Georgia and Ukraine, though not American military operations, appeared as Western-backed efforts at regime change. Each episode may have had its own logic in Washington. Seen from Moscow, they were chapters in a single story—a story in which the ‘victorious’ West felt no obligation to honour earlier assurances or to treat Russia as an equal. This perception of betrayal was not merely a propaganda line; it was, and remains, held by much of the Russian elite, from liberal internationalists to hardliners. Both Vladimir Putin and Dmitri Medvedev have repeatedly spoken of promises made and broken, particularly around NATO enlargement. Whether every recollection is precise is less important than the cumulative effect: a deep conviction that the United States, having declared itself the winner of the Cold War, is determined to keep Russia permanently constrained.

In this context, sanctions appear less as an episodic instrument than as a standing feature of Washington’s Russia policy, with roots reaching back to 1917. Indeed, after new American sanctions were imposed in response to alleged Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Medvedev, then prime minister, remarked that Russia had been sanctioned for a hundred years in one form or another.9 Even Medvedev, often cast at the time as one of the system’s more pragmatic, West-facing figures, described relations as razrushennye (разрушенные), or ‘destroyed’.10

The climactic crisis of this third cold war act came, of course, in Ukraine. The seeds were planted long before 2014, but that year’s events, Kyiv’s Maidan Revolution, the flight of President Yanukovych, the Russian annexation of Crimea (or, as Russians refer to it, the reunification of Crimea), and the outbreak of war in Donbass accelerated the spiral. From Washington’s standpoint, Russia had violated international law and the sovereignty of a neighbouring state. From Moscow’s standpoint, the West had supported what it saw as a coup in Kyiv and had refused to acknowledge any Russian stake in the outcome. Even then, there remained a narrow diplomatic path. The Minsk Accords were intended to provide a framework for reintegrating Donbass into Ukraine with a special status and constitutional guarantees. Yet successive Ukrainian governments, encouraged by Western rhetoric and arms deliveries, did not implement the political provisions of Minsk, while Russia maintained its military and political backing for the separatists. Likewise, neither the United States nor the European Union exerted serious pressure on Kyiv to take the difficult steps necessary to make the accords work.

From 2007 onward, Russian officials repeatedly signalled that the prospect of Ukraine (and Georgia) joining NATO was a red line. These warnings were often dismissed in the United States, Canada, and the European Union as bluster or bargaining. Then came the 2008 war in Georgia, the Bucharest Summit’s reckless promise that Ukraine and Georgia ‘will become members of NATO’, and years of mutual distrust. In late 2021, Putin’s government sent written proposals to the United States and NATO outlining what it claimed were its security concerns and desired guarantees. Whatever one thinks of the specifics, Washington responded by treating the proposals largely as unacceptable.

In February 2022, as Ukrainian forces increased their deployments to the eastern frontlines and President Volodymyr Zelensky began publicly musing about nuclear weapons and fast-track NATO membership, Putin made the decision to launch a full-scale invasion. If Putin pulled the trigger, it was the United States and its allies who had spent decades loading the gun.

This is not a defence of Russia’s actions. The invasion was a preventive war by choice not necessity. The threat to Russia’s existence, while emerging, was not imminent. Diplomacy, however strained and unlikely to succeed, had not been exhausted. War, once unleashed, proved predictably catastrophic—cities destroyed, half a million killed or maimed, millions displaced—and the risk of escalation to direct NATO–Russia confrontation or even nuclear use was far from negligible. Looking back, it is clear that Putin’s decision rested on a cascade of miscalculations. He overestimated the readiness and effectiveness of his own armed forces, underestimated Ukrainian resilience and nationalism, and, perhaps most dangerously, misjudged the willingness of the American foreign policy establishment to continue its Cold War-style confrontation at high cost and high risk. He was hardly alone in misreading the situation, but as the leader ordering the invasion, he bears ultimate responsibility for the choice.

Had the Istanbul peace talks in the spring of 2022 produced a settlement, those who argue that Putin’s gamble was strategically justified might have had a stronger case. But the war has dragged on. The drawn-out character of the conflict, its mounting death toll, and the cumulative devastation have made it increasingly difficult to portray the invasion as a rational act of statecraft, even from a narrowly Russian perspective. It is quite possible that, over time, Russia will secure enough territory or political leverage to claim some sort of victory, but whether those gains will be worth the economic, military, and human price is a different question entirely.

What is unmistakable, however, is that the war in Ukraine has not become part of a ‘New Cold War’ so much as deepened an old one. The structures of distrust, grievance, and mutual suspicion that have shaped American–Russian relations since 1917 have simply entered a new, more dangerous phase. The language of a ‘New Cold War’ suggests a break with the past, as if something fundamentally different began in 2014 or 2022. In reality, we are watching the third act of a drama whose first lines were spoken when the United States refused to recognize the Soviet state and whose central theme, the inability of Washington and Moscow to move beyond a zero-sum view of each other, has never been resolved.

In Donald Trump’s first term as president, from 2017 to 2021, there were brief, contradictory signals about a possible shift. On the one hand, Trump occasionally spoke in terms that sounded closer to Joseph Davies’s old advice, hinting at the possibility of better relations with Russia, questioning the wisdom of some interventions, and expressing scepticism about endless confrontation. On the other hand, his administration’s actual policies included new sanctions, arms sales to Ukraine, and a hard line on many issues, most notably its decision to withdraw from the INF Treaty. The broader American establishment, Congress, the intelligence agencies, and much of the media treated any talk of a détente as almost treasonous. A kind of ‘Russia frenzy’ took hold in sections of the Western political class, where every domestic controversy seemed to include a Russian angle.

The subsequent Biden administration, from 2021 to early 2025, reverted to a more traditional American posture: rhetorical commitment to democracy and alliances, support for NATO enlargement, culminating in the accession of Finland and Sweden, and a willingness to treat Russia primarily as a malign actor to be contained, sanctioned, and weakened. When the 2022 invasion confirmed every negative expectation about Moscow, it became even harder in Washington to argue for anything resembling Roosevelt’s old vision of a concert of powers.

In January 2025, Donald Trump returned to the White House for a second term with rhetoric which, again, suggested some instinctive openness to reducing tensions with Moscow or at least to questioning the automatic logic of permanent confrontation. Yet he is hemmed in by the same structural forces that constrained his first term: a foreign policy establishment invested in the existing paradigm, a Congress suspicious of any overture to Russia, and allies wary of any unilateral American bargain. The tension between Trump’s occasional gestures toward Davies and the entrenched Harriman school in Washington has only grown more visible. The administration’s November 2025 National Security Strategy makes this tension plain.11 It rails against ‘globalism’ and promises restraint, yet insists that U.S. economic and military pre-eminence must endure and treats the war in Ukraine as a problem to manage rather than a chance to rethink relations with Russia. The document does not end the long Cold War; it quietly updates it.

In late November 2025, Reuters published the text of a draft 28-point U.S.-backed peace framework for the Russia–Ukraine war, which it reported obtaining.12 It pairs a reaffirmation of Ukrainian sovereignty with a constitutional bar on NATO membership, constraints on Ukraine’s armed forces, phased sanctions relief for Russia, and an economic reintegration agenda including energy, critical minerals, and investment vehicles. It treats enforcement and incentives as the core mechanism of stability, with conditional guarantees and compensation doing the heavy lifting. Regardless of its feasibility or justice, the document reads less like an exit from the long cold war and more like its management by contract—a management which is now shaping the next phase of the war in Ukraine.

Now in its fifth year, the war in Ukraine has evolved into a grinding contest of attrition, with periods of escalation and stalemate, recent expanded strikes on Kyiv and Russian warnings of further attacks, diplomatic initiatives raised and abandoned, and a steady tightening of the sanctions and countersanctions that now shape the broader relationship. Inside Russia, too, the long war has narrowed Putin’s room for manoeuvre: high interest rates and the hidden conversion to a war economy have strained the civilian economy,13 and the scale of Russian casualties has become increasingly difficult to conceal.14 Yet public opinion appears to reflect the same constraint: many Russians favour ending the war, but far fewer support doing so if it requires returning the territories Russia already holds.15 This leaves the Kremlin facing pressure for an endgame, but not necessarily for territorial rollback or for a settlement that looks like defeat. That tension has given hardline voices within Russia’s strategic and foreign-policy establishment more room to sharpen a longstanding argument that Moscow should impose an outcome in Ukraine rather than wait for a negotiated settlement with Washington, a view reinforced by the war on Iran and by the belief that Tehran was left bargaining over sovereign choices under military and economic duress before receiving only a fragile interim understanding.16 Trust between Washington and Moscow is effectively non-existent. Arms control frameworks that once put guardrails on the rivalry have eroded or collapsed. The wider international system has grown more multipolar and more brittle, with other powers—China, India, and regional actors in the Middle East and the Global South—seeking to navigate between a sanctioned but assertive Russia and a self-confident but internally divided United States.

In this landscape, American leaders often describe the confrontation as a global struggle between democracy and autocracy. Such language captures some of what is at stake, but it misses a deeper divide. The real fault line in the latest phase of this long cold war runs between a universalist project and various forms of non-universalism. On one side stand those who insist that a single set of political and economic norms can and should apply everywhere and that the United States and its allies remain the natural guardians of those norms. On the other stand states and movements that reject this universalizing claim, whether in the name of sovereignty, civilizational identity, religious tradition, or simple resentment of Western power.

Russia does not offer a coherent alternative model of world order, and neither do many of the governments that resist Western pressure. What they share is a refusal to accept that Washington’s preferences are identical to the interests of humanity as a whole. Russia’s own official rhetoric has increasingly framed this refusal in civilizational terms. Since 2022, and building on older debates, the language of Russia as a distinct civilization or ‘state-civilization’ has moved closer to the centre of official discourse, though in practice this civilization is imagined less as a culture above the state than as a multi-confessional, statist order protected and defined by the state itself.17 For them, the argument with the West is less about the details of parliamentary procedure and more about who has the authority to declare which rules are binding for everyone and which are open to negotiation. In practice, the current confrontation is not simply a contest between democrats and authoritarians. It is a struggle over whether any power can still claim to speak for a universal order and what follows if that claim is no longer widely believed.

Seen in that light, references to a ‘New Cold War’ between America and Russia obscure more than they reveal. What we are living through is not a fresh confrontation born of Putin’s personality or NATO’s latest moves. Rather, it is the third stage of a long-standing cold war that has repeatedly changed its surface form while preserving its core: a deep, reciprocal inability to imagine security with the other side rather than against it coupled with a recurring American temptation to confuse its own universalism with the interests of the world.

There have always been alternative voices. Roosevelt’s vision of a Grand Alliance, including the Soviet Union and China as co-guarantors of peace, was one. Davies’s recommendation to Truman to deal with Stalin carefully and without gratuitous provocation was another. Even in recent years, scattered figures in both countries have argued that the true threats to American and Russian security—international terrorism, nuclear proliferation, climate change, pandemics, and cyber vulnerabilities—are not problems that can be solved by treating one another as permanent enemies or by insisting that one side’s institutions are the universal template for all.

Yet the zealots of confrontation in Washington and their counterparts in Moscow have repeatedly prevailed. In the United States, ideological triumphalism combines with entrenched institutional interests to make questioning the logic of endless rivalry exceedingly difficult. The military-industrial complex, far from being a conspiracy theory, is a structural reality of American politics, reinforced rather than restrained by partisan polarization. The U.S. operation that captured Nicolás Maduro and removed him from power in early January 2026 serves as a reminder that the repertoire of intervention remains readily available, even in the Western Hemisphere.18 In Russia, a mixture of genuine security concerns, wounded pride, and regime self-preservation has reinforced a siege mentality that feeds on Western missteps. On both sides, universalist rhetoric is often used to justify policies that deepen, rather than reduce, insecurity.

What we are witnessing is not a ‘New Cold War’, but an old one still unfolding, now in its third phase and more than a century old. The urgent task is not to debate labels but to confront a deeper impasse: the United States’ reluctance to relinquish the claim that its own model represents the sole legitimate destination of history, and Russia’s continued tendency to ground its foreign policy in grievance rather than coexistence. Without some modest retreat from universalist ambition and some corresponding acceptance of pluralism, talk of ending the cold war will remain empty.

For the sake of their own citizens and the wider world, American leaders will eventually have to decide whether they wish to continue staging new variations of the same cold war drama or whether they are prepared to imagine something different. Roosevelt once believed that the United States could ‘renounce the practice of arbitrary intervention’ and ‘cooperate…to relieve the common ills of mankind’. That imagination has flickered at times, but it has never quite gone out. The tragedy of the last century is that whenever such voices have emerged, in the United States as in Russia, they have been marginalized by those who regard confrontation as a permanent necessity or, worse, a profitable habit. The danger today is that we now find ourselves closer to catastrophic miscalculation than at any time since the early 1980s war scares and, arguably, since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

Rather than debating whether this ‘New Cold War’ is really new, it is time to ask what the old one can still teach, even if learning those lessons is harder in a world where the claim to speak for universal values is contested as never before. 

By Leonid Ragozin, The American Conservative, 7/17/26

Once upon a time, Donald Trump promised to end what he dubbed “Biden’s war” in Ukraine within 24 hours of his second inauguration. But a year and a half after Trump moved back into the White House, the war continues to rage. Moreover, he has put on his predecessor Joe Biden’s hat, trying to coerce Vladimir Putin into accepting peace on Western terms by raising the stakes to new, insane levels. 

Several such attempts by the U.S.-led West throughout the 12 years of the Russia–Ukraine war invariably ended in fiascos that have come to define the trajectory of this conflict. The crude attempt to reframe the 2014–2015 Minsk agreements in Ukraine’s favor prompted Russia’s all-out invasion in February 2022. Ditching the Istanbul framework agreement in the spring of the same year resulted in an epic catastrophe for Ukrainians. Even if the war ended soon, Ukraine would need decades to recover in demographic and infrastructural terms. But just as on every previous occasion, the pro-war lobby is doing its utmost to promote the narrative that this time things are going to be different.

“It’s an escalation, but it’s also an escalation that can help lead to an end,” Trump said at the NATO summit in Ankara last week. He praised his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky for doing “an amazing job” with drone strikes on oil refineries that have engineered a fuel crisis across Russia and an acute one in the occupied Crimea. 

Trump’s apparent turnaround was preceded by a massive PR surge aiming to prove to its one-man target audience, Trump himself, that “the tide is turning” and Russia is beginning to lose. Judging by Trump’s statements in Ankara, the effort seems to have paid off, with a significant caveat being his propensity for changing his mind shortly after saying things observers interpret as policy.

The “turning tide” campaign rests on a constellation of dubious assumptions about the state of the war, Russia’s society and economy, and the West’s ability to contain the conflict without it sliding into nuclear apocalypse. 

One assumption is that fuel shortages caused by drone strikes could make the war untenable for Putin by raising domestic political pressure. This line of thought derives from imagining modern Russians, or at least the Russian establishment, as snowflakes who will turn against Putin as soon as they have to wait a whopping 20 minutes to get their car fueled. The same kind of magical thinking fueled Western excitement during the Wagner Group founder Yevgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny in 2023 and Ukraine’s Kursk incursion in 2024.

There are multiple issues with this approach. First, Russians have experienced far worse economic and security conditions in living memory. If you need to figure out what kind of hardships a post-Soviet people can potentially endure, look no further than Ukraine, which successfully adapted to the near-total destruction of its own large refineries earlier in the war. 

The problem is that Russian resilience is just beginning to be tested. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s society and economy have worn down to a dangerous level that Russia, if the war of attrition continues, would take decades to reach. There is virtually no way for Ukraine and the West to make Russia so unlivable that Putin would end the invasion before Ukraine itself becomes completely lifeless. This equation has been obvious from the war’s outset, although somehow not to its ardent cheerleaders.

What Russia is doing now in response to Ukrainian strikes is inching towards total war, with Russian drones and missiles methodically knocking out petrol stations in addition to energy infrastructure. Moscow has also begun to target food-processing facilities, agricultural equipment, and trucks on highways. Ukrainians are bracing for another horrific winter in unheated apartments, while Russians are merely at the stage of making an extra effort to fuel their cars. The contrast couldn’t be starker.

Finally, Russians largely do buy into the Kremlin’s narrative about the war. They see it as existential and themselves as underdogs fighting for their sovereignty against the enormous Western military and economic machine. What Trump has been doing to Iran over the last several months has bolstered their impression of malign Western intentions (and confirmed for them the importance of having a huge nuclear arsenal).

Moreover, Russians are being flooded with rabidly xenophobic, even genocidal, anti-Russian propaganda on social networks, thanks to government-linked online mobs like NAFO and, sometimes, high-ranking officials in Kiev and elsewhere. In a recent tweet, Sergiy Kyslytsya—Zelensky’s first deputy chief of staff and formerly a UN ambassador—wrote about the “exceptional degeneracy” of Russian society, comparing the Russian world to “mold” that must be “wiped out” rather than bleached. The tweet was promoted by America’s former Assistant Secretary of State Daniel Fried, one of the architects of NATO expansion into the post-Soviet space, including Ukraine.

Western cynicism regarding Ukraine—as in the late Senator Lindsey Graham’s statement about the U.S. helping Ukraine fight to the last Ukrainian, or in the EU proposal to stop admitting draft-age Ukrainians fleeing mobilization—also doesn’t go unnoticed.

It is hard to predict how long Trump will remain a Russia hawk, but it is safe to say that another historical chance to settle the conflict has been squandered, and the old pattern that has defined the trajectory of this conflict for years is back: Every time peace becomes a realistic prospect, the pro-war lobby derails it by selling the illusion that it will take just few hundred billion more dollars and the next technological magic wand to vanquish Putin’s war machine.

The result has been the same every time—hair-raising escalation, enormous and partially irrecoverable losses for Ukraine in lives, territory, infrastructure, and Russia pressing even harder than before. Every time Ukraine emerges from an escalatory period, it faces far more disastrous terms of peace than it could previously have achieved. There is no indication this time will be different.

Driven by war-industry lobbyists, most Western discourse regarding the Ukraine war evinces a severe misunderstanding of the conflict in every aspect—from the trajectory of the conflict to Russia’s true motives and intentions to human rights and democracy in Ukraine. It hinges on a plethora of taboo subjects, like the brutality of Ukraine’s mobilization and the public resistance to it (see the Lviv riot last week), as well as the infiltration of the Ukrainian state and military by former far-right street thugs, many of whom have become darlings of the Western media and the defense industry.

It also draws a surreal, essentialist portrait of Putin’s Russia as an inherently evil, alien civilization that’s incompatible with Western values by definition, rather than a complex, post-totalitarian society whose phobias and authoritarian instincts are partly driven by the long history of Western aggression (including current footage depicting what the U.S. and its proxies have done to Iran and Gaza).

Strategic planners and think-tankers in Washington concoct schemes to “weaken Russia,” but their efforts have so far produced the exact opposite result—a Russia that’s increasingly adaptive, technologically advanced, ready for modern war, and genuinely hostile to the West. For now, it is the Ukrainians, above all, who are paying the price with their property, blood, and future livelihoods.

Trump might be thinking that he can atone for the Iran debacle by being “tough on Russia” and resolving the Ukraine war on Western terms. But he could soon find himself facing an even greater debacle than the one he’s created in the Middle East.

By Steve Jermy, Substack, 7/2/26

Steve Jermy is a Commodore (Rtd) Royal Navy. Naval commander, offshore energy CEO, strategic thinker.

Executive Summary

NATO, EU and E3 leaders are taking Europe down a path to be ready for war by 2030. In the light of European bellicosity, Russia could decide to start this sooner. If so, the US would be unwilling to fight Russia on Europe’s behalf. Unable to defend itself against Russia’s conventional ballistic/hypersonic missiles, Europe would suffer a rapid defeat and very high military losses. Even after suing for peace, destruction of Europe’s energy system would plunge Europe into economic crisis. Europeans should be invited publicly to debate these risks and have their views heard.

1. Introduction – Understanding War’s Nature

As European leaders’ calls to be ready for war with Russia by 2030 grow ever louder, we would do well to consider the advice of war’s greatest philosopher, General Carl von Clausewitz:

‘Wars must vary with the nature their motives and the situations that give rise to them. The first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgement that the statesman and the commander have to make is to establish by that test the kind of war on which they are embarking; neither mistaking it for, nor trying to turn it into, something which is alien to its nature. This is the first of all strategic questions and the most comprehensive.’[1]

We should think hard on the nature of war with Russia: how our leaders’ public statements are heard in Russia; when such a war might start; how it might unfold; what its consequences and costs might be. This article builds one such scenario.

2. The Strategic Context

To begin, we must understand how we got here. It is clear, to anyone familiar with strategic history, that the roots of the crisis run back to 1989. When the Berlin Wall fell, there was an opportunity to build a durable, inclusive European security architecture — one that accommodated Russia’s legitimate security interests. That opportunity was squandered. Through the 1990s and 2000s, despite the original reassurances offered to Russia, NATO expanded relentlessly eastward. Prescient voices of caution — Kennan, Matlock, Burns, Kissinger, Mearsheimer— were dismissed or ignored. So too were Russia’s explicit and repeated red line warnings.

The Russo-Ukraine War must be understood in this context. The West is replete with conventional opinion that Russia intervened for imperial ambition. But all the credible evidence suggests that Russia went to war because it concluded — rightly or wrongly — that NATO expansion represented an existential threat. In Russia’s eyes, this was – and still is – a defensive war of survival.[2] Not surprising given that Kaja Kallas, EU foreign policy lead, has called publicly[3] for the breakup of Russia. Whatever one thinks of Russia’s methods, understanding its motivation is critical to understanding the nature of our future war with Russia.

3. Russia responds to European Escalation

Notwithstanding this fundamental insight, the publicly stated intention of the E3’s leaders — Macron, Merz and soon, no doubt, Burnham — is to increase the supply to Ukraine of long-range precision drones and cruise missiles, all capable of striking deep into Russian territory. In response, Moscow’s public warning is unambiguous: if this continues, directly targeting European production facilities will not be ruled out.

If E3 leaders choose not to take this warning seriously – a logical assumption, given that they have ignored all of Russia’s previous warnings – it is quite possible, even likely, that such a conflict could start this year, much earlier than Europe’s planned 2030. The second half of 2026 is thus taken as the start line for this scenario.

In September 2026, with its warnings ignored, and attacks into the Russian heartland increasing with E3 increased weapons deliveries, Russia acts. Conventional ballistic missile and hypersonic strikes destroy key E3 drone and missile production facilities in the Britain’s Midlands, the Ruhr, and outside Bordeaux. NATO Article 5 is invoked. But Article 5 does not require military action — it requires each member to take ‘such action as it deems necessary’. The shallowness of the guarantee upon which E3 leaders assumed they could rely is now exposed.

Spain and Hungary decline to commit forces. Italy, Poland, and several Eastern European members equivocate. More importantly, the White House, after recently appearing to shift to support operations against Russia now has urgent second thoughts. Having just lost a war in Iran, with badly depleted ammunition stockpiles, no domestic appetite for US troops fighting and dying on the other side of the Atlantic, and the mid-terms ahead, ‘Extending Russia’[4] does not look like such a good idea. The White House quickly concludes it is not in the US national interest to join a war with Russia on the European mainland. After spent years talking about strategic autonomy without creating it, the E3 now know what this means.

4. The First 3 Months of the War

Nevertheless, trapped in the political narrative they have constructed, the leaders of the E3 and smaller willing nations — perhaps the Dutch, Scandinavians, and Balts — respond.

The only place where an offensive is possible is in the air. But Europe’s strike packages now discover what Ukrainian pilots have known for years. Whilst a small proportion of European cruise missiles find their targets, the majority are destroyed by Russia’s layered and well-practiced S-400 and S-500 networks, which also exact an unsustainable toll on European pilots and aircraft. Without American suppression of enemy air defences – and perhaps even with it – there is no further prospect of achieving air superiority nor any effective counter attack.

In response to the air strikes, Russia takes the gloves off, determined once and for all to remove the threat from Europe to its people and homeland. Russia strikes airfields, training bases, dockyards, logistics hubs, and marshalling yards, inflicting 1,000s of military casualties amongst European forces before they can even deploy. The Europeans now learn the lesson that the US have just learnt in the Gulf – European militaries have very little protection against conventional ballistic attacks, and none against hypersonic missiles.[5]

The point is cruelly reinforced by simultaneous Russian strikes that systematically dismantle the Europe’s energy infrastructure — gas terminals, power stations, grid interconnectors, storage facilities — with the same clinical precision applied to Ukraine’s grid from 2022 onwards. Acutely vulnerable as the world’s largest regional hydrocarbon importer, at 12.8 million barrels per day,[6] Europe’s energy system is already under severe strain — the consequence of self-defeating sanctions on Russian oil and gas, recently compounded by the Strait of Hormuz energy shock.[7]

At sea, Russian submarines have deployed into the North Sea and Atlantic, and a wartime blockade has been announced. The mere threat of losing commercial vessels is enough for maritime insurers to withdraw cover and for shipping companies to stand down. Europe’s hydrocarbon imports grind to a halt and energy systems start to fail. The lights begin to go out. More importantly, without diesel, Europe’s farming, fishing and food logistics systems fail. Although only 2-3 months into the conflict, Europe’s economic situation is now perilous.

4. The Ceasefire, Costs and Consequences

Faced with the binary choice of escalating with nuclear weapons or accepting defeat, British and French leaders pause. Both nations’ nuclear deterrents exist to deter nuclear attack on their own territories, not to take nationally suicidal action to rescue a failing conventional campaign. Meanwhile, the US – having made its position on the sidelines clear and now acutely worried about the risk of nuclear war with Russia – is urgently working with both sides to bring the war to a close. Which can only be done on Russia’s terms. Under intense pressure from the US and the smaller European nations, E3, NATO and EU leaders sue for peace.

Only 3 months into the conflict, the human costs are already severe. Military casualties are orders of magnitude higher than Western and NATO losses in 25 years of operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. But military surrender is not the end, just the beginning.

With its energy system shattered, European industrial production is collapsing, unemployment is surging. Europe’s largest countries, other than Germany, are already shouldering debt-to-GDP ratios over 100%[8]. European public finances buckle then crack under the rapidly increasing burden of emergency energy subsidies, future reconstruction costs, collapsing stock markets, bond market runs leading to higher government interest costs, and lost tax revenues.

The failed state that is Ukraine provides indisputable evidence of what comes next. An economic contraction of 10% is the conventional criterion for a depression[9]: Ukraine’s is over 30%. The US is fiscally unable – and the Rest of the World politically unwilling – to offer a Marshall Plan. Thus, Europe faces alone an economic contraction greater than the Great Depression.

The political consequences are no less profound. The coalitions that launched the war collapse, and the leaders who led the charge are rapidly and ruthlessly deposed. NATO and the European Union, both judged complicit in the war’s commission, are irreparably fractured. Populist and nationalist movements surge. Social contracts between elites and the peoples, built over generations and in societies that had not experienced war on their own soil since 1945, strain to breaking point. Europe, once a coherent political and economic region, now faces a dystopian reckoning.

5. Conclusion – The Choice Europeans Face

If this scenario is plausible – even remotely so – are the risks the E3 leaders are inviting us to accept worth it? Without any public discussion?

There is an alternative: it’s called diplomacy. Not the diplomacy of ultimatums, nor meaningless peace conferences from which one belligerent is triumphantly excluded. But rather the diplomacy of honest conversation, in which each side listens to the other. Russia’s security needs are not difficult to understand. Because they have been repeating them for 20 years, almost ad nauseam for those of us who were prepared to listen and hear. A neutral Ukraine. No NATO membership. Real security guarantees. All of which Russia was willing to offer and Ukraine willing to accept in March 2022 – before Zelensky was persuaded otherwise by Boris Johnson and Joe Biden.

As General André Beaufre wrote: ‘In war the loser deserves to lose because his defeat must result from errors of thinking, made either before or during the conflict’. Over the first quarter of this 21st Century, Western leaders in general and Europe leaders in particular have a consistent track record of ‘errors in thinking’ – as our failed operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and now Ukraine unequivocally prove. This time though the stakes for Europeans could not be higher.

To conclude, before they march us onwards towards war, our leaders owe us two things. First, an honest, public, strategic assessment of the risks to which this course of action could expose us. Second, an opportunity for our views to be sought and our voices to be heard. After all, it is we, not they, who will be the ones expected to fight the war and bear its costs and consequences.

The choice we Europeans face is simple. Should we change course toward peace, and begin a difficult but honest diplomatic conversation with Russia? Or should we let our leaders – guided by a political narrative that they have constructed and ignoring the existential risks set out here – continue to lead us onwards towards war? As did their illustrious predecessors, a century or so ago, in the Summer of 1914?

By Simplicius, Substack, 7/10/26

The Economist published two important pieces centered on Russian “oligarch” Andrey Melnichenko, who is labeled one of Russia’s most ‘enigmatic’ wealth titans despite at times occupying first place amongst Russia’s richest men as, what Economist calls, the world’s “fertilizer king” and Russia’s “biggest industrialist”. He’s presented as particularly unique due to his more “centrist” position as someone who’s both inhabited Putin’s inner circle, yet also spent years living the Westernized liberal and Europhile lifestyle typical to Russian billionaires.

The first piece is a kind of introduction to him, while the second piece is an oped written by him and given tribune on the Economist as a kind of urgent message to the world about Russia.

The piece is long and filled with some interesting revelations. In its quest to skew the narrative toward the usual “Kremlinology” talking points of oligarchs serving a powerful undemocratic Russian autocrat, the Economist instead inadvertently gives light to contradictory realities. It exposes the fact, for instance, that contrary to the West’s beliefs, oligarchs in Russia had already been without real political power for some time, though the writers would never dare utter the reason why:

When Putin invaded Ukraine, the world waited for Russia’s rich and powerful to speak against the war. But they stayed quiet. The West imposed sanctions on them, partly to make them apply pressure on Putin. But this betrayed a lack of understanding of how power worked in Russia—the business elite had long given up trying to influence politics.

The journal admits that Western sanctions actually did the opposite of their intent, and pushed Russian elite back into the state’s bosom, with Melnichenko—who chose to live in Switzerland for a long portion of his life—himself admitting that for the first time he felt Russia was his only home:

Putin himself was worried the oligarchs would betray him. Instead sanctions pushed them back into his embrace. Yet when they returned, they repatriated their interests and ambitions along with their money. Melnichenko’s opening gambit when our conversations began three months ago was: “For the first time I feel I have no other country but Russia.” Given the reticence of his peers, it is astonishing that Russia’s most enigmatic oligarch, while living in Moscow, is willing to put his head above the parapet and lay his views on the record.

It goes on to even admit that, following the onset of the SMO, the Russian state did in fact begin confiscating oligarchs’ assets and returning them to “loyalists”:

At around that time he and other businessmen realised that the war would not end soon. With no reprieve from sanctions in sight, they started to repatriate themselves back to Russia, where they faced a different kind of threat to their assets.

Property rights in Russia had always been conditional. But the war unleashed a rapacity that hadn’t been seen for decades. Since 2023, assets worth $60bn have been nationalised or handed over to loyalists. It was the biggest redistribution of property since the mass privatisations of the 1990s.

In August 2023 prosecutors sought to confiscate Sibeco, a Siberian power plant, from Melnichenko, arguing that his purchase of it had involved fraudulent collusion with the previous owner. Two weeks later, the prosecutor-general’s office backed down in return for Melnichenko making a donation to a “charitable organisation”. According to people familiar with the settlement, the sum was 32bn roubles ($335m)—the same amount that Melnichenko had originally paid for Sibeco. The charitable organisation was Sirius, a school for gifted children favoured by Putin.

This is important to understand because it highlights this Economist series’ entire underlying thread, which is that the SMO has been slowly revolutionizing Russian society, turning the oligarchs back from liberalized sixth columnists to nation-serving adherents in the manner of China.

Melnichenko was amongst the first and most astute to recognize what must be done. He decided to get back in good favor with his motherland, which he had begun to use merely as a source of extraction and profits while he enjoyed life abroad. He returned and began to ingratiate himself with Russian elites, re-learning the system and re-absorbing the true national ‘pulse on the ground’:

Melnichenko now knew that he needed to establish property rights in Russia. The only way to do this was to work his way into the system, understand the competing interests and help shape its objectives. “If you want a seat at the table, you have to do something.”

As always he began by observation. “In 2023 I started to spend more time in Russia and was getting to know it in a much deeper way.” He talked to anyone who had a stake and a viewpoint: “politicians, journalists, thinkers, liberals, nationalists, communists”. He could be found having breakfast with Dmitry Muratov, the Nobel prizewinner and founding editor of Novaya Gazeta, a liberal newspaper, who was ostracised by the government and branded a “foreign agent”. In the evening he might have tea with Alexander Dugin, a nationalist philosopher who glorifies the war.

But here’s where the entire Economist series hinges. In his quest to re-integrate into Russian society, Melnichenko discovered that Russian elites are confounded and lack a unified vision of a workable future, for the time being. He then notes that Russia is seen as standing at a crossroads between four different potentialities, all of which sound grim, and which the Economist uses as the chief centerpiece to hook the series’ narrative on.

But it is a deliberately misleading hook, because they disingenuously present it as Melnichenko’s visions of a collapsing Russia with no options. In reality, Melnichenko presented the four “doom” scenarios in order to really pose his fifth redemptive one.

And what is that? To find out, we must peer into the second piece, written by the man himself:

In the piece, he keeps a deliberately neutral language in regard to the Ukrainian conflict, never quite openly blaming Ukraine or Russia, despite rumors he had been outspoken against the Russian SMO in the past. Now he’s clearly treading a fine line, and hoping for resolution which benefits himself, as well as society.

Critically, the theme of his entire piece can be condensed into one word: Sovereignty.

He accuses the West of trying to undermine and sabotage Russian sovereignty, and carefully implies that the broader conflict between Russia and the West revolves around the West’s disintegrating security architectures viewing Russian sovereignty as a threat to them—which is precisely accurate and true.

From his piece:

Russia today possesses sovereignty: it has made and continues to make its decisions independently. This is not an evaluative judgment but a descriptive one. Russia has defined its vital interests, possesses the material base to defend them and bears the consequences of its own decisions.

The current Western discourse on post-war Russia, for all its variation in political packaging, aims at one thing: the destruction of that sovereignty or its radical limitation. The logic is understandable. If Russian sovereignty is perceived as a threat, its elimination seems to solve the problem.

He goes on to pose the four scenarios, though it must be said, he specifically notes these are scenarios being discussed in the West—a stark contradiction to the Economist’s attempted painting of these “harrowing” outcomes as those feared by Russian elites as represented by Melnichenko.

You see, he doesn’t warn of any “looming disaster” facing Russia, but rather paraphrases threats the West itself is scripting, which is an all-too-inconvenient fact for the Economist staff who rather spin it in a more sensational way. It serves their agenda to pretend it’s “Putin’s own oligarchs” who are sounding the alarm of Russia’s “coming collapse”.

The four scenarios Melnichenko gives are:

1. “A humiliated Russia lingering on the periphery of the West.”
2. Russia becomes a vassal of China, ending its relationship with the West.
3. Russia becomes fragmented and falls apart like the USSR.
4. Russia becomes a “fortress: closed, mobilized, in permanent siege”, and a state of “perpetual emergency.”

As stated, these are Western fantasies, and the ‘Overton window’ of Russia’s future that Western politicians and pundits alike would like us to believe is the only trajectory of Russia’s fate. Melnichenko tacitly disagrees, but cleverly makes sure not to make this too obvious as he’s writing for a Western audience for the purpose of reconciliation.

Melnichenko finally reaches the inescapable conclusion, which is that the very heart of the conflict revolves around the issue of Russian sovereignty, and by ignoring this, the Europeans doom the conflict toward existential escalation:

How Russia conducts its own political process and towards what ends it directs its sovereignty is a question that can be resolved only inside Russia itself, without deference to external preferences. Any attempt to manage this process from outside is not only doomed but counterproductive: it destroys the very condition—sovereignty—without which sustainable peace is impossible in principle. This must be accepted, not out of sympathy for Russia but from the understanding that no alternative to this recognition exists.

He goes on to lay out a rather brilliantly nested exegesis which is a message, and a hidden threat, to the Western order. Like a Matryoshka doll, he conceals this message beneath layers of “openness” that appear ostensibly as calls for understanding and cooperation with the West. In reality, what he’s laying out is his accurate portent for Russia’s future, one where businesses, oligarchs and citizens alike, all work toward a common sovereign revolution. This is sold as being beneficial to the West because, as he foresees things, it creates “predictable” stability—but the real threat is hidden in the message that the West is pushing Russia to become more unified and powerful than ever before.

I have grounds to believe this reckoning will come, and these grounds can only be understood by explaining why it has not come sooner.

Those who built the new Russia—entrepreneurs, scientists, artists, sportsmen, professionals who created its economy, its meaning, its reputation in the world—largely saw themselves as internationalists. This was neither weakness nor naivety. It was the obvious choice in a world where global integration seemed irreversible. Science operated by international standards, technology came from the best sources, rights and obligations were governed by Western law in Western courts, children studied at the world’s best universities, capital was placed where it was protected. This choice meant, consciously or not, the transfer of a significant part of sovereignty to external systems. Not because that was the desire. Because it seemed that the rules were neutral and access was open to all.

After spelling out how the new Russia was built by internationalists, he admits that globalization was a failure because it was nothing more than a ruse to take away Russia’s sovereignty:

For many years Russia’s authorities warned that this was a mistake. The advocates of global integration viewed this as a remnant of Soviet thinking. Time has proved them wrong, not because globalisation did not exist but because it was never neutral.

Sanctions showed this plainly. They were written by some, in the interests of some, and can be revised for others by political decision. My own experience of Western sanctions matters here not as a personal grievance, but as evidence that the infrastructure of globalisation is politically conditional. Assets can be frozen; rights once considered inviolable dissolve the moment a political decision is taken.

The systemic effect of sanctions proved broader than their original intent. Disconnection from global systems—financial, technological, legal, educational—confronted Russia’s creative class with a choice it had not anticipated: either full emigration with the severing of all ties, or a return to the question it had been avoiding for three decades: how to build its own world inside Russia, by its own rules, to its own standards.

He concludes that this process of rebuilding Russia as a self-contained ecosystem, “by its own rules, to its own standards” will not come fast or easy, but it is now fatefully ensured:

This process is neither fast nor easy. But it is inevitable, since the global world in its former sense no longer exists. Those who know how to create find themselves choosing not between Russia and a global space, but between Russia and a fragmented world in which each bloc builds its own rules. Under these conditions, the logic of creation points inward: to build something that will be attractive—to those who left long ago with the dissolved Soviet Union, to those who left recently, and to the Russian-speaking world at large.

Layered even deeper in his admonishment is the prediction that expats and Russian businesses alike—particularly those which may have sold out in the beginning, it is implied—will again eventually find their home in Russia:

Large Russian businesses that invest in a sovereign Russia will, in time, become an integral part of it. The same will hold for other important institutions. As a consequence, Russia itself will become different. If we strive for a sovereignty that creates unity between citizens and institutions, I hope that in time we will correct all the internal imbalances for which we too bear responsibility—through the fact that we were once glad to absent ourselves.

In closing, he argues that such a sovereign, internally coherent, and unified Russia will not please the West, but it will be a far safer option than a Russia destabilized and fractured to the point of dangerous unpredictability:

The attraction of predictability

A sovereign Russia will not make every country comfortable. But it will be more advantageous in the long run than the alternatives. The choice for external players is not between a friendly Russia and a hostile one. It is between a Russia whose behaviour is predictable and one whose trajectory is unknown. In the world taking shape now, predictability is more important than sympathy.

The internal discussion about what Russia should be is inevitable. But that conversation belongs after the war and inside the country.

Once more, buried within the goodwill courtesies and ingratiating overtures toward the West, Melnichenko infact subtly retraces Putin’s own longstanding call for a renewal of the Westphalian system which the West itself had long abandoned:

The choice before the world is not between love for Russia and hatred of it, between punishment and forgiveness, between moral clarity and political cynicism. It is between two kinds of future: one in which major powers again learn to respect each other’s sovereignty, and one in which each attempts to reduce the others to objects of management. The second path has already brought us here.

The most important thing is that we step back from the abyss. Only then can we ask how we reached it and how to arrange the world differently. That work belongs to the next generation. Our role is to ensure they have something to work with.

In short, Melnichenko’s piece is in effect a Trojan horse of sorts: With a subtle appeal to the West’s sympathies—and its ego—meant to lull and disarm Western readers to his true message, he deftly delivers the thematic heart of Putin’s own longstanding arguments, famed from the days of the seminal 2007 Munich speech.

The Economist appeared to sense this hidden subversion in Melnichenko’s language and was forced to quickly publish a third additional ‘addendum’ piece simply to reframe his message to the tune of the correct narrative.

This unprecedented third piece of the day on the same topic is brief and to the point—only a few paragraphs in length. Its purpose is obvious: to control the narrative by highlighting only the most superficial platitudes and inferred “warnings” of Russia’s collapse, while burying the deeper hidden message which unequivocally declares that the West is pushing Russia into a historic reawakening of its national soul, wherein oligarch, corporate powers, and citizens alike unite under one common purpose of betterment for the nation.

The new piece above goes into full damage control mode, disingenuously miscasting Melnichenko’s return to Russia as a bid to save the country from internal “rot”:

…he has lived by Mr Putin’s rules—make money, but keep your nose out of politics. He is talking now because he and his fellow tycoons can no longer afford to ignore the rot of a country they watched descend into tyranny.

In reality, Melnichenko himself clearly states he came back not because of Russia’s corruption, but due to the West’s own unhinged and unprincipled immorality—sanctioning and seizing his assets, etc. Economist shills even openly wrote a disclaimer in order to distance themselves from Melnichenko’s thoughts, just in case their readers happened to intuit the true message beyond the Economist’s superficially phony “collapse” narrative:

Mr Melnichenko issued his warning in over 60 hours of interviews with The Economist (see 1843) and more guardedly in an essay that we are publishing online. This is the first time an oligarch inside Russia has spoken out at such length. We are giving him space not because we agree with all his views or he is a champion of democracy and human rights. Instead he is a pragmatist who wants his businesses to thrive. That is why his call could resonate in a country where wars gone wrong, including the defeat to Japan in 1905, have led to campaigns by industrialists for political change.

In short, the damage control piece desperately tries to change the message, but to those who know how to read carefully, Melnichenko’s words are clear: the war is the West’s fault, and Russia is being restructured as a self-sufficient society of supreme sovereignty where even the previously-alienated liberal class of exiles and pariahs has returned with newfound patriotism in its veins. A nation where oligarchs and big businesses are increasingly working for the benefit of the state and its people, rather than the crooked Western system which deceived and betrayed them.

The Economist tepidly tries to spin this message into an epigram about “reform”, and how the current moment is supposed to reflect the period following Russia’s loss to Japan in 1907, culminating in the Tsar’s overthrow during the later revolution. This is wishful thinking and naked sophistry on the part of the Economist staff, who are too terrified to voice Melnichenko’s true thesis.

It is a sure sign of the times that even Russia’s so-called “oligarchs” are now warning the West that it has freed the Russian genie from the bottle, and that there will be no turning back. But, as per usual, the message has fallen on deaf ears, because the Western system has decayed to such a degree that it can at this point function only on lies, propaganda, and deliberate misinterpretation.

In the West’s fragile court, the acquittal of a single truth is now too dangerous a risk.

---

Ukraine hits warehouse of top online marketplace

The Bell, 7/20/26

Ukraine’s long-range drones hit warehouses used by Wildberries, Russia’s answer to Amazon, in attacks over the weekend. The online marketplace handles 10% of the country’s entire retail trade. Kyiv said the facilities were trading in sanctioned goods and supplying the Russian army. The attacks could be an attempt to bring the consequences of the war to regular Russians, who cannot imagine life without Wildberries.

On Saturday night, Ukrainian drones attacked two of the company’s biggest warehouses in Central Russia — one in Elektrostal in the Moscow region, the other in Kotovsk in the Tambov region. According to official statements, eight people were killed and a further 80 injured. Footage of the fire in Elektrostal suggests that nothing at all remains of the warehouse after it burned for more than a day. The Kotovsk facility is likely a total loss as well.

***

Hitting the Wildberries warehouse is a lot more painful than it looks

By Ben Aris, Intellinews, 7/20/26

The tit-for-tat missile war escalated at the weekend after Ukraine hit the largest distribution centre belonging to Wildberries, the “Amazon of Russia.” The Kremlin hit back the next day with a massive drone and missile barrage.

The war has entered a new and brutally destructive phase with both sides adopting a “punishment strategy” – both are deliberately targeting civilian infrastructure and assets with the intention of just making people’s lives hell.

Zelenskiy was careful to say that Wildberries sells things like drone parts and both Wildberries, and its Ukrainian equivalent Nova Poshta, are used by regular people to send their men at the front care packages and supplies.

Zelenskiy claims the military supply component makes the Wildberries’ warehouse a legitimate military target, but we all know what is going on here: the AFU just wants to bring the war into the homes of regular Russians, who have been largely insulated from the effects until now. Pictures coming out of Moscow over the weekend show a huge black cloud over the city leading people to quip that it looks like Mordor.

But destroying the Wildberries’ warehouse is actually a lot more painful than it first appears. Wildberries became not only the largest e-commerce site in Russia, but the largest retail outlet of any kind in 2019 when it overtook Sportsmaster, the previous leader. The destruction of its stockpile is not just going to make shopping harder, it has also destroyed the livelihoods of thousands of SMEs that have already been struggling due to the sharp economic slowdown this year.

People (and the sanctions) focus on Russia’s oil wealth, but as I detailed in a piece way back in 2004, Russia is a “Soviet Sandwich” – there is a top piece of tasty and nutritious bread that is the oil and gas sector, but there is also a bottom piece equally appealing that is the retail sector. The middle was made up of greasy, grislily, and unhealthy pink processed and unreformed Soviet industrial sausage meat. There is a reason why half of all Russia’s imports over the last three decades has been machinery.

People forget how vast Russia’s consumer market is: 150mn gadget- and fashion-hungry punters. That is half as big again as Germany, the second most populous country in Europe. Pre-war retail turnover was approaching half a trillion dollars – about one third of GDP. This is why companies like Auchan and Raiffeisen Bank International (RBI) refuse to leave the Russian market – when I was at the EIU companies told me that not only was Russia their biggest market in terms of headcount, but also their most profitable, because the barriers to entry were so high, that pushed up the profit margins.

The upshot is amongst my Russian friends from the 1990s, anyone that had any good idea for any product or service, quickly became a millionaire, simply because the market is vast.

Light manufacturing Which brings us to Wildberries and why it is so successful. The second unusual factor that plays into this equation is not only is the consumer market vast, but so is the country. To get your goods to punters you have to send them over huge distances – literally halfway across the planet if a Moscow widget-maker sells something to a customer in Vladivostok.

Companies like Wildberries, and its rival Ozon (see my 2019 interview with the boss here), stepped into the breach here and have set up marketplaces which have become the basis of a flourishing micro-economy. But crucially they also set up the logistics distribution network. As Ozon CEO Alexander Shulgin told me: “Someone that makes nice chairs used to only be able to sell them to people in his town or city. What we do is open up the whole country to these craftsmen.” The way it works is you make your wooden stylish chair and drop it off at the local distribution centre (or they come and pick it up) but once it goes online and is sold, Wildberries or Ozon take over and will send it anywhere in the country, as well as taking care of billing and collection. Suddenly a small shop in Ryazan has access to 150mn people.

This is Germany’s Mittelstand with knobs on. The German version is thousands of small firms that make things like specialist high precision engineering goods or machines that they sell to bigger companies. The Russian version is much broader and is largely B2C rather than Germany’s B2B.

In other words, we are talking about jobs for regular people. The online marketplaces make it even easier to invent yourself as an entrepreneur in Russia than in Germany, and a very successful one at that if you have a good product.

This process has also been fuelled in a fundamental change in the cost of production. A great example and early success story was Obuv Rossii, a Siberian shoe shop, catering to the middle classes. The CEO, Anton Titov, told me that he used to have his shoes made in China, but after a decade of growth, Chinese wages grew at the same time as the ruble devalued to the point where it became cheaper to make things in Russia. China stopped being the world’s factory, as Chinese President Xi Jinping switched from an export-led economic model to a consumption-led one. This led to an explosion of light-weight manufacturing investment that was catalysed by online market places which appeared at exactly the right time to solve the very serious marketing and distribution problems overnight. In many ways Russia’s online sector has leapfrogged western retail which still relies on bricks and mortar chains on the high street.

Russia is physically so big, and the cities so spread out, that the physical distribution and shop networks make a lot less sense as they are so much more expensive. The heart of the online marketplace revolution is that a handful of leading companies have basically concentrated Russia’s entire logistics into a few centrally controlled systems that cover the whole range of products to make it as efficient as possible and have the economies of scale. The same is true to Ukraine’s Nova Poshta, probably the best company in the country.

Russia skipped over the light manufacturing stage in 1991. Usually, emerging markets get their first shot in the arm after the transition by attracting light manufacturing foreign direct investment (FDI) because wages are so low. But in Russia’s case the so-called Dutch disease of a heavily overvalued currency, thanks to oil and gas exports, meant that the cost of labour was too high, adding to the pain of the Yeltsin-era chaos. When I arrived in Moscow in 1993, despite the fact the economy had collapsed about a year earlier, the city was insanely expensive.

Belatedly, the light manufacturing boom finally took off nearly 20 years after the collapse of central planning. The tasty bottom layer of bread in the Soviet sandwich is also part of the reason the Russian economy has been so robust in the last few years as it can’t be sanctioned. VAT is the biggest contributor to budget revues (40%), far more than oil & gas (25%). How do you sanction retail sales that happen entirely inside the Russian economy and rely on no imports? That’s the whole point of local light manufacturing: it only uses Russian inputs to keep things cheap.

And there is the rub. Not only did Ukraine blow up a retail distribution hub so it will be harder to get your groceries this week in Moscow, but it also blew up the stock of thousands of small entrepreneur businesses. This has wrecked not just their jobs, but many of these small businesses have sunk life savings into funding their production in an effort to grow. I have seen reports of one woman that had invested $25,000 into her children’s clothes production and all her capital was tied up in inventory – all stored in the Wildberries’ Elektrostal logistics centre. She will have to go back to scratch and start all over again, carrying some heavy debt.

That is why Zelenskiy’s decision to hit the warehouse is so painful. He has chosen a target that is in many ways more painful for the economy than blowing up the oil terminals at Primorsk and Ust-Luga last month, not because it will hurt the budget, but because it will hurt a big source of employment for regular people. It was a lot more painful than it first appears as it hit a part of economy that was flourishing.

It was only one warehouse, but that is the main feature of the escalating missile war: both sides are now hitting warehouses, supermarket, delivery trucks and transport hubs. For example, Russia has started to systematically target Ukraine’s petrol stations. There are hundreds of these, but Russia is producing millions of drones. It will slowly wear Ukraine’s ability to put fuel in cars in the same way that Ukraine has already caused a fuel crisis by targeting Russian oil refineries. Soon just getting your shopping could become hard too. And currently the plan is to continue the war for two more years.

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Russian Strikes Pound Ukrainian Cities After Ukrainian Drone Attacks Killed Eight in Russia

By Dave DeCamp, Antiwar.com, 7/19/26

Russian missiles and drones targeted multiple Ukrainian cities on Sunday, killing at least six people, in strikes that came a day after a Ukrainian drone barrage killed eight people in Russia.

Russia’s Defense Ministry said that its forces intercepted 379 Ukrainian drones over multiple Russian regions on Saturday. Local officials said that seven people were killed and 25 were wounded by an attack that hit a logistics center belonging to Wildberries, a Russian online retailer, in the Tambov Oblast. One other person was killed, and 61 were wounded by various attacks in the Moscow Oblast.

Russian officials vowed there would be a response, and according to the Ukrainian Air Force, Russia’s armed forces fired 41 missiles and 125 drones into Ukraine overnight into Sunday. Local officials reported three killed in a Russian attack that hit a postal facility near Kharkiv, and three other people were killed by separate attacks in Kyiv, Sumy, and Kherson.

Russia’s Defense Ministry claimed attacks on military targets, facilities that produce military equipment, and energy infrastructure, though photos show apartment buildings were also damaged in the Russian barrage. The Russian ministry also said its forces targeted Ukrainian ports and “vessels used in the interests of the Ukrainian army,” and Ukrainian officials reported five people were killed by a Russian strike on a cargo ship in the Black Sea.

Ukrainian forces also launched drones into Russia again on Sunday, with the Russian Defense Ministry claiming its forces downed over 160 Ukrainian drones over the Black Sea and multiple Russian regions. Ukraine’s drone attacks are known to be supported by US intelligence, meaning they always risk an escalation between Moscow and NATO.