THERE IS NO RUSSIA:

The time has come to ask whether, objectively speaking, Vladimir Putin is an agent of American imperialism. For no American has ever done half as much damage to what Putin calls the "Russian world" as the Russian leader himself has.

This thought came to me recently when I was in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, talking to Ukrainians made refugees in their own country by Putin's war. "I was a Russian speaker until 24 February," said Adeline, an art student from the now Russian-occupied town of Nova Kakhovka, referencing the date of Russia's full-scale invasion earlier this year. Russia has failed to take over Ukrainian culture, she said, so now it has set out to kill it. Several other Ukrainian students told me they find "the spirit of freedom" in Ukrainian literature, but of subservience to power in Russian literature.

Tetiana, a refugee from the ruthlessly bombed and destroyed city of Mariupol, had suffered without heat, light or water in a cellar under constant bombardment, seen her best friend killed by a Russian missile, and then had a traumatic odyssey of escape. Tetiana not merely speaks much better Russian than Ukrainian; her mother is actually from Russia, as are her parents-in-law. The Russian president would consider her a Russian. So I asked her for her message to Putin. She replied that she would like to kill him.

Wherever I turned, in every conversation, there was a total rejection not just of the Russian dictator, not merely of the Russian Federation as a state, but of everything and almost everyone Russian. Polling by the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology shows that some 80% of Ukrainians had a positive attitude to Russia in 2013; by May 2022, the figure was just 2%. A university lecturer told me that his students now write "russia" with a small initial letter. "I don't correct them."

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