I read it twice, all the way through, and I’m not going to pretend I came out the other side feeling smart about it.
The first time I read it the way you’re supposed to read an argument. Scoring it, annotating it in my head. Well, actually NATO did expand. Well, actually Minsk was never implemented. Well, actually there were far-right battalions and you can find the photos. All of that is true. And when I got to the end, I had that queasy feeling you get when something is working on you and you can’t quite say how.
The second time I stopped arguing and just read it as a story. What story is this trying to tell, and who is it for?
Then it clicked.
This isn’t the case for the war. It’s the case Russia tells itself so it can live with the war. It’s the version that lets a country that lost 27 million people to the Nazis, that put Gagarin in orbit, that has a thousand years of seeing itself as a big, tragic, soulful civilization look at what’s happening in Ukraine and still face the mirror. It isn’t propaganda in the stupid sense, leaflets and bad Photoshop. It goes deeper than that. It’s the story you need to sleep at night.
And it works, which is the scary part. It works because none of it is made up from nothing. Every piece is bolted to something real.
The collapse in ‘91 was a humiliation. If you haven’t sat with someone who lived through it, you won’t get it. One day you’re a superpower, and the next your savings are gone, your job is gone, the flag is gone, and some American economist is on TV telling you this is liberation. That trauma is real. It never went away, it just went quiet for a while.
NATO expansion happened. You can list the dates. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in ‘99. The Baltics, Bulgaria, and Romania in ‘04. Then Albania, Croatia, Montenegro, North Macedonia. It’s on Wikipedia. If you’re sitting in Moscow drawing circles on a map, that looks exactly like encirclement. If you’re sitting in Warsaw, it looks like finally choosing your own friends after fifty years of not being allowed to. Both can be true, and each side pretends the other’s view doesn’t exist.
2014 is where it gets seductive. Call Euromaidan a coup and half of Moscow nods. Yanukovych was elected. He was corrupt as hell, but he was elected, and then he was gone. And yes, Nuland was handing out cookies on the Maidan and McCain was literally on stage. If you’ve spent twenty years watching Americans talk about democracy while doing very obvious democracy-management in your backyard, you start seeing a pattern. You might not even be wrong about parts of it.
But that’s where the trap snaps shut.
Because in that version of 2014, Ukrainians don’t exist. Not really. They’re props. They didn’t stand in the freezing cold because they were sick of being robbed. They had no reasons of their own to want Yanukovych gone. They were just managed, lured, bought with cookies. The story only works if you delete Ukrainian agency completely, if you decide 40 million people next door can’t possibly want something unless Washington told them to.
That’s the trick the whole narrative pulls, over and over. Russia never acts, it only reacts. It never chooses, it’s only forced.
Crimea wasn’t seized, it was “corrected.” Donbas wasn’t invaded, it was a response to a “junta.” The tanks rolling toward Kyiv in February 2022 weren’t an invasion, they were a “special operation” to stop NATO from putting missiles somewhere. Every act of aggression gets re-dressed as defense.
Some of the grievances underneath are legitimate, and that’s what makes it so hard to argue with. NATO did expand. The West did make vague promises in the 90s that it never wrote down. Minsk was a cynical, unworkable mess that nobody implemented. The US did train Ukrainian units. The West did politically back Maidan. You can prove all of it with footnotes.
But none of it, none of it, gets you to “therefore we had to invade.”
That’s the line it crosses without ever saying so. The logic goes: we felt threatened, so we get to invade. We lost an empire, so we get to take a piece back. We don’t trust your intentions, so we get to use force. That isn’t defense. It’s what every empire has told itself before crossing someone else’s border. Every aggressor in history has felt defensive. Hitler felt defensive. That isn’t a justification, it’s psychology.
The “denazify” part is where it goes from self-deception to something darker. To be fair to the original piece, it at least tries to be honest: “Was it exaggerated? Yes. Was it completely invented? No.” That’s true. There was Azov, at least in its early form. There were people marching with Bandera portraits in Lviv. The far right is a real problem in Ukraine, as it is in half of Europe.
But the jump from “there are far-right elements in Ukraine” to “Ukraine is a Nazi regime that must be destroyed” isn’t an argument. It’s a justification built after the fact, and whoever wrote that talking point knew exactly what they were doing. They knew what the word Nazi does to a Russian whose grandfather died at Kursk. They knew it would turn a war of choice into a sacred duty. It let people support the war without thinking about what the war actually was. That isn’t belief, it’s marketing.
And then the ending. God, the ending.
“The West sees it differently. They see a war of aggression. They see Bucha. They see Mariupol. They see a dictator trying to rebuild an empire. They’re not wrong. But Moscow sees it differently.”
I had to put my phone down after that line.
“They’re not wrong.”
That’s as close as the whole worldview can get to saying the truth out loud. It can’t say the West is right, and it can’t say we did it. So it says they’re not wrong, but...
But we have our reasons.
That’s the entire thing in one sentence. Your facts are true, but they don’t matter, because my feelings are truer.
I don’t know what you do with that, I really don’t. If you sat across from a decent, educated Russian who told you that story, 1991, NATO, Maidan, Minsk, Azov, fact by fact, you’d struggle to call him a liar about most of it. You’d find yourself nodding along.
Until you get to Bucha. Until you get to Mariupol, and the maternity ward there. Until you get to the mass graves in Izyum. Until you remember that the piece mentions 14,000 dead in Donbas before 2022, which is true, but leaves out that a huge share of them were civilians killed by the separatists and by Russian artillery that was supposedly not there.
In this story every Russian death is a grievance and every Ukrainian death is a footnote. Every Russian fear is existential and every Ukrainian fear is staged.
That’s the wound that never healed. Not ‘91, not NATO. The wound is that Russia can’t hold two ideas in its head at once: that its pain is real, and that what it did with that pain was monstrous. So it built a house where it is always the victim, where the people in the apartment blocks that got shelled somehow forced Russia to shell them.
That’s why this piece is so dangerous. Not because it’s all lies, but because it’s mostly true, and the truth is arranged to lead you to a lie. It’s a corridor where every door you open makes sense, until you step outside and realize you’re standing in someone else’s ruined living room.
I don’t know if this war ends, and I don’t know if that story ever cracks. I do know you can’t negotiate with a story like that. You can’t negotiate with someone who truly believes he’s defending himself from you while standing in your house. You can fight him. You can wait until he’s exhausted. Or you can give him something that lets him keep telling himself he was the good guy.
None of those are good options.
The house is on fire, and the guy holding the match is absolutely convinced he’s the one burning.
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