Away from the Chat channel at the moment for health reasons but a few days ago I read in full on camera Marlene Laruelle’s piece comparing Tim Snyder with Dugin. TLDR. - Marlene's latest book "ideology and meaning-making under the Putin regime' is warmly recommended and she is an excellent expert. - There is nothing in principle wrong with the comparison. But you have to make the comparison interesting. I would be happy to be the subject of such a comparison, even if the other party were a genocidal entrepreneur. But again, make it interesting. - obviously, Marlene doesn’t deny the gaps in ethical equivalence. First, Dugin is genocidal and Tim is nice. Second, Dugin is calculatingly driven by self-advancement - Tim is not. - the point about liberals over emphasising values, willpower, ideas over social and economic forces is well made - it's a perennial problem in the liberal tradition - but it’s not skillfully applied to Snyder. To do that you need to estimate how much it applies to his history books, his public intellectual books, and his social media content. - there is no consideration of the fact that Tim shoves a camera in his own face all the time and just speaks, trying to engage with people's fears and sense of being lost. THIS IS A JOB. You need to understand what kind of job it is, and what it means to do it adequately and inadequately. Tim is very good at this job, even if all the criticisms applied to him are correct. He impact a lot of people positively. Marlene needed to give her take on this. But she didn't. Her piece is still stimulating, but for this reason it flops more than it succeeds. - the point about Tim being disconcertingly adored by his fans goes two ways. Yes, some people are absurdly triggered by any criticism of Tim. But also no - in abstract, I make the points Marlene makes in her piece even even more strongly than her. And my audience handles it well. My audience is familiar with the frequent academic objections to Tim but still gets a lot of out him. What is doing on here? What do they get? Is what they get what they think they get? -The objections include (1) over clarification of Ukraine’s past to align with today’s nationalist myths. (2) over essentialisation of Russia (3) excess of hyper identity politics (4) poorly made connection between Ilyin and Putin (5) insufficient emphasis on social forces (6) excessive causal attribution to malign Russian interference. (7) attribution of genocidal intent to Putin’s mobilisation across the regions of Russia. They all either apply or partly apply. - the lines about fascism, as ever, are weak, because there is an implication that fascism is either something historically contingent that happened in the 1930s, or a particularly narrow and extreme political mode which occurs rarely. If Tim’s mistake is over emphasis on ideas and values, Marlene’s mistake is detaching ideology from a social imaginary. There may be political reasons to stop short of calling Trump a fascist, but explanatorily, Trump and Putin are both to a minor to moderate degree fascists. - not enough distinction is made between what Tim thinks and what Marlene thinks Tim thinks he thinks. This is a big issue. In particular, Marlene needed to give an account of what Tim needs to think and say, given his general commitments and dispositions, and what he thinks and says but doesn’t need to think and say. This not being unpacked makes the piece struggle for interest. - bottom line, if you want to critique someone for indulgence and a lack of analytic seriousness, your own article needs more curiosity and seriousness than Marlene managed to put into her piece.

Anger, guilt, shame: the deepest unseen wound of this war is the rift between those who left and those who stayed behind, says Ukrainian writer Diana Berg

Look at the left image.

Trump declared a three-day ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine ahead of Russia’s “Victory Day” parade celebrating the defeat of Nazi Germany in 1945. Moments later, a presidential decree appeared on Ukraine’s government website. “About the parade in Moscow,” the single-article statement read. “Allow a parade to be held on May 9, 2026, in the city of Moscow.” The declaration was short but strong on symbolism. Ukraine’s president Volodymyr Zelensky had spent last week threatening to disturb the celebrations with Ukrainian drones “buzzing” overhead. While he eventually agreed to Trump’s short ceasefire, the point of the Ukrainian statement was that it would be Kyiv, not Washington, dictating the terms. While the front line of the Ukraine war remains a grinding stalemate, Kyiv’s confidence in setting its own war aims has increased as its long-range drones have brought the war deep inside Russia’s borders. Zelensky’s threats to the Victory Day parade were more than mere posturing. In the past weeks, Ukraine has evaded Russia’s defenses, dealing unprecedented damage to Russia’s energy economy. At a shortened Victory Day parade, Russian president Vladimir Putin spoke of Russia’s soldiers advancing in Ukraine. Yet just hours later he told reporters that he thought the war could be approaching an end, a hint that Putin sees his country is weary of the conflict. It’s a sign that Ukraine has been pushing Russia closer to serious negotiations. The Black Sea port city of Tuapse, one of Russia’s most vital energy hubs, presents a stark picture of how Ukraine’s assaults are forcing Russia to change its calculus. Ukrainian drones struck the city’s oil infrastructure four times in 16 days, coating the city in black smog and contaminating 30 miles of Black Sea coastline. The attacks have cost Russia $300 million and closed schools across the city as oily droplets falling from the sky make it unsafe for residents to leave their homes. The strikes in Tuapse are the clearest example that Ukraine may be finding leverage to force a peace on its own terms: Energy exports generate 30 percent of Russia’s federal revenues and determine how much Vladimir Putin can spend on his grinding frontline assault. When Ukraine first began its long-range strike campaign in 2024, it relied heavily on U.S. help. American satellite imagery provided the majority of the information Ukraine used to identify its targets, said Taras Chmut, the founder of Ukraine’s Come Back Alive Foundation, which helps arm the Ukrainian military. U.S. and British aviators, patrolling the skies nearby in F-35 aircraft, helped identify other installations that the satellites couldn’t detect. The U.S. also provided ATACMS ballistic missiles, manufactured by American defense giant Lockheed Martin, which Chmut says were critical to the campaign because Russian air defenses struggle to intercept them. But last spring, the Trump administration began to wind down this assistance. In March 2025, the Pentagon announced a review of aid to Ukraine and paused intelligence sharing with the Ukrainian military. Now, the U.S. sends smaller quantities of weapons to Ukraine, purchased by European allies, and provides some access to satellite imagery but no longer lends the intelligence of its F-35s. Ukrainian officials say their stocks of ATACMS have nearly run out. In their absence, Kyiv has developed its own long-range strike capabilities. This April and May, Ukraine carried out its most effective attacks on Tuapse of the war, targeting not only the refinery but also storage tanks and export facilities, according to Sergey Vakulenko, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Russia Eurasia Center. The weapons doing most of the damage are now Ukrainian-made. The FP-1, a long-range strike drone with a range up to 1,600 kilometers manufactured by Ukrainian defense company Fire Point, bears the brunt of the work. For targets better protected by Russian air defenses, Ukraine turns to its cruise missiles, which former CIA director General David Petraeus told me in an interview last month travel farther and carry heavier payloads than American cruise missiles. Fabian Hoffman, a Ukrainian defense expert, estimates that 95 percent of the drones and missiles used in long-range strikes are manufactured in Ukraine. The intelligence needed to direct these weapons is more challenging for Ukraine to replace. Hoffman explains that American satellite and aviation intelligence is crucial—not for finding the energy targets themselves, but for taking out Russian air defenses that stand in the way. “You can find a refinery or a gas facility by looking up the coordinates on Google,” he said. “Where satellites can be really useful is understanding where the adversary deploys its air defense capabilities so that you can reroute around them.” But Kyiv has managed to find workarounds. French president Emmanuel Macron said in January that two-thirds of the intelligence Ukraine receives now comes from France. “With the United States stepping back, we have obviously started to try to engage European countries more,” Chmut said. “They may be somewhat more technologically limited, but they are faster in making decisions than the Americans.” The Ukrainian military has also increased attacks on Russian air defenses themselves, as intelligence gaps make it more challenging to evade them. Russia now appears to be running low on the missiles it uses to intercept Ukrainian strikes. Hoffman says that has created opportunities for slower, clunkier Ukrainian drones to reach their targets that might have otherwise been intercepted. “Russia now has to distribute their limited air defense systems over an ever-expanding territory,” Hoffman said, “and Ukraine is exploiting that.” The attacks have not broken Russia’s war-financing machine. President Zelensky said on May 1 that Russia has lost at least $7 billion since the start of 2026. However, because the war in Iran has pushed up oil prices, Russian oil export revenue is still climbing on the whole. According to Russia’s finance ministry, oil and gas revenues rose 40 percent from March to April this year. Still, the strikes could eventually erode Russia’s ability to fund and arm its military, even if their impact does not materialize immediately. “The idea of quickly collapsing the adversary through strategic air power—historically, this has never happened. But what has happened repeatedly is that strategic air power unfolded a later effect that degraded adversaries’ war-fighting capacity,” Hoffman said, noting that many labeled the Allied bombing of Germany a failure in 1943 before its wear on Germany’s industrial base became clear a year later. Unlike in the Second World War, America’s role in ending the war in Ukraine is receding, not expanding. When the Trump administration first paused military assistance to Kyiv in March 2025, after his infamous Oval Office meeting with Zelensky, the U.S. was still providing roughly half of Western military aid to Ukraine. Today, that number has fallen close to zero as Europe pays for almost all new assistance. Now that the U.S. no longer shoulders Kyiv’s security burden, the limits of Washington’s influence are becoming clearer. “We don’t need anyone’s permission,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said after Zelenskyy posted his note about the Victory Day parade. Yet when it came time for the parade on Saturday—normally a demonstration of Russia’s military might—Russia’s tanks and missiles were nowhere in sight. Just in case, despite President Trump’s ceasefire, any Ukrainian drones still chose to buzz overhead. © 2026 The Free Press ### Share this news from Ukraine Today .org: * Share on Facebook (Opens in new window) Facebook * Share on X (Opens in new window) X * Share on Pinterest (Opens in new window) Pinterest * Share on LinkedIn (Opens in new window) LinkedIn * Share on Reddit (Opens in new window) Reddit * Share on Tumblr (Opens in new window) Tumblr * Share on Telegram (Opens in new window) Telegram * Share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window) WhatsApp * Email a link to a friend (Opens in new window) Email * Print (Opens in new window) Print * ### Like this: Like Loading… ### _Related_

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