Paths and Bridges says:

• Solidarity with the Ukrainian people.
• Victory to the Ukrainian resistance.
• Support the anti-war movement and the movement for democracy in Russia.
• No to the logic of exterminism.

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For the first few days Putin’s war went badly for him and the Russian army he ordered into Ukraine. The impressive Ukrainian resistance revealed what Putin denied: Ukraine is an independent country with a strong national identity. Russia’s armed forces didn’t make the advances expected with such a huge force, superior airpower, the tools of cyber warfare and the advantage of the initiative. Instead captured Russian soldiers or those encountered by ordinary Ukrainians seem unsure why they are in Ukraine and display low morale according to many reports and social media posts.

Some observers even think Russia’s invasion force – 190,000 troops – is too small given the size of Ukraine and the number of fighters it can mobilise. They say Putin spoke of a “special operation” as a euphemism to conceal the reality of war but probably swallowed his own propaganda thinking his “special operation” would be like the second Chechen war when he started burnishing his strongman of Russia persona shortly before his election as President in spring 2000. Since then Putin has overseen other “special operations” (South Ossetia, saving Assad’s rule in Syria, supporting separatists in eastern Ukraine and annexing Crimea) but nothing on the scale of the war with Ukraine.

In the invasion’s early days there was evidence of stretched supply lines and poor strategic planning as columns and detachments ran out of fuel and even food. There is talk of poor morale and troops being pitched into a war about whose nature they are ignorant. Frankly at a certain point this starts to look questionable both for the front line Russian soldier and the citizen ‘back home’ – you can inhabit a misinformation universe and fundamentally support your government’s stance. In comparison Ukrainian defenders are well motivated and many have experienced a tour of duty in the Donbas. Yet reports are now suggesting Russian armed forces have made major gains in some parts of Ukraine’s vast territory especially in the south and south east. Also Putin is clearly raising the lethality of the invasion to try and break the back of the unexpected resistance Russian forces have faced. This is likely to lead to indiscriminate warfare obliterating the line between combatants and civilians as we saw in Chechnya and Syria.

Clearly after one week of Putin’s war the Russian invasion is unleashing shattering violence to ensure Pax Great Rus prevails.

Paths and Bridges has previously explored this in terms of the modern ‘battlefield’ no longer constituting a discrete geographical space especially in situations where conventional war blurs into citizens insurgency or military objectives are urban. The globalised world seems to have ushered in a new age of uncivil wars and ‘death worlds’ in expanding liminal conflict zones where the state has broken down (or a strong state pursues the breakdown of another state) or a weakened state is challenged by ‘war-machines’, sectarian, millenarian insurgencies or other novel forms of martial agency.

The great drawback for Russia of ferocious military violence is that it will only deepen Ukrainian hostility to Russia. Any possible occupation – presently hard to envisage – or stooge government imposed by Moscow would face severe challenges achieving any semblance of co-operation which suggests punishing violence would continue to be a feature of any Russian presence. Apparatus’s of coercion and repression require willing collaborators and it’s difficult to envisage Moscow successfully constructing such an apparatus. Perhaps Moscow imagines ethnic Russians (17% of the Ukrainian population) would willingly sign up to be jailers and policemen? Putin’s occupation – whatever form it takes – is set to fail because it is based on his own fantasy of ‘Slav brothers’ ready to thank him for deliverance from fascist government. In reality it seems more likely Putin plans to carve out more Ukrainian territory for Greater Russia especially in the south beyond the already annexed Crimea where ethnic Russians are more highly concentrated and Russophile political parties (from moderates desiring closer ties with Moscow, at least before the invasion, to groups strongly opposed to Ukrainian independence) enjoy a significant presence.

So far Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy (who resisted Trump’s corrupt blandishments to smear Biden for US aid in 2019) has provided brave, intelligent leadership while impressive Ukrainian resistance has stiffened opposition to Putin across Europe where sanctions are finally being ramped up as Russian banks were shut out of SWIFT. Some commentators have suggested China’s abstention in the recent UN vote condemning Russia’s aggression indicates some unease with Putin’s course. We are sceptical. Beijing knew Russia would veto the motion. China says it respects national sovereignty but insists Putin’s security concerns are legitimate. The US shared its intelligence about Russia’s invasion plans with the Chinese presumably hoping Beijing would use its influence to dissuade Putin from his course. Instead China shared the US intelligence with Moscow. Yet there must be some unease with Putin’s course given the unpredictability of such a major conflict in the bowels of Europe and the reality there would be no bystanders in a global nuclear war.

The most important impact of the Ukrainian fightback could be inside Russia itself where Putin appears unassailable, dissent is strongly repressed and civil society is weak. Even so Putin is hiding the reality of the war against ‘brother Slavs’ for a reason. Russian state TV dissimulates a narrative from a parallel universe pretending there is genocide against Russian speakers and tabooing talk of ‘invasion’ or ‘war’ while also cracking down on any independent news reporting. But the invasion’s real nature can’t be banished entirely as the bodies of Russian soldiers return home. Despite the repression on the domestic front there have been anti-war protests in fifty or so Russian cities and towns with currently over 6,000 arrests – perhaps the start of a revival of political opposition to authoritarianism.

Putin’s nuclear threats are genuinely alarming and should probably be read as a sign of his frustration with the course of the war so far. In placing Russia’s nuclear capability on a higher alert status, Putin wants to cow all who support Ukraine. Less than a week into the invasion the sense this isn’t going to end well for Putin is becoming immovable. The belief the nuclear threats are theatrical “sabre rattling” though understandable in such circumstances, feels complacent. Putin has twice threatened a ‘West’ he clearly loathes deeply, with his nuclear arsenal despite there being no direct threat to Russia. Putin is naked, his paranoid nature, obsessive ideological fixations and sense of grievance at Russia’s imaginary humiliation, has been fully unveiled for all to see. It is our misfortune Putin is in charge of a superpower’s nuclear arsenal.

So Russia’s long planned and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine was finally unleashed as we surely knew it would with the US doggedly sharing its intelligence to alert the world and perhaps discourage Putin. It was widely reported last November the US administration took the unusual step of sending the CIA chief Bill Burns to Moscow to air Washington’s disquiet about Russia’s troop build up on the border with its neighbour. Putin denied Ukraine’s right to exist and insultingly promises to “de-Nazify” a government whose President and Prime Minister are both Jewish (much of Zelenskyy’s family were killed in the Nazi’s genocidal invasion of Ukraine) though in a warped worldview imbibed from his KGB formation and authoritarian illiberalism combined with elements of Great Russian imperial multi-nationalism, Orthodox Christian’s were equally the victims of the Nazi’s invasion.

Obviously Zelenskyy is not a fascist but crucially neither is Putin though some observers like Charles Clover believe he has tolerated Eurasian fascist ideologues like Alexander Dugin. Perhaps Dugin was considered a ‘useful idiot’ (implying he was also a nuisance) by some in Russia’s top military circles but he has also been kept at arms length despite the appeal of his foregrounding of the geopolitical. Dugin’s fascism (no matter how Russified) as opposed to his illiberalism and authoritarianism is a real sticking point because of a strong public aversion to an ideology responsible for over 20 million Soviet war dead. Tsarism’s imperial pan-slavism was taken over wholesale by the Bolsheviks despite Putin’s cute belief Lenin ‘invented’ Ukraine (a strategic error in Putin’s eyes) and Putin is committed to refurbishing imperial multi-nationalism with the Russian state as hegemon. This goal might be compatible with xenophobia or chauvinism but it doesn’t fit racial ideology. Marlene Laruelle convincingly demonstrates unapologetic fascists like Dugin are more marginal and have had much less impact on Russian elite circles than is commonly assumed by commentators in the West. This is relevant because on the subject of fascism – who is and isn’t a fascist or proto-fascist, Laruelle provides a corrective (dispelling red-brown herrings) and fruitfully lays for the ground for thinking about how Putin’s Russia should be understood without becoming entangled in defining Russia as fascist.

Putin’s goal is to erase Ukraine’s existence as an independent country though his war will only strengthen Ukrainian national identity. No doubt the ‘West’ is guilty of missing opportunities to confront Putin though the competing, non-complementary nature of the interests involved always make such unanimity difficult to achieve. The initial reluctance to impose tough sanctions stemmed from the severe economic pain it would inflict in Europe revealing the continents profound economic entanglement with Russia. Even now Europe is still buying Russian oil and gas and helping fund Putin’s war. Shortly before becoming President in 2000 Putin helped raze Grozny, the capital of Chechnya in the brutal second Chechen war. These shocking tactics were also implemented in Syria against urban centres like Aleppo. Ominously the Russia military are now issuing ‘warnings’ civilian casualties in Ukrainian cities would be the result of enemy combatants using civilians as human shields. This is a signal the indiscriminate targeting of civilians are sure to be a feature of the Russian military campaign.

If Putin wins his victory will be pyrrhic. Proxies in Chechnya or South Ossetia or even Donetsk are one thing but a puppet government in a vast, developed country like Ukraine with a strong national identity and a real democratic political culture that has developed since independence in 1991, is quite another. It is hard to believe Putin was once popular in Ukraine when there was little appetite to join NATO. All that began to change when Ukraine’s citizens overthrew the country’s pro-Moscow President in 2014 and Putin seized the opportunity to annex Crimea and back a Russian separatist land grab in eastern Ukraine.

Putin’s authoritarian modus operandi was clear from the beginning of his eternal Presidency. It isn’t explained as a reaction to NATO expansion or aggression as Putin apologists claim. The small frontline Baltic states are the most vociferous NATO members not because they are fascists or keen to go to war with Russia but because they have a well founded fear of their giant neighbour. Russia’s unaccountable kleptocratic elite and the silovik (state managers and politicians heavily drawn from the intelligence services and the military) who rule, basically share the complementary goals of building Russian state power and influence and protecting their rule from any popular or democratic pressure of the Russian people. Paths and Bridges believes this is primarily why Ukraine as an independent, democratic country on its neighbours doorstep, has to be destroyed as its example threatens the continued rule of Russia’s elite.

In recent years many observers have commented on how liberal or representative democracy as a political and institutional model is embattled in the face of a challenge from what we might describe the new authoritarianism involving the uncoupling of a developed modern economy and consumer society from democracy, epitomised by China which has rapidly ascended to the status of near invulnerable global power.

China exemplifies the new authoritarianism but also new forms of bio-political governance of populations evident to some degree in all developed countries. Unsurprisingly China chiefly holds the US and NATO responsible for the ‘Ukraine crisis’ for aggressive, expansionist policies while firmly supporting the principle of ‘non-interference’ in the affairs of all internationally recognised sovereign states. However China is selective about sovereignty and rejects Taiwan’s status as a independent state as the island is viewed as part of the mainland which aspires to bring it under Beijing’s rule. Given this backdrop Putin’s use of brute force to bloodily redraw Europe’s map is a dark portent for any rules based international order respecting national sovereignty. Equally realpolitik in relations between countries encourages authoritarians everywhere to treat minorities arbitrarily as the fate of the Uyghur population in China’s Xinjiang province shows. A startling aspect of Putin’s denial Ukraine is a genuine nation is his belief the Ukrainians belong to the great Slav nation. Evidently Moscow and Beijing have drawn closer in recent years because they share a common enemy: NATO and they both reject liberalism and democracy. But Putin’s brazen invasion might not be wholly positive for the Chinese leadership. China expected Putin to present NATO with real problems but his course is also making the case for joining NATO as shifting opinion in Sweden and Finland reveals.

We mentioned the recent commentary on the impasse of liberal democracy seemingly embattled or becalmed. For instance the ‘waves of democracy’ (originally popularised by the US scholar and liberal hawk Samuel Huntington and further explored by John Markoff, Seva Gunitsky and others) seem to have ebbed in recent years. These civic surges or ‘revolutions of a new type’ like the ‘Arab Spring’ (especially Egypt, Bahrain and Syria), the Hong Kong democracy movement and the ‘Belarus Spring’, demonstrate the daunting odds social contestation and protest has faced in recent years because of the repressive firepower of the modern state. The near universal rhetoric about the ‘war on terror’ often conflates war and civic insurgencies with the breakdown of the distinction between the battlefield and all other spaces or zones has been blurred or erased. When the battlefield is potentially everywhere civilians quickly become the primary target of military campaigns and the use of weapons like chemical weapons as happened in Syria.

Russia’s 2014 intervention in Syria in support of Assad and his Iranian and Hezbollah allies turned the tide against the ‘Syrian Spring.’ Another tragedy of Putin’s Ukrainian war has been the successful co-optation of Alexander Lukashenko’s repressive Belarus as a junior parter in war. Lukashenko was almost overthrown by the popular ‘Belarus Spring’ (2020-21) but survived thanks to the harsh repression of the democratic opposition. Yet a weaker Lukashenko was compelled to move closer to Moscow (previously resisted by Lukashenko). It is reported Belarusian troops have joined Russia’s invasion. The memory of the mass street protests in Minsk and throughout Belarus sparked by Lukashenko’s ‘sixth Presidential’ term (he supposedly won 80% of the popular vote) now seems distant. The opposition and EU didn’t consider the election free or fair. We are still paying the cost of another strongman’s political survival. Now Belarus is Moscow’s willing tool having green lighted Russian nuclear weapons being sited on Belarusian soil after a grotesque, dubious referendum.

Perhaps the gravest threat political democracy now faces are internal. Globally becalmed if not in retreat the most alarming signs of democratic senescence are in democracy’s original heartlands in western and northern Europe but particularly the US where the continued convalescence of the American Republic’s democracy can’t be taken for granted after Trump’s expulsion from the White House in 2020 thanks to Democratic Party lassitude on the one hand, and the hyper-partisan anti-democratic turn of the Republican party still in thrall to Trump and determinedly disenfranchising all those voting demographics that would block its permanent lock on power. It would be remiss of us not to admit that either the Liar in Chief who felt such kinship with Putin or a Trump anointed Republican candidate could be sitting in the White House in two years.

In 2014 Kyiv’s pro-Moscow President Viktor Yanukovich was overthrown by the Euromaidan ‘Revolution of Dignity’ and fled to Russia. The conflict essentially sprang from Yanukovich’s attempts to apply the breaks on closer relations with the EU including possible membership and instead tilt towards Russia’s ‘customs union’ as countries like Armenia had done with some arm twisting by Moscow. Putin has never forgiven Ukraine’s political class or its people for moving away from Russia towards the EU. On departing Ukraine Yanukovich pitched up in Rostov-on-Don for an impromptu press conference and tossed one final bouquet to the Ukrainian people. He invited the neighbour Putin and his military forces to intervene in Ukraine and restore ‘order.’ Essentially this was Yanukovich’s last ditch bid to get his job back. This could have been for life as is so often the case with an authoritarian coup de main but even Putin realised the bad odour about Yanukovich was too strong and he passed on this foolish pitch.

Still Putin denounced the ‘Revolution of Dignity’ and the Ukrainian masses as fascists and NATO’s pawns. In the political upheaval of 2014 he spotted a larcenous opportunity and annexed the Crimea (“gifted” to the Ukraine by Khrushchev in 1954 without any referendum being held) whose population of over 4 million people was mainly composed of ethnic Russians. Ukrainians and Tatars are the two main minorities in Crimea. Today Tatars are the subjects of oppressive surveillance and harassment by the Crimean authorities. The Tatars are the descendants of communities brutally deported to central Asia by Stalin in May 1944 as a collective punishment for ‘collaborating’ with the Nazi’s when the Soviet Union was invaded (Tatars were not the only ethnic group targeted for collective punishment). Geography meant Ukraine was a major battlefield in the Nazi’s exterminatory war of conquest. The German invasion happened a decade after Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture policies led to a genocidal famine in Ukraine (today known as Holodomor) that killed millions and led to widespread cannibalism. Since Perestroika over 250,000 Tatars had returned to their Crimean homeland. Crimea’s ethnic Russian majority generally welcomed Moscow’s annexation and a quick referendum ratified Crimea’s absorption into the Russian Federation.

Putin also backed Russian separatists in Donetsk and Luhansk in eastern Ukraine (Donbas) in 2014. A number of shadowy figures one or two removes from Putin himself were involved in fermenting and financing separatism in the Donbas and Crimea like the oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, a ‘devout’ Orthodox Christian and Putin supporter who channeled huge sums into the Donbas and Crimea. Malofeev also mixed with a number of dubious red-brown ideologues. Many had military service in the Russian army or had been mercenaries. As Charles Clover notes the first Donetsk separatist government was almost entirely Russian – the Defence Minister Igor Girkin known as Strelkov was formerly a mercenary and Malofeev’s bodyguard while the first PM was a Russian PR man called Alexander Borodai who was an associate of Malofeev and Girkin and moved in Eurasianist/nationalist circles in Moscow. This cadre of Russian red-brown ideologues and Eurasianist fantasists, albeit admittedly living the dream, have also had links with Europe’s right including the Austrian Freedom Party (FPO) and France’s Front National (FN) that rebranded itself Rassemblement National in 2018.

Speaking on 21 February 2022 after eight years of conflict in the Donbas and scorning Ukraine’s independence Putin officially recognised Donetsk and Luhansk and sanctioned a greater land grab as the separatists only occupied a third of those territories. In Putin’s up is down world this was prevent ‘genocide’ but is likely to create more bloodshed in the future. Ukraine first became independent in 1991. Russia recognised Ukraine’s sovereignty in the 1994 Budapest Memorandum and recognition was reaffirmed in the 1997 Friendship Treaty when Ukraine voluntarily divested itself of the world’s third largest nuclear arsenal.

Though Russia’s Ukraine about turn surprised some, it was a development long unfolding. As everyone knows by now Putin thought the collapse of the Soviet empire was the greatest geo-political tragedy of the C20th and the main cause of Russia’s decline. As Timothy Snyder ironically noted it was an event where Putin’s future patron Boris Yeltsin was a major protagonist. Whatever Putin’s underlying motives are for his greatest gamble those mooted ‘security concerns’ about NATO’s expansionary threat don’t wholly ring true. Ukraine’s NATO membership was moribund thanks to the ongoing Donbas disputes. If paranoia is part of the explanation, detachment from the world might be another while it seems his inner circle are either unable or incapable of delivering home truths to their Kremlin boss.

Putin also wildly claimed Zelenskyy wanted nuclear weapons for Ukraine – another falsehood though last year Ukraine’s German ambassador unwisely suggested aloud his country might have to revisit its nuclear free status. But they were referring to the unravelling of the original security pledges Moscow made when Kyiv mothballed its nuclear arsenal (Ukraine does still have a civil nuclear programme). A paranoid Putin has even suggested an independent Ukraine retains the capacity to build nuclear weapons as a developed modern society. Ukraine could never covertly embark on a suicidal course of building such weapons under the nose of their all powerful, all seeing neighbour even if they really wished to. But there was a more chilling unspoken aspect of Putin’s paranoid argument: Ukraine was best kept as a relatively backward vassal state. Perhaps a Ukraine absorbed into Greater Russia might host Russian nuclear weapons pointed at the great enemy in the West as Belarus has just signalled?

The crucial point is simply Ukraine has faced an unenviable Catch 22 dilemma given eight years of unremitting Russian hostility and pressure, the constant cyber attacks and Russia’s renewed appetite to restore an informal Greater Russian empire. It’s hard to believe Putin would stop at, or accept Ukrainian ‘neutrality’ as Ukrainians know perfectly well. Crucially existence in the Russian orbit would be fatal for Ukrainian democracy. Timothy Snyder pointed out that since independence in 1991 successive Ukrainian governments have tacked back and forth between the West and Moscow, partly to appease different constituencies (Ukraine is home to the largest Russian diaspora). But this phenomena also indicated that some Ukrainian politicians shared an elective affinity with Russia’s kleptocracy. The latter were an object lesson in insulating acquired power and wealth from the people, undermining the rule of law and subverting democracy.

In Russia such existential dicta facing the silovik and kleptocrats helped drive authoritarian state building requiring docile citizens at home and growing interference and subversion of political life abroad mainly in Russia’s nearest neighbours especially the former Soviet republics. There was also the murder of exiled opponents abroad including the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal in Salisbury using a Russian nerve poison which killed a British woman. But the most spectacular success was boosting Donald Trump’s 2016 Presidential campaign against Hilary Clinton. The operation was personally ordered by Putin and involved a St. Petersburg troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency which was able to reach millions of American social media users. Putin’s political career has been indistinguishable from building an authoritarian state including the exile of opponents and the murder of journalists. This has included coquetting with a revanchist Eurasian ideology promulgated by such ludic fascists as Alexander Dugin, the author of The Foundation of Geopolitics (1997) published by Russia’s Academy of the General Staff that outlined a plan for dismembering Ukraine. Eurasianism is unapologetically mystical and reactionary, delighting in reactivating tropes of an older authoritarian social imaginary of imperial Russia. Whether Putin or the silovik were ever fully paid up acolytes of Eurasianism or just pragmatic cherry pickers of a authoritarian ideology celebrating Great Russian power and hostile to liberalism and democracy, is not unimportant (see our remarks on Marlene Laruelle’s cogent dismissal of the widely shared belief Putin is a fascist above) but elements of it was certainly congenial with Putin’s reactionary outlook.

Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the Russian state’s wars show the overall authoritarian direction of travel and help explain why a democratic political culture has not been established in the country. The wars that illustrate this trend were:

The First Chechen War (1994-96) which greatly undermined Putin’s future political patron Boris Yeltsin when Russian troops enjoying overwhelming firepower were checked by Chechen separatists. Humiliating defeat marked a major boost to Russian nationalism in politics. This development dovetailed with a global trend identified by the late Zygmunt Bauman where the strong state offered security to its citizens in exchange for diminishing freedom. This was inherently illiberal and congenial to authoritarian political steering and actively fosters fear while manufacturing enemies.

This logic revealed itself in the brief and brutal Second Chechen War (1999-2000) when the Russian political class and military demonstrated they had absorbed the lessons of the first war. There wasn’t much Russian appetite for further conflict when Shamil Basaev’s Islamist fighters made an incursion into neighbouring Dagestan snapping Moscow’s patience. Russian forces now combined with Chechen defectors from the independence camp to fight the separatists in a brutal war that ended with the shattering siege of Grozny, Chechnya’s capital. Putin was Russia’s Prime Minister when Basaev entered Dagestan. A series of bombings throughout the Russian Federation including Moscow solidified Russian opinion behind a military campaign which eventually triumphed. Putin’s approval ratings skyrocketed and shortly after in spring 2000 he won the Presidential election. The Russian public’s revulsion for a separatist bombing campaign of apartment buildings that killed so many innocent people was Putin’s good fortune but questions have lingered whether these bombings were ‘false flag’ operations designed to manipulate Russian public opinion. In Ryazan vigilant residents already on the alert foiled the bombing of a residential apartment. A police bomb disposal officer disarmed the device. Shortly after the ‘bombers’ were arrested in the town except they turned out to be FSB officers. A FSB chief claimed his officers were conducting an exercise to test citizens vigilance while the bomb was a ‘fake’ – a claim rebutted by the police bomb disposal officer. Promised investigations into the murky affair never transpired.

So the Second Chechen War helped ‘make’ Putin with victory consolidating his political dominance but also accelerating illiberalism and authoritarianism. Other conflicts followed including the Georgian-Russian War in 2008 when Russian military forces helped separatists in the South Ossetian region of Georgia breakaway after Russian military forces swept through the Roki Tunnel (separating Russia and Georgia) and quickly routed the Georgian army after an uneasy truce escalated into a more serious conflict. The South Ossetian separatist leader Eduard Kokoity was close to Dugin’s Euasian movement. On Russian radio Dugin claimed ‘genocide’ against South Ossetian civilians was taking place and when Putin returned from the Beijing Olympics he repeated the charge. Russia’s success against Georgia hardened a geo-political shift Putin signalled in his 2007 Munich speech to resist a unipolar world led by the US and recreate Russia’s sphere influence in eastern Europe by gathering in the former Soviet republics and creating a ‘Eurasian union.’

The Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili had canvassed the idea of Georgia joining NATO. This was a ‘red line’ for Moscow which was already nettled by what it saw as US unilateralism in the Balkans (the US recognised Kosovo’s independence in opposition to Moscow and its Serbian ally). Further diplomatic conflict included sanctions the West considered imposing on Russia was effectively scotched by the global financial meltdown in 2008 while Russia which spent $200bn of its hard currency reserves firefighting the crisis, backed away from any overt anti-Western stance. By 2009 Vice-President Biden was declaring a reset in relations with Moscow.

We must briefly mention Russia’s intervention in the Syrian Spring (2011-?) discussed extensively by Paths and Bridges (for example Notes on Syria and the Coming Global Thanatocracy). In 2011 Bashir Assad’s brutal Baathist state faced peaceful demonstrations demanding major economic and political reforms across Syria. Protests began in Tunisia and spread to Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Syria and elsewhere across MENA. Assad responded to protesters with brutal escalating violence including firing on demonstrators, detention, torture and killing in custody (an established modus operandi of the Baathist state). Assad’s violence sparked an extraordinary civic, urban rebellion but as the violence grew, the Syrian revolution was compelled to arm itself and civil war ensued. Though Assad was aided by Iranian troops and Hezbollah militias, the Baathist state stood on the precipice of defeat by September 2015. Iran appealed to its Russian ally to join Assad’s counter-revolution. Russia obliged and helped crush the Syrian people’s resistance by participating in Assad’s ferociously brutal war with indiscriminate shelling and bombing of urban and civilian areas, the use of cluster bombs, chemical weapons, barrel bombs, white phosphorous and airpower. Sadly we must mention the fact Assad and Putin were able to appeal to Islamophobia in crushing the Syrian Spring by falsely portraying a civic insurgency whose civic aspect retreated before Assad’s counter-revolutionary blows, as dominated by Salafist militants (many Syrian based Salafist militants were cynically released from Assad’s murderous prisons and torture centres in the early days of the Syrian Spring) and utilising the thoroughly debased and discourse of a ‘War on Terror.’ Like Grozny a decade before Syrian towns and suburbs like Aleppo and Deir ez Zor were ferociously pulverised by Assad with the aid of Russian airpower including white phosphorous, cluster bombs and thermobaric bombs.

The spread of such profoundly anti-democratic, reactionary forms of authoritarianism that deliberately dissimulate post-truth are fundamentally inimical to democracy and autonomy and any possibility of extending and deepening democracy. Also Putin’s Russia is a major power that relies on militarism to defend kleptocratic rule not Russian sovereignty. If Putinism isn’t really an ideology, Putin does nevertheless appeal to fascist and racist social imaginaries that draw on older imperial ideologies of Great Rus to justify Russian state power including militarism and their extension for the purpose of shaping the fate of its neighbours and their peoples.

This is why Putin’s Russia must be vigorously resisted. This is why the Ukrainian people must finally win and democracy in Russia reborn.

Paths and Bridges Editorial ////// 3.3.2022