In a new article in Foreign Affairs, Liana Fix and Michael Kimmage explain how even if Russia loses its war in Ukraine, the international outlook that creates is a dark one. Far better than it winning. But still very dark. Looking to a post-Ukraine war world order, the authors write: “History has shown that it is immensely difficult to build a stable international order with a revanchist, humiliated power near its center, especially one of the size and weight of Russia.”

I spent the morning planning to write a version of this post when I saw a quote from Russia’s head of foreign intelligence that made me think there was perhaps more here than I’d even suspected. Sergei Naryshkin said today: “The masks are off. The West isn’t simply trying to close off Russia behind a new iron curtain. This is about an attempt to ruin our government — to ‘cancel’ it, as they now say in ‘tolerant’ liberal-fascist circles.”

Now, on its face this is more than a bit much. Russia is in the process of trying to erase another country from the map, in effect if not through formal annexation. That seems like the more relevant meaning of ‘canceling’ in this context. This is also a reminder of the confluence of discourses between the American revanchist right (Trumpism and its earlier monikers, essentially) and Russian state revisionism. One thing we are constantly and rightly reminded of in these moments is that people in other countries, Russia in this case, understand the world very differently than we do. And yet here they are using language that is in fact quite familiar. It doesn’t seem alien at all. There’s a rhetorical symbiosis between the two worlds. Some of this was driven by the 2015–16 Russian interference campaign. But at a deeper level that symbiosis was the foundation on which that interference campaign became possible. Just as the democratic civic world has some elements of a transnational common political language, the authoritarian, revisionist international does too.

Yesterday, as you no doubt saw, the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly to denounce Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. 141 countries voted for the resolution. The 5 who voted against it were an unsurprising list: Russia, two countries Russia essentially owns (Belarus and Syria), another country opposed to any sanctions against bad regimes (North Korea) and Eritrea. The really interesting list though was the 35 abstainers. That list looks like a view into the future, in part because the bulk of the countries abstaining looked less like they were seeking to avoid criticism of Russia than they were following the diplomatic lead of China — the most prominent abstainer on the list.

I’ve mentioned this a few times already. But I remain stunned at the number of people I’m generally used to seeing decrying “forever wars” and the military industrial complex insisting the time has come for us to intervene militarily in Ukraine. The favored demand seems to be a “no fly zone” either over Kyiv or the entirety of Ukraine — which in case you haven’t reviewed the maps is a very large country. The preference for “no fly zones” is itself a reminder that the U.S. public has virtually no living memory of war with a peer military force or even one that can put up any kind of fight. The word gets tossed around as though it described a kind of high tech forcefield the U.S. deploys when we’ve gotten fed up with the pictures we’re seeing on TV. I’ve even seen people questioning whether a “no fly zone” actually constitutes an act of war.

There’s one point I want to re-emphasize though it may sound a discordant note. In wartime communications even the good guys lie. Indeed, there’s at least some argument that wartime deception is a component of warfare itself. But the point is, governments and armies lie — especially when their backs are against the wall. The chaos and confusion of war also create erroneous reports. Sometimes the two intertwine. So while most of the claims we see coming out of the Russian side are downright Orwellian, we shouldn’t assume that all the claims we’re hearing from the Ukrainian side will bear out.

Twitter is chock full of hyperbole, ignorance and deception. But one of its special qualities is that if you take some care and follow some basic rules you can find people who you can actually learn quite a lot from. They’re out there. And during chaotic and fast-moving news events you can learn a lot from them. One of those people is Michael Kofman, who is one of the people on my list of people to follow to keep track of developments in the Ukraine Crisis. Among other things he’s the Director of the Russia Studies program at the Center for Naval Analyses, the main Navy/Marines think tank in Washington, DC. His opinions may be right or wrong. But given the Navy’s/Marine Corps’ interest in keeping tabs on the Russian military we can be confident he’s highly knowledgable about that topic specifically. I’ve been following his commentary over the last week or so and yesterday he posted a lengthy Twitter thread about what we’ve seen over the last three days.

I wanted to address a few points that have come up in discussions about the Ukraine Crisis in recent days and which John mentions below. I’ll start with the question of U.S. intelligence estimates about an imminent Russian invasion which appear to have been very accurate both in the overall prediction and the specifics of how one would take place.

I’ve seen a number of people say this was a surprise or at least not a given because of the intelligence failure that preceded the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

But I view this very differently.

A number of you have asked me, where’s President Biden? Why aren’t we seeing him on TV? Note that he has a State of the Union address coming up which will provide an extremely high profile setting. But the real reason is almost certainly that the U.S. administration wants to have Europeans taking the most visible role announcing new sets of sanctions. I suspect they also want to avoid taking the bait of President Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling. Reports suggest that — wisely and unsurprisingly — President Biden has chosen not to match Russia’s nuclear forces alert status. First, there’s no need to. Our strategic nuclear forces are already on plenty of alert to manage the unthinkable. There’s no need for that kind of tit for tat escalation. We also don’t need competing press availabilities.

With all this said, though, there’s clearly something more happening here than just allowing Europe to take the lead in announcing measures the U.S. was trying to persuade them to take. There’s also clearly a sea change, both in the willingness to contemplate crippling economic sanctions as well as to openly arm the Ukrainian army.

We have two big developments this morning. The first is that in a televised exchange with his top military leaders, President Putin ordered the country’s strategic nuclear forces on alert in response to Western sanctions and what he called “threatening statements” from leaders in Europe. That means as little and as much you think. It underscores that while the punishing sanctions unveiled yesterday are merited this is nevertheless a spectacularly dangerous international crisis. Not just dangerous in Ukraine but for the whole world. At the same time, Russia and Ukraine have agreed to hold peace talks near the border with Belarus. They are talks without preconditions.

One curious feature of social media is that we actually have lots of detailed and close up imagery and information about particular military engagements. But it remains hard, at least for me, to get a clear view of the overall picture of what is happening right now in Ukraine.

The Ukrainian government has released a number of figures about alleged Russian combat fatalities, which are very high. But it’s hard to know what to make of those numbers. Combat armies have a notoriously hard time estimating their adversaries’ casualties and fatalities. And the Ukrainians, involved in an existential battle, have plenty of very understandable incentives to make those numbers high.