Two Faces of War

THEY ARE THE two faces of this war. They tell us that we haven’t come a long way from those battlefields where one man’s madness was resisted by the armaments of morality. They show how the power of one—the self-chosen one—taps into fear to control the fundamental decencies of democracy, and how the victim defends freedom from the frontlines. One comes from the dark recesses of history, rearmed by paranoia and imperial memory; the other from the streets that won’t give up. One has retired from reality and taken permanent residence in the make-believe of the eternal leader safeguarding the national soul; the other, suddenly denied the very right to exist, becomes a global symbol of fearless patriotism. Together, with their contrasting destinies as defenders of fantasy and reality, they have forced the world to choose between the uses of pragmatism and the obligations of moral power. Some are still wavering.
Vladimir Putin, in his self-portrait, is not the villain the liberal consensus has made him out to be. As someone shaped by the artificially assembled empire of the Soviet Union, and his worldview formed by the enemy-fetish of its dreaded secret service, he has all along been fighting against what he perceives as the mercilessness of history. The collapse of the Soviet Union was a man-made error, not a historical inevitability, and he is the man, the redeemer, who has assigned to himself the mission of restoring the empire from the ruins of a hoary past. The more he gave himself to the mission, the more he realised that constitutionally bound powers of an elected office were not enough.

The cult of the redeemer was incompatible with the pluralism of freedom, and so it was natural for him to withdraw from what he saw as the pretences of democracy and place himself in the autonomous space of the me-alone leader. It was a space of isolation, and what the former secret agent saw from there were unsettling images of enemies crowding outside. The Western strategic apparatus was denying Russia the status it deserves in Europe. And the liberated Ukraine’s Eurocentrism was subversion, as Ukraine’s liberation itself was a lie. That’s why it’s not a war for him but a corrective military operation—not just against Ukraine but against a West that has failed to see the depth of Slavic grievance.

Set against him is the face of resistance: a dishevelled president as street fighter, crying for more help, and talking directly to the fellow Slavs in Russia. Volodymyr Zelensky exudes the power of ordinariness, and the emboldening leadership of the citizen-president. He is the amateur for whom politics has become the performative art of truth. Before the war, some even ridiculed him as a comedian who got the script all wrong once in power, and his showmanship a distractive alternative to statecraft. Television may have launched his career and made him a people’s star. His cultural genealogy stretches back to the streets of Eastern Europe where the “apolitical politician” spearheaded the liberation movement of 1989. His fight, unlike the professional politician’s calculated chess moves, is spontaneous; it is not slowed down by the demands of ideology. Power for him is the pursuit of struggle itself. If Putin’s war is powered by political lies, the idea of Ukraine as an extension of Russia being the chief among them, Zelensky’s resistance is powered by the fierceness of independence. He carries within him the sighs and sorrows of a people whose sense of independence is older than Russia’s imperial history—real or imaginary. Zelensky is the kind of subversive who denies an autocrat like Putin peace of mind. This war is an expression of the autocrat’s fear of the free spirit.

Every autocracy, in the end, is about the transference of internalised fear. It feeds on fear to put up a façade of bravado. The so-called populists from stage-managed democracies are the best ones at the job, and the reinvention of the nation on the ruins of cultural decadence is their promise. It’s sustained by the recurrence of the enemy, the one that mars the nationalist ideal. Putin plays with suitable history—in which the strongman-redeemer preserves the imperial flame—to keep his grip on a people whom he cannot afford to trust. Zelensky—epitomising the recklessness of freedom—is a contagion. He must go not for the sake of Ukraine alone. A Ukraine minus the subversive spontaneity of a Zelensky is a pre-requisite for Russia’s own survival as a power unblemished by democracy. The autocrat knows that the freedom streets of Kyiv stretch all the way
to Moscow.

The world, with the dishonourable exception of a few, stands by the citizen-president in this war, which can end only with the liberation of Russia. That will be the spirit of Ukraine.

Russia invades UkraineUkraineVladimir PutinZelensky