Putin as Fighting the Anti-christ

 Finally, someone in the mainstream mentions what has been stirring up the Orthodox Church, Putin using religious ideas to promote a Russian identity that needs to remove Ukraine and Ukrainians from the map:

Jason Stanley told me that the war was “not abstract” to Snyder: “One always has to remember that. These are his friends. Tim takes friendship extremely seriously. These are people he’s known for decades.” Yet it is also true that the war represents a stark illustration of the themes that have shaped Snyder’s work over the past three decades. Most obviously, Ukraine’s surprisingly successful defence efforts offer an instance of the sort of geopolitical agency that he has, in his work, tried to restore to the historiography of eastern Europe. Putin’s war has also provoked crucial questions about Ukrainian nationhood and the Ukrainian state, of precisely the kind that Snyder has spent his career investigating. And while Snyder predicted that the outcome will be decided by material factors – humanitarian support, debt forgiveness, weapon deliveries – he also sees the war as a fight about ideas. To Snyder, Putin’s repeated claims about the spiritual unity of Russian and Ukrainian nations are not mere propaganda meant to obscure a hard-nosed strategic calculation. They are part of a deeply held neo-imperial vision that Putin has cobbled together from his reading of Ilyin, from Soviet history, and from a more general sense of Russian greatness.

That is from The Guardian's Putin, Trump, Ukraine: how Timothy Snyder became the leading interpreter of our dark times, which has several very good arguments for supporting Ukraine and opposing Trump.

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