AS THE Ukraine war has progressed, we have seen more and more emotional commitment to it within a Western World not obviously affected by it. Other conflicts have been longer-lasting. Israeli-Arab conflict has been ongoing since the formation of modern Israel in 1947, insurgent conflict has been ongoing from 2002 in the Maghreb/Sahel region, Sudanese conflict and civil war has been ongoing from 2008 and it’s very arguable that civil war conditions in Myanmar have been continuous despite periods of severe military junta control from 1948 onwards.
Other conflicts are arguably more urgent in terms of humanitarian crisis. In Sudan, there have been more civilian casualties than in either Gaza in the Israeli-Hamas War or Ukraine in the Russia-Ukraine War. Between 600,000 and 1.1million have died in the Sudanese conflict. Mass starvation and malnutrition is a far more urgent problem in Sudan than it is in Gaza (if such claims have any reality at all in Gaza). In Kiev and much of Ukraine, there is no Russian blockade and no immediate or even mid-term threat of starvation. Perhaps there are some Sudanese warlords living in comfort, but how many of those are flying on jets back and forth to Paris on shopping expeditions, as Ukrainian leaders and their wives have done, and just how many cities in other war zones have seen a boom in the sale of luxury cars, as has occurred in Kiev?
Yet the Sudanese conflict is treated with sublime indifference by the West, more as if it were occurring on another planet rather than another continent. In Africa in the recent past we saw a slaughter on unimaginable scale during the Rwandan Genocide. There were no calls for European or US intervention as up to 800,000 Tutsis were slaughtered in just 100 days.
In the Congo, multiple wars have involved every neighbouring African nation again with devastating consequences for civilians and very high death tolls, and again with no calls for Western military intervention or support for one particular side. In South Africa too, all the conditions of genocide exist towards white farming families. Here too, even the mildest of Western intervention in the form of criticism of the South African leadership or offering asylum to South African whites, is more condemned than supported. Similar vast indifference is applied to the many regions of Africa which see Islamic terrorist groups such as Boko Haram slaughtering Christians and taking children as sex slaves.
If the argument is that we must intervene in Ukraine because it is part of Europe, why did we have to intervene in Iraq, outside Europe? If the argument is that Kiev is ‘only’ about 1,000-or-so miles away from London and that is why our intervention is required, then clearly we have a geographic duty to determine what happens should conflict break out in Morocco, which is separated from Spain only by the narrow waters of the Strait of Gibraltar.
Clearly whether we intervene or do not, whether we care or not, is not determined by geographic distance alone. If it were the 1,325 miles from Kiev to London, or the 4,881 miles from Washington to Kiev, would it render the fate of Ukraine as meaningless to us, much more meaningless to us, than the politics of Morocco? Is there then some magical duty of care which arises from an alleged pan-European unity? Are conflicts in Europe innately more important than conflicts in Africa or Asia? That may possibly be true, but it’s an odd position to be advocated by those who are also racked with post-colonial guilt and confused critical race theory notions of the innately evil and guilty nature of European history.
Our leaders simultaneously seem to be telling us that everything we have inherited that distinguished us as Europeans or of European descent, is worthless and wicked and not the true measure of our identity, AND that there is some innate European specialness that binds us all together and means that we must leap to protect any European nation when it is invaded. So what is the special link we allegedly share with Ukraine that we should care about it and its people?
It’s clearly not shared Christianity, otherwise the leaders who care about Ukraine would care about Christians being massacred in Nigeria or, more directly, about the Kiev regime’s assaults on Orthodox Christian churches and their denial of religious equality and freedom to ethnic Russians within Ukraine.
How can saying ‘Ukraine is part of Europe, we must intervene!’ be a real argument, when it is distant enough that Russian rule there would not make the slightest difference to any of us and when the only links that make ‘Europeanness’ in any sense real are things the same war-hungry forces invoking that ‘shared identity’ undermine constantly and determinedly in everything else they think and do?
Set aside for a moment the purely emotive argument that Putin is a bad man, a dictator, an evil person, and look at declared identity instead. After all, our current ‘values’ tell us that declared identity matters more than old moral judgments, doesn’t it? The European leaders who hate Putin believe in declared identity trumping even such things as biological reality. So if the argument that we must defend Ukraine is one based on shared identity, what is Putin’s European identity, and what is Zelensky’s European identity?
Zelensky was a stand-up comic and TV entertainer. He seems to have a very modern European identity. He is Jewish, but not in the least bit religiously Jewish or seemingly concerned with that cultural and ethnic heritage. He did not in any way ever stand for or represent traditional European or Christian or Judeo-Christian values. As a comic his material and thinking was very much in the progressive leftist mode. He mocked traditional European values. He celebrated hyper-modern European ‘values’. He played the piano with his penis. He dressed in sado-masochistic bondage gear and performed semi-naked dance routines that seemed like gay fetish twink and sub erotica. He ‘deconstructed’ masculinity, before he was built up as an absurd Poundshop Churchill and took to wearing paramilitary fatigues. The kind of freedom and value system he represented was the kind once viewed with giggling shock even by the avant-garde. It seems extremely likely that much-denied rumours of a coke addiction are accurate, to add to the fetish performance past.
When people say we have shared values with Ukraine or with Zelensky, is this what they mean and what they think is worth risking a nuclear war or a major war with Russia on behalf of? Are we intended to be fighting for the right of Ukrainians to be led by an alleged cocaine-addicted entertainer who plays the piano with his penis? I’m not sure that this is what many of us consider the kind of culture we identify with.
Perhaps people will say that this is unfair, because we aren’t just supporting Zelensky, we are supporting shared European values and innocent Ukrainians threatened by Russian invasion and conquest. But if that is the case, why the level of symbolic focus on Zelensky, why the turning of this man into a supposed heroic figure we are supposed to admire and worship and see as a new Churchill? When it suits them, the advocates of supporting Ukraine are very willing to reduce the whole thing to a matter of a few personalities. We should fight for Ukraine because Putin is bad or because Zelensky is good.
What if there are things about Putin that are much more appealing to us than a sort of Eurotrash vacuity? Putin, by contrast with our leaders and with Zelensky, has notably and repeatedly defended traditional Western values. Many people, particularly on the right, refuse to take this point seriously. Putin gives speeches about Western decadence and we say that all dictatorial enemies of the West have done so, that Hitler did so or that Islamic jihadis do so. But it seems to me that Putin doesn’t just talk about what is wrong with the West. He also talks about what was traditional and right about the West. He has strongly advocated Christianity. The Russian Orthodox Church and faith has been restored in Russia since the Soviet system fell. The Soviet persecution could not kill it, but the mere end of persecution could not have fully restored it.
Only real support could have seen it come back the way it has, a solace and a guide to the Russian people, and Putin supplied that.
As far as I can see the only culture Zelensky represents is that shallow, narrow, hyper-modern one that rejects the entire past and substitutes self-gratification, knowing and nihilistic relativism, and sexual fetish masquerading as freedom. And as far as I can see Putin, whether or not he’s a ‘nice man’, actually does know and care about his nation, its history, a set of values that are older and deeper than the right to do drugs, dress in bondage wear and have a thousand genders. Putin references old and real things. He seems a traditional Russian nationalist and Orthodox Russian Christian. There’s no evidence that shows his advocacy of these things or older European culture to be dishonest or merely manipulative.
Now, for any real Western conservative, for anyone sickened by much of modernity, we are in Putin and Zelensky offered a contrast between old values and new ones. We are told we should regard Russian nationalism as inexplicable and evil, and the desire to join the EU or Nato (two post-war modern institutions young enough to have no sanctity of tradition and old enough to have succumbed to the perversion of mission and values which is the fate of every older bureaucracy) is sacred and worthy of war. We are told we should take the defence of degenerate European culture, this shallow mess of self indulgence and historical ignorance, as a thing worth fighting and dying for, while equally considering the restoration of the traditional sphere of influence of a major European power with an old and storied history, as a thing we cannot understand or endorse.
Now tell me, if you really are right-wing, does that make sense?
When Putin says that Ukraine was historically part of Russia, that it has a longer history as a part of Russia than Texas has as a part of the US or that the US has as an independent nation which isn’t part of the British Empire, he’s telling the truth. You can believe that historic connections don’t matter, but it’s hard to believe that as a patriot, a conservative, or someone informed on history.
It’s telling that Putin referenced long history when justifying the invasion of Ukraine, and equally telling that everyone in the West dismissed that as meaningless. People, even on the right, laughed at Putin trying to explain Ukraine by reference to the origins of Rus or to princes who have been dead for hundreds of years or even a thousand years and more. But this is not reflective of Russia’s justifications for involvement in Ukraine being false or absurd. It’s reflective of Russians being serious people who know their own nation and value its history, and of Western Europeans being unserious people who know and value hardly anything older than World War Two.
What that laughing contempt for Putin’s history lessons tells me is that even many rightists in the West have no accurate conception of history, or knowledge or respect for how it shapes modern conflict. Modern understanding even among so called conservatives is incredibly shallow and ignorant in the West. It isn’t in Russia, that part of the West that straddles much of the geographic East.
Anyone with even a basic familiarity with Russian history would not enact stupidities such as comparing Putin to Hitler or thinking a desire for a sphere of interest is the same as a desire for world conquest. The Russian desire for buffer-zones, for friendly neighbouring nations and for no Nato military alliance on their border, is based on perfectly understandable history. Russians remember Napoleon and 1812. They remember the West invading in support of White Russian forces in the early 20th century. They particularly remember losing 20million people in World War Two and Ukrainian separatists at that time being allies of Nazism.
Because Western Europe has rejected and ignored and mocked its own history, they expect Putin and Russia to show the same contempt for their historic connections and rights . . . and they do not.
None of this says that invading Ukraine was moral or good. But it was certainly understandable and possibly justifiable. Especially since the modern very anti-Russian turn of Ukraine was indeed facilitated, aided and secretly and conspiratorially supported by the neocons of the West. Those same people helped a coup in 2014, without which Zelensky and his Ukrainian oligarch backers would not be in charge and the Russian invasion would not have occurred. Again, pro-Ukraine fanatics tell us all of this doesn’t matter.
Of course it matters. Russia’s history explains its tendency for autocracy and the limits on what Putin is allowed to concede. A successful Russian leader is expected to preserve a Russian sphere and Russia as a major power which has to be taken seriously. Russians fear another 20million deaths if this isn’t the case.
Equally the immoral interference and reckless tinkering stupidity of the West, together with the shallow historical ignorance and pathetic and sordid values of our leaders and all their corrupt connections in Ukraine, matters too.
Just as we are told that Zelensky’s degeneracy and corruption should not matter to us, we are told that Putin’s autocracy should. But what are our own leaders if not also autocrats? All the Western leaders and parties that condemn Russia for invasion and consider this the easy and simple basis on which to judge accurately, and all the Western leaders and parties that condemn Russia as an initiator of war and an aggressor, now possess a history of military interventionism with more dead bodies to its name than Russia has created in the last 20 years.
This is not relativism. Establishment conservatives say that people like me are doing what the Left has done for a long time – supporting an enemy using moral relativism to do so. But I don’t love Russia more than Britain. I don’t hate my own nation. I do not want Russia to rule Britain. Old leftists wanted the Soviets to win against US, not just against some nation we were supporting against them. And when we fought the Cold War, I strongly agreed with that. Communism is internationalist and all Communists want a version of world conquest, just as all Islam does. Communism is also inherently opposed to our nations and our national interest. And people from Churchill to Thatcher who opposed the Soviet Union were right that the West was better than the Soviet Union.
Is Keir Starmer a better man than Putin? Is Globalism less dangerous than Russian nationalism? I’d argue no on both points.
Russian nationalism is not inherently opposed to my interests the way Communism was. It can be a competitor without being an enemy. Russia is belligerent because we won’t admit it as a great power to be respected and because Western Globalists and neocons have been working towards its destruction ever since Putin blocked the mass theft of Russian resources they had anticipated in the post-Soviet collapse. An estimated 75trillion dollars’-worth of Russian natural resources were supposed to be divvied up by our corporations and nations as the reward for beating the Soviet Union. But just like he dealt with Russian oligarchs who wanted to siphon off that wealth and take it abroad, Putin blocked Western seizure of Russia’s assets. These were supposed to be handed over in the same way Ukrainian leaders did deals to hand much of Ukraine to western ‘investors’.
The Western Globalist fixation on Russia and determination to create a West v Russia war is based on three things:
- The ideological contrast and that culture difference Putin accurately cites between Russia as Christian, nationalist and traditional and the West as post-Christian, anti-Christian, internationalist and degenerate.
- The financial and corrupt lure of Russia as a resource-rich land where Western corporate exploitation was thwarted.
- The Western economic and social mismanagement that makes war necessary as an economic driver and means of keeping a banking and financial system going when it’s on the point of total collapse without some massive readjustment, the kind of readjustment that’s easiest to enact in the circumstances of war.
These are the real causes for Russophobia and for the propaganda-driven hysterical support of Ukraine, into which is dragged a whole host of absurd comparisons and vast claims (Putin is Hitler, it’s 1939 again, peace is appeasement, Ukraine is an ally, Ukraine is a bastion of Democracy, our war mongers are fighting for Democracy, we have shared values with Ukraine, Putin wants world conquest etc etc). None of that stuff is real.
The one thing a Kissinger-style realpolitik got right (as opposed to the things it got wrong as a sort of precursor of neocon interventionism) was that nobody in power is making their judgments morally, and that moral judgment of a leader is also less important than national interest. The idea that Keir Starmer or Emmanuel Macron or Ursula von der Leyen or any other Globalist has a moral dedication to defending ‘Europe’, to seeing borders as sacred, and to demanding moral behaviour from national leaders, let alone some kind of holy righteous mission in defending Ukraine, is laughable.
How can anyone take seriously such claims, which are the only arguments given for supporting Ukraine?
Is the Britain I live in now democratic? Of course it isn’t. Is the EU? No. Is Western Europe? No. Is Ukraine? No. Do the nations and leaders attacking Putin as a dictator hold free and fair elections still, unaffected by fraud? No. Are there things they won’t do and rights they won’t take away? Hardly, given covid measures. Are the values they really care about ones an ordinary patriot or conservative can share? Of course not. Do they represent my best national interests? No – they have supplied nothing but decline and betrayal for pretty much the entire period since 1945. Do they really think borders are worth fighting and dying for? Well, Ukraine’s are, but ours aren’t. Is Putin or Russia the most urgent threat (sans Western Globalist provocation of them) to my security, life, liberty and values? Hardly. It’s not Putin who rules me unjustly and can imprison me arbitrarily.
Are there more urgent threats, more meaningful loyalties, I should care about before Ukraine? Of course. And who is threatening the things I love most immediately, and who is destroying my nation and my liberty and endangering my children? It’s not Putin.
Putin does not seem good to me. His interests aren’t identical with mine or those of my nation. But his interest and Russian interest is understandable to me. He values a few things that I value too. His loyalties are to something real. He’s not superficial, stupid, or insane. His reasons for invading Ukraine are comprehensible, based on Russian security and national interest. There is far more substance to them than there was to claims of weapons of mass destruction existing in Iraq.
And nobody has been able to persuade me that I should wish my nation to fight a war against a nation that need not be an enemy, on behalf of a nation that has never been an ally, in support of a dictator who is a degenerate, because his enemy is a dictator who isn’t a degenerate, and on the instruction of people who behave like dictators towards me. The moral reality of our leaders renders any moral argument from them redundant. The tyranny of our leaders renders any other tyranny less urgent, because it is our leaders who apply tyranny to us. I don’t take instructions in good and evil from degenerate psychopaths who sympathise with Hamas and invite Al Qaeda-trained terrorists to State banquets. People who have killed hundreds of thousands in unnecessary wars aren’t the people to tell me that someone else is an invading maniac with no concern for civilians. People who have lied to me for years don’t get to tell me I’m falling for Russian propaganda. People who won’t defend my borders can’t tell me to defend someone else’s. People who despise the history and culture I care about are not the people I listen to on which history and culture matters.
In all this I think my national leaders have lied in every reason they have given for me to care about Ukraine. I don’t think Putin has lied about any of his reasons for invading Ukraine. They may or may not justify the invasion, but he’s not lying about why he did it. The idea that it is 1939 again is an obvious fantasy based on only knowing a tiny bit of history. The idea that Russia and Ukraine have been linked for centuries is an obvious truth verified by any knowledge of history.
I don’t deny that thousands upon thousands of Ukrainians have died because Putin invaded. I do deny the idea that it’s a morally simple matter because of that. And I especially deny that I should risk everything I love so that people I hate can interfere in a war I don’t actually care about at all, any more than they care about what is happening in Sudan. I’m actually vastly indifferent to whether Russia or Ukraine wins. A Russian victory brings absolutely zero additional threat to me. A Ukrainian victory with British help probably brings much more risk for me and mine then a Russian win does. But in terms of loving and caring about either . . . these are not my people.
My people are being raped and murdered at home. My people are being denied free speech at home. My people are being subjected to the slow genocide of total demographic and cultural and religious and ethnic replacement. Islam threatens my culture, at home. My leaders threaten me with prison for political protest or for saying things that are true.
Even the very few things I have in common with Putin are vast points of accord when compared with all the things I don’t share with my own leaders. Even though Putin is a ruthless autocrat, he is an explicable and sane autocrat.
This alone makes him better than our lot.
A longer version of this article appeared in Jupplandia on June 5, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
