ALSO SEE: Phillips P. Obrien | Phillips’s Newsletter (Substack)

Hello All,

Before I begin this piece, here is a reminder that people who want to sign up to be grandfathered in permanently to the original price of this Substack need to enroll by midnight EST tomorrow (8 July).

For almost four and a half years Russia has not been at war, officially. It has actually been involved in a “special military operation” against Ukraine. It has even been illegal in the Russian Federation to speak of the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine as a “war”. This preposterous fiction was maintained for a few reasons. Internationally, the Russians wanted to pretend to the world that they were not at “war” but instead were involved in a pre-emptive defensive operation. Domestically it was a way of avoiding certain constitutional triggers that would have been activated by a formal declaration of war and, finally, it was a way of assuring the Russian people that the government had the situation in hand. No war means no problems.

That fiction ended yesterday and it is worth considering what it means.

One of the dirty little secrets of dictatorships is that, while they regularly trade on and indeed amplify nationalism and faux patriotism, they are often deeply fearful of their populations. Understanding that their power comes from the barrels of guns more than anything else, dictators can be very worried about causing too much deprivation and suffering to their people.

READ MORE