DEAR READER: Please consider a basic support membership at $5 per month. As a journalist in Ukraine, I work every day (even during blackouts and drone attacks) to examine our world situation from where the fulcrum of the world’s hell pivots, and your help is vital. Today is my 1436th day in this 1482nd of full-scale war (4408 since 2014), and Independent Journalism is not cheap to do, and I will keep making the posts available for all readers (even during nearly 24 hr daily blackouts), but good patrons are needed and I thank you for your time. – Chris Sampson, Kyiv, March 16, 2026
I want to tell you about the smell.
Not the smell of war in the abstract — the literary version, the kind described in memoirs read from armchairs. The actual smell. The specific smell of a building that has been hit by a Russian missile in the hours after impact, when the dust has begun to settle and the fires are either out or still burning and the emergency workers are pulling at rubble and the neighbors are standing in the street in whatever they were wearing when their walls came down. It is not a dramatic smell. It is not the smell of heroism or resistance or any of the other words that get attached to Ukraine in the foreign press. It is the smell of someone’s life — their food, their clothes, their furniture, the accumulated material reality of years of ordinary existence — pulverized and released into the cold air all at once.
I know this smell. I have experienced in it in Bucha, in Izyum, in Kherson, in Kharkiv, in Odesa, Vinnytsa, and so many neighborhoods of Kyiv, that were just streets before the missiles came. I have held Ukrainians who sat in shock during it, and I can tell you with precision what their faces look like in those moments.
That knowledge — the specific, embodied, irreplaceable knowledge of what this war actually is — is the credential I bring to this conversation. Not a degree. Not a think-tank affiliation. Not a well-curated Twitter feed with strong opinions about Eastern European geopolitics. Four years of living in it and documenting it.
I am raising this now because the people I am about to write about don’t have it. They have never had it. And their absence from the physical reality of this war does not stop them from lecturing the people who live in it. In fact — and this is what I need you to understand — their distance seems to be the source of their authority, in their own minds. The further you are from the bombs, the freer you are to theorize about the proper response to them.
This is what I mean when I talk about the opinions of the unbombed.
Oscar Night in the City That Is Still on Fire
On March 15, 2026, Pavel Talankin stood on the stage of the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles and accepted the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature for Mr. Nobody Against Putin — a film, let’s be precise about this, documenting Russia’s systematic indoctrination of children in its war against Ukraine.
The film is real. It is a genuine document of horror. Talankin spent two years as a school videographer in Karabash, a small mining town in Russia’s Chelyabinsk region, secretly filming what the Russian government was doing to children while those children’s Ukrainian counterparts were being killed. He filmed pro-war assemblies. He filmed Putin’s paramilitary Wagner Group arriving to give weapons demonstrations to students. He filmed teachers telling children that Ukraine had “chosen the path of neo-Nazism” and needed to be “liberated.” He filmed the slow, systematic poisoning of an entire generation, and then he took those hard drives and he fled, and he risked everything to get the footage out, and he made it into a film that won the BAFTA and then won the Oscar, and none of that is nothing.
And then, on that stage, with the entire watching world as his audience, with Ukrainians live-streaming the ceremony from apartments in cities still being struck by the very war his film documented, with nearly twenty thousand Ukrainian children currently held in Russian territory in a program of forced re-education so systematic it earned Putin an ICC arrest warrant — Talankin opened his mouth and said:
“There are countries where instead of falling stars, bombs fall from the sky and drones fly. In the name of our future, in the name of all of our children, let us stop all wars.”
Stop all wars.
Not: stop Russia’s war. Not: free Ukraine. Not: return the children. Not: end the occupation. Not even the word Ukraine, spoken as a noun, the name of a specific country where a specific genocide is being conducted by a specific aggressor that he himself spent two years documenting.
All wars.
And the room stood and cheered.
I have been in Ukraine for over four years and during the entire fullscale war, minus 46 non-consecutive days in 2022. I have been here continuously since. I have watched 1,482 days of this war pass. I have watched Ukrainians bury their dead in numbers that continue to climb toward the impossible. I have watched a society mobilize — not symbolically, not rhetorically, but actually, in the flesh, in the blood, in the daily arithmetic of who didn’t come home — for the defense of something the rest of the world treats as an abstraction.
When I watched that acceptance speech, I thought about a friend I know in Kharkiv who sends me voice messages sometimes when the air raid alerts sound because she is alone and terrified and has no basement. I thought about my friends like Artur Shkeul, 501st Battalion Marine, who spent years in Russian captivity before he came home in prisoner exchange in August 2025. I thought about the bodies in Bucha and Izyum. The torture chambers in Balaklia and Kherson. The mass graves where they found people buried with their hands tied.
And then I thought about the Western liberals watching the same ceremony and feeling — what? Moved. Inspired. Grateful that Russia has produced a man willing to say, in his best Oscar voice, that war in general is bad.
I thought: here we go again.
The Machine and What It Runs On
There is a machine in Western liberal culture, and it runs on one specific fuel: the Good Russian.
The Good Russian is not a person, exactly. He is a function. He is the individual Russian who opposes Putin — usually through artistic or journalistic or activist means, usually having suffered professionally or personally for it, usually now residing in comfortable exile in Prague or Berlin or London or Copenhagen — who the Western liberal establishment elevates as proof that Russia is not irredeemable. That Russia contains, within its vast and complicated body, the seeds of its own moral reconstruction. That if we are patient and generous and appreciative enough of the Good Russians among us, the arc of history will eventually bend.
The machine is always running. It has been running for decades. Before Talankin there was the Navalny documentary. Before that there were the dissident artists, the exiled journalists, the human rights lawyers who became household names in Western capitals while remaining strangers in their own country. The cast rotates. The function does not change.
Here is what the function is.
The Good Russian releases the West from a demand it cannot tolerate: the demand for a reckoning with Russian society, not just Russian leadership. Ukrainians have been saying for four years — for longer, since 2014, since before — that this is not just about Putin. That Putin is the expression of something, not the cause of it. That Russian imperial culture, Russian colonial consciousness, the Russian refusal to acknowledge Ukrainian identity as real and distinct and sovereign — these are not the invention of one man and they will not die with him. That the poll numbers showing majority Russian support for the war are not manufactured by the Kremlin but reflect something real and deep and socially embedded about how Russian society understands its relationship to the territories it considers its own.
This is an uncomfortable argument. It requires sitting with complexity that does not resolve neatly into heroes and villains. It requires acknowledging that accountability for this war is not limited to one dictator and his inner circle, that Russian society has been a participant and not merely a victim. It requires the West to maintain a harder, less sentimental position toward Russia as an entity — which is difficult when the Western liberal imagination is deeply invested in the idea that all peoples are fundamentally good and that bad systems are the problem, not the people who sustain them.
The Good Russian makes all of this go away. He says: here is your good Russian, here is your proof that the system is the villain and the people are the victims, here is your permission to feel warmth toward Russia again, here is your absolution from the Ukrainian demand for accountability.
He is a pressure valve. When he appears, the pressure drops. When the pressure drops, Ukraine loses.
This is not a metaphor. This is mechanism.
What “Stop All Wars” Actually Means
I want to spend time on the specific language Talankin used, because it matters, and because the Westerners who cheered seem not to have noticed what it does.
“Stop all wars” is not a politically neutral statement. In the context of a war with a clear aggressor and a clear victim — in the context of a film explicitly documenting that aggressor’s methods — it is a specific political choice. It is the choice to refuse sides. It is the choice to flatten the moral distinction between Russia, which invaded, and Ukraine, which was invaded. It is the choice to present this war as one of those tragic situations where multiple parties bear responsibility and the best anyone can do is appeal to everyone’s better nature and hope the violence stops.
This is, word for word, the Kremlin’s framing.
I am not saying Talankin is a Kremlin agent. I am saying that the linguistic reflex he reached for — the universalizing move, the “all wars” formulation, the deliberate abstraction that removes Ukraine from its own story — is a reflex shaped by a culture that has been telling itself for decades that Russia’s wars are mutual tragedies rather than acts of aggression. You absorb that reflex. It runs deep. It is the water you swim in when you grow up Russian, even when you oppose Putin, even when you risk your life to document his crimes. The hardest thing in the world is to see clearly through your own cultural formation, and Talankin, standing on that stage at the moment of his maximum platform and minimum personal risk — he was already in exile, already had the Oscar in his hands, there was nothing left to lose — could not do it.
Fair enough. He is one man. He did a brave thing. He could have done a braver thing on that stage, and he did not.
What is not fair, what I will not let pass without naming, is the Western liberal response: the standing ovation, the weeping, the social media posts about what an extraordinary moment this was. Because the people weeping in their living rooms in London and Toronto and Berlin were not weeping for Ukraine. They were weeping for themselves. They were weeping at the confirmation that their preferred narrative — Russia bad, Putin especially bad, but Russia redeemable, Russia capable of producing heroes — was correct. Talankin gave them that. He gave them nothing else.
And then they turned to Ukrainians and said: isn’t this wonderful?
And when Ukrainians said no — when Ukrainians said this is not enough, he didn’t even say our name, our children are being held in Russian territory and he stood there and said all wars and collected his Oscar — the Western liberals did what they always do.
They melted down.
The Meltdown: A Full Anatomy
I need you to understand something before I walk you through this. What I am about to describe is not a one-time event. It is not a failure of good people under pressure. It is a pattern. It has been repeating for years. I have watched it happen to Ukrainians I know personally — activists, journalists, ordinary people with the audacity to express an opinion about their own war on social media — and I have watched the mechanism operate with such clockwork regularity that I can now call each stage before it arrives.
The spammy post was being circulated this week, from the anonymous account from Australia called, the Emu Brigadier, because some folks are so brave they hid their identity while lecturing Ukrainians how to advocate for themselves. And that post was the one that an uptight, self-centered Australian white woman named Jane Castles was quoting — is a perfect specimen. It is the full cycle compressed into a few paragraphs. Study it. It tells you everything.
“The problem many Ukrainian and pro-Ukrainian activists are facing is their complete misunderstanding of solidarity in social movements.”
That is Stage Zero. The condescension is structural, built into the opening sentence, before a single argument has been made. The Ukrainians have a problem. Their problem is a misunderstanding. The person writing this — unbombed, unoccupied, entirely safe — is going to correct the misunderstanding. He has the right framework. He is going to share it.
This is not a rhetorical accident. This is the baseline posture of a certain kind of Western progressive when engaging with Ukrainians about their own war. The posture of the expert. The posture of the teacher. The person who has read the right books and formed the correct theoretical framework and is now, with great patience, making it available to the people who have the unfortunate handicap of actually living in the situation.
From Stage Zero, the rest proceeds with grim inevitability.
Stage One: The Disappointed Parent.
The Western commentator — and it is almost always a commentator, a person whose relationship to the war is primarily textual — expresses disappointment. Not anger. Disappointment. The distinction matters. Anger would imply equal standing: two people in conflict. Disappointment implies hierarchy. The parent who had hoped for better from the child. The teacher who expected more from the student.
“They blame Talankin for failing to mention Ukraine.” The framing is already doing work. Not: “they correctly noted that Talankin failed to name the country his film documents.” Instead: “they blame” — as if the Ukrainian response were an emotional failure rather than a political observation. As if the problem were Ukrainian anger rather than Talankin’s specific, deliberate omission.
The disappointment is calibrated to make Ukrainians feel they have failed a test. The test is solidarity. The test is gratitude. The test is the proper performance of appreciation for the Good Russians who have decided to take an interest in their situation. Fail the test and you are told you are fracturing your own movement, alienating allies, demonstrating tribalism that undermines your cause.
Let me say this clearly: the requirement that Ukrainians perform gratitude for insufficient gestures, on a schedule set by people who have never been bombed, is one of the most offensive dynamics in the Western discourse around this war. It is the demand that victims manage their own victimhood in ways that are comfortable for observers. It is the demand for emotional labor from people already performing every other conceivable kind of labor just to survive.
Stage Two: The Historical Lecture.
When disappointment fails to produce compliance, the Western commentator escalates to education. History is deployed. The complexities of Russian opposition politics are outlined with great care. The tradition of dissent is explained at length.
The Emu Brigadier post does it this way: “When Navalny called for support for the territorial integrity of Ukraine, reparations from Russia, etc., did you support him? No.”
I want to pause here specifically, because this sentence is breathtaking in its dishonesty.
Alexei Navalny never, while alive and capable of speaking, called clearly and unambiguously for the return of Crimea. His foundation explicitly stated that Crimea’s status was “extremely complicated” and required “a public discussion involving all interested parties.” He made videos comparing ethnic minorities to cockroaches. He made videos comparing Chechen and Georgian people to animals. He built a political movement explicitly organized around Russian national interests — a better Russia, yes, a less corrupt Russia, but Russia first. Ukrainian sovereignty, in Navalny’s political worldview, was a problem to be negotiated, not a right to be affirmed.
When Ukrainians named these facts — with specificity, with documentation, with the knowledge of people who understood exactly what was being built — the Western liberal establishment responded with fury. They were called ungrateful. They were told they didn’t understand the constraints Navalny operated under. They were told that demanding ideological purity from a man in a penal colony was obscene.
This argument was always a bait and switch. Not because Navalny wasn’t brave — he was — but because bravery in one dimension does not require the suspension of scrutiny in another. A Russian opposition leader who will not name Crimea as illegally occupied, who treats Ukraine as a complexity to be managed rather than a sovereign state with inviolable rights, is not a straightforward ally for Ukraine. Saying so is not ideological purity. It is reading a political program accurately.
The historical lecture exists to prevent accurate reading. Its function is to overwhelm Ukrainian specificity with Western abstraction, to replace what Ukrainians actually know from lived experience with what the Western commentator has read about in books and finds more philosophically sophisticated.
The people delivering this lecture do it to people who lived through 2014. Who lived through the annexation of Crimea in real time. Who watched Donbas bleed for eight years before the world decided to pay attention. Who have been navigating the reality of Russian imperial ambition since before the Western commentator had an opinion about it.
Stage Three: The Whataboutism.
“Has any Ukrainian influencer said anything in solidarity with Russian political prisoners?”
When disappointment doesn’t produce compliance and the history lecture fails to establish authority, the Western commentator reaches for equivalence. The move is familiar. It is, in miniature, structurally identical to what Kremlin propagandists do when they ask whether NATO is really peaceful or whether Western democracies have their own atrocities. The logic is the same: refuse the specific claim by expanding the frame until the specific claim dissolves.
Has Ukraine been perfect? Have Ukrainians ever said anything nationalist or problematic? Has anyone in Ukraine ever failed the standard of moral perfection that the Western commentator is now applying? The answer is always yes, because no country under existential siege produces morally perfect actors, and the whataboutism doesn’t care about the specifics anyway. The point is not to establish a genuine equivalence. The point is to muddy. To create the impression that Ukrainian frustration with Russian impunity is itself a form of bias that invalidates Ukrainian testimony.
The West does not notice that it is doing this. This is what makes it dangerous.
Stage Four: The Accusation.
If the Ukrainian continues to push — if the journalist covering the war continues to push, if anyone pushes — the mask comes off.
They are accused of tribalism. Of ethnic nationalism. Of demanding collective punishment. Of refusing peace. Of prolonging the war with intransigence. Of hating Russians. The most direct version ends with the Western commentator declaring that Ukrainian skepticism of Russian dissidents is itself bigotry — a refusal of solidarity based on ethnicity rather than politics.
This accusation is so divorced from what Ukrainians are actually arguing that it requires active misreading to sustain. Ukrainians are not saying Russian dissidents should be silenced or punished. They are saying specific Russian dissidents, praised by the West as heroes, have specific documented positions incompatible with Ukrainian sovereignty, and that Western uncritical celebration of these figures has specific costs for Ukraine’s ability to press for accountability. That is a political argument. It is grounded in documented facts. It is not an ethnic argument.
But the accusation of tribalism is not aimed at the argument. It is aimed at the standing. It says: your emotional investment in this disqualifies you from the conversation. Your anger, your grief, your refusal to perform gratitude on schedule — these mark you as a bad-faith actor. You are not objective. You are too close.
Too close to the situation.
I want to sit with that phrase for a moment. Too close to the situation.
I have held a woman in her fifties while she shook so hard she could not speak. She had just learned her building had been struck. Her neighbors were dead. People she had known for decades. Her hands were cold. There was nothing to say.
Too close to the situation.
The accusation that being subjected to violence makes your account of it unreliable is one of the oldest and most repugnant mechanisms of oppressor-class discourse. It is what people who need to dismiss testimony say when they cannot refute it. It has been deployed against every population demanding accountability for violence done to them throughout history. It is being deployed against Ukrainians, right now, today, on social media, by people who call themselves progressive.
Stage Five: The Dramatic Exit.
“I can’t support this kind of thinking.”
The Western commentator declares they are done. They are withdrawing their support — as if their support, consisting of social media posts and vague general sympathy, is something Ukraine can feel the absence of in the field. They exit. They announce the exit. The announcement is addressed not to the Ukrainian they were arguing with but to a broader audience, because this was never about the argument. It was about positioning. They tried. They offered solidarity. It was rejected. They are blameless.
And then.
Stage Six: The Quiet Return.
Weeks pass. Sometimes months. And the same person who declared they could not support this kind of thinking is back in the feed, sharing a piece about a new Good Russian. A new dissident. A new brave soul who stood up to Putin. A new film. A new arrest. A new gesture of courage that the West should know about and celebrate.
No acknowledgment of the previous exchange. No reckoning. No reconsideration. The cycle resets, and it runs again.
This is not solidarity. This is management. The management of a narrative that the Western liberal establishment has a significant emotional investment in maintaining, and Ukrainians who insist on telling a different story are not disrupting solidarity — they are threatening the investment. That is why the meltdown happens. Not because the Western commentator is malicious. Because they are emotionally attached to a story, and the story is more important to them than the people it claims to be about.
The Privilege of Distance and the Violence of Advice
Let me tell you what it sounds like when a building near you has been struck by a Russian missile.
There is a pressure change before the sound. And then it hits, and it is not like anything you have seen in a film. It is a physical event. It rearranges you internally for a moment. It shakes something loose in the chest. And then there is the silence before everything that follows: the alarms, the voices, the crunch of glass underfoot, the smell.
I have experienced this. The people I live among have experienced this hundreds of times. Some thousands. In 1,482 days since February 24, 2022.
Now let me tell you what it sounds like when a Western commentator tells Ukrainians they need to be more generous in their solidarity assessments.
It sounds like nothing. It is a digital text. It arrives via notification. It is one of a thousand things happening on a screen in a moment when a hundred more important things are also happening.
But it lands. It lands because it is one more repetition of a message Ukrainians have been receiving since before the full-scale invasion: that their understanding of their own situation is incomplete, that their anger is counterproductive, that their political analysis would benefit from the perspective of someone who has studied similar situations from a comfortable distance and developed theories about what works.
The nerve of it.
I have been in this country for four years. I have Ukrainian military press accreditation. I have documented war crimes of the Russians. It is my job. I have interviewed survivors and commanders and civilians who have lived through things no human being should have to live through. And I will tell you plainly: I am not the authority on Ukrainian experience. I am a witness. There is a difference. The authority on Ukrainian experience is Ukrainians, and when Ukrainians speak about their own war — about what helps them and what doesn’t, about who is their ally and who is performing allyship for Western consumption — they deserve to be heard without being graded.
The specific form of condescension deployed against Ukrainians is calibrated to a paradox the Western liberal establishment has not resolved. Ukrainians are sympathetic victims in the Western imagination, but they are also expected to behave according to the norms of sympathetic victimhood. Express anger and you become difficult. Name your aggressor specifically instead of reaching for the universal and you become tribal. Reject the Good Russian and you become problematic. Decline to perform the gratitude the narrative requires and you become Ukrainians who don’t understand solidarity in social movements.
And the people saying this are unbombed. Every single one of them. Not one of them has lived through what they are opining about. Not one of them has held a person in complete traumatic shock — the specific kind that is not dramatic, not cinematic, just a human being sitting very still and shaking, making a sound that is not quite crying — in the hours after a building comes down. Not one of them has stood in what I described at the beginning of this piece and watched someone try to process, in real time, the fact that the physical place where their life existed is now rubble.
They have opinions, though. Very strong opinions. And their distance is not understood by them as a limitation. It is understood as a qualification. The further from the bombs, the more objectively you can assess the situation. The more you have read, rather than lived. The more theory you can apply.
This is the epistemological violence of the unbombed. It has been one of the defining features of Western discourse around this war from the beginning, and it is getting worse, not better, as the war enters its fifth year and compassion fatigue sets in and the Good Russian becomes an increasingly necessary emotional shortcut.
The Particular Cruelty of the Expert
There is a specific subspecies of the unbombed opinion that I want to name separately, because it is its own category of harm.
It is the expert. The academic, the think-tank analyst, the conflict studies professor, the geopolitical commentator with a verified account and a book deal. The person who has studied this region, this conflict, these dynamics, and who brings to their opinions not just the confidence of the safely remote but the credibility of credentials. They have done the reading. They have the framework. They have been on the podcasts.
They are particularly dangerous in this context because they provide intellectual legitimacy to the meltdown. When the disappointed parent says Ukrainians are being tribal, it can be dismissed. When the conflict studies professor says Ukrainians are being tribal, people listen. When the think-tank analyst explains that the Good Russian represents an important strand of Russian civil society that Ukraine would be strategically wise to cultivate, it sounds like policy analysis rather than the same fundamental misreading dressed in better vocabulary.
The expert’s version of the Good Russian argument goes like this: Ukrainian hostility to Russian dissidents is strategically counterproductive because it pushes potential allies toward indifference or even toward consolidation around Russian nationalism. The smart play for Ukraine is to support Russian civil society, to distinguish loudly and publicly between Putin’s regime and Russian citizens who oppose it, to build the coalition that will eventually be necessary for a post-Putin Russia that is at peace with its neighbors. Ukrainian anger, in this framing, is an obstacle to Ukraine’s own strategic interests.
This argument has a surface plausibility that the pure meltdown lacks, and that is precisely what makes it more dangerous. It dresses the same fundamental demand — that Ukrainians perform solidarity for Russians — in the language of strategic rationality. It frames Ukrainian testimony about their own experience as a strategic liability rather than information. It tells Ukrainians that their anger is not just impolite but counterproductive, that the correct response to being invaded is to run a sensitivity campaign for the invading society’s internal critics.
I have had this argument made to me by such people. I have seen it made in publications that consider themselves serious. I want to be clear about what it requires you to believe in order to accept it.
It requires you to believe that Ukrainians, who have been navigating the reality of Russian imperial pressure for their entire existence as a nation, who have watched the “Russian civil society that will eventually transform Russia from within” argument fail for thirty years while Russian aggression expanded, who have specific and documented reasons for their skepticism of specific Russian political figures — that these Ukrainians have miscalculated their own strategic interests, and the strategic recalculation should come from outside, from people who encounter Russia primarily as an analytical problem rather than an existential threat.
This is not strategic advice. This is the expert version of telling someone being punched in the face that they are holding their hands wrong.
The reason this expert consensus is wrong is not that Ukrainians are right about everything. It is that the people with the most knowledge about what Russian civil society has actually produced — in terms of political action, in terms of solidarity, in terms of willingness to name Ukraine specifically in the moments that matter — are Ukrainians. They have been watching this closely for decades. Their skepticism is not ignorance. It is a conclusion drawn from evidence, and the evidence is not ambiguous.
Thirty years of waiting for Russian civil society to transform Russia from within has produced February 24, 2022. That is the outcome of the patience. That is what the arc bent toward.
The Big Tent and Who Gets Left Outside It
The Emu Brigadier’s concluding argument — that successful social movements build big tents — is worth examining on its own terms, because it reveals something important about how this genre of argument functions.
The big tent metaphor comes from Western progressive movement politics. It refers to coalition building, to the importance of not alienating potential allies over ideological purity tests, to the pragmatic recognition that broad movements require participants who don’t agree on everything. It is a reasonable principle in the contexts where it was developed.
It is being applied here to a country defending itself against genocide.
The “big tent” in the Emu Brigadier formulation would include Russian dissidents who won’t name Ukraine specifically. It would include, implicitly, the full range of Russian opposition figures who oppose Putin for reasons that have nothing to do with Ukrainian sovereignty — who want a better Russia, a freer Russia, a Russia that respects its own citizens, but who have not arrived at the position that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is categorically wrong, categorically criminal, and categorically demands accountability including the return of territory and the prosecution of war crimes.
Ukraine is being asked to build this tent. Ukraine, the country being invaded. The people being asked to make the tent bigger are the people being killed. The people being invited into the tent are, at minimum, some of the people who have failed to name the killing for what it is.
And the people issuing the invitation are safe.
Let me offer an alternative framework. The big tent that actually serves Ukraine is not one that requires Ukrainians to dilute their political demands in order to include Russian dissidents who haven’t met the minimum threshold of naming the war. The big tent that actually serves Ukraine is one that requires Western supporters — the unbombed commentators, the experts, the sympathetic observers — to meet Ukrainians where they are. To accept Ukrainian testimony about their own situation without filtering it through a framework developed elsewhere. To understand that Ukrainian anger is data, not a communication failure. To recognize that the demand for solidarity is a demand on the people making it, not a demand on the people receiving it.
This would be a genuinely big tent. It would be much harder to build than the one being proposed, because it requires the Western liberal to do something genuinely uncomfortable: to accept that their role is not to manage Ukrainian grief or moderate Ukrainian demands or explain to Ukrainians the strategic costs of their anger, but to show up for the specific, material, unglamorous things that Ukraine actually needs.
No Oscar speeches required. No Good Russians required. Just the actual work.
What Actual Solidarity Looks Like
Since the word has been deployed so extensively in this conversation, let me say what solidarity actually looks like from where I am sitting.
It looks like calling your elected representative and demanding they support continued military assistance to Ukraine, not once, not when there is a news cycle about it, but persistently, as a permanent feature of your political engagement.
It looks like understanding the specific weapons systems Ukraine needs and why — understanding what ATACMS do, understanding what air defense interceptor consumption rates mean, understanding the specific military problem Ukraine is trying to solve — and communicating that understanding in the conversations you have with people who don’t have it.
It looks like refusing the “both sides” framing every time it appears. Every time a commentator, a politician, a publication implies that this is a conflict between parties of comparable legitimacy, that Ukraine bears some responsibility for the invasion, that Russian security concerns are a valid frame for discussing Ukrainian sovereignty — refusing that framing out loud, in writing, publicly.
It looks like supporting Ukrainian journalists, Ukrainian civil society, Ukrainian cultural institutions not because they are sympathetic but because they are doing the work of documenting what is happening, and that documentation matters for accountability, and accountability is one of the things that might eventually mean this does not happen again.
It looks like being honest about what your government is and is not doing. Not celebrating the symbolic gestures and ignoring the material failures. Not treating the announcement of a weapons package as equivalent to the delivery of a weapons package. Not treating the expression of support as equivalent to the provision of support.
It looks like understanding, finally and permanently, that this war does not resolve on a schedule convenient for Western attention spans. That four years in, with the war still active and the outcome still genuinely uncertain, sustained engagement is not optional for anyone who claims to give a damn.
None of this requires a Good Russian. None of this requires celebrating someone who stood on a stage and said “all wars.” None of this requires lecturing Ukrainians about the strategic value of a bigger tent.
It requires showing up. Persistently. Without requiring gratitude. Without melting down when the people you claim to support say something that disrupts your preferred narrative.
That’s it. That’s the whole job.
The Body Count Arithmetic
This is not academic. This is life and death arithmetic, and I want to walk you through it without euphemism.
Every time the Good Russian absorbs Western attention, something is displaced. Not metaphorically displaced. Materially displaced.
Weapons. When the Western conversation is about the Good Russian — about Talankin’s film, about Navalny’s legacy, about the brave individuals who oppose Putin — it is not about weapons deliveries. Not about the pace of long-range strike permissions. Not about whether Germany will finally deliver what it has promised. Not about the interceptor consumption rate and what Ukraine needs to sustain its air defense through another year of Russian missile saturation. The Good Russian provides an emotional outlet that reduces urgency. We are doing something. We are celebrating these brave people. We are on the right side. The pressure drops. The weapons move slower.
Sanctions. Every conversation about the Good Russian is a conversation not happening about the companies still operating in Russia, the financial institutions still processing Russian transactions, the European governments still buying Russian LNG through third-country routing. The Good Russian makes Russia feel like a country in the process of reforming from within. Internal opposition is stirring. Change is coming. This makes external pressure feel less essential. The political will for genuine economic warfare is harder to sustain when the preferred narrative is redemption rather than accountability.
Accountability. The Good Russian implicitly argues that Russia will produce its own accountability — that the Talankins and the Navalnys are the beginning of something, that internal opposition will eventually transform Russian society, that patience is a strategy. This argument has been made since at least 2008. The evidence for it has not improved. But it serves a function: it allows the indefinite postponement of the question of what accountability imposed from outside would look like. Reparations. War crimes tribunals. The confiscation of frozen Russian assets and their transfer to Ukraine for reconstruction. These conversations are harder to have when you are celebrating the Good Russian, because the Good Russian is evidence that the problem is self-correcting.
Ukrainian testimony. Every Ukrainian voice that gets shouted down in the meltdown — every account of lived experience dismissed as tribalism, every political argument reframed as ethnic bias, every expression of anger managed as counterproductive — is a voice that does not reach the people who need to hear it. The Western liberal who exits the conversation declaring they cannot support this kind of thinking takes with them a potential constituency for real pressure and replaces it with nothing except the warm feeling of having offered solidarity that was ungratefully refused.
Ukrainians are not asking for sympathy. They are asking for weapons, money, sustained political pressure, and the specific forms of accountability that actually end wars and prevent them from restarting. The Good Russian fantasy makes all of these things marginally harder to achieve. Marginally, repeated over four years, across millions of interactions, in dozens of countries, adds up.
It adds up in bodies. That arithmetic is not abstract. It happens every day this war continues that did not have to continue.
The Anonymous Silly Supporter and the Genre
The post circulating by an anonymous account in Australia under, “Emu Brigadier” this week deserves a closer reading as a specimen because it has achieved, in a few paragraphs, a near-complete taxonomy of the genre’s moves.
It opens with the condescension structural. Ukrainians have a “complete misunderstanding.” They need this explained.
Then comes the solidarity argument deployed as a weapon against the people solidarity is supposed to serve. “Solidarity is a two-way street.” The people being invaded owe solidarity to the people invading them. The people whose children have been abducted should have been louder in their support for Russian political prisoners. The people being shelled should have been more generous in their political assessments of Russian opposition figures.
Then the historical score-settling. Did you support Navalny? You didn’t. When he died, your lot celebrated it. When Russian political prisoners were exchanged, you openly protested. You spent years character-assassinating every Russian who said anything against Putin.
Notice what this does. It transforms Ukraine’s genocide into a referendum on Ukrainian conduct. It asks whether Ukrainians have been good enough allies to Russia’s internal critics — the critics of the country currently conducting the genocide. It establishes a ledger and finds Ukraine wanting. Ukraine’s suffering becomes, at least partially, the consequence of Ukrainian political failures. If they had been better allies to the Good Russians, they would have better allies now.
I will not dress this up nor sugar coat it. That logic is indistinguishable from what Kremlin propagandists produce. Not because the person producing it is a Kremlin agent. Because the logic serves the same function: diffusing responsibility for Russian violence, partially restoring Russian victimhood, converting the aggressor-victim dynamic into a mutual failure of solidarity. The mechanism is the same. The conclusion is the same. The person reaching it considers themselves a supporter of Ukraine.
Then the big tent argument. “Successful social movements build big tents.” Ukraine’s struggle for survival is being assessed against the template of Western progressive coalition politics. The standards of movement building, developed in contexts where the stakes are political, are being applied to a country defending itself against erasure.
I do not have words adequate to the obscenity of this framing. I will only say: the audacity required to evaluate a genocide defense through the lens of social movement strategy is not available to people who have stood in the specific smell I described at the beginning of this piece. It is available only to the unbombed.
The Question That Does Not Get Asked
Underneath all of this is a question that almost never gets asked directly but that I want to put on the table now.
Why does the Good Russian make you feel better about Ukraine than Ukrainians do?
Why does a Russian who documents Russian crimes — and cannot say the word Ukraine at the moment it would cost him nothing — generate more warmth in the Western liberal imagination than the Ukrainians who have been naming those crimes for a decade, at the cost of their homes and their families and their lives?
Why, when a Ukrainian tells you exactly what is happening and exactly what they need, does the response so often involve some version of yes, but — but have you considered the Good Russians, but have you extended your solidarity, but aren’t you being a little extreme — while a Russian who says something far less specific and far less demanding generates uncritical celebration?
The answer is uncomfortable. The Good Russian gives you a version of this war that is emotionally manageable. He gives you a hero. He gives you a narrative arc that Western liberalism is trained to recognize: the brave individual who stands up to the corrupt system. He gives you hope in the specific register Western liberalism requires hope — that individuals of sufficient courage can redeem corrupt systems from within, that moral progress is available without structural change, that the story has a protagonist you can love.
Ukrainians, in aggregate, don’t give you that. They give you something harder and more demanding. They give you a collective survival story that requires collective response. They give you demands that do not have a face — for weapons, for accountability, for reparations, for the sustained political will to see this through to an outcome that actually secures their sovereignty. They give you anger that does not perform gratitude on schedule. They give you grief that does not resolve into uplift.
And they give you, repeatedly and insistently, the corrective that the Good Russian narrative specifically exists to avoid: that this is not about one bad man. That Russian society is implicated. That the problem is structural and cultural and historical, and will not be solved by admiring individual Russians who have managed to escape it.
This corrective is what the meltdown suppresses. When it cannot be suppressed — when Ukrainians keep saying it, keep refusing the narrative — the meltdown intensifies. The accusations escalate. The exits become more dramatic. Because the investment in the Good Russian is not incidental. It is load-bearing. Remove it and the comfortable story collapses, and you are left with the actual story, which requires actual response, which is harder and more expensive and less emotionally satisfying than weeping at an Oscar speech.
What I Am Not Saying, and What I Am
I want to be precise here, because the whataboutism stage will attempt to reframe this as arguments I have not made.
I am not saying Pavel Talankin is a bad person. His film is a genuine and important document. What he did to get that footage out was genuinely dangerous and the courage required was real. None of that is in dispute. But it is just one Russian and typifies no real change in the empire.
I am saying the Western liberal response to his acceptance speech — the uncritical celebration, the sense that a great moment had occurred — was a response to something that did not happen. Nothing of substance for Ukraine occurred on that stage. A film about Ukraine’s war won an award. The man who made it said all wars should stop. The room stood. Ukraine remains at war. The children remain in Russia. The missiles keep coming.
Ukrainians do not owe Russians they don’t know a specific political performance in response to gestures that fall short of what the moment demands. I am saying the demand that they perform this — and the meltdown when they don’t — reveals something about the Western liberal relationship to Ukrainian suffering that Ukrainians have every right to name and name loudly.
I am not saying the West has done nothing for Ukraine. I am saying the Good Russian narrative actively works against the sustained pressure and material commitment that Ukraine’s survival requires, by providing a cheaper emotional alternative that lets people feel engaged without doing anything. I am saying every unit of political attention spent on the Good Russian is a unit not spent on demanding accountability from Russia as a state, or from the Western governments still enabling it, or from the international institutions still treating this war as a negotiable dispute between parties of roughly comparable legitimacy.
And I am saying this above all: the people who perform their solidarity loudest and melt down hardest when it is questioned are, almost without exception, people for whom this war is a news story. People who can close the tab. People whose cities are not being struck. People who have never held a trembling human being in the hours after the world they knew was physically destroyed.
You do not get to instruct those people. You do not get to grade them. You do not get to tell them they have misunderstood solidarity, or that their anger is strategically counterproductive, or that they need to build a bigger tent.
You are not the teacher here.
The Last Thing
I started this piece with a smell. I want to end it with a face.
I will not give you a name. There are good reasons for that. But there is a face I carry from an interview in the first year of this war, in a city that had been struck repeatedly and would be struck again. Someone who had lost people. Someone who was still, in some fundamental sense, trying to understand how the world they had known had become the world they were now in.
When I asked what they needed from the outside world, they did not say solidarity. They did not say awareness. They did not say please celebrate the Russians who document our suffering.
They said: weapons. And justice. And don’t forget us.
Don’t forget us.
Not: give us your Good Russian. Not: celebrate the brave dissenters. Not: build a big tent with the people killing us and see if that strategy eventually produces a ceasefire.
Don’t forget us.
The West keeps forgetting. Not completely — the coverage continues, the awards are given, the speeches are made, the posts accumulate. But the specific, particular, irreplaceable reality of what is happening here keeps getting replaced by a more manageable story. A story with a Russian hero. A story where the problem is one man and not a culture. A story where standing ovations are appropriate responses and gratitude is owed and solidarity is a feeling rather than a commitment.
Talankin won his Oscar. The room cheered. And somewhere in Kharkiv, someone’s phone lit up with the notification and they looked at it for a moment and put it down and went back to whatever they were doing to survive another day.
They are not waiting for the Good Russian.
They are waiting for you to figure out what you actually owe them.
And that number is not nothing. And the reckoning is not optional. And no meltdown in a Twitter thread, no pearl-clutching at Ukrainian anger, no lecture about solidarity in successful social movements, changes the number of days this war has been going.
Day 1,482.
And counting.