Thirty years ago, in a Ukrainian churchyard where my Russian ancestors are buried, I knelt beside a very old woman leaning on a stick, her hair covered in a black kerchief. Behind us stood the Russian church that my great-grandfather built on his estate and where he lies buried. The
“What’s the point of a world without Russia in it?” asked a well-known politician, now a wanted war criminal, back in 2018. A less prominent Russian figure echoed this sentiment in 2024, though less threateningly, when he remarked, “The disintegration of Russia would be a catastrophe, not only for
Nineteen-thirty-eight is an apposite metaphor for 2024, of a world poised on the brink of a devastating war. The pieces are all there: Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, tensions across the Taiwan Strait, the U.S. increasingly divided and isolated, the Middle East divided along sectarian and tribal lines, a
