Since 2022, my mornings have usually followed a pretty predictable routine. I crawl out of bed and make coffee on autopilot, even now when Prague is already unbearably hot and my apartment feels like a little bit of micro-dosing hell before most people are awake. Against my better judgment and to the detriment of my constantly dysregulated nervous system, I usually drink my coffee with iROZHLAS open. Visible on the page every day is the same banner, though these days it’s admittedly a bit smaller: “Ruská válka na Ukrajině (den 1620).”
This morning, the banner was bordering news about another Russian ballistic missile attack on Ukrainian cities. 25 missiles were launched within an hour, with 40 missiles launched in total. Most of them hit thanks to the Trump administration’s undying fealty to the Kremlin(it’s worth mentioning that in recent days Trump himself walked back any talk of helping with Patriot missiles after a 90 minute phone call with Putin) and the resulting absence of Patriot missile supply. The attack came, as it almost always does, past 1:00 in the morning while people were sleeping. According to people in Kyiv, air monitors weren’t able to detect this latest wave of missiles, air defense wasn’t functioning, and by the time warnings came, buildings were already shaking upon impact and people were killed trying to run to shelters outside. At least nine people are dead, children included, and dozens are hospitalized. Windows have been blown out and entire homes are gone. The worst part is that this isn’t an outlier - it was the second attack on a similarly harrowing scale in less than 48 hours.
Realizing that this level of death, destruction, and horror is becoming as routine as to the amount of coffee I drink every morning is both frustrating and disturbing. I read these headlines alongside messages from people I care about in Kyiv who are either waking up after a handful of anxious hours spent napping, if they slept at all. I remember the last time I was in Kyiv back in 2015, visiting a family member, and my brain has a hard time associating that city with the pictures of body bags being carried out from under rubble and around missile-sized craters in the ground. I read these headlines from Prague, a city that remembers decades of Soviet occupation justified as “brotherly assistance” and liberation, which is rhetoric that feels uncomfortably familiar when Russia today insists it’s invading Ukraine to “protect” Ukrainians or free them from imaginary oppressors. If you’re reading this from outside of Europe, Prague probably feels impossibly far from the war. Tourists still flood the city and treat it as some cursed version of cheap-beer-Disneyland and most vacationers probably don’t think twice about what’s happening on the same continent. But to put it into perspective, Ukraine’s western border is only about as far away as New York City is from Cleveland or Boston from DC. The people who dismiss Czech or broader Eastern European fears or disgust with Russia’s decades of terrorism as “Russophobia” rarely seem interested in why those fears exist in the first place.
For a lot of people, this is nothing more than another story that briefly interrupts the news cycle before disappearing beneath the next crisis or idiotic non-news, if it makes the news cycle at all. Here, it’s part of a constant background noise. Every morning, another day of the war is added to the count. Every morning, there’s usually a headline beneath it that describes another apartment block, another hospital, or another family annihilated over night. Living with that as omnipresent white noise has made the online arguments about the war feel increasingly and insultingly detached from the reality they claim to “analyze.”
I’ve written a lot, maybe even too much, about campism. I’ve dissected the strange contortions some corners of the authoritarian left twist themselves into in order to avoid saying, plainly, that Russia is the aggressor in this war. I’ve laid out the history, the empire, the show trials, the suffocating censorship, the deportations, the prisons, and the executions. For the most part, it hasn’t really mattered. I’ve watched people I otherwise respect choose invented narratives over uncomfortable facts because the invented narrative lets them keep believing their worldview is intact, principled, and respectable. I’m tired of writing that essay. I don’t think I have another version of it in me that will land any differently than the last 10 or so did.
It’s exhausting. I’m tired of trying to explain it through different lenses and using different vocabulary to try to reach different people. But falling into pure exhaustion isn’t a strategy, and neither is spending the next decade screaming past one another while the world gets worse. And things are absolutely going to get worse before they get any better.
Fascism is present and rapidly corroding society almost everywhere. Unapologetic, blatant white nationalism is no longer something confined to obscure internet forums or fringe groups shoved underground. Governments across the world are becoming increasingly comfortable testing the limits of state power, and often show no signs of stopping even if people push back. We are watching in real time the expansion of mass surveillance, the criminalization of migrants (even those who jumped through all the hoops), the demonization of political opponents, the intimidation of journalists, the invention of terrorists that don’t exist by evoking the word “ANTIFA”, and a steady suffocating growth of militarized power, both in brazenness and brutality. And I want you to notice that I did not say “in the U.S.” Because this is not an insolated case of American imperial decline - we are all facing some form of it it in one way or another and it’s worth noticing the commonalities.
And even though this isn’t about treating the U.S. as some exceptional example, it’s worth examining what’s actually happening there. ICE agents, a role usually assumed by violent smooth-brained cowards who earn more than educators and couldn’t find another way to enact their innermost despotic fantasies out of fear of brown people, in unmarked vehicles and plain clothes, often fully masked, are pulling people out of courthouses, off job sites, and out of school pickup lines with impunity. Last summer, Trump federalized California’s National Guard over the governor’s objection and sent more than 4000 soldiers and 700 Marines into LA to face down people protesting the brutal raids that were kidnapping their neighbors. A federal judge later ruled that the entire operation violated the Posse Comitatus Act, writing plainly that there was no “rebellion” to quell and that civilian law enforcement had never actually been unable to handle the protests on its own. A judge made it objectively clear that the “unrest” was manufactured to justify the show of force. In that same stretch, immigration arrests in the LA area quadrupled, and the share of people swept up with no criminal record at all jumped from roughly a third to nearly 70 %. That is horrifying.
And people are dying. Renee Nicole Good, a 37 year old mother of three and a U.S. citizen who was non-violent and unarmed, was shot and killed by an ICE agent in Minneapolis this January after backing her car away from agents who had surrounded her in traffic. Later that same month, in the same city, Alex Pretti, an ICU nurse, was tackled to the pavement and shot dead by Border Patrol agents while holding nothing but his phone, after they had already removed the legally carried firearm off him. Silverio Villegas González, a 38 year old line cook, was shot during a traffic stop outside Chicago minutes after dropping his child off at daycare. Jaime Alanis, a 57 year old farmworker, fell nine meters to his death trying to escape a raid on a Southern California greenhouse. Ruben Ray Martinez, a 23 year old U.S. citizen, was killed by an ICE agent in Texas, and the government didn’t even acknowledge his death publicly until reporters uncovered it almost a year later. Immigration agents have fatally shot at least 8 people since January 2025. At least 6 more died inside ICE detention facilities in January of this year alone, one of them ruled a homicide by local authorities.
And all of this is propped up by unbridled American capitalism. Around 70,000 people are currently held by ICE across 225 facilities. These facilities are directly and freshly funded by a Congressionally approved $45 billion injection. And the two companies responsible for the operations of most of this heinous system recently announced the best fiscal year in their history. GEO Group's profit margin skyrocketed roughly 700% to $254 million, while CoreCivic's jumped by nearly 70%. On their earnings calls, investors openly complained that ICE wasn't filling beds fast enough to hit the numbers they'd been promised. That’s exactly what this system is designed to do - turn human detention into a business model whose growth is dependent on keeping cages full of bodies. When shareholders complain that occupancy is too low, they're effectively arguing that more people need to be imprisoned so quarterly targets can be met.
Then there’s the part built specifically to criminalize and eliminate opposition. Last September, an executive order designated ANTIFA (an idea with no headquarters, leadership structure, or even formal membership) as a domestic terrorist organization. A follow-up memo directed federal agencies to investigate nonprofits for supposedly financing “political violence,” which uses language elastic enough to mean whatever the administration decides it should mean at any given moment.
And you can see this put into practice with Prairieland. On the July 4th last year, a group gathered outside the ICE detention center in Alvarado, Texas. According to prosecutors, some participants set off fireworks, damaged property, and tried to draw officers away from the facility. During the confrontation, someone allegedly shot and wounded a police officer before fleeing. The alleged shooter, a former Marine reservist, was captured after a weeklong manhunt and later sentenced to a staggering 100 years in prison.
And if a 100-year prison sentence isn’t horrifying enough, what happened to everyone else should also concern you. Prosecutors treated the action as a single conspiracy, charging more than a dozen other participants under the same terrorism framework, even when they were accused only of acts like graffiti, property damage, helping someone evade arrest afterward, or even moving a box of zines. One man whose admitted conduct amounted to spray-painting a slogan received a sentence of 22 months. Others who never fired a weapon received sentences of 30, 50 or 70 years. 15 defendants were sentenced to a combined 556 years, while the Department of Justice described the group as a “North Texas ANTIFA cell.” Civil liberties advocates and legal scholars have warned that the case could become a blueprint for using terrorism laws to prosecute entire protest movements.
If you’re reading this, you likely already know at least something about what’s been happening in the U.S. and wonder why I’m even mentioning it, so allow me to explain. I’m mentioning this obvious acts of fascism and authoritarian crackdown to emphasize how similar this is to what’s happening in Russia at the moment, a state that (somehow) many leftists continue to make excuses for, or even blindly support.
This entire authoritarian approach applied by the current U.S. administration is borrowed with almost embarrassing fidelity from a playbook Russia has been sticking to for years. For the sake of brevity, we’ll start with more recent events. Since the Crocus City Hall attack in 2024, Russian police have conducted sweeping raids through (almost exclusively) migrant neighborhoods, detaining people by the tens of thousands, frequently for no documented violation beyond looking Central Asian. New laws now let police expel migrants without a judge ever reviewing the case. Self-appointed white supremacist “citizen patrol” groups operate alongside actual law enforcement, filming themselves assaulting migrant workers and proudly post the footage online. Migrants who show up to renew legal paperwork have been pressured into signing military contracts instead, with deportation dangled as the alternative. Migrant children are now required to pass Russian language exams to enroll in school, and the overwhelming majority fail, which puts their entire families on a list for removal.
Politically, Russia has spent years methodically criminalizing dissent using almost the exact same rhetoric that you hear coming out of Washington: extremist, terrorist, enemy of our values, undesirable, etc. The list of officially designated terrorist organizations has grown to include an opposition conference, a communist party structure, an entire federation of anti-war exiles, and an anarchist collective, so that even a small donation to any of them becomes its own criminal offense. The Anti-War Committee of Russia was added to that list this spring, and dozens of its members now face criminal charges simply for opposing the invasion of Ukraine.
Russian leftists and anarchists in particular have absorbed the worst of it. Azat Miftakhov, a mathematician and anarchist, was tortured on his first day inside a Russian penal colony this spring. He was brutally beaten with a wooden hammer on the soles of his feet, stripped, threatened with rape, and shocked with electricity on his toes, after refusing an order given purely to humiliate him. Aleksandr Snezhkov received an additional terrorism sentence for reading his own case file aloud to his cellmates, on the theory that the words themselves might “inspire extremism.” Members of an anarchist collective in Yekaterinburg, best known locally for running a Food Not Bombs chapter, were detained and tortured last summer. A young anarchist in Rostov, sentenced to 16 years for setting fire to an empty draft-office building, took his own life after the verdict came down. Young anti-fascists or even just young people interested in alternative culture have been profiled and tortured by Russian security services on “extremist organization” charges that amounted to little more than the music they listened to and the opinions they held.
It’s undeniable and well-documented that there’s a deliberate, years-long project to make the political left in Russia too frightened and too isolated to organize at all. And it’s worth noticing how closely that resembles turning a can of spray paint at a protest into a decades-long terrorism sentence in the U.S.
I’m not saying that everything about Russia and the U.S. are identical, but the tools deployed are essentially the same. In both cases you’ll find the use of a label vague enough to catch anyone, a media apparatus willing to repeat that label until it sounds like common sense, a legal architecture engineered so that due process is never guaranteed, and a public that goes along with it because being angry at migrants or “domestic terrorists” is so much easier than confronting what’s actually driving the country into decline. Across Central and Eastern Europe, a growing number of nationalist and far right governments and parties have spent years testing the same playbook. They depict NGOs and independent media as foreign agents, disassemble arts and cultural institutions that refuse to cave in to far right pressure, cast migrants, queer people, or political opponents as existential threats, eliminate judicial independence, and present every election as a battle for the nation's survival using white nationalist language. Several are openly citing Trump’s America as the template, while others admire Moscow, because both provide them with an authoritarian toolkit with more palatable branding and plausible deniability.
We are living at a moment of urgency. And while “leftist unity” often sounds and feels both uncomfortable and often impossible, it will likely become necessary. None of what I described throughout this article gets stopped by anyone acting alone or acting in accordance with the narrowest and purest of principles that don’t meet the occasion. It takes the widest possible coalition, everyone willing to oppose authoritarianism (even to help those they may not entirely agree with), and the politics of manufactured enemies wherever they appear.
What's striking is that many of the people living under or closest to authoritarianism have already arrived at this conclusion. Ukrainian socialists, anti-authoritarian organizers, and Russian anarchists have repeatedly argued, in different ways, that there will be little left worth debating if authoritarianism is allowed to keep advancing unchecked. Russian anarchists in Autonomous Action (Автономное действие), for example, continue to criticize states, nationalism, militarism, and capitalism, yet they have also argued that a Russian victory in Ukraine would further consolidate an increasingly fascist regime and leave even less space for anarchists, trade unionists, and anyone else trying to organize inside Russia. They haven't abandoned their principles. They've recognized that principles become impossible to defend if the conditions needed to practice them disappear.
And this is precisely where I watch parts of the Western left fall on its face time after time. It often engages in something that looks less like solidarity and more like self-sabotage or cannibalism. Instead of building that coalition, real energy goes into defending an increasingly narrow and often factually shaky worldview that materially benefits absolutely no one.
What makes this especially frustrating is that I often see the opposite instinct across much of Central and Eastern Europe. People who have spent years confronting authoritarianism at home, whether in Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Georgia, the Balkans, or elsewhere, immediately recognize many of the same patterns taking shape in the United States. They clearly see the expansion of state power, the criminalization of dissent, attacks on migrants and minorities, the manufacture of internal enemies, and the steady normalization of reactionary politics. They have extended solidarity because they understand these are not isolated national crises and history has also usually provided insight regarding what happens if this is allowed to exist without opposition. The forces driving them organize internationally, and resistance has to do the same.
Too often though, that solidarity is not returned. Instead, those who do not fall in line and accept the Soviet symbolism, the defense of Russia, and the paternalistic lectures are proclaimed as “problematic” or “infantile.” Ukrainians probably have it the worst as they’re dismissed as fascists, or worse, too stupid and incapable of having any agency to decide what’s best for them. Russian imperialism is treated as secondary, derivative, or merely reactive, as though it cannot exist on its own terms and the propaganda produced by decades of such imperialism somehow becomes gospel. And the willingness of too many to take a “well, they were asking for it” approach to news of dead Ukrainian civilians aside, how do they reckon with the facts of how Russian leftists are treated? If their analysis must rest on taking Russians’ word for it, what does it have to say to the Russian leftists imprisoned, exiled, tortured, or killed by their own state for opposing the Kremlin? What does it say to the anti-war activists prosecuted under “discrediting the army” laws, to anarchists, trade unionists, journalists, socialists, and ordinary people whose lives have been destroyed because they refused to support an imperial war? To the working class, poor, and ethnic minorities forcibly mobilized at alarmingly higher rater than white ethnic Russians in major cities? Are they also simply collateral damage in a story whose only real actors are Washington and NATO because some people keep incorrectly regurgitating Mao’s claims about “primary contradictions?”
If internationalism means anything, it cannot ask people in regions historically occupied, invaded, and colonized to recognize fascism, authoritarianism, and state violence everywhere except in Russia. Nor can it demand solidarity from those resisting these forces at home while denying it to those resisting them across the border. Internationalism that only travels westward, or only points at one empire, is just another way of dividing the people who have the most to gain by finding some pathway to potentially work together.
And while we’re on the topic, we need to address the absolute entitled narcissism at the root of the absurd demand for purity testing that goes into actively talking people out of showing up for Palestine unless they agree to abandon Ukrainians first.
I’ve asked this a hundred times in a hundred different ways and never once have I gotten an honest answer, so here it is again: what is the actual goal of telling people they can’t support Ukraine because they also support Palestine? Who does that convert? What is the material benefit for anyone involved in this? Why is your own terminally online purity testing more important than advocacy for people actually experiencing occupation? What it actually does, every single time, is shrink the number of people willing to donate, advocate, or share information about Gaza, in service of a framework built on distorted history and, often, direct disinformation, and calling it principle. People who are engaging in this are choosing to feel pure rather than be useful, while Palestinians pay the actual price for that luxury of choice.
If someone donates to humanitarian aid in Ukraine or advocates for working class Ukrainians who are simply trying to survive, why should that make their efforts to fundraise for humanitarian aid in Gaza invalid? If someone documents and shares information about Russian war crimes, why should that mean they cannot also shed light on Israeli ones? If someone has built an audience of some kind because they cover Ukraine, why would you rather alienate them or denounce their credibility than persuade them to also care about and be vocal about Palestine? None of these are hypothetical people. They’re often the exact donors, advocates, people willing to engage in significant acts of protest, and journalists this fight cannot afford to lose right now. And yet your childish need to satisfy yourself and reinforce the walls of your revolutionary echo chambers are somehow more important.
I’m genuinely tired of repeating this talking point, but I’ll say it once more anyway: holding this position requires quietly ignoring what Russia actually does with Israel, as opposed to what it says or what its strongest advocates think it stands for. The third largest group of foreign soldiers are Russian, directly behind American and French soldiers. And no, I do not mean people formerly from the Soviet Union as those nationalities are accounted for separately. Behind the statements about Gaza, Moscow has spent years quietly coordinating with Israel’s air force in Syria, giving advance notice of Israeli strikes so its own air defenses don’t shoot Israeli jets down by accident. It has never sanctioned Israel. It has offered Hamas nothing more concrete than photo-ops in Moscow and statements at the UN. Russia is the largest provider of refined fuel to Israel, directly fueling its war machine and genocide of Palestinians. Ask yourself why the worldview you’re demanding everyone to adopt is so contradictory of itself, or why it treats Russia as some natural ally of Palestinian liberation, instead of a government that says whatever is convenient in whatever room it happens to be standing in.
Movements grow by expanding the number of people willing to act. They do not grow by constantly inventing new ideological entrance exams that have no effect or benefit on material reality, and that’s exactly what’s happening here. Who actually benefits from this? It certainly isn’t Palestinians. It certainly isn’t the Ukrainian working class that so many of you often reference and pretend to care about as nothing more than a device to engage in an internet argument. And it certainly isn’t the broader struggle against militarism, authoritarianism, and empire, since every person you push out over that meaningless test is one fewer person available for that actual fight.
So let me be exact about what I am and am not asking for, because I know how easily this gets twisted. I am not asking anyone to uncritically defend NATO as some magical heroic force. I am not asking anyone to pretend the United States hasn’t spent a century running coups, arming death squads, and propping up dictators from Guatemala to Chile to Indonesia whenever that served Washington’s interests at the expense of everyone else. All of it happened and all of it deserves the same sober criticism I’m asking you to aim at Russia, and I’ll keep aiming at it myself, in the same breath, without treating it as leverage. That isn’t really what I’m asking for.
What I’m actually asking is smaller, and I personally think considerably more reasonable. The next time you’re about to explain to someone from this part of the world who empathizes with you and wants to take part in a shared anti-fascist struggle that their fear or even hatred of Russia is just internalized NATO propaganda, or that Ukrainian sovereignty is non-existent as Ukrainians are simply proxies of Western imperialism, stop and notice the dynamic of who’s speaking and who’s being spoken to. Consider the fact that maybe, people who have spent generations living next to an empire likely better understands its methods, actions, and rhetoric than someone who only experiences it through a screen. As a broad example, Finland and Sweden weren’t dragged into NATO by Washington. They walked in themselves, within months, ending decades of careful neutrality because their own citizens decided the risk of staying out had finally outgrown the risk of joining. That was autonomous consent arrived at the hard way, by people who had been paying far closer attention than the ones now explaining their choice back to them. I’ve watched people who have never set foot east of Berlin lecture Ukrainians, Poles, and Balts about self-determination while writing off the actual referendums, the actual movements, the actual polling, and the actual votes coming out of those countries as manufactured consent, because the real numbers are inconvenient for the theory. It’s glaringly obvious that these conclusions are being drawn by someone who has never had to leave a city at 3 in the morning under fire deciding they understand that city, culture, and history better than the people who live in it.
I’m not asking for dramatic apologies or pandering, and I’m not asking you to defer to people in Eastern Europe on everything just because of where they’re from. I’m asking for a pause for thoughtful consideration. Before you tell someone from this part of the world who actually subscribes to leftist (not “liberal”) ideology, that their politics are insufficiently pure, or their fear is manufactured, or their historical memory is just propaganda they haven’t outgrown yet, ask yourself honestly whether you’ve considered what they’ve actually experienced. What shaped these ideas? What would be the point of them clinging to what you believe is misinformation or propaganda? Most people saying these things from a comfortable distance haven’t experienced life with Russia as a neighbor and that’s genuinely fine, most people haven’t. What isn’t fine is refusing to pause and consider context, to keep applying that same nausea-inducing tone of overconfidence, and that specific refusal to read the room and adjust to reality is the thing I’m most tired of.
And if we’re being honest, those of us on this side of the Atlantic can be guilty of making assumptions without considering context and material reality. I see Eastern Europeans sometimes dismiss all Americans as overfed, overprivileged, undereducated, and indifferent whenever they’re personally more concerned about rent, healthcare, wages, or public transit instead of Ukraine. But for most people, politics is local because survival is local. Millions of Americans are trying to keep a roof over their heads, afford medical treatment, pay childcare costs, or simply avoid financial ruin and homelessness from getting sick and needing to see a doctor. We can’t forget that they’re operating inside a system that often fails to provide things many Europeans, including those of us in post-communist countries, now take for granted. Expecting them to treat a war thousands of miles away as the defining issue of their lives misunderstands the pressures shaping their lives just as surely as many Westerners misunderstand the historical experiences shaping those of Eastern Europeans.
And not every person who calls themselves a socialist is a tankie, and not everyone who refuses to see NATO as a force for good without criticism wants Stalin back. There are people in Western leftist spaces who are simply trying to build a world that will provide people with better lives. They want to see a world with accessible healthcare, housing that doesn’t bankrupt people, and something resembling a safety net. Too often they get lumped in, by people from our part of the world, with regimes they’d be horrified to actually live under and never try to rehabilitate. I think it’s easy to build assumptions based on what we see online, and while loud screeching tankies are hard to ignore, I reufse to believe they’re anything resembling a majority.
I don’t have a clean, clear, or satisfying ending for this rant. I’m not naive enough to think an essay most of these people won’t read to the end changes anything, least of all after everything else I’ve already written and watched fall upon deaf ears. But we don’t have time for the echo chambers anymore, on either side. I’m asking for openness. Not agreement. Not conversion. Just enough openness to actually hear each other and consider a last ditch effort to find some way forward before things do (and they will) get worse for all of us.
From an American in Kyiv very glad to be reading these words. What a happy discovery today of your writing. Keep at it, as fruitless as it often feels, maybe just maybe it can make a difference.