The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

Putin’s brutal war of blatant aggression on Ukraine continues, but it seems to be entering a new phase.  In this Perspective, I want to summarize what this new phase looks like and comment on the pathetic position of the US in this struggle.

First, the actual war in Ukraine:

• Ukraine is “holding some cards. The European Union is united behind it. There is no prospect of America pushing for an entirely pro-Russian settlement of the sort raised at last year’s summit in Anchorage (‘Alaska is dead,’ a senior official in Kyiv says with a smile). But it would be fantasy to hope for anything like a wider peace or ceasefire. Mr. Putin will not countenance pausing his assault before next spring, at the soonest.”
• “Ukraine will fight on and will continue to inflict enormous pain on Russia. On the front line and in the areas behind it, arguably it has the upper hand. The battle for territory is not static, but it is clearly not progressing to Putin’s liking—a net gain of perhaps 100 square kilometers this year, or just 0.017% of Ukraine’s pre-2014 territory. A Ukrainian source puts confirmed Russian dead at 600,000, and estimates Ukraine is killing 22,000-23,000 Russians each month. Add the seriously wounded, and Russian losses are probably running above the current recruitment rates of 30,000-31,000. (Ukrainian sources also fear that reinforcements from North Korea are on the way.)
• “The drone wars: Now the enemy forces are building equivalent offensive operations of their own. Piloted drones at this range most often rely on a satellite-based data connection. For Ukraine, it is Starlink. Troublingly, Russia has developed local jamming techniques and is rushing to establish a copycat constellation called Rassvet. In the meantime Russia is using a “mesh” network of radio relays between drones. They base it around long-range Geran drones, more commonly called the Shahed, after their Iranian-designed parent. These relays can reach only about 200km into Ukrainian air space, but within that range piloted drones can hunt moving targets, not just home in on pre-set co-ordinates . . . Two further dismaying developments are helping Russia along. The first is that old propeller-driven Shaheds are being replaced by ones powered by jet engines, probably imported from China. Ukraine’s ground-based defenses—mostly machineguns and shoulder-fired missiles—can barely cope with such swifter, higher-flying assailants. Fighter aircraft, such as Ukraine’s F-16s and MiG-29s, can destroy them, but they lack ammunition or, being older second-hand models, are often abroad for expert maintenance. That leaves ground-based interceptors, but Ukraine lacks the sort to do the job . . . The second development is Russia speeding up its production of ballistic missiles. By one estimate it can launch over 100 of all types every month. Ukraine has little answer, especially given its very low stocks of American Patriot interceptors.”
• Winter is coming: “In some respects, Ukraine is better prepared than it has ever been to cope with the Russian onslaught. Its energy infrastructure, long a favored target for Russia, has been hardened with Western help. Even so, Russian strikes will occasionally cause huge power cuts, probably more than last year. Several large cities, especially Kyiv, are especially vulnerable since they depend on large central-heating plants that are impossible to protect fully. If, as last year, local power generation is destroyed, Kyiv could become an electrical island, dependent on a handful of fragile choke points. Last winter, whole districts survived weeks in freezing temperatures after Russia destroyed nearby heating plants. This year, the fear is also that food, water and especially sewerage will be messed up.”

Second, Putin’s expansion of the war into Europe:

Putin’s war of sabotage against Europe has escalated sufficiently that on September 18th Emmanuel Macron, France’s president, summoned French party leaders and presidential candidates for a briefing on the threat of civilian casualties. “No one is safe,” Macron told them, according to Le Monde, a daily. The Russians, he said, aim to “break our support for the Ukrainians.” A day earlier Donald Tusk, Poland’s prime minister, had cited intelligence that Russia intended to hit countries supporting Ukraine with drones or missiles, then claim the strikes were accidental. Russia wanted to “paralyze” NATO, he said, by testing Article 5 of its treaty, which pledges that an attack on one will be treated as an attack on all. A tepid response would cast doubt on that commitment.

The Economist reports that “Russia has been staging deniable provocations against European countries for many years. Since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 they have increased. There have been incursions by reconnaissance drones, hacking, arson, parcel bombs targeting cargo flights and plots to kill executives of European arms firms. In recent months the pace appears to have risen again. The Russian operations have three main goals, according to security officials: trying to coerce European countries into halting their support for Ukraine; raising the costs of providing that support; and attempting to make NATO look powerless. ‘It feels like we are moving from a series of grey-zone incidents into a continuous campaign,’ says Andrew Thomson, a British former diplomat who is now at Monarch, a German security firm . . . [Recently,] Italian jets on a NATO mission shot down an explosives-laden drone that entered Lithuania from Belarus, and others intercepted two Russian fighter jets that violated NATO air space. In the same week, Russian drones struck a train in Ukraine within 2km of a Polish border crossing, soon after Boris Johnson, a British former prime minister, had travelled through. In the Netherlands the railway network was recently disrupted by the coordinated placement of pipes on tracks. More significantly, in August an explosive-laden drone was flown into a cargo plane used to transport weapons for Ukraine at Germany’s Leipzig-Halle airport, though it failed to detonate. Germany blamed Russia for the attack and closed a Russian cultural center in retaliation.”

Third, Putin is using Soviet-style indoctrination in schools as a part of his war effort against Ukraine.

The Economist reports on Putin’s “’Lesson of Courage,’ a regular event in classrooms across the country since Russia invaded Ukraine. The lessons are part of a massive program of indoctrination: Vladimir Putin calls the battle for children’s minds a ‘new front.’ ‘Patriotic education’ has entered the curricula of schools and universities. On September 1st it was introduced in kindergartens. ‘A sovereign education system . . . is an absolutely fundamental matter,’  Putin declared in 2023. Making education ‘sovereign’ has meant rolling back the autonomy Russian schools enjoyed after the Soviet Union collapsed. In 2022 Putin signed a law mandating a ‘federal program of upbringing,’ so that citizens “know and respect Russia’s . . . military exploits and labor achievements.’ Each week pupils of all ages gather for ‘Conversations about Important Things.’  Scripts are assigned by the Ministry of Education. Most concern Russian scientists, musicians, nature and sport. But about 10% are military, including ‘Russia: A Nation of Victors’ and ‘The Reunification of Crimea with Russia.’”

Finally, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow, has just published War: Beyond the Visible Causes and Consequences, doubling down on his campaign to justify in religious terms Russia’s war of extermination against Ukraine. Editorially, the Wall Street Journal details that Krill’s book, issued by the official publishing house of the Moscow patriarchate, “casts Vladimir Putin’s war as a salvific action: a duty to God and a Russian service to a corrupt world. Patriarch Kirill lurched into heresy when he promised Russian soldiers immediate entrance into heaven, their sins forgiven, if they die in Mr. Putin’s ‘holy war.’ Now Patriarch Kirill asserts the ‘great responsibility’ of the Russian people is to win the war because ‘our earthly vocation is to be warriors of the Lord, to resist evil.’ God has determined the war’s outcome, he writes, ‘and victory belongs to those who stand on the side of the light.’”

“Russian Orthodoxy’s leaders are instruments of Russian state power, not people with whom serious theological conversation is possible. The patriarchate of Moscow does more than underwrite the Kremlin’s brutal aggression against Ukraine. As former patriarchate official Sergei Chapnin documents in his book Religious Communities Under Pressure, the Russian Orthodox Church persecutes and disowns any of its clergy and laity who oppose the war on Ukraine. Chapnin warned a decade ago that Patriarch Kirill was transforming Russian Orthodoxy into a political ideology and later predicted that he would valorize a future Russian war against Ukraine in religious language. Now he demonstrates that the Moscow patriarchate’s campaign of repression, which included the death of a nondenominational antiwar protester in a penal colony, targets any religious believer who challenges Kremlin policy and practice.”

In conclusion, President Trump is keen to blame Ukraine’s attacks on Russia (rather than his war in Iran) for high global prices of diesel. He refuses to criticize or put any kind of significant pressure on Putin, who is a brutal, horrific dictator. Our president should be ashamed of himself at how he leads on this most significant global crisis.

How should we think about the situation in Ukraine and Trump’s efforts to end the Ukraine war, apparently on Russia’s terms?  Anne Applebaum argues that “For eight decades, America’s alliances with other democracies have been the bedrock of American foreign policy, trade policy, and cultural influence. American investments in allies’ security helped keep the peace in formerly unstable parts of the world, allowing democratic societies from Germany to Japan to prosper, by preventing predatory autocracies from destroying them. We prospered too. Thanks to its allies, the U.S. obtained unprecedented political and economic influence in Europe and Asia, and unprecedented power everywhere else.  The Trump administration is now bringing the post–World War II era to an end.”

Columnist and conservative advocate George F. Will puts all of this in historical context.  He writes, “The road to war in 1939 was paved with spurious ‘realisms.’ Today, the road to a wider war is being paved by U.S. leaders’ ignorance of history, and by nonsense from people who are paid to make sense of things.”  He takes us back to 1938, which has clear echoes of what is happening today in Europe:  In 1938, the leaders of four nations—Germany, Italy, France, Britain—settled the fate of a fifth, Czechoslovakia. “Realism” dictated its dismemberment.  A Czech official argued: “The Germans will be able to cut our country in half within a day.” British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s aide: “I am not responsible for the realities of geography. . . . Ninety percent of your country will remain intact and you will not be invaded.”

In 1938, hours before Chamberlain signed the Munich agreement, an aide told him that Hitler “plans a war of conquest to gain living space for the German people.” Hitler had said so. Chamberlain: “You need to learn a few lessons in political reality.” Realities such as the reluctance of democratic publics to face unpleasant realities. Particularly for the benefit of (as Chamberlain had described the Czechs) people in “a faraway country,” “of whom we know nothing.” We know Putin’s thinking about who should be Russians, and what Russia should be. He has told us.  Trump says he does not care “much about anything” other than “peace.” “Peace for our time,” Chamberlain said triumphantly “when he landed in London from Munich. Peace lasted 336 days, until Sept. 1, 1939, the first of the European war’s 2,077 days.”

It has been said that the one thing we learn from history is that we don’t learn anything from history.  That seems most appropriate to apply to the Trump administration.

See The Economist (19 September 2026), pp. 16-18; (12 September 2026), p. 44; (26 September 2026), pp. 43-44; Wall Street Journal editorial (7 August 2026); George F. Will in the Washington Post (17 February 2025); Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic Daily (13 February 2025.