The Gift of Defeat

What Russia needs and America won't give

Vasily Vereshchagin, The Apotheosis of War (1871). State Tretyakov Gallery. Vereshchagin traveled with the Russian Army as it conquered much of Central Asia.

By Andrew Chakhoyan

Have you ever been accused of Russophobia? The charge is often leveled at anyone who criticizes Moscow’s wars, exposes Kremlin’s lies, or traces the imperial through-line from the Golden Horde to today’s “Federation.” But to confront the reality of a predatory state is not chauvinism. Russian aggression stems not from genetics but from a vicious historical cycle: Grievance feeds conquest, conquest is followed by denial, denial seeds the next false grievance.

To ask why a society repeatedly spawns mass violence or genocide is not to claim anything innately wrong with the people. But they are raised within a Moscow-centered polity that was never a nation-state in the Western sense. From inception, it functioned as an imperial system—one where political legitimacy rests on expansion, and where violence and impunity have been the only durable inheritance.

Russia’s war on Ukraine has now raged for nearly twelve years, beginning with the seizure of Crimea in 2014 and escalating into a full-scale invasion in 2022. It was born not of a single man’s whim but of grim historical momentum. In this sense, the decision to invade almost made itself. Vladimir Putin was both the driver and the vehicle—animated by the wheels of Russian history.

Blaming it all on a single villain—a wanted war criminal, no less—may feel intuitive, but it strips Russian people of agency and divorces citizenship from responsibility, which is, ironically, the essence of Putinism.

If not Putin alone, and not every Russian, then who is to blame?

The deeper culprit is what might be called Russia’s colonized–colonizer double bind: a political system that perpetually seeks to subjugate others abroad while reproducing submission at home. As Ukrainian philosopher Volodymyr Yermolenko has argued, Russian imperialism rests on imposed sameness—a demand that others, Russians included, exist only as extensions of Moscow. Out of this grows the archetype of the “little person”: a model citizen conditioned to submission yet sustained by messianic fantasies of national greatness.

In a recent lecture, the military historian Sarah Paine, who has spent decades studying imperial warfare, put it plainly: “Russia has posed existential threat to its neighbors forever. There are so many neighbors you have never heard of because they’ve disappeared from the pages of history, courtesy of the Russians.”

A refusal by the Russian people to confront their blood-soaked history sustains a narrative of perpetual martyrdom, in which Moscow casts itself—cynically and incessantly—as the victim of outside forces. Russia co-initiated World War II by signing the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact and its secret protocol to invade, occupy, and partition Poland. Yet in the Kremlin’s canonical narrative, blame rests exclusively with Hitler. Looking at Russian society today through the prism of “the victim rather than the accomplice,” German historian Franziska Davies has observed, is “strongly reminiscent of West German discourses after 1945.”

Russia threatens its neighbors, who then seek to join defensive alliances, but in Moscow’s upside-down world, NATO is somehow responsible for Kremlin’s belligerence. The claimed victimhood of the aggressor is not merely a distortion of reality; it is central to the crime itself.

What Moscow now bills as the “Russian Federation” is in reality a patchwork of subjugated nations—defeated peoples whose languages, cultures, and political autonomy have been, or are being, mercilessly erased. Conquest is staged to intimidate neighbors but, more importantly, to shore up the Kremlin’s internal legitimacy.

As documented by Foreign Policy, Russia’s 2022 mobilization disproportionately conscripted men from the country’s ethnic republics—from Siberian Buryatia to Dagestan and Bashkortostan—a reminder that forced resettlement and compulsory conscription remain the twin tools through which Moscow depletes, disperses, and ultimately dissolves the peoples it rules.

To admit the “Federation” is an empire is to admit it must one day collapse. That idea is unfathomable to Kremlin loyalists, politically taboo to the liberal opposition, and deeply feared in Western capitals, which confuse the inevitable disintegration of the Moscow-centric colonial order with global catastrophe. Yet a unitary Russian state is inseparable from violence—as demonstrated in Ichkeria, Georgia, Syria, Crimea, Donbas, and now the entirety of Ukraine.

The world did not end when the British Empire dissolved. Freedom expanded when fourteen of Russia’s former colonies gained independence in 1991.

When Muscovy, the precursor to modern Russia, transitioned from a vassal of the Khans into a continental empire, it never developed the political architecture of a nation-state. Where Western nations built legitimacy through citizenship and law, Muscovy built cohesion through expansion and coercion. Every nation has a founding myth. Muscovy simply appropriated Ukraine’s—rebranding itself as “Russia” by looting the very name Rusʹ from Kyiv. Many of Russia’s contradictions and social pathologies trace back to this foundational act of historical theft.

Few empires have so brazenly weaponized the language of justice. Russia colonizes in the name of “anti-imperialism,” it “shields” Russian-speakers from harm with missile strikes, and brings “freedom” through occupation. Lies are the glue holding a Frankenstein state together—a convenient stand-in for a national idea it never possessed. The extreme nature of the falsehoods isn’t a flaw but a feature of the Kremlin’s governance model. This is how learned helplessness is produced: governance through humiliation.

Naturally, Russia’s “national interests” diverge sharply from the interests of its people. Moscow maintains a cruel, extractive, self-serving order by offering conquest and fantasies of greatness in exchange for political freedom—and by plundering disproportionate wealth from citizens, especially ethnic minorities in resource-rich regions of the Caucasus, Siberia, or the Urals.

As Nobel laureate Oleksandra Matviychuk has observed, Russia’s long history of state-ordered violence—carried out by ordinary people under bureaucratic command—has created a morass of complicity from which no one fully escapes. From Stalin’s gulags to Bucha, the cycle persists because neither those who command, nor those who obey, nor the society that bears silent witness is ever made to answer.

No single reform or enlightened leader can address such a condition, because a structural disease cannot be made to yield by personal virtue. Empires rarely reform themselves into democracies while they remain empires. Historically, meaningful change is triggered only when the last colonial war is lost. This creates the precondition for freedom among the oppressed, and, paradoxically, for moral regeneration among the former oppressors.

As historian Timothy Snyder points out: “Defeating Russia is the best thing we could do for Russia.” Until such a reckoning arrives, Moscow will continue to disempower its internal nations, attack its neighbors, and generate policies that outside observers will endlessly misread as ideological aberrations rather than imperial reflex.

“Putin is not the cause of Russia being a terrorist state; he is the result,” Ukrainian filmmaker Nariman Aliev has observed. The self-colonization paradox—where tormentors are also tormented—may help explain Russia’s pervasive political passivity. But explanation is not exculpation. Structural coercion may condition submission, yet moral responsibility still exists along a gradient. Those who design the violence, those who execute it, and those who normalize it all participate differently—but participate nonetheless.

The Free World must therefore commit not merely to Ukrainian survival, but to Ukrainian victory—and to Russia’s unambiguous defeat. Not humiliation for its own sake, but the irreversible loss of imperial capacity: defeat on the battlefield, the end of colonial occupation, the collapse of coercive security absolutism, and the forced confrontation with historical truth.

Peace through strength is not merely a slogan in this context. It is the only remaining path—for Ukraine’s freedom, for Europe’s security, and for the long-deferred possibility of a post-imperial, democratic future in Russia itself.

Andrew Chakhoyan is an Academic Director at the University of Amsterdam and a former US government official at the Millennium Challenge Corporation. A Ukrainian-American, he studied at Harvard Kennedy School and Donetsk State Technical University.