Responding to: Why U.S. Presidents Misjudge Putin — Barton Swaim · 2026-06-05

What the Piece Argues

The source opinion piece argues that U.S. presidents repeatedly misjudge Vladimir Putin because they assume he operates as a Western liberal-democratic “rational actor” — someone who calculates costs and benefits, responds to battlefield realities, and can be brought to the negotiating table by pressure or exhaustion. Drawing on a new Dutch book by Beatrice de Graaf and Niels Drost, the piece contends that Putin has, over a quarter-century of rule, constructed a worldview rooted in czarist-imperial nostalgia, Eastern Orthodox political theology, and an apocalyptic self-conception as the katechon — the biblical restrainer of evil. From this vantage, the invasion of Ukraine is a holy war, borders are expressions of cultural identity rather than measurable interests, and the global order is a field of competing empires rather than autonomous nation-states. The piece concludes that expecting Putin to cut his losses and negotiate in response to military or economic setbacks is a category error: a man who sees himself as empowered by God to restrain satanic influence will not behave according to Western rational-actor models.

Receipts

The move is to dress up a gangster’s land‑grab as an exotic clash of civilizations so that the criminal looks inscrutable and the victim looks naïve.

  • The framing wants you to believe: Putin is driven by a deep, half‑mystical Orthodox mission to restore the Russian empire, and Western leaders’ failure to grasp this quasi‑religious worldview is why diplomacy keeps failing. The war is a tragedy of cross‑cultural misunderstanding, not a crime.
  • What’s really going on:
    • Mechanism: Putin is a former KGB officer running a petro‑state kleptocracy; the invasion was preceded by written secular demands for NATO withdrawal, not a theological manifesto.
    • Beneficiary: Putin’s inner circle launders billions through offshore accounts exposed by the Pandora Papers (ICIJ, 2021) and turns permanent war into a profit center for energy, defense, and patronage.
    • Omitted Fact: The “holy war” language is a post‑hoc propaganda veneer; the Kremlin’s own 2021 draft treaties contain no religious or czarist language, only conventional great‑power demands.

The DEFCON Ladder

DEFCON 5 — Polite Reframe

When to use: with a persuadable moderate, a good‑faith family member who read the piece and is genuinely perplexed.

Consider a young mother in Kharkiv. On a February morning in 2022, she carried her two children into the metro station while the building above them shook. She is not a geopolitical analyst, but she knows the difference between an explosion and a misunderstanding. She is not interested in whether the man who ordered the bomb believes he is a czar or a commando. She knows only that her apartment is rubble and her husband was killed by a missile fired from Russian soil.

We can debate historical worldviews until the eschatology comes home, but the receipts are simpler. Putin’s own government demanded, in writing, that NATO withdraw its forces from Eastern Europe and that Ukraine be permanently neutralized. Those demands were not phrased in church Slavonic. They were drafted by diplomats, in secular diplomatic language, and they listed strategic objectives: territory, buffer states, and power. The holy czar routine came later, when the bodies started piling up and the propaganda needed a fresh coat of paint.

The op‑ed wants you to believe that Putin can’t negotiate because his soul belongs to Nicholas I. But the real obstacle to negotiation is that Putin benefits from permanent war—it silences the opposition, enriches his defense contractors, and turns attention away from the billions his circle has stashed in Dubai and Cyprus. That is not a mystery. It is a business model. And you don’t need a degree in Russian history to see that the man who sent mercenaries to kill civilians in Bucha is not an inscrutable mystic. He is a predator who knows exactly what he is doing.

What we are asking for—what the Kharkiv mother is asking for—is not a lecture on the “epistemic rationality” of empire. It is for the West to stop pretending that a land‑grab becomes a spiritual crisis when the land‑grabber crosses himself in front of a camera. We are Christians, too. We feed, clothe, and heal the people the bombs hit. That is what a real holy mission looks like.

DEFCON 4 — Firm Moral Superiority

When to use: with an identity‑protective mixed‑faith audience, an op‑ed reader who thinks the piece is “interesting” rather than obscene.

The evening after the first Grad rockets hit Mariupol, doctors in a basement delivered a baby by the light of a cellphone. The mother had been pulled from a maternity hospital that Russian aircraft had bombed a week earlier. The photograph of that wrecked hospital traveled around the world. Vladimir Putin’s foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, called it “fake news.”

That is the regime whose spiritual longings the Journal wants you to contemplate. Not the body bags, not the filtration camps, not the more than 13,800 verified civilian deaths (with the true toll certainly far higher)—but the statues of Alexander I and the epiphany bathing.

Here is the distributional truth the op‑ed buries under a pile of Romanov nostalgia. The war has one primary beneficiary: the tight circle of former KGB apparatchiks, energy oligarchs, and defense magnates who control Russia’s state assets. For them, the war is a pure profit center: oil and gas prices spiked, defense contracts ballooned, and the offshore accounts revealed by the Pandora Papers grew fatter. The costs fall on Ukrainian families and on the hundreds of thousands of Russian conscripts who are being fed into a meat grinder for a cause their commanders don’t even bother to frame in religious terms. The official Russian justification for the war, repeated daily on state television, is “denazification”—a secular lie so thin it would embarrass a Soviet propagandist. Not once, in the 2021 ultimatum the Kremlin handed to Washington, did the words “holy war” appear. The demand was for spheres of influence, and the language was that of a protection racket.

The Journal’s piece relies on the work of a historian who has counted how many statues Putin erected and how many speeches he gave. That is a worthwhile academic exercise, but it is not a substitute for looking at what the man actually does. A man who assassinates political opponents with nerve agents, who orders the kidnapping of Ukrainian children, and who shells nuclear power plants has not put himself beyond rational analysis; he has put himself beyond the reach of a polite foreign‑policy seminar. The technique logicians call ignoratio elenchi—ignoring the issue at hand—is the entire structure of the argument. We are asked to talk about czarist iconography while the man who ordered the slaughter is meeting with his generals to discuss which city to flatten next.

Dr. King, at Riverside Church in April 1967, warned his own government that it could not “speak of peace” if it was simultaneously “raining down fire on a hapless people.” The same warning applies to the columnists who ask us to consider a tyrant’s inner life while the cities he is destroying are still on fire. The moral task is not to decode Putin’s soul. It is to stop his bullets.

By any means necessary—and in this case, the means are the weapons and sanctions and legal architecture that the democratic world has at its disposal—we will defend the people who are being murdered until the murder stops. That is not Western naïveté. That is the first duty of every government that pretends to care about human life.

DEFCON 3 — Mockery and Ridicule

When to use: for the bystander scrolling Twitter, the friend who needs to see how absurd the “czarist dream” framing really is.

Oh, we get it now. The bombs falling on the maternity ward, the mass graves in Izium, the Russian soldiers filming themselves torturing civilians—none of that was geopolitics. It was theology. Vladimir Putin wasn’t seizing a warm‑water port; he was reclaiming the baptismal font of St. Vladimir, circa the year 1000. He didn’t pocket a few hundred million dollars from Gazprom; he was re‑sacralizing the Third Rome. The man dips himself in ice water once a year and the Journal invites us to rethink the entire Western rational‑actor model.

Brenda in Detroit feeds her two kids on four hundred dollars a month of SNAP, and Barton Swaim thinks the real victim of American shortsightedness is the billionaire ex‑spy who thinks he’s Ivan the Terrible’s understudy. The Journal wants you to believe that Putin’s vast spiritual mission is so subtle that only two Dutch historians and one opinion‑page writer have managed to decode it—while the entire rest of the planet has been busy noticing the war crimes.

Let’s do the math. Putin’s inner circle, by the Pandora Papers’ accounting, has stashed vast offshore wealth. His palatial Black Sea residence, exposed by Alexei Navalny’s team, is larger than the entire historic district of St. Petersburg. He didn’t need a holy war to get those things. He needed a compliant judiciary, a controlled media, and a steady stream of oil revenue. The statues are the set dressing. The money is the plot.

And the Journal plays along: “He sees the world as a place of big empires.” Of course he does. So did Al Capone, if we replaced “empire” with “territory.” The question isn’t whether Putin views the world in czarist terms; it’s whether we are going to let a newspaper that charges a subscription fee sell us the proposition that a mass murderer should be understood through his interior decorating choices. The op‑ed is the rhetorical equivalent of a sommelier describing the terroir of a poison. It doesn’t matter how well the notes are described; the glass is still full of cyanide.

DEFCON 2 — Aggressive Villainization

When to use: when the “both‑sides” moderates need to be shown exactly whose water they are carrying.

Barton Swaim has written a defense attorney’s brief for a war criminal. He just doesn’t know it—or he knows it and does it anyway. The brief argues that Vladimir Putin cannot be held accountable in the normal way because his mind operates on a different plane of reality, one where the categories of “aggression” and “sovereignty” are replaced by “empire” and “holy mission.” That is the exact argument every imperial apologist has made since the Duke of Alba told the Dutch that burning heretics was an act of love.

Let us be plain. The man Swaim describes as a “reimbodied czar” is a killer. His forces have committed documented acts of torture, rape, and summary execution in Bucha, Irpin, and a hundred other towns. His regime has abducted tens of thousands of Ukrainian children and adopted them into Russian families, a crime the International Criminal Court has formally indicted him for. The “epistemic rationality” Swaim’s Dutch historian invokes is just the intellectual alibi for a regime that has outperformed every twentieth‑century fascist state in its willingness to shell civilian neighborhoods.

Swaim writes that “the Kremlin’s intentions remain ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma.’” No. The intentions are legible. They are legible in the crater where a theater in Mariupol stood, where the word “CHILDREN” had been painted on the pavement in letters visible from the air. They are legible in the bodies of the men and women found with their hands bound behind their backs. The only riddle is why a major American newspaper keeps paying people to translate gangster logic into a seminar on comparative mysticism.

Here is the mirror. Swaim’s piece is structurally identical to the arguments that were made about Japanese militarists in the 1930s—that the West couldn’t possibly understand the Bushido code, that the emperor was divine, that the attack on Pearl Harbor was a tragic consequence of cross‑cultural incomprehension. That argument was propaganda then, and it is propaganda now. The people who run Moscow’s oil fields and weapons plants do not give a damn about the holiness of the moment. They give a damn about whether their yachts will be seized in Monaco. The op‑ed performs the function of a money launderer: it takes the dirty cash of expansionist violence and washes it through the bleaches of “historical context” until it comes out looking like a noble, doomed spiritual quest.

We name the technique. When a writer ignores the overwhelming documentary record of material self‑interest and instead spins a narrative of cultural mysticism, rhetoricians call that manufactured controversy. The Journal is manufacturing a controversy about Putin’s soul in order to avoid the settled fact that his soul is for sale to the highest bidder—and that the Biden administration, and the Trump administration before it, and every European government that ever signed a gas contract with Gazprom, knew exactly what they were buying.

DEFCON 1 — Nuclear Satire

When to use: against bad‑faith actors who weaponize intellectualism to defend carnage.

Gather round, ladies and gentlemen, and behold Barton Swaim’s Magic Lantern Show of Geopolitical Exoneration. In this tent, Vladimir Putin is not a KGB alumnus who figured out how to convert an energy monopoly into a personal empire. No: he is a tragic, misunderstood figure, a Greek Orthodox Hamlet in a world of prose. Every massacre he orders is just another stanza in a centuries‑old Russian poem that our tiny Western minds can’t scan.

The Journal has discovered that Putin erects a lot of statues. Statues! The man has erected so many statues that two Dutch academics had to write a whole book about it. Never mind that the statues are mass‑produced in the same Soviet‑era foundries that used to churn out Lenin busts. The important thing is that a priest sprinkled holy water on them. So the bombs—those are holy bombs. The mass graves—holy mass graves. The torture chambers—holy waterboarding, sprinkled with the same sanctified liquid.

Do you know what else Putin’s regime erected in the last quarter‑century? An offshore financial system so elaborate that it required the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists to spend two years untangling it. The Journal is perfectly capable of running stories about hidden wealth; they just don’t run them when the wealth belongs to the man they’re spinning as Rasputin 2.0. Instead we get: “Putin’s outlook has evolved… into a spiritual amalgam every bit as eschatological as that of Iran’s mullahs.” Translation: please, please don’t look at the bank accounts. Look at the icons. The icons are so much more photogenic.

When a serial killer tells the court he was possessed by a demon, we don’t schedule a conference on comparative demonology. We lock him up. But when a serial invader tells the op‑ed page he’s the new Nicholas I, the op‑ed page hires a book reviewer to explain why he means it. What would the Journal say if a Mexican cartel boss announced he was the reincarnation of Montezuma and started carving out territory from Texas? Would they run a 1,500‑word essay on the spiritual underpinnings of Aztec revivalism, or would they notice the severed heads?

Swaim ends with a flourish: “A reimbodied czar, a man empowered by God to restrain evil and protect Russia from satanic influence, probably won’t conform to expectations.” That is beautiful. That is the closing line of a nineteenth‑century novel. It is also the closing line of a con man’s pitch. The only evil being restrained here is the truth. The only satanic influence is the one that tells a newspaper to publish fantasy in the name of analysis while the children the fantasy excuses are still being pulled from the rubble.

DEFCON 1+ — Prophetic Indictment

When to use: when the reader needs to feel the moral weight of the canon against the lies.

Let the prophet speak. Jeremiah stood in the court of the temple and said to those who called the house of the Lord a sanctuary, “Will you steal and murder, commit adultery and perjury, and then come and stand before me in this house, which bears my Name, and say, ‘We are safe’—safe to do all these detestable things?” The Journal has turned its opinion section into that temple, and the detestable thing it shelters is the rationalization of mass killing under the vestments of historical curiosity. It is the same sin the prophets named: whitewash on a wall that will not hold.

Putin is not a katechon. He is a king of the bloody city Ezekiel described, the prince who builds his house on unrighteousness and his upper rooms on injustice. The op‑ed’s language is the language of the court historian who explains that the emperor’s appetite for territory is actually a metaphysical hunger, and that the bodies piled outside the gate are just the regrettable side‑cost of a grand civilizational narrative. We have heard this language before. It was spoken by the priests who blessed the conquistadors’ swords. It was spoken by the bishops who gave Hitler’s armies their “Gott mit uns” belt buckles. It is spoken now, in a softer form, by a columnist who thinks he is doing intellectual work but is in fact doing the work of obfuscation for a regime whose hands are so full of blood that the prophet’s imagery is not hyperbole.

“They have sown the wind, and they shall reap the whirlwind,” Hosea wrote. The wind the Journal sows is the wind of moral equivalence: Putin is a little eccentric, a little hard to understand, but not a criminal in the ordinary sense—just a man with a different “epistemic rationality.” What it will reap is not a whirlwind of divine retribution but something more mundane: more dead Ukrainians, more dead Russian conscripts, more years of a war that could have been stopped if the world’s most powerful newspaper had decided to call a gangster a gangster instead of calling him a “reimbodied czar.”

Dr. King, in his eulogy for the four children killed in the Birmingham church bombing, refused the limited frame of individual perpetrators. The deeper inquiry, he said, is into the system, the way of life, the philosophy that produced the murderers. The Journal is not producing the murderers. But it is producing the philosophy that excuses them. That philosophy will sit on the page, preserved in the archive, long after the last statue of Peter the Great has been toppled and the last oligarch’s yacht has been seized. It is the wormwood in the cup of a nation that has forgotten how to blush.

Amos cried out: “Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream.” Roll down, then, on the editorial board that green‑lit a puff piece on a war criminal. Roll down on the writer who lent his byline to a narrative that launders genocide into a graduate seminar. Roll down until the water rises high enough that the stained‑glass window the Journal has erected around Putin shatters under the pressure of the truth it was built to hold back. That will be the day the op‑ed page recovers its soul. Count on the prophets: that day will cost it everything it has.

(One expletive, calibrated below the apex: The “holiness” of the moment Swaim rhapsodizes about is a goddamn lie, and the priests who sprinkle holy water on the statues of mass murderers will answer for it in a court higher than any on earth.)

DEFCON 1++ — Profane Scorched‑Earth

When to use: when the reader needs to hear the full fury, no brakes, no Sunday‑school vocabulary.

What Barton Swaim did in this op‑ed is not complicated. He took a fucking torturer’s expense ledger and read it aloud as if it were a prayer book. He handed the Wall Street Journal a piece that performs the exact service a money launderer performs for a cartel—it washes the cash. The cash is a war of aggression, and the wash cycle is czarist iconography. That is the mechanism, and it is a goddamn obscenity.

You want to talk about evil? Evil is paying a columnist to explain that the man who kidnapped Ukrainian children and sent them to re‑education camps is just playing out a centuries‑old Russian drama that our tiny Western minds can’t comprehend. Evil is the fucking byline under the headline, because the byline knows exactly what it is doing. The “holy war” frame is a rhetorical shroud, and the Journal is holding one end of it while Putin’s butchers wrap the bodies.

Swaim quotes his Dutch historian: “If someone aligns his deeds with his words for the past 26 years, you may properly infer that he attaches some meaning to the words.” What the fuck does that even mean? The deeds are the torture chambers. The deeds are the mass graves in the pine forests. Align those deeds with the words “holy war” and you aren’t doing history—you’re doing PR for a psychopath. You are taking the blood‑soaked reality of a criminal enterprise and airbrushing it with the iconography of the Orthodox Church until it looks like a Netflix series about the Romanovs. That is a fucking academic exercise to whitewash a torturer’s ledger, and the Journal ran it as analysis.

Let us talk about what the Journal left out. The Pandora Papers, which documented that Putin’s closest associates have stashed vast offshore wealth—money stolen from the Russian people while the “czar” was commissioning statues of his favorite dead monarchs. The December 2021 treaty drafts that demanded NATO’s dismemberment, which is not a mystical koan but a gangster’s ultimatum. The fact that Patriarch Kirill, the man sprinkling the holy water, wears a $30,000 watch and owns a luxury apartment the Russian Orthodox Church bought for him. This is not a holy kingdom. This is a fucking mob, and the Journal is the consigliere in the corner booth who tells the press his boss is just a little misunderstood.

I am sick of reading op‑eds that treat mass murder as a cultural misunderstanding. I am sick of people who have never heard a Grad rocket in their lives lecturing the rest of us about how the guy who fired it is in touch with a deeper reality. That deeper reality is that Putin is a coward who poisons his enemies with nerve agents because he’s too afraid to face them in a fair trial. He is a coward who hides in a palace while he sends conscripts to die in the mud. He is a coward who wraps his cowardice in a shroud of “holiness” and counts on the Wall Street Journal to carry the shroud for him.

The worst thing that can happen to a piece of propaganda is for someone to shine a light on it and say, out loud, what it is. This piece is propaganda. It is propaganda for a war criminal. It will be in the Journal’s archive forever, and every future historian who studies how the American establishment soft‑pedaled genocide will find it, and they will know exactly what kind of people wrote it and exactly what kind of people published it.

Putin’s war is not a holy war. It is a holy fucking shitshow of greed and incompetence and cruelty, and the only appropriate response from a newspaper that calls itself a journal of business and finance is to call the goddamn thing by its goddamn name: a crime. Not an enigma. Not a riddle. A crime. And the people who write apologias for it are accessories.

The Deeper Breakdown

The cui‑bono finding is straightforward. The talking point Swaim advances—that Putin’s behavior is incomprehensible unless you understand his mystical czarist worldview—benefits exactly one party: Vladimir Putin’s regime. By framing the war as a cultural‑religious misunderstanding, the op‑ed deflects attention from the material interests that drive it and from the documentary record of those interests. The beneficiaries of the war include: the inner circle of siloviki and oligarchs who control Russia’s energy, defense, and extractive industries; the military command that draws expanded budgets; and Putin himself, whose domestic grip tightens when the country is at war. The cost‑bearers are the Ukrainian civilians whose cities are destroyed and the hundreds of thousands of Russian conscripts used as disposable infantry.

The load‑bearing receipts:

  • The conflict is about secular strategic goals, not holy war. The Russian Federation’s “draft treaties” presented to NATO and the United States in December 2021 demanded a written guarantee that Ukraine would never join NATO and that NATO forces would withdraw from Eastern Europe. The documents, formally titled “Treaty between the United States of America and the Russian Federation on Security Guarantees” and “Agreement on Measures to Ensure the Security of the Russian Federation and Member States of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization,” contain no religious or czarist language. They are conventional great‑power security demands. (Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, published 17 December 2021.)

  • Putin’s regime is a documented kleptocracy, not a spiritual mission. The Pandora Papers investigation (International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, October 2021) exposed how associates of Putin have moved billions of dollars through offshore shell companies. Key figures include Svetlana Krivonogikh (who, per Russian media, became wealthy after a relationship with Putin) and Konstantin Ernst (head of state‑run Channel One), both explicitly named in ICIJ reporting. The architectural scale of the Black Sea palace revealed by Alexei Navalny’s Anti‑Corruption Foundation in 2021 further underscores that the Kremlin is a financial operation, not a monastic one.

  • The “holy war” justification is a post‑hoc propaganda adjustment. The official Russian justification for the invasion, repeated by state media and ambassadors for months, was “denazification” and “demilitarization” of Ukraine. Patriarch Kirill’s sermon on 6 March 2022, calling the war a struggle against “gay parades,” was mocked by secular war supporters inside Russia and was clearly an effort to inject an Orthodox‑nationalist frame after the initial “special military operation” failed to produce a quick victory. Academic research on Kremlin propaganda, including the work of Jade McGlynn and others, documents that the eschatological framing has intensified only as the conflict has bogged down, a pattern consistent with regime legitimation under strain, not with a long‑held mystical worldview that determined the decision to invade.

  • The op‑ed’s own source undercuts the claim of a fixed worldview. Beatrice de Graaf’s research reportedly shows that Putin’s public references to czars and Orthodoxy changed dramatically after 2011 and again after 2014—that is, in response to domestic protests and the Maidan revolution. A “worldview” that shifts opportunistically in reaction to political threats is not a fixed spiritual compass; it is a propaganda instrument.

One key piece of missing information: we do not have direct, verifiable access to Putin’s private beliefs. The op‑ed itself concedes that its central claim rests on an inference from public speeches. The historical record strongly suggests that the speeches are calibrated for domestic political consumption, but a definitive “smoking gun” of cynical intent is, by the nature of the question, unavailable. What is available is the massive asymmetrical weight of documented material interest and secular strategic demand, which together make the mystical‑worldview explanation a thin justification for an act of aggression that the West understood perfectly well—Kyiv was three days from falling before ordinary Ukrainians with ordinary Soviet‑era rifles stopped the convoy. That didn’t happen because the defenders understood Putin’s soul. It happened because they understood his tanks.