Putin's Russia Will Be No Exception
- Garry Kasparov
- 1.09.2026, 10:53
Ukraine's victory is not merely a matter of the outcome of a single war.
Putin’s Russia is the reincarnation of absolute evil, having absorbed all the bloodiest and most inhumane elements spawned by the dictatorships of the past—from Stalinism to fascism. It is a country with a mad dictator and a completely deranged public consciousness. The overwhelming majority of Russian “society” sees no problem whatsoever in either the endless war or the killings their country commits every day, and there are no signs that change is possible within Russia today. The usual parallel with Nazi Germany does not hold true for Putin’s Russia. There, despite the monstrous scale of the terror, there were a huge number of people who consciously chose to resist the regime, paying for it with their freedom and their lives. There is nothing comparable in scale in Putin’s Russia today.
Against this backdrop, the fuss made by a segment of the Russian émigré community is particularly telling. It reveals both the caliber of these people and their inability to take a basic, universal human stance. How is it possible to continue associating oneself in any way with what is happening in the fascist Reich? How is it even possible, against the backdrop of the relentless bombing of Ukrainian cities and the daily loss of life, to stammer about some kind of “Smart Voting,” which is, in essence, a form of solidarity with Russian crimes?
We could discuss endlessly the reforms you supposedly plan to implement once you arrive there on the “first flight.” The only problem is that you won’t be flying anywhere—neither on the first flight nor the second—and you won’t be carrying out any reforms. Because before the conditions for transformation even emerge in Russia, this regime must collapse and the collective consciousness—which today is thoroughly steeped in war—must change.
Our country’s entire history shows that real change in Russia has only become possible after severe geopolitical defeats, when people’s notions of the right to impose their will on others crumbled. Putin’s Russia will be no exception. And only a Ukrainian victory—which would mean the defeat of Putin’s Russia and the collapse of its imperial project—can give us such a historic opportunity.
That is precisely why Ukraine’s victory is not merely a matter of the outcome of a single war. It is the victory of free people over evil and barbarism, the victory of those values that are unconditional for any decent person and cannot be up for debate. Therefore, the question “Are you for Ukraine’s victory or not?” is a fundamental dividing line. It is a question of which side a person is on and whether they share the fundamental principles upon which the free world is built. Any attempt to blur this line, to introduce an element of political maneuvering, or to find excuses and loopholes places a person on the other side of the moral boundary that separates the world of normal, free people from the world of dictatorship, war, and violence.
Garry Kasparov, Telegram