Extremists in Europe

Even some of my own colleagues repeat his idiotic ideas, preferring to believe an autocrat's fabrications over the United Nations, the WHO or any independent media that can see how Putin's Russia is using lies and threats.

In Mariupol, Putin is recreating the hell he made before in Syria and Chechnya

Who are Russia's remaining allies in the world? Which countries voted with Putin at the UN? In the European Union, his friends coincide precisely with right-wing extremists, like Viktor Orbán, who would not allow arms for Ukraine to pass through Hungary. They are the likes of Italy's Matteo Salvini, French politicians Éric Zemmour and Marine Le Pen, and Spain's Santiago Abascal — the denizens of the sordid, anti-European world of right-wing extremism.

And his allies in the Americas? They're also of the extreme Right: Trump called him a genius. In Brazil, Bolsonaro is awed. Then there are the tin-pot dictators who claim to be socialists, in Venezuela, Cuba and Nicaragua. As the novelist Javier Cercas said, "The Russian invasion is the first, large-scale martial confrontation between national-populism and democracy."

Kramatorsk train station aftermath

Murderer in the Kremlin

At the start of his tale, Taras Bulba, the 19th-century writer Nikolai Gogol explains the role of the Ukraine's cossacks in European history. In Ruthenian, cossack means a "free man," and his tale shows just what it means to "drink like a cossack."

The cossacks, he wrote, arose in the 15th century, in a corner of Europe "devastated and pillaged by the Mongols," where men had to become "brave and forget there is fear in the world." These became the warriors of a once-peaceful land, and an unyielding rampart for Europe against the ruinous invasions of the East.

Today, the invasion, as well as the bloodstained imperialism behind it, come from a fascistic autocrat. He showed his colors in a recent speech, urging a purge of "Russian traitors" who oppose his "military operation." He wants to pummel those "who live in Russia but think like Europeans" and deny this is a war to "denazify Ukraine." He wants them spat out like "a pesky fly in your mouth."

Putin spouts a Nazi-style jargon, and confirms it with vile deeds: bombing hospitals, schools, theaters and residential blocks. In Mariupol, he is recreating the hell he made before in Syria and Chechnya, sending thousands of civilians — and hundreds of children — into mass graves. In more recent days, we have seen the atrocities in Bucha and the massacre at the Kramatorsk railway station.

This is Putin the murderer, a hero in the West to the extremists on the right.