After three years of full-scale war, we now face an authoritarian world order

~ Nikita Ivansky ~

Russia started its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, believing in it’s own imperial myth of military strength. It hoped to swiftly take over Kyiv and the rest of the country and establish a puppet regime. But the Russian army choked on the scattered forces of Ukrainian army, volunteer battalions, and small groups who took action against the invaders. The Ukrainian people became the mud in which the Russian war machine began to sink. 

Now, we face a new world order where Putin’s friend in Washington has started blackmailing the Ukrainian government into a colonial-style deal intended to extract as much resources from the region as possible. Meanwhile, European countries are struggling to get some space for future discussions of what Trump and Putin have been agreeing behind closed doors.

With all of this, the interests of ordinary people in Ukraine and Eastern Europe are being left behind. We are once again in the age of global empires that use brute force to batter people into submission. This fits in perfectly with the MAGA narrative that Trump has been pushing so hard to US voters for almost a decade. And while the “free” world was inspired by the resistance of the Ukrainian people in the first months of the invasion, more and more people in Europe and the US are tired of the war as it threatens their first world comforts. 

Ukrainians are now in peril of being left on their own, with very limited possibilities to resist the Russian invasion. Grassroots solidarity won’t be able to provide as many resources as necessary to fight back. Trump understands this perfectly. The new “king” of the USA, as he called himself, understands the power he has over the Ukrainian state at this point of history, and through this power he is trying to benefit from this war without all these conversations about protecting the free democratic world from authoritarianism. Trump himself wants to have the same power dynamics between the state and the people as they currently have in Russia or China. 

That is why those who shout for “peace” at right-wing rallies around the world are actually repeating the Kremlin’s propaganda. They are not in favour of peace, but against a war from which they do not profit. Fascism is not an ideology of peace. It is an ideology of conflict, and it benefits from creating chaos and confusion to establish and maintain its rule. Except for a very few groups and organisations, anarchists and anti-authoritarian leftists have so far failed to develop a common platform to approach this crisis.

We are in the darkest of times on this planet. The new world order is being built by forces that have little regard for human life or freedom. It is easy in these moments to drown in self-pity and sadness, to abandon political engagement, or to find safety in social media bubbles. But now is the time when the struggle matters most. It is not the time for despair, but rather for anger and hope, because history has shown that darkness can be scattered by the brave souls who dedicate themselves to the struggle for a better world. It is our turn to pick up that torch.