Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is sickening. Vladimir Putin had this Monday claimed that the “Kiev regime” refused any resolution of the conflict in the Donbas except through “military means.” The Russian president now claims to resolve it with far more bloodshed, already spreading beyond the Donbas region and risking a wider conflagration.

Putin’s open disregard for Ukrainian independence expresses a reactionary civilizational politics, as expressed in his article scouring medieval myths for reasons to kill and maim in the present. True, he famously once claimed that the fall of the USSR was the last century’s “greatest geopolitical disaster.” Yet it was no accident that this week he cast Lenin as the “architect” of Ukraine, who had subverted an older and thus somehow more authentic tsarist imperial order.

Putin’s rule surely has drawn legitimacy from Russia’s post-Soviet malaise. His government’s credo of militarized stability built its support in an atmosphere of real popular despair following the destruction of the pre-1991 social order; a series of border conflicts have in turn radicalized its nationalist revanchism. But his insistence this week that he would “really decommunize” Ukraine, by dismantling it, showed his hatred even for the most formal Soviet rhetoric of “fraternity among peoples.”