Invasion: The Inside Story of Russia's Bloody War and Ukraine's Fight for Survival

by Luke Harding

Russia’s battle went beyond Ukraine. It was—to a large degree—a proxy war against the West. The glavniy protivnik was the United States—the chief adversary in dry KGB language—as well as other democratic governments that had armed the Ukrainians. Washington had sent ammunition and Javelin anti-tank missiles, London the Next generation Light Anti-tank Weapon (NLAW) system, the Baltic states additional hardware. These defensive shipments enraged Moscow. As conceived in the Kremlin, the war was something else, too: a civilizational struggle. It was more akin to a medieval crusade than the wars of the past century. One ideological foe was decadent liberalism. In the view of the Russian Orthodox Patriarch, Kirill I, who defended and blessed Putin’s endeavor, Europe was permissive and anti-family. The conflict’s scope extended into a transcendent realm; Russia’s armored vehicles were marked with a mystical Z. What the letter meant was unclear. It became the main propaganda symbol of Russia’s invasion.