Editor’s letter

In Bucha, outside Kyiv, the corpses lay in the street for weeks. Long enough for satellites to pass over them and record their locations from space. Long enough for dogs to gnaw at them. Long enough to rot. We already knew some of the horror of the war in Ukraine—children buried in the ruins of their shelter, a city without water, “green corridors” turned into shooting galleries. But, as almost always seems to be the case, what was hidden is worse than what was known. It is always worse than it looks. But maybe at least things will get better? After all, around Kyiv the Russians seem to be in retreat. At the United Nations, Volodymyr Zelensky captivates the world. Europe is rallying around NATO. Russia faces calamitous economic consequences. In the story the West tells itself, evil—made even more manifest by the latest atrocities—will fall, and democracy is winning.

But is it really? Within Russia, Putin’s approval rating is at 83 percent (one of the few independent enterprises Putin allows is polling, because pollsters tend to show how popular he is). In China, the Ukraine war is an opportunity to create a counterbalance to U.S. power—and distract the world from its own crimes in Xinjiang. From India, the reaction has been polite disinterest, with some mild condemnation of civilian killings. Hungary, right on Ukraine’s border, is actually peeling away from the West, re-electing its homegrown aspiring autocrat Viktor Orbán. Outside NATO, Putin’s implicit nuclear threat of consequences “such as you have never seen in your entire history” appears to have achieved its objective of keeping NATO from direct intervention. In the latest images from Ukraine, the West sees only terror and outrage. For many in the world, though, the willingness to resort to every kind of brutality appears to be business as usual. For dictators and their supporters, it even looks like tenacious realpolitik. Unless the West is able to defeat that perception, it will not win.