The Russian Soul Survives Everything Except Accountability
A Poem in Several Acts of Willful Blindness
DEAR READER: Please consider a basic support membership at $5 per month. As a journalist in Ukraine, I work every day (even during blackouts and drone attacks) to examine our world situation from where the fulcrum of the world’s hell pivots, and your help is vital. Today is my 1436th day in this 1482nd of full-scale war (4408 since 2014), and Independent Journalism is not cheap to do, and I will keep making the posts available for all readers (even during nearly 24 hr daily blackouts), but good patrons are needed and I thank you for your time. – Chris Sampson, Kyiv, March 17, 2026
THE PRODUCT
There is a thing the West needs more than weapons, more than sanctions, more than the specific, inconvenient, unsexy work of holding a nuclear-armed state accountable for what it does to the people it has decided do not exist.
The West needs a Russian.
Not Russians. Not the hundred and forty million who have had twenty-six years to look at what their government does in apartment buildings in Grozny, in schools in Beslan, in the streets of Tbilisi, in the maternity ward in Mariupol — twenty-six years to look at it and say no and who have not said no, who have gone to the polling station and said yes, who have posted the Z, who have sent their sons, who have accepted the pension supplement and the car payment and the flat-screen television that came with the bargain of pretending not to know what the bargain cost.
Not those Russians.
One Russian. The exceptional one. The one who suffers correctly — aesthetically, cinematically, in a way that does not require you to change your foreign policy or your gas supplier or your subscription to the Bolshoi live stream which is still available, did you know, still technically accessible if you know where to look, because culture, because art, because you cannot hold Tchaikovsky responsible for what Tchaikovsky’s country is doing to the concert halls of Kharkiv.
One Russian. That’s all the West asks for. One is enough. One is plenty. One Russian who dissents — who writes the letter, who makes the film, who stands at the podium and says something vaguely opposed to the general concept of violence without naming the violence specifically, without naming the country it is being done to, without naming the children it is being done to, without naming the mass graves, the torture chambers, the filtration camps, the twenty thousand children taken across a border and renamed and re-educated and told they are Russian now, they were always Russian, the country they came from was not real —
without naming any of that, the West will take him.
The West will weep for him. The West will give him a prize and a standing ovation and a long profile in a magazine with good photography and a comment section full of people saying this gives me hope.
Hope.
For what?
For the idea that somewhere inside the machine that is grinding Ukraine into a fine historical paste, there is a conscience. A soul. The famous Russian soul about which so much has been written by people who have never stood in what it leaves behind.
THE MANUFACTURE
You should know how it is made.
The soul has a long production history. It did not arrive naturally. Nothing about Russia’s cultural presence in the Western imagination arrived naturally.
Go back. Go back to 1948 when FIDE held its first organized World Chess Championship and the Soviet Union looked at the chessboard the way it looked at everything else — as a theater of operations.
Understand what that means.
It means Viktor Baturinsky, KGB Colonel, became Vice President of the USSR Chess Federation and director of Moscow’s Chess Club. It means Anatoly Karpov carried a codename — “Raul” — in KGB files, and the West played chess with “Raul” and thought it was playing chess.
It means eighteen intelligence officers attended one championship match in Manila with one specific assignment: ensure the right man wins. Eighteen. For a chess match. Because the soul does not trust itself to win without assistance, but the West does not ask about the assistance — the West watches the game and marvels at the depth of Russian intellect, at the profundity of Russian strategic thinking, at the soul —
the soul that thinks fourteen moves ahead, the soul that plays the long game, the soul that has been playing the long game on every board simultaneously for a century while the West congratulates itself on appreciating a culture so refined it can see further than ordinary people.
This is what the chess was.
And the ballet.
Go back to 1959 when the Bolshoi first toured America and drew hundreds of thousands — sold-out houses, resale tickets at twelve hundred dollars, Khrushchev in the audience, Life magazine covers — go back to what that tour was underneath the arabesque.
It was the Lacy-Zarubin Agreement. A diplomatic instrument. A state program. Every dancer accompanied by people who were not what they said they were. Every tour a double operation: project the soul to the audience, collect intelligence on everyone who came to see it.
The KGB told Baryshnikov in London in 1972 that they knew every word he had spoken. Every word. They told him this not to threaten him but to inform him — to ensure he understood the terms of the performance.
He performed anyway. He performed beautifully. And two years later he ran from his handlers in Toronto while fans swarmed him for autographs — a lawyer hid phone numbers under his wedding ring to pass them past the man who was not a translator — and the West wept and called it a leap to freedom and marveled at the courage of the Russian soul.
The soul that the KGB had considered breaking the legs of. Specifically. In memoranda. With operational language. Because the soul is a state asset and state assets do not defect without consequences.
The Mitrokhin Archive has the files. Christopher Andrew read the files. The files say: consider breaking his legs.
The West does not read the files. The West watches the performance.
THE CENTURY OF THE EXCUSE
Let us be honest about the timeline.
1994: Grozny. Apartment buildings reduced to geometry. Ninety-six thousand dead in the first war alone — the number varies depending on whose mathematics you accept and the West largely did not accept any mathematics, did not hold a referendum on Russian culture, did not review its Bolshoi subscription, did not ask what a state that does this to Chechnya is doing with its chess federation and its film exports and its gas pipeline and its seat on the UN Security Council.
The West said: Chechnya is complicated. The West said: there are terrorists. The West said: Yeltsin is a reformer. The West said: give it time.
Beslan, 2004. Three hundred and thirty-four dead. A hundred and eighty-six of them children. The soul did not prevent Beslan. The soul was at a festival. The soul was being profiled in a literary supplement. The soul had recently won a prize for a poem about loss — not this loss, a different loss, a more aesthetically manageable loss — and the West had championed the poem and the soul had thanked them in remarks that did not mention Beslan because Beslan had not yet happened and anyway the soul does not speak to events. The soul speaks to the human condition.
Georgia, 2008. Five days. South Ossetia. Abkhazia. Russian tanks in a country that is not Russia.
The West held an emergency meeting and condemned the action and then went back to what it had been doing which was importing Russian gas and attending Russian cultural events and finding individual Russians of great moral seriousness who had concerns about the direction of things.
The West found its Russian. The West was satisfied.
Crimea, 2014. Not a war, said Russia. A referendum. The people chose. Never mind the soldiers without insignia who were there before the vote. Never mind the ballot options that did not include remain part of Ukraine. Never mind the Crimean Tatars who had been deported once before, by Stalin, and recognized the pattern because they have good reason to recognize the pattern and tried to tell people who did not want to hear it because they had just found a very compelling Russian who was writing bravely about Russian corruption and it seemed important to focus on that.
Donbas, 2014. The war that was not a war. The volunteers who were not soldiers. The weapons that appeared in the hands of men with Russian military tattoos and Russian military training and Russian military coordination but were not Russian soldiers they were volunteers who happened to have Buk missile systems and happened to shoot down a Malaysian airliner with two hundred and ninety-eight people on it who did not volunteer for any of this.
The West was troubled. The West imposed limited sanctions. The West found an extremely compelling Russian — perhaps the most compelling Russian yet, the most narratively satisfying, the one with the best production values on his social media, the one who named the corruption so specifically, the one who was so obviously brave, the one who had a foundation and a YouTube channel and a very photogenic arrest —
and the West decided that this Russian was the answer.
And when Ukrainians said: he will not name Crimea, he treats our sovereignty as a negotiating position, his politics are Russian nationalist politics with better aesthetics —
the West said: you don’t understand the complexity of Russian opposition politics.
The West said: demanding ideological purity from a man in prison is obscene.
The West said: he is doing what he can within his constraints.
The West did not ask what Ukraine was doing within its constraints, which were: being invaded.
TWENTY-SIX YEARS
Let us do the arithmetic.
Putin came to power in 1999.
Twenty-six years.
A child born in the year Putin became President is now twenty-six years old. That child grew up inside the machine. That child was educated inside the machine. That child watched state television inside the machine. That child went to a school where a teacher — perhaps a teacher like the one in Karabash, perhaps a less brave teacher, perhaps a teacher who was not secretly filming — taught the lesson the ministry sent down: Ukraine is Nazis, Russia is liberation, the West wants to destroy us, we must be strong.
That child is now twenty-six years old. That child has had twenty-six years to look out a window and notice what the machine does to people.
Some of them have noticed. Some of them have left. Some of them are in exile in Prague and Berlin and Tbilisi drinking coffee and writing letters and going to readings and explaining to European hosts that they too are victims of the regime and they too deserve sympathy and perhaps a residency permit and certainly a platform at which to speak about the tragedy of being Russian in these difficult times.
And the European hosts feel this. The European hosts understand that it must be very hard. The European hosts are glad to provide the platform and the residency and the sympathy and will be even gladder when the Russian exile produces something — a poem, a film, a chess move, a bravely worded statement — that confirms what the European hosts already believe: that Russia contains within it a soul that is not responsible for what Russia does.
The hundred and forty million who stayed. Who voted. Who wore the ribbon. Who sent the son. Who believed, or chose to believe, or chose not to ask, which is its own choice — the West is not interested in those Russians.
Those Russians are the inconvenient majority.
The West is interested in the exceptional minority — the one percent, the fraction of a percent, the individual who can be held up and pointed at and used as evidence that the system is not the people and the people are not the crimes and the crimes are the fault of one man and one man can be removed and when he is removed the soul will emerge blinking into the light and everything will be as it should be.
Twenty-six years of this argument.
The soul is still waiting to emerge. Putin is still there. The war is in its fourth year. The missiles are still Russian. The hands on the targeting systems are Russian. The pilots are Russian. The soldiers walking into Ukrainian houses and doing what they do in Ukrainian houses — they are Russian. They went there. Nobody conscripted their conscience. They drove there and they did the things that were done in Bucha and the West found this very upsetting and awarded a documentary about it and the documentary maker said stop all wars and the West gave him a standing ovation.
Because the soul.
Because you cannot hold a hundred and forty million people responsible for what a hundred and forty million people have enabled for twenty-six years.
You can only find one. You can only hold up one. You can only say: see? Not all of them. This one. This one is the proof that Russia is redeemable.
And Ukraine buries its dead and says: we do not need Russia to be redeemable. We need it to stop.
And the West does not hear this because it is at the premiere.
THE FESTIVALS
Oh, the festivals.
The documentary arrived at Sundance with its hard drives and its story and its Special Jury Award and its journey from a small town in the Urals where the propaganda was filmed to a theater in Park City, Utah where the propaganda about the propaganda was screened to an audience that gave it a standing ovation because they were against propaganda in principle and this film confirmed that and everyone felt clarified.
Then the BAFTA. Then the Oscar. Then the acceptance speech — stop all wars, in the name of all children, everywhere — and the room rose to its feet and the tears came and somewhere in the mathematics of the evening Ukraine had been present as a concept, as a backdrop, as the context for Russian suffering — the suffering of a Russian man who documented what Russia did and then could not, at the moment of maximum safety and maximum platform and minimum cost, say the name of the country Russia is doing it to.
Could not. Or chose not. The distinction matters less than the result.
The result is: the room stood. The soul was confirmed. The West exhaled. The pressure dropped. The weapons moved a little slower. The sanctions debate softened by another news cycle. The Russian cultural presence in the international imagination restored by one more increment — not Kremlin propaganda, no, this is anti-Putin, this is the good kind, this is the exception —
and in Kharkiv somebody’s phone buzzed with the notification about the Oscar and they looked at it for a moment and put it down and went back to the window and the window was taped against the blast.
THE LIBERAL WHO MEANS WELL
Here is the person I am writing to.
You are educated. You read. You have opinions about Gaza and climate and representation and the moral bankruptcy of late capitalism and you have had those opinions for long enough that you have refined them into a coherent worldview that makes you feel that you understand how power works and who the victims are and what solidarity requires.
You went to university somewhere that had a Russian literature department. You read Bulgakov. You read Akhmatova. You read Pasternak. You understood, correctly, that these were great writers who suffered under a terrible system and that their suffering and their greatness were connected — that art produced under pressure is a kind of resistance and resistance is noble and noble is what you want to be in proximity to.
And so when Russia does what Russia does — when the apartment buildings collapse in Grozny, when the school fills with gas in Beslan, when the tanks cross into Georgia, when the little green men appear in Crimea, when the full-scale invasion begins on February 24, 2022, when the satellite images come back from Bucha —
you do not reach for the sanctions list. You do not call your MP. You do not donate to the artillery fund.
You reach for your Russian.
You find the filmmaker. You find the chess player. You find the poet in exile reading at the bookshop in Prenzlauer Berg to an audience of thirty who came because they too wanted to feel that they were standing with the part of Russia that is not doing this.
You go to the reading. You buy the book. You post about it.
Incredible evening. Reminded me why I believe in the power of art to cross borders and find our common humanity.
And across the border that has been crossed by something other than art — by tanks, by Shahed drones, by the specific make and model of missile that enters a building at a speed that does not allow for the appreciation of common humanity —
someone is looking at your post.
They are looking at it the way you look at a car crash on the other side of a highway barrier — with the specific comprehension of someone who knows you are separated from what they are experiencing by something that is not as solid as it looks.
They do not comment. What is there to say?
I’m glad you found your Russian. I hope the reading was good. The drones came last night at 3 AM. I did not sleep. My neighbor’s window is plastic sheeting now. Please enjoy the book.
THE ARGUMENT THEY MAKE
When Ukrainians push back — when they say: your Russian did not say our name, your Russian’s film is about Russia, your hero’s politics treated our sovereignty as a subject for discussion rather than a fact —
the argument comes.
It comes in stages.
First: disappointment. I had hoped for more generosity from Ukraine. Generosity. From the people being bombed to the people watching. The direction of the required generosity is always the same.
Second: the lecture. The history of Russian dissent. The courage it takes. The constraints they operate under. The complexity of opposition politics inside an authoritarian system — explained by someone who has never operated inside an authoritarian system, to people who are currently operating inside an authoritarian missile strike.
Third: the whatabout. Have Ukrainians been perfect? Have Ukrainian politicians said things? Has anyone in Ukraine ever failed to meet the precise standard of conduct being retrospectively applied by someone who is currently quite safe?
The whatabout exists to muddy. Not to clarify. The whatabout says: your suffering does not give you the right to analyze your own situation without being reminded of your own imperfections. Your dead are not uncontested.
Fourth: the accusation. Now you are tribal. Now you are nationalist. Now you want collective punishment. Now you are the obstacle to peace. Now you are prolonging the war with your unwillingness to welcome the Russians who have expressed generalized reservations about the direction of things.
You are making it harder for everyone. You are making it harder for the Russians who want to help. You are making it harder for the West which is trying to find a framework that allows it to feel good about the outcome whatever the outcome is.
And finally — the exit.
I can’t support this kind of thinking.
The door closes.
The same person will reappear in six weeks with a link to something new — a new Russian, a new film, a new poem, a new brave gesture at a safe distance from the thing it gestures toward — and the cycle will begin again.
No memory. No reckoning. No accumulation of the lesson that keeps being offered by the people dying to teach it.
WHAT THE SOUL DOES NOT CONTAIN
The soul does not contain Chechnya.
Not the first war. Not the second. Not the hundred thousand. Not Grozny from the air — a city, a city where people lived, reduced to the kind of rubble that looks like photographs of Dresden except no one who discusses Russian culture discusses this the way they discuss Dresden.
The soul does not contain the apartment buildings in Moscow and Ryazan and Buynaksk that were blown up in 1999 to justify the second Chechen war — blown up by whose agents is a question that journalists who asked it are no longer alive to keep asking. Anna Politkovskaya asked it. The soul mourned her beautifully. The soul has been mourning her beautifully for eighteen years and has not produced an answer to who killed her. The soul was not asked to produce an answer. The soul was asked to mourn. The soul mourns well. That is what the soul does.
The soul does not contain Beslan except as an occasion for grief — not accountability, not the question of who orders a school to be taken, not the structure of a state that produces this as a method — just grief, beautiful grief, the kind of grief that the West can stand beside and feel that it is standing with the right people.
The soul does not contain the MH17 missile. The soul does not contain the Buk. The soul does not contain the two hundred and ninety-eight who were just flying. The soul was at a festival when they were flying and was at a different festival when the wreckage came down over a field in Donbas and has been at festivals ever since, and the West has been at the festivals with the soul, and they have had very meaningful conversations about art and truth and the necessity of bearing witness, and nobody has been held responsible for the missile because the soul was not responsible for the missile and the soul is the only Russia the West is willing to prosecute.
THEY FLY TO EUROPE
They fly to Europe and they cry.
This is documented. This is the thing that happens when you sanction a passport — the Russian who opposed nothing for twenty-six years, who said nothing, who voted as instructed or who did not vote which is also a choice, who watched the television and understood that the television was lying because everyone understood the television was lying and understanding and doing nothing about a lie is a particular kind of participation in it —
that Russian flies to Tbilisi, flies to Yerevan, flies to Belgrade, flies to the last airports that will take the passport, and cries because the coffee shop in Berlin that they have been following on Instagram for three years has a sign in the window that says we do not serve Russians and this is unbearable, this is discrimination, this is exactly the kind of thing that the Russians who oppose Putin should not have to experience because they are not Putin, they are just people who lived in the country where Putin operated for twenty-six years and did not stop him but that is very hard, you have to understand, that is very very hard, the television is so powerful, the FSB is so powerful, what could they do, one person, what could anyone do —
and the white liberal who is very concerned about discrimination in all its forms opens the door and says: come in.
Come in. Tell me about it. Tell me what it’s like.
And the Russian tells them. And the white liberal posts about the conversation. Incredible insight from a Russian in exile. Reminded me that ordinary people are not their governments. We must not let hate win.
And the ordinary people who are not their government in Ukraine — who did not vote for the invasion, who did not want the invasion, who have been trying since 2014 to tell anyone who would listen that the invasion was coming and were told they were being paranoid, nationalistic, extreme —
those ordinary people are currently under the invasion.
They are not in Berlin. They are not crying at a coffee shop. They are in a different kind of situation which the white liberal also cares about deeply in the way that you care about something that is very far away and very terrible and not requiring of any specific action on your part beyond awareness, which you have, you are very aware, you donated once and you changed your profile picture in February 2022 and you have not changed it back which says something about the depth of your commitment.
THE PARALYMPIC ARGUMENT
The wheelchair.
Let us discuss the wheelchair.
Russian Paralympic athletes competed in Paris in 2024 under a neutral flag — Individual Neutral Athletes, the IOC called them, scrubbed of insignia, laundered of affiliation, pure athletes pursuing pure sport above the squalid business of national responsibility.
The IOC deliberated at length. The IOC weighed the rights of clean athletes against the crimes of states. The IOC produced a framework. The IOC is very good at frameworks. The IOC has had a long relationship with Russian frameworks — the 1980 Moscow Olympics, the 2014 Sochi Olympics where the FSB drilled a hole in the wall of the anti-doping laboratory and swapped samples through the hole at night and the IOC deliberated and produced a framework and the sport continued because the sport must continue because sport is above politics and the hole in the wall was also technically above politics — it was a sporting hole —
and the wheelchair crossed the finish line and the neutral athlete did not look at the flag because there was no flag to look at and the crowd applauded because the crowd appreciates athletic achievement in principle regardless of what the state that produced the athlete is doing to the athletes of another country who will not be crossing any finish lines in Paris because they are at a different kind of finish line entirely.
BECAUSE HOW
Because how can you stop a genocide when you have tickets to the Bolshoi?
This is the question the poem has been building toward. Not as a joke. As the actual, serious, documented question that the West has been failing to answer for twenty-six years while finding individual Russians of great personal integrity who it could admire in lieu of answering it.
Because how can you stop a genocide when the alternative is admitting that the culture you loved — the chess, the ballet, the novels, the cinema, the sardonic poets, the conceptual artists, the grandmasters and the prima ballerinas and the dissident filmmakers who say stop all wars from the safest stages in the world — that the culture you loved was never separate from the state that produced it, was always partly a product of the state that produced it, was deployed by the state that produced it for a century with specific intent, with specific intelligence assets, with specific operational objectives that included making you love it so that when the state did what the state does you would hesitate — you would find your Russian — you would say but the soul and the soul would say stop all wars and you would stand and applaud and the war would continue.
Because how can you stop a genocide when stopping it requires you to say: there is no exception. There is no individual Russian of sufficient personal virtue to serve as a substitute for Russian accountability. There is no film, no poem, no chess move, no Oscar speech, no Paralympic wheelchair crossing a neutral finish line that balances the ledger of what Russia has done to Chechnya and Georgia and Ukraine and what Russia is doing right now while you are reading this, right now, while you are deciding whether this poem is too angry, whether it fails to appreciate complexity, whether the speaker has not sufficiently acknowledged the genuine courage of individual Russians who have done brave things —
because how can you stop a genocide when the work of stopping it is so much harder than finding the exception, than posting the exception, than going to the reading where the exception reads the poem about Russian suffering under Russian power and the audience is very moved and the audience goes home and the genocide continues on schedule?
Because how can you stop a genocide when you have already decided that what you owe it is awareness and a profile picture and attendance at the documentary that does not say the name of the country the documentary is about?
Because how can you stop a genocide with a ticket to the Bolshoi that you bought before the invasion and have been meaning to use and it seems a waste to throw it away now because the performance will be extraordinary and art is universal and you cannot hold Tchaikovsky responsible and the dancer is not Putin and the musician is not Putin and the choreographer is not Putin and Putin is Putin and Putin is the problem and if you just wait long enough Putin will be gone and the soul will emerge and everything will have been worth it —
the waiting, the ticket, the standing ovation for the speech that did not say the name, the open door for the exile who did not stop it, the frameworks, the deliberations, the profiles, the prizes —
worth it, you tell yourself, worth it, because the alternative is that you were not a witness but a participant, not a supporter but a mechanism, not someone who cared but someone who cared in the specific way that costs nothing and changes nothing and allows the machine to keep running because the machine has always known that the West would find its Russian and love its Russian and use its Russian as a reason to keep its ticket.
THE LAST MOVEMENT
In Karabash a school videographer filmed the lesson. He was brave. He took the drives. He fled. He made the film. He stood on the stage in Los Angeles and said: stop all wars.
In Kharkiv the alert sounds.
In Zaporizhzhia a building that was a building is something else.
In Kyiv a phone buzzes.
In a field in Donbas the wreckage of a Malaysian airliner has been in the earth for eleven years.
In Grozny the city has been rebuilt in the image of the man who destroyed it and his name is on the stadium.
In Beslan the gymnasium where the children died has a memorial and the memorial has visitors and the visitors come from many countries and some of them are from the West and they are moved and they take photographs and they post the photographs and the captions say never forget and they have forgotten or they have chosen something that functions identically to forgetting — the choosing of the exception, the finding of the Russian, the decision to locate the soul and love it so hard that the body count becomes someone else’s accounting problem.
The soul survives everything.
That is the point of the soul.
The soul survived Grozny. The soul survived Beslan. The soul survived Georgia. The soul survived Crimea. The soul survived Bucha. The soul is currently surviving Kharkiv, one missile at a time, and will emerge from this as it emerges from everything — intact, eloquent, invited to festivals, given prizes, asked to say something brave and universal that doesn’t name anything specifically enough to require anyone to do anything specifically enough to stop it.
The soul will survive.
The question is who else will.
And that question — the actual question, the one with bodies in it, the one with the smell of pulverized lives and the sound before the sound and the cold hands of the woman who cannot stop shaking —
that question is not answered at the Bolshoi.
It is not answered in the documentary.
It is not answered at the reading in Prenzlauer Berg or the chess match in Astana or the Paralympic final in Paris or the Oscar ceremony in Los Angeles where the room stood and wept and felt that something important had happened.
Nothing important happened.
A film won a prize.
Ukraine is still on fire.
Go home.
Look at your ticket.
Decide.
The wire tap is live.
The archive does not sleep.
The dead do not care about your epiphany.
They care about what you do after it.
😉 Well, done. Definitely 👍 well said. Truth is too rough for some folks to hear or acknowledge, until it’s at their door. Well America, this is NOW @ our table.
We were warned😱😵💫by Ukrainians, yet still turned our ears on TRUTH.