In Ukraine, I saw the greatest threat to the Russian world isn’t the west – it’s Putin | Timothy Garton Ash

The Kremlin's imperial war has made its own culture and language a common enemy for people across its former empire

The time has come to ask whether, objectively speaking, Vladimir Putin is an agent of American imperialism. For no American has ever done half as much damage to what Putin calls the Russian world" as the Russian leader himself has.

This thought came to me recently when I was in the Ukrainian city of Lviv, talking to Ukrainians made refugees in their own country by Putin's war. I was a Russian speaker until 24 February," said Adeline, an art student from the now Russian-occupied town of Nova Kakhovka, referencing the date of Russia's full-scale invasion earlier this year. Russia has failed to take over Ukrainian culture, she said, so now it has set out to kill it. Several other Ukrainian students told me they find the spirit of freedom" in Ukrainian literature, but of subservience to power in Russian literature.