The Russo-Ukrainian conflict has revealed a correlation that is hard to ignore. The further to the right someone stands in American politics, the more likely that person will back Vladimir Putin and the Russian side in the war. By the same token, the further to the left someone stands, the more likely that person will be backing the Ukrainian armed forces and the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. Who started the war seems less likely to influence these judgments than where one stands ideologically, as I learned to my surprise two years ago, when the conflict began.

At that time, the Russian military invaded Ukraine, and I found myself automatically siding with Russia’s neighbor. Not only were Russian armies devastating Ukraine, but the Russian government was repeating the kind of atrocities committed by its Soviet predecessors against the Ukrainian people in the 1930s. For me, this seemed to be the second belated phase of the havoc that Stalin and his henchmen unleashed on the Ukrainians in the 1930s, characterized by the starving of hapless peasants and the murder of those who resisted Russian rule. 

I wrote several commentaries to that effect, one of which Mark Levin read on his radio program. I expressed shock that members of the anti-communist right, which had deplored Soviet crimes against the Ukrainians for many decades, was suddenly defending the actions of Putin, a former KGB agent who attacked a people that had already been victimized by the Soviets. Why had so many of my comrades-in-arms changed sides?

And why have so many on the left, who throughout my life viewed the Ukrainians as a nation of Nazi collaborators who had  switched the swastikas on their lapels for Ukrainian flags, stood teary-eyed for the Ukrainian national anthem, and proclaimed “Slava Ukraina!” This “renversement des alliances,” as the Austrian foreign minister Anton Wenzel von Kaunitz described his country’s unnatural alliance with France in the mid-18th century, took me aback and I’m still trying to process what’s occurred. 

Since the beginning of this struggle, it has become increasingly apparent that Americans have taken sides in the Russo-Ukrainian War based on their political ideology. Therefore, what one thinks and says about the war independent of this reference point now matters much less than one’s political orientation. In this taking of sides, the traditional right has gravitated toward the Russian invaders. This right, I’ve observed, has long been pro-Russian even if it opposed Soviet Russia because of its Communist regime.

The right’s relationship to Russia has been entirely different from a still widespread anti-Nazi mindset, one whose representatives hate Germans at least as much as they abhor Hitler and his followers. The neoconservative attitude toward Soviet Russia showed a similar character. During the Cold War, neoconservatives expressed distaste for Russia at least as often as they called for fighting Soviet Communism. They associated a specifically Russian political enemy with anti-Semitism and other national traditions that offended them.

The contemporary right’s relationship to Russia, by contrast, has been generally exuberantly positive. Anti-communists of the right were always happy to support Russia without a Communist government, which was seen as an unhappy fate that befell a good Christian nation during the Russian Revolution. That this happened was typically blamed on outside forces, such as the mistake of Imperial Germany in helping to bring Lenin to power, or the failure of Western countries to have overthrown the Soviet dictatorship. 

The collapse of Soviet Communism brought from the traditional right no calls for holding the Russian people responsible for Soviet mass murder. That is in stark contrast to the left, which insisted, and still insists, on holding the Germans responsible for Nazi atrocities. Instead, there was rejoicing that the Russians had been liberated. Please note the traditional right’s longtime celebration of that quintessential Russian nationalist and Christian mystic, Alexander Solzhenitsyn. And oh yes, it’s hard not to notice the recent rush of Southern conservatives to embrace the Russian Orthodox religion together with Putin’s cause.

Moreover, among those on the right who are backing or praising Putin, the conservative establishment is held in very low regard. Especially among younger right-wing bloggers and Southern conservatives, who justifiably feel excluded from the well-heeled establishment media, much of which receives support from neoconservative funders like the Murdoch family and Paul Singer. For this growing group of dissenters, Putin is a symbol of right-wing resistance and a defender of tradition, who bans LGBTQ teaching in Russian schools and who keeps wokery out of Russian public life.

Putin makes no attempt to accommodate Western leftist hegemony and, in fact, enjoys making fun of it. While he restores monasteries and defends his nation’s Orthodox faith, he also deals ruthlessly with his enemies and doesn’t hesitate to try to take back territories that once belonged to his country. No world leader (except possibly for Donald Trump) stands in such striking contrast to the present Western European and Canadian gynocracy, in which unsexed feminists co-rule with effeminate, politically correct men.

This growing pocket of support for Putin on the right reveals the yawning gulf that persists between the conservative establishment media and those it works to keep out. Rallying to the Russian side in the conflict with Ukraine signifies, among other things, opposition to an establishment that treats the Russian leader mostly as a villain and which, not incidentally, practices gatekeeping against a younger and much harder American right. These are the people whom Jordan Peterson, on a recent appearance on Fox News, called for removing from conservative discussions in favor of the “moderates,” just as has been done repeatedly to the more boisterous conservatives of past decades. Unfortunately for Peterson’s plan, the people whom he hopes to expel from his club were never members in the first place. They have survived and grown in number even while being treated as outcasts.

Southern conservatives, like those identified with the Abbeville Institute, may be the most fervent of the pro-Putin conservative traditionalists. They have seen the “the Cause” relentlessly vilified by the present conservative establishment, which has entirely marginalized these white Southerners who wish to cling to their historic past. In Putin’s Russia, whatever its defects, these disaffected Southern conservatives see the last bastion of Western Christian conservatism, except possibly for Orbán’s Hungary, which unfortunately has much less of a presence on the world stage. For some of these conservatives whom I know, visiting Russia has become a “political pilgrimage,” if we may apply a term that the late Paul Hollander used to describe leftist intellectuals visiting Communist countries. 

Arguing against these Putinophiles by pointing out that the Russian government is corrupt, or that Putin’s enemies have mysteriously dropped dead, won’t change their minds. What they admire about Russia is what makes it different from what they reject about the contemporary West. In Russia, the government tells us unequivocally there are only two sexes and that each one has distinctive traits and inherited social roles. Russian leaders have no interest in importing into their country a Third World Lumpenproletariat, and they try to protect the identity of their historic nation. Although I haven’t met any of these Putinophiles who have actually made good on their promises to relocate to Russia, they generally do what they can to back the Russian presence in Ukraine. 

These Putin admirers on the right, at least the ones I’ve encountered, don’t really care much about what happens to Ukraine. They view it as an integral part of Mother Russia and regard its leadership as complicit in Ukraine’s fate by virtue of wishing to become part of NATO. Most importantly for those on the Russian side, the left is coming to own Zelenskyy and the Ukrainian cause, no matter how far to the right some Ukrainian nationalists, for example, the Azov Brigade, may be situated.

This situation, it seems to me, was shaped by a necessary search for allies, but also owing to Zelenskyy’s indiscretion. The Ukrainian government was forced into an alliance with woke-left governments like the German and French ones and sidled up to the Biden administration because Zelenskyy understandably fawned on those who gave his country assistance. In return for that help, the Ukrainian president has mouthed the post-Christian human rights language and even introduced gay marriage into his country. 

Zelenskyy has also, however, gone out of his way to show favor to the Democratic Party. Last summer, he was spotted in my state of Pennsylvania, campaigning for Kamala Harris. Meanwhile, Republicans like JD Vance have improved their relationship with the right by strongly criticizing American aid to Ukraine. The American left has responded by denouncing the Republican right for following Donald Trump’s lead in favoring the Russian “Hitler,” Vladimir Putin. Quite predictably, the neoconservatives have joined the predominantly leftist chorus by going after any politician who fails to pledge eternal fealty to both Israel and Ukraine. 

Republicans like JD Vance have improved their relationship with the right by strongly criticizing American aid to Ukraine. The American left has responded by denouncing the Republican right for favoring the Russian “Hitler,” Vladimir Putin. Quite predictably, the neoconservatives have joined the predominantly leftist chorus by going after any politician who fails to pledge eternal fealty to both Israel and Ukraine.

Thus, the Murdoch-owned New York Post featured this admonition in a column by neoconservative columnist Isaac Schorr, warning us against “our isolationist VP” JD Vance. There we are told that Vance, Revolver News founder and Trump State Department official Darren Beattie, and others tugging at the president’s ear are naive enough to trust Putin’s word and to imagine they can broker a deal with “Gazan Islamists.” Schorr hopes Trump won’t heed these dangerous isolationists and that he will continue to engage in “assertive American action,” which consists of standing by the Israeli government and “providing Ukraine with lethal weapons to defend itself.” What strikes me about this warning is the connection made between backing the Netanyahu government in its war against Hamas and giving lethal assistance to Zelenskyy. For the neoconservatives, these positions are necessarily linked.

Finally, the Jewish background of the Ukrainian leader and his previous career as a risqué comedian may also factor into the sides being taken here. Zelenskyy’s presence at the top of Ukraine’s government may have wiped out for the left his country’s onetime reputation as anti-Semitic while strengthening Jewish leftist support for the Ukrainian fight against Russia. After all, the face of Ukrainian nationalism has now become that of a Jewish comedian rather than that of Stepan Bandera (1909-1950), who was the most famous Ukrainian nationalist of the first half of the last century and someone open to collaboration with the Third Reich. Zelenskyy has helped turn the Ukrainian cause into a woke leftist one headed by a cooperative Jewish leader. No matter how loudly the pro-Russian right rages against all the neo-Nazis on the Ukrainian side, by now this charge is completely ignored by the public.

That said, the new face of Ukrainian nationalism may also have become repulsive to the American and European right, that is, to any right that is not identical with the conservative establishment in those countries. The Ukrainian cause has allowed itself, perhaps inevitably, to become captive to the left and the now widely hated neoconservatives. The latter relationship, for those who may have forgotten, goes at least as far back as former State Department official Victoria Nuland’s successful attempt in 2014 to arrange for a coup d’état in Kiev favoring the interests of America and the West. The result deepened Russian suspicion of an American/NATO takeover of their neighboring country.

This polarization means that Putin will likely remain the darling of many on the traditional right; and even those who do not belong to that persuasion will end up being associated with it as soon as they criticize American support for the war. The fact that Israel and Ukraine have been linked by neoconservative publicists and government advisors will likely give rise to more whispered charges about America’s promotion of “Jewish interests.”

But that’s the observation with which this commentary began, that whatever is happening in the struggle between Russia and Ukraine is now being seen through ideological lenses. And we’re long past the point at which that can be changed.