American journalist Brent Renaud, who was killed in Ukraine (Image: Invision/AP/Charles Sykes)

The killing overnight of an American journalist in Ukraine has grabbed the headlines, but it’s just the latest stage in an increasingly brutal war on independent journalism by the Russian state both in Ukraine and Russia itself.

Coupled with Putin’s “make Russia great again” wartime rhetoric, it’s dragging the country back to a brutal 20th century totalitarianism, but with a dangerous expansive nationalism, not communism, as its ideological core.

Inside Russia it’s the final signal that the invasion of Ukraine is as much about remaking Russia internally — from a kleptocratic authoritarianism to a nationalist totalitarianism — as it is about restoring imperial boundaries.

American reporter Brent Renaud was killed outside Kyiv yesterday when a group of journalists covering the evacuation of Ukrainians were fired on by Russian troops. It’s not the first killing of a journalist of the Russian imperial project.

We can date the beginning of Putin’s crackdown on independent media — along with civil society, NGOs and Putin’s political opponents — to 2006, when Anna Politkovskaya was murdered for her reporting on the war in Chechnya. Her Novaya Gazeta editor, Dmitry Muratov, was recognised with last year’s Nobel Peace Prize for the paper’s commitment to unflinching journalism.

Now her old paper has been forced to flinch in the face of new laws that threaten 15 years in jail for “dissemination of knowingly false information”. The law bans words like “war” or “invasion”, requiring instead the more anodyne “military operation”.

Independent media in the country like radio station Ekho Moskvy or TV broadcaster Dozhd have opted to shut down. Other digital news media are being blocked by the internet regulator. Novaya Gazeta is, for the time being, continuing to publish but at the price of ignoring the war. Even cautiously apolitical media have stopped publishing rather than risk falling foul of the law, leaving the field to a “nothing to see here” state-owned media.

Most European and North American broadcasters have pulled their bureaus out of the country or have been barred. The big tech platforms, including Facebook, have been banned. (You can find a running list from Columbia University here.) 

Banning independent news does more than deny the Russian people the ability to know what’s going on, according to The New Yorker’s Masha Gessen, a long-term writer on Putin’s authoritarianism.

It produces, she says, “the impossibility of knowing what people think in a totalitarian society. And like the actual impossibility of it, because it’s not that you can’t find out what people really think. It’s that people can’t really think. And so you can’t find out what they can really think”.

Russia’s totalitarian embrace renders irrelevant the popular question: is Putin nuts or savvy? Based on news out of the country over the weekend, it’s the system that’s pathological, not the leader.

The Times in London reported over the weekend that the head and deputy head of the foreign intelligence branch of Russia’s Federal Security Bureau had been arrested for giving dud advice on the invasion. Looks like telling the boss what he wants to hear (“you’ll be greeted with flowers in the street!”) doesn’t produce the most rational decision-making in Washington or in Moscow.

But perhaps we’ve been looking in all the wrong places for the reasons behind the war. Maybe we should take Putin at his word that the “military operation” is about an internal remaking of Russian society within what it sees as its legitimate borders.

The hunt for some comprehensive rationality is the last trot around the paddock for the so-called “realist” school of analysis — the idea that we should expect nation states to “rationally” throw their weight around, particularly in their own backyard. It’s got a natural attraction for both the unipolar strivings of the US neo-conservatives and the anti-American imperialists on the Stop-the-War left.

Turn on Fox News and you’ll  be treated to the popularised version. The school’s guru, John Mearsheimer, is providing the “it’s the West’s fault” take in The Economist.

Problem is it skips over a few hard facts about autocracies. The 20th century taught us that wars of aggression are never rational (or, in fact, successful) but fearful advisers mean autocrats are denied the hard-headed analysis needed for rational decision-making.

I’ve got no time for it. It sacrifices the true heroes of our time, the democratic activists (journalists too)  who have shrugged off Russian colonialism and faced down autocracy in their own countries (including inside Russia) to build the emerging democratic space that is now being bombed away.