Russia and the war in Ukraine: Three critical myths

Though often framed as a conflict between an autocratic regime and a liberal democracy, the Russo-Ukrainian War also represents a direct challenge to the post-1989 global order and its cosmopolitan norms. Paradoxically, many Critical International Relations (IR) theorists—once skeptical of Western militarism—now align with liberal interventionist responses to the war. Drawing on Cunliffe’s concept of the “utopianism of unipolarity,” this article argues that Critical IR has embraced a reductive “good war” narrative that casts Ukraine as a virtuous subaltern state resisting Russian imperialism, while dismissing left critiques as denials of Ukrainian “agency.” In doing so, Critical IR reproduces cultural myths about both Ukraine and Russia and relies on the fiction of a functional “rules-based order.” Yet Western actions have often undermined both international norms and Ukrainian agency. The article contends that Critical IR’s support for NATO expansion and Western intervention raises serious questions about its oppositional stance. Rather than offering a radical critique, Critical IR appears to have become an ideological agent of the very liberal interventionism it once opposed.