While reading this yarn about the Varangians, the Mongols, and the "Finno-Ugric substrate," a modern, unhinged empire is writing its current bloody chapter in real time.

We aren't living through an intellectual exercise about "The Third Rome," and it feels like distraction or misdirection to waxing poetic abut five-century-old antecedents while blood runs down the streets of Kyiv and Kharkiv.

If I was going to give my energy to writing about a murderous empire, I wouldn't shine up their history with gilded theory on why the attacker felt entitled to attack. Turn the lens where the people are dying and being attacked - today, as I write this.