Once upon a time, it was a Russian man who would walk across the border from his home into the Ukrainian village of Milove, and ring the church bells that summoned the faithful from both sides of the frontier to prayer.

But that was in the old days. Now the border is closed, demarcated by a barbed wire fence erected by the Russians that illustrates the growing rift between the two neighbors. Somewhere on the other side, an estimated 130,000 Russian troops are massing.

Not that the residents of this drab, snow-covered outpost have seen any preparations for war, other than two newly deployed Ukrainian border guards brandishing assault rifles who were strolling up and down their side of the frontier last weekend. Nor do they seem to be giving the prospect of conflict much thought; many villagers dismiss it as remote.

That might be because a Russian invasion would tear deeply at their sense of who they are. Mainly Russian-speaking, ruled from Moscow for most of the 20th century as part of the Soviet Union, and now Ukrainian citizens, the villagers of Milove – like residents of border towns the length of the Russian-Ukrainian frontier – inhabit complex, confused, and often ambiguous identities.

“No traditions separate us,” says Sergei Ivanovich, a Russian-speaking Ukrainian nationalist who says he is ready to take up arms to defend his land if necessary. But “today Ukrainians and Russians are two different peoples. I always felt Ukrainian and always will, even if I speak Russian.”

Strong bonds of friendship and kinship have endured in this rural district. Russia is not only right next door. For most people here, Russians are kin, a view rooted in a common sense of history, local industries that remained intertwined until long after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and high rates of intermarriage.

The view from Peoples’ Friendship Street

The street that the border guards patrol used to be shared by both countries and is still called Peoples’ Friendship Street. But the Soviet-era parade of that name, celebrating unity between Slavic peoples, came to a halt in 2014, the year Russia forcibly annexed the Crimean peninsula from Ukraine.

Dominique Soguel

Ukrainian soldiers walk along a border fence that bisects a road once shared by the village of Milove and Russia’s Chertkovo. The border guards don't seem to be giving the prospect of a conflict between Ukraine and Russia much thought; many villagers dismiss it as remote.

The sense of friendship was further strained later that year when Russian-backed separatists took over the Ukrainian border regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. Fighting there has killed about 15,000 people on the Ukrainian side, according to Kyiv.

“This is not a natural divide,” insists Sergei Ivanovich. “It is politicians who have split Russia from Ukraine and Ukraine from Russia.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin does not think it is a natural divide either. In a long essay published last year, which some interpret as an intellectual justification for an invasion, he argued that Russians and Ukrainians are “one people – a single whole.” Russia and Ukraine are “parts of what is essentially the same historical and spiritual space,” he added.

Ironically, for Tetiana Oleksandrivna, a Ukrainian national born in Russia, it was the Russian government’s actions in 2014 that made her feel more Ukrainian. “We are a Slavic people,” the agronomist says. “Putin is here today but tomorrow someone else will be in his place. I have brothers, sisters, and aunts on the other side. What should I do? See them as aggressors? No. Culturally I feel Ukrainian today, but it used to be different.”

Raised by farmers tilling land collectivized under Soviet rule, Olexandre Polyakov was schooled in Russian and spoke Russian with his parents, but says he feels Ukrainian because “my ancestors were Ukrainian.”

The owner of a liquor and candy store right on the border that used to be highly popular with Russian clients, he attributes pro-Russian sentiment in the village to nostalgia for Soviet times, when life was easier, and misunderstanding of the Kremlin’s motivations.

“Putin does not want democracy,” says Mr. Polyakov. “He uses the illusion of caring about his people here [in Ukraine] for his own personal interest.”

He is equally critical of the government in Kyiv, calling President Volodymyr Zelenskyy a liar. But he thinks war “is absolutely impossible.”

On the other hand, interrupts a customer, “we didn’t think there would be a fence either.”

Reclaiming – or rewriting – history?

Milove’s school sits in a stately 19th-century building in the center of the village of 5,500 people. Its approach to education reflects national efforts to imbue children with a strong sense of Ukrainian identity and history. Since last year, Ukrainian has been mandated as the only language in which classes may be taught in all educational establishments, and new curricula revisit chapters of Russian and Soviet history with an eye for Ukrainian national heroes.

History class might begin with a lesson on Bohdan Khmelnytsky, the supreme military commander of the Ukrainian state in the 17th century. Or it will go further back to the Middle Ages, reframing the traditionally dominant Russocentric narrative.

“The older generations here call it rewriting history,” says Nadiya Yaroslavivna, the school’s headmistress. “I can understand their views and grievances. All their lives they have been taught the Soviet ideology, and if you don’t feel yourself Ukrainian inside it is difficult to accept this new history. There are many new facts that are now known that had been kept secret in Soviet times. For them it is very hard to accept.”

Crafting a sense of Ukrainian identity, buttressed by the Ukrainian language, is a cause close to her heart, says Ms. Yaroslavivna. Any sense of kinship that she felt with Russia, growing up as a Russian speaker, was shattered when she witnessed the takeover of Luhansk, where she was teaching in 2014.

“Until age 35, I spoke fluent Russian,” she recalls. “It was a conscious decision to opt for the Ukrainian language because there was an understanding that this was important for raising children, both in the schools and my own. 

“I believe identity starts from the language,” adds Ms. Yaroslavivna. “If I don’t speak the Ukrainian language, how will I transmit to the next generation all the folklore and traditions from Ukraine?”

It troubles her that some in the community still do not see Russia as the aggressor, but she pins her hopes on the next generation.  

“When I first arrived, seventh graders would tell the same [Soviet-era] nostalgic tales of their grandparents,” Ms. Yaroslavivna says. “Now, when they finish school, they say ‘Glory to Ukraine!’”

The classes seem to be having at least some of the desired effect on three Russian-speaking girls sitting in the village’s sole cafe, a mostly empty establishment garishly decorated in lime green and yellow. They note with pride that their village was the first to be liberated from the Germans by Soviet fighters in World War II.

Dominique Soguel

From left to right, Liza, Oksana, and Veronika hang out at a cafe in the border town of Milove, Ukraine, Feb. 4, 2022. “If you’d ask me a couple of years ago, I would have told you the old Russian ways were preferable,” says Veronika. “Now I think, well, we live in Ukraine so we should speak Ukrainian.”

The youngest two, 14-year-old Liza and Oksana, consider themselves Ukrainians, but they still struggle to name any Ukrainian national heroes and Oksana is uncomfortable with the language switch. “It is not pleasant for us, because not all of us speak good Ukrainian,” she admits. 

Veronika, a 21-year-old university student, considers herself a culturally Ukrainian Slav, but says she “does not like to distinguish between people on the basis of their nationality.

“If you’d ask me a couple of years ago, I would have told you the old Russian ways were preferable,” she adds. “Now I think, well, we live in Ukraine so we should speak Ukrainian.”

She and her sister, Liza, use the Moscow-approved nomenclature for the separatist border enclave, the Luhansk People’s Republic, but it does not appear to carry much weight with them.

“Young people are more respectful when it comes to political differences and differences in opinion,” says Veronika. “Older people get very heated about politics and try to impose their authoritarian worldview.”

Discussions about identity indeed turn heated at the offices of Word of the Breadmaker, a local newspaper first published in 1932 that today prints 800 copies a week. The building sits on a snow-covered street that Google Maps still identifies as Lenin Street but locals now know as Peace Street.

The newspaper is published primarily in Ukrainian although it does make room for an occasional Russian-language article. Financed by the municipality, coverage tends to steer clear of Russian and Ukrainian politics but takes deep dives into local history and agricultural astrology, and updates citizens on new regulations that concern them. 

“We are fed up with all this identity stuff,” says Ukrainian-speaking bookkeeper Larysa Volodymyrivna. “We are fed up with all this war. Nobody invited Russian troops to come here and kill our people. For me it is clear: I am Ukrainian. But it is not like that for everyone here. If you hate Ukraine, go to Russia.”

Layout specialist Kateryna Anatolivna says it is not as simple as that. Nostalgia for the Soviet era does not necessarily imply approval of Russian policy in Ukraine, she points out. It is largely rooted in economic and social grounds, she says, such as care for older people, decent pensions, and good playgrounds for children at the region’s collective farms that the Soviet government provided.

“I do have a sense of nostalgia,” she says. “I feel Slavic.”

Since the church in Milove opened in 1995, the villagers and their neighbors from the adjacent rural Russian village of Chertkovo, just across the border, had always celebrated Sunday services and celebrations such as Easter together as one community. That is no longer possible, and Archpriest Igor Zakharkin of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the Moscow Patriarchate blames politicians.

“There has been a purposeful effort ... from both sides to disrupt brotherly ties here,” he says. “Every political effort has been made to make Ukraine and Russia quarrel. Politicians and the mass media take part in this. Here we accept people as they come. We don’t check their passport.” 

But the old Russian bell ringer cannot come anymore. Today it is Sister Yelisaveta, a Ukrainian nun, who rings Milove’s church bells in the tower overlooking the border fence. Russian bells, they say, ring back each Sunday in what remains a cordial conversation. 

Vyacheslav Ageyev contributed research and translation assistance in the reporting of this article.

Dario Lopez-Mills/AP/File

A migrant and her daughter have their biometric data entered at the intake area of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security holding facility in Donna, Texas, March 30, 2021. Late last year, the so-called Remain in Mexico program was reimplemented after President Joe Biden's termination of it was ruled unlawful.

The choice for president in 2020, both candidates said, hinged not just on policy or ideological differences, but on morals. And on one issue their differences were especially distinct: immigration.

Donald Trump’s administration had waged “an unrelenting assault on our values and our history as a nation of immigrants,” Joe Biden’s campaign wrote in 2019. It was an assault he promised not only to stop, but actively to reverse. Harsh Trump-era policies would end, he said. In general, immigrants would be treated with dignity and humanity.

One year later, President Biden has, to a degree, delivered on those promises. But in some important ways, little has changed.

Some of the practices decried by critics as inhumane during the Trump years, such as the separation of migrant children from their families, are effectively still in place, experts and advocates say. Systemic issues with the U.S. immigration system as a whole – including long backlogs, a lack of resources, and an infrastructure designed for outdated migration patterns – have hampered some of the actions President Biden has taken, they add.

“We are building safe, orderly, and humane alternative pathways” into the U.S., said Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas during a visit to El Paso, Texas, last week, the El Paso Times reported. 

“We are rebuilding a system here in the United States that was dismantled in its entirety.”

Here’s a look at immigration under the Biden administration.

Why are people saying not much has changed?

Even before President Trump, the southern border has been synonymous with U.S. immigration policy. But that focus intensified under his administration with efforts to construct a border wall and intentionally punitive policies like the separation of migrant families and the Migration Protection Protocols (MPP), also known as “Remain in Mexico.”

Mr. Trump pointed to a surge in asylum seekers during his administration as justification for his policies. Traffic to the border has only increased since Mr. Biden entered office – migrant encounters in the first quarter of fiscal 2022 more than doubled from the first quarter of fiscal 2021, which in turn was a roughly 70% increase from the start of fiscal 2020. Still, his administration has said they want to tackle the issue with more compassion. 

Jacquelyn Martin/AP/File

Supporters of immigration reform march while asking for a path to citizenship and an end to detentions and deportations, April 28, 2021, in Washington. “We’re very disappointed,” says Juliana Macedo do Nascimento, senior advocacy manager at United We Dream. “We believed that [the Biden administration] would follow through on their campaign promises.”

But on paper and in reality, the Biden administration has changed little at the southern border.

“We’re very disappointed,” says Juliana Macedo do Nascimento, senior advocacy manager at United We Dream, a national youth-led immigrant advocacy group.

“We believed that they would follow through on their campaign promises,” she adds. “They’re just not moving on these things in a bold or fast enough way.”

Republicans, meanwhile, have been hammering Mr. Biden on his immigration policy. Pointing in particular to issues at the southern border, they say he’s not doing enough to keep the country safe and stop the surge in migrants traveling to the country. Rep. Elise Stefanik of New York, the third-ranking House Republican, told the New York Post last month that Mr. Biden is “failing to enforce our rule of law and pouring violent criminals into our communities in the cover of night.”

MPP, implemented by the Trump administration in January 2019, required asylum seekers to stay in Mexico while their claims were being processed. Mr. Biden terminated the program on his first day in office, but a federal judge ruled that the administration ended the program in an unlawful manner. After the U.S. Supreme Court agreed, the administration began to reimplement it late last year.

The administration says it made some changes intended to improve the program, including enabling better access to lawyers, but it also chose to expand it to cover citizens of all countries in the Western Hemisphere. (Before, it had only covered Spanish-speaking countries.) And just like during the Trump years, thousands of asylum seekers are living in squalid, dangerous camps in Mexican border cities.

SOURCE:

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; Jill H. Wilson, Temporary Protected Status and Deferred Enforced Departure (Congressional Research Service, 2021); U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services

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Jacob Turcotte and Henry Gass/Staff

The Biden administration has also continued the Trump-era Title 42 program, which allows the government to rapidly expel migrants before they can apply for asylum if they come from a country where COVID-19 is prevalent.

Mr. Biden did issue an executive order last week directing federal agencies to review various aspects of U.S. immigration strategy, including Title 42 and MPP. But for Charlene D’Cruz, an immigration attorney who has been representing migrants in Brownsville, Texas, since late 2019, the situation isn’t much different from the Trump years.

“There’s still all sorts of barriers to asylum, even for vulnerable people,” she says. “It’s still not a humane process.”

“When you relegate people into a trench by the border, there is no degree of humanity,” she adds. “There’s no reason why these folks could not be processed through the border and let in to do their asylum cases.”

For those who have been living in the United States, efforts to create permanent pathways to citizenship – particularly for “Dreamers,” those brought to the U.S. as children – have been frustrated as Mr. Biden’s legislative agenda has stalled in Congress.

All told, the situation has exasperated advocates, some Democratic lawmakers – and even members of the Biden administration. 

“It has been frustrating to all of us on the inside, and personally to me,” said Esther Olavarria, deputy director for immigration in the administration’s Domestic Policy Council, during a panel hosted by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI) last month. 

“There is much more that we need to be doing and could be doing.”

Some things have changed though, right?

Yes, but compared with the border policies, those changes have had a less visible effect.

The current administration raised the cap on refugee admissions for this year to 125,000, the highest level since 1993. It also expanded the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program, which grants protection from deportation and work authorization to immigrants already in the U.S. because their countries are deemed too unsafe to return to. Immigrants from Myanmar and Venezuela are now eligible for TPS, and newer arrivals from Haiti, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen are also newly eligible.

Both moves are in sharp contrast to the Trump administration, which set the refugee admissions cap at 15,000 in its last year, and also sought to reduce or end TPS for many immigrants, only to be blocked by the courts.

Elliot Spagat/AP/File

Asylum seekers in Tijuana, Mexico, listen to names being called from a waiting list to claim asylum at a border crossing in San Diego, Sept. 26, 2019. The U.S. immigration system was designed to catch and deport adult men crossing illegally from Mexico. The shift toward families and unaccompanied minors seeking asylum has put pressure on the system's weakest points.

Another area where the Biden administration has made a U-turn from the Trump era is on interior enforcement by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The number of immigrants in ICE detention has decreased in the past year, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University (TRAC), because the administration has taken a softer approach toward the estimated 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the country.

Large ICE workplace raids have been ended, and the designation of “sensitive locations” where agents can’t make arrests – like schools, hospitals, and religious institutions – has been expanded.

And while the Trump administration made virtually any individual in the U.S. illegally a priority for arrest and removal, ICE officers have now been instructed to focus on those who pose a national security risk, have been convicted of certain crimes, or recently entered the country illegally. Officers have also been told to make individualized enforcement decisions, meaning they should consider both “aggravating” and “mitigating” factors in an individual’s case when deciding whom to target. 

“It’s a much more nuanced prioritizing [of interior] enforcement than in the past,” says Jessica Bolter, an associate policy analyst at MPI. And the expansions of refugee admissions and TPS, she adds, “are significant legal protections, at least on a temporary basis.” 

The challenge the Biden administration is facing – and will continue to face – however, is ensuring that their policies are implemented effectively in an immigration system with deep systemic problems.

What are the systemic problems? And what can we expect moving forward?

The challenge for every Congress and president in the past few decades has been to overhaul an outdated, under-resourced, and bureaucracy-laden immigration system. 

The system was designed to effectively and efficiently catch and deport adult men crossing illegally from Mexico looking for work. So the shift toward large numbers of families and unaccompanied minors seeking legal asylum in the U.S. has put pressure on the weakest points in America’s immigration infrastructure. Shelter space is nonexistent, and immigration courts have been understaffed and overworked for years. The case backlog in those courts recently reached 1.6 million, the largest it’s ever been – and it’s accelerating, according to TRAC.

The pandemic has exacerbated these backlogs, but so have bureaucratic issues. The pandemic has closed immigration courts around the country, but as of September last year, only about 100 of the country’s 580 immigration judges had been issued laptops allowing them to hold remote hearings, says Mimi Tsankov, president of the National Association of Immigration Judges.

“I don’t doubt the [Justice Department] is working to obtain that technology,” she adds. But “we could be much more effective if we all had that.”

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services – which handles visa applications, immigrant benefits programs, and TPS, among other responsibilities – has a backlog of more than 8 million cases. And U.S. consulates, which handle the early stages of refugee admissions, are not yet back to pre-pandemic staffing levels, says Ms. Bolter.

“Some of Biden’s major changes have had their impact stalled a bit because of these backlogs,” she adds. 

Ultimately, the Biden administration’s immigration policy has seen mixed results so far. While its border policies have attracted a lot of attention, and criticism from both left and right, it has quietly made significant changes elsewhere. But as past administrations have found, the U.S. immigration system continues to suffer from decades-old flaws that will frustrate efforts to improve it.

“I don’t want to talk about the Biden administration as a complete failure … because it’s difficult,” says Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera, an associate professor at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government and an expert on immigration and Mexico-U.S. relations.

“I didn’t expect that all the problems that had been created in a number of years, a number of decades, would be solved in one year.”

Monika Rebala

Snow covers Godziszów in eastern Poland, where the overwhelming majority of residents voted against joining the European Union in 2003. Today, the rural village is thriving thanks to subsidies from the bloc, and locals are much more favorably disposed toward it.

The inhabitants of the Polish village of Godziszów in southeast Poland might have once been receptive to the idea of their country going its own way, outside the European Union.

Not that the idea of a Polish exit, or “Polexit,” from the bloc is something that most people in the country publicly claim to want. The ruling Law and Justice party (PiS) has officially stated that it doesn’t desire to leave the EU.

But the right-wing, conservative party’s relationship with Brussels since it came to power in 2015 has been largely antagonistic. As PiS has consolidated its power and remade Poland’s judicial system, the EU has criticized the party of violating European law. It has both brought legal action against Poland and threatened to cut off European funds to Poland in response.

Religious and patriotic, Godziszów is a natural bastion for PiS. And this rural village and its surrounding commune of 5,700 voted overwhelmingly against joining the EU in 2003. But while some residents still express concern that the EU may be undermining Christian values, most today have a clear sense that Polish values and interests align more strongly with the West rather than with the East – especially amid tensions between NATO and Russia, once a Polish occupier.

And their attitudes show why a Polexit is such a remote possibility.

“I voted against joining the EU,” recalls Aleksander Zdybel, the oldest local councilor, who gave his son a 26-acre farm in 2003 that prospered with the help of EU funding. “Today I would vote for it. Times have changed; we wouldn’t manage alone.”

“It would be harder for us without EU support”

The roads of Godziszów are in constant need of repair. They can’t cope with the high summer traffic of big tractors and heavy machinery that farmers bought tapping into EU agricultural subsidies.

Godziszów Mayor Józef Zbytniewski of PiS notes that EU funds cover around half the commune’s budget – with about $10 million spent in recent years – and that there is fierce competition among village elders to get projects off the ground. EU money revitalized the local library and cultural center, spread the use of solar collectors and environmentally friendly heating stoves, and helped repair the roads shredded by the machinery.

Monika Rebala

Mayor Józef Zbytniewski, shown here in his office in the local council building in Godziszów, Poland, says, “The majority of residents would also be for the union today, despite the fear that the union is changing, i.e., moving away from Christian values.”

“The model of agriculture in Poland is changing,” explained Mr. Zbytniewski on a dreary December day that left the surrounding fields blanketed in snow. “There are fewer farmers, so there is more acreage to work on and more mechanical work. They seek funds from the EU and see the benefit.”

EU funds have played a major role in the development of rural areas in Poland. Among direct beneficiaries, Polish farmers represent the largest group, at about 1.3 million people. Council member Maria Ciupak, for example, has been able to grow her farm from 25 to 75 acres, and leases 75 more with the help of such funds.

“The people from Godziszów have found their place in the EU – they know how to utilize EU funds and how to fight for subsidies,” says Ms. Ciupak, who combines farming with teaching and her council duties. “It would be harder for us without EU support.”

Mirosław Gąska, headmaster of the Godziszów Elementary School, still remembers how when he started at the school in 1998, the corridors of the Soviet-era building would fill with water after heavy rains. The windows were so fragile that the glass would shatter when students bounced a ball on the gym floor. EU funds permitted several upgrades including a new playground, better toilets, and modern teaching aids. That fact is not lost on students, who cite access to EU funds as the main perk of membership in that club of nations.

It isn’t difficult to see the development Poland has had since joining the EU, says Mr. Gąska, a local anomaly for casting a pro-EU membership vote nearly two decades ago. “Everything in this world has its imperfections, but on balance Polish presence in the EU is a positive.”

The tangible benefits of EU membership in this rural community are clear. So is the strength of its Christian conservative values, with crucifixes ubiquitously adorning public and private spaces alike.

Godziszów voted overwhelmingly (88%) against membership in the bloc in 2003. With the benefit of hindsight, elders in the town attribute that result to a fear of the unknown; worries that strong Roman Catholic traditions would give way to secularism or, even worse, outright atheism; and concerns that Poland would not be dealt with as an equal among European nations. Farmers were also afraid of losing the land to wealthy European buyers. 

By and large, those worries proved unwarranted. Capitalist and secularist outsiders never arrived in the commune. Still, says Mayor Zbytniewski, “maybe these old fears have not come true, but new ones have arisen.”

“If we were alone it could be worse”

Those new fears have manifested as PiS and its conservative supporters clash with the EU, on issues ranging from LGBTQ rights to the rule of law.

The Polish constitutional court in October ruled that national law supersedes EU treaties, a move that threatened the very essence of the union. It rattled Brussels enough to withhold €24 billion ($27 billion) in grants from the bloc’s COVID-19 recovery funds and raised questions over the ruling party’s commitment to membership in the EU.

Despite all the tussles with Brussels, the top brass of the Law and Justice party wants to remain in the bloc, according to Rafał Chwedoruk, political scientist at the University of Warsaw. “There is no indication that the leadership of PiS, [party co-founder and leader Jarosław] Kaczyński and his closest circle, want to leave the European Union,” he says, although they are against deepening integration.

If Godziszów is any indication, there is just as little interest among PiS supporters in leaving the EU.

“I think the majority of residents would also be for the union today,” says Mayor Zbytniewski, “despite the fear that the union is changing, i.e., moving away from Christian values.”

It will be “faster [that] Brussels will throw us out of the EU for not obeying the law than we will leave the EU by ourselves,” says Daniel Król, a young farmer loading sacks of buckwheat onto the back of a truck.

“There are many young farmers in Godziszów and they would not vote for Polexit,” Mr. Król adds. His family owns 200 acres of land, and they have benefited from EU subsidies. “Our country has too many benefits from membership in the EU to give them up by itself.”

Dr. Chwedoruk notes that the idea of Polexit doesn’t hold the same resonance in Poland as Brexit does in Britain, due to historical context – especially Poland’s lack of an equivalent to the British Empire. “There was never a strong political stream that said Poland’s place was outside the Western world,” he says. “It cannot exist alone in international space.”

That may be reflected in the thinking of Jan Golec, a middle-aged farmer growing raspberries and cereal in Godziszów. He notes that Poland is benefiting from improved living standards and job creation, as well as access to the labor markets of the EU. But he decries Poland’s loss of sovereignty as Brussels “dictates” to Warsaw.

Still, he says, staying in the EU might be the best choice available to Poland.

“Let me put it this way.” he says. “A chained dog has to obey its master, but it has a warm kennel, food, etc. On the one hand, his life is bad because he is subordinated, but on the other hand, he has everything he needs. If he was free, he would have to look after himself. For sure, if I had to choose today between the West or Russia, I would choose the West without hesitation. We are not a rich enough country to do what we want.”

“Strength is in a group; if we were alone it could be worse,” he adds. “Russia has not forgotten that this was once its territory.”

Dominique Soguel contributed reporting from Basel, Switzerland.

James Manship, a conservative activist who regularly attends right-wing marches and rallies, wears his politics. 

From the bottom up, he puts on colonial riding boots, stockings, breeches, a white dress shirt, a vest, an overcoat, a white wig, and a tricorn hat. It can be an uncomfortable get-up. But if George Washington could wear it into battle, this George Washington interpreter can wear it in his battle for American values. 

“I didn’t have a Ph.D. or a JD, so nobody was going to listen to me about my understanding of the Constitution,” says Mr. Manship, who lives in Alexandria, Virginia. “But they would listen to the president of the Constitutional Convention.”

Mr. Manship loves his history, and he dresses as George Washington, in part, out of personal interest. It’s also strategic. Mr. Manship is a devout Christian and conservative, active in state politics. In his 30 years of interpreting, he’s spoken to thousands of students and addressed the Virginia General Assembly multiple times. When General Washington shows up, he says, other conservatives want to listen. 

Most people are more subtle in their attire, but right-leaning Americans across the country frequently appeal to the nation’s founding. The fight against big government is one of “patriots” against “tyranny.” In heavily Republican areas, the historical Gadsden flag – with a coiled rattlesnake and the words “Dont tread on me” – has migrated from flagpoles to license plate frames. In response to the 1619 Project, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalistic collection about slavery, there’s now a 1776 Project. 

This iconography has long been a hallmark of the American right, but it’s becoming increasingly important. The uproar about instruction related to race in schools, in particular, often stems from conservatives sensing critiques of the country’s founding, says Amy Cooter, a sociologist at Vanderbilt University. To many, that history isn’t a relic. It’s a fundamental part of conservative identity today. Figuring out how to make issues like race less controversial demands understanding why the founding – and the founders themselves – matter so much to many people right of center. 

Many conservatives “want to believe so badly that we’re a good nation,” says Dr. Cooter. Questioning the founding is “threatening to … who they think they are as people, who they think they are as Americans.”

Founders or founding principles?

People’s sense of themselves as Americans often depends on their view of America. On that topic, the left and right have very different views. 

In a YouGov/Economist survey last December, those who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 were far more pessimistic about America’s relative standing on issues like income inequality and minority rights than those who voted for Donald Trump. A report from Pew Research Center, published a month before, had similar findings. People who identified furthest to the right were far more likely to agree that “The U.S. stands above all other countries in the world” than people furthest to the left – 69% to 1%. 

For some of those conservatives who believe in American exceptionalism, displaying symbols of America’s founding is a way to show national pride. But it’s not the only way, nor are conservatives the only patriotic Americans. In the YouGov survey, independents responded more like Republicans than Democrats. 

“Conservatives or conservative activists might display these symbols the most, but I think the vast majority of Americans are remaining patriotic,” says Donald Critchlow, professor of history at Arizona State University and author of “Revolutionary Monsters: Five Men Who Turned Liberation into Tyranny.” 

In his opinion, the symbols have more to do with political organizing than patriotism. Movements need a shared language and iconography, and conservatives have long used that of the founding. When Franklin Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court in 1937, he says, protesters arrived in Washington dressed as Minutemen. 

Still, despite the different strains of the American right and the many symbols they could rally around, there’s something specific about the founding that resonates. In part, it’s a natural fit with conservative thought. If you want the country to remain true to the way it started, then you’re more likely to celebrate those who started it. It also reflects a specific view of the country’s founding popular among the right.

“The understanding of the country as something based on a creed of rational principles has always stood in contrast to a point of view which said, no, it’s not based on what these guys wrote. It’s based on who they were,” says Lawrence Rosenthal, chair and lead researcher of the Berkeley Center for Right-Wing Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. 

People on the left, he says, are much more likely to value the principles of America’s founding documents – things like individual rights, democracy, and equality. People on the right also value those documents but tend to emphasize the identity of the founders who wrote them, particularly their race or religion. The latter view, says Dr. Rosenthal, has grown more popular than ever since Mr. Trump’s presidency.

“They really see themselves as acting in the lineage especially of the Founding Fathers,” says Dr. Cooter.

Jacquelyn Martin/AP/File

James Manship, dressed as President George Washington, holds a pocket copy of the Constitution while attending the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, Feb. 23, 2018.

Consulting the Constitution 

Mr. Manship thinks that way.

His reverence for the Constitution started at the age of 10, when a former editor of the Atlanta Constitution told him to treasure the nation’s founding documents. Later, he pledged to “defend the Constitution of the United States from all enemies, foreign and domestic” when serving in the Navy. Protecting the Constitution is largely how he views politics today. Like many conservatives, he thinks it’s under threat. 

In a November 2021 poll by the Public Religion Research Institute, Republicans were more than twice as likely as Democrats to agree that “today, America is in danger of losing its culture and identity.” A more recent poll shows Republicans generally feel more pessimistic about the country’s direction.

Appeals to the founding can be powerful forms of reassurance for conservatives who feel threatened – especially as narratives of American history grow more inclusive, and often more critical. In last year’s school board races, some candidates opposed to instruction related to race, signaled their positions by signing an online 1776 Pledge.

The founding is “more appealing to conservatives because we do have this view of limited government,” says John Eidsmoe, a former staff attorney with the Alabama Supreme Court and outspoken conservative. “We’re concerned about government getting too powerful, about taking too much of our tax money, about using it for purposes that we think would be immoral.”

But the founding doesn’t appeal to all on the right the same way. 

Brett Ames frequently consults the Constitution when thinking about political problems today and proudly traces his American ancestry back to Braintree, Massachusetts, in 1632. He’s a conservative and respects fixtures of America’s founding, but he doesn’t consider them all sacred. The founders were just men, he says.

“I don’t think that they personally, if they saw how revered they were to this day, that they would be comfortable with it,” says Mr. Ames. 

Still Mr. Ames, a former IT employee, flies two flags off his porch in Buckhall, Virginia: the Marine Corps flag and the Gadsden flag. The first is for his son, who serves in the military. The second is in honor of Revolutionary War naval commander John Paul Jones, who allegedly flew it from his ship. Those two reflect his love of country, but he says they’re more about his own values. 

In his own way, Mr. Manship would agree. Dressing as George Washington can be a signal to other conservatives, but not just conservatives. He wants people to know how much he cares about the Constitution. What better way to show it, he says.

“They see the image of a George Washington. ... They see and feel the passion,” says Mr. Manship. “That’s going to communicate a love for this Constitution better than if I come before them in a coat and tie or a T-shirt.”

Spring is incipient here in Maine. This calls for an important preparatory activity, though snow still lies about and the stream behind my house remains choked with ice: The apple tree must be pruned before the sap rises.

Pruning an apple tree is one of the purest expressions I know of the philosophy that less is more. The bulk of the task is a matter of removing so-called suckers, or “water sprouts,” shoots that sally forth from the trunk and branches and reach toward the high heavens like exclamation points on an overwrought sentence. But there is also the occasional heavy branch that must be sawed off. All of this clipping and hacking is designed to accomplish two things: enable the tree to direct its energy toward setting fruit, rather than supporting wayward growth, and allow light to reach all the leaves. The rule of thumb is that a robin should be able to fly through the apple tree unimpeded, although an experienced friend of mine says that a cat should be able to leap through the expanse of branches untouched.

My apple tree is a Cortland, which is described in the catalogs as an “improved McIntosh.” I’m not sure where the improvement lies, but Cortlands do have two impeccable features: The white flesh of the fruit is slow to turn brown after cutting, making it a good choice for salads, and the tree itself – unlike many apple trees, which tend toward gangliness – is wonderfully symmetrical. The one in my backyard resembles nothing so much as an immense beach umbrella.

I bought the Cortland a good 20 years ago. It was a thin whip then, a specimen left over at the end of a fruit-tree sale. I bought it not only because it was the last tree on the lot, but also because it looked so forlorn, leaning up against a shed like a child whose friends had excluded it from play. I brought it home and planted it on a rise overlooking the stream. 

It must have liked the spot, because it grew by leaps and bounds. Today it is a mature tree with a magnificent crown, bearing reliably from year to year. Its white blossoms are a sight to behold in midspring.

But all this largesse has a price: the time and effort of pruning, which is a full day’s work if the task is done right. The most essential tools are loppers and a pruning saw, but these would be all but useless without a good apple ladder. The salient feature of such a ladder is that it’s pointed, the better to pass through tangled branches.

Here in Maine we have a man who works ash and aspen into the most exquisite apple ladders. I own one, and come February, I haul it out and slip it among the branches of the Cortland. And then, with loppers and pruning saw, I climb up, up until I am a denizen of the tree’s still-bare canopy. Although I am not one of those who talks to plants out of any faith that they understand me, I find myself voicing my thoughts nonetheless. “Let’s clip this branch here.” “And this one, which is growing the wrong way.” “Look at the angle of this branch! It’s too narrow. I’ll have to use my saw ...”

I begin my work in the cold, but by the time it’s done I’m warm to the point of comfort. I descend the ladder, step back, and examine my handiwork. 

The sun has moved around to the southwest, and abundant light silhouettes every branch against the wild blue yonder. Before too many days have passed, the sap will rise, the buds will swell, the blossoms will burst forth, and the fruit will set. With the help of sharpened tools and an apple ladder, I take some ownership in this. 

Let the show begin.

AP

A woman walks by a building destroyed during fighting between the Ukrainian military and pro-Russian separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Foreign leaders are giving Vladimir Putin any number of reasons for Russia not to take Ukraine by force or other means. Yet the best advice may be coming from within Russia itself. In recent days, statements from two disparate groups, prominent liberal thinkers and former military officers, have described Kremlin provocations and threats against Ukraine as “criminal.” 

Russia will become a “pariah of the world community” if it invades its close neighbor, wrote retired Col. Gen. Leonid Ivashov, a former chief of military cooperation, on behalf of the All-Russian Officers Assembly. Meanwhile, more than 5,000 members of the Congress of Russian Intellectuals asked the Putin regime to avoid an “immoral, irresponsible, and criminal” war.

These warnings of a moral crisis for Russia were echoed in the United States this week when officials estimated an invasion could result in 25,000 to 50,000 civilian casualties in Ukraine. That possible violation of humanitarian law – part of the rules of war embedded in the 1949 Geneva Conventions – may give pause to Mr. Putin’s calculations of war. Ukraine has already begun to document cases of war crimes by pro-Russian combatants in the eastern region.

On top of any killing of noncombatants in Ukraine, Amnesty International warns of a mass migration to the West. “It is frightening to imagine what scale the refugee crisis could reach in the event of escalating hostilities in Ukraine. It will be a continent-wide humanitarian disaster with millions of refugees seeking protection in neighboring European countries,” said Agnès Callamard, the group’s secretary-general.

Russia has often backed protections for vulnerable civilians in conflict zones. In Syria’s war, it has backed a “humanitarian pause” to let trapped civilians escape the fighting. In 2017, it accused Ukraine’s government of killing Russian speakers in the eastern region.

Yet in 2019, Moscow walked away from a vital part of the Geneva Conventions that authorizes investigations into alleged war crimes against civilians. And it has ended its support of a 2005 United Nations doctrine known as Responsibility to Protect. That doctrine allows international intervention in countries that fail to protect mass killings of civilians. 

Still, Russia’s behavior hints Mr. Putin may be all too aware of the reputational costs of violating moral guardrails that prevent civilian harm. His taking of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula in 2014, for example, was done by stealth incursion of Russian troops out of military uniform, or what NATO calls “unattributed warfare.” And U.S. officials speculate that Russia might use cyberattacks against Ukraine’s civilian infrastructure or limit an invasion to the Russian-speaking territories

The idea that warring parties must recognize the innocence of civilians has taken hold in most countries over decades. It provides an essential legal bumper to prevent wars with no limits. It also promotes the universal principle of reverence for life. From both inside and outside Russia, that message may yet persuade Mr. Putin to hold his fire.