To the Editors: In his review of Georgios Varouxakis’s The West [NYR, December 18, 2025], Yuri Slezkine makes assertions that should unsettle anyone concerned about the fate of liberal democracy. Most troubling are these: that historic Russia is a largely passive entity against which “the West” defines itself; that Ukraine—a country fighting for its existence as a free society—is a “radical ethnocracy” whose leaders are busy homogenizing a multicultural, multireligious country according to the slogan “Army, Language, Faith”; and, finally, that it’s “bogus” to claim that Russia threatens people beyond its borders. A long-term historical view quickly reveals the first proposition as wrong. However we understand “the West,” Russia was just one of many factors against which it was defined. Fundamental are events that precede Varouxakis’s analysis, above all the fall of Constantinople in 1453. Only after that did “the West” arise as an idea uniting peoples and states. This basic variant has never disappeared; witness the “pro-Western” anti-Islamic rhetoric of Europe’s far right—this is “the West” of which Russia is an integral part. In …