I was shocked to learn that Latvia is moving to declare journalist @leonidragozin Leonid Ragozin persona non grata, potentially forcing him out of the country. The immediate danger is obvious. Ragozin is a Russian citizen and a longtime critic of Vladimir Putin and Russia’s war against Ukraine. Forcing him back to Russia could put him at risk of persecution. But this is about much more than one journalist. Ragozin’s real offense appears to be his refusal to tell the story of this war in the comforting language of good and evil: Putin as Hitler, Zelensky as Churchill, Russia as absolute evil, and the West as a spectator with neither agency nor responsibility for the catastrophe unfolding in Ukraine. Ragozin has never denied Russia’s aggression. What he has challenged is the idea that acknowledging the aggressor absolves us from asking how we arrived here. His journalism insists on examining the uncomfortable history behind the war: NATO expansion, the collapse of the post-Cold War security order, Maidan and its aftermath, competing nationalisms, the failure of diplomacy, Putin’s authoritarianism and the steadily escalating confrontation between Russia and the West. You can disagree with his conclusions. But if questioning the Western dominant narrative of a war can make a journalist a national-security threat, something has gone badly wrong. Explanation is not justification. Understanding your enemy is not collaboration with your enemy. And asking how a war began is not treason. That is what makes the Ragozin case so disturbing. It suggests that Europe’s accelerating militarization is being accompanied by an intellectual one: a narrowing of what may be said, questioned, and even thought about this war. As Europe prepares for an increasingly open-ended confrontation with Russia, inconvenient voices become inconvenient for a reason. Nuance interferes with mobilization. Doubt interferes with certainty. And journalism becomes dangerous when it asks questions that politics no longer wants answered. This should frighten us. Europe will not protect democracy by policing the boundaries of permissible thought. Nor will it bring peace closer by silencing those who question the logic of permanent confrontation. We are talking, after all, about a confrontation involving nuclear powers. At such a moment, the dangerous voices are not those demanding that we understand how we got here. The truly dangerous moment comes when we are no longer allowed to ask.