the war in ukraine essay

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Ukraine: Conflict at the Crossroads of Europe and Russia

• Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has set alight the bloodiest conflict in Europe since World War II.
• A former Soviet republic, Ukraine had deep cultural, economic, and political bonds with Russia, but the war could irreparably harm their relations.
• Some experts view the Russia-Ukraine war as a manifestation of renewed geopolitical rivalry between major world powers.

Introduction

Ukraine has long played an important, yet sometimes overlooked, role in the global security order. Today, the country is on the front lines of a renewed great-power rivalry that many analysts say will dominate international relations in the decades ahead.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 marked a dramatic escalation of the eight-year-old conflict that began with Russia’s annexation of Crimea and signified a historic turning point for European security. A year after the fighting began, many defense and foreign policy analysts cast the war as a major strategic blunder by Russian President Vladimir Putin.  

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Many observers see little prospect for a diplomatic resolution in the months ahead and instead acknowledge the potential for a dangerous escalation, which could include Russia’s use of a nuclear weapon. The war has hastened Ukraine’s push to join Western political blocs, including the European Union (EU) and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

Why is Ukraine a geopolitical flash point?

Ukraine was a cornerstone of the Soviet Union, the archrival of the United States during the Cold War. Behind only Russia, it was the second-most-populous and -powerful of the fifteen Soviet republics, home to much of the union’s agricultural production, defense industries, and military, including the Black Sea Fleet and some of the nuclear arsenal. Ukraine was so vital to the union that its decision to sever ties in 1991 proved to be a coup de grâce for the ailing superpower. In its three decades of independence, Ukraine has sought to forge its own path as a sovereign state while looking to align more closely with Western institutions, including the EU and NATO. However, Kyiv struggled to balance its foreign relations and to bridge deep internal divisions . A more nationalist, Ukrainian-speaking population in western parts of the country generally supported greater integration with Europe, while a mostly Russian-speaking community in the east favored closer ties with Russia.

Ukraine became a battleground in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea and began arming and abetting separatists in the Donbas region in the country’s southeast. Russia’s seizure of Crimea was the first time since World War II that a European state annexed the territory of another. More than fourteen thousand people died in the fighting in the Donbas between 2014 and 2021, the bloodiest conflict in Europe since the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. The hostilities marked a clear shift in the global security environment from a unipolar period of U.S. dominance to one defined by renewed competition between great powers [PDF].

In February 2022, Russia embarked on a full-scale invasion of Ukraine with the aim of toppling the Western-aligned government of Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

What are Russia’s broad interests in Ukraine?

Russia has deep cultural, economic, and political bonds with Ukraine, and in many ways Ukraine is central to Russia’s identity and vision for itself in the world.

Family ties . Russia and Ukraine have strong familial bonds that go back centuries. Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, is sometimes referred to as “the mother of Russian cities,” on par in terms of cultural influence with Moscow and St. Petersburg. It was in Kyiv in the eighth and ninth centuries that Christianity was brought from Byzantium to the Slavic peoples. And it was Christianity that served as the anchor for Kievan Rus, the early Slavic state from which modern Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarussians draw their lineage.

Russian diaspora . Approximately eight million ethnic Russians were living in Ukraine as of 2001, according to a census taken that year, mostly in the south and east. Moscow claimed a duty to protect these people as a pretext for its actions in Crimea and the Donbas in 2014.

Superpower image . After the Soviet collapse, many Russian politicians viewed the divorce with Ukraine as a mistake of history and a threat to Russia’s standing as a great power. Losing a permanent hold on Ukraine, and letting it fall into the Western orbit, would be seen by many as a major blow to Russia’s international prestige. In 2022, Putin cast the escalating war with Ukraine as a part of a broader struggle against Western powers he says are intent on destroying Russia.

Crimea . Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev transferred Crimea from Russia to Ukraine in 1954 to strengthen the “brotherly ties between the Ukrainian and Russian peoples.” However, since the fall of the union, many Russian nationalists in both Russia and Crimea longed for a return of the peninsula. The city of Sevastopol is home port for Russia’s Black Sea Fleet, the dominant maritime force in the region.

Trade . Russia was for a long time Ukraine’s largest trading partner , although this link withered dramatically in recent years. China eventually surpassed Russia in trade with Ukraine. Prior to its invasion of Crimea, Russia had hoped to pull Ukraine into its single market, the Eurasian Economic Union, which today includes Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan.

Energy . Moscow relied on Ukrainian pipelines to pump its gas to customers in Central and Eastern Europe for decades, and it paid Kyiv billions of dollars per year in transit fees. The flow of Russian gas through Ukraine continued in early 2023 despite the hostilities between the two countries, but volumes were reduced and the pipelines remained in serious jeopardy.

Political sway . Russia was keen to preserve its political influence in Ukraine and throughout the former Soviet Union, particularly after its preferred candidate for Ukrainian president in 2004, Viktor Yanukovych, lost to a reformist competitor as part of the Orange Revolution popular movement. This shock to Russia’s interests in Ukraine came after a similar electoral defeat for the Kremlin in Georgia in 2003, known as the Rose Revolution, and was followed by another—the Tulip Revolution—in Kyrgyzstan in 2005. Yanukovych later became president of Ukraine, in 2010, amid voter discontent with the Orange government.

What triggered Russia’s moves in Crimea and the Donbas in 2014?

It was Ukraine’s ties with the EU that brought tensions to a head with Russia in 2013–14. In late 2013, President Yanukovych, acting under pressure from his supporters in Moscow, scrapped plans to formalize a closer economic relationship with the EU. Russia had at the same time been pressing Ukraine to join the not-yet-formed EAEU. Many Ukrainians perceived Yanukovych’s decision as a betrayal by a deeply corrupt and incompetent government, and it ignited countrywide protests known as Euromaidan.

Putin framed the ensuing tumult of Euromaidan, which forced Yanukovych from power, as a Western-backed “fascist coup” that endangered the ethnic Russian majority in Crimea. (Western leaders dismissed this as baseless propaganda reminiscent of the Soviet era.) In response, Putin ordered a covert invasion of Crimea that he later justified as a rescue operation. “There is a limit to everything. And with Ukraine, our western partners have crossed the line,” Putin said in a March 2014 address formalizing the annexation.

Putin employed a similar narrative to justify his support for separatists in southeastern Ukraine, another region home to large numbers of ethnic Russians and Russian speakers. He famously referred to the area as Novorossiya (New Russia), a term dating back to eighteenth-century imperial Russia. Armed Russian provocateurs, including some agents of Russian security services, are believed to have played a central role in stirring the anti-Euromaidan secessionist movements in the region into a rebellion. However, unlike Crimea, Russia continued to officially deny its involvement in the Donbas conflict until it launched its wider invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Why did Russia launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022?

Some Western analysts see Russia’s 2022 invasion as the culmination of the Kremlin’s growing resentment toward NATO’s post–Cold War expansion into the former Soviet sphere of influence. Russian leaders, including Putin, have alleged that the United States and NATO repeatedly violated pledges they made in the early 1990s to not expand the alliance into the former Soviet bloc. They view NATO’s enlargement during this tumultuous period for Russia as a humiliating imposition about which they could do little but watch.

In the weeks leading up to NATO’s 2008 summit, President Vladimir Putin warned U.S. diplomats that steps to bring Ukraine into the alliance “would be a hostile act toward Russia.” Months later, Russia went to war with Georgia, seemingly showcasing Putin’s willingness to use force to secure his country’s interests. (Some independent observers faulted Georgia for initiating the so-called August War but blamed Russia for escalating hostilities.)

Despite remaining a nonmember, Ukraine grew its ties with NATO in the years leading up to the 2022 invasion. Ukraine held annual military exercises with the alliance and, in 2020, became one of just six enhanced opportunity partners, a special status for the bloc’s closest nonmember allies. Moreover, Kyiv affirmed its goal to eventually gain full NATO membership.

In the weeks leading up to its invasion, Russia made several major security demands of the United States and NATO, including that they cease expanding the alliance, seek Russian consent for certain NATO deployments, and remove U.S. nuclear weapons from Europe. Alliance leaders responded that they were open to new diplomacy but were unwilling to discuss shutting NATO’s doors to new members.

“While in the United States we talk about a Ukraine crisis , from the Russian standpoint this is a crisis in European security architecture,” CFR’s Thomas Graham told Arms Control Today in February 2022. “And the fundamental issue they want to negotiate is the revision of European security architecture as it now stands to something that is more favorable to Russian interests.”

Other experts have said that perhaps the most important motivating factor for Putin was his fear that Ukraine would continue to develop into a modern, Western-style democracy that would inevitably undermine his autocratic regime in Russia and dash his hopes of rebuilding a Russia-led sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. “[Putin] wants to destabilize Ukraine , frighten Ukraine,” writes historian Anne Applebaum in the Atlantic . “He wants Ukrainian democracy to fail. He wants the Ukrainian economy to collapse. He wants foreign investors to flee. He wants his neighbors—in Belarus, Kazakhstan, even Poland and Hungary—to doubt whether democracy will ever be viable, in the longer term, in their countries too.”

What are Russia’s objectives in Ukraine?

Putin’s Russia has been described as a revanchist power, keen to regain its former power and prestige. “It was always Putin’s goal to restore Russia to the status of a great power in northern Eurasia,” writes Gerard Toal, an international affairs professor at Virginia Tech, in his book Near Abroad . “The end goal was not to re-create the Soviet Union but to make Russia great again.”

By seizing Crimea in 2014, Russia solidified its control of a strategic foothold on the Black Sea. With a larger and more sophisticated military presence there, Russia can project power deeper into the Mediterranean, Middle East, and North Africa, where it has traditionally had limited influence. Some analysts argue that Western powers failed to impose meaningful costs on Russia in response to its annexation of Crimea, which they say only increased Putin’s willingness to use military force in pursuit of his foreign policy objectives. Until its invasion in 2022, Russia’s strategic gains in the Donbas were more fragile. Supporting the separatists had, at least temporarily, increased its bargaining power vis-à-vis Ukraine.  

In July 2021, Putin authored what many Western foreign policy experts viewed as an ominous article explaining his controversial views of the shared history between Russia and Ukraine. Among other remarks, Putin described Russians and Ukrainians as “one people” who effectively occupy “the same historical and spiritual space.”

Throughout that year, Russia amassed tens of thousands of troops along the border with Ukraine and later into allied Belarus under the auspices of military exercises. In February 2022, Putin ordered a full-scale invasion, crossing a force of some two hundred thousand troops into Ukrainian territory from the south (Crimea), east (Russia), and north (Belarus), in an attempt to seize major cities, including the capital Kyiv, and depose the government. Putin said the broad goals were to “de-Nazify” and “de-militarize” Ukraine.

However, in the early weeks of the invasion, Ukrainian forces marshaled a stalwart resistance that succeeded in bogging down the Russian military in many areas, including in Kyiv. Many defense analysts say that Russian forces have suffered from low morale, poor logistics, and an ill-conceived military strategy that assumed Ukraine would fall quickly and easily.

In August 2022, Ukraine launched a major counteroffensive against Russian forces, recapturing thousands of square miles of territory in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions. The campaigns marked a stunning setback for Russia. Amid the Russian retreat, Putin ordered the mobilization of some three hundred thousand more troops, illegally annexed four more Ukrainian regions, and threatened to use nuclear weapons to defend Russia’s “territorial integrity.”

Fighting in the subsequent months focused along various fronts in the Donbas, and Russia adopted a new tactic of targeting civilian infrastructure in several distant Ukrainian cities, including Kyiv, with missile and drone strikes. At the first-year mark of the war, Western officials estimated that more than one hundred thousand Ukrainians had been killed or wounded , while Russian losses were likely even higher, possibly double that figure. Meanwhile, some eight million refugees had fled Ukraine, and millions more were internally displaced. Ahead of the spring thaw, Ukraine’s Western allies pledged to send more-sophisticated military aid, including tanks. Most security analysts see little chance for diplomacy in the months ahead, as both sides have strong motives to continue the fight.

What have been U.S. priorities in Ukraine?

Immediately following the Soviet collapse, Washington’s priority was pushing Ukraine—along with Belarus and Kazakhstan—to forfeit its nuclear arsenal so that only Russia would retain the former union’s weapons. At the same time, the United States rushed to bolster the shaky democracy in Russia. Some prominent observers at the time felt that the United States was premature in this courtship with Russia, and that it should have worked more on fostering geopolitical pluralism in the rest of the former Soviet Union.

Former U.S. National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, in Foreign Affairs in early 1994, described a healthy and stable Ukraine as a critical counterweight to Russia and the lynchpin of what he advocated should be the new U.S. grand strategy after the Cold War. “It cannot be stressed strongly enough that without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire,” he wrote. In the months after Brzezinski’s article was published, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Russia pledged via the Budapest Referendum to respect Ukraine’s independence and sovereignty in return for it becoming a nonnuclear state.

Twenty years later, as Russian forces seized Crimea, restoring and strengthening Ukraine’s sovereignty reemerged as a top U.S. and EU foreign policy priority. Following the 2022 invasion, U.S. and NATO allies dramatically increased defense, economic, and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine, as well as ramped up their sanctions on Russia. However, Western leaders have been careful to avoid actions they believe will draw their countries into the war or otherwise escalate it, which could, in the extreme, pose a nuclear threat.  

Ukraine’s Struggle for Independence in Russia’s Shadow

What are U.S. and EU policy in Ukraine?

The United States remains committed to the restoration of Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. It does not recognize Russia’s claims to Crimea or the other regions unlawfully annexed by Russia. Prior to the 2022 invasion, the United States supported a settlement of the Donbas conflict via the Minsk agreements [PDF].

Western powers and their partners have taken many steps to increase aid to Ukraine and punish Russia for its 2022 offensive. As of February 2023, the United States has provided Ukraine more than $50 billion in assistance, which includes advanced military aid, such as rocket and missile systems, helicopters, drones, and tanks. Several NATO allies are providing similar aid.

Meanwhile, the international sanctions on Russia have vastly expanded, covering much of its financial, energy, defense, and tech sectors and targeting the assets of wealthy oligarchs and other individuals. The U.S. and some European governments also banned some Russian banks from the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, a financial messaging system known as SWIFT; placed restrictions on Russia’s ability to access its vast foreign reserves; and blacklisted Russia’s central bank. Moreover, many influential Western companies have shuttered or suspended operations in Russia. The Group of Eight, now known as the Group of Seven , suspended Russia from its ranks indefinitely in 2014.  

The invasion also cost Russia its long-awaited Nord Stream 2 pipeline after Germany suspended its regulatory approval in February. Many critics, including U.S. and Ukrainian officials, opposed the natural gas pipeline during its development, claiming it would give Russia greater political leverage over Ukraine and the European gas market. In August, Russia indefinitely suspended operations of Nord Stream 1, which provided the European market with as much as a third of its natural gas.

What do Ukrainians want?

Russia’s aggression in recent years has galvanized public support for Ukraine’s Westward leanings. In the wake of Euromaidan, the country elected as president the billionaire businessman Petro Poroshenko, a staunch proponent of EU and NATO integration. In 2019, Zelensky defeated Poroshenko in a sign of the public’s deep dissatisfaction with the political establishment and its halting battle against corruption and an oligarchic economy.

Before the 2022 offensive, polls indicated that Ukrainians held mixed views on NATO and EU membership . More than half of those surveyed (not including residents of Crimea and the contested regions in the east) supported EU membership, while 40 to 50 percent were in favor of joining NATO.

Just days after the invasion, President Zelenskyy requested that the EU put Ukraine on a fast track to membership. The country became an official candidate in June 2022, but experts caution that the membership process could take years. In September of that year, Zelenskyy submitted a formal application for Ukraine to join NATO, pushing for an accelerated admission process for that bloc as well. Many Western analysts say that, similar to Ukraine’s EU bid, NATO membership does not seem likely in the near term.

• What triggered Russia’s moves in 2014?
• Why did Russia launch an invasion in 2022?

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9 big questions about Russia’s war in Ukraine, answered

Addressing some of the most pressing questions of the whole war, from how it started to how it might end.

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by Zack Beauchamp

The Russian war in Ukraine has proven itself to be one of the most consequential political events of our time — and one of the most confusing.

From the outset, Russia’s decision to invade was hard to understand; it seemed at odds with what most experts saw as Russia’s strategic interests. As the war has progressed, the widely predicted Russian victory has failed to emerge as Ukrainian fighters have repeatedly fended off attacks from a vastly superior force. Around the world, from Washington to Berlin to Beijing, global powers have reacted in striking and even historically unprecedented fashion.

What follows is an attempt to make sense of all of this: to tackle the biggest questions everyone is asking about the war. It is a comprehensive guide to understanding what is happening in Ukraine and why it matters.

1) Why did Russia invade Ukraine?

In a televised speech announcing Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine on February 24 , Russian President Vladimir Putin said the invasion was designed to stop a “genocide” perpetrated by “the Kyiv regime” — and ultimately to achieve “the demilitarization and de-Nazification of Ukraine.”

Though the claims of genocide and Nazi rule in Kyiv were transparently false , the rhetoric revealed Putin’s maximalist war aims: regime change (“de-Nazification”) and the elimination of Ukraine’s status as a sovereign state outside of Russian control (“demilitarization”). Why he would want to do this is a more complex story, one that emerges out of the very long arc of Russian-Ukrainian relations.

Ukraine and Russia have significant, deep, and longstanding cultural and historical ties; both date their political origins back to the ninth-century Slavic kingdom of Kievan Rus. But these ties do not make them historically identical, as Putin has repeatedly claimed in his public rhetoric. Since the rise of the modern Ukrainian national movement in the mid- to late-19th century , Russian rule in Ukraine — in both the czarist and Soviet periods — increasingly came to resemble that of an imperial power governing an unwilling colony .

Russian imperial rule ended in 1991 when 92 percent of Ukrainians voted in a national referendum to secede from the decaying Soviet Union. Almost immediately afterward , political scientists and regional experts began warning that the Russian-Ukrainian border would be a flashpoint, predicting that internal divides between the more pro-European population of western Ukraine and relatively more pro-Russian east , contested territory like the Crimean Peninsula , and Russian desire to reestablish control over its wayward vassal could all lead to conflict between the new neighbors.

It took about 20 years for these predictions to be proven right. In late 2013, Ukrainians took tothe streets to protest the authoritarian and pro-Russian tilt of incumbent President Viktor Yanukovych, forcing his resignation on February 22, 2014. Five days later, the Russian military swiftly seized control of Crimea and declared it Russian territory, a brazenly illegal move that a majority of Crimeans nonetheless seemed to welcome . Pro-Russia protests in Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine gave way to a violent rebellion — one stoked and armed by the Kremlin , and backed by disguised Russian troops .

The Ukrainian uprising against Yanukovych — called the “Euromaidan” movement because they were pro-EU protests that most prominently took place in Kyiv’s Maidan square — represented to Russia a threat not just to its influence over Ukraine but to the very survival of Putin’s regime. In Putin’s mind, Euromaidan was a Western-sponsored plot to overthrow a Kremlin ally, part of a broader plan to undermine Russia itself that included NATO’s post-Cold War expansions to the east.

“We understand what is happening; we understand that [the protests] were aimed against Ukraine and Russia and against Eurasian integration,” he said in a March 2014 speech on the annexation of Crimea. “With Ukraine, our Western partners have crossed the line.”

Beneath this rhetoric, according to experts on Russia, lies a deeper unstated fear: that his regime might fall prey to a similar protest movement . Ukraine could not succeed, in his view, because it might create a pro-Western model for Russians to emulate — one that the United States might eventually try to covertly export to Moscow. This was a central part of his thinking in 2014 , and it remains sotoday.

“He sees CIA agents behind every anti-Russian political movement,” says Seva Gunitsky, a political scientist who studies Russia at the University of Toronto. “He thinks the West wants to subvert his regime the way they did in Ukraine.”

Beginning in March 2021, Russian forces began deploying to the Ukrainian border in larger and larger numbers. Putin’s nationalist rhetoric became more aggressive: In July 2021, the Russian president published a 5,000-word essay arguing that Ukrainian nationalism was a fiction, that the country was historically always part of Russia, and that a pro-Western Ukraine posed an existential threat to the Russian nation.

• Europe’s embrace of Ukrainian refugees, explained in six charts and one map

“The formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state, aggressive towards Russia, is comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us,” as he put it in his 2021 essay .

Why Putin decided that merely seizing part of Ukraine was no longer enough remains a matter of significant debate among experts. One theory, advanced by Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar , is that pandemic-induced isolation drove him to an extreme ideological place.

But while the immediate cause of Putin’s shift on Ukraine is not clear, the nature of that shift is. His longtime belief in the urgency of restoring Russia’s greatness curdled into a neo-imperial desire to bring Ukraine back under direct Russian control. And in Russia, where Putin rules basically unchecked, that meant a full-scale war.

2) Who is winning the war?

On paper , Russia’s military vastly outstrips Ukraine’s. Russia spends over 10 times as much on defense annually as Ukraine; the Russian military has a little under three times as much artillery as Ukraine and roughly 10 times as many fixed-wing aircraft. As a result, the general pre-invasion view was that Russia would easily win a conventional war. In early February, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley told members of Congress that Kyiv, the capital, could fall within 72 hours of a Russian invasion .

But that’s not how things have played out . A month into the invasion, Ukrainians still hold Kyiv. Russia has made some gains, especially in the east and south, but the consensus view among military experts is that Ukraine’s defenses have held stoutly — to the point where Ukrainians have been able to launch counteroffensives .

The initial Russian plan reportedly operated under the assumption that a swift march on Kyiv would meet only token resistance. Putin “actually really thought this would be a ‘special military operation’: They would be done in a few days, and it wouldn’t be a real war,” says Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military at the CNA think tank.

This plan fell apart within the first 48 hours of the war when early operations like an airborne assault on the Hostomel airport ended in disaster , forcing Russian generals to develop a new strategy on the fly. What they came up with — massive artillery bombardments and attempts to encircle and besiege Ukraine’s major cities — was more effective (and more brutal). The Russians made some inroads into Ukrainian territory, especially in the south, where they have laid siege to Mariupol and taken Kherson and Melitopol.

But these Russian advances are a bit misleading. Ukraine, Kofman explains, made the tactical decision to trade “space for time” : to withdraw strategically rather than fight for every inch of Ukrainian land, confronting the Russians on the territory and at the time of their choosing.

As the fighting continued, the nature of the Ukrainian choice became clearer. Instead of getting into pitched large-scale battles with Russians on open terrain, where Russia’s numerical advantages would prove decisive, the Ukrainians instead decided to engage in a series of smaller-scale clashes .

Ukrainian forces have bogged down Russian units in towns and smaller cities ; street-to-street combat favors defenders who can use their superior knowledge of the city’s geography to hide and conduct ambushes. They have attacked isolated and exposed Russian units traveling on open roads. They have repeatedly raided poorly protected supply lines.

This approach has proven remarkably effective. By mid-March, Western intelligence agencies and open source analysts concluded that the Ukrainians had successfully managed to stall the Russian invasion. The Russian military all but openly recognized this reality in a late March briefing, in which top generals implausibly claimed they never intended to take Kyiv and were always focused on making territorial gains in the east.

“The initial Russian campaign to invade and conquer Ukraine is culminating without achieving its objectives — it is being defeated, in other words,” military scholar Frederick Kagan wrote in a March 22 brief for the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) think tank.

Currently, Ukrainian forces are on the offensive. They have pushed the Russians farther from Kyiv , with some reports suggesting they have retaken the suburb of Irpin and forced Russia to withdraw some of its forces from the area in a tacit admission of defeat. In the south, Ukrainian forces are contesting Russian control over Kherson .

And throughout the fighting, Russian casualties have been horrifically high.

It’s hard to get accurate information in a war zone, but one of the more authoritative estimates of Russian war dead — from the US Defense Department — concludes that over 7,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in the first three weeks of fighting, a figure about three times as large as the total US service members dead in all 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan. A separate NATO estimate puts that at the low end, estimating between 7,000 and 15,000 Russians killed in action and as many as 40,000 total losses (including injuries, captures, and desertions). Seven Russian generals have been reported killed in the fighting, and materiel losses — ranging from armor to aircraft — have been enormous. (Russia puts its death toll at more than 1,300 soldiers, which is almost certainly a significant undercount.)

This all does not mean that a Russian victory is impossible. Any number of things, ranging from Russian reinforcements to the fall of besieged Mariupol, could give the war effort new life.

It does, however, mean that what Russia is doing right now hasn’t worked.

“If the point is just to wreak havoc, then they’re doing fine. But if the point is to wreak havoc and thus advance further — be able to hold more territory — they’re not doing fine,” says Olga Oliker, the program director for Europe and Central Asia at the International Crisis Group.

3) Why is Russia’s military performing so poorly?

Russia’s invasion has gone awry for two basic reasons: Its military wasn’t ready to fight a war like this, and the Ukrainians have put up a much stronger defense than anyone expected.

Russia’s problems begin with Putin’s unrealistic invasion plan. But even after the Russian high command adjusted its strategy, other flaws in the army remained.

“We’re seeing a country militarily implode,” says Robert Farley, a professor who studies air power at the University of Kentucky.

One of the biggest and most noticeable issues has been rickety logistics. Some of the most famous images of the war have been of Russian armored vehicles parked on Ukrainian roads, seemingly out of gas and unable to advance. The Russian forces have proven to be underequipped and badly supplied, encountering problems ranging from poor communications to inadequate tires .

Part of the reason is a lack of sufficient preparation. Per Kofman, the Russian military simply “wasn’t organized for this kind of war” — meaning, the conquest of Europe’s second-largest country by area. Another part of it is corruption in the Russian procurement system. Graft in Russia is less a bug in its political system than a feature; one way the Kremlin maintains the loyalty of its elite is by allowing them to profit off of government activity . Military procurement is no exception to this pattern of widespread corruption, and it has led to troops having substandard access to vital supplies .

The same lack of preparation has plagued Russia’s air force . Despite outnumbering the Ukrainian air force by roughly 10 times, the Russians have failed to establish air superiority: Ukraine’s planes are still flying and its air defenses mostly remain in place .

“The Russian Army was not prepared to fight this war” —Jason Lyall, Dartmouth political scientist

Perhaps most importantly, close observers of the war believe Russians are suffering from poor morale. Because Putin’s plan to invade Ukraine was kept secret from the vast majority of Russians, the government had a limited ability to lay a propaganda groundwork that would get their soldiers motivated to fight. The current Russian force has little sense of what they’re fighting for or why — and are waging war against a country with which they have religious, ethnic, historical, and potentially even familial ties. In a military that has long had systemic morale problems, that’s a recipe for battlefield disaster.

“Russian morale was incredibly low BEFORE the war broke out. Brutal hazing in the military, second-class (or worse) status by its conscript soldiers, ethnic divisions, corruption, you name it: the Russian Army was not prepared to fight this war,” Jason Lyall, a Dartmouth political scientist who studies morale, explains via email. “High rates of abandoned or captured equipment, reports of sabotaged equipment, and large numbers of soldiers deserting (or simply camping out in the forest) are all products of low morale.”

The contrast with the Ukrainians couldn’t be starker. They are defending their homes and their families from an unprovoked invasion, led by a charismatic leader who has made a personal stand in Kyiv. Ukrainian high moraleis a key reason, in addition to advanced Western armaments, that the defenders have dramatically outperformed expectations.

“Having spent a chunk of my professional career [working] with the Ukrainians, nobody, myself included and themselves included, had all that high an estimation of their military capacity,” Oliker says.

Again, none of this will necessarily remain the case throughout the war. Morale can shift with battlefield developments. And even if Russian morale remains low, it’s still possible for them to win — though they’re more likely to do so in a brutally ugly fashion.

4) What has the war meant for ordinary Ukrainians?

As the fighting has dragged on, Russia has gravitated toward tactics that, by design, hurt civilians. Most notably, Russia has attempted to lay siege to Ukraine’s cities, cutting off supply and escape routes while bombarding them with artillery. The purpose of the strategy is to wear down the Ukrainian defenders’ willingness to fight, including by inflicting mass pain on the civilian populations.

The result has been nightmarish: an astonishing outflow of Ukrainian refugees and tremendous suffering for many of those who were unwilling or unable to leave.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees , more than 3.8 million Ukrainians fled the country between February 24 and March 27. That’s about 8.8 percent of Ukraine’s total population — in proportional terms, the rough equivalent of the entire population of Texas being forced to flee the United States.

Another point of comparison: In 2015, four years into the Syrian civil war and the height of the global refugee crisis, there were a little more than 4 million Syrian refugees living in nearby countries . The Ukraine war has produced a similarly sized exodus in just a month, leading to truly massive refugee flows to its European neighbors. Poland, the primary destination of Ukrainian refugees, is currently housing over 2.3 million Ukrainians, a figure larger than the entire population of Warsaw, its capital and largest city.

For those civilians who have been unable to flee, the situation is dire. There are no reliable estimates of death totals; a March 27 UN estimate puts the figure at 1,119 but cautions that “the actual figures are considerably higher [because] the receipt of information from some locations where intense hostilities have been going on has been delayed and many reports are still pending corroboration.”

The UN assessment does not blame one side or the other for these deaths, but does note that “most of the civilian casualties recorded were caused by the use of explosive weapons with a wide impact area, including shelling from heavy artillery and multiple-launch rocket systems, and missile and airstrikes.” It is the Russians, primarily, who are using these sorts of weapons in populated areas; Human Rights Watch has announced that there are “early signs of war crimes” being committed by Russian soldiers in these kinds of attacks, and President Joe Biden has personally labeled Putin a “war criminal.”

Nowhere is this devastation more visible than the southern city of Mariupol, the largest Ukrainian population center to which Russia has laid siege. Aerial footage of the city published by the Guardian in late March reveals entire blocks demolished by Russian bombardment:

In mid-March, three Associated Press journalists — the last international reporters in the city before they too were evacuated — managed to file a dispatch describing life on the ground. They reported a death total of 2,500 but cautioned that “many bodies can’t be counted because of the endless shelling .” The situation is impossibly dire:

Airstrikes and shells have hit the maternity hospital, the fire department, homes, a church, a field outside a school. For the estimated hundreds of thousands who remain, there is quite simply nowhere to go. The surrounding roads are mined and the port blocked. Food is running out, and the Russians have stopped humanitarian attempts to bring it in. Electricity is mostly gone and water is sparse, with residents melting snow to drink. Some parents have even left their newborns at the hospital, perhaps hoping to give them a chance at life in the one place with decent electricity and water.

The battlefield failures of the Russian military have raised questions about its competence in difficult block-to-block fighting; Farley, the Kentucky professor, says, “This Russian army does not look like it can conduct serious [urban warfare].” As a result, taking Ukrainian cities means besieging them — starving them out, destroying their will to fight, and only moving into the city proper after its population is unwilling to resist or outright incapable of putting up a fight.

5) What do Russians think about the war?

Vladimir Putin’s government has ramped up its already repressive policies during the Ukraine conflict, shuttering independent media outlets and blocking access to Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram . It’s now extremely difficult to get a sense of what either ordinary Russians or the country’s elite think about the war, as criticizing it could lead to a lengthy stint in prison.

But despite this opacity, expert Russia watchers have developed a broad idea of what’s going on there. The war has stirred up some opposition and anti-Putin sentiment, but it has been confined to a minority who are unlikely to change Putin’s mind, let alone topple him.

The bulk of the Russian public was no more prepared for war than the bulk of the Russian military — in fact, probably less so. After Putin announced the launch of his “special military operation” in Ukraine on national television, there was a surprising amount of criticism from high-profile Russians — figures ranging from billionaires to athletes to social media influencers. One Russian journalist, Marina Ovsyannikova, bravely ran into the background of a government broadcast while holding an antiwar sign.

“It is unprecedented to see oligarchs, other elected officials, and other powerful people in society publicly speaking out against the war,” says Alexis Lerner, a scholar of dissent in Russia at the US Naval Academy.

There have also been antiwar rallies in dozens of Russian cities. How many have participated in these rallies is hard to say, but the human rights group OVD-Info estimates that over 15,000 Russians have been arrested at the events since the war began.

Could these eruptions ofantiwar sentiment at the elite and mass public level suggesta comingcoup or revolution against the Putin regime? Experts caution that these events remain quite unlikely.

Putin has done an effective job engaging in what political scientists call “coup-proofing.” He has put in barriers — from seeding the military with counterintelligence officers to splitting up the state security services into different groups led by trusted allies — that make it quite difficult for anyone in his government to successfully move against him.

“Putin has prepared for this eventuality for a long time and has taken a lot of concerted actions to make sure he’s not vulnerable,” says Adam Casey, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan who studies the history of coups in Russia and the former communist bloc.

Similarly, turning the antiwar protests into a full-blown influential movement is a very tall order.

“It is hard to organize sustained collective protest in Russia,” notes Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard who studies protest movements . “Putin’s government has criminalized many forms of protests, and has shut down or restricted the activities of groups, movements, and media outlets perceived to be in opposition or associated with the West.”

Underpinning it all is tight government control of the information environment. Most Russians get their news from government-run media , which has been serving up a steady diet of pro-war content. Many of them appear to genuinely believe what they hear: One independent opinion poll found that 58 percent of Russians supported the war to at least some degree.

Prior to the war, Putin also appeared to be a genuinely popular figure in Russia. The elite depend on him for their position and fortune; many citizens see him as the man who saved Russia from the chaos of the immediate post-Communist period. A disastrous war might end up changing that, but the odds that even a sustained drop in his support translates into a coup or revolution remain low indeed.

6) What is the US role in the conflict?

The war remains, for the moment, a conflict between Ukraine and Russia. But the United States is the most important third party, using a number of powerful tools — short of direct military intervention — to aid the Ukrainian cause.

Any serious assessment of US involvement needs to start in the post-Cold War 1990s , when the US and its NATO allies made the decision to open alliance membership to former communist states.

Many of these countries, wary of once again being put under the Russian boot, clamored to join the alliance, which commits all involved countries to defend any member-state in the event of an attack. In 2008, NATO officially announced that Georgia and Ukraine — two former Soviet republics right on Russia’s doorstep — “ will become members of NATO ” at an unspecified future date. This infuriated the Russians, who saw NATO expansion as a direct threat to their own security.

There is no doubt that NATO expansion helped create some of the background conditions under which the current conflict became thinkable, generally pushing Putin’s foreign policy in a more anti-Western direction. Some experts see it as one of the key causes of his decision to attack Ukraine — but others strongly disagree, noting that NATO membership for Ukraine was already basically off the table before the war and that Russia’s declared war aims went far beyond simply blocking Ukraine’s NATO bid .

“NATO expansion was deeply unpopular in Russia. [But] Putin did not invade because of NATO expansion,” says Yoshiko Herrera, a Russia expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Regardless of where one falls on that debate, US policy during the conflict has been exceptionally clear: support the Ukrainians with massive amounts of military assistance while putting pressure on Putin to back down by organizing an unprecedented array of international economic sanctions.

On the military side, weapons systems manufactured and provided by the US and Europe have played a vital role in blunting Russia’s advance. The Javelin anti-tank missile system, for example, is a lightweight American-made launcher that allows one or two infantry soldiers to take out a tank . Javelins have given the outgunned Ukrainians a fighting chance against Russian armor, becoming a popular symbol in the process .

Sanctions have proven similarly devastating in the economic realm .

The international punishments have been extremely broad, ranging from removing key Russian banks from the SWIFT global transaction system to a US ban on Russian oil imports to restrictions on doing business with particular members of the Russian elite . Freezing the assets of Russia’s central bank has proven to be a particularly damaging tool, wrecking Russia’s ability to deal with the collapse in the value of the ruble, its currency. As a result, the Russian economy is projected to contract by 15 percent this year ; mass unemployment looms .

There is more America can do, particularly when it comes to fulfilling Ukrainian requests for new fighter jets. In March, Washington rejected a Polish plan to transfer MiG-29 aircraft to Ukraine via a US Air Force base in Germany, arguing that it could be too provocative.

But the MiG-29 incident is more the exception than it is the rule. On the whole, the United States has been strikingly willing to take aggressive steps to punish Moscow and aid Kyiv’s war effort.

7) How is the rest of the world responding to Russia’s actions?

On the surface, the world appears to be fairly united behind the Ukrainian cause. The UN General Assembly passed a resolution condemning the Russian invasion by a whopping 141-5 margin (with 35 abstentions). But the UN vote conceals a great deal of disagreement, especially among the world’s largest and most influential countries — divergences that don’t always fall neatly along democracy-versus-autocracy lines.

The most aggressive anti-Russian and pro-Ukrainian positions can, perhaps unsurprisingly, be found in Europe and the broader West. EU and NATO members, with the partial exceptions of Hungary and Turkey , have strongly supported the Ukrainian war effort and implemented punishing sanctions on Russia (a major trading partner). It’s the strongest show of European unity since the Cold War, one that many observers see as a sign that Putin’s invasion has already backfired.

Germany, which has important trade ties with Russia and a post-World War II tradition of pacifism, is perhaps the most striking case. Nearly overnight, the Russian invasion convinced center-left Chancellor Olaf Scholz to support rearmament , introducing a proposal to more than triple Germany’s defense budget that’s widely backed by the German public.

“It’s really revolutionary,” Sophia Besch, a Berlin-based senior research fellow at the Centre for European Reform, told my colleague Jen Kirby . “Scholz, in his speech, did away with and overturned so many of what we thought were certainties of German defense policy.”

Though Scholz has refused to outright ban Russian oil and gas imports, he has blocked the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline and committed to a long-term strategy of weaning Germany off of Russian energy. All signs point to Russia waking a sleeping giant — of creating a powerful military and economic enemy in the heart of the European continent.

China, by contrast, has been the most pro-Russia of the major global powers.

The two countries, bound by shared animus toward a US-dominated world order, have grown increasingly close in recent years. Chinese propaganda has largely toed the Russian line on the Ukraine war. US intelligence, which has been remarkably accurate during the crisis, believes that Russia has requested military and financial assistance from Beijing — which hasn’t been provided yet but may well be forthcoming.

That said, it’s possible to overstate the degree to which China has taken the Russian side. Beijing has a strong stated commitment to state sovereignty — the bedrock of its position on Taiwan is that the island is actually Chinese territory — which makes a full-throated backing of the invasion ideologically awkward . There’s a notable amount of debate among Chinese policy experts and in the public , with some analysts publicly advocating that Beijing adopt a more neutral line on the conflict.

Most other countries around the world fall somewhere on the spectrum between the West and China. Outside of Europe, only a handful of mostly pro-American states — like South Korea, Japan, and Australia — have joined the sanctions regime. The majority of countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America do not support the invasion, but won’t do very much to punish Russia for it either.

• Why India isn’t denouncing Russia’s Ukraine war

India is perhaps the most interesting country in this category. A rising Asian democracy that has violently clashed with China in the very recent past , it has good reasons to present itself as an American partner in the defense of freedom. Yet India also depends heavily on Russian-made weapons for its own defense and hopes to use its relationship with Russia to limit the Moscow-Beijing partnership. It’s also worth noting that India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, has strong autocratic inclinations .

The result of all of this is a balancing act reminiscent of India’s Cold War approach of “non-alignment” : refusing to side with either the Russian or American positions while attempting to maintain decent relations with both . India’s perceptions of its strategic interests, more than ideological views about democracy, appear to be shaping its response to the war — as seems to be the case with quite a few countries around the world.

8) Could this turn into World War III?

The basic, scary answer to this question is yes: The invasion of Ukraine has put us at the greatest risk of a NATO-Russia war in decades.

The somewhat more comforting and nuanced answer is that the absolute risk remains relatively low so long as there is no direct NATO involvement in the conflict, which the Biden administration has repeatedly ruled out . Though Biden said “this man [Putin] cannot remain in power” in a late March speech, both White House officials and the president himself stressed afterward that the US policy was not regime change in Moscow.

“Things are stable in a nuclear sense right now,” says Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on nuclear weapons at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. “The minute NATO gets involved, the scope of the war widens.”

In theory, US and NATO military assistance to Ukraine could open the door to escalation: Russia could attack a military depot in Poland containing weapons bound for Ukraine, for instance. But in practice, it’s unlikely: The Russians don’t appear to want a wider war with NATO that risks nuclear escalation, and so have avoided cross-border strikes even when it might destroy supply shipments bound for Ukraine.

In early March, the US Department of Defense opened a direct line of communication with its Russian peers in order to avoid any kind of accidental conflict. It’s not clear how well this is working — some reporting suggests the Russians aren’t answering American calls — but there is a long history of effective dialogue between rivals who are fighting each other through proxy forces.

“States often cooperate to keep limits on their wars even as they fight one another clandestinely,” Lyall, the Dartmouth professor, tells me. “While there’s always a risk of unintended escalation, historical examples like Vietnam, Afghanistan (1980s), Afghanistan again (post-2001), and Syria show that wars can be fought ‘within bounds.’”

If the United States and NATO heed the call of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to impose a so-called “no-fly zone” over Ukrainian skies, the situation changes dramatically. No-fly zones are commitments to patrol and, if necessary, shoot down military aircraft that fly in the declared area, generally for the purpose of protecting civilians. In Ukraine, that would mean the US and its NATO allies sending in jets to patrol Ukraine’s skies — and being willing to shoot down any Russian planes that enter protected airspace. From there, the risks of a nuclear conflict become terrifyingly high.

Russia recognizes its inferiority to NATO in conventional terms; its military doctrine has long envisioned the use of nuclear weapons in a war with the Western alliance . In his speech declaring war on Ukraine, Putin all but openly vowed that any international intervention in the conflict would trigger nuclear retaliation.

“To anyone who would consider interfering from the outside: If you do, you will face consequences greater than any you have faced in history,” the Russian president said. “I hope you hear me.”

The Biden administration is taking these threats seriously. Much as the Kremlin hasn’t struck NATO supply missions to Ukraine, the White House has flatly rejected a no-fly zone or any other kind of direct military intervention.

“We will not fight a war against Russia in Ukraine,” Biden said on March 11 . “Direct conflict between NATO and Russia is World War III, something we must strive to prevent.”

This does not mean the risk of a wider war is zero . Accidents happen, and countries can be dragged into war against their leaders’ best judgment. Political positions and risk calculi can also change: If Russia starts losing badly and uses smaller nukes on Ukrainian forces (called “tactical” nuclear weapons), Biden would likely feel the need to respond in some fairly aggressive way. Much depends on Washington and Moscow continuing to show a certain level of restraint.

9) How could the war end?

Wars do not typically end with the total defeat of one side or the other. More commonly, there’s some kind of negotiated settlement — either a ceasefire or more permanent peace treaty — where the two sides agree to stop fighting under a set of mutually agreeable terms.

It is possible that the Ukraine conflict turns out to be an exception: that Russian morale collapses completely, leading to utter battlefield defeat, or that Russia inflicts so much pain that Kyiv collapses. But most analysts believe that neither of these is especially likely given the way the war has played out to date.

“No matter how much military firepower they pour into it, [the Russians] are not going to be able to achieve regime change or some of their maximalist aims,” Kofman, of the CNA think tank, declares.

A negotiated settlement is the most likely way the conflict ends. Peace negotiations between the two sides are ongoing, and some reporting suggests they’re bearing fruit. On March 28, the Financial Times reported significant progress on a draft agreement covering issues ranging from Ukrainian NATO membership to the “de-Nazification” of Ukraine. The next day, Russia pledged to decrease its use of force in Ukraine’s north as a sign of its commitment to the talks.

American officials, though, have been publicly skeptical of Russia’s seriousness in the talks. Even if Moscow is committed to reaching a settlement, the devil is always in the details with these sorts of things — and there are lots of barriers standing in the way of a successful resolution.

Take NATO. The Russians want a simple pledge that Ukraine will remain “neutral” — staying out of foreign security blocs. The current draft agreement, per the Financial Times, does preclude Ukrainian NATO membership, but it permits Ukraine to join the EU. It also commits at least 11 countries, including the United States and China, to coming to Ukraine’s aid if it is attacked again. This would put Ukraine on a far stronger security footing than it had before the war — a victory for Kyiv and defeat for Moscow, one that Putin may ultimately conclude is unacceptable.

• What, exactly, is a “neutral” Ukraine?

Another thorny issue — perhaps the thorniest — is the status of Crimea and the two breakaway Russian-supported republics in eastern Ukraine. The Russians want Ukrainian recognition of its annexation of Crimea and the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions; Ukraine claims all three as part of its territory. Some compromise is imaginable here — an internationally monitored referendum in each territory, perhaps — but what that would look like is not obvious.

The resolution of these issues will likely depend quite a bit on the war’s progress. The more each side believes it has a decent chance to improve its battlefield position and gain leverage in negotiations, the less reason either will have to make concessions to the other in the name of ending the fighting.

And even if they do somehow come to an agreement, it may not end up holding .

On the Ukrainian side, ultra-nationalist militias could work to undermine any agreement with Russia that they believe gives away too much, as they threatened during pre-war negotiations aimed at preventing the Russian invasion .

On the Russian side, an agreement is only as good as Putin’s word. Even if it contains rigorous provisions designed to raise the costs of future aggression, like international peacekeepers, that may not hold him back from breaking the agreement.

This invasion did, after all, start with him launching an invasion that seemed bound to hurt Russia in the long run. Putin dragged the world into this mess; when and how it gets out of it depends just as heavily on his decisions.

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Russia's war in Ukraine

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Insights > Russia's war in Ukraine

Like most people around the world, we are shocked and saddened by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

These pages bring together journal articles, book chapters, and expert analysis from Taylor & Francis and Routledge authors and editors that can help us make sense of the situation. 

They look at the background to the crisis and the role of media and disinformation in the conflict . They examine what research could tell us about what might happen next – during the conflict and beyond.

We're also offering free access to selected Handbook of Refugee Health chapters and highlighting how institutions in Ukraine can get free access to academic and professional peer-reviewed content .

Related: Our statement on the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Recent insights

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4 December 2023

Migration and soft power: the EU's visa and refugee policy response to the war in Ukraine

By matilde rosina in the journal of policy studies.

30 November 2023

The impact of war on human capital and productivity in Ukraine

By balázs égert & christine de la maisonneuve in the journal of policy studies.

17 November 2023

More river pollution from untreated urban waste due to the Russian-Ukrainian war: a perspective view

By vita strokal, anna kurovska & maryna strokal in the journal of integrative environmental sciences.

26 October 2023

How do uncertainties affect the connectedness of global financial markets? Changes during the Russia-Ukraine conflict

By yang wan, wenhao wang, shi he and bing hu in the asia-pacific journal of accounting & economics.

Background and geopolitics

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Between Dependence and Integration: Ukraine’s Relations With Russia

By rilka dragneva and kataryna wolczuk in europe-asia studies.

Since it gained independence in 1991, Ukraine's economy has depended heavily on Russia. This article examines Ukraine's response to Russian initiatives and explores how Ukraine aims to extract economic benefits while minimizing its commitments to its eastern neighbor.

Russia and its Allies in Three Strategic Environments

By nikolai silaev in europe-asia studies.

This article provides a geopolitical analysis of Russian alliance policy in three environments: Russia's immediate post-Soviet neighborhood; more distant regions of the Eurasian continent; and the global stage.

Ukraine: Contested Nationhood in a European Context

By ulrich schmid.

This 2021 book explores the common view that Ukraine is a country split between a pro-European West and a pro-Russian East. It looks at the complicated cultural history of Ukraine and highlights the importance of regional traditions for an understanding of the current political situation.

Book chapter

Diasporic Visions of Democracy and Territory

By jumana bayeh in democracy, diaspora, territory: europe and cross-border politics.

This chapter explores the complexity of territory within the field of diaspora studies. It emphasizes a modern perspective of diaspora, framed by deterritorialization.

Media and disinformation

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Making Sense of the News in an Authoritarian Regime: Russian Television Viewers’ Reception of the Russia–Ukraine Conflict

By maxim alyukov in europe-asia studies.

Do citizens in autocracies trust state media? This study uses Russian television viewers’ reception of the Russia–Ukraine conflict to investigate media perception in an autocracy. It argues that citizens in non-democracies lack the opportunities, motivation, and tools to substantively process news.

Presidential Elections 2018: The Struggle of Putin and Navalny for a Media Agenda

By anastasia kazun and kseniia semykina in problems of post-communism.

In Russia, the mainstream media is largely influenced by the authorities, while the Internet has more freedom.

This study compared the issue agendas of Vladimir Putin and opposition leader Alexey Navalny across traditional and digital media in the run-up to the 2018 presidential election.

Russia's hybrid aggression against Ukraine

By yury e. fedorov in routledge handbook of russian security.

Disinformation and propaganda campaigns are a common method in 'hybrid warfare' – a term that describes a mix of conventional military operations with non-military methods. This chapter exposes the Russian concept of hybrid warfare. It highlights its strategic goals toward Ukraine and outlines the evolution of its war plans from ‘traditional’ to hybrid operations.

Russia Today and Conspiracy Theories: People, Power, and Politics on RT

By ilya yablokov and precious n chatterje-doody.

The Russian international media outlet Russia Today (RT) has been widely accused in the Western world of producing government propaganda and conspiracy theories. This book explores for the first time the role that conspiracy theories actually play in the network’s broadcasts.

Free access to Handbook of Refugee Health chapters

The UN reports that almost 8 million people – including many children – have left Ukraine seeking safety, protection, and assistance since the invasion. The war has forced many more to move inside the country.

Worldwide, there are at least 89 million people who have been forced to flee their homes.

The conditions refugees experience during their journeys and how they're received at their destinations will determine their health outcomes as well as the health of those living in host communities.

To support health professionals and humanitarians, we're offering free online access to selected Handbook of Refugee Health chapters:

• Part 1, chapter 1 – the global reality: forced migration and health
• Part 2, chapter 1 – health needs assessment in the context of forced displacement
• Part 3, chapter 1 – emergency scenarios

This book provides a framework to identify and approach health needs, from basic elements like service mapping and initial interventions to more complex elements of ongoing healthcare. It also discusses associated areas, including human rights and law, public health, medical anthropology, and cultural awareness.

Find out more about the book on the Routledge website .

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Donating laptops to Ukrainian children

Many children fleeing the war in Ukraine didn't have a chance to gather their possessions, including the devices they use for school work and keeping in touch with friends and family.

We've been giving old laptops a new lease of life and donating them to Ukrainian children who are in the U.K.

So far this year we've donated 100+ laptops. And there are plans to donate more – in the U.K. and in the U.S. and India.

Thank you very much for the laptop that you donated to me! I can now do online classes with my school back in Ukraine and stay in touch with my friends. Danya, student at Reading Ukrainian School

Alexandra Sevko, Headteacher at Reading Ukrainian School

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ASSOCIATION OF THE UNITED STATES ARMY

Voice for the army - support for the soldier, the russo-ukrainian war: a strategic assessment two years into the conflict.

by LTC Amos C. Fox, USA Land Warfare Paper 158, February 2024  

In Brief Examining the strategic balance in the Russo-Ukrainian War leads to the conclusion that Russia has the upper hand. In 2024, Ukraine has limited prospects for overturning Russian territorial annexations and troop reinforcements of stolen territory. Ukraine’s ability to defend itself against Russian offensive action decreases as U.S. financial and materiel support decreases. Ukraine needs a significant increase in land forces to evict the occupying Russian land forces.

Introduction

The Russo-Ukrainian War is passing into its third year. In the period leading up to this point in the conflict, the defense and security studies community has been awash with arguments stating that the war is a stalemate. Perhaps the most compelling argument comes from General Valery Zaluzhny, former commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s armed forces, who stated as much in an interview with the Economist in November 2023. 1 Meanwhile, there are others, including noted analyst Jack Watling, who emphatically state the opposite. 2  

Nonetheless, two years in, it is useful to objectively examine the conflict’s strategic balance. Some basic questions guide the examination, such as: is Ukraine winning, or is Russia winning? What does Ukraine need to defeat Russia, and conversely, what does Russia need to win in Ukraine? Moreover, aside from identifying who is winning or losing the conflict, it is important to identify salient trends that are germane not just within the context of the Russo-Ukrainian War, but that are applicable throughout the defense and security studies communities.

This article addresses these questions through the use of the ends-ways-means-risk heuristic. In doing so, it examines Russia and Ukraine’s current strategic dispositions, and not what they were in February 2022, nor what we might want them to be. Viewing the conflict through the lens of preference and aspiration causes any analyst to misread the strategic situation. The goal of this article, however, is to take a sobering look at the realities of the conflict, offer an assessment of the situation, and posit where the conflict is likely to go in 2024. 

The overall conclusion is that Russia is winning the conflict. Russia is winning because it possesses its minimally acceptable outcome: the possession of the Donbas, of the land bridge to Crimea, and of Crimea itself. This victory condition, however, is dependent upon Ukraine’s inability to generate a force sufficient to a) defeat Russia’s forces in each of those discrete pieces of territory; b) retake control of that territory; and c) hold that territory against subsequent Russian counterattacks. No amount of precision strike, long-range fires or drone attacks can compensate for the lack of land forces Ukraine needs to defeat Russia’s army and then take and hold all that terrain. Thus, without an influx of resources for the Ukrainian armed forces—to include a significant increase in land forces—Russia will likely prevail in the conflict. If U.S. support to Ukraine remains frozen, as it is at the time of this writing, then Russian victory in 2024 is a real possibility.   

Laying the Groundwork: Situational Implications

Moreover, several other important implications emerge for the defense and security studies community. First, land wars fought for control of territory possess inherently different military end states than irregular wars, counterinsurgencies and civil wars. Therefore, militaries must have the right army for the conflict in which they are engaged. A counterinsurgency army or constabulary force, for instance, will not win a war for territory against an industrialized army built to fight and win wars of attrition. This is something policymakers, senior military leaders and force designers must appreciate and carefully consider as they look to build the armies of the future. 

Second, land wars fought for control of territory require military strategies properly aligned to those ends. Therefore, militaries must have the right strategy for the conflict, or phase of the conflict, in which they are engaged. A strategy built on the centrality of precision strike but lacking sufficient land forces to exploit the success of precision strike, for instance, will not win a war for territory—especially against an industrialized army built to fight and win wars of attrition. Policymakers and senior military leaders must periodically refresh and reframe their political ends and military strategies according to their means; otherwise, they risk a wasteful strategy that fritters away limited resources in the pursuit of unrealistic goals. 

Third, despite statements to the contrary, physical mass—in this case, more manpower—is more important than precision strike and long-range fires where the physical possession of territory is a critical component of political and military victory for both states. Physical mass allows an army to hold and defend territory. The more physical mass an army possesses, the more resilient it is to attacks of any type and the more difficult and costly it is to defeat—whether that be in munitions expended, number of attacks conducted or lives lost. 

Fourth, a prepared, layered and protected defense, like that of Russia’s along the contact line with Ukraine’s armed forces, is challenging to overcome. This challenge grows exponentially if the attacker lacks sufficiently resilient and resourced land forces that are capable of a three-fold mission: (1) defeating the occupying army; (2) moving into the liberated territory; and (3) controlling that land. Armies that are designed to deliver a punch but lack the depth of force structure to continue advancing into vacated or liberated territory after a successful attack, and subsequently are unable to stave off counterattacks, are of little use beyond defensive duty. This finding is at odds with conventional wisdom regarding future force structure that posits that future forces should be small and light and should fight dispersed. 

Fifth, Carl von Clausewitz warns that, “So long as I have not overthrown my opponent, I am bound to fear he may overthrow me. Thus, I am not in control: he dictates to me as much as I dictate to him.” 3 The Russo-Ukrainian War has reiterated Clausewitz’s caution: as neither army is able to outright defeat the other, Russia and Ukraine are locked in a long war of attrition, which is fueling the stalemate to which Zaluzhny refers and Watling rejects. The writing between the lines thus suggests that, when confronted with war, a state must unleash a military force that is capable of both defeating its adversary’s army and simultaneously accomplishing its supplemental conditions of end state, to include taking and holding large swaths of physical terrain. Without defeating an adversary’s army—regardless of its composition—one must then always contend with the possibility that tactical military gains are fleeting. Moreover, by first defeating an adversary’s army, one might turn what would otherwise be a long war of attrition into a short war of attrition.  

Russian Strategic Assessment

Russia’s strategic ends can be summarized as: 

• fracture the Ukrainian state—politically, territorially and culturally; 
• maintain sufficient territorial acquisitions to support a range of acceptable political-military outcomes; 
• maintain strategic materiel overmatch; 
• exhaust Ukraine’s ability to continue fighting—both materially and as regards Ukrainian support from the international community; 
• normalize the conflict’s abnormalities; and 
• undercut and erode Ukraine’s ability to conduct offensive operations to reclaim annexed territory. 

When viewing all of these ends collectively, it is clear that denationalization of the Ukrainian state is Russia’s strategic end in this conflict. Raphael Lemkin defines denationalization as a state’s deliberate and systematic process of eroding or destroying another state’s national character and national patterns (i.e., culture, self-identity, language, customs, etc.). 4 Russia’s policy and military objectives have evolved ever so slightly since February 2022, but Ukraine’s denationalization remains at the heart of the Kremlin’s strategic ends. The Kremlin’s objectives in 2022 included unseating President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, ending Ukrainian self-rule and replacing it with a Russian partisan political leadership, and annexing a significant portion of Ukraine’s territory. To that end, Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke at the time of “denazifying” and “demilitarizing” Ukraine, while also forcing Kyiv to remain politically and militarily neutral within the international community’s network of political and military alliances. 5 Putin reaffirmed these policy aims during a December 2023 press conference in Moscow. 6 Nonetheless, Russia’s military activities—which have not made advances toward Kyiv since Moscow’s initial assault on the capital failed in April 2022—do not indicate any renewed effort to remove Zelenskyy or Ukraine’s government from power. There is, though, a real possibility of this occurring in 2024, especially if U.S. support to Ukraine remains frozen for the foreseeable future. 

It does appear, however, that the Kremlin is attempting to elongate the conflict in time and cost such that Moscow outlasts both Kyiv’s financial and military support from the international community and Ukraine’s material means to continue attempting offensive military activities to reclaim its territory. In doing so, the Kremlin likely intends to accelerate Ukraine to strategic exhaustion and subsequently force Kyiv to broker a peace deal.

As noted recently, Russia’s territorial ambitions of Ukraine likely operate along a spectrum of acceptable outcomes. 7 Presumably, as noted above, Russia’s minimally acceptable outcome—or the minimal territorial holdings that the Kremlin is satisfied to end the war possessing—include retention of the Donbas, the land bridge to Crimea and Crimea (see Figure 1). For clarity’s sake, the land bridge to Crimea includes the Zaporizhzhia and Kherson oblasts—the two oblasts that provide a unified ground link between the Donbas and Crimea. The land bridge is important because it provides Russia a ground-based connection from Russian territory between the occupied Donbas and occupied Crimea, thus simplifying the governance, defense and retention of Crimea.  

2024 will be a pivotal year for Ukraine. If the United States elects a Ukraine-friendly president, then Kyiv can likely expect continued financial and military support from the United States in 2025. On the other hand, if it does not elect a Ukraine-friendly president, then Kyiv can anticipate a range of decreasing financial and military support in the defense of their state against Russian denationalization efforts. 

At the same time, the appearance of Chinese, North Korean and Iranian weapons and munitions on the Ukrainian battlefield indicate that Russia is facing its own challenges keeping up with the conflict’s attritional character. 8 Though the degree to which external support is helping keep its war-machine going in Ukraine is challenging to discern through open-source information, we do know that external support allows the Russian military to overcome some of its defense industry’s production and distribution shortfalls. In turn, Chinese, North Korean and Iranian support allows the Kremlin to continue elongating the conflict in time, space and resources with the goal of exhausting Ukraine’s military and Kyiv’s capacity to sustain its resistance to Russia.   

Russia has already weathered much of the risk associated with invading Ukraine. Economic sanctions hit hard early on, but Russian industry and its economy have absorbed those early hardships and found ways to offset many of those challenges—including through Chinese, North Korean and Iranian support. 9 Further, the West’s gradual escalation of weapon support to Ukraine allowed Russia to develop an equally gradual learning curve to those weapons, and, in most cases, nullify any “game-changing” effects that they might have generated if introduced early in the conflict and with sufficient density to create front-wide effects. 10 Instead, the slow drip of Western support allowed Russian forces to observe, learn and adapt to those weapon systems and develop effective ways to counter Western technology and firepower. 11 The Russian military’s learning process has allowed it to recover from its embarrassing performance early in the conflict and draw into question the U.S. and other Western states’ strategy of third-party support to Ukraine. 12  

The primary risks that the Russo-Ukrainian War poses to Russia today are: (1) The United States and/or NATO might intervene with their land forces on behalf of Ukraine; and (2) political upheaval might occur as a result of domestic unrest. The risk of U.S. and NATO intervention with land forces is low, and will likely remain that way, because of the fear of Russian escalation with tactical or strategic nuclear weapons. 13 Although the likelihood of Russian nuclear strikes in Ukraine is also low, Russian political leaders regularly unsheathe nuclear threats to oppose and deter unwanted activities. 14 Dmitry Medvedev, Deputy Chairman of Russia’s Security Council, recently threated Ukraine with a nuclear response if Ukraine attacked Russian missile launch sites within Russia with Western-supplied, long-range missiles. 15 This follows Russia’s repositioning of some of its nuclear arsenal to Belarus in the summer of 2023. 16 Nonetheless, short of the commitment of U.S. or NATO land forces, or the potential loss of the Crimean peninsula, Russia’s likelihood to actually use nuclear weapons remains low. 

To the second risk—that of domestic unrest creating political instability—Putin and his coterie of supporters continue to use old Russian methods to offset this problem. Arrests, assassinations, disappearances and suppression are the primary methods employed against this challenge and to deter domestic opposition to his policies vis-à-vis Ukraine. 17 The assassination of Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of the Wagner Group, in August 2023, is perhaps the most high-profile example of this technique. 18 Further, the periodic disappearances and imprisonments of Alexei Navalny is another example of the Putin regime attempting to keep political opposition quiet. 19 Longtime Kremlin henchman, Igor Girkin, who was extremely critical of Putin and of the Kremlin’s handling of the war in Ukraine during 2023, was sentenced to four years in prison in January 2024. 20 Moreover, the suppression of journalists within Russia is spiking as Putin seeks to silence opposition and punish dissent in the wake of the strong economic and domestic upheavals caused by his war. 21

In addition, former U.S. Army Europe commander, Lieutenant General Ben Hodges, USA, Ret., states that Russia mobilizes citizens from its peripheral and more rural areas for its war in Ukraine. 22 Many of these individuals are ethnic minorities and therefore of lesser importance in Putin’s (and many Russians’) social hierarchy. 23 According to Hodges, by pulling heavily from the areas outside of Russia’s major population centers, to include Moscow and St. Petersburg, Putin is able to offset a significant potential domestic unrest by thrusting the weight of combat losses into the state’s far-flung reaches, to be borne by those with less social status. 24 Doing so buys Putin more time to continue the conflict and attempt to bankrupt both Ukrainian and Western resolve.   

Means are the military equipment and other materiel that a military force requires to create feasible ways. Moreover, means operate as the strategic glue that binds a military force’s ends with their ways. As mentioned in the Ends section, Russian industry appears to be challenged by the Russian armed forces’ demand for military equipment and armaments. The Russian armed forces’ ways—or approach to operating on the battlefield against Ukraine—is resource-intensive. Early Russian combat losses—the result of stalwart Ukrainian fighting coupled with inept Russian tactics—generated massive logistics challenges for Russia. Further, Russia has continued to fight according to long-standing Russian military practice: lead with fires, and move forward incrementally as the fires allow. The incremental advances, however, have also come at extreme costs in men and materiel. Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds, for instance, refer to Russian fighting at the battles of Mariupol and Bakhmut as relying on “meatgrinder tactics” in which human-wave attacks are used to advance Russian military interests. 25 As of 20 February 2024, Russia has lost 404,950 troops, 6,503 tanks, 338 aircraft and 25 ships, among many other combat losses; the losses that they have afflicted on Ukrainian forces remains largely unknown. 26  

As noted by Kyrylo Budanov, Ukraine’s chief intelligence officer, Russia’s use of proxy forces is the primary way in which they have sought to offset land force requirements and to relieve some of the stress on their own army. 27 The contractual proxy, the Wagner Group, and the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Armies (DPA and LPA, respectively)—both cultural proxies—were the primary proxies used between the renewed hostilities of February 2022 through the summer of 2023. The Wagner Group’s attempted coup in June 2023 naturally cooled the Kremlin’s reliance on it. At the same time, Russia’s military operations have become less offensive and more defensive, seeking to retain land already annexed, as opposed to confiscating more Ukrainian territory. Consequently, Moscow’s demand for more land forces and disposable infantry has somewhat diminished. 

Nonetheless, fighting a defensive war along the contact line across the Donbas and the land bridge to Crimea has increased Russia’s need for drones and strike capability. As noted previously, Russia has maintained good diplomatic relationships with China, North Korea and Iran; this has allowed the Russian armed forces access to important weaponry from those states for use on the battlefield in Ukraine. Thus, despite the potential for economic sanctions to cripple Russia’s ability to wage war, the Kremlin has diversified its bases of economic and military power to ensure that it has the means it requires to continue the conflict with Ukraine. Moreover, this has allowed Russia to overcome many of the advantages that Ukraine obtained through the introduction of U.S. and other Western-supplied military aide and so to return theater-level stasis to the battlefield. Put another way, Russia’s ability to diversify its means has allowed it to generate a stalemate—which works in Moscow’s favor—and to keep the conflict going, with the goal of outlasting the international community’s military support and exhausting Ukraine’s ability to continue fighting. 

Considering Russia’s diverse bases of power, it is likely that battlefield stasis—or stalemate—will continue through 2024. In fact, this is probably Russia’s preferred course of action. It is likely that Russia is seeking to elongate the conflict through the upcoming U.S. presidential election, in hopes that the United States will elect a president who is not as friendly toward Kyiv and the Ukrainian fight for sovereignty—namely, one that will eliminate U.S. support to Ukraine’s war effort altogether.   

Ways are the specific methods an actor seeks to obtain their ends, with deference to their means. Ways consist of many supporting lines of operation or lines of effort. Moreover, many complimentary campaigns and operations can exist simultaneously within a strategy’s ways. Further, from a taxonomical position, the dominant approach or line of operation (or effort) within a strategy’s ways often becomes shorthand for a combatant’s general strategy. To that end, Russia’s strategy can be considered a strategy of exhaustion. 

Russia’s strategy of exhaustion can be broken into five lines of effort: 

• incrementally increase territorial gains to support negotiations later down the line; 
• fortify territorial gains to prevent Ukrainian efforts to retake that land; 
• destroy Ukraine’s offensive capability to prevent future attempts to retake annexed territory; 
• temporally elongate the conflict to outlast U.S. and Western military support; and 
• temporally and spatially elongate the conflict to exceed Ukraine’s manpower reserves. 

Early in the conflict, Russia’s strategy focused on the conquest of Ukrainian territory. The scale is up for debate, but Russian military operations indicated that they intended to take Kyiv, the oblasts that paralleled both sides of the Dnieper River, and all the oblasts east of the Dnieper to the Ukraine-Russia international boundary. This operation floundered, but Russia was able to extend their holdings in the Donbas, retain Crimea and obtain the land bridge to Crimea—which had been a goal of their 2014–2015 campaign, one that they came up short on at that time. 28  

As noted in the Means section above, Russia attempted limited territorial gains through 2023. 29 The attainment of any further Ukrainian territory is likely only for negotiation purposes. With that, if and when Russia and Ukraine reach the point in which they must negotiate an end to the conflict, Russia can offer to “give back” some of Ukraine’s territory as a bargaining chip so that it can hold onto what it truly desires: retention of the Donbas, the land bridge to Crimea and Crimea. This is a trend that will likely continue through 2024; we can expect to see Russia attempting to extend their territorial holdings along the contact line, arguably for the purpose of improving their bargaining position if and when negotiations between the two states come to fruition. 

Further, Russia seeks to cause Ukraine’s war effort to culminate by depleting Ukrainian materiel and manpower—both on hand and reserves. Putin states that Russia currently has 617,000 soldiers participating in the conflict. The number of combat forces within Ukraine is unknown. 30 Nonetheless, significant battles, such as Mariupol, Bakhmut, Avdiivka and others, while tough on Russia, are of serious concern for Ukraine. Russia’s population advantage in relation to Ukraine means, quite simply, that the Kremlin has a much deeper well from which to generate an army than does Kyiv. Therefore, Russia continues to leverage its population advantages over Ukraine in bloody battles of attrition to exhaust Ukraine’s ability to field forces. The Kremlin’s attempt to cause the Ukrainian armed forces to culminate shows signs of success. In December 2023, for instance, Zelenskyy stated that his military commanders were asking for an additional 500,000 troops. 31 Zelenskyy called this number “very serious” because of the impact it would have on Ukrainian civil society. 32 Budanov more recently echoed Zelenskyy, stating that Ukraine’s position was precarious without further mobilizations of manpower. 33  

Russia’s strategy of exhaustion, therefore, appears to be working. Russian mass has generally frozen the conflict along the lines of Russia’s minimally acceptable outcome noted previously, i.e., the retention of the Donbas, the land bridge to Crimea and Crimea. This reality flies in the face of General Chris Cavoli, commander of U.S. Army European Command and Supreme Allied Commander Europe, who emphatically stated: “Precision can beat Mass. The Ukrainians have showed that this past autumn. But it takes time for it to work, and that time is usually bought with space. And so, to use this method, we need space to trade for time. Not all of us have that. We have to compensate for this in our thinking [and] our planning.” 34  

While U.S. and Western-provided precision strike might have helped Ukraine in some early instances within the conflict, Russian mass, coupled with Russian’s intention on retaining territory, is disproving Cavoli’s hypothesis. Further, the sacrifice of territory for time that Cavoli refers to actually plays to the favor of Russian rather than Ukrainian political-military objectives. The land that Ukrainian forces have involuntarily ceded to Russian land forces is not likely to be retaken by precision strike. Ukraine will require a significant amount of land forces, supported by joint fires and precision strike, to dislodge Russian land forces, to control the retaken territory, and to hold it against subsequent Russian counterattacks.   

Russian Strategic Assessment: Summary

If winning in war is defined by one state’s attainment of their political-military objectives at the cost of their adversary’s political-military objectives, then Russia appears to possess the upper-hand through two years of conflict (see Table 1). Russia’s strategy of exhaustion and territorial annexation appears to be working, albeit at high costs to the Russian economy and the Russian people. Russia has had to diversify its bases of power to maintain the war stocks required to execute its strategy of exhaustion, and it has had to exact a heavy toll on the Russian people to conduct the bite-and-hold tactics needed to make its territorial gains. Considering that Russia is largely on the defensive now, holding its position along the time of contact, the toll on the Russian people will likely decrease in the coming year. Moreover, considering its heavily fortified defensive position, it will likely maintain the upper hand on the battlefield through 2024.  

Ukrainian Strategic Assessment

Ukraine’s focus remains to liberate its territory from Russian occupation and restore its 1991 borders with Russia, which includes restoring its sovereignty over the Donbas and Crimea. 35 Beyond that, Ukraine continues to work to strengthen its bonds with the West. From security assistance partnerships to working on joining the European Union (EU), Zelenskyy and his government continue to press the diplomatic channels to maintain and gain political, military and economic support from the international community. 36

Kyiv’s efforts to join the EU and continue to maintain support from the international community are arguably much more realistic than its objective to remove Russian military forces—to include Russian proxies—from Ukraine’s territory. The classic board game Risk provides an excellent analogy for what Ukraine must do. In Risk, to claim or reclaim a piece of territory on the map, a player must attack and defeat the army occupying a territory. If (and when) the attacker defeats the defender, the attacker must then do two things—not just one. The attacker must not only move armies into the conquered territory, but he must also leave at least one army in the territory from which he initiated his attack. In effect, any successful attack diffuses combat power, and this is on top of any losses suffered during the attack. And yet, the attacker must identify the appropriate balance of armies between the newly acquired territory and the territory from which he attacked. An imbalance in either territory creates an enticing target for counterattack by the vanquished occupier. 

Ukraine finds itself in just such a position; however, instead of just attacking to retake one small portion of its territory, Ukraine must work to reclaim nearly 20 percent of its territory. 37 Compounding this problem is the size of Russia’s occupation force. As noted previously, Putin indicated that Russia has 670,000 soldiers committed to the conflict—this is more than a 200 percent increase from Moscow’s initial 190,000-strong invasion force. 38 It is challenging to verify Putin’s numbers, or to identify how those numbers are split between combat and support troops, and troops operating in Ukraine vice support troops committed to the conflict but operating in Russia. Nonetheless, for the sake of argument, let’s assume all 670,000 Russian troops are in Ukraine. Using the traditional attacker-to-defender heuristic, which states that a successful attack requires three units of measure to every one defensive unit of measure (3:1), and using individual troops as the unit of measure, we find that a successful Ukrainian attack would require more than two million troops to execute the sequence outlined above. 

Are two million troops really what’s required to evict Russian land forces from Ukraine and hold it against a likely counterattack? Some analysts—both old and current—suggest that the 3:1 ratio is flawed, not relevant, or both. 39 Or does modern technology obviate the need for some of those land forces, as Cavoli suggested? 

The fact of the matter remains: Long-range precision strike, drones of all types and excellent targeting information have done what complimentary arms and intelligence have always done—they have supported the advance or defensive posture of competing land forces, but they have not supplanted it. Moreover, technology must be viewed in the context of both the operations that it is supporting, but also the adversarial operations that it seeks to overcome. If it is correct that Russian strategy is primarily concerned with retaining its territorial acquisitions at this point, and thus Russian military forces are focused on conducting defensive operations, and that Ukrainian land forces do not have the numbers to conduct the attack-defeat-occupy-defend sequence in conjunction with those other components of combined arms operations, then the precision strike, drones and targeting information might be the window dressing for a futile strategic position. Seen in this light, Kyiv’s strategy is out of balance; that is, Kyiv’s ends exceed the limits of its means. The effect of this situation has contributed to the conflict being characterized as a war of attrition.  

The greatest risk to Ukraine’s strategy for winning the war against Russia is the loss of U.S. political, financial and military support. The loss of support from other European partners closely follows in order of importance. A great deal has been written about this in other publications, and as a result, this section will examine other strategic risks. 

One of Kyiv’s biggest strategic risks is exhausting or diffusing its military force so much so that Russian land forces might attack and confiscate additional Ukrainian land through increasingly vulnerable positions. For instance, Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the summer of 2023 could have very well created so-called soft spots in Ukraine’s lines through which a localized counterattack might create an operational breakthrough. That did not happen, but this situation is something that strategic military planners must consider if Zelenskyy and his government truly intend to liberate all of Ukraine’s territory from Russia.

In addition, the reclamation of Crimea is something that is potentially a game-changing situation. Putin has stated the Crimea is Russia’s red line, indicating that a nuclear retort could likely coincide with any legitimate Ukrainian attempt to retake the peninsula. 40 Therefore, Putin’s red line is something policymakers and strategists in Kyiv would have to consider before enacting any attempt to seize and hold Crimea. Might Putin’s red line be a bluff? Perhaps. But the threat of nuclear strike, coupled with Putin’s move of nuclear weapons into Belarus and his repositioning of nuclear strike weapons close to Ukraine earlier in the conflict, demonstrate some credibility to the threat.   

As noted extensively in the section on Ukraine’s strategic ends, manpower is the biggest resource inhibiting Ukraine from attaining its political-military objectives. 41 As Zaluzhnyi notes in a recent essay, Ukraine’s recruiting and retention problems, coupled with a fixed population, no coalition to share the manpower load and two years of killed in action and other casualties, have put Ukraine in this position. 42 It is not a position that they are likely to overcome, even if Kyiv initiates a conscription system. Considering the 3:1 math outlined above, Kyiv theoretically needs to generate a trained army of more than two million troops if it hopes to remove Russian land forces from Ukraine. Moreover, if technology enthusiasts are correct and precision strike weapons, drones and advanced intelligence could shift the 3:1 ratio to perhaps 2:1 or even 1.5:1 in open combat, that advantage would shift back toward the defenders in urban areas. This is because of considerations of International Humanitarian Law and the challenges of targeting in more respective operating environments—a useful segue to discuss combat in urban areas. 

The math gets even more challenging when this context is applied. Trevor Dupuy writes that, “The 3:1 force ratio requirement for the attacker cannot be of useful value without some knowledge of the behavioral and other combat variable factors involved.” 43 As such, factors such as the operating environment, the type of opponent and the method in which they have historically fought must also be applied to the situation. Theory and military doctrine both suggest that the ratio for attacker to defender in urban operating environments increases from 3:1 to 6:1. 44  

Considering the large number of cities in Ukraine’s occupied areas, as well as their breadth and the depth of the front that Kyiv’s forces would have to work through, this poses a significant challenge. Hypothetically, Russian forces might strong-point places like Donetsk City, Mariupol, Melitopol, Simferopol and Sevastopol, creating a network of interlocked spikes in required strength—from 3:1 to 6:1—and thus increasing the overall combat power required by Ukraine to remove Russian military forces from the country. 

Moreover, if Ukraine is able to remove Russian land forces from Ukraine, the question of insurgency must also come into the equation. Retaking physical territory is one thing; securing the loyalty of the people in that territory is quite another. Vast portions of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts, as well as the entirety of Crimea, have been occupied by Russia for a decade. The political loyalties, cultural affiliation and domestic politics of the population in those areas are far from certain at this point. Thus, the chance for an insurgency in the Donbas and Crimea must also be considered when calculating the means—in this case, human capital—required to conduct operations to reclaim and hold lost territory. 

Already running short of needed ammunition, to include artillery, missiles and air defense missiles, Ukraine’s ammunition crunch is likely to accelerate through 2024. This is yet another concern raised by Zaluzhnyi in his recent essay on what Ukraine needs to survive and win against Russia. 45 At the time of this writing, Congress has failed to approve the Department of Defense’s latest funding requests for Ukraine. Whether they move forward on that remains to be seen. Nonetheless, for the purpose of continuing the discussion, let’s assume that Congress approves the funding in March 2024. But by that time, that lapse in funding will have created a lapse in support to Ukraine, exacerbating an already tenuous ammunition situation and potentially creating something far more critical. As it currently stands, Ukrainian units are approaching the point at which they are able to do little more than defend their positions and maintain the front lines. 46 Moving forward in time, Ukrainian units will not be able to conduct robust offensive operations—which would require methodically penetrating Russian defensive belts and destroying Russian land forces in stride—because they will not have enough ammunition. 

A lag will also develop between the time in which Congress authorizes funds for Ukraine, the time that the military can deliver the equipment associated with those funds to Ukraine’s armed forces and the time that the Ukrainian armed forces can put that equipment to use on the battlefield. In the interim period between Congressional approval and the Ukrainian forces putting the equipment to use in the field, the risk of Russian tactical and operational military offensive operations increases, while Ukraine’s risk of successful defensive operations decreases. Therefore, one might expect to see Russian land forces attempting to penetrate Ukrainian lines in the coming months in an effort to exploit Ukraine’s ammunition crisis and, as noted earlier, to take additional territory to strengthen its bargaining position later down the road.   

Having examined Ukraine’s strategic ends and the challenges presented to those ends by both Ukraine’s risks and means, the ways is a fairly simple discussion. Ukraine’s limited manpower and ammunition base already limits what Ukraine can do offensively. If Russian forces in Ukraine do actually approach 670,000, and the 3:1 ratio (or 6:1 ratio) are accurate planning considerations, Kyiv would have to generate, at a minimum, the men, materiel and ammunition for a two million-soldier army to retake the Donbas, the land bridge to Crimea and Crimea. Moreover, this does not account for any counterattacks that might follow Ukrainian success or for potential insurgencies in any of those newly liberated areas. 

In recent conversations on the subject, Michael Kofman and Franz-Stefan Gady made mention of this and suggested that, for the foreseeable future, Ukrainian forces are limited to defensive operations along the contact line and to small, limited objective offensives with operations rarely exceeding platoon size. 47 Hardly a way to win a war. Although Gady’s assessment of Ukraine’s position was more optimistic than Kofman’s, both analysts suggest a very challenging 2024 for Kyiv’s armed forces. Considering the strategic balance, Gady and Kofman are correct—Ukraine will be quite challenged in 2024 to do much more than defend the contact line with sufficient force to prevent Russian breakthroughs. Avdiivka is a case in point. 

Avdiivka—located along the contact line in Donetsk oblast—is the conflict’s current hot spot. Russian land forces continue to use “meat assaults” to attrite Ukrainian men, materiel and equipment in the city in hopes of extending their territorial annexation and exhausting Ukraine’s ability to continue fighting. 48 After months of fighting, Russia appears to be on the cusp of claiming the city. 49 Accurate casualty numbers are challenging to identify at this point, but reports indicate that thousands of troops on both sides have died as the struggle for the city churns through men and resources. Holding the line against robust Russian attacks, like that at Avdiivka, is likely to be the maximum extent of Ukrainian operations through 2024.  

Ukrainian Strategic Assessment: Summary

The most basic finding is that Ukraine has culminated and is not capable of offensive operations at the scale and duration required to retake the Donbas, the land bridge to Crimea or Crimea. What’s more, the Ukrainian armed forces will require a significant augmentation of land power to remove Russia from Ukraine’s territory. Precision strikes and air power will help in this endeavor, but Ukrainian infantry and armored forces must still move into the terrain, clear the terrain of Russian land forces, hold the terrain and then prevail against any Russian counterattacks. Therefore, onlookers should not expect any grand Ukrainian offensive through 2024. Ukraine might attempt one or two smaller scale offensives to nibble away Russian held territory, but anything larger exceeds Ukraine’s means. 

If U.S. support to Ukraine remains frozen for an extended period of time, Ukraine’s ability to just hold the contact line with Russia will deteriorate further. U.S. weapons, ammunition and military equipment are vital to Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. Each day without that support adds more fragility to Ukraine’s supply network, its artillery forces and its land forces. It means increasing weaknesses proliferating through the Ukrainian armed forces and Kyiv’s inability to develop useful military strategy. In short, 2024 looks bleak for Ukraine and for its ability to meet its political-military objectives.   

If, however, U.S. support to Ukraine is unlocked relatively soon, Ukraine’s ability to defend itself will still see a slight dip in capability, but it will likely rebound quickly. Nonetheless, Ukraine’s manpower challenges will still prevent it from any large-scale offensives during 2024. The influx of long-range precision strikes, air power and intelligence from the United States—and other Western nations—will help mitigate some of the personnel challenges, but certainly not completely obviate that concern. Therefore, the attritional grind of forces aligned on opposing trench networks is likely to characterize the conflict throughout 2024.   

The Russo-Ukrainian War is currently in stasis. This stalemate is the result of competing strategies, one of which is focused on the retention of annexed territory—and the other on the vanquishment of a hostile force from its territory without the means to accomplish that objective. Considering the balance in relation to each state’s ends, Russia is currently winning the war (see Table 3). Russia controls significant portions of Ukrainian territory, and they are not likely to be evicted from that territory by any other means than brutal land warfare, which Ukraine cannot currently afford. What’s more, it is debatable if Ukraine will be able to generate the forces needed to liberate and hold the Donbas, the land bridge to Crimea and Crimea. It would likely take an international coalition to generate the number of troops, combat forces and strike capabilities needed to accomplish the liberation of Ukraine’s occupied territory. This international coalition materializing is extremely unlikely to happen.

As stated in the Introduction, land wars fought for territory possess different military end goals than irregular wars, counterinsurgencies and civil wars. Moreover, a strategy’s ends must be supported first by its means, and secondarily, by resource-bound ways to accomplish those ends. Thus, precision strike strategies and light-footprint approaches do not provide sufficient forces to defeat industrialized armies built to fight wars based on the physical destruction of opposing armies and occupying their territory. Robust land forces, capable of delivering overwhelming firepower and flooding into territory held by an aggressor army, are the future of war, not relics of 20th century armed conflict. This is not a feature of conflict specific to Europe, but, as John McManus notes, something that has also been proven in east Asia during U.S. operations in the Pacific theater during World War II. For instance, McManus notes that the U.S. Army employed more divisions during the invasion of The Philippines than it did during the invasion of Normandy. 50 Given the considerations that policymakers face regarding a China-Taiwan conflict scenario, it is useful to take into account McManus’ findings, as well as the realities of war laid bare in Ukraine. If China were to invade Taiwan, with the intention of annexation, then similar factors to that of the Russo-Ukrainian War are worth weighing. Large, robust land forces would be required to enter, clear and hold Taiwan. 

Moreover, Russia’s operations in Ukraine illustrate that mass beats precision, and not the other way around. Precision might provide a tactical victory at a single point on the battlefield, but those victories of a finite point are not likely to deliver strategic victory. Further, denigrating Russia’s mass strategy as “stupid” misses the point. If Russia delivers strategic victory, it cannot be that illogical, regardless of how dubious the methods. Ultimately, Russia’s operations in Ukraine show that mass, especially in wars of territorial annexation, are how a state truly consolidates its gains and hedges those military victories against counterattacks.   

Finally, the Russo-Ukrainian War illustrates how important it is to eliminate an enemy army to insulate one’s state from see-saw transitions between tactical victories. Clausewitz asserts that an undestroyed army always presents the possibility of returning to the battlefield and undercutting its adversary’s aims. Ukraine’s inability to eliminate Russia’s army and remove it from the battlefield in Ukraine means that Kyiv will have to continually wrestle with the Kremlin aggressively pursuing its aims in Ukraine. Ukraine’s inability to generate the size of force, coupled with the destructive warfighting capabilities needed to destroy Russia’s army in Ukraine and to occupy and hold the liberated territory, means that this war of attrition will likely grind on until either Ukraine can generate the force needed to evict Putin’s army from Ukraine, Ukraine becomes strategically exhausted and has to quit the conflict, or both parties decide to end the conflict. Regardless of the outcome, 2024 will likely continue to see Russia attempting to strategically exhaust Ukraine; meanwhile, Kyiv will do its best to maintain its position along the contact line as it tries to recruit and train the army needed to destroy Russia’s army and to liberate its territory.

Amos Fox is a PhD candidate at the University of Reading and a freelance writer and conflict scholar writing for the Association of the United States Army. His research and writing focus on the theory of war and warfare, proxy war, future armed conflict, urban warfare, armored warfare and the Russo-Ukrainian War. Amos has published in RUSI Journal and Small Wars and Insurgencies among many other publications, and he has been a guest on numerous podcasts, including RUSI’s Western Way of War , This Means War , the Dead Prussian Podcast and the Voices of War .

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The views and opinions of our authors do not necessarily reflect those of the Association of the United States Army. An article selected for publication represents research by the author(s) which, in the opinion of the Association, will contribute to the discussion of a particular defense or national security issue. These articles should not be taken to represent the views of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, the United States government, the Association of the United States Army or its members.

Ukraine Has Changed Too Much to Compromise With Russia

My generation has tasted freedom and experienced a competitive, vibrant political life. We can’t be made a part of what Russia has become.

H ere in Ukraine , we often react very emotionally when we hear people in the West calling for peace with Russia. According to some commentators , this would be achieved by means of a “compromise,” entailing Ukrainian “concessions” that would somehow satisfy the Kremlin and stop the war: major territorial giveaways, armed forces reduced to insignificance, no further integration with the West—you name it.

Most of us see such views as extremely naive, given the totalitarian and militaristic nature of Vladimir Putin’s Russia. Having built his rule on war hysteria, land grabs, imperial chauvinism, and global confrontation, Putin is hardly likely to stop even at a deal that most Ukrainians would find entirely unacceptable.

But that leads us to another problem that much of the Western media fail to fully appreciate: Ten years of confrontation with the Kremlin, and especially the past two years of Russia’s full-scale invasion, have fundamentally changed Ukraine. These changes are not superficial or easily swept away.

Read: The one element keeping Ukraine from total defeat

A little more than a decade ago, many young Ukrainians—including those, like myself, from Ukraine’s Russian-speaking east—were angry and restless, itching for something we saw just over the horizon. In high schools and universities, we read Montesquieu and soaked up such tantalizing concepts  as the rule of law, democracy, and human rights. Western values felt native to our generation; we were open to the world in a way that our parents had never imagined. Most of them had ventured no farther than Central Asia for their Soviet military service, or maybe Moscow for the 1980 Olympics.

My peers and I wanted our country to have clean streets, polite police, and government officials who would resign at the exposure of petty corruption scandals. We wanted to be able to start businesses without passing money under the table, and to trust that courts of law would render justice. What we did not want were irremovable, lifetime dictators who packed the government with cronies on the take and sent goons to beat us up in the streets.

In Kyiv’s Maidan Square, starting in November 2013 and lasting into February 2014, demonstrators showed their fervor for such a future in what became known as the Revolution of Dignity. Some gave their lives to unseat Viktor Yanukovych, the kleptocratic ruler Moscow supported, and orient Ukraine unequivocally toward the West. At the site of desolation, armloads of flowers commemorated these dead. Yanukovych fled a country that despised him and had spiraled out of his control.

A new Ukraine began—and with it, a decade-long war of independence, as the Kremlin marked our revolution by seizing Crimea and infiltrating the Donbas region in the country’s east. For nearly a decade, Ukraine was fighting on two fronts: a military war against Russia, and an internal struggle for its revolution’s ideals, which meant stamping out corruption, obsolescence, unfreedom—everything that might drag the country back into the past.

Ukraine is still far from achieving all that my generation once dreamed of. But we do live in a country that is radically different from the Russian-influenced Ukraine of 2013—politically, mentally, and culturally. And we are starkly different from Putin’s Russia.

Ukrainians have tasted freedom and experienced a competitive, vibrant political life. We elected a comedian to be our leader after he faced down an old-school political heavyweight in a debate that was held in a giant stadium in downtown Kyiv and aired live to the nation. We’ve reinvented Ukrainian culture, generating new music, poetry, and stand-up comedy. Starting in 2014, we had to build our country’s armed forces almost from scratch; we are insanely proud of them, as they have fought heroically against one of the largest and most brutal war machines in existence.

A few weeks ago , I brought my dog to a veterinarian in Bucha, the town outside Kyiv where Russian forces committed a well-documented massacre in 2022. As the young doctor handled my dog, I noticed a large Ukrainian trident entwined with blue and yellow ribbons tattooed on her wrist under her white sleeve. For my generation of Ukrainians, such national symbols are an expression of pride in all we’ve made and defended.

I was with one of the first groups of journalists to enter Bucha after the Russian retreat in 2022. To describe the atmosphere is very difficult: I remember rot, stillness, a miasma of grief. The Russians had graffitied the letter V everywhere. On a fence along the main street: Those entering the no-go zone shall be executed. V. We followed the Ukrainian police as they broke through doors into premises inhabited only by the dead. Some of the bodies were charred and mutilated. I saw two males and two females lying on the ground, incompletely burned, their mouths open and hands twisted. One looked to be a teenage girl.

Outside the Church of Andrew the Apostle—a white temple that rises high over Bucha—Ukrainian coroners in white hazmat suits carefully removed layers of wet, clayish soil from a mass grave and placed 67 bodies on simple wooden doors under the cold drizzle. A tow truck hoisted the cadavers out one by one, hour by hour. Now and again, the rain would pick up, and the coroners would hastily cover the grave with plastic sheeting stained with dried gore.

“My theory is that there was a very brutal Russian commander in charge of Bucha,” Andriy Nebytov, the chief of police for Kyiv Oblast, told reporters at the church that day. “And they unleashed hell in this place.”

The Continent apartment complex used to be one of the finest in Bucha. I met a guy named Mykola Mosyarevych in a basketball court there. In his 30s and fit, he was a likely target for the Russians—a potential guerrilla fighter or member of the Territorial Defense—and so he’d spent the whole month in a basement. After the Russians left Bucha, on the day of my visit, he sat staring at a pair of ripped Russian fatigues marked with the orange-and-black striped ribbon of Saint George—a symbol of war and love for destruction. He wept. Over and over again, he said: “I just don’t understand. I don’t understand. I don’t understand why they would want to do all this to us.”

We all asked similar questions, and our fragmentary answers could bring little comfort to Mosyarevych or anyone else: lust for power, years of aggressive propaganda, a sense of impunity, a would-be emperor grasping at illusion. Deep down, fear.

Read: Ukraine’s shock will last for generations

Later that day, I walked alone with my camera through what was left of a Russian armored column on Vokzalna Street. Bucha’s defenders recalled that the Russians in this column had been moving carelessly and singing patriotic songs when Ukrainian forces struck their leading and trailing vehicles. The column stopped. The remaining Russian vehicles scrambled like bumper cars to maneuver through the wreckage, find a way out, and save themselves. But Vokzalna Street is narrow: They were trapped. A Ukrainian artillery strike left hardly any vehicle whole. The layer of ash on the ground was so thick that it crunched underfoot like snow.

What used to be a leafy green lane, part of my favorite bicycle route to Bucha and Hostomel, had become a cemetery. But within three weeks, Ukrainian workers had cleared away the rubble and repaved the road. Later, Warren Buffett’s son donated funds for Ukrainian authorities to completely renovate the street and construct new, Scandinavian-style, single-family houses with lawns and picket fences. Online, people posted tens of thousands of likes and comments under images comparing Vokzalna Street during the Russian occupation and after.

Springtime soon came, too, and with it snaking lines of cars, as thousands of people who had fled poured back into their hometown days after its liberation. Young mothers returned with their strollers. Time would absorb the grief and horrors of this war, as it had of so many that had come before.

Even so, I don’t want to think about what will happen to my dog’s veterinarian if the Russians make it back to Bucha. Or what will happen to Ukraine. After everything that’s transpired over the past decade—and especially given what Russia has become—Ukraine must not be made a Russian colony again.

Today’s Russia is a neo-Stalinist dictatorship led by an aging chauvinist. In the grip of his messianic delusion, Putin initiated the biggest European war since World War II. He seeks to eliminate Ukraine not only as an independent nation, but also as an idea. No concessions or compromises are possible with such a vision—not given the kind of country Ukrainians have made and fought to defend.

This essay is adapted from I Will Show You How It Was: The Story of Wartime Kyiv , published on May 7 by Bloomsbury.

​When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

Lessons from Ukraine

Editor’s Note: This piece is part of a series of policy analyses entitled “ The Talbott Papers on Implications of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine ,” named in honor of American statesman and former Brookings Institution President Strobe Talbott. Brookings is grateful to Trustee Phil Knight for his generous support of the Brookings Foreign Policy program .

Introduction

Constanze stelzenmüller.

At the one-year anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, much Western commentary features a mixture of relief and self-congratulation. Both are deserved in considerable measure. Ukrainians have proved astonishingly brave and resilient in the face of an assault of a scale and brutality not seen in Europe since 1945. The war galvanized the trans-Atlantic alliance into unity and action, with forceful and generous American leadership, and an unexpectedly muscular role played by the European Union. Indeed, the United States and Europe have been highly effective in leveraging each other’s diplomatic, economic, and military assets to support Ukraine, and constrain Russia. Public opinion, too, has remained remarkably supportive of aiding Ukraine.

At the same time, the alliance has been careful to draw red lines. Western leaders have said throughout that they are giving Ukraine the means to defend itself, but will not become parties to the conflict, for instance by establishing a no-fly zone or deploying NATO troops. Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, has also — despite his repeated assertions that Russia is being attacked by the West, and bald-faced threats of escalation — observed red lines himself by avoiding overt military action against Ukraine’s supporters. And despite ambivalence in the rest of the world in view of calls to take sides on behalf of Ukraine, it is notable how many non-Western countries have spoken out in condemnation of Russia’s actions, or (like Japan and South Korea) sent money and materiel to Kyiv.

Nonetheless, for what may already be the defining crisis of our era, crucial questions remain unresolved: how to avoid an escalation of the war; how and when to bring this war to an end; how to stop sanctions evasion; how to avoid impunity for the perpetrators and bring them to justice; how to assure the effectiveness of NATO deterrence and defense; how to prevent key non-Western powers — above all China — from throwing their full weight in with Russia; how to mitigate the immense costs of supporting Ukraine and the global consequences of the war; how to reconstruct Ukraine and bring back refugees; how to redefine the European security order against an imperialist Russia; and how to do better at protecting the world from the depredations of autocratic great powers.

This much is clear: 2023 could be a decisive year for the future of Ukraine, the West, and global order and security — for better, but also for worse. Below, 16 Brookings scholars examine the lessons of the first year of Russia’s war against Ukraine and look ahead to coming challenges.

Fiona Hill observes that Russia’s attack on Ukraine is a full-scale assault on the post-World War II global order and demands nothing less than a U.S.-led revamping of the international security system. Restoring European security and deterrence will require the United States and its allies to persuade skeptical middle powers that a world order that is safe for all nations can only be based on international law and the United Nations Charter. Steven Pifer addresses the thorny question of how Ukraine can best protect itself against future Russian aggression; he argues that the West’s red lines — NATO boots on the ground and membership for Ukraine — mean that Kyiv must be given all the arms it needs to defend itself.

James Goldgeier explains that the Biden administration, after a remarkably adept and forceful response, must nonetheless now contemplate a long and demanding war; and he cautions America’s allies that the bipartisan consensus around supporting Ukraine may not last. Tara Varma writes that the invasion of Ukraine provoked a strategic awakening in Europe. But the coming months may well see intra-European division — and Europe’s security dependency on the United States — resurface. Aslı Aydıntaşbaş charts Turkey’s complex balancing act between Russia and the West under President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and predicts that — despite a potential post-earthquake warming of relations between Ankara and its NATO allies — Turkey will remain ambivalent as long as there is no clear victor in Ukraine.

Patricia M. Kim maintains that China’s “no limits” partnership with Russia will endure because both powers share an interest in challenging what they perceive as a Western-dominated global order. But China also stands to lose much more than Russia from global insecurity. Western powers should use this leverage to get Chinese leaders to constructively influence Moscow to prevent escalation in Europe. Suzanne Maloney points out that Iran’s emergence as the only state to provide offensive weaponry to Moscow reflects a decisive shift in Tehran’s risk tolerance and its geopolitical orientation toward Russia and China. It puts paid to efforts by the Biden administration and its European allies to resuscitate the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, as Tehran nears nuclear breakout.

Tanvi Madan argues that the Western-led coalition supporting Ukraine should not be surprised by the reservations and ambivalence of non-Western powers like India. Instead, the West should highlight how Russian imperialism is a threat to the global order and offer real alleviation to these countries’ concerns. Bruce Jones says the West needs to face up to a future of unstable great power relations and the risk of manifold disruptions from deepening global interdependence; building security will be hard and costly for democracies.

Caitlin Talmadge notes that the danger of nuclear escalation has constrained both Russia and the West in this war, but other states are likely to reconsider the importance of having nuclear weapons of their own. Melanie W. Sisson interrogates the Western alliance’s many failures to predict the course of this war and warns that a focus on incremental, tactical successes could mask a real problem: the absence of a compelling vision of how to end it. Michael E. O’Hanlon is struck by the echoes of World War I: not just in the battlefield dynamics, but also in the prospect of a long war of attrition — and especially in the challenge of finding a peace settlement that does not merely create a pretext for the next horrific war.

David Wessel remarks that some of the war’s economic lessons challenge conventional wisdom: the resilience of Ukraine’s economy — as well as Russia’s, despite unprecedented Western sanctions — and the ability of Europeans to wean themselves off Russian fossil fuel imports. Samantha Gross describes the global tensions between climate change mitigation policies and the energy market disruptions unleashed by the war — as well as the extraordinary efforts made by governments, businesses, and consumers to soften their impact. But she cautions that 2023 might witness significant new disturbances.

Finally, Sophie Roehse and Kemal Kirişci remind us of the horrific human cost paid by Ukrainians: a displacement crisis on a scale and speed not seen in Europe since World War II. Nearly 40% of the country’s citizens have been driven from their homes in the past year; more than 8 million are refugees in Europe or North America, and more than 5 million are internally displaced. Their ability to return safely to their homes will determine Ukraine’s ability to reestablish itself as a functioning and prosperous state in Europe.

Russia and European security

Assault on global order.

This commentary is based on Dr. Hill’s opening statement to a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on global security challenges and strategy on February 15, 2023. Video of the hearing can be found here .

The war in Ukraine has necessitated the third intervention by the United States in a European conflict in a little over a century; and what will likely be its third attempt at revamping the international security system. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 was an assault on the post-World War II global order. This wasn’t just an American-imposed order but a set of rules that all nations, including Russia and its predecessor, the Soviet Union, had agreed to. Russia violated the United Nations Charter and fundamental principles of international law by attacking an independent state that had been recognized by all members of the international community — including Russia itself — for more than 30 years.

The current challenge in Europe is how to craft more durable regional security arrangements that roll back Russia’s land grab in Ukraine, are embraced by all Europeans, and set a precedent for reinvigorating the larger set of international agreements. We need to find a formula that is not entirely dependent on U.S. military and economic power and political leadership to ensure its long-term success.

The European security environment was ruptured in 2014 when Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and sparked off a brutal proxy war in the Donbas region. None of the United States and Europe’s mechanisms and practices for keeping the peace after World War II and during the Cold War had much, if any, effect on deterring Russia from seizing Crimea or attempting to take Kyiv and the rest of Ukraine in 2022. Western deterrence failed in part because American and European policymakers never meaningfully emphasized the West’s redlines. Indeed, one might even ask, “what were the redlines?” The West certainly did not appear to uphold the postwar principle of ensuring independent states’ sovereignty and territorial integrity. Instead, after 2014, European leaders, led by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, rushed to push Russia’s annexation of Crimea to one side and broker a quick peace settlement in Donbas — the Minsk Accords, which would have limited Ukraine’s sovereignty if fully implemented.

We have spent more time contemplating the perils of provoking Russia’s mercurial president, Vladimir Putin, than the merits of bolstering Europe’s resilience and capacity to limit Putin’s coercive power.

The tepid Western political response to Russia’s violation of Ukraine’s territory and the limited application of international sanctions after this first invasion convinced Moscow that attacking Ukraine was not, in fact, a serious breach of post-World War II norms. Indeed, Western commentary since 2014 has frequently focused on the risks of stepping over Russia’s redlines, rather than enforcing the West’s. We have spent more time contemplating the perils of provoking Russia’s mercurial president, Vladimir Putin, than the merits of bolstering Europe’s resilience and capacity to limit Putin’s coercive power.

In charting a path forward, we need to recognize that the war in Ukraine has been brewing for decades because of a key distinction in the way the international community approached the collapse of the Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. In the case of Yugoslavia, the country was dissolved without the recognition of a single successor state. Serbia’s territorial claims against its neighbors were rejected. In the case of the USSR, the United States and every other country recognized Russia as the sole successor state. Moscow inherited the Soviet Union’s U.N. Security Council seat and its other privileges and obligations, as well as, it seemed, the Soviet Union’s Cold War sphere of influence in Eastern Europe. Ukraine and other former Soviet republics fell into a gray zone where Russia’s interests trumped theirs’. They were deemed Russia’s “near abroad.”

Putin has repeatedly stated that Moscow has the right to dominate this neighborhood and reclaim “lost” territory. For Putin, the war in Ukraine is a continuation of the Soviet struggle with the United States to carve up Europe after 1945. Russia still sees NATO as a U.S. Cold War bloc — a cover for American imperialism, not an alliance of equals to ensure common defense and security. In this context, NATO’s post-Cold War expansion and Ukraine’s reluctance to implement the Minsk Accords in Donbas became the current war’s casus belli.

Redefining European security and restoring deterrence will involve explicitly countering this narrative. Building an international coalition against Russia’s aggression to facilitate an eventual settlement of the war will require the same. The United States and its allies must clarify and emphasize that they are supporting Ukraine on the battlefield to uphold the United Nations Charter and international law. Building on President Joe Biden’s historic February 20 visit to Kyiv to underline enduring U.S. support for Ukraine, Washington needs to step up diplomatic efforts, including in the U.N., to convince friends and ambivalent middle powers in the so-called Global South that the West’s goal is not to retain supremacy in Europe but to keep the world safer for every nation. If Russia succeeds in carving up Ukraine, then the future sovereignty and territorial integrity of other states could be imperiled. Upholding international norms must once again be a central part of U.S. global security strategy.

Arm Kyiv for self-defense

Steven pifer.

Ukraine has surprised many, not least the Kremlin, with its resistance against the aggression that Russian President Vladimir Putin unleashed in February 2022. The tenacity, skill, and courage of Ukraine’s soldiers, and many of its civilians as well, have frustrated an all-out invasion launched by what was regarded as the world’s second or, at least, third most powerful military.

The Russia-Ukraine conflict has demonstrated that modern force-on-force warfare consumes much in terms of ammunition, materiel, and soldiers’ lives. That provides an important lesson for Western militaries, now in the process of restoring their focus on traditional territorial defense in the face of a very evident Russian security threat to Europe.

By dint of tactical agility and innovation , a lesser-armed but more motivated Ukrainian military has withstood the attacks of a larger and far more powerful adversary. The West can learn from that, and, as it integrates more sophisticated Western arms into its operations, the Ukrainian military will want to maintain that agility and innovation.

As for the Ukrainian civilian population, it has shown remarkable resilience , particularly as the Russian military launched attacks on electric power, municipal central heating, and other infrastructure to make up for its lack of progress in battle. The lesson here is that a people who see themselves in an existential fight for their national identity, democracy, and land will endure great hardship.

The West has helped Ukraine by  providing weapons ,  financial assistance , and intelligence support . Ukraine needs to maintain and expand that flow.

At the same time, Kyiv has to recognize that the West has drawn a firm red line: no troops. NATO members have armed and trained Ukrainians, but no member has offered to join the fight. President Joe Biden, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, and other Western leaders ruled out a no-fly zone over Ukraine, as it raised the prospect of U.S. and NATO pilots shooting down Russian planes and conducting strikes against Russian air defenses — perhaps in Russia itself.

Looking to the longer term, Kyiv should bear the West’s red line in mind, including as it considers postwar security arrangements.

To be sure, Ukraine has not asked for troops. Still, looking to the longer term, Kyiv should bear the West’s red line in mind, including as it considers postwar security arrangements. It is difficult to see Moscow winning — at least in the sense implied by the Russian army’s multiple attack vectors in February 2022, which suggested Kremlin goals of occupying Kyiv and perhaps the eastern one-half to two-thirds of Ukraine. However, a Ukrainian victory or a stalemated end to the current fighting would still leave Ukraine facing the risk of future Russian aggression.

To deal with that, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy understandably seeks NATO membership . Ukraine meets the democratic standards that NATO expects of aspiring members and, prior to the war, had built a functioning if flawed market economy. Ukraine’s military has proven a force to be reckoned with; just ask General Valery Gerasimov.

Nine European members of NATO have expressed support, as has Canada . However, membership would require the consent of all 30 alliance members (32 once Finland and Sweden enter). Each would have to be prepared to go to war against Russia for Ukraine. True, with Ukraine in the alliance, NATO’s military would be added to the equation of helping Ukraine deter a new Russian attack. That seems less risky than what might happen if NATO forces were to enter the ongoing war.

Still, a majority of NATO members currently deem that risk too great. This suggests a serious membership bid would have little prospect in the near term.

In the future, Ukraine will need a modernized military to deter a new Russian assault. Kyiv should look to the West for the weapons to arm that military. That means Abrams and Leopard tanks, Bradley and other fighting vehicles, ATACMS surface-to-surface missiles, and fighter aircraft, among other things.

Many Western leaders seem readier to agree to arm Ukraine than to support its NATO membership. Now, and in a post-conflict situation, Kyiv should ask for — and the West should pay — a significant price in weapons in return for the delay of Ukraine’s NATO quest.

That does not mean NATO membership comes off the table forever. Ukraine should continue its preparations so that, when the political window opens, it can pass through. In the meantime, a strongly armed Ukraine would put Ukraine’s defense where it best belongs: in the hands of Ukrainians.

United States

Leadership, but for how long, james goldgeier.

Considering how the United States responded to the 2014 Russian invasion of Ukraine, namely with economic sanctions and supplying only non-lethal military aid to Kyiv, one could be forgiven for being repeatedly surprised over the past year. Perhaps if Russia had succeeded in taking over much of Ukraine right away, toppled the government, and installed a puppet regime, the U.S. response in 2022 would not have been dramatically different than it was eight years earlier. But despite Russian President Vladimir Putin’s longstanding obsession with controlling Ukraine and his apparent belief he could get away with it, the Russians failed in their drive to occupy Kyiv, and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy did not flee to form a government in exile. And the rest of Europe finally realized what the Balts and Poles had been trying to tell them for years: Putin was a threat to the peaceful continental order the Europeans thought they had achieved after the end of the Balkans wars more than two decades ago.

With Ukrainians fighting valiantly against a brutal invasion, the United States and its allies stepped into the breach to assist them. After four years of his predecessor denigrating and dismissing allies, all the while expressing admiration for Putin, President Joe Biden was eager to rally American allies and partners to support Ukraine. If there was anything his long political career as senator, vice president, and president prepared him for, it was leading the trans-Atlantic alliance in a vigorous response to the horrific Russian attack. While explicitly refusing to send American troops into the fight to prevent a direct NATO-Russia conflagration, Biden committed nearly $47 billion dollars in U.S. military assistance after February 2022, with increasing levels of lethality, and he rallied NATO allies and partners to send significant military assistance of their own. Over time, the United States enhanced its intelligence and military support by sending a variety of systems not contemplated at the war’s outset, including the High Mobility Artillery Rocket System, Patriot air defense missile systems, Bradley fighting vehicles, and finally M1 Abrams tanks (to be delivered later).

As the war continues with little sign of slowing down, and the prospects for a peace settlement remain quite dim, the United States and its allies will have to continue to stand fast in the face of Putin’s imperial designs.

With strong bipartisan support on Capitol Hill and among the general public, the United States was engaged in a European conflict in ways that few would have predicted on February 23, 2022, particularly after the administration entered office determined to focus attention on the China challenge and had only recently completed a chaotic military withdrawal from Afghanistan. While Putin may have been emboldened by the administration’s desire to pivot to Asia and its mishandling of the Afghanistan withdrawal, he completely miscalculated what the United States and its allies were willing to do for Ukraine.

As the war continues with little sign of slowing down, and the prospects for a peace settlement remain quite dim , the United States and its allies will have to continue to stand fast in the face of Putin’s imperial designs. They must prepare for a long war that will require continued investments in Ukraine’s defense and reconstruction for years to come. The U.S. policy to help Ukraine liberate more territory without provoking a NATO-Russia war remains the right approach. However, given the divided government that emerged after the U.S. 2022 midterm elections, it is increasingly uncertain whether or not that kind of sustained involvement is politically possible .

Strategic wake-up call

A year into Russia’s full-scale war in Ukraine, Europeans are taking stock — literally and figuratively — of where they stand and where they need to be in a few months’ time.

They have undergone several shocks: First, war, in the form of a massive attack by one state upon another, was back on the continent. Second, Europe had created dependencies, especially on Russian gas and oil, that were endangering its very existence. It needed to become a more sovereign actor.

The first shock was hard to recover from. Despite U.S . and U.K. warnings as early as the fall of 2022 that Russian President Vladimir Putin was intent on invading not only part of Ukraine but the whole country, Western Europeans were mostly skeptical. They did prepare an economic response and threatened Putin with heavy sanctions if he went ahead with his plans. But they were still in shock when his troops entered the country. Past the initial state of paralysis, the European Union acted steadfastly in coordinating with NATO and implementing the first of several sanctions packages meant to seriously damage the Russian economy. Europeans also realized the extent of their dependency on Russian gas and oil and worked to effectively be free of it by the end of 2022. Putin’s aggression provoked a strategic awakening on one of the most sensitive topics in European foreign policy, relations with Russia.

For a long time, Europeans were divided on their approach to Russia: some privileged the economic dimension, some warned of the existential threat Russia posed, and others wanted to integrate Russia into a new European security architecture. When Putin decided to invade Ukraine, he thought he could exploit those divisions once again, as he had in the past. He wasn’t expecting — few were — such a wave of Ukrainian resistance, which in turn won European and U.S. support for Kyiv. Soon, materiel, humanitarian aid, and lethal weapons were flowing to Ukraine, including, unprecedently, through the EU .

The strategic awakening mentioned above took several forms. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz proclaimed a “Zeitenwende” or turning point for Berlin’s foreign policy, but that remains incomplete . France also fought the belief of its Central and Eastern European partners that Paris had been complacent when it came to Russia. These eastern partners took on a much greater role in shaping the debate in European foreign policy. The war proved how the Europeanization of climate, energy, and defense has become critical. On sanctions, the sense of unity was strong. But now that weaponry for Ukraine is the central discussion, and since military spending remains a national member-state prerogative, the risk of comparison and division is emerging again.

The European and trans-Atlantic unity we witnessed is still fragile. There are divisions in the EU about supporting more sanctions packages, with ramifications in national debates. This has been evident in both Bulgaria and Hungary , for example, and debate on the war and its economic consequences was very present in the Italian and French elections in 2022.

European reliance on the United States was also made clear. We need only to see how anxiously Europeans were following the American midterm elections in the fall, as several Republican leaders indicated that if they won control of Congress, they might end U.S. support to Ukraine. European security still very much depends on the United States. The reciprocal is far less true amidst deteriorating U.S. relations with and concern about China.

The future of the European project will be determined by what comes next and by the Europeans’ capacity to respond to major challenges ahead: political, economic, social, and geopolitical.

For Europeans, the outcome of the war carries special weight, as they have now granted EU membership perspectives to both Ukraine and Moldova, which is also the target of Russian destabilization. Hence, the future of the European project will be determined by what comes next and by the Europeans’ capacity to respond to major challenges ahead: political, economic, social, and geopolitical. Responding to these risks will require them to develop European sovereignty when it comes to information, decision, and action: fostering their agency to address the economic and security challenges posed by the interdependence mentioned above, all the while defending the trans-Atlantic partnership and the rules-based order.

The war has shifted the nature of the debate everywhere in Europe: after a 30-year opt-out, Denmark will now be participating in EU defense initiatives ; Sweden and Finland have formally sought to join NATO; and many European member states are increasing their defense spending in line with NATO requirements. Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas has suggested that the EU proceed to common procurement of weapons for Ukraine, as it did for vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic. The EU’s Strategic Compass and NATO’s Strategic Concept , published in March and July 2022, paved the way for a common vision of Europe’s role as a global actor and security provider. This vision now needs implementation, for the sake of Ukraine, Moldova, and Europe.

(L): Russia’s President Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdoğan meet on the sidelines of the sixth summit of the Conference on Interaction and Confidence-building Measures in Asia (CICA), in Astana, Kazakhstan, October 13, 2022. Sputnik/Vyacheslav Prokofyev/Pool via Reuters. (R): Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan hold talks before signing an agreement on rebuilding Ukraine’s damaged infrastructure, in Lviv, Ukraine, August 18, 2022. EYEPRESS News via Reuters.

East-West balancer

Aslı aydıntaşbaş.

As the war in Ukraine enters its second year, with waves of soldiers on both sides fighting and dying on the battlefield, Turkey is turning inward. The massive earthquake that hit southern Turkey in early February will have significant political and economic consequences for the country.

For starters, the earthquake disrupts Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s re-election plans and his carefully calibrated balancing act between the West and Russia. Self-confident and eager for a greater role on the world stage, Erdoğan’s Turkey had seen Russia as an economic partner and useful leverage in its relations with the West. While Turkey has been selling drones to Ukraine and has restricted Russian access in the Bosporus and Dardanelles, Ankara has also deepened its economic ties with Moscow and kept a line of communication open with the Kremlin. Erdoğan has been proud of his “balanced” policy and has criticized the robust Western response to Russia’s invasion as “ provocative .”

There are both geopolitical and domestic imperatives for Ankara’s desire to protect its relations with Moscow. Over the past few years, Russia has made investments in Turkey’s energy industry and, facing an economic downturn, Erdoğan’s government has been relying on financial flows from Russia — as well as the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia — to muddle through until the Turkish elections. Russian energy giant Rosatom reportedly announced plans last summer to transfer $15 billion to Turkey’s central bank for the construction of the country’s first nuclear reactor; Gazprom also pledged to delay Ankara’s natural gas payments. These steps, coupled with the inflow of Russian tourists and investors, led Russia to emerge as an indispensable partner for the Turkish government ahead of a highly competitive election season.

But that doesn’t mean Ankara’s contribution to Ukraine’s war effort is unimportant. Turkey truly plays both ends of the equation. Early in the war, Turkish drones made a difference on the battlefield and in the defense of Kyiv. Erdoğan has been essential in securing the grain deal that allowed for Ukrainian food supplies to reach world markets. Turkey has also facilitated prisoner swaps and organized two rounds of negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow. If the current stalemate on the battlefield pushes either side toward negotiations later this year, Turkey will once again emerge as an enabler, providing a possible meeting point and important channel to Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Russia continues to be indispensable for Erdoğan, the Turkish economy, and Turkey’s strategic leverage in Syria — and the earthquake will not change that.

But will the earthquake that hit Turkey this month alter that equation? While this might create a desire in Turkey for closer cooperation with Europe and the United States, it is unlikely to change the symbiotic nature of the Turkish government’s relationship with Russia — sealed at the top by the chemistry between Putin and Erdoğan. Russia continues to be indispensable for Erdoğan, the Turkish economy, and Turkey’s strategic leverage in Syria — and the earthquake will not change that.

However, earthquake diplomacy can create a better atmosphere in Ankara’s relations with Washington. Turkey’s estranged neighbors like Greece and Armenia, as well as its NATO allies, were quick to come to its aid in the early phase of search and rescue operations — invalidating the government’s consistent domestic narrative that the West is not Turkey’s friend and even has ambitions to destabilize it. Days before the devastating earthquake, Turkey’s interior minister had accused Washington of organizing terrorist acts in Turkey and called on the U.S. ambassador to “take [his] dirty hands off of Turkey.” Today, European nations and the United States are already making plans to provide reconstruction aid to Turkey’s devastated southern region.

This catastrophic natural disaster could usher in a new honeymoon between Turkey and the West. Ankara will need reconstruction funds for years to come and support from NATO allies and multinational organizations will be essential. Rekindling ties with the trans-Atlantic community may lead Erdoğan’s government to moderate its tone toward NATO allies and even greenlight Sweden and Finland’s NATO accession.

But even if Turkey tilts a little toward the West, it will not become another Poland overnight. The Turkish public and its leadership are united in an intuitive desire for neutrality in the Russia-Ukraine War. Whether under Erdoğan or a future leader, Turkey will be cautious about antagonizing Russia.

As long as the war in Ukraine continues, with no clear winner, Ankara will, for good or bad, stick to its balancing act between the West and Russia.

A strategic alliance with risks

Patricia m. kim.

The last 12 months since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have revealed three striking aspects of China and Russia’s strategic alignment, including the depth of their ties, the limits of their partnership, and the prospects for China to serve as a moderating force to Russia’s violent revisionism.

Since declaring a “no limits” partnership with Moscow in February of last year, Beijing has doubled down on its alignment with Moscow, despite the steep costs to its global reputation and strategic interests, particularly around Taiwan. While claiming to be a neutral party to the conflict and to respect the territorial integrity and sovereignty of all states, Beijing has refused to explicitly condemn Russian President Vladimir Putin’s brutal aggression in Ukraine and expressed sympathy for Moscow’s “legitimate security concerns.”

China-Russia ties have been maintained, if not strengthened, across the diplomatic, economic, and military domains in recent months. High-ranking Chinese officials and their Russian counterparts, including Chinese President Xi Jinping and Putin, have met consistently both in person and virtually. China-Russia trade has boomed, breaking previous records to reach more than $190 billion last year. Quite strikingly, Beijing has also continued its joint military exercises with Moscow. These include bilateral naval exercises in Northeast Asia last spring as U.S. President Joe Biden visited the region and again this past December . This year, China and Russia held their first military exercise together with South Africa off the latter’s coast, which coincided with the anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine.

The last year has made clear that China and Russia’s strategic alignment is not simply a marriage of convenience, but a deep partnership that is likely to endure for the foreseeable future.

The last year has made clear that China and Russia’s strategic alignment is not simply a marriage of convenience, but a deep partnership that is likely to endure for the foreseeable future. To be sure, Beijing’s embrace of Moscow is motivated in part by a hardheaded calculation of the need to stabilize relations with its former rival and militarily formidable neighbor as China braces for long-term competition with the United States. But beyond realpolitik concerns, at the core of Beijing and Moscow’s 21st-century partnership is a shared aim of challenging what these two states perceive to be a Western-dominated global order that enables the United States and its allies to impose their standards, values, and interests on others thanks to international institutions that were created by and continue to favor Western powers.

Although China and Russia seek to jointly challenge the existing global order, the two do not always see eye to eye on the means to achieving these shared objectives given their different material circumstances. China, as the world’s second-largest economy, stands to lose much more than Russia from global instability and economic isolation. Chinese leaders have therefore called for a cease-fire in Ukraine and expressed opposition to the threat or use of nuclear weapons in the conflict. While there are recent reports of Chinese companies selling dual-use items such as commercial drones to Russian entities, Beijing has refrained thus far from providing Putin with direct military assistance. The Biden administration has recently revealed that China may be on the cusp of supplying Russia with lethal weapons, however, and has strongly warned Beijing not to take such steps. According to a breaking report , the Russian military is in negotiations with a Chinese drone manufacturer to mass produce so-called “kamikaze” drones. Whether Beijing allows this or other weapons transactions to move forward with increased global scrutiny remains to be seen. At present, it seems unlikely that China will lean into the conflict to militarily support Moscow to the degree that the United States and its partners have assisted Kyiv.

Barring an extreme situation, such as the use of weapons of mass destruction by Russian forces, Beijing is also unlikely to join in on Western sanctions against Russia or to embrace other measures that may endanger its ties with Moscow. China has a strong self-interest in a stable global environment as it seeks sustained economic growth and prosperity for its people. Consequently, Washington and its allies should continue to lean on Chinese leaders to, at a minimum, refrain from assisting Moscow’s war efforts, and to constructively use their influence to reduce escalatory risks as the war rages on in Europe. Recent diplomatic efforts by Biden, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and others to press Xi to oppose Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling were critical for sending the right signal to Russia. Similar efforts should be made to ensure China cooperates in advocating for a peace agreement that does right by Ukraine, once such a roadmap emerges.

Turn toward Moscow

Suzanne maloney.

In the first year of Russia’s war in Ukraine, Iran has emerged as an unlikely wild card — the only state in the world that is providing offensive weaponry to Moscow to bolster its brutal military campaign. Tehran’s unusual gambit to insert itself into a war in the heart of Europe reflects a decisive shift in its geopolitical orientation and risk tolerance. The conflict in Ukraine has supercharged a strategic partnership between Iran and Russia that began nearly eight years ago in Syria, accelerating Iran’s embrace of authoritarian alternatives to the West and dooming any prospects for the Biden administration’s dogged efforts to resuscitate the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action.

Some observers have described the Tehran-Moscow relationship as an “ alliance of convenience ,” a case of short-term opportunism by a beleaguered regime. After all, Iranians know something about wars of aggression, having endured their own catastrophic conflict with a neighbor, the eight-year “ imposed war ” precipitated by Saddam Hussein’s 1980 invasion. And the legacy of Russian territorial acquisitiveness still looms large in Iran, which ceded the southern Caucasus to imperial Russia in the 19th century and outmaneuvered Soviet attempts to install proxies in northwest Iran after World War II. While their more recent engagement in Syria has been mutually beneficial, Tehran has always been clear-eyed about the divergence in Russian and Iranian interests there.

And yet this inauspicious legacy has not inhibited Iran’s support for the Russian war effort. As the conflict approached its six-month mark, Iranian unmanned aerial vehicles began striking  Ukraine’s critical infrastructure . Reports suggest that Tehran is helping to train Russian soldiers and transfer drone production systems to Russia, and ballistic missile exports to Moscow may be next. In return, Moscow has promised fighter jets, helicopters, and newer air defense systems. Even so-called pragmatic political figures in Iran  endorse the Russian narrative  that its war is purely defensive. As a result, the cagey cooperation established between their militaries in Syria has now blossomed into “ a full-fledged defense partnership ” according to the Biden administration — one that provides  significant military value to both regimes. Iran’s intervention can’t turn the tide of the war in Moscow’s favor, but Iranian drones can impose significant financial costs on Ukraine and terrorize its citizens.

The reciprocal military cooperation reflects only one dimension of the deepening strategic partnership between the two countries. Beyond the battlefield, Tehran and Moscow have exchanged a series of high-level visits and significantly upgraded military, economic, and energy cooperation. The fruits of this new partnership include a mostly speculative commitment of a $40 billion Russian investment in Iran’s oil and gas development and sanctions-proof trade corridors and financial mechanisms .

Today, Iranian leaders are persuaded that their country’s fortunes lie in China and Russia.

The multifaceted relationship between Tehran and Moscow belies any sanguine assertion of opportunism. Rather, Iranian leaders are pursuing longstanding pledges to  pivot east . Iran’s leaders have long anticipated — and exulted in — the decline of U.S. influence on the world stage. That forecast has increasingly been supplemented by a recognition of the shift in the locus of economic, diplomatic, and military power to Asia. While Beijing has not delivered on its epic 2021 $400 billion economic pact  with Tehran, its imports of Iranian crude oil in defiance of U.S. sanctions have proven an essential lifeline for sustaining Iran’s economy and its ruling system. With  Tehran’s accession  to the Shanghai Cooperation Organization last year, the influential Iranian newspaper Kayhan celebrated this newfound convergence among “ the three great powers ” — Russia, China, and Iran.

Tehran’s embrace of Russia and China also reflects its assessment that the West is no longer a desirable or reliable conduit for economic or diplomatic opportunities. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine coincided with hard-fought progress toward resuscitating the nuclear deal with Iran. A decade ago, access to Western finance was a central imperative in persuading Tehran to negotiate over its nuclear program, but today, Iranian leaders are persuaded that their country’s fortunes lie in China and Russia. That calculation suits Russian interests neatly; whatever benefits Moscow might once have perceived in constraining Iran’s nuclear advances have been displaced by the exigencies of the war in Ukraine. As a result, Washington now must be prepared to balance a brewing crisis over Iran’s proximity to nuclear breakout even as it contends with the monumental Russia and China challenges.

Global South

It’s complicated, tanvi madan.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the “Global South” — encompassing a diverse range of countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific — has been seen as “sitting on the fence.” Yet in vote after vote in the UN General Assembly, most of the developing world has criticized Moscow’s actions. The abstentions — particularly India’s in the U.N. Security Council — received greater attention, but even the abstainers list is striking since it includes several traditional Russian partners who declined to support Moscow’s actions despite Russian lobbying. Bhutan’s permanent representative identified the reason , “for small states [the UN principles] serve as the guarantor of our existence … We cannot condone the unilateral redrawing of international borders.” The Kenyan representative asserted that security concerns did not justify “breach[ing]” Ukraine’s territorial integrity or legitimizing “irredentism and expansionism.”

Yet the Kenyan representative also exposed a North-South fault line. He suggested that the powerful — and not just Russian President Vladimir Putin — operated on the basis of one rule for me, but not for thee. Other officials have noted that the West expects the Global South to care about European security but doesn’t reciprocate. More broadly, there is worry that the war — which unleashed intensified inflationary pressures, debt sustainability doubts, and food and energy insecurity as a result of higher grain, fuel, and fertilizer prices — has worsened developing countries’ economic challenges, which COVID had already exacerbated. And they question whether the West will now meet its commitments to help address their development, health security, and climate change-related challenges. In addition, defense trade partners of Russia and Ukraine are facing military supply disruptions.

The response and impact in the Global South have varied. India, for instance, has been more reluctant to criticize Russia by name, but it shares several of these concerns — one reason it seeks to play a bridging role between North and South and East and West. Moreover, the war is making India’s largest military supplier (Russia) more dependent on India’s primary adversary (China). New Delhi is also concerned about China filling the vacuum left in the developing world by a distracted Russia, and how the war has complicated its ties with crucial partners in North America, Europe, and Asia — and might reduce their attention on the Indo-Pacific.

Given these concerns, it should not be surprising that the developing world wants to see the Russia-Ukraine War end.

Developing countries have see the West condemning them for what the United States and Europe often do — protecting their own interests.

Yet many Western observers seem taken aback by the Global South’s reaction. That perhaps reflects that developing countries are overlooked when Washington or Brussels do not perceive them as relevant to their dominant strategic frameworks. Now that developing countries’ views are coming into focus, they find themselves being criticized for not isolating Moscow. Instead of acknowledging their comments in support of the international order, they see the West condemning them for what the United States and Europe often do — protecting their own interests.

This is counterproductive for the West. Rather, it could heed the lessons from President Dwight Eisenhower’s second-term engagement with non-aligned countries: (1) learn to tolerate differences, and (2) honey works better than vinegar. Moreover, instead of taking a with-us-or-against-us attitude or talking about weakening Russia, a more effective approach would keep the focus on Moscow’s violation of Ukraine’s territorial integrity and the need for it to end the war (and thus alleviate the developing world’s pain). Outreach from Russia’s neighbors — e.g., Central and Eastern European countries that don’t have imperial baggage or had pre-1991 ties with the Global South — might resonate more than from major powers who are seen as selectively citing the rules-based order. They can also highlight the imperial nature of Putin’s project, using his own words — not least to counter Moscow’s attempt to portray itself as anti-imperialist and Russia and China’s messaging that NATO, not Russia, is responsible for this war. The United States and its European allies should also more proactively highlight that it is primarily Putin’s war of choice rather than Western sanctions that is causing developing countries’ pain — most countries don’t realize that food, fuel, and fertilizer are largely not sanctioned.

The West has made some efforts along these lines. This has been evident in the Biden administration’s outreach to Africa, and Berlin’s acknowledgment of the need to demonstrate concern about developments beyond the West.

Most significantly, however, the West needs to be visibly responsive in alleviating the pain being felt beyond its borders and addressing these countries’ development concerns — especially vis-à-vis food, energy, health, and climate security. This cannot be a one-time effort. It needs to involve consistent outreach that recognizes the variation in the Global South and these countries’ agency, and tailors engagement accordingly. This will not be easy given bandwidth and other constraints, but it is a necessary task on which Western countries should collaborate with each other and with like-minded partners in the “Global South” as well.

International order

This will be hard (and could get worse), bruce jones.

Russia’s re-invasion of Ukraine does not yet rank among the deadliest wars of the post-Cold War period, but it is surely the most dangerous — with nuclear-armed Russia invading a sovereign country that borders NATO members, signaling wider ambitions, and threatening nuclear escalation. The West has reacted accordingly, pouring weaponry and money into the fight, as well as imposing sanctions on Russia — while staying open to (credible) diplomacy.

A year in, we can take stock of the wider consequences. Politically speaking, Ukraine’s courage and the West’s response have helped stem the leaching of influence away from the democratic powers. China was stunned by the sophistication of America’s operational intelligence in advance of Russia’s invasion, giving Beijing pause for thought in its own regional ambitions. Russia itself is weakened (though not hobbled), and its partnership with China is revealed to have sharp limits. The diplomacy surrounding the war, though, also revealed that the non-Western middle powers (including democracies) have limited stakes in an order whose “rules” do little to help them through crises, and much to frustrate their growth. As guardians at the gate, the United States and the European powers are the objects of much resentment for keeping the southern powers from a seat at the table at the key institutions that shape the economic order — to say nothing about the deep anger at the West’s nationalist and recalcitrant responses in the first phase of the COVID-19 crisis and vaccine distribution. An order that fails to attract rising adherents is at risk.

We must retool our security concepts around the fact of sustained tension and the economic architecture around the need for less dependence on distrusted partners.

The war is also chipping away at the remaining delusions about operating a global system built, over 40 years, on the premise of stable great power relations. We are beginning to understand that we must retool our security concepts around the fact of sustained tension and the economic architecture around the need for less dependence on distrusted partners. The reality we still shy away from is: this is going to be extremely costly and dangerous.

But the alternatives are likely worse. Among them: a naval crisis in the western Pacific that badly disrupts global trade. Despite “teaching moments” in the Suez Canal and Long Beach, we are still sea-blind: our imaginations do not encompass how dependent every major economy (including America’s) is on the flow of goods — industrial, agricultural, energy — by sea. Despite the sophistication of U.S. intelligence on Ukraine, we were caught flat-footed when naval conflict in the Black Sea roiled global food markets, risking famine for tens of millions. A similar, sustained interruption of trade flows through the East and South China Seas would cause a global economic crisis and kneecap the American economy — as well as China’s. Yet scenario exercises around a Taiwan crisis often underestimate the effect of interrupting shipping. Integrating the reality of sea-borne globalization into our strategic planning is vital.

There’s another cost: to our bandwidth for other crises. In Haiti, Yemen, the Sahel, and the Horn of Africa, violence, lawlessness, or famine rises while the West’s attention, deployments, and resources dwindle — to say nothing of the disaster left behind in Afghanistan. The United States and Europe may rise to the occasion in response to the devastating earthquake in Turkey and Syria, but their central role in managing global crises is diminishing.

And then there are the hazards. The conflict in Ukraine is not yet a direct war between the nuclear powers, but it is the most important of several recent instances that have seen the armed personnel of one nuclear power killed by partners of another. In the absence of robust deterrence beyond allied territory and determined to resist new “spheres of influence,” the West is drawn into these indirect but substantial fights over non-allied territory. Escalation dynamics are running ahead of either real deterrent capacity or diplomatic guardrails. A sense of being in the wars before the war is mounting.

This leaves us in urgent need of invigorating our defenses for a geopolitical contest that no longer seems likely to remain “ short of war .” And with the long, hard graft of re-globalizing to decrease the role of China in vulnerable supply chains. Except in niche technologies, the wrong approach to that is expensive friend-shoring; the right approach is adapting our investments and trade rules to better support productive growth in emerging economies.

All of this lies ahead of us even if Russia fails to win — which, in parallel, we must work with Ukraine to guarantee.

Nuclear deterrence

We will all go together when we go, caitlin talmadge.

As Russian President Vladimir Putin’s February 2022 speech announcing the invasion of Ukraine reminded the world, “Russia remains one of the most powerful nuclear states,” and fears of Russian nuclear use have persisted with varying intensity throughout the conflict. Neither the conventional war nor the prolonged nuclear crisis it has sparked appears likely to end any time soon, so modesty is warranted in drawing any grand conclusions. Yet given that data on nuclear crises are (thankfully) rare, the past year offers an unusual opportunity to reflect on the emerging contours of strategic deterrence in an era of resurgent competition. Three lessons stand out.

The Russia-Ukraine War has reinforced how important nuclear weapons are because, by their very existence, they dramatically raise the potential costs of escalation.

First, nuclear weapons still cast a long shadow on world politics. They have not been fired in anger since 1945, but that doesn’t mean that they’ve gone away. The Russia-Ukraine War has reinforced how important they are because, by their very existence, they dramatically raise the potential costs of escalation. Putin has leveraged this fact, repeatedly reminding the world of his country’s arsenal in an effort to dissuade other countries from intervening on Ukraine’s behalf. His nuclear threats have not succeeded in stopping outside aid, but they have induced significant restraint in the extent, nature, and pace of that support. Western military assistance, while vigorous, has been piecemeal , careful , and cautious due to fears of escalation . Absent Russian nuclear weapons, the escalation discussion would sound very different, and the West would worry much less about the dangers of a decisive Russian defeat. Instead, it faces a situation in which it has to balance a desire to support Ukraine against the need to avoid World War III if Putin’s conventional campaign implodes. Of course, Putin has to worry about U.S. nuclear weapons too, which is a major reason that he has avoided attacking NATO supply lines.

Second, nuclear weapons deter invasion — and states without the protection of such weapons are more vulnerable to attack. Even though nuclear weapons have not been employed in this war, the fact that the war occurred at all surely reminds states of the inescapable value of nuclear deterrence in protecting the homeland. No one wants to be the next Ukraine. Ukraine had neither its own nuclear weapons nor an extended deterrence guarantee from a nuclear patron. Facing a nuclear-armed Ukraine, or a Ukraine under NATO’s nuclear umbrella, Russia would have had to worry that a large-scale invasion might prompt a nuclear response. Instead, Russia gambled on invasion, knowing that doing so would never put its own cities at risk. Watching this unfold, Japan , South Korea , Taiwan , and others (perhaps Iran and Saudi Arabia) have all undoubtedly been taking notes. They are likely to infer the renewed importance of acquiring their own nuclear weapons, pursuing nuclear sharing , or obtaining stronger security guarantees from a nuclear power. This is not good news for the global non-proliferation regime.

Third, arms control is a vital tool in a world of nuclear danger. As scary as the nuclear dimensions of the war have been, some of the guardrails in the U.S.-Russian relationship held during the first year of the war, most notably the New START Treaty. Though on  life support , this strategic arms control framework still managed to provide some assurances to each side about the other’s nuclear arsenal at a time of intense distrust. It also enabled the two sides to continue communicating about routine peacetime nuclear activities such as missile  tests , reducing the chance that a test might be mistaken for a launch against the backdrop of hostilities. Just as important have been the less formal methods of risk reduction between the two sides, such as maintaining  military-to-military communications  to avoid miscalculations. The war thus reinforces the role of dialogue as a tool for managing escalation — a mutual interest shared by even the most bitter enemies. Of course, Putin’s recent  announcement  that Russia is suspending its participation in the treaty raises deep concerns about the future; it will be important to discern whether Putin intends to evade the treaty’s force limits or simply to halt inspections permanently. Either way, the episode also reminds us that the United States and China lack an arms control  framework  for managing their interactions akin to what the United States and Russia have had over the past year. Were conflict to break out over Taiwan, for example, even the minimal guardrails that have been present in the current war would be absent.

Future of warfare

Plan for the end of the war, or be sorry, melanie w. sisson.

There has been intense interest over the past year in extracting lessons from the allied West’s attempt to forestall Russian President Vladimir Putin’s appalling aggression in Ukraine, and from the war that has followed. There is examination of whether and how the West could have done more and better to deter Putin from acting on his ego and id, on whether and how modern technologies — drones, precision munitions, and cyber operations — are affecting the course of this war and what they mean for the future of warfare , and on whether and how this conflict will affect the likelihood of others after it, most especially in the contested Taiwan Strait .

All of these very pragmatic areas of inquiry deserve the attention they are getting. So too, however, should the war in Ukraine reinforce the fact — not the idea, but the fact — that war is inherently unpredictable. It should be sobering not just that Putin’s predictions were so very wrong , but that so too were those of the West — despite the most modern and sophisticated intelligence organizations in the world, despite the collective expertise of scholars and analysts who have devoted their careers to studying Putin and warfare, and despite the observable, ongoing consequences of the West’s own poor predictions in Iraq and Afghanistan.

NATO similarly has surprised itself with the extent of its willingness to arm Ukrainian fighters. Hard lines drawn in February 2022 for fear of escalation have softened over the course of the conflict. Now, one year in, the unthinkable has become the doable with the promised delivery to Ukraine of German Leopard and U.S. M1 Abrams tanks. Policymakers explain this evolution as a responsiveness to conditions on the ground , to the wisdom of pressing advantages as they arise. When viewed through the unsentimental lens of history, however, this progression usually is called mission creep, the pejorative term used to describe an incrementalism that either makes wars longer and bloodier or that puts the conflict on a path toward expansion and escalation.

It should be sobering not just that Putin’s predictions were so very wrong, but that so too were those of the West.

The likelihood of mission creep correlates with the extent to which policymakers enter their nation into war — as a direct combatant or as a material supporter thereof — without a clear concept of the peace they are seeking to achieve, or with only idealized visions of how that peace will come about. The latter characterizes the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which succeeded in the breaking but failed in the building, and there is reason to be concerned that the former characterizes the alliance’s engagement in Ukraine today.

Economically, it is unclear for how long or until what point the alliance intends to use sanctions, export controls, financial restrictions, and other measures to punish Russia. Militarily, the White House is taking great care not to assert that the goal is either Ukrainian victory or Russian defeat, much less to describe what either of those terms would mean in practice. Instead, it is declaring an intent to ensure that Ukraine is in the “ strongest possible position ” to defend itself on the battlefield so that it can be “ in the best possible position at the negotiating table ” when that time comes. This framing makes it difficult not to worry that policymakers will be tempted to use Ukrainian battle victories as predictors of future success, as indicators of irreversible progress toward having that strong hand at the negotiating table, and therefore as justification for continuing to redraw the lines of what military armaments are, and are not, out of bounds.

Allowing events to alleviate the pressure on policymakers to make hard decisions about goals and objectives and to reduce NATO vigilance about escalation can have dangerous effects in a war with a cynical, sadistic, nuclear-armed adversary. Perhaps the most unpleasant of all lessons to be learned from the first year of this terrible war, then, is that strategies led by predictions about how the fighting will go rather than by a vision of how it should end run the risk of failing either very slowly, or in very dangerous ways.

Parallels with WWI

Nothing quiet on the eastern front, michael e. o’hanlon.

As I reflect on the Ukraine war one year in, the many parallels with World War I haunt me.

The similarities, or at least strong echoes, begin with the causes of conflict. Old-fashioned imperial ambitions and rivalries were key then, and in the case of Moscow, they have been important here too.

But it is in the war’s actual combat dynamics where the World War I analogy may apply best, even if of course they are not exact. At the tactical level, the heavy use of artillery constitutes an obvious parallel, as does the widespread use of trenches to protect against it. In this conflict, as in World War I, aircraft have been important but not too important; the same is true of tanks so far. Offensives have been possible in both wars; for example, on the Western Front, the front lines moved considerably in both 1914 and 1918. But such offensives tend to be difficult, costly in casualties, and inconclusive in strategic effect. Where weapons have improved, countermeasures often partially cancel out their advanced characteristics. For example, much Russian artillery today is still unguided, as in World War I, but even those weapons that are more precise can often be partly countered through jamming, defensive measures like deeper trenches, dispersal of combat forces, and other responses.

I fear there could be another echo of World War I in today’s conflict — the distinct possibility that we could be in for a long war. Few expected as much, of course, in the summer of 1914, when leaders widely expected that “the boys will be home before the leaves fall” or at least before Christmas. But after September 1914’s so-called “Miracle on the Marne,” in which the Entente Powers stymied Germany’s attempt at Paris, and subsequently, the inconclusive “race to the sea” around Ypres, Belgium, stalemate settled in. By year’s end, there was a trench line nearly 500 miles long from the English Channel to the Swiss Alps, and the parties settled in for a protracted struggle. Each winter, industry would churn out prodigious amounts of weaponry as generals would plot new offensives for the coming spring and summer. But until 1918 at least, these efforts proved generally futile. Front lines barely moved for about three years.

If proposed terms of peace are too lenient, Russia may be able to attack again after months or a few years of preparation. Alternatively, if they are too tough, Russia may wind up destitute, angry, and vengeful.

Admittedly, that was the Western Front in World War I. The Eastern Front, including today’s Ukraine, was usually more fluid. Also, today’s fight features precision weaponry, drones, and exquisite intelligence that the parties to World War I did not possess. The parallels, therefore, are far from absolute. Still, many aspects of the current fight have an uncanny precedent in World War I. It seems distinctly possible that the durations of the two wars could wind up similar as well — we will have to see — though this war could be shorter or, heaven forbid, even longer. That will call for continued Western resolve in helping Ukraine over the long haul.

Avoiding a forever war in Ukraine may also hinge on a smart strategy for eventual negotiations — even if now is not yet the time. This is where the echoes of World War I are particularly poignant. The Versailles peace wound up establishing the predicate for World War II more than producing stability; it is for that reason that historian Margaret MacMillan entitled her history of the conflict The War that Ended Peace.

The lessons for today are twofold. If proposed terms of peace are too lenient, or if there is simply a cease-fire but no durable agreement on ending the conflict, Russia may be able to attack again after months or a few years of preparation. Alternatively, if they are too tough, Russia may wind up destitute, angry, and vengeful. Right now, the latter concerns seem beside the point, given Russian President Vladimir Putin’s horrendous behavior and his disinterest in talks. But that could change. We need to be ready if it does — so that we can wind up this war better than nations a century ago were willing and able to stop World War I.

All m easures short of war

David wessel.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has taught us a lot — about Russia’s revanchism, the strength of the NATO alliance, and the nature of warfare in the early 21st century. It has reminded us of the horrors of war, especially since this time we are seeing it in almost real time on our smartphones. This is not primarily an economic event, but we have learned a few economic lessons, some of which challenge what was conventional wisdom just a year ago.

The war has been devastating for Ukraine, its people, and its economy, but the economy has done better than many predicted.

First, the Ukrainian economy is impressively resilient. Russia’s cruel assault on Ukrainian infrastructure, industry, and neighborhoods has taken an enormous human toll and devastated the Ukrainian economy. Ukraine’s GDP shrank by 30% in 2022 . (That’s Great Depression territory.) The Kyiv School of Economics estimates that as of November 2022 $136 billion worth of buildings and infrastructure had been destroyed, a sum equal to about two-thirds of pre-invasion GDP. Photos and videos remind me of the pictures of Berlin, Dresden, Kassel, and other German cities at the end of World War II. But beyond that horror, Ukrainians have proved remarkably resilient amid the largest military aggression in Europe since World War II. The government is functioning, even from bunkers . Pensions are being paid. The banking system, strengthened before the invasion, is working. The central bank is setting up stations with backup electricity for Ukrainians to charge phones and tap ATMs when there are blackouts — and I’m told even in Russian-occupied territory, Ukrainians can tap their hryvnia bank accounts for transactions on their phones. Of course, the war has been devastating for Ukraine, its people, and its economy, but the economy has done better than many predicted.

Second, unprecedented Western sanctions have not debilitated Russia’s economy. We have learned that the United States and its allies can and will impose stiff economic sanctions, such as freezing what Russia says is about half of its more than $600 billion in foreign-currency reserves. Restricting Russia’s imports of high-tech (and not-so-high-tech) goods is harming its economy. Russian automakers, for example, were forced to produce cars without airbags and anti-lock braking-system sensors, an industry standard. Because of U.S. and European sanctions, Russia is forced to sell its oil at a deep discount to India and China. But Russia’s economy did not melt down. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) says Russia’s 2022 economic contraction was smaller than IMF economists anticipated , and the economy will grow a bit this year, not shrink as the IMF predicted in its October forecast. Since Russia continues to run a significant current-account surplus — it is importing less and the price of its primary export, oil, is up — it has weathered the freezing of reserves and other financial sanctions. The worst may be yet to come, though: Russia’s government budget deficit is growing as military spending soars and sanctions bite. There has been a significant loss of human capital (due to both death and emigration), and the inability to import key parts and technology points to slower productivity growth in the future. Still, economic sanctions do not seem to have influenced Russian President Vladimir Putin’s aggressiveness on the battlefield.

Third, Russia is an unreliable energy supplier. A year ago, the notion that Europe could wean itself off Russian energy imports seemed far-fetched. No longer. When this war ends — and it will someday — Russia will find that Europe is no longer a lucrative market for its natural gas. Germany is acquiring floating terminals so it can import liquified natural gas from the United States and Qatar — and will add capacity over the next few years. It will be a long time — if ever — before Europe looks to Russia to satisfy its appetite for petroleum and natural gas. Russia probably will find other markets eventually, though that is easier for petroleum (much of which travels by ships) than for natural gas (which, for Russia, requires pipelines). However, for Russia, transporting to these markets will be costlier than selling to Europe and the other buyers (e.g., China and India) probably will have more bargaining power.

Fourth, all this slowed the move to wean the world off fossil fuels. Despite the rising angst about climate change and the popularity of renewable energy, the spike in energy prices and the urgent need to replace Russian gas in Europe has led to calls to increase the production of fossil fuels outside of Russia. One energy expert quipped the other day that the major legacy of the Greens in the German coalition government may be to extend the life of coal in the country’s energy mix. And in the United States, one sign of the changing attitude toward oil and natural gas production came at S&P Global’s annual CERAWeek conference. At the March 2021 conference, newly confirmed Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm’s rhetoric was all about investing in clean energy and weaning the nation off of fossil fuels to combat climate change. At CERAWeek 2022, her message was different: “We need more supply. Right now, we need oil and gas production to rise to meet current demand.”

Unpleasant trade-offs

Samantha gross.

In the energy policy world, we refer to the challenge of providing sustainable, secure, and affordable energy as the “energy trilemma.” Policy focus in recent years has been on the sustainable part of the equation, given the imperative of preventing the worst impacts of climate change. However, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reminded us that the secure and affordable parts of the equation are also critical.

The war in Ukraine is disrupting energy markets all over the world, as both Russia and the West attempt to use energy markets and energy interdependence to further their goals. The European Union, G-7 countries, and Australia have sanctioned Russian crude oil and oil products , an unprecedented action against one of the world’s largest oil exporters, in an attempt to reduce an important source of funding for Russia’s war machine. Russian oil and oil products can avoid the sanctions if they are sold below specified prices. The effectiveness of “price caps,” as the mechanism is called, is uncertain so far.

But unquestionably, the European natural gas market has been hardest hit by the energy impacts of the war. Russia is weaponizing its gas supply to try to soften European support for Ukraine. In 2021, Russia supplied nearly 40% of Europe’s total natural gas consumption, imported mostly through pipelines. Slowdowns in gas deliveries started before the war, in the fall of 2021, when the state-owned Russian gas provider Gazprom did not fill gas storage facilities it owned or controlled in Europe in advance of the winter. Since that time, gas flows have slowed to a trickle. Little gas was flowing through the Nord Stream pipeline from Russia to Germany in September 2022, when an act of sabotage damaged both that pipeline and its completed, but not operational, twin, Nord Stream 2. The culprit is not yet known.

Europe has not wavered in its support for Ukraine, but greatly reduced natural gas supply has brought hardship to European governments and citizens. European gas prices reached their highest level ever in August 2022 . Heading into the winter, Europeans were concerned not just about high prices, but about actual shortages, potentially requiring shutdowns of gas-reliant industries. In response, the European Union established a plan for member states to reduce their gas demand 15% by March 2023 and prioritized sectors to receive gas in case of shortage. Subsidies are also blunting the impact on gas consumers of tight supply and high prices, but at great expense to EU governments. Subsidies and other policies to cope with the natural gas crisis cost 1.7% of GDP in Germany, 2.3% in Spain, 2.8% in Italy, and 3.7% in Greece.

In addition to financial impacts, reduced natural gas supply required some difficult decisions by the EU and member governments. For example, Germany extended the lives of its last three nuclear power plants by several months, until April 2023. The EU is supporting the development of natural gas supply in the Eastern Mediterranean and North Africa and liquified natural gas (LNG) receiving facilities on the continent. Coal consumption in Europe increased in each of the last two years as a substitute for natural gas in power generation (and to make up for shortfalls in French nuclear power generation). Each of these decisions would have been nearly unthinkable before the crisis.

Although Europe has managed to dodge an energy crisis, more challenges lie ahead, and not just because next winter might be colder.

Despite fears of idled factories and cold homes, Europe is surviving the winter quite well, and natural gas prices are now below their prewar level . LNG has been a savior for Europe, although there is not enough LNG in the world to make up for the loss of Russian pipeline gas. Europe’s LNG imports increased by 65% in 2022 over their 2021 volume, with the United States as the largest supplier . Europe managed to enter the winter heating season, when natural gas demand is highest, with more than 90% of its reserve storage capacity filled . Reduced gas demand has been the other key factor, due to warm weather and conservation efforts and fuel switching by gas consumers. If trends continue, European gas storage could exit the winter approximately half full .

Although Europe has managed — with a lot of money, some gas conservation efforts, and more than a little good luck — to dodge an energy crisis, more challenges lie ahead, and not just because next winter might be colder. China’s economy is recovering quickly from its COVID-19 woes and is likely to increase its demand for energy, including LNG. No new LNG facilities are coming online in 2023 , meaning that the global market is expected to be tight, and expensive. Europe is likely to face very high prices yet again, having already spent significant resources to get through the first round. The transition to a low-carbon energy system is the long-term answer to fossil fuel crises but cannot occur overnight. In the meantime, Europe must continue its efforts to conserve natural gas, find new sources of supply, and accelerate its energy transition.

The human cost

Sophie Roehse and Kemal Kirişci

One year of Russia’s war in Ukraine has triggered a displacement crisis of staggering speed and scale. Almost 40% of Ukraine’s prewar population has been driven out of its homes since the invasion. With no end to the conflict in sight, the future of displaced Ukrainians remains highly uncertain. For Ukraine, the return of refugees from abroad and effective support of internally displaced persons (IDPs) will determine the country’s ability to reestablish itself as an independent state, prosper, and deter future attacks on its territorial integrity and sovereignty.

Putin’s strategy of terror and displacement. Russia has waged a ruthless campaign of destruction in Ukraine. The victims are Ukrainian civilians, who have been terrorized by widespread bombing campaigns, targeted airstrikes on energy and social infrastructure, and regional massacres in Russian-controlled territories. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s tactics have prompted millions to leave the war-torn country, with over 8 million Ukrainian refugees having fled to Europe and hundreds of thousands crossing the Atlantic Ocean to seek refuge in the United States and Canada . An additional estimated 5.4 million Ukrainians are currently displaced within Ukraine, among whom almost 60% have lived outside their habitual residences for six months or longer.

Forced relocations. An ominous aspect of the displacement crisis is the fate of the almost 3 million Ukrainian refugees reported to have fled to Russia . Though some Ukrainians — especially residents of eastern Ukraine — may reasonably have gone voluntarily to escape active fighting , forced deportations of Ukrainian civilians to Russia and Russian-occupied territories have raised serious international concern. At crossing points bordering Russian-controlled areas, investigations have uncovered a “ filtration process ” suspected to ensure obedience with Kremlin-doctrine and deny entry of individuals deemed ideologically threatening . Those who fail screening are reportedly detained in “ filtration camps ,” which have been discovered across occupied and illegally annexed territories and described as a new form of Russian mass incarceration . Hundreds of thousands of children have been among these involuntary removals, including orphans relocated with adoptive Russian families and children separated from their parents.

Refugees’ decisions about whether to return or not will have tremendous demographic consequences for Ukraine, shaping its ability to recover economically, repair its social fabric, and defend its national security.

Domestic resilience and international political will are central to Ukraine’s survival. Using terror and the displacement of civilians as a war tactic is not new. One needs to look no further than Syria , where the Assad regime and Russia used forced mass migration as a way of applying international political pressure. In Ukraine, however, Putin’s plan to coerce Ukraine’s government and civil society into negotiations and create a fait accompli with annexed territories has not succeeded. The Zelenskyy government and the Ukrainian people have proven outstandingly courageous and resilient in defending Ukrainian independence. Beyond the country’s borders, societies across the European Union and in the United States have risen to the challenge of arriving Ukrainian refugees — contrary to expectations — with solidarity and temporary protection. When safe conditions are met, however, most Ukrainians abroad hope to return home. Yet the longer the conflict endures, the deeper their roots in host communities will grow. Refugees’ decisions about whether to return or not will have tremendous demographic consequences for Ukraine, shaping its ability to recover economically, repair its social fabric, and defend its national security. Similarly, ensuring the return of those internally displaced through safe transit routes as well as supporting them with housing and economic assistance will be crucial in rebuilding communities from the local level up. In reconstruction planning, Ukraine’s supporters should start to think now about strategies for incorporating refugees and IDPs.

As for Russia, its forced relocation of Ukrainian civilians constitutes an outright violation of international humanitarian laws . The laws of war articulated in the four Geneva Conventions aim to protect civilian life and minimize harm to innocent civilians in conflict situations, which Putin’s troops have violated repeatedly. Forcibly deporting people as a means of erasing Ukrainian national identity is increasingly resembling the ethnic cleansing experienced during the war in Yugoslavia, when displacement was last weaponized in Europe. Some have even argued that Russia’s actions may constitute genocide . Necessarily, the Kremlin regime and its perpetrators on the battlefield and in the state bureaucracy will have to face international legal accountability for their offenses. It is the right thing to do; but more fundamentally, it is crucial to ensure compliance with the international laws of war, to confirm respect for the inviolability of territorial integrity and national sovereignty, and to protect human life beyond Ukraine.

About the Authors

Director – center on the united states and europe, senior fellow – foreign policy, center on the united states and europe, nonresident senior fellow – foreign policy, center on the united states and europe, strobe talbott center for security, strategy, and technology, arms control and non-proliferation initiative, visiting fellow – foreign policy, center on the united states and europe, visiting fellow – foreign policy, center on the united states and europe, the turkey project, david m. rubenstein fellow – foreign policy, center for east asia policy studies, john l. thornton china center, vice president and director – foreign policy, director – the india project, director – project on international order and strategy, nonresident senior fellow – foreign policy, strobe talbott center for security, strategy, and technology, fellow – foreign policy, strobe talbott center for security, strategy, and technology, director of research – foreign policy, director – the hutchins center on fiscal and monetary policy, director – energy security and climate initiative, sophie roehse, research assistant – foreign policy, center on the united states and europe, kemal kirişci, nonresident senior fellow – foreign policy, center on the united states and europe, the turkey project, for more….

The Russia-Ukraine War: Year two and strategic consequences

Ukraine Index

The Kremlin’s grand delusions

Meeting the Russia challenge: Lessons from the foreign policy transition from Bush to Obama

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Harriman Institute Statement

The Harriman Institute strongly condemns the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This attack on the Ukrainian people and on Ukrainian sovereignty violates the principles of international law and has inflicted deplorable suffering and instability across the region. In these tragic times, we will continue to inform and educate, particularly in an atmosphere of authoritarianism and amplified disinformation, as articulated by Columbia University’s President Lee Bollinger. We stand with all who are so terribly affected by this crisis. Please check back as we continue to announce initiatives and projects to support people and scholars of Ukraine. Suggestions for where to donate can be found at Razom for Ukraine .

Fellowships

In recognition of the need for urgent support of Ukraine’s intellectual community in the face of Russia’s war of aggression, the Harriman Institute, along with partner organizations, has created two new fellowship programs.

Non-residential Fellowships

Recognizing the need for ongoing support of Ukraine’s intellectual community in the face of Russia’s war of aggression, the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM Vienna), the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University (HURI), and the Harriman Institute at Columbia University are partnering to offer non-residential fellowships for Ukrainian scholars in the humanities and social sciences.

We have jointly awarded 35 fellowships , which provide a one-time stipend of 5000 EUR to support recipients’ intellectual activities and carry a 5-month affiliation with the IWM from February-June 2023.

Residencies in Paris

The Harriman Institute, the  Institute for Ideas and Imagination , and  Global Centers | Paris , with a gift from the Ukrainian Studies Fund , sponsored four 12-month residencies for Ukrainian writers, journalists, and creative artists for the 2022-23 academic year. Meet the fellows >

Residency in Vienna

The Harriman Institute and the Austrian Society for Literature, in partnership with the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria, are sponsoring a six-month residency for a displaced Ukrainian writer from January 1, 2024 to June 30, 2024. Olesya Yaremchuk , a freelance journalist and writer based in Lviv, has been named the Spring 2024 Harriman Resident

Faculty, Students, and Alumni Speak Out About

Kimberly Marten on the Wagner Group One Year After the Mutiny

Tanya Domi Interviewed About Ukraine Peace Summit

Tanya Domi Interviewed on TVP World About Russia’s Use of Torture as War Tactics

Elise Giuliano Gives Two Talks on the War in Ukraine

Voices of Ukraine Season 2, Episode 7: To See Beauty Again: Anna Stavychenko on the Importance of Promoting Ukrainian Culture

Doria Chomiak Chosen for Time100Health’s Top 100

Postdoc Spotlight: Emma Mateo

Tanya Domi on Russian Influence in the Balkans in The Geopost

Tanya Domi Publishes Op-Ed on Wartime Sexual Violence

2024 Issue of Harriman Magazine

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Mark Andryczyk

Associate Research Scholar, Ukrainian Studies Program

Jason Bordoff

Professor of Professional Practice in International and Public Affairs and Director of the Center on Global Energy Policy

Peter Clement

Adjunct Senior Research Scholar in the Arnold A. Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies

Alexander A. Cooley

Claire Tow Professor of Political Science & Vice Provost for Research, Libraries and Academic Centers, Barnard College

CBS Professor Emerita of Professional Practice in International Journalism; Editor-in-Chief, Harriman Magazine

Leonard Kaye Assistant Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature, Dept. of Slavic Languages

Timothy M. Frye

Marshall D. Shulman Professor of Post-Soviet Foreign Policy

Keith Gessen

George T. Delacorte Assistant Professor of Magazine Journalism

Elise Giuliano

Senior Lecturer in Political Science; Director of the MARS-REERS Program; Director of the Program on U.S.-Russia Relations

Valentina Izmirlieva

Director, Harriman Institute; Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures

Thomas Kent

Adjunct Associate Professor of International and Public Affairs

Rebecca Kobrin

Russell and Bettina Knapp Associate Professor of American Jewish History; Co-Director, Institute for Israel and Jewish Studies

Valerii Kuchynskyi

Adjunct Professor of International Relations

Volodymyr Kulyk

Visiting Professor of Political Science

Robert Legvold

Marshall D. Shulman Professor Emeritus, Department of Political Science

Lawrence Markowitz

Visiting Associate Professor of International and Public Affairs

Kimberly Marten

Professor of Political Science, Barnard College

Emma C. Mateo

Petro Jacyk Postdoctoral Research Scholar in Ukrainian Studies, Lecturer in Sociology

Alexander Motyl

Adjunct Professor, Department of History

Matthew Murray

Adjunct Professor of International and Public Affairs

Ukrainian History & Culture

Writers Respond to the War in Ukraine. Essays by Yevgenia Belorusets, Georgi Gospodinov, Maria Stepanova.

We’ll Not Die in Paris & Other Poems by Natalka Bilotserkivets (Harriman Resident at the Institute for Ideas & Imagination (Paris)

In Isolation: Dispatches from Occupied Donbas by Stanislav Aseyev (HURI Books, 2022)

Mondegreen: Songs about Death and Love by Volodymyr Rafaienko (HURI Books, 2022)

Apricots of Donbas by Lyuba Yakimchuk (Lost Horse Press, 2021)

The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine by Serhii Plokhy (Basic Books, 2021)

The Orphanage – A Novel Set in the Donbas War by Serhiy Zhadan (Yale University Press, 2021)

The Burden of the Past: History, Memory, and Identity in Contemporary Ukraine by Malgorzata Glowacka-Grajper and Anna Wylegała (Indiana University Press, 2020)

Imperial Urbanism in the Borderlands: Kyiv, 1800-1905 by Serhiy Bilenky (University of Toronto Press, 2019)

Ukraine: A Book of Essays by Intellectuals in English (Ukraine World, 2019)

Ukraine and Russian: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War by Paul J. D’Anieri (Cambridge University Press, 2019)

The Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine: An Anatomy of the Holodomor by Stanislaw Kulchytsky (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2018)

My Final Territory: Selected Essays by Yuri Andrukhovych (University of Toronto Press, 2018)

Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine by Anna Applebaum (Penguin Random House, 2018)

Ukraine and Europe , edited by Giovanna Brogi Bercof, Marko Pavlyshyn, Serhii Plokhy (University of Toronto Press, 2017)

The White Chalk of Days: The Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series Anthology compiled and edited by Mark Andryczyk (Academic Studies Press, 2017)

Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine edited by Oksana Maksymchuk & Max Rosochinsky (Academic Studies Press, 2017)

Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder (Basic Books, 2010)

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Putin’s New Story About the War in Ukraine

How russian propaganda went from “denazification” to fighting the west, by mikhail zygar.

Since invading Ukraine in February 2022, Russia has changed the story it tells itself about the war. In the beginning, Russian President Vladimir Putin explained to the Russian public and the world that he considered an invasion of Ukraine justified because there was a need to “denazify” the country. Putin claimed that a Nazi junta had seized power in Kyiv and was terrorizing the people, especially those who spoke Russian. To rescue Ukraine, Putin argued, Russian troops had once again been dispatched to save the world from Nazis.

But today you don’t hear much talk about Nazis. After the Russian military suffered a series of defeats at the outset of the war, the Kremlin quickly adjusted its propaganda. It was no longer helpful to assert that Moscow was fighting Ukrainian Nazis after the Russian military failed to take Kyiv. Being defeated by Ukrainians was too humiliating for Putin’s propagandists . Therefore, Russia changed the enemy it was fighting: the Kremlin began to say that Russia was at war with NATO and even the United States. In this telling, the war in Ukraine was a proxy war, and the Ukrainians were in the hands of “overseas puppet masters.” For Russians, this was a familiar story, reawakening the Cold War mindset of us versus them.

As the message has changed, so has the audience. Putin is no longer speaking only to his people, trying to justify an ill-conceived war. Today, he is competing with the West for allies across the developing world, where his allegations of Western hypocrisy are resonating. And in recent weeks, Putin has found new material to exploit: the United States’ unconditional support for Israel in its war in the Gaza Strip.

DENAZIFICATION

When Putin announced his goal of denazifying Ukraine , it was not the first time he and his propagandists had described Ukrainian nationalists as fascists. In 2014, when a popular uprising forced Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych from office, Putin and his supporters on Russian television claimed that there had been an armed coup in Kyiv, launched by radical nationalists. It was a laughable falsehood: if an anti-constitutional junta had seized power, why did the new government in Ukraine hold democratic elections in 2019, and how could the incumbent, President Petro Poroshenko, lose if he was an autocratic leader? And if the government in Kyiv was made up of Nazis, why did it have a president who was Jewish, Volodymyr Zelensky? But Putin doesn’t let facts get in the way of a good story.

In 2022, in the early months of the war, denouncing the Ukrainian “Nazis” was mandatory for Russian officials and news anchors. Vladimir Solovyov, one of the most odious Russian propagandists, established a tradition: every day in his Telegram channel, he would add “Denazification is inevitable!” as the final sentence for the Russian army’s daily report about the casualties on the frontlines.

But it soon became clear that the Russian public wasn’t buying this message. On June 16, 2022, at a pro-war rally organized by the authorities of Dalnegorsk, a small provincial town in the far east, the mayor, Alexandr Terebilov, tried to quote Putin, but stumbled three times on the Russian word for “denazification,” at one point unintentionally calling for the “denazification of Russia.” As the crowd broke into laughter, he corrected himself, but it was too late: the video went viral online. The furious mayor tried to punish the journalist who uploaded the video by sending him to the army, but the journalist left the city before he could be caught.

After this scandal, the Kremlin conducted a special study that revealed that the majority of Russians neither understood the term “denazification” nor believed that it applied to Ukraine. The study revealed that post-Soviet society is very pragmatic, if not cynical. The Russian public does not trust that Putin is going to save anyone, including Ukrainians. Propagandists soon stopped using the word “denazification.” By the fall of 2022, Solovyov was no longer posting his daily slogan.

WHATABOUTISM

Moscow’s early setbacks in the war convinced Russian propagandists that a bigger, more credible enemy was needed to justify the battlefield losses. Rather than fighting only the Ukrainians, Russia recast the conflict as a proxy war with NATO and the United States. Russia also stopped talking about rescuing Ukrainians from fascists. The tone of the propaganda hardened: Ukrainians were now traitors who therefore deserved punishment, not compassion. This message built on a traditional myth from Russian imperial history, in which Ukrainians repeatedly betrayed Russia by conspiring with Russia’s enemies and fighting for independence. In April 2022, Timofey Sergeytsev, a former Russian political adviser in Ukraine, now living in Moscow, published an article calling for “de-Ukrainization.” The very identity Ukrainian, in his opinion, should no longer exist.

The main target of Russian propaganda was no longer Ukraine, however, but the West, a larger opponent for the Russian public to rally against. In July 2022, Dmitry Medvedev, the former Russian president and prime minister, who had once been considered pro-Western and liberal, wrote a piece emblematic of the new narrative. Putin’s goals in Ukraine would be achieved, he contended, but the war had already solved a different problem: Russia was once again being taken seriously—“like the Soviet Union used to be.” He likened the situation to a child facing neighborhood bullies. “If you chickened out and ran away home, you are no one and you will not be invited anywhere else,” Medvedev wrote. “But if you hit first, then the chances of defending your position are significantly higher. That is why it is so important that the country is respected and taken into account.”

It was a revealing story, because Medvedev, who was raised in a professorial family in Leningrad, likely did not fight with anyone in the neighborhood as a child. But Putin, who grew up in much humbler circumstances in the same city, definitely did. The gangster values he learned in childhood—hit first or become the victim—had seeped into official speech and had become popular among Russians. This new explanation of the war in Ukraine also appealed to nostalgia for the Soviet Union, which is widespread among the older generation.

Putin doesn’t let facts get in the way of a good story.

Today, for the first time since the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russian authorities openly say that they are fighting the United States . But there is a fundamental difference between then and now. During the Soviet years, Russian propaganda insisted that the Soviet Union was fighting for world peace and that the Americans were warmongers. Soviet propagandists claimed that their country was just and prosperous, whereas the West was guilty of apartheid, racism, and human rights violations. Today, the propaganda in Russia is completely different: no one pretends that one side is any better than the other.

The core of Russian propaganda is now “whataboutism”—responding to any criticism by pointing to the supposed malice of the other side—and no one does it better than Margarita Simonyan, editor in chief of the television channel RT. She likes to tell the story of when she was 16 years old and spent a year as an exchange student at a school in New Hampshire, living with an American family. This experience made her skeptical of the United States and she learned to dislike American values, although she never elaborates on what exactly happened during her year abroad that made her think this way. She can spend hours on television making the case that it is not only in Russia where there is no freedom of speech, fair elections, or a just judicial system. According to her, these democratic values and institutions do not exist anywhere in the world. In her mind, Western politicians know how to deceive their population, but in Russia no one is pretending.

Today, the message being spread by Russian propagandists is that any superpower has the right to violence. For decades, only Americans had the opportunity to start wars and invade other countries. Putin’s allies ask, why shouldn’t that right extend to Russia? If the Americans could invade Iraq in 2003, why can’t Russia invade Ukraine? This, they argue, is the privilege of being a superpower.

Surprisingly, this second strain of propaganda about Ukraine has turned out to be much more convincing than the original one, which explains why it is still the dominant message today. Many Russians prefer to believe that it was not Russia that attacked Ukraine but the United States that provoked the conflict and dragged both sides into it.

ANTICOLONIALISM

Russian whataboutism has gained traction not only at home but also across the world. For many countries outside of the West, the war in Ukraine is not a top priority, and the idea that it is a struggle against American hegemony offers extra permission to stay disengaged. For many in the global South , the fact that Putin destroyed the United States’ monopoly on violence makes him, if not a hero, then at least a situational ally.

During last year’s presidential campaign in Brazil, perhaps the only common point of view between the two main candidates—Jair Bolsonaro and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva—was their appreciation for Putin. In February 2022, with Russian troops massing on Ukraine’s borders, Bolsonaro traveled to Moscow and said Brazil was in “solidarity” with Russia. And Lula, during his campaign, said about Zelensky : “This guy is as responsible as Putin for the war.” In China, India, Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia, and even some European countries, people see Putin as a strong leader and a fighter against American influence.

For many years, Putin avoided claiming the mantle of global anti-Americanism, because he was still looking to make deals with the West. But he still maintained warm relations with various notorious anti-Americanists, such as Venezuela’s Hugo Chávez and Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi. Today, Putin eagerly plays this role. In an article published in September, Nikolai Patrushev, a top adviser to Putin, called Westerners “parasites.” “The Western-centric colonial world order,” he argued, is “undergoing a final breakdown.” And Russia now sees itself “in a large-scale battle for minds and hearts” with the United States.

The core of Russian propaganda is now “whataboutism.”

Putin himself has seized on this view. On October 6, he spoke for almost four hours at the Valdai Forum, a Moscow-based think tank. Putin’s speech focused not on Ukraine per se but on the broader confrontation with the West. Reaching back into history, he promised that “the era of colonial rule will not return.” In an interview that same month with Chinese state television, Putin returned to the theme. “Colonial countries have always said that they bring enlightenment to their colonies, that they are civilized people and bring the benefits of civilization to other peoples, who are considered second-class people,” he said. “Today’s political elite, say in the United States, speaks of its exclusivity. This is a continuation of this colonial thinking. Our approach is completely different.”

The appeal to anticolonialism is rich, given Russia’s own colonial history. Siberia, for example, was colonized by Russian Cossacks long before western European powers colonized Africa and Asia. Putin prefers to leave out this inconvenient truth, however, arguing that all Russian territories have always joined “Mother Russia” voluntarily.

PUTIN THE HUMANIST

The new crisis in the Middle East has strengthened the Kremlin’s propaganda. Putin turned 71 on October 7, and the outbreak of war in the Middle East was a gift for him in every sense. For one thing, the war in Ukraine will likely disappear from the front pages of international media, and it will look local when compared to Israel’s war in Gaza , which is still at risk of escalating to a regional war. For another, the conflict in the Middle East provides Putin a unique opportunity to demonstrate his leadership in the anti-American camp. He doesn’t even need to support Hamas openly; he just needs to repeat at every opportunity that the Americans are to blame for everything.

In the first days after Hamas’s attack against Israel, the Russian propaganda machine changed its tone. Solovyov, a TV presenter from the state TV channel Russia 1, is Jewish. Several years ago, he said in an interview with Israeli media that if a war broke out in Israel, he would fly to the country to defend his historical homeland. Today, Solovyov can be heard on television condemning Israel’s policies. Meanwhile, Simonyan, who usually reacts on RT with caustic ridicule to information about civilian victims of Russian bombardment in Ukraine, is reacting with horror to similar events in Gaza. On October 17, after an explosion rocked the al-Ahli Arab Hospital in Gaza City, she posted her thoughts to her Telegram channel: “I don’t even know what to write about a world in which it is still acceptable (and accepted) such executions as the one that happened in Gaza. Every day, it becomes more and more unbearable to be a contemporary of this world.”

For a long time, Putin himself held Israel in high esteem and enjoyed a close relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The two leaders have similar worldviews and similar political methods: neither of them cares much about democracy. That no longer matters. Putin, despite his personal feelings toward Netanyahu, has criticized Israeli airstrikes on civilian targets and has voiced sympathy for the population of Gaza.

“Using heavy equipment in residential areas is a complex matter with serious consequences for all parties,” he said on October 13. “And most importantly, civilian casualties will be absolutely unacceptable. There are almost two million people.”

German chancellor Olaf Scholz has called Putin’s position on Gaza cynical. But it is the Kremlin’s accusations of Western hypocrisy that are having a potent effect around the world.

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• MIKHAIL ZYGAR is a columnist at Der Spiegel , founding Editor in Chief of the independent Russian television channel TV Rain, and the author of War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine .
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Russia, One Year After the Invasion of Ukraine

By Keith Gessen

A year ago, in January, I went to Moscow to learn what I could about the coming war—chiefly, whether it would happen. I spoke with journalists and think tankers and people who seemed to know what the authorities were up to. I walked around Moscow and did some shopping. I stayed with my aunt near the botanical garden. Fresh white snow lay on the ground, and little kids walked with their moms to go sledding. Everyone was certain that there would be no war.

I had immigrated to the U.S. as a child, in the early eighties. Since the mid-nineties, I’d been coming back to Moscow about once a year. During that time, the city kept getting nicer, and the political situation kept getting worse. It was as if, in Russia, more prosperity meant less freedom. In the nineteen-nineties, Moscow was chaotic, crowded, dirty, and poor, but you could buy half a dozen newspapers on every corner that would denounce the war in Chechnya and call on Boris Yeltsin to resign. Nothing was holy, and everything was permitted. Twenty-five years later, Moscow was clean, tidy, and rich; you could get fresh pastries on every corner. You could also get prosecuted for something you said on Facebook. One of my friends had recently spent ten days in jail for protesting new construction in his neighborhood. He said that he met a lot of interesting people.

The material prosperity seemed to point away from war; the political repression, toward it. Outside of Moscow, things were less comfortable, and outside of Russia the Kremlin had in recent years become more aggressive. It had annexed Crimea , supported an insurgency in eastern Ukraine , propped up the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria, interfered in the U.S. Presidential election. But internally the situation was stagnant: the same people in charge, the same rhetoric about the West, the same ideological mishmash of Soviet nostalgia , Russian Orthodoxy , and conspicuous consumption. In 2021, Vladimir Putin had changed the constitution so that he could stay in power, if he wanted, until 2036. The comparison people made most often was to the Brezhnev years—what Leonid Brezhnev himself had called the era of “developed socialism.” This was the era of developed Putinism. Most people did not expect any sudden moves.

My friends in Moscow were doing their best to wrap their minds around the contradictions. Alexander Baunov, a journalist and political analyst, was then at the Carnegie Moscow Center think tank. We met in his cozy apartment, overlooking a typical Moscow courtyard—a small copse of trees and parked cars, all covered lovingly in a fresh layer of snow. Baunov thought that a war was possible. There was a growing sense among the Russian élite that the results of the Cold War needed to be revisited. The West continued to treat Russia as if it had lost—expanding NATO to its borders and dealing with Russia, in the context of things like E.U. expansion, as being no more important or powerful than the Baltic states or Ukraine—but it was the Soviet Union that had lost, not Russia. Putin, in particular, felt unfairly treated. “Gorbachev lost the Cold War,” Baunov said. “Maybe Yeltsin lost the Cold War. But not Putin. Putin has only ever won. He won in Chechnya, he won in Georgia, he won in Syria. So why does he continue to be treated like a loser?” Barack Obama referred to his country as a mere “regional power”; despite hosting a fabulous Olympics, Russia was sanctioned in 2014 for invading Ukraine, and sanctioned again, a few years later, for interfering in the U.S. Presidential elections. It was the sort of thing that the United States got away with all the time. But Russia got punished. It was insulting.

At the same time, Baunov thought that an actual war seemed unlikely. Ukraine was not only supposedly an organic part of Russia, it was also a key element of the Russian state’s mythology around the Second World War. The regime had invested so much energy into commemorating the victory over fascism; to turn around and then bomb Kyiv and Kharkiv, just as the fascists had once done, would stretch the borders of irony too far. And Putin, for all his bluster, was actually pretty cautious. He never started a fight he wasn’t sure he could win. Initiating a war with a NATO -backed Ukraine could be dangerous; it could lead to unpredictable consequences. It could lead to instability, and stability was the one thing that Putin had delivered to Russians over the past twenty years.

For liberals, it was increasingly a period of accommodation and consolidation. Another friend, whom I’ll call Kolya, had left his job writing life-style pieces for an independent Web site a few years earlier, as the Kremlin’s media policy grew increasingly meddlesome. Kolya accepted an offer to write pieces on social themes for a government outlet. This was far better, and clearer: he knew what topics to stay away from, and the pay was good.

I visited Kolya at his place near Patriarch’s Ponds. He had married into a family that had once been part of the Soviet nomenklatura, and he and his wife had inherited an apartment in a handsome nineteen-sixties Party building in the city center. From Kolya’s balcony you could see Brezhnev’s old apartment. You could tell it was Brezhnev’s because the windows were bigger than the surrounding ones. As for Kolya’s apartment, it was smaller than other apartments in his building. The reason was that the apartment next to his had once belonged to a Soviet war hero, and the war hero, of course, needed the building’s largest apartment, so his had been expanded, long ago, at the expense of Kolya’s. Still, it was a very nice apartment, with enormously high ceilings and lots of light.

Kolya was closely following the situation around Alexey Navalny , who had returned to Russia and been imprisoned a year before. Navalny was slowly being tortured to death in prison, and yet his team of investigators and activists continued to publish exposés of Russian officials’ corruption. There was still some real journalistic work being done in Russia, though a number of outlets, such as the news site Meduza, were primarily operating from abroad. Kolya said that he worried about outright censorship, but also about self-censorship. He told me about journalists who had left the field. One had gone to work in communications for a large bank. Another was now working on elections—“and not in a good way.” The noose was tightening, and yet no one thought there’d be a war.

What is one to make, in retrospect, of what happened to Russia between December, 1991, when its President, Boris Yeltsin, signed an agreement with the leaders of Ukraine and Belarus to disband the U.S.S.R., and February 24, 2022, when Yeltsin’s hand-picked successor, Vladimir Putin, ordered his troops, some of whom were stationed in Belarus, to invade Ukraine from the east, the south, and the north? There are many competing explanations. Some say that the economic and political reforms which were promised in the nineteen-nineties never actually happened; others that they happened too quickly. Some say that Russia was not prepared for democracy; others that the West was not prepared for a democratic Russia. Some say that it was all Putin’s fault, for destroying independent political life; others that it was Yeltsin’s, for failing to take advantage of Russia’s brief period of freedom; still others say that it was Mikhail Gorbachev’s, for so carelessly and naïvely destroying the U.S.S.R.

When Gorbachev began dismantling the empire, one of his most resonant phrases had been “We can’t go on living like this.” By “this” he meant poverty, and violence, and lies. Gorbachev also spoke of trying to build a “normal, modern country”—a country that did not invade its neighbors (as the U.S.S.R. had done to Afghanistan), or spend massive amounts of its budget on the military, but instead engaged in trade and tried to let people lead their lives. A few years later, Yeltsin used the same language of normality and meant, roughly, the same thing.

The question of whether Russia ever became a “normal” country has been hotly debated in political science. A famous 2004 article in Foreign Affairs , by the economist Andrei Shleifer and the political scientist Daniel Treisman, was called, simply, “A Normal Country.” Writing during an ebb in American interest in Russia, as Putin was consolidating his control of the country but before he started acting more aggressively toward his neighbors, Shleifer and Treisman argued that what looked like Russia’s poor performance as a democracy was just about average for a country with its level of income and development. For some time after 2004, there was reason to think that rising living standards, travel, and iPhones would do the work that lectures from Western politicians had failed to do—that modernity itself would make Russia a place where people went about their business and raised their families, and the government did not send them to die for no good reason on foreign soil.

That is not what happened. The oil and gas boom of the last two decades created for many Russians a level of prosperity that would have been unthinkable in Soviet times. Despite this, the violence and the lies persisted.

Alexander Baunov calls what happened in February of last year a putsch—the capture of the state by a clique bent on its own imperial projects and survival. “Just because the people carrying it out are the ones in power, does not make it less of a putsch,” Baunov told me recently. “There was no demand for this in Russian society.” Many Russians have, perhaps, accepted the war; they have sent their sons and husbands to die in it; but it was not anything that people were clamoring for. The capture of Crimea had been celebrated, but no one except the most marginal nationalists was calling for something similar to happen to Kherson or Zaporizhzhia, or even really the Donbas. As Volodymyr Zelensky said in his address to the Russian people on the eve of the war, Donetsk and Luhansk to most Russians were just words. Whereas for Ukrainians, he added, “this is our land. This is our history.” It was their home.

About half of the people I met with in Moscow last January are no longer there —one is in France, another in Latvia, my aunt is in Tel Aviv. My friend Kolya, whose apartment is across from Brezhnev’s, has remained in Moscow. He does not know English, he and his wife have a little kid and two elderly parents between them, and it’s just not clear what they would do abroad. Kolya says that, insofar as he’s able, he has stopped talking to people at work: “They are decent people on the whole but it’s not a situation anymore where it’s possible to talk in half-tones.” No one has asked him to write about or in support of the war, and his superiors have even said that if he gets mobilized they will try to get him out of it.

When we met last January, Alexander Baunov did not think that he would leave Russia, even if things got worse. “Social capital does not cross borders,” Baunov said. “And that’s the only capital we have.” But, just a few days after the war began, Baunov and his partner packed some bags and some books and flew to Dubai, then Belgrade, then Vienna, where Baunov had a fellowship. They have been flitting around the world, in a precarious visa situation, ever since. (A book that Baunov has been working on for several years, about twentieth-century dictatorships in Portugal, Spain, and Greece, came out last month; it is called “The End of the Regime.”)

I asked him why it was possible for him to live in Russia before the invasion, and why it was impossible to do so after it. He admitted that from afar it could look like a distinction without a difference. “If you’re in the Western information space and have been reading for twenty years about how Putin is a dictator, maybe it makes no sense,” Baunov said. “But from inside the difference was very clear.” Putin had been running a particular kind of dictatorship—a relatively restrained one. There were certain topics that you needed to stay away from and names you couldn’t mention, and, if you really threw down the gauntlet, the regime might well try to kill you. But for most people life was tolerable. You could color inside the lines, urge reforms and wiser governance, and hope for better days. After the invasion, that was no longer possible. The government passed laws threatening up to fifteen years’ imprisonment for speech that was deemed defamatory to the armed forces; the use of the word “war” instead of “special military operation” fell under this category. The remaining independent outlets—most notably the radio station Ekho Moskvy and the newspaper Novaya Gazeta —were forced to suspend operations. That happened quickly, in the first weeks of the war, and since then the restrictions have only increased; Carnegie Moscow Center, which had been operating in Russia since 1994, was forced to close in April.

I asked Baunov how long he thought it would be before he returned to Russia. He said that he didn’t know, but it was possible that he would never return. There was no going back to February 23rd—not for him, not for Russia, and especially not for the Putin regime. “The country has undergone a moral catastrophe,” Baunov said. “Going back, in the future, would mean living with people who supported this catastrophe; who think they had taken part in a great project; who are proud of their participation in it.”

If once, in the Kremlin, there had been an ongoing argument between mildly pro-Western liberals and resolutely anti-Western conservatives, that argument is over. The liberals have lost. According to Baunov, there remains a small group of technocrats who would prefer something short of all-out war. “It’s not a party of peace, but you could call it the Party of peaceful life,” he said. “It’s people who want to ride in electric buses and dress well.” But it is on its heels. And though it was hard for Baunov to imagine Russia going back to the Soviet era, and even the Stalinist era, the country was already some way there. There was the search for internal enemies, the drawing up of lists, the public calls for ever harsher measures. On the day that we spoke, in late January, the news site Meduza was branded an “undesirable organization.” This meant that anyone publicly sharing their work could, in theory, be subject to criminal prosecution.

Baunov fears that there is room for things to get much worse. He recalled how, on January 22, 1905—Bloody Sunday—the tsar’s forces fired on peaceful demonstrators in St. Petersburg, precipitating a revolutionary crisis. “A few tens of people were shot and it was a major event,” he said. “A few years later, thousands of people were being shot and it wasn’t even notable.” The intervening years had seen Russia engaged in a major European war, and society’s tolerance for violence had drastically increased. “The room for experimentation on a population is almost limitless,” Baunov went on. “China went through the Cultural Revolution, and survived. Russia went through the Gulags and survived. Repressions decrease society’s willingness to resist.” That’s why governments use them.

For years after the Soviet collapse, it had seemed, to some, as if the Soviet era had been a bad dream, a deviation. Economists wrote studies tracing the likely development of the Russian economy after 1913 if war and revolution had not intervened. Part of the post-Soviet project, including Putin’s, was to restore some of the cultural ties that had been severed by the Soviets—to resurrect churches that the Bolsheviks had turned into bus stations, to repair old buildings that the Soviets had neglected, to give respect to various political figures from the past (Tsar Alexander III, for example).

But what if it was the post-Soviet period that was the exception? “It’s been a long time since the Kingdom of Novgorod,” in the words of the historian Stephen Kotkin . Before the Revolution, the Russian Empire, too, had been one of the most repressive regimes in Europe. Jews were kept in the Pale of Settlement. You needed the tsar’s permission to travel abroad. Much of the population, just a couple of generations away from serfdom, lived in abject poverty. The Soviets cancelled some of these laws, but added others. Aside from short bursts of freedom here and there, the story of Russia was the story of unceasing government destruction of people’s lives.

So which was the illusion: the peaceful Russia or the violent one, the Russia that trades and slowly prospers, or the one that brings only lies and threats and death?

Russia has given us Putin, but it has also given us all the people who stood up to Putin. The Party of peaceful life, as Baunov called it, was not winning, but at least, so far, it has not lost; all the time, people continue to get imprisoned for speaking out against the war. I was reminded of my friend Kolya—in the weeks after the war began, as Western sanctions were announced and prices began rising, he was one of the thousands of Russians who rushed out to make last-minute purchases. It was a way of taking some control of his destiny at a moment when things seemed dangerously out of control. As the Russian Army attempted and failed to take Kyiv , Kolya and his wife bought some chairs. ♦

More on the War in Ukraine

How Ukrainians saved their capital .

A historian envisions a settlement among Russia, Ukraine, and the West .

How Russia’s latest commander in Ukraine could change the war .

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A filmmaker’s journey to the heart of the war .

Sign up for our daily newsletter to receive the best stories from The New Yorker .

By Daniel Immerwahr

By Ian Buruma

By Masha Gessen

On February 24, 2022, the world watched in horror as Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, inciting the largest war in Europe since World War II. In the months prior, Western intelligence had warned that the attack was imminent, amidst a concerning build-up of military force on Ukraine’s borders. The intelligence was correct: Putin initiated a so-called “special military operation” under the  pretense  of securing Ukraine’s eastern territories and “liberating” Ukraine from allegedly “Nazi” leadership (the Jewish identity of Ukraine’s president notwithstanding). 

Once the invasion started, Western analysts predicted Kyiv would fall in three days. This intelligence could not have been more wrong. Kyiv not only lasted those three days, but it also eventually gained an upper hand, liberating territories Russia had conquered and handing Russia humiliating defeats on the battlefield. Ukraine has endured unthinkable atrocities: mass civilian deaths, infrastructure destruction, torture, kidnapping of children, and relentless shelling of residential areas. But Ukraine persists.

With support from European and US allies, Ukrainians mobilized, self-organized, and responded with bravery and agility that evoked an almost unified global response to rally to their cause and admire their tenacity. Despite the David-vs-Goliath dynamic of this war, Ukraine had gained significant experience since  fighting broke out  in its eastern territories following the  Euromaidan Revolution in 2014 . In that year, Russian-backed separatists fought for control over the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in the Donbas, the area of Ukraine that Russia later claimed was its priority when its attack on Kyiv failed. Also in 2014, Russia illegally annexed Crimea, the historical homeland of indigenous populations that became part of Ukraine in 1954. Ukraine was unprepared to resist, and international condemnation did little to affect Russia’s actions.

In the eight years between 2014 and 2022, Ukraine sustained heavy losses in the fight over eastern Ukraine: there were over  14,000 conflict-related casualties  and the fighting displaced  1.5 million people . Russia encountered a very different Ukraine in 2022, one that had developed its military capabilities and fine-tuned its extensive and powerful civil society networks after nearly a decade of conflict. Thus, Ukraine, although still dwarfed in  comparison  with  Russia’s GDP  ( $536 billion vs. $4.08 trillion ), population ( 43 million vs. 142 million ), and  military might  ( 500,000 vs. 1,330,900 personnel ;  312 vs. 4,182 aircraft ;  1,890 vs. 12,566 tanks ;  0 vs. 5,977 nuclear warheads ), was ready to fight for its freedom and its homeland.  Russia managed to control  up to  22% of Ukraine’s territory  at the peak of its invasion in March 2022 and still holds 17% (up from the 7% controlled by Russia and Russian-backed separatists  before the full-scale invasion ), but Kyiv still stands and Ukraine as a whole has never been more unified.

The Numbers

Source: OCHA & Humanitarian Partners

Civilians Killed

Source: Oct 20, 2023 | OHCHR

Ukrainian Refugees in Europe

Source: Jul 24, 2023 | UNHCR

Internally Displaced People

Source: May 25, 2023 | IOM

As It Happened

During the prelude to Russia’s full-scale invasion, HURI collated information answering key questions and tracing developments. A daily digest from the first few days of war documents reporting on the invasion as it unfolded.

Frequently Asked Questions

Russians and Ukrainians are not the same people. The territories that make up modern-day Russia and Ukraine have been contested throughout history, so in the past, parts of Ukraine were part of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union. Other parts of Ukraine were once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Republic of Poland, among others. During the Russian imperial and Soviet periods, policies from Moscow pushed the Russian language and culture in Ukraine, resulting in a largely bilingual country in which nearly everyone in Ukraine speaks both Ukrainian and Russian. Ukraine was tightly connected to the Russian cultural, economic, and political spheres when it was part of the Soviet Union, but the Ukrainian language, cultural, and political structures always existed in spite of Soviet efforts to repress them. When Ukraine became independent in 1991, everyone living on the territory of what is now Ukraine became a citizen of the new country (this is why Ukraine is known as a civic nation instead of an ethnic one). This included a large number of people who came from Russian ethnic backgrounds, especially living in eastern Ukraine and Crimea, as well as Russian speakers living across the country. 

See also:  Timothy Snyder’s overview of Ukraine’s history.

Relevant Sources:

Plokhy, Serhii. “ Russia and Ukraine: Did They Reunite in 1654 ,” in  The Frontline: Essays on Ukraine’s Past and Present  (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2021). (Open access online)

Plokhy, Serhii. “ The Russian Question ,” in  The Frontline: Essays on Ukraine’s Past and Present  (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2021). (Open access online)

Ševčenko, Ihor.  Ukraine between East and West: Essays on Cultural History to the Early Eighteenth Century  (2nd, revised ed.) (Toronto: CIUS Press, 2009).

“ Ukraine w/ Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon  (#221).” Interview on  The Road to Now   with host Benjamin Sawyer. (Historian Kimberly St. Julian-Varnon joins Ben to talk about the key historical events that have shaped Ukraine and its place in the world today.) January 31, 2022.

Portnov, Andrii. “ Nothing New in the East? What the West Overlooked – Or Ignored ,” TRAFO Blog for Transregional Research. July 26, 2022. Note:  The German-language version of this text was published in:  Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte , 28–29/2022, 11 July 2022, pp. 16–20, and was republished by  TRAFO Blog . Translation into English was done by Natasha Klimenko.

Ukraine gave up its nuclear arsenal in exchange for the protection of its territorial sovereignty in the Budapest Memorandum.

But in 2014, Russian troops occupied the peninsula of Crimea, held an illegal referendum, and claimed the territory for the Russian Federation. The muted international response to this clear violation of sovereignty helped motivate separatist groups in Donetsk and Luhansk regions—with Russian support—to declare secession from Ukraine, presumably with the hopes that a similar annexation and referendum would take place. Instead, this prompted a war that continues to this day—separatist paramilitaries are backed by Russian troops, equipment, and funding, fighting against an increasingly well-armed and experienced Ukrainian army. 

Ukrainian leaders (and many Ukrainian citizens) see membership in NATO as a way to protect their country’s sovereignty, continue building its democracy, and avoid another violation like the annexation of Crimea. With an aggressive, authoritarian neighbor to Ukraine’s east, and with these recurring threats of a new invasion, Ukraine does not have the choice of neutrality. Leaders have made clear that they do not want Ukraine to be subjected to Russian interference and dominance in any sphere, so they hope that entering into NATO’s protective sphere–either now or in the future–can counterbalance Russian threats.

“ Ukraine got a signed commitment in 1994 to ensure its security – but can the US and allies stop Putin’s aggression now? ” Lee Feinstein and Mariana Budjeryn.  The Conversation , January 21, 2022.

“ Ukraine Gave Up a Giant Nuclear Arsenal 30 Years Ago. Today There Are Regrets. ” William J. Broad.  The New York Times , February 5, 2022. Includes quotes from Mariana Budjeryn (Harvard) and Steven Pifer (former Ambassador, now Stanford)

What is the role of regionalism in Ukrainian politics? Can the conflict be boiled down to antagonism between an eastern part of the country that is pro-Russia and a western part that is pro-West?

Ukraine is often viewed as a dualistic country, divided down the middle by the Dnipro river. The western part of the country is often associated with the Ukrainian language and culture, and because of this, it is often considered the heart of its nationalist movement. The eastern part of Ukraine has historically been more Russian-speaking, and its industry-based economy has been entwined with Russia. While these features are not untrue, in reality,  regionalism is not definitive in predicting people’s attitudes toward Russia, Europe, and Ukraine’s future.  It’s important to remember that every  oblast  (region) in Ukraine voted for independence in 1991, including Crimea. 

Much of the current perception about eastern regions of Ukraine, including the territories of Donetsk and Luhansk that are occupied by separatists and Russian forces, is that they are pro-Russia and wish to be united with modern-day Russia. In the early post-independence period, these regions were the sites of the consolidation of power by oligarchs profiting from the privatization of Soviet industries–people like future president Viktor Yanukovych–who did see Ukraine’s future as integrated with Russia. However, the 2013-2014 Euromaidan protests changed the role of people like Yanukovych. Protesters in Kyiv demanded the president’s resignation and, in February 2014, rose up against him and his Party of Regions, ultimately removing them from power. Importantly, pro-Euromaidan protests took place across Ukraine, including all over the eastern regions of the country and in Crimea. 

Ukraine’s Zelenskyy charting ‘comprehensive plan’ to end war with Russia

Ukrainian president says as the war rages and casualties mount, a plan to end the 28-month conflict is ‘the diplomatic route we are working on’.

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy says he’s drawing up a “comprehensive plan” for how Kyiv believes the war with Russia should end.

“It is very important for us to show a plan to end the war that will be supported by the majority of the world,” the Ukrainian president said at a news conference in Kyiv alongside Slovenian President Natasa Pirc Musar on Friday.

Keep reading

Russia suffers setbacks as ukraine braces for tough month on battlefield, why did the ukraine peace summit fail, top european court finds russia guilty of rights violations in crimea, russia-ukraine war: list of key events, day 854.

“This is the diplomatic route we are working on.”

There are no current negotiations between Ukraine and Russia and, based on public statements by Zelenskyy and Russian President Vladimir Putin, the two sides appear as far apart as ever when it comes to the terms of a potential peace settlement.

Ukraine has repeatedly said Russia must pull its troops out of its internationally recognised territory – including the peninsula of Crimea that Moscow annexed in 2014 – before peace talks can start.

Meanwhile, Putin, who launched the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, is demanding Ukraine effectively capitulate by evacuating even more territory across its east and south that Russia now occupies.

Zelenskyy hosted a major international summit in Switzerland earlier this month — and Russia was not invited — to rally support for Ukraine’s position.

‘We don’t have too much time’

More than 90 countries sent leaders and senior officials to the two-day summit and a vast majority agreed to a final communique that stressed the need for Ukraine’s “territorial integrity” to be respected in any settlement.

But some key countries that attended, such as India, did not agree and others, such as Russia’s ally China, boycotted the summit in protest at Moscow not being invited.

Russia’s troops are slowly advancing on the battlefield , claiming to have seized another small front-line village on Friday.

Moscow currently occupies about 25 percent of Ukraine and in 2022 claimed to have annexed four more regions, none of which they fully control.

On Thursday, at an EU Council Summit in Brussels, Zelenskyy said he would put forward a “detailed plan” in a matter of months to end the war.

“We don’t have too much time,” he said, pointing to the high casualty rate among soldiers and civilians.

Anger at the US

Russia warned the United States on Friday its reconnaissance drone flights over the Black Sea risked leading to a “direct” military clash, issuing the threat days after angrily blaming Washington for a missile attack on Crimea.

Ukraine’s attack on the Russian-annexed port of Sevastopol on Sunday drew fury from Moscow, which accused Kyiv of using US-supplied ATACMS missiles equipped with cluster munitions.

Four people, including two children, were killed as missile fragments fell over the city, in what the Kremlin’s foreign ministry called a “bloody crime”.

On Friday, Russia’s Defence Ministry said it “observed an increased frequency of US strategic unmanned aerial vehicle flights over the waters of the Black Sea” that surrounds Crimea.

Drones are “carrying out reconnaissance” and providing information for Western-supplied Ukrainian weapons that Kyiv plans to use to strike Russian targets, it said.

Such flights “increase the risk of a direct confrontation” between NATO and Russia, and the army has been instructed to prepare an “operational response”, the defence ministry added.

The United States routinely carries out drone flights over the Black Sea, operations that it says are conducted in neutral airspace and in accordance with international law.

Ukraine’s defence ministry said on Friday the military destroyed the Russian space communication centre in Moscow-occupied Crimea in an attack this week.

In a statement on Telegram, the ministry described the target as a valuable military component in satellite communication and navigation system for Russian troops. There was no immediate response from Moscow.

Ukraine needs to stop fighting the war Russia wants

• Ukraine is trapped in a strategy that favors Russia, a Ukrainian security expert argues.
• Without a grand strategy for victory, the most that Ukraine can do is try to hold on.
• "The lack of a strategy for victory will turn this war into a war of attrition," Oleksandr Danylyuk told BI.

Ukraine is caught in a strategic trap. It barely has the strength to keep Russia from making major advances, yet it is not strong enough to eject Russian forces from the territory it held prior to the 2022 invasion. The result is a war of attrition that Ukraine can't win.

The solution? Build up Ukrainian military power and compel Russia to agree to peace, argues a Ukrainian security expert. But that can't happen unless Ukraine devises a grand strategy that extends beyond mere survival that's characterized much of the war in 2024 as Russia exploited the long delay of US arms support.

"The lack of a strategy for victory will turn this war into a war of attrition for Ukraine, which completely coincides with Russian interests," Oleksandr Danylyuk told Business Insider.

Danylyuk dismisses the notion that even with Western aid, Ukraine can match Russia in the sheer numbers of military power like tanks, artillery and troops. "Trying to win a war with Russia at the expense of only a symmetrical mass increase is a flawed strategy, given that Russia has a larger number of [military-age] human reserves (about 30 million people in Russia, compared to about 8 million people in Ukraine), significant stockpiles of weapons and military equipment inherited from the USSR or built by 2022, as well as a developed defense-industrial complex and a powerful mining industry that satisfies its needs for a significant amount of strategic materials," he wrote in an essay for the Royal United Services Institute, a British think tank.

That leaves improving the quality of Ukraine's military. But this involves more than better weapons and tactics. Danylyuk argues that political mobilization is just as important, a view that seems reminiscent of the 19th Century German military philosopher Carl von Clausewitz, who envisioned a nation's war effort as a trinity comprised of the people, government and military.

"The political effectiveness of a military organization consists of its ability to receive financial support, the provision of weapons and military equipment, and the replenishment of human forces in the volume and quality necessary to eliminate existing threats," Danylyuk wrote. However, "the political effectiveness of the [Armed Forces of Ukraine] remains insufficient, as Ukraine's defense needs are currently only partially met."

Danylyuk blames Western restrictions on the types of weapons being supplied, and how they can be used. The US and Europe have long imposed restraints on using long-range weapons, such as ATACMS long-range guided rockets , to hit targets deep inside Russia. Only recently has the Biden administration begun to relax that policy . Easy victories with Western weapons have failed to materialize as the war has dug in. It's also clear that even with robust EU and US support, Ukraine is still at a disadvantage against the Russian war machine in a years-long fight.

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Danylyuk also worries that political divergences between Ukraine and its allies are undermining Ukrainian military effectiveness. Ukraine's current government wants to liberate all occupied territory, which is "undeniably fair and rational, but it ignores the fact that the liberation of territory does not necessarily mean the end of the war," he wrote. On the other hand, US and European desires for a negotiated settlement "will be viewed by Russia as a tactical respite which can be used to restore and build capabilities and plan a new phase of aggression."

In other words, Russia could exploit a peace deal to rebuild its battered forces before launching another invasion of Ukrainian lands.

The result is that the Ukrainian military isn't sure what kind of war to prepare for. "The AFU are in an extremely difficult situation, as the political leaderships of both Ukraine and its partner countries see these goals in different ways, which negatively affects the ability of the AFU to develop and implement a military strategy aimed at achieving them," wrote Danylyuk.

Without a grand strategy for victory, the most that Ukraine can do is hold its own, Danylyuk told Business Insider. "The planning of individual operations, the assessment and provision of the needs of the AFU, the development of training programs and preparation, and the introduction of new tactical techniques can at best support Ukraine's ability to conduct the war, but not to win it."

There are too many competing visions of Ukrainian victory, he argues. These include retaking all lost Ukrainian territory, threatening Russia's hold on Crimea to force it into negotiations, punishing Russian industry and exports to try to force Russians to reconsider the war's costs, or exacting such a heavy toll that Russian leaders are compelled to withdraw similar to the Soviet pullout from Afghanistan.

Danylyuk does fault Ukraine for some military mistakes, such as failure to adequately prepare and train for the failed counteroffensive against well-entrenched Russian forces in summer 2023. But he considers tactical improvements to be at the bottom of Ukraine's to-do list.

The West can boost Ukrainian military power by focusing on weapons that have already proven devastating against Russian vulnerabilities, according to Danylyuk. This includes cheap naval drones that have sunk numerous Russian warships and driven Russia's Black Sea Fleet from the Ukrainian coast, as well as giving Ukraine more Western aircraft and air-to-air missiles to contest Russian airpower.

Interestingly, Danylyuk blames the West for failing to adapt its equipment to the lessons of the Ukraine war. "This concerns, first of all, their ability to quickly improve military equipment not only because Ukraine needs it, but also because the security of the partners themselves depends on its improvement. The current pace of this improvement is completely unsatisfactory, and the approaches to identifying and eliminating the shortcomings of such systems require a complete revision."

Danylyuk's analysis does leave some questions unanswered. For example, as the Germans discovered on the Eastern Front in World War II, quality doesn't always triumph over quantity. And as Ukraine's failed 2023 counteroffensive demonstrated, achieving decisive battlefield success is no easy matter . With Russian society mobilized for total war, and with Moscow able to procure resources from allies such as China, North Korea and Iran, Russia's ability to wage a long war is considerable.

Also, choosing a grand strategy is easier said than done. For example, the Ukrainian government vows to liberate all occupied territory, including the Crimean peninsula and eastern Ukraine which Russia has annexed. Some critics say this is unrealistic, and Ukraine will have to accept some loss of territory.

Whatever strategy Kyiv chooses, Danylyuk argues, it can't be the status quo.

Michael Peck is a defense writer whose work has appeared in Forbes, Defense News, Foreign Policy magazine, and other publications. He holds an MA in political science from Rutgers Univ. Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn .

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• Ray Kurzweil on how AI will transform the physical world

The changes will be particularly profound in energy, manufacturing and medicine, says the futurist

B Y THE TIME children born today are in kindergarten, artificial intelligence ( AI ) will probably have surpassed humans at all cognitive tasks, from science to creativity. When I first predicted in 1999 that we would have such artificial general intelligence ( AGI ) by 2029, most experts thought I’d switched to writing fiction. But since the spectacular breakthroughs of the past few years, many experts think we will have AGI even sooner—so I’ve technically gone from being an optimist to a pessimist, without changing my prediction at all.

After working in the field for 61 years—longer than anyone else alive—I am gratified to see AI at the heart of global conversation. Yet most commentary misses how large language models like Chat GPT and Gemini fit into an even larger story. AI is about to make the leap from revolutionising just the digital world to transforming the physical world as well. This will bring countless benefits, but three areas have especially profound implications: energy, manufacturing and medicine.

Sources of energy are among civilisation’s most fundamental resources. For two centuries the world has needed dirty, non-renewable fossil fuels. Yet harvesting just 0.01% of the sunlight the Earth receives would cover all human energy consumption. Since 1975, solar cells have become 99.7% cheaper per watt of capacity, allowing worldwide capacity to increase by around 2m times. So why doesn’t solar energy dominate yet?

The problem is two-fold. First, photovoltaic materials remain too expensive and inefficient to replace coal and gas completely. Second, because solar generation varies on both diurnal (day/night) and annual (summer/winter) scales, huge amounts of energy need to be stored until needed—and today’s battery technology isn’t quite cost-effective enough. The laws of physics suggest that massive improvements are possible, but the range of chemical possibilities to explore is so enormous that scientists have made achingly slow progress.

By contrast, AI can rapidly sift through billions of chemistries in simulation, and is already driving innovations in both photovoltaics and batteries. This is poised to accelerate dramatically. In all of history until November 2023, humans had discovered about 20,000 stable inorganic compounds for use across all technologies. Then, Google’s GN o ME AI discovered far more, increasing that figure overnight to 421,000. Yet this barely scratches the surface of materials-science applications. Once vastly smarter AGI finds fully optimal materials, photovoltaic megaprojects will become viable and solar energy can be so abundant as to be almost free.

Energy abundance enables another revolution: in manufacturing. The costs of almost all goods—from food and clothing to electronics and cars—come largely from a few common factors such as energy, labour (including cognitive labour like R & D and design) and raw materials. AI is on course to vastly lower all these costs.

After cheap, abundant solar energy, the next component is human labour, which is often backbreaking and dangerous. AI is making big strides in robotics that can greatly reduce labour costs. Robotics will also reduce raw-material extraction costs, and AI is finding ways to replace expensive rare-earth elements with common ones like zirconium, silicon and carbon-based graphene. Together, this means that most kinds of goods will become amazingly cheap and abundant.

These advanced manufacturing capabilities will allow the price-performance of computing to maintain the exponential trajectory of the past century—a 75-quadrillion-fold improvement since 1939. This is due to a feedback loop: today’s cutting-edge AI chips are used to optimise designs for next-generation chips. In terms of calculations per second per constant dollar, the best hardware available last November could do 48bn. Nvidia’s new B 200 GPU s exceed 500bn.

As we build the titanic computing power needed to simulate biology, we’ll unlock the third physical revolution from AI : medicine. Despite 200 years of dramatic progress, our understanding of the human body is still built on messy approximations that are usually mostly right for most patients, but probably aren’t totally right for you . Tens of thousands of Americans a year die from reactions to drugs that studies said should help them.

Yet AI is starting to turn medicine into an exact science. Instead of painstaking trial-and-error in an experimental lab, molecular biosimulation—precise computer modelling that aids the study of the human body and how drugs work—can quickly assess billions of options to find the most promising medicines. Last summer the first drug designed end-to-end by AI entered phase-2 trials for treating idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, a lung disease. Dozens of other AI -designed drugs are now entering trials.

Both the drug-discovery and trial pipelines will be supercharged as simulations incorporate the immensely richer data that AI makes possible. In all of history until 2022, science had determined the shapes of around 190,000 proteins. That year DeepMind’s AlphaFold 2 discovered over 200m, which have been released free of charge to researchers to help develop new treatments.

Much more laboratory research is needed to populate larger simulations accurately, but the roadmap is clear. Next, AI will simulate protein complexes, then organelles, cells, tissues, organs and—eventually—the whole body.

This will ultimately replace today’s clinical trials, which are expensive, risky, slow and statistically underpowered. Even in a phase-3 trial, there’s probably not one single subject who matches you on every relevant factor of genetics, lifestyle, comorbidities, drug interactions and disease variation.

Digital trials will let us tailor medicines to each individual patient. The potential is breathtaking: to cure not just diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s, but the harmful effects of ageing itself.

Today, scientific progress gives the average American or Briton an extra six to seven weeks of life expectancy each year. When AGI gives us full mastery over cellular biology, these gains will sharply accelerate. Once annual increases in life expectancy reach 12 months, we’ll achieve “longevity escape velocity”. For people diligent about healthy habits and using new therapies, I believe this will happen between 2029 and 2035—at which point ageing will not increase their annual chance of dying. And thanks to exponential price-performance improvement in computing, AI -driven therapies that are expensive at first will quickly become widely available.

This is AI ’s most transformative promise: longer, healthier lives unbounded by the scarcity and frailty that have limited humanity since its beginnings. ■

Ray Kurzweil is a computer scientist, inventor and the author of books including “The Age of Intelligent Machines” (1990), “The Age of Spiritual Machines” (1999) and “The Singularity is Near” (2005). His new book, “The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge with AI”, will be published on June 25th.

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By invitation june 22nd 2024, vladimir putin’s war against ukraine is part of his revolution against the west.

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In Debate, Trump Shrugs and It’s NATO That’s Shaken

Across Asia and Europe, the event stoked concerns about American stability, both domestically and on crucial foreign policy issues like Washington’s commitment to alliances.

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By Steven Erlanger and Motoko Rich

Steven Erlanger reported from Berlin and Motoko Rich from Tokyo, with other Times reporters contributing from around the world.

• June 28, 2024

Amid a faltering performance by President Biden in the presidential debate Thursday night, former President Donald J. Trump caused anxiety among America’s allies with a simple shrug.

Mr. Trump has regularly disparaged NATO and even threatened to withdraw the United States from it, and during the debate, he did nothing to assuage European concerns about his antipathy toward the military alliance.

Asked by Mr. Biden if he would pull out of NATO, Mr. Trump did not answer but shrugged.

“I was very worried prior to this debate and I’m even more worried now,” said Jana Puglierin, director of the German office of the European Council on Foreign Relations. “Trump may or may not want to leave NATO officially, but he has every means to undermine NATO.”

At the heart of NATO is Article Five of its charter, committing each member country to the defense of all the others. “Deterrence is all about credibility, and deep down, Article Five, has always been what you make of it,” Ms. Puglierin said. “So it depends on the U.S. president making it a credible threat.”

Given Mr. Trump’s skepticism about alliances, European nations that rely on the promise of American protection, she said, are worried he might try to forge bilateral relationships with Europe “and make them transactional.”

Camille Grand, a former assistant secretary general of NATO, said that in a second term, Mr. Trump would be surrounded by people “who want to turn his instincts into policy rather than saying, ‘This is a bad idea, Mr. President.’”

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