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The War in Ukraine Is a Colonial War

When Vladimir Putin denies the reality of the Ukrainian state, he is speaking the familiar language of empire. For five hundred years, European conquerors called the societies that they encountered “tribes,” treating them as incapable of governing themselves. As we see in the ruins of Ukrainian cities, and in the Russian practice of mass killing, rape, and deportation, the claim that a nation does not exist is the rhetorical preparation for destroying it.

Empire’s story divides subjects from objects. As the philosopher Frantz Fanon argued, colonizers see themselves as actors with purpose, and the colonized as instruments to realize the imperial vision. Putin took a pronounced colonial turn when returning to the Presidency a decade ago. In 2012, he described Russia as a “state-civilization,” which by its nature absorbed smaller cultures such as Ukraine’s. The next year, he claimed that Russians and Ukrainians were joined in “spiritual unity.” In a long essay on “historical unity,” published last July, he argued that Ukraine and Russia were a single country, bound by a shared origin. His vision is of a broken world that must be restored through violence. Russia becomes itself only by annihilating Ukraine.

As the objects of this rhetoric, and of the war of destruction that it sanctions, Ukrainians grasp all of this. Ukraine does have a history, of course, and Ukrainians do constitute a nation. But empire enforces objectification on the periphery and amnesia at the center. Thus modern Russian imperialism includes memory laws that forbid serious discussion of the Soviet past. It is illegal for Russians to apply the word “war” to the invasion of Ukraine. It is also illegal to say that Stalin began the Second World War as Hitler’s ally, and used much the same justification to attack Poland as Putin is using to attack Ukraine. When the invasion began, in February, Russian publishers were ordered to purge mentions of Ukraine from textbooks.

Faced with the Kremlin’s official mixture of fantasy and taboo, the temptation is to prove the opposite: that it is Ukraine rather than Russia that is eternal, that it is Ukrainians, not Russians, who are always right, and so on. Yet Ukrainian history gives us something more interesting than a mere counter-narrative to empire. We can find Ukrainian national feeling at a very early date. In contemporary Ukraine, though, the nation is not so much anti-colonial, a rejection of a particular imperial power, as post-colonial, the creation of something new.

Southern Ukraine, where Russian troops are now besieging cities and bombing hospitals , was well known to the ancients. In the founding myth of Athens, the goddess Athena gives the city the gift of the olive tree. In fact, the city could grow olives only because it imported grain from ports on the Black Sea coast. The Greeks knew the coast, but not the hinterland, where they imagined mythical creatures guarding fields of gold and ambrosia. Here already was a colonial view of Ukraine: a land of fantasy, where those who take have the right to dream.

The city of Kyiv did not exist in ancient times, but it is very old—about half a millennium older than Moscow. It was probably founded in the sixth or seventh century, north of any territory seen by Greeks or controlled by Romans. Islam was advancing, and Christianity was becoming European. The Western Roman Empire had fallen, leaving a form of Christianity subordinate to a pope. The Eastern (Byzantine) Empire remained, directing what we now call the Orthodox Church. As Rome and Constantinople competed for converts, peoples east of Kyiv converted to Islam. Kyivans spoke a Slavic language that had no writing system, and practiced a paganism without idols or temples.

Putin’s vision of “unity” relates to a baptism that took place in this setting. In the ninth century, a group of Vikings known as the Rus arrived in Kyiv. Seeking a southbound route for their slave trade, they found the Dnipro River, which runs through the city. Their chieftains then fought over a patchwork of territories in what is now Ukraine, Belarus, and the northeast of Russia—with Kyiv always as the prize. In the late tenth century, a Viking named Valdemar took the city, with the help of a Scandinavian army. He initially governed as a pagan. But, around 987, when the Byzantines faced an internal revolt, he sensed an opportunity. He came to the emperor’s aid, and received his sister’s hand in marriage. In the process, Valdemar converted to Christianity.

Putin claims that this messy sequence of events reveals the will of God to bind Russia and Ukraine forever. The will of God is easy to misunderstand; in any case, modern nations did not exist at the time, and the words “Russia” and “Ukraine” had no meaning. Valdemar was typical of the pagan Eastern European rulers of his day, considering multiple monotheistic options before choosing the one that made the most strategic sense. The word “Rus” no longer meant Viking slavers but a Christian polity. Its ruling family now intermarried with others, and the local people were treated as subjects to be taxed rather than as bodies to be sold.

Yet no rule defined who would take power after a Kyivan ruler’s death. Valdemar took a Byzantine princess as his wife, but he had a half a dozen others, not to mention a harem of hundreds of women. When he died in 1015, he had imprisoned one of his sons, Sviatopolk, and was making war upon another, Yaroslav. Sviatopolk was freed after his father’s death, and killed three of his brothers, but he was defeated on the battlefield by Yaroslav. Other sons entered the fray, and Yaroslav didn’t rule alone until 1036. The succession had taken twenty-one years. At least ten other sons of Valdemar had died in the meantime.

These events do not reveal a timeless empire, as Putin claims. But they do suggest the importance of a succession principle, a theme very important in Ukrainian-Russian relations today. The Ukrainian transliteration of “Valdemar” is “Volodymyr,” the name of Ukraine’s President. In Ukraine, power is transferred through democratic elections: when Volodymyr Zelensky won the 2019 Presidential election , the sitting President accepted defeat. The Russian transliteration of the same name is “Vladimir.” Russia is brittle: it has no succession principle , and it’s unclear what will happen when Vladimir Putin dies or is forced from power. The pressure of mortality confirms the imperial thinking. An aging tyrant, obsessed by his legacy, seizes upon a lofty illusion that seems to confer immortality: the “unity” of Russia and Ukraine.

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In the Icelandic sagas, Yaroslav is remembered as the Lame; in Eastern Europe, he is the Wise, the giver of laws. Yet he did not solve the problem of succession. Following his reign, the lands around Kyiv fragmented again and again. In 1240, the city fell to the Mongols; later, most of old Rus was claimed by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, then the largest state in Europe. Lithuania borrowed from Kyiv a grammar of politics, as well as a good deal of law. For a couple of centuries, its grand dukes also ruled Poland. But, in 1569, after the Lithuanian dynasty died out, a Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth was formalized, and the territories of Ukraine were placed under Polish jurisdiction.

This was a crucial change. After 1569, Kyiv was no longer a source of law but an object of it—the archetypal colonial situation. It was colonization that set off Ukraine from the former territories of Rus, and its manner generated qualities still visible today: suspicion of the central state, organization in crisis, and the notion of freedom as self-expression, despite a powerful neighbor.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, all the forces of Europe’s globalization seemed to bear down on Ukraine. Polish colonization resembled and in some measure enabled the European colonization of the wider world. Polish nobles introduced land-management practices—along with land managers, most of whom were Jewish—that allowed the establishment of profitable plantations. Local Ukrainian warlords rushed to imitate the system, and adopted elements of Polish culture, including Western Christianity and the Polish language. In an age of discovery, enserfed peasants labored for a world market.

Ukraine’s colonization coincided with the Renaissance, and with a spectacular flowering of Polish culture. Like other Renaissance thinkers, Polish scholars in Ukraine resuscitated ancient knowledge, and sometimes overturned it. It was a Pole, Copernicus, who undid the legacy of Ptolemy’s “ Almagest ” and confirmed that the Earth orbits the sun. It was another Pole, Maciej of Miechów, who corrected Ptolemy’s “ Geography ,” clearing Ukrainian maps of gold and ambrosia. As in ancient times, however, the tilling of the black earth enabled tremendous wealth, raising the question of why those who labored and those who profited experienced such different fates.

The Renaissance considered questions of identity through language. Across Europe, there was a debate as to whether Latin, now revived, was sufficient for the culture, or whether vernacular spoken languages should be elevated for the task. In the early fourteenth century, Dante answered this question in favor of Italian; English, French, Spanish, and Polish writers created other literary languages by codifying local vernaculars. In Ukraine, literary Polish emerged victorious over the Ukrainian vernacular, becoming the language of the commercial and intellectual élite. In a way, this was typical: Polish was a modern language, like English or Italian. But it was not the local language in Ukraine. Ukraine’s answer to the language question was deeply colonial, whereas in the rest of Europe it could be seen as broadly democratic.

The Reformation brought a similar result: local élites converted to Protestantism and then to Roman Catholicism, alienating them further from an Orthodox population. The convergence of colonization, the Renaissance, and the Reformation was specific to Ukraine. By the sixteen-forties, the few large landholders generally spoke Polish and were Catholic, and those who worked for them spoke Ukrainian and were Orthodox. Globalization had generated differences and inequalities that pushed the people to rebellion.

Ukrainians on the battlefield today rely on no fantasy of the past to counter Putin’s. If there is a precursor that matters to them, it is the Cossacks, a group of free people who lived on the far reaches of the Ukrainian steppe, making their fortress on an island in the middle of the Dnipro. Having escaped the Polish system of landowners and peasants, they could choose to be “registered Cossacks,” paid for their service in the Polish Army. Still, they were not citizens, and more of them wished to be registered than the Polish-Lithuanian parliament would allow.

The rebellion began in 1648, when an influential Cossack, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, saw his lands seized and his son attacked by a Polish noble. Finding himself beyond the protection of the law, Khmelnytsky turned his fellow-Cossacks toward revolt against the Polish-speaking, Roman Catholic magnates who dominated Ukraine. The accumulated cultural, religious, and economic grievances of the people quickly transformed the revolt into something very much like an anti-colonial uprising, with violence directed not only against the private armies of the magnates but against Poles and Jews generally. The magnates carried out reprisals against peasants and Cossacks, impaling them on stakes. The Polish-Lithuanian cavalry fought what had been their own Cossack infantry. Each side knew the other very well.

In 1651, the Cossacks, realizing that they needed help, turned to an Eastern power, Muscovy, about which they knew little. When Kyivan Rus had collapsed, most of its lands had been absorbed by Lithuania, but some of its northeastern territories remained under the dominion of a Mongol successor state. There, in a new city called Moscow, leaders known as tsars had begun an extraordinary period of territorial expansion, extending their realm into northern Asia. In 1648, the year that the Cossack uprising began, a Muscovite explorer reached the Pacific Ocean.

The war in Ukraine allowed Muscovy to turn its attention to Europe. In 1654, the Cossacks signed an agreement with representatives of the tsar. The Muscovite armies invaded Poland-Lithuania from the east; soon after, Sweden invaded from the north, setting off the crisis that Polish history remembers as “the Deluge.” Peace was eventually made between Poland-Lithuania and Muscovy, in 1667, and Ukraine was divided more or less down the middle, along the Dnipro. After a thousand years of existence, Kyiv was politically connected to Moscow for the first time.

The Cossacks were something like an early national movement. The problem was that their struggle against one colonial power enabled another. In 1721, Muscovy was renamed the Russian Empire, in reference to old Rus. Poland-Lithuania never really recovered from the Deluge, and was partitioned out of existence between 1772 and 1795. Russia thereby claimed the rest of Ukraine—everything but a western district known as Galicia, which went to the Habsburgs. Around the same time, in 1775, the Cossacks lost their status. They did not gain the political rights they had wanted, nor did the peasants who supported them gain control of the black earth. Polish landowners remained in Ukraine, even as state power became Russian.

Whereas Putin’s story of Ukraine is about destiny, the Ukrainian recollection of the Cossacks is about unfulfilled aspirations. The country’s national anthem, written in 1862, speaks of a young people upon whom fate has yet to smile, but who will one day prove worthy of the “Cossack nation.”

The nineteenth century was the age of national revivals. When the Ukrainian movement began in imperial Russian Kharkov—today Kharkiv , and largely in ruins—the focus was on the Cossack legacy. The next move was to locate history in the people, as an account of continuous culture. At first, such efforts did not seem threatening to imperial rule. But, after the Russian defeat in the Crimean War, in 1856, and the insult of the Polish uprising of 1863 and 1864, Ukrainian culture was declared not to exist. It was often deemed an invention of Polish élites—an idea that Putin endorsed in his essay on “historical unity.” Leading Ukrainian thinkers emigrated to Galicia, where they could speak freely.

The First World War brought the principle of self-determination, which promised a release from imperial rule. In practice, it was often used to rescue old empires, or to build new ones. A Ukrainian National Republic was established in 1917, as the Russian Empire collapsed into revolution. In 1918, in return for a promise of foodstuffs, the country was recognized by Austria and Germany . Woodrow Wilson championed self-determination, but his victorious entente ignored Ukraine, recognizing Polish claims instead. Vladimir Lenin invoked the principle as well, though he meant only that the exploitation of national questions could advance class revolution. Ukraine soon found itself at the center of the Russian civil war, in which the Red Army, led by the Bolsheviks, and the White Army, fighting for the defunct empire, both denied Ukraine’s right to sovereignty. In this dreadful conflict, which followed four years of war, millions of people died, among them tens of thousands of Jews.

Though the Red Army ultimately prevailed, Bolshevik leaders knew that the Ukrainian question had to be addressed. Putin claims that the Bolsheviks created Ukraine, but the truth is close to the opposite. The Bolsheviks destroyed the Ukrainian National Republic. Aware that Ukrainian identity was real and widespread, they designed their new state to account for it. It was largely thanks to Ukraine that the Soviet Union took the form it did, as a federation of units with national names.

The failure of self-determination in Ukraine was hardly unique. Almost all of the new states created after the First World War were destroyed, within about two decades, by Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, or both. In the political imaginations of both regimes, Ukraine was the territory whose possession would allow them to break the postwar order, and to transform the world in their own image. As in the sixteenth century, it was as if all the forces of world history were concentrated on a single country.

Stalin spoke of an internal colonization, in which peasants would be exploited so that the Soviet economy could imitate—and then overtake—capitalism. His policy of collective agriculture, in which land was seized from farmers, was particularly unwelcome in Ukraine, where the revolution had finally got rid of the (still largely Polish) landholders. Yet the black earth of Ukraine was central to Stalin’s plans, and he moved to subdue it. In 1932 and 1933, he enforced a series of policies that led to around four million people dying of hunger or related disease. Soviet propaganda blamed the Ukrainians, claiming that they were killing themselves to discredit Soviet rule—a tactic echoed, today, by Putin. Europeans who tried to organize famine relief were dismissed as Nazis.

The actual Nazis saw Stalin’s famine as a sign that Ukrainian agriculture could be exploited for another imperial project: their own. Hitler wanted Soviet power overthrown, Soviet cities depopulated, and the whole western part of the country colonized. His vision of Ukrainians was intensely colonial : he imagined that he could deport and starve them by the millions, and exploit the labor of whoever remained. It was Hitler’s desire for Ukrainian land that brought millions of Jews under German control. In this sense, colonial logic about Ukraine was a necessary condition for the Holocaust .

Between 1933 and 1945, Soviet and Nazi colonialism made Ukraine the most dangerous place in the world . More civilians were killed in Ukraine, in acts of atrocity, than anywhere else. That reckoning doesn’t even include soldiers: more Ukrainians died fighting the Germans, in the Second World War, than French, American, and British troops combined.

The major conflict of the war in Europe was the German-Soviet struggle for Ukraine, which took place between 1941 and 1945. But, when the war began, in 1939, the Soviet Union and Germany were de-facto allies, and jointly invaded Poland. At the time, what is now western Ukraine was southeastern Poland. A small group of Ukrainian nationalists there joined the Germans, understanding that they would seek to destroy the U.S.S.R. When it became clear that the Germans would fail, the nationalists left their service, ethnically cleansed Poles in 1943 and 1944, and then resisted the Soviets. In Putin’s texts, they figure as timeless villains, responsible for Ukrainian difference generally. The irony, of course, is that they emerged thanks to Stalin’s much grander collaboration with Hitler. They were crushed by Soviet power, in a brutal counter-insurgency, and today Ukraine’s far right polls at one to two per cent. Meanwhile, the Poles, whose ancestors were the chief victims of Ukrainian nationalism, have admitted nearly three million Ukrainian refugees , reminding us that there are other ways to handle history than stories of eternal victimhood.

After the war, western Ukraine was added to Soviet Ukraine, and the republic was placed under suspicion precisely because it had been under German occupation. New restrictions on Ukrainian culture were justified by a manufactured allocation of guilt. This circular logic—we punish you, therefore you must be guilty—informs Kremlin propaganda today. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, has argued that Russia had to invade Ukraine because Ukraine might have started a war. Putin, who has said the same, is clearly drawing on Stalin’s rhetoric. We are to understand that the Soviet victory in the Second World War left Russians forever pure and Ukrainians eternally guilty. At the funerals of Russian soldiers, grieving parents are told that their sons were fighting Nazis.

The history of the colonization of Ukraine, like the history of troubling and divisive subjects in general, can help us get free of myths. The past delivers to Putin several strands of colonial rhetoric, which he has combined and intensified. It also leaves us vulnerable to a language of exploitation: whenever we speak of “the Ukraine” instead of “Ukraine,” or pronounce the capital city in the Russian style , or act as if Americans can tell Ukrainians when and how to make peace, we are continuing imperial rhetoric by partaking in it.

Ukrainian national rhetoric is less coherent than Putin’s imperialism, and, therefore, more credible, and more human. Independence arrived in 1991, when the U.S.S.R was dissolved. Since then, the country’s politics have been marked by corruption and inequality, but also by a democratic spirit that has grown in tandem with national self-awareness. In 2004, an attempt to rig an election was defeated by a mass movement. In 2014, millions of Ukrainians protested a President who retreated from the E.U. The protesters were massacred, the President fled, and Russia invaded Ukraine for the first time. Again and again, Ukrainians have elected Presidents who seek reconciliation with Russia; again and again, this has failed. Zelensky is an extreme case: he ran on a platform of peace, only to be greeted with an invasion.

Ukraine is a post-colonial country, one that does not define itself against exploitation so much as accept, and sometimes even celebrate, the complications of emerging from it. Its people are bilingual, and its soldiers speak the language of the invader as well as their own. The war is fought in a decentralized way , dependent on the solidarity of local communities. These communities are diverse, but together they defend the notion of Ukraine as a political nation. There is something heartening in this. The model of the nation as a mini-empire, replicating inequalities on a smaller scale, and aiming for a homogeneity that is confused with identity, has worn itself out. If we are going to have democratic states in the twenty-first century, they will have to accept some of the complexity that is taken for granted in Ukraine.

The contrast between an aging empire and a new kind of nation is captured by Zelensky, whose simple presence makes Kremlin ideology seem senseless. Born in 1978, he is a child of the U.S.S.R., and speaks Russian with his family. A Jew, he reminds us that democracy can be multicultural. He does not so much answer Russian imperialism as exist alongside it, as though hailing from some wiser dimension. He does not need to mirror Putin; he just needs to show up. Every day, he affirms his nation by what he says and what he does.

Ukrainians assert their nation’s existence through simple acts of solidarity. They are not resisting Russia because of some absence or some difference, because they are not Russians or opposed to Russians. What is to be resisted is elemental: the threat of national extinction represented by Russian colonialism, a war of destruction expressly designed to resolve “the Ukrainian question.” Ukrainians know that there is not a question to be answered, only a life to be lived and, if need be, to be risked. They resist because they know who they are. In one of his very first videos after the invasion, when Russian propaganda claimed that he had fled Kyiv, Zelensky pointed the camera at himself and said, “The President is here.” That is it. Ukraine is here.

Ukraine: Conflict at the Crossroads of Europe and Russia

A protester sits on a monument in Kyiv during clashes with riot police in February 2014.

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.

NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization)
Military Operations

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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Pardee’s Igor Lukes and Vesko Garčević assess the unfolding crisis: “This is not about Ukraine alone. This is about the future of democracies everywhere”

Rich barlow.

With troops on the ground and rockets from the air, Russia attacked Ukraine Thursday as Vladimir Putin made good on months of threats against a neighboring country that he claims, falsely, wasn’t a country at all until communist Russia created it. The invasion, the largest attack by one European nation on another since World War II, has had widespread global impact, causing stock markets to plummet, oil prices to soar, and NATO countries, including the United States, to threaten aggressive consequences for Russia.

Among the sanctions against Russia from President Biden that are already in place, or expected soon, are restricting Russia’s access to large financial institutions, cutting it off from advanced technology that could hinder its communications, and sanctioning members of Putin’s closest inner circle. Biden has sent troops to fortify NATO allies, but vows they won’t engage in the Russia-Ukraine war.

For perspective on the stunning developments, BU Today asked two Pardee School of Global Studies professors, Igor Lukes and Vesko Garčević, to assess the crisis. Lukes , a professor of history and of international relations, specializes in Central European history and contemporary Russia (he watched the 1968 Russian invasion of Prague as a teenager). Garčević is a professor of the practice of international relations, specializing in diplomacy, security, and conflict, and in Europe. He has served as Montenegro’s ambassador to several nations and international organizations, including NATO.

With Igor Lukes and Vesko Garčević

Bu today: how dangerous is the european situation, and why should americans care about it.

Igor Lukes: The situation is dangerous. Russia has committed a massive force to seize a peaceful sovereign country that never presented any threat. This will trigger limited countermeasures by NATO. Diplomats and politicians of all nationalities—including Russia’s last plausible partner, China—had warned Putin not to use force. He dismissed their concerns. Launching this attack on Ukraine, he has irreparably damaged the post–Cold War order. Should Americans care? Yes, they should. This is not about Ukraine alone. This is about the future of democracies everywhere. But even the most fervent supporters of Ukraine must bear in mind John Quincy Adams’ view that America, although a champion of universal freedom, “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” The Ukrainians are on their own as they face Putin’s armed force.

Vesko Garčević: Vesko Garčević: The world should care about it, because it puts the European security architecture in question. And not just the European architecture; it’s international norms, like respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty of other countries. [If] the big ones can take small countries as booties in world affairs… I come from a small country, therefore I understand it very well. On top of it, Russia has more nuclear warheads than three NATO states—the United States, the UK, and France— put together . It has the third largest conventional army in the world. And it has a veto in the UN Security Council, which prevents the council from taking any measures in this case. Russia knows its power very well. It’s exercising its power right now in front of our eyes, and I would say that very much matters to somebody who lives in the United States as much as somebody who lives in Europe.

BU Today: Russia is not the military threat that it once was, correct?

Vesko Garčević: Garčević: I would disagree with that. We can speak about other problems that Russia is facing, like economic crisis and the political system, but whether it is on the same level as the USSR or lagging behind, it is still powerful enough to match the power of other big powers. It has a security culture of an empire that implies they can use power in the way they are using it right now. I would just refer to the open letter signed by 73 European security experts a couple of weeks ago in which they highlighted the military might of Russia.

Igor Lukes: Lukes: The threat has changed. Nobody expects the Russian troops to come pouring through the Fulda Gap in Germany on their way to the English Channel to install the flag of communism along the way. Putin’s objective is to degrade and destabilize the West to camouflage his failure to improve Russia. Looking at the collapsing global markets today, he is rubbing his hands.

BU Today: Some observers say that Putin’s end game is to revive the Soviet empire, while others suggest he has real security concerns, whether unfounded or not. Which is your view?

Vesko Garčević: Garčević: It has something to do with both of those. I would say Russia sees itself more as tsarist Russia than the USSR. They think in terms of spheres of influence, and they need to have buffer zones around them because—I’m speaking of their official narratives—of a need of enlargement; they would like to get security guarantees. It’s not the first time that Russia brought up this issue. In the ’90s, they believed that they would be able to create, along with Americans and others, some type of umbrella security organization in Europe. It’s about the influence of Russia in regions they consider historically, intimately, inherently part of their sphere of influence. An essay by Putin last year referred to Ukraine as a nation that doesn’t exist as such; the same narrative, according to media reports, Putin used in meetings with other world leaders. I can disagree, but I can recognize the idea of a sphere of influence of Russia.

Igor Lukes: Lukes: In 2005, Putin said that the “collapse of the Soviet Union was a major geopolitical disaster of the [20th] century.” However, I reject the chimera of Putin’s alleged “security concerns.” Note that Russia, after months of deceptive signals—maskirovka—has attacked its neighbor. The much weaker Ukrainian troops were deployed in a defensive pattern because they had no plan to attack Russia. Under such circumstances, who should feel insecure? Stalin, generations of Soviet arms control negotiators, and now Putin have all sought to gain unilateral advantage by claiming that Russia’s historical experience with foreign invasions justified their disproportionate demands. It is easy to refute the myth of Russia’s vulnerability and victimhood, provided one has patience with a bit of history. The British noted in 1836 that since Peter the Great (1672-1725), the boundaries of Russia had extended 700 miles toward Berlin, 500 miles toward Constantinople, 630 miles toward Stockholm, and 1,000 miles toward Teheran. In 1848, a clear-sighted Central European historian warned the Frankfurt Assembly: “You are aware of the power possessed by Russia; you know that this power, already grown to colossal size, increases in strength and pushes outward from the center from one decade to the next. Every further step that it may be able to take…threatens the speed and creation and imposition of a new universal monarchy, an unimaginable and unmentionable evil, a calamity without limit or end.” This trend was only accelerated by Joseph Stalin, who extended his dominion from Berlin to Vladivostok. The Russian state began emerging in the 15th century and grew into the biggest country on this planet. This could hardly have happened as a result of foreign invasions.

BU Today: We’ve long been told Putin is a master chess player in international affairs. But some say he’s miscalculated and bitten off too much with Ukraine. Which is it?

Igor Lukes: Lukes: Putin is an improviser. He started in 2000 by promising to focus on Russia’s unprecedented population decline, public health, environment, and education. He dropped all of those needed reforms because they took too long and were not properly spectacular. Instead, he focused on military reform, weapons development, killing his critics at home and abroad. Nobody should mistake this mediocre KGB lieutenant colonel for a strategist. With his war on peaceful Ukraine, he has unified NATO, his neighbors, including Finland and Sweden, and the European Union. His troops may swiftly overwhelm the regular Ukrainian forces. But they will merge with the civilians, and later, at a time of their choosing, come out at night; it will hurt.

Vesko Garčević: Garčević: Even great chess players make mistakes. I would not say this action has not been carefully planned. A year ago, there were Russian troops on the border of Ukraine, staging something similar, but this was put on hold. Russia didn’t decide to invade Ukraine on a whim—Putin simply woke up one morning and [said], let’s go and invade Ukraine. But that doesn’t mean that this is not a miscalculation. I think for the long run, Russia, and particularly Russian citizens, will pay a steep price. Even if they have immediate gains—one may be to install a puppet government in Ukraine—for the long run, this may not be a right calculation. Because Russia should cooperate with the world and not live as a pariah in world affairs.

BU Today: Several analysts, and history, suggest sanctions won’t be effective. Are there any that the West has imposed, or might impose, that could make Putin negotiate a settlement?

Igor Lukes: Lukes: I agree that sanctions won’t change anything, but they won’t be pleasant. I hope that they will be tailored to hit the Kremlin clique rather than the innocent Russian people. I’d like to see the oligarchs and Putin’s family expelled from the palaces in the West, deported to Russia, their accounts frozen. The banks that finance Russian intelligence services need to be cut off. Putin has turned himself into an international pariah, below the level of Kim Jong Un. Treat him accordingly.

Vesko Garčević: Garčević: I come from a country, [the former] Yugoslavia, that was under sanctions [during the Bosnian and Kosovo wars of the 1990s]. I experienced myself what it means. General economic sanctions don’t work. They affect ordinary people. I just discussed with my students: imagine you live in an authoritarian regime which controls the economy. Once space shrinks, who benefits are those who are connected to the regime. There are not many options on the table, and I think Putin knows that, because Ukraine is not a NATO member. You cannot invoke Article 5 [obligating NATO to defend members under attack]. But you cannot also sit still, looking at what’s going on in front of all eyes. Well-crafted sanctions that target people that are behind [the regime], freezing their assets—or what the UK just did, kicked out [Russian billionaire Roman] Abramovich from the UK—those types of sanctions, but trying to avoid that ordinary people suffer, this is the only way to go. For the long run, I think this [invasion] tells us that Russia feels cornered. Not many countries will side with Russia. But in the short run, militarily, Russia outmatches Ukraine. They may reach Kiev or destabilize Ukraine to bring to power somebody who is similar to [pro-Russia] Belarus, Kazakhstan, Armenia. They will eliminate any potential threat that Ukraine may turn to the West. If Ukraine becomes a prosperous, democratic country, that’s a message for Russians, too.

BU Today: Are fears that Putin will threaten other nations if he succeeds in Ukraine warranted? Is this the start of a new and unstable Cold War?

Vesko Garčević: Garčević: When it comes to Russia’s intentions, I’m not sure that they’re going to go further. There is NATO, and the situation is different in the Baltic states. I tweeted that if Ukraine teaches us something, it teaches that for the Baltic states, the best decision they made was to join NATO. [Otherwise], they would have been targeted potentially by Russia on the same pretext—they have a Russian national minority that may call the mother state to intervene to protect their rights. But Russia may play in another part of Europe, like the Balkans, where I come from. The Balkans are not fully integrated into the European Union or NATO. It can be seen as an easy target, low-hanging fruit. It is what many people are concerned about, including me. There are also people [there] very supportive of Russia.

Igor Lukes: Lukes: Excepting the crises in Berlin, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Able Archer in 1983 [when a NATO military exercise panicked Russia into readying nuclear forces], the Cold War was a stable and predictable affair. The Kremlin leaders, including Stalin and Brezhnev, were rational actors. Putin is not. Therefore, he is a threat to the world order, and he is probably proud of it.

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Rich Barlow is a senior writer at BU Today and Bostonia magazine. Perhaps the only native of Trenton, N.J., who will volunteer his birthplace without police interrogation, he graduated from Dartmouth College, spent 20 years as a small-town newspaper reporter, and is a former Boston Globe religion columnist, book reviewer, and occasional op-ed contributor. Profile

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There are 12 comments on Russia and Ukraine Explained and Analyzed

This is a great read, Rich. Thanks to all for the insight.

I have to confess to not sleeping well over this the past few nights. Let’s keep the folks of Ukraine in our thoughts.

Thank you for a great article. I tend to agree with most of what the two professors say, but would like to put Professor Lukes’ statements about Russian expansion since the 15th century in context.

Many years ago, at the time of the Cold War, I also read the figures about Russia having expanded xxx miles towards the West … xxx miles towards the South … xxx miles towards the East … In fact, an analyst calculated the number of square miles per year!!! If I am not mistaken, the piece was triggered by British concerns that the Russians were advancing in Central Asia and approaching India … hence the Anglo-Afghan Wars

There is no doubt that Russia expanded … but this was very much part of the massive European expansion of the 18th and 19th century. It was no different from the United States expansion towards the Pacific , or the mighty overseas empires of Portugal, Spain, Britain and France.

The Russians were “somewhat lucky” because Siberia was virtually empty, but they fought nasty wars in the Caucasus and elsewhere … they even partitioned Poland with the Prussians and the Austrians … and they fought endless wars with the Ottoman Turks for control of today’s Ukraine and the Balkans.

It cannot be denied that Russia was an expanding empire but she was far from unique.

However, the invasions they suffered are not a myth, and Hitler was only the last.

They had Napoleon also coming from the West … and before that Swedes and Poles … and from the East they had Tatars and Mongols who destroyed their state several times.

The Russians are afraid of the outside world and it is actually a wonder that they have not invaded more! They genuinely fear the West and cannot think of NATO as purely defensive. They have a siege mentality.

I read somewhere that during the 1980s the CIA went to Ronald Reagan and convinced him that the Russians were truly scared … so Reagan moderated his “Evil Empire” statements.

It is true that we cannot trust Putin. But because of their history, I find it difficult to believe that the Russians will ever trust the West.

Since the 1939 invasion of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union or Russian army attacked or intervened militarily in Finland (1940), Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania (1940), Hungary (1956), Czechoslovakia (1968), Afghanistan (1980), Georgia (2008), and now Ukraine. The Russian argument of being surrounded by enemies does not stand ground in confrontation with their aggressive history of expansionism and brutal russification and/or Sovietization of territories they tried to subjugate.

“Igor Lukes: The situation is dangerous. Russia has committed a massive force to seize a peaceful sovereign country that never presented any threat.”

Ukraine has been wanting to join NATO. That presents a threat to Russia. It appears that this is the root cause due to which Putin decided to invade.

Ukraine may have tried to gain membership to NATO, but it was not granted nor is there any indication that it’s status would change. This is demonstrated by the Western governments not commuting troops directly to the conflict

And once Russia takes over Ukraine they will look around and see there are now many more NATO countries next to them. Then what will they do to alleviate that ‘threat’?

Only those who have lived through the horrors of total war will understand what is going on. Academic deliberation is pointless at this time.

Ukrainians have the right to join any organization they want as they are an independent country. Putin’s feelings are of no relevance here. The military aggression, killing, and subjugating countries and their populations to the will of the strongman can’t be tolerated. The peers of BU students in Ukraine are dying to defend their abandoned and imperfect country, while some BU academics are falsely portraying the USA as the ultimate evil and source of all wrongs. Ask the Ukrainians who they look to most for help! The test of this American generation is coming whether we like it or not.

BU Students and staff should organize a peaceful march on Comm Ave or Marsh Plaza to show support for Ukraine . This is the least we can do .

This is not a crisis, this is war. Please show some integrity with your headlines for once.

Please inform people about the real story behind Luganks and Donetsk. How Ukrainian air force bombed the middle of the city right near the kindergarten and a children’s playground in an attempt to kill the leaders of Lugansk, how there was a massive internal war in Donetsk. How LNR and DNR formed. All of that is vital information.

Also, how about you guys look into other wars going on right now? Saudi bombing Yemen, Israel bombing Syria, USA bombing Somali, Turkey bombing Rojava. Please talk about the fact that since 1945 81% of all wars were started by USA.

I am not saying either side is right or wrong. All I am stating is facts and I am trying to bring them to light. I want people to make decisions for themselves and be able to think and not just consume the information they are told to believe.

As a Ukrainian, it is very painful to hear some of the comments about Ukrainian “crisis”. It has always been about Russian Aggression. Ukrainian nation is the stronger in spirit, patriotic, talented, courageous, and now desperately in need for help! Not debating who is right or wrong, but the world unity and support to the nation that is so brave and standing alone! in front of the 3rd largest army in the world. We are defending not only our land, but the whole concept of democracy and other countries that are lucky enough not to be neighbors with the country aggressor.

“Igor Lukes: The situation is dangerous. Russia has committed a massive force to seize a peaceful sovereign country that never presented any threat.”

Exactly! However, what is missing here is to mention 2008 Georgia. This was the first time Russia openly invaded independent sovereign nation. And what did Obama and Angela Merkel do? Symbolic sanctions and staying quite. This is exactly what motivated Putin to become an international bully and go after Crimea and Eastern Ukraine at first and then attack the rest of the country.

The US, EU & NATO made huge mistakes in dealing with Russia and treating Putin as a rational decision-maker.

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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

Acknowledgments.

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How Ukraine's history differs from Putin's version

NPR's Michel Martin speaks with Yale professor Timothy Snyder, about the difference between the history of Ukraine and the version of it told by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

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Understanding Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

Aaron Stein
Maia Otarashvili
February 24, 2022
Eurasia Program

Introduction

On February 24, 2022 Russia began its invasion of Ukraine.

In times of crisis, balanced, in-depth analysis and trusted expertise is paramount. The Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) remains committed in its mission to provide expert analysis to policy makers and the public on the most pressing foreign policy challenges.

To help you understand this evolving crisis, we have compiled a list of publications, event recordings, and podcasts to help explain current events in Ukraine. FPRI has also included resources about other protracted conflicts, the neighboring Baltic states, and the role of NATO in managing the fallout from the war.

If you have not already done so, be sure to follow the FPRI fellows listed below for further reading and resources. For press inquiries, please contact [email protected]

Russian Aggression in Ukraine & Russian Defense

Moscow’s Mind Games: Finding Ideology in Putin’s Russia – February 2023
The Confrontation with Russia and US Grand Strategy – February 2023
Tanks a Lot (Well, Actually Not That Many for Ukraine) – February 2023
Wagner Group Redefined: Threats and Responses – January 2023
‘Let’s Make a Deal’? Ukraine and the Poor Prospects for Negotiations with Putin – January 2023
Will Russia Survive Until 2084? – December 2022
How the Battle for the Donbas Shaped Ukraine’s Success – December 2022
Ecological Path to Peace Is Possible in Ukraine – November 2022
Putin’s Philosophers: Reading Vasily Grossman in the Kremlin – November 2022
The Russian-Ukrainian War Triggers an Energy Revolution – September 2022
Ukraine’s Defense Industry and the Prospect of a Long War – September 2022
Understanding Russia’s Efforts at Technological Sovereignty – September 2022
Watching the War on Russian Television – August 2022
War Crimes in Ukraine: In Search of a Response – August 2022
Why Russian Elites Are Standing By Putin – July 2022
Climate Action Meets Energy Security: The Russian Invasion of Ukraine Adds a New Dimension to Energy Transition – June 2022
The War’s Impact on Russia’s Economy and Ukrainian Politics – June 2022
The Evolving Political-Military Aims in the War in Ukraine After 100 Days – June 2022
How Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine has Affected Kazakh Politics – June 2022
Russia’s Use of Cyberattacks: Lessons from the Second Ukraine War – June 2022
What’s Next for Ukraine’s (and its Neighbors’) Domestic and Foreign Policy? – June 2022
Reviving the Prospects for Coercive Diplomacy in Ukraine – May 2022
Food Prices, Elections, and the Wagner Group in Africa – April 2022
Appraising the War in Ukraine and Likely Outcomes – April 2022
Ukraine War Sparks Suspicion over Russia’s Designs on Kazakhstan – April 2022
Do Russians Really “Long for War” in Ukraine? – March 2022
Kadyrov’s Ukraine Gamble – March 2022
Lukashenka’s Fatal Mistake – March 2022
What We Can Learn about Russian Strategy from Ivan III – March 2022
The Russian Navy in the Russia-Ukraine War Scare – February 2022
How Will China Respond to the Russia-Ukraine Crisis? – January 2022
Moscow’s Compellence Strategy – January 2022
Zapad 2021 and Russia’s Potential for Warfighting – September 2021
Russia’s Coercive Diplomacy – August 2021
Russia’s Forever Wars: Syria and Pursuit of Great Power Status – September 2021
Understanding Russia’s Cyber Strategy – July 2021
Russia’s Nuclear Strategy: A Show of Strength Despite COVID-19 – May 2021
Even Thieves Need a Safe: Why the Putin Regime Causes, Deplores, and Yet Relies on Capital Flight for its Survival – November 2021
Five Years of War in the Donbas – October 2019
Coal Mines, Land Mines and Nuclear Bombs: The Environmental Cost of the War in Eastern Ukraine – September 2019
Volodymyr Zelensky: Ukraine’s Servant of the People? – September 2019
Russia’s Tragic Great Power Politics – March 2019
Ukraine’s Presidential Election and the Future of its Foreign Policy – March 2019
Bond of War: Russian Geo-Economics in Ukraine’s Sovereign Debt Restructuring – September 2018
The Ukrainian Military: From Degradation to Renewal – August 2018
Reflecting on a Year of War – February 2023
Will Russia Survive Until 2084? – January 2023
The Russia-Ukraine War and Implications for Azerbaijan – July 2022
Russia’s War in Ukraine: Uncompromising Objectives and an Uncertain Future – June 2022
The State of Play in Ukraine – May 2022
Russia’s War in Ukraine: Nukes, Negotiations, and Neutrality – April 2022
Russia’s War in Ukraine: Implications for China – March 2022
What the West Needs to Know About Russia’s War in Ukraine – March 2022
Russia’s War in Ukraine: Analyzing the Western Military and Economic Response – March 2022
Russia’s War in Ukraine: The Humanitarian Crisis and Prospects for Resolution – March 2022
Russia’s Long Shadow and the Future of Europe – February 2022
Russia-Ukraine Tensions: Will Moscow’s Compellence Strategy Work? – January 2022
Interview with Russian Dissident Ilya & Former Duma Member Ilya Ponomarev – January 2022
Russia’s Coercive Diplomacy – August 2021
FPRI Special Briefing: U.S. Sanctions Against Russia – March 2021
FPRI Special Briefing: Alexeyi Navalny and U.S.-Russia Relations – February 2021
Don’t Mention the War – April 2023
Torn in the USA: How Important is the War in Ukraine for the United States? – March 2023
Ukraine One Year In: The Helpers – March 2023
Reflecting on a Year of War – February 2023
Mobilize This – January 2023
War in Ukraine: A Firsthand Account – December 2022
Public Opinion in Russia: What Do We Know, What Can We Know? – November 2022
Russia’s War in Ukraine: The Strategic Picture – September 2022
Russia’s Manpower Conundrum in Ukraine – May 2022
The Air War Over Ukraine – March 2022
Debating a No Fly Zone: The Risk of Escalation with Moscow – March 2022
Examining Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine – March 2022
The Risk of War: Russia’s Options for War in Ukraine – February 2022
The Risk of War in Ukraine: Moscow’s Military Posture – February 2022
Tensions Over Ukraine: Russia’s Rationale for War – February 2022
Russian Perceptions of Military AI and Automation – February 2022
Russia’s Anti-Satellite Weapon: Understanding Russia’s ASAT Test – November 2021
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Navalny? – September 2021
Russia’s Coercive Diplomacy: Looking Back at the Ukraine Crisis – August 2021
Russian-Turkish Relations and Their Implications for the West – May 2021
Learning From Our Adversaries: Russian Aerial Operations in Syria – April 2021

Protracted Conflicts: Moldova and Georgia

War As a Neighbor: Moldova and the Challenges of Facing Russian Aggression in Ukraine – April 2023
Strategic Connectivity in the Black Sea: A Focus on Georgia – December 2021
Taking Stock of U.S. Military Assistance to Georgia – December 2021
Georgia’s Democracy is in Trouble, It’s Time for Closer Engagement – November 2021
Russia’ Permanent War Against Georgia – March 2021
Georgia’s Doomed Deep-Sea Port Ambitions: Geopolitics of the Canceled Anaklia Project – October 2020
Anatomy of a Fraud: The Moldovan Parliamentary Elections – March 2019
Geopolitical Games Expected Ahead of Moldova’s 2018 Elections – October 2017
The Future of US Strategic Interests in the South Caucasus: Challenges and Opportunities for the Biden Administration – October 2021
Tug of War in the Black Sea: Defending NATO’s Eastern Flank – July 2021
The Turkish Veto: Why Erdogan Is Blocking Finland and Sweden’s Path to NATO – March 2023
Article 5 for the Next Decade of NATO – December 2022
The Art of the Possible: Minimizing Risks as a New European Order Takes Shape – November 2022
The Baltics Predicted the Suspension of the Ukraine Grain Deal — and Contributed to its Resumption – November 2022
Good and Bad Neighbors: Perceptions in Latvian Society – September 2022
Europe’s Wait for Turkmen Natural Gas Continues – September 2022
From the Migrant Crisis to Aggression in Ukraine: Belarus is Still on the Baltic Agenda – July 2022
Two Less Obvious Lessons for Baltic Defense from Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine – June 2022
The Baltic Road to Energy Independence from Russia Is Nearing Completion – May 2022
America Needs a Comprehensive Compellence Strategy Against Russia – April 2022
Baltic Sea Mining as an Extension of the Russian Gray Zone – April 2022
The Significance of the Turkish Straits to the Russian Navy – March 2022
Fear, Solidarity, and Calls for Further Action in the Baltics as Russia Invades Ukraine – March 2022
Latvia’s First Response to Russia’s War in Ukraine – March 2022
Turkey’s Careful and Risky Fence-Sitting between Ukraine and Russia – February 2022
At the Double: Poland’s Military Expansion – January 2022
Turkey’s Response to the Russia-Ukraine Crisis – January 2022
Afghanistan was a Turbulent NATO Proving Ground for the Baltic States – December 2021
Crowded Pond: NATO and Russian Maritime Power in the Baltic Sea – December 2021
Baltic Perspectives on U.S. and Transatlantic Nuclear Negotiations with Russia – October 2021
Namejs vs. Zapad: Military Exercises on Both Sides of the Frontline – September 2021
Reconceptualizing Lithuania’s Importance for U.S Foreign Policy – July 2021
Russian-Turkish Relations and Their Implications for the West – April 2021
Nord Stream 2: Germany’s Faustian Bargain with Gazprom and Why it Matters for the Baltics – December 2020
Cooperation, Competition, and Compartmentalization: Russian-Turkish Relations and Their Implications for the West – May 2021
America’s Approach to the Three Seas Initiative – May 2021
The Baltic States as NATO Heavyweights – March 2023
The Future of European Energy – February 2023
What’s Happening With Russian Speakers in Latvia? – January 2023
We Can France if We Want To: What Does Paris Want for Ukraine and Europe? – November 2022
Giorgia on My Mind: Italy’s Rightward Turn and Its Implications – October 2022
Stuck in the Magyar: Why is Hungary the “Bad Boy” of Europe? – October 2022
Bloc Party: The EU and the War in Ukraine – September 2022
The View from Ukraine: An interview with Dr. Volodymyr Dubovyk – August 2022
What Does Erdogan, Erdo-want? – July 2022
Baltic Power Hour – July 2022
No More Niinistö Nice Guy: Has Finland’s Security Calculus Changed? – June 2022
Swedening the Deal: Stockholm Turns to NATO – June 2022
The Energy Trilemma: An interview with Dr. Andrei Belyi – May 2022
The Sejm Difference? Poland and the New, Old Europe – May 2022
Bundes-where? Germany’s Politics and Security in Changing Times – May 2022
Ukrainian Refugees in Latvia: An interview with Agnese Lāce – April 2022
Who Speaks For Eastern Europe? – February 2022
Foreign Minister Edgars Rinkēvičs on Latvia’s Foreign Policy Challenges – November 2021
Reframing the Baltic states: An Interview with Dr. Andres Kasekamp – October 2021

FPRI Experts to Follow

Rob Lee – @RALee85 Eurasia Senior Fellow, PhD Student at King’s College, London
Bob Hamilton – @BobHam88 Black Sea Fellow, Research Professor at the U.S. Army War College
Maia Otarashvili – @MaiaVanRijn Deputy Director of Research
Aaron Stein – @aaronstein1
Chris Miller – @crmiller1 Director of Eurasia Program, Assistant Professor at The Fletcher School, Tufts University
Nikolas Gvosdev @FPRI_Orbis Editor, Orbis: FPRI’s Journal of World Affairs, Captain Jerome E. Levy Chair in Economic Geography and National Security at the U.S. Naval War College
Clint Watts – @SelectedWisdom Distinguished Research Fellow , National Security Contributor for NBC News and MSNBC
Indra Ekmanis – @indraekmanis Baltic Sea Fellow and Editor of the Baltic Bulletin
Una Bergmane @UnaBergmane Baltic Sea Fellow, Researcher at the University of Helsinki
Mitchell Orenstein @m_orenstein Eurasia Senior Fellow, Professor of East European and Russian Studies, University of Pennsylvania
Stephanie Petrella @sdpetrella Eurasia Fellow
Sara Ashbaugh @sara_ashbaugh Editor in Chief, BMB Russia
Eilish Hart @EilishHart Eurasia F ellow, Eurasia Program
Clara Marchaud @ClaraMarchaud Editor of BMB Ukraine

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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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Putin’s Ukraine gamble seen as biggest threat to his rule

FILE - President Vladimir Putin speaks in his annual televised New Year’s message after a ceremony during a visit to the headquarters of the Southern Military District, at an unknown location in Russia, Dec. 31, 2022. American and allied sanctions and export controls are constraining Russia’s ability to wage war on Ukraine by degrading its military, a top Treasury Department official says. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends an Orthodox Easter service in the Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow, Russia, on Sunday, April 24, 2022. Putin sent forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, appears determined to prevail -- ruthlessly and at all costs. (AP Photo, Pool, File)

Ukrainian soldiers stand amid destroyed Russian armored vehicles in the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, on Thursday, March 31, 2022. Russian forces shelled Kyiv’s suburbs, two days after the Kremlin said it would significantly scale back operations near both the capital and the northern city of Chernihiv after its forces met with stiff resistance. Russian President Vladimir Putin, who started the war on Feb. 24, 2022, and could end it at any time, still appears determined to prevail -- ruthlessly and at all costs. (AP Photo/Rodrigo Abd, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin holds binoculars while watching military exercises Center-2019 at Donguz shooting range near Orenburg, Russia, on Sept. 20, 2019. Putin, whose forces invaded Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, appears determined to prevail -- ruthlessly and at all costs. (Alexei Nikolsky, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

A giant statue of Mother of the Homeland is seen atop of the memorial on Mamayev Hill in the southern city of Volgograd, Russia, on Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2023, the 80th anniversary of the Soviet victory in the city once known as Stalingrad. The Battle of Stalingrad turned the tide in World War II with the death toll for soldiers and civilians estimated at about 2 million. Russian President Vladimir Putin was on hand for the anniversary of the battle amid the war in Ukraine, which on Feb. 24, 2023, will mark its first anniversary. (AP Photo, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with Japanese Foreign Minister Fumio Kishida with a painting depicting Russian Czar Peter the Great in the background, in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Friday, Dec. 2, 2016. Putin sent Russian troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail -- ruthlessly and at all costs. (Mikhail Klimentyev/Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Then-Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is seen riding a horse in the mountains of the Siberian region of Tuva, during his vacation on Monday, Aug. 3, 2009, . Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail -- ruthlessly and at all costs. (Alexei Druzhinin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

In this photo released on Saturday, Oct. 30, 2010, then-Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin carries a hunting rifle during his trip in Ubsunur Hollow in the Siberian region of Tuva, on the border with Mongolia. Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail -- ruthlessly and at all costs. (Dmitry Astakhov, Sputnik, Government Pool Photo via AP, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a training session with his country’s national judo team at the Yug-Sport Training Center in Sochi, Russia, on Thursday, Feb. 14, 2019. Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail -- ruthlessly and at all costs. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Then-Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin swims while in the Siberian region of Tuva during a vacation on Monday, Aug. 3, 2009. Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail -- ruthlessly and at all costs. (Alexei Druzhinin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin stands on the ice at the Night Hockey League skating rink next to the GUM Department store in Red Square in Moscow, Russia, on Saturday, Dec. 23, 2017. Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail -- ruthlessly and at all costs. (Alexei Nikolsky, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, drives a motorbike decorated with a Russian national flag, with Crimean leader Sergei Aksenov, in sidecar, and Sevastopol Gov. Mikhail Razvozhaev, behind, during the Babylon’s Shadow bike show camp in Sevastopol, Crimea, on Saturday, Aug. 10, 2019. Putin sent forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail -- ruthlessly and at all costs. (Alexei Druzhinin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks in an interview with the Russia-1 TV channel in the Bocharov Ruchei residence in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, Russia, on Friday, June 3, 2022. Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail. (Mikhail Metzel, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, speaks during an interview with American movie director Oliver Stone for a documentary in the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, on Wednesday, June 19, 2019. Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail. (Alexei Druzhinin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin, center, and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, right, review warships before the main naval parade marking Russian Navy Day in the Gulf of Finland, at St. Petersburg, Russia, on Sunday, July 31, 2022. Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail -- ruthlessly and at all costs. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Participants watch Russian President Vladimir Putin addressing a plenary session of the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum in St.Petersburg, Russia, on Friday, June 17, 2022. Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail. (AP Photo, File)

From left, Vladimir Saldo, the head of the Kherson region; Yevgeny Balitsky, the head of the Zaporizhzhia region; Russian President Vladimir Putin, center; Denis Pushilin, head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic; and Leonid Pasechnik, head of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic, pose at a ceremony to sign treaties to illegally annex Ukrainian territories at the Kremlin in Moscow, on Friday, Sept. 30, 2022, in a sharp escalation of the war in Ukraine. Putin sent troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail. (Grigory Sysoyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin, center, speaks to a soldier as he visits a military training centre of the Western Military District for mobilized reservists in the Ryazan region of Russia, on Oct. 20, 2022. Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu is seen back to camera. Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kemlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Riot police detain demonstrators at a protest in Moscow, Russia, on Wednesday, Sept. 21, 2022, after Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered a partial mobilization of reservists, effective immediately. Putin sent Russian troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail -- ruthlessly and at all costs. (AP Photo, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin gestures while speaking during a news conference following a meeting of the State Council at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia on Thursday, Dec. 22, 2022. Putin sent Russian troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail. (Sergey Guneyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin listens to the national anthem at a ceremony for the nuclear-powered icebreaker Ural and the launching of the icebreaker Yakutia, via videoconference, at his Novo-Ogaryovo state residence, outside Moscow, Tuesday, Nov. 22, 2022. Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail. (Mikhail Metzel/Pool Photo via AP, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin, center, speaks as Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, left, and Chief of the General Staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov attend a meeting with senior military officers in Moscow, Russia, on Wednesday, Dec. 21, 2022. Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail. (Sergey Fadeichev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin, second left, listens to Deputy Prime Minister Marat Khusnullin, left, as he visits the Crimean Bridge connecting Russian mainland and the Crimean Peninsula over the Kerch Strait on Monday, Dec. 5, 2022. The bridge was damaged by a truck bomb in October in an attack that Russia blamed on Ukraine. Putin sent Russian troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, appears determined to prevail. (Mikhail Metzel, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin looks at the Polikarpov I-16, a Soviet single-engine single-seat fighter aircraft from World War II, at an interactive museum commemorating the 81st anniversary of the Battle for Moscow, at Red Square in Moscow, Russia, on Tuesday, Nov. 8, 2022. Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail. (Sergei Bobylev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

In this handout photo taken from video and released by Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on Friday, Oct. 28, 2022, a Ka-52 helicopter gunship of the Russian air force fires rockets at a target at an unknown location in Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin sent forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP, File)

Ukrainian soldiers fire artillery at Russian positions near Bakhmut in Ukraine’s Donetsk region, on Sunday, Nov. 20, 2022. Russian President Vladimir Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail. (AP Photo/LIBKOS, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with mothers of military personnel at his Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow, Russia, on Friday, Nov. 25, 2022. Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail. (Alexander Shcherbak, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a Christmas service at the Annunciation Cathedral in Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, on Friday, Jan. 6, 2023. Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas on Jan. 7, in accordance with the Julian calendar. Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin departs a ceremony for the Russian Olympic Committee’s medalists of the XXIV Olympic Winter Games in Beijing and members of the Russian Paralympic team in the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, Tuesday, April 26, 2022. Putin sent Russian forces into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, and appears determined to prevail. (AP Photo, File)

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Vladimir Putin says he learned from his boyhood brawls in his native St. Petersburg: “If you want to win a fight, you have to carry it through to the end, as if it were the most decisive battle of your life.”

That lesson, cited in the most recent biography of the Russian president, seems to be guiding him as his invasion of Ukraine suffers setbacks and stalemates. The Kremlin strongman, who started the war on Feb. 24, 2022, and could end it in a minute, appears to be determined to prevail, ruthlessly and at all costs.

Stoking his countrymen this month on the 80th anniversary of the Battle of Stalingrad that turned around Moscow’s fortunes in World War II, he said: “The willingness to go beyond for the sake of the Motherland and the truth, to do the impossible, has always been and remains in the blood, in the character of our multiethnic people.”

But so far, Putin’s gamble in invading his smaller and weaker neighbor seems to have backfired spectacularly and created the biggest threat to his more than two-decade-long rule.

HISTORY AND MODERN ROADBLOCKS

He began the “special military operation” in the name of Ukraine’s demilitarization and “denazification,” seeking to protect ethnic Russians, prevent Kyiv’s NATO membership and to keep it in Russia’s “sphere of influence.” While he claims Ukraine and the West provoked the invasion, they say just the opposite — that it was an illegal and brazen act of aggression against a country with a democratically elected government and a Jewish president whose relatives were killed in the Holocaust.

Putin laid the foundation for the invasion with a 5,000-word essay in 2021, in which he questioned Ukraine’s legitimacy as a nation. That was only the latest chapter in a long obsession with the country and a determination to correct what he believes was a historical mistake of letting it slip from Moscow’s orbit. He reached back three centuries, to Peter the Great, to support his quest to reconquer rightful Russian territory.

But rectifying history soon hit modern roadblocks.

“Literally everything that he set out to do has gone disastrously wrong,” said British journalist Philip Short, who published his biography, “Putin,” last year.

Despite armed interventions in Chechnya, Syria and Georgia, Putin overestimated his military and underestimated Ukrainian resistance and Western support. Russian media try to boost his authority with images of a bare-chested Putin riding a horse, shooting at a military firing range and dressing down government officials on TV, but the war has exposed his shortcomings and the weakness of his military, intelligence services and some economic sectors.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, center, speaks as Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, left, and Chief of the General Staff Gen. Valery Gerasimov attend a meeting with senior military officers in Moscow, Russia, Wednesday, Dec. 21, 2022. (Sergey Fadeichev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Ukrainian forces have liberated more than half the territory Russia seized. The war has killed tens of thousands on both sides, caused widespread destruction, and induced not only Ukraine but Sweden and Finland to seek NATO membership. It has increased the security threat to Russia and scuttled decades of Russia’s integration with the West, bringing international isolation.

Increasingly, Putin seems to be improvising in a conflict much longer and more difficult than he expected. For example, he’s threatened to use nuclear weapons, then backed off. The strategy is familiar from his lifelong passion, judo: “You must be flexible. Sometimes you can give way to others if that is the way leading to victory,” Putin recounted in flattering 2015-17 interviews with American director Oliver Stone.

In Putin’s view, an aggressive West wants to crush Russia. His narrative, along with increasingly repressive measures to stifle domestic dissent, has galvanized patriotic support among many of his countrymen. But it runs up against an inefficient, top-down power structure inherited from the Soviet Union, against the interconnected world’s porous borders, and against the sacrifices Russians are suffering firsthand.

AN ERRATIC BUT DETERMINED LEADER

In interviews with The Associated Press, Short, other analysts and a former Kremlin insider describe the 70-year-old Putin as an erratic, weakened leader, rigid and outdated in his thinking, who overreached and is in denial about the difficulties.

They say he seems concerned about waning, though still strong, domestic public opinion — albeit from unreliable polls. Mostly isolated due to COVID-19 concerns and his personal security, Putin speaks with a small set of advisers, but they appear reluctant to provide honest assessments.

Observers see a long, grinding war that Putin is determined to win, with his way out hard to predict.

“It’s not Putin that rules Russia. It’s circumstances which rule Putin,” said Tatiana Stanovaya, senior fellow of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Short believes the Kremlin leader “has painted himself into a corner. … He will be looking for ways to push ahead, but I don’t think he’s found them.” Giving up is unlikely, Short said, recalling that “his character was always to double down and fight harder.”

Fiona Hill, who served in the past three U.S. administrations and is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, believes Putin wanted to win quickly in Ukraine, install a new president in Kyiv and force it to join Belarus in a Slavic union with Russia. A successor would run Russia, she said, with Putin elevating himself to lead the larger alliance.

But now, according to Stanovaya, “It feels like there is not any hopes that the conflict can be solved any other way than militarily. And this is scary.”

WHAT’S AHEAD

Analysts see several scenarios for Putin, depending on battlefield developments. The scenarios, not mutually exclusive, range from what could be his biggest nightmare — a coup or uprisings like those he saw as a KGB agent in East Germany in 1989, in the USSR in 1991 or Ukraine in 2004 and 2014 — to winning reelection next year. That would extend what is already the longest rule of any Kremlin leader since Josef Stalin.

Dmitry Oreshkin, a political analyst and professor at Free University in Riga, Latvia, said Putin could revise his goals in Ukraine, declaring he achieved them by establishing a land corridor from Russia to Crimea and taking over the Donetsk and Luhansk regions in the east. Then he could announce, “We punished them. We showed them who is the boss in the house. We have defeated all NATO countries,” Oreshkin added.

But Kyiv has shown no willingness to cede territory, and for Putin to sell this as a victory, Orsehkin believes “he needs to convince himself that he defeated Ukraine. And he understands better than anyone that, in fact, he lost.”

As military setbacks mount, Russians are withdrawing morally and psychologically, and thinking, “Yes, we see that something is wrong in the war, but we do not want to know,” according to Oreshkin.

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a meeting with mothers of military personnel at his Novo-Ogaryovo residence outside Moscow, Russia, on Friday, Nov. 25, 2022.(Alexander Shcherbak, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Such tuning out, along with economic hardships, could blow back on Putin, he said, perhaps this spring, as Russians ask, “You promised victory, so where is it?”

Former Putin speechwriter Abbas Gallyamov said the Russian president doesn’t admit mistakes or defeats, and “desperately needs a victory just to prove the point that he’s a strongman.”

Even some in the military are turning critical, he said.

“When he becomes hated by more than half — and we’re driving in this direction — the chances for a coup, elite coup, military coup, will increase,” Gallyamov said, giving a timeline of 2024 “plus a couple of years.”

Stanovaya and Short believe no uprising is imminent.

“Even if people are suffering, and they can be discontented and angry, there is no way to make it political,” Stanovaya said.

Gallyamov sees a way out for Putin if he can gain recognition of “new territories, plus a declaration of NATO that it stops expansion, for example, or Ukrainian introduction into their constitution of their neutral status ... or their declaration that Russian will be the second official language.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin gestures while speaking during a news conference following a meeting of the State Council at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia on Thursday, Dec. 22, 2022. (Sergey Guneyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

DEATH OR SUCCESSION

Another possibility is Putin dying in office, but CIA Director William Burns is skeptical.

“There are lots of rumors about President Putin’s health, and as far as we can tell, he’s entirely too healthy,” Burns, a former U.S. ambassador to Moscow, told the Aspen Security Forum in Colorado in July.

Short said Putin has established such tight security controls and rival power centers that he’s more likely to suffer “a totally unanticipated heart attack than to be overthrown by the people around him.”

He and Hill believe Putin will eventually look for a successor. Gallyamov lists “technocrats” such as Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin and Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin as possibilities. Hill said Dmitry Medvedev, whom Putin tapped as president from 2008 to 2012, “seems to be auditioning for that role again.”

For the moment, Putin remains very much in charge. In his authorized 2000 biography, he noted: “There are always a lot of mistakes made in war. ... You have to take a pragmatic attitude. And you have to keep thinking of victory.”

When a reporter asked him in December if his “special military operation” in Ukraine has been taking too long, Putin replied with a Russian idiom about big goals being achieved incrementally: “The hen pecks grain by grain.”

Russian President Vladimir Putin speaks in an interview with the Russia-1 TV channel in the Bocharov Ruchei residence in the Black Sea resort of Sochi, Russia, on Friday, June 3, 2022. (Mikhail Metzel, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Then-Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin swims while in the Siberian region of Tuva during a vacation on Monday, Aug. 3, 2009. (Alexei Druzhinin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a Christmas service at the Annunciation Cathedral in Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, on Friday, Jan. 6, 2023. Orthodox Christians celebrate Christmas on Jan. 7, in accordance with the Julian calendar. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Then-Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin is seen riding a horse in the mountains of the Siberian region of Tuva, during his vacation on Monday, Aug. 3, 2009. (Alexei Druzhinin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Russian President Vladimir Putin, left, drives a motorbike decorated with a Russian national flag, with Crimean leader Sergei Aksenov, in sidecar, and Sevastopol Gov. Mikhail Razvozhaev, behind, during the Babylon’s Shadow bike show camp in Sevastopol, Crimea, on Saturday, Aug. 10, 2019. (Alexei Druzhinin, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP)

Russian President Vladimir Putin, center, and Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, right, review warships before the main naval parade marking Russian Navy Day in the Gulf of Finland, at St. Petersburg, Russia, on Sunday, July 31, 2022. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

From left, Vladimir Saldo, the head of the Kherson region; Yevgeny Balitsky, the head of the Zaporizhzhia region; Russian President Vladimir Putin, center; Denis Pushilin, head of the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic; and Leonid Pasechnik, head of the self-proclaimed Luhansk People’s Republic, pose at a ceremony to sign treaties to illegally annex Ukrainian territories at the Kremlin in Moscow, on Friday, Sept. 30, 2022, in a sharp escalation of the war in Ukraine. (Grigory Sysoyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Follow AP’s coverage of the war in Ukraine at https://apnews.com/hub/russia-ukraine

The increasingly complicated Russia-Ukraine crisis, explained

How the world got here, what Russia wants, and more questions, answered.

by Jen Kirby and Jonathan Guyer

A military trainer with Ukraine’s 112th Territorial Defense Brigade works with civilians during a military exercise outside Kyiv on February 5. The Ministry of Defense created defense brigades in Ukraine’s main cities because of the risk of invasion by Russia, which is amassing troops at the border.

Editor’s note, Wednesday, February 23 : In a Wednesday night speech, Russian President Vladimir Putin said that a “special military operation” would begin in Ukraine. Multiple news organizations reported explosions in multiple cities and evidence of large-scale military operations happening across Ukraine. Find the latest here .

Russia has built up tens of thousands of troops along the Ukrainian border, an act of aggression that could spiral into the largest military conflict on European soil in decades.

The Kremlin appears to be making all the preparations for war: moving military equipment , medical units , even blood , to the front lines. President Joe Biden said this week that Russia had amassed some 150,000 troops near Ukraine . Against this backdrop, diplomatic talks between Russia and the United States and its allies have not yet yielded any solutions.

On February 15, Russia had said it planned “ to partially pull back troops ,” a possible signal that Russian President Vladimir Putin may be willing to deescalate. But the situation hasn’t improved in the subsequent days. The US alleged Putin has in fact added more troops since that pronouncement, and on Friday US President Joe Biden told reporters that he’s “convinced” that Russia had decided to invade Ukraine in the coming days or weeks. “We believe that they will target Ukraine’s capital Kyiv,” Biden said.

Get in-depth coverage about Russia’s war on Ukraine.

Why Ukraine?

Learn the history behind the conflict and what Russian President Vladimir Putin has said about his war aims .

The stakes of Putin’s war

Russia’s invasion has the potential to set up a clash of nuclear world powers . It’s destabilizing the region and terrorizing Ukrainian citizens . It could also impact inflation , gas prices , and the global economy.

How other countries are responding

The US and its European allies have responded to Putin’s aggression with unprecedented sanctions , but have no plans to send troops to Ukraine , for good reason .

How to help

Where to donate if you want to assist refugees and people in Ukraine.

And the larger issues driving this standoff remain unresolved.

The conflict is about the future of Ukraine. But Ukraine is also a larger stage for Russia to try to reassert its influence in Europe and the world, and for Putin to cement his legacy . These are no small things for Putin, and he may decide that the only way to achieve them is to launch another incursion into Ukraine — an act that, at its most aggressive, could lead to tens of thousands of civilian deaths, a European refugee crisis, and a response from Western allies that includes tough sanctions affecting the global economy.

The US and Russia have drawn firm red lines that help explain what’s at stake. Russia presented the US with a list of demands , some of which were nonstarters for the United States and its allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Putin demanded that NATO stop its eastward expansion and deny membership to Ukraine, and that NATO roll back troop deployment in countries that had joined after 1997, which would turn back the clock decades on Europe’s security and geopolitical alignment .

These ultimatums are “a Russian attempt not only to secure interest in Ukraine but essentially relitigate the security architecture in Europe,” said Michael Kofman, research director in the Russia studies program at CNA, a research and analysis organization in Arlington, Virginia.

As expected, the US and NATO rejected those demands . Both the US and Russia know Ukraine is not going to become a NATO member anytime soon.

Some preeminent American foreign policy thinkers argued at the end of the Cold War that NATO never should have moved close to Russia’s borders in the first place. But NATO’s open-door policy says sovereign countries can choose their own security alliances. Giving in to Putin’s demands would hand the Kremlin veto power over NATO’s decision-making, and through it, the continent’s security.

Now the world is watching and waiting to see what Putin will do next. An invasion isn’t a foregone conclusion. Moscow continues to deny that it has any plans to invade , even as it warns of a “ military-technical response ” to stagnating negotiations. But war, if it happened, could be devastating to Ukraine, with unpredictable fallout for the rest of Europe and the West. Which is why, imminent or not, the world is on edge.

The roots of the current crisis grew from the breakup of the Soviet Union

When the Soviet Union broke up in the early ’90s, Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, had the third largest atomic arsenal in the world. The United States and Russia worked with Ukraine to denuclearize the country, and in a series of diplomatic agreements , Kyiv gave its hundreds of nuclear warheads back to Russia in exchange for security assurances that protected it from a potential Russian attack.

Those assurances were put to the test in 2014, when Russia invaded Ukraine. Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula and backed a rebellion led by pro-Russia separatists in the eastern Donbas region. ( The conflict in eastern Ukraine has killed more than 14,000 people to date .)

Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian-installed head of Crimea, Sergei Aksyonov, far right, attend a rally at Red Square in Moscow, Russia, on March 18, 2014, after Putin annexed Crimea from Ukraine.

Russia’s assault grew out of mass protests in Ukraine that toppled the country’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych (partially over his abandonment of a trade agreement with the European Union). US diplomats visited the demonstrations, in symbolic gestures that further agitated Putin.

President Barack Obama, hesitant to escalate tensions with Russia any further, was slow to mobilize a diplomatic response in Europe and did not immediately provide Ukrainians with offensive weapons.

“A lot of us were really appalled that not more was done for the violation of that [post-Soviet] agreement,” said Ian Kelly, a career diplomat who served as ambassador to Georgia from 2015 to 2018. “It just basically showed that if you have nuclear weapons” — as Russia does — “you’re inoculated against strong measures by the international community.”

But the very premise of a post-Soviet Europe is also helping to fuel today’s conflict. Putin has been fixated on reclaiming some semblance of empire, lost with the fall of the Soviet Union. Ukraine is central to this vision. Putin has said Ukrainians and Russians “ were one people — a single whole ,” or at least would be if not for the meddling from outside forces (as in, the West) that has created a “wall” between the two.

“It’s not about Russia. It’s about Putin”: An expert explains Putin’s endgame in Ukraine

Ukraine isn’t joining NATO in the near future, and President Joe Biden has said as much. The core of the NATO treaty is Article 5, a commitment that an attack on any NATO country is treated as an attack on the entire alliance — meaning any Russian military engagement of a hypothetical NATO-member Ukraine would theoretically bring Moscow into conflict with the US, the UK, France, and the 27 other NATO members.

But the country is the fourth largest recipient of military funding from the US, and the intelligence cooperation between the two countries has deepened in response to threats from Russia.

“Putin and the Kremlin understand that Ukraine will not be a part of NATO,” Ruslan Bortnik, director of the Ukrainian Institute of Politics, said. “But Ukraine became an informal member of NATO without a formal decision.”

Which is why Putin finds Ukraine’s orientation toward the EU and NATO (despite Russian aggression having quite a lot to do with that) untenable to Russia’s national security.

Demonstrators with Ukrainian national flags and posters march in the center of Kharkiv, Ukraine, on February 5. Kharkiv is Ukraine’s second largest city, just 25 miles from some of the tens of thousands of Russian troops massed at the border.

The prospect of Ukraine and Georgia joining NATO has antagonized Putin at least since President George W. Bush expressed support for the idea in 2008. “That was a real mistake,” said Steven Pifer, who from 1998 to 2000 was ambassador to Ukraine under President Bill Clinton. “It drove the Russians nuts. It created expectations in Ukraine and Georgia, which then were never met. And so that just made that whole issue of enlargement a complicated one.”

No country can join the alliance without the unanimous buy-in of all 30 member countries, and many have opposed Ukraine’s membership, in part because it doesn’t meet the conditions on democracy and rule of law.

All of this has put Ukraine in an impossible position: an applicant for an alliance that wasn’t going to accept it, while irritating a potential opponent next door, without having any degree of NATO protection.

Why Russia is threatening Ukraine now

The Russia-Ukraine crisis is a continuation of the one that began in 2014. But recent political developments within Ukraine, the US, Europe, and Russia help explain why Putin may feel now is the time to act.

Among those developments are the 2019 election of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a comedian who played a president on TV and then became the actual president. In addition to the other thing you might remember Zelensky for , he promised during his campaign that he would “reboot” peace talks to end the conflict in eastern Ukraine , including dealing with Putin directly to resolve the conflict. Russia, too, likely thought it could get something out of this: It saw Zelensky, a political novice, as someone who might be more open to Russia’s point of view.

President-elect Volodymyr Zelensky claps during his inauguration in the Ukrainian parliament in Kyiv on May 20, 2019.

What Russia wants is for Zelensky to implement the 2014 and ’15 Minsk agreements, deals that would bring the pro-Russian regions back into Ukraine but would amount to, as one expert said, a “Trojan horse” for Moscow to wield influence and control. No Ukrainian president could accept those terms, and so Zelensky, under continued Russian pressure, has turned to the West for help, talking openly about wanting to join NATO .

Public opinion in Ukraine has also strongly swayed to support for ascension into Western bodies like the EU and NATO . That may have left Russia feeling as though it has exhausted all of its political and diplomatic tools to bring Ukraine back into the fold. “Moscow security elites feel that they have to act now because if they don’t, military cooperation between NATO and Ukraine will become even more intense and even more sophisticated,” Sarah Pagung, of the German Council on Foreign Relations, said.

Putin tested the West on Ukraine again in the spring of 2021, gathering forces and equipment near parts of the border . The troop buildup got the attention of the new Biden administration, which led to an announced summit between the two leaders . Days later, Russia began drawing down some of the troops on the border.

Putin’s perspective on the US has also shifted, experts said. To Putin, the chaotic Afghanistan withdrawal (which Moscow would know something about) and the US’s domestic turmoil are signs of weakness.

Putin may also see the West divided on the US’s role in the world. Biden is still trying to put the transatlantic alliance back together after the distrust that built up during the Trump administration. Some of Biden’s diplomatic blunders have alienated European partners, specifically that aforementioned messy Afghanistan withdrawal and the nuclear submarine deal that Biden rolled out with the UK and Australia that caught France off guard.

Europe has its own internal fractures, too. The EU and the UK are still dealing with the fallout from Brexit . Everyone is grappling with the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. Germany has a new chancellor , Olaf Scholz, after 16 years of Angela Merkel, and the new coalition government is still trying to establish its foreign policy. Germany, along with other European countries, imports Russian natural gas, and energy prices are spiking right now . France has elections in April , and French President Emmanuel Macron is trying to carve out a spot for himself in these negotiations.

From left, French President Emmanuel Macron and Russian President Vladimir Putin conduct a joint press conference after their talks on February 7, in Moscow.

Those divisions — which Washington is trying very hard to keep contained — may embolden Putin. Some experts noted Putin has his own domestic pressures to deal with, including the coronavirus and a struggling economy, and he may think such an adventure will boost his standing at home, just like it did in 2014 .

Diplomacy hasn’t produced any breakthroughs so far

A few months into office, the Biden administration spoke about a “stable, predictable” relationship with Russia . That now seems out of the realm of possibility.

The White House is holding out the hope of a diplomatic resolution, even as it’s preparing for sanctions against Russia, sending money and weapons to Ukraine, and boosting America’s military presence in Eastern Europe. (Meanwhile, European heads of state have been meeting one-on-one with Putin in the last several weeks.)

Late last year, the White House started intensifying its diplomatic efforts with Russia . In December, Russia handed Washington its list of “legally binding security guarantees ,” including those nonstarters like a ban on Ukrainian NATO membership, and demanded answers in writing. In January, US and Russian officials tried to negotiate a breakthrough in Geneva , with no success. The US directly responded to Russia’s ultimatums at the end of January .

In that response, the US and NATO rejected any deal on NATO membership, but leaked documents suggest the potential for new arms control agreements and increased transparency in terms of where NATO weapons and troops are stationed in Eastern Europe.

Russia wasn’t pleased. On February 17, Moscow issued its own response , saying the US ignored its key demands and escalating with new ones .

One thing Biden’s team has internalized — perhaps in response to the failures of the US response in 2014 — is that it needed European allies to check Russia’s aggression in Ukraine. The Biden administration has put a huge emphasis on working with NATO, the European Union, and individual European partners to counter Putin. “Europeans are utterly dependent on us for their security. They know it, they engage with us about it all the time, we have an alliance in which we’re at the epicenter,” said Max Bergmann of the Center for American Progress.

US troops exit a transport aircraft in Rzeszow, Poland, on February 6, as tensions between the NATO alliance and Russia continue to intensify.

What happens if Russia invades?

In 2014, Putin deployed unconventional tactics against Ukraine that have come to be known as “hybrid” warfare, such as irregular militias, cyber hacks, and disinformation.

These tactics surprised the West, including those within the Obama administration. It also allowed Russia to deny its direct involvement. In 2014, in the Donbas region, military units of “ little green men ” — soldiers in uniform but without official insignia — moved in with equipment. Moscow has fueled unrest since , and has continued to destabilize and undermine Ukraine through cyberattacks on critical infrastructure and disinformation campaigns .

It is possible that Moscow will take aggressive steps in all sorts of ways that don’t involve moving Russian troops across the border. It could escalate its proxy war, and launch sweeping disinformation campaigns and hacking operations. (It will also probably do these things if it does move troops into Ukraine.)

But this route looks a lot like the one Russia has already taken, and it hasn’t gotten Moscow closer to its objectives. “How much more can you destabilize? It doesn’t seem to have had a massive damaging impact on Ukraine’s pursuit of democracy, or even its tilt toward the West,” said Margarita Konaev, associate director of analysis and research fellow at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

And that might prompt Moscow to see more force as the solution.

There are plenty of possible scenarios for a Russian invasion, including sending more troops into the breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine, seizing strategic regions and blockading Ukraine’s access to waterways , and even a full-on war, with Moscow marching on Kyiv in an attempt to retake the entire country. Any of it could be devastating, though the more expansive the operation, the more catastrophic.

Russian and Belarusian forces conduct training exercises at a firing range in the Brest region of Belarus on Feburary 3.

A full-on invasion to seize all of Ukraine would be something Europe hasn’t seen in decades. It could involve urban warfare, including on the streets of Kyiv, and airstrikes on urban centers. It would cause astounding humanitarian consequences, including a refugee crisis. The US has estimated the civilian death toll could exceed 50,000 , with somewhere between 1 million and 5 million refugees. Konaev noted that all urban warfare is harsh, but Russia’s fighting — witnessed in places like Syria — has been “particularly devastating, with very little regard for civilian protection.”

The colossal scale of such an offensive also makes it the least likely, experts say, and it would carry tremendous costs for Russia. “I think Putin himself knows that the stakes are really high,” Natia Seskuria, a fellow at the UK think tank Royal United Services Institute, said. “That’s why I think a full-scale invasion is a riskier option for Moscow in terms of potential political and economic causes — but also due to the number of casualties. Because if we compare Ukraine in 2014 to the Ukrainian army and its capabilities right now, they are much more capable.” (Western training and arms sales have something to do with those increased capabilities, to be sure.)

Such an invasion would force Russia to move into areas that are bitterly hostile toward it. That increases the likelihood of a prolonged resistance (possibly even one backed by the US ) — and an invasion could turn into an occupation. “The sad reality is that Russia could take as much of Ukraine as it wants, but it can’t hold it,” said Melinda Haring, deputy director of the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center.

What happens now?

Ukraine has derailed the grand plans of the Biden administration — China, climate change, the pandemic — and become a top-level priority for the US, at least for the near term.

“One thing we’ve seen in common between the Obama administration and the Biden administration: They don’t view Russia as a geopolitical event-shaper, but we see Russia again and again shaping geopolitical events,” said Rachel Rizzo, a researcher at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center.

The United States has deployed 3,000 troops to Europe in a show of solidarity for NATO and will reportedly send another 3,000 to Poland , though the Biden administration has been firm that US soldiers will not fight in Ukraine if war breaks out. The United States, along with other allies including the United Kingdom, have been warning citizens to leave Ukraine immediately. The US shuttered its embassy in Kyiv this week , temporarily moving operations to western Ukraine.

The Biden administration, along with its European allies, is trying to come up with an aggressive plan to punish Russia , should it invade again. The so-called nuclear options — such as an oil and gas embargo, or cutting Russia off from SWIFT, the electronic messaging service that makes global financial transactions possible — seem unlikely, in part because of the ways it could hurt the global economy. Russia isn’t an Iran or North Korea; it is a major economy that does a lot of trade, especially in raw materials and gas and oil.

A worker at a compressor station for the Nord Stream 2 offshore natural gas pipeline, in Ust-Luga, Russia, in July 2021. Once operational, the Nord Stream 2 pipeline will supply gas from Russia to Germany.

“Types of sanctions that hurt your target also hurt the sender. Ultimately, it comes down to the price the populations in the United States and Europe are prepared to pay,” said Richard Connolly, a lecturer in political economy at the Centre for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Birmingham.

Right now, the toughest sanctions the Biden administration is reportedly considering are some level of financial sanctions on Russia’s biggest banks — a step the Obama administration didn’t take in 2014 — and an export ban on advanced technologies. Penalties on Russian oligarchs and others close to the regime are likely also on the table, as are some other forms of targeted sanctions. Nord Stream 2 , the completed but not yet open gas pipeline between Germany and Russia, may also be killed if Russia escalates tensions.

Putin himself has to decide what he wants. “He has two options,” said Olga Lautman, senior fellow at the Center for European Policy Analysis. One is “to say, ‘Never mind, just kidding,’ which will show his weakness and shows that he was intimidated by US and Europe standing together — and that creates weakness for him at home and with countries he’s attempting to influence.”

“Or he goes full forward with an attack,” she said. “At this point, we don’t know where it’s going, but the prospects are very grim.”

This is the corner Putin has put himself in, which makes a walk-back from Russia seem difficult to fathom. That doesn’t mean it can’t happen, and it doesn’t eliminate the possibility of some sort of diplomatic solution that gives Putin enough cover to declare victory without the West meeting all of his demands. It also doesn’t eliminate the possibility that Russia and the US will be stuck in this standoff for months longer, with Ukraine caught in the middle and under sustained threat from Russia.

But it also means the prospect of war remains. In Ukraine, though, that is everyday life.

“For many Ukrainians, we’re accustomed to war,” said Oleksiy Sorokin , the political editor and chief operating officer of the English-language Kyiv Independent publication.

“Having Russia on our tail,” he added, “having this constant threat of Russia going further — I think many Ukrainians are used to it.”

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The neoliberal battle for Ukraine’s reconstruction

The country’s postwar future is almost as riven as the war itself.

By Lily Lynch

At a breakfast discussion at Davos in January 2023, the BlackRock CEO Larry Fink said that Ukraine’s postwar recovery could become “a beacon to the rest of the world about the power of capitalism”. The scene could have been a parody of Russian propaganda: the head of an American asset firm telling a rapt crowd of the Western business and political elite that Ukraine’s reconstruction would not only be a cash cow but would be touted as a capitalist success story – presumably something to congratulate themselves about at future breakfasts in Davos. For Fink, Ukraine’s reconstruction presented not just a business opportunity but an ideological one. If Western political leaders saw the war in Ukraine as an occasion to reinvigorate EU and Nato enlargement, then Fink and his ilk viewed it as an opportunity to revive a waning faith in capitalism .

The idea sounds somehow familiar. Fink’s words reflect the continuation of a more than 30-year project adopted by – and in some ways, imposed on – Ukraine and its neighbours. The “disaster capitalism” of the current war was preceded by the administration of 1990s “shock therapy”, a series of radical neoliberal reforms following the fall of the Soviet Union, from which the country never fully recovered. The current war has introduced an innovation on the old formula: the fusion of neoliberal economic policies with cowboy advances in technology, particularly artificial intelligence (AI) and digitalisation. Wartime Ukraine has already seen a dramatic influx of Western donor funds, consultants, experts, engineers and Silicon Valley venture capital. The result has been radical experiments in the introduction of AI-enhanced platforms for mine clearance and the rapid collation of commercial satellite data (both supplied by Peter Thiel’s Palantir); and economic strategies like the “fast state”, a Ukrainian government proposal that envisions a state so streamlined that it “disappears in one’s own efficiency”.

Ukraine’s reconstruction will be an unimaginably daunting task. The World Bank recently assessed that it would cost close to $500bn. Beyond the staggering cost in human life, war has devastated the economy: in the first year of the conflict, the country lost between 30-35 per cent of its GDP. Poverty more than quadrupled and one in three families are now food insecure . Over 15 per cent of Ukraine’s territory – comprising some of the most fertile farmland on Earth – is now contaminated with landmines and unexploded ordnance.

With devastation of this magnitude, Ukraine insists that reconstruction cannot wait until the war ends. In fact, the ideological and technological foundations of Ukraine’s reconstruction are being built now. Yet, as the political economist Oleksandr Svitych told me, the current strategy is misguided, reflecting “the global and still dominant liberal rationality, whereby everything must be modelled according to the market”.

Ukraine’s reconstruction is complicated by how it had already been mired in economic crises for years prior to Russia ’s war. When the country gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, the early transition was ruinous. Privatisation of state property was rapid and largely arbitrary. An oligarchy crystallised in the 1990s, and proved to be one of the country’s most resilient institutions.

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“Post-Soviet transformation turned out to be de-modernising rather than modernising, with no new vector of development to replace a Soviet project which had itself been stagnating by the 1970s,” the sociologist Volodymyr Ishchenko writes in his book Towards the Abyss: Ukraine from Maidan to War . Through deindustrialisation, jobs disappeared. And soon, so did people. On the eve of independence, Ukraine had a population of 52 million; in 2020, it was just 44 million. Many of its well-educated, highly skilled labour force sought work abroad, and in 2020, Ukraine was one of the top recipients of migrant remittances in Europe with respect to GDP.

Volodymyr Zelensky ’s party Servant of the People (SN) won power in 2019 in part due to his popular TV series of the same name, which satirised this post-Soviet condition. But while Zelensky’s populist campaign capitalised on dissatisfaction with the status quo, once in office, Svitych said a “turbo-regime of essentially neoliberal reforms” was introduced, including budget cuts, sales of public property and slashing of labour protections. Meanwhile, technology was adopted as a symbol of the modern government, and a ministry of digital transformation was established. Though it would be easy to dismiss as a gimmick, the idea built on one of Ukraine’s undeniable strengths: the country’s burgeoning IT sector. IT exports tripled to nearly $7bn a year between 2016 and 2021 alone. The “start-up nation” idea has become integral to Ukrainian national identity in wartime.

Yet some of the government’s early policies drew criticism. Beginning in 2020, Zelensky attempted to introduce reforms that would limit the role of trade unions and scale back regulations around hiring, firing and management. This drew backlash from the EU as it conflicted with the bloc’s “social market economy”.

Luke Cooper, Director of PeaceRep’s Ukraine programme at the London School of Economics, said that “while Ukraine’s trade unions had initially been successful in mounting opposition to reforms to the labour code that reduced collective bargaining rights, these were passed after the full-scale invasion in the context of martial law (with protests forbidden)”. The war also prompted further liberalisation, sometimes as a requirement of international aid: last year’s $15.6bn loan from the International Monetary Fund was reportedly conditional on Kyiv cutting back on social expenditures.

The government’s “fast state” scheme marries liberalisation with technology. The wildly popular app Diia, which was funded by the US Agency for International Development (USAID), places “the state in a smartphone”. It allows citizens to access a digital passport (the first in the world), birth certificate, register the birth of a child, and even report Russian collaborators. The app will also be critical to Ukraine’s war reconstruction efforts, as users can use the app to log war damage to property. With typical bombast, Ukraine’s Western partners are touting Diia as a revolutionary tool that will transform the globe. At an event showcasing the app in Washington last year, USAID administrator Samantha Power said that where Ukraine was known as the bread basket of Europe, the country would now also be renowned for the app, “an open source, digital public good”, a gift to the world. That objective would be fulfilled with Washington’s help.

The war in Ukraine has also been a testing ground for AI. The term “algorithm war” has been used to describe the race to develop and apply new technologies on the battlefield. For Western tech companies, the war was an opportunity to test their pioneering technologies in real time. The Silicon Valley firm Palantir has furnished Ukraine with cutting-edge AI that allows it to rapidly collate information from several sources, including commercial satellite data and app messages shared by soldiers on the ground. Previously, hundreds of analysts would have been required to do the same. Technology provided by Palantir can also map safe routes for Ukrainian drones, allowing them to circumvent air defences and Russian jammers.

Other Western companies have been assigned significant roles in Ukraine. Along with JP Morgan, BlackRock is assisting in the creation of a reconstruction bank, the Development Fund of Ukraine, which will be registered in Luxembourg; BlackRock will also coordinate investments in the economy. Ukraine “shouldn’t be talking to [BlackRock] or other big asset-manager funds whose model is very financialised and poorly calibrated to Ukraine’s specific needs,” Cooper at LSE told me. These needs include rebuilding critical infrastructure, providing housing to the internally displaced, and growing Ukraine’s production capacity. Predictably, Russian officials have seized on BlackRock’s involvement, claiming that Kyiv has “sold itself” to American firms. (Of course, officials there have said nothing of their own country’s long-running relationship with BlackRock, a major investor in Russian banking and energy enterprises until 2022.)

Critics are wary that foreign donors have reinforced rather than challenged the prevailing neoliberal approach of Western firms. “If you read USAID’s programmatic documentation, it emphasises the need for ‘entrepreneurship’, ‘empowerment’ and ‘resilience’,” Svitych, the political economist, said. “It may seem natural and even humane that donors encourage Ukrainian citizens to take control of their lives and become self-sufficient. The downside of this approach, however, is that it downplays structural inequalities – such as poor public infrastructure or lack of adequate labour protections – and injustices which the state – not individuals – has the mandate and capacity to redress.”

Western donors have also promoted hollow anti-corruption politics, which play several important functions in Ukraine. The World Bank defines corruption as “the abuse of public office for private gain”, but that definition shields the private sector. It does not capture some major forms of malfeasance, such as the use of offshore networks, that do not involve the abuse of public office. Anti-corruption discourse is also employed as a catch-all excuse for the catastrophic failures of Ukraine’s transition to capitalism. In this self-serving view, the system itself wasn’t responsible; the failures of capitalism can be blamed on a few malign individuals.

Unsurprisingly, tech solutionism has also merged with anti-corruption politics: Diia has been touted as an antidote to corruption. As Zelensky has said of the app, “a computer has no friends or godfathers, and doesn’t take bribes”. But it is also incapable of empathy, which may prove desirable when cutting social benefits. A “new social contract” announced by the government in March 2023 envisions a reduced role of the state, slashing its support for citizens to a bare minimum. The new plan involves the digitisation of benefit payments as a way of “strengthening control” over their allocation. In practice, this means that fewer people will be determined eligible for government assistance.

Yet Cooper noted that there have also been tentative signs that the government is reversing some of the “liberalisation excesses” of recent years, such as rolling back unusually generous corporate tax rates. Cooper maintains that this shift was precipitated by wartime necessity. “You can’t fight a war with free-market economics,” he said. “You can’t make such enormous increases in defence spending without ending up with a state-dominated economy. And you can’t do that without raising taxes.” 

Ukrainian officials have also indicated that they might be more discerning about foreign investors. Last year, the finance minister Sergii Marchenko gave a speech at the London Ukraine Recovery Conference that reflected this shift. “Traditionally, we were open to any form of money,” he said. “Now we are not. If you want to invest in Ukraine, you must accept the priorities of Ukraine.” The nationalisation of strategic assets throughout the war has also prompted a backlash among some supporters in Washington.

Among Ukraine’s most daunting tasks will be convincing the 6.5 million citizens who have fled the war to return and rebuild the country. The government is in an unenviable position: to maintain interest from foreign investors, who are typically drawn to the region for its cheap labour force, it will also need to ensure the repatriation of refugees, who won’t be keen to return if only low-paying jobs await them.

Cooper stressed that the “turbo liberal regime” of the past must be abandoned for good. “Fundamental to all of this will be actively growing the incomes of the working population and not relying on the myth of ‘trickle-down economics’.” The availability of good jobs will also be essential to reducing dependency on post-conflict foreign aid.

Ukraine’s recovery will take generations. There is no doubt that “shock therapy 2.0” has provided a valuable military, technological and economic testing ground for liberal ideologues, Western governments and Silicon Valley companies. But the more important question – whether these things will also deliver durable development, opportunity and security to Ukraine – leads to a far more ambiguous conclusion.

[See also: After Kursk: Who’s winning now? ]

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Watch | PM Modi in Ukraine: Will it change India’s stand on Russia conflict?

Pm modi did what many saw as a major u-turn in foreign policy - arriving in kyiv for a visit western countries have been pressing him to do since the russia-ukraine war began.

Updated - August 23, 2024 11:09 pm IST

Published - August 23, 2024 11:05 pm IST

Six weeks after his Moscow move , PM Narendra Modi arrived in Kyiv . Was the Prime Minister’s mission in Ukraine just about geopolitical balancing, or does New Delhi now essay a more ambitious role in mediating in the Russia-Ukraine war?

This week, Mr Modi did what many saw as a major U-turn in foreign policy - arriving in Kyiv for a visit Western countries have been pressing him to do since the Russia-Ukraine war began in February 2022. The visit was not just his first - it is the first visit by an Indian Prime Minister to Ukraine since its independence in 1991.

All eyes were on the optics, and the outcomes of the visit, but also on whether Mr Modi’s formulation of the war - India’s position on the war is that here are no victors on the battlefield, solutions come from dialogue and diplomacy - something Mr Modi repeated in Poland the day before the Kyiv visit, where he paid respects at World War 2 memorials, including a square named after an Indian maharajah who had sheltered about 1000 Polish children fleeing the world war.

How big was the shift implied by Modi’s Ukraine Visit? Here is how New Delhi had approached the war so far

- No criticism of Russia at the UN/Abstention on votes

- PM Modi did not accept Ukraine’s request to participate in the G20 last year

- India has not cut its trade or oil imports from Russia, in fact they grew multifold- from about 0.5% of India’s total imports to 44% this month

- India had not so far accepted Ukraine’s request to supply telecom, medical and construction equipment for help in reconstruction

- Finally, India has not been part of peace initiatives- and disassociated from June Swiss Peace summit document

So, the question. Why did PM Modi go to Kyiv now?

- In order to preserve a balanced approach to the conflict in Ukraine, after his visit to Moscow

- The visit will blunt sharp criticism from the US of the Moscow visit, and “disappointment” from Zelenskyy over Modi’s embrace of Putin- although the MEA denied the visit to Kyiv came due to pressure from the US

- With the War progressing for two and half years now- and Russia continuing to occupy Ukrainian territory- Ukraine has opened a new front in the Russian oblast of Kursk- it is clear that the best case scenario is now a frozen conflict, not an outright win for either side

- Next month, Modi will be at the UN for the Summit of the Future- and New Delhi may have felt the Kyiv visit is important if India’s voice is to be heard on global conflict

- While the government has maintained India’s strategic autonomy, the fact is that India’s perceived bias in favour of Russia in the war has been bleeding into other ties with European countries- and it is hoped that the visit to Poland and Ukraine will stem that

What should we watch most closely now?

- Russia’s reaction

- India’s position on War- and whether there is any shift

- Efforts at mediation/ Peace process in November -

Supplies to Ukraine- as per Kyiv’s requests

Modi’s next visit to Russia for BRICS

Worldview take

By travelling to Kyiv at this time, PM Modi has attempted a tricky balance that was perhaps necessitated by his visit to Moscow in July. While personal travel, and face to face summits have some importance, foreign policy is built on a much longer-term pattern of actions, and it remains to be seen whether New Delhi is shifting its position on Ukraine in a broader context as well. Remember- a balanced position on the war does not indicate a balance in ties with Kyiv and Moscow- as India’s ties with Russia are far deeper and broader.

Reading recommendations

The Zelensky Effect By Olga Onuch and Henry E. Hale

War in Ukraine: Making Sense of a Senseless Conflict by Medea Benjamin and Nicolas J. S. Davies

Displaced: Civilians in the Russia-Ukraine War by Valery Panyushkin

Russia- Ukraine War: The Conflict and Its Global Impact by Ajay Singh

Indian Diplomacy: Beyond Strategic Autonomy Kindle Edition by Rajendra Abhyankar

India at the Global High Table The Quest for Regional Primacy and Strategic Autonomy Teresita C. Schaffer and Howard B. Schaffer

The Second Homeland: Polish Refugees in India by Anuradha Bhattacharjee

Presentation: Suhasini Haidar

Production: Shibu Narayan, Kanishkaa Balachandran

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As Ukraine Pushes Into Russia, Its Next Steps Are Unclear

American officials are not convinced that Ukraine intends to hold its position in Russia long term.

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A soldier dressed in military gear holds a gun. In the background, a person carrying a plastic bag walks past a brick building.

By Eric Schmitt Helene Cooper and Julian E. Barnes

Reporting from Washington

More than two weeks into Ukraine’s incursion into western Russia, Ukrainian politicians have begun talking about establishing a buffer zone there. But how much farther Ukraine might try to advance into Russia, and how long it plans to stay, is unclear, U.S. officials said.

Ukrainian forces have pushed out in different directions after quickly breaking through thinly manned border defenses early this month. They have broadened their incursion wherever they find the least resistance, setting the contours of what could be a defensible buffer zone to protect Ukrainian towns and villages, which President Volodymyr Zelensky now says is a primary objective of the attack.

After the first week of fighting, Ukraine claimed to control almost 400 square miles of Russian territory — an area roughly the size of Los Angeles.

But American officials are not convinced that Ukraine intends to hold its position in Russia long term. Ukrainian forces have not been digging the kind of extensive trenches necessary to protect soldiers and equipment from enemy fire, if Russia musters enough firepower to repel the attack. They have not been laying minefields to slow down a counterattack, nor have they constructed barriers to slow down Russian tanks, the officials say.

“What the war has shown us so far is that the way to slow a military down is through ‘defense in depth,’” said Seth G. Jones, a senior vice president with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, in a reference to the strategy of using multiple layers of defensive positioning. “If they are not defending territory with a mixture of trenches and mines, it is going to be virtually impossible to hold territory.”

And the more territory Ukraine captures, the greater the challenge it will be for the some 10,000 Ukrainian troops there to defend it, U.S. officials and analysts said.

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Ukraine: Conflict at the Crossroads of Europe and Russia

Introduction

Why is Ukraine a geopolitical flash point?

What are Russia’s broad interests in Ukraine?

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

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

What are Russia’s objectives in Ukraine?

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Lessons from Ukraine

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Russia and European security

Arm Kyiv for self-defense

United States

Strategic wake-up call

East-West balancer

A strategic alliance with risks

Turn toward Moscow

Global South

International order

Nuclear deterrence

Future of warfare

Parallels with WWI

All m easures short of war

Unpleasant trade-offs

The human cost

About the Authors

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

How Ukraine's history differs from Putin's version

Understanding Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine

Introduction

Russian Aggression in Ukraine & Russian Defense

Protracted Conflicts: Moldova and Georgia

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Michael Kimmage and Maria Lipman

Putin’s Ukraine gamble seen as biggest threat to his rule

HISTORY AND MODERN ROADBLOCKS

AN ERRATIC BUT DETERMINED LEADER

WHAT’S AHEAD

DEATH OR SUCCESSION

The increasingly complicated Russia-Ukraine crisis, explained

The roots of the current crisis grew from the breakup of the Soviet Union