an essay on russia and ukraine war

• Foreign Affairs
• CFR Education
• Newsletters

Climate Change

Global Climate Agreements: Successes and Failures

Backgrounder by Lindsay Maizland December 5, 2023 Renewing America

• Defense & Security
• Diplomacy & International Institutions
• Energy & Environment
• Human Rights
• Politics & Government
• Social Issues

Myanmar’s Troubled History

Backgrounder by Lindsay Maizland January 31, 2022

• Europe & Eurasia
• Global Commons
• Middle East & North Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa

How Tobacco Laws Could Help Close the Racial Gap on Cancer

Interactive by Olivia Angelino, Thomas J. Bollyky , Elle Ruggiero and Isabella Turilli February 1, 2023 Global Health Program

• Backgrounders
• Special Projects

Nonproliferation, Arms Control, and Disarmament

CFR Welcomes Lori Esposito Murray

July 25, 2024

• Centers & Programs
• Books & Reports
• Independent Task Force Program
• Fellowships

Oil and Petroleum Products

Academic Webinar: The Geopolitics of Oil

Webinar with Carolyn Kissane and Irina A. Faskianos April 12, 2023

• Students and Educators
• State & Local Officials
• Religion Leaders
• Local Journalists

NATO's Future: Enlarged and More European?

Virtual Event with Emma M. Ashford, Michael R. Carpenter, Camille Grand, Thomas Wright, Liana Fix and Charles A. Kupchan June 25, 2024 Europe Program

• Lectureship Series
• Webinars & Conference Calls
• Member Login

Ukraine: Conflict at the Crossroads of Europe and Russia

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

Introduction

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

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

• NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization)
• United States
• 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?

More From Our Experts

How Will the EU Elections Results Change Europe?

In Brief by Liana Fix June 10, 2024 Europe Program

Iran Attack Means an Even Tougher Balancing Act for the U.S. in the Middle East

In Brief by Steven A. Cook April 14, 2024 Middle East Program

Iran Attacks on Israel Spur Escalation Concerns

In Brief by Ray Takeyh April 14, 2024 Middle East Program

Top Stories on CFR

How the U.S. Can Counter Disinformation From Russia and China

Expert Brief by Dana S. LaFon August 14, 2024

Africa and the Gulf Are Growing Closer. Will It Increase Global Tensions?

In Brief by Alexandra Dent and Mariel Ferragamo August 8, 2024

Middle East and North Africa

Mapping the Growing U.S. Military Presence in the Middle East

Article by Jonathan Masters and Will Merrow August 6, 2024

ASSOCIATION OF THE UNITED STATES ARMY

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

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

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

Laying the Groundwork: Situational Implications

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

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

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

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

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

Russian Strategic Assessment

Russia’s strategic ends can be summarized as: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Russian Strategic Assessment: Summary

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

Ukrainian Strategic Assessment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ukrainian Strategic Assessment: Summary

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• “The Commander-in-Chief of Ukraine’s Armed Forces on How to Win the War,” Economist , 1 November 2023.
• Jack Watling, “The War in Ukraine is Not a Stalemate,” Foreign Affairs , 3 January 2023.
• Carl von Clausewitz, On War , trans. and eds. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), 77.
• Raphael Lemkin, Axis Rule in Occupied Europe: Laws of Occupation, Analysis of Government, Proposals for Redress (Concord, NH: Rumford Press, 1944), 80–82. 
• Guy Faulconbridge and Vladimir Soldatkin, “Putin Vows to Fight on In Ukraine Until Russia Achieves its Goals,” Reuters , 14 December 2023.
• Harriet Morris, “An Emboldened, Confident Putin Says There Will Be No Peace in Ukraine Until Russia’s Goals are Met,” Associated Press , 14 December 2023.
• Amos Fox, “Myths and Principles in the Challenges of Future War,” Association of the United States Army , Landpower Essay 23-7, 4 December 2023.
• “China’s Position on Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine,” US-China Economic and Security Review Commission , 31 December 2023; Robbie Gramer, “Iran Doubles Down on Arms for Russia,” Foreign Policy , 3 March 2023; Kim Tong-Hyung, “North Korea Stresses Alignment with Russia Against US and Says Putin Could Visit at an Early Date,” ABC News , 20 January 2024.
• Tong-Hyung, “North Korea Stresses Alignment with Russia”; “China’s Position on Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine”; Darlene Superville, “The White House is Concerned Iran May Provide Ballistic Missiles to Russia for Use Against Ukraine,” Associated Press , 21 November 2023.
• Matthew Luxmoore and Michael Gordon, “Russia’s Army Learns from Its Mistakes in Ukraine,” Wall Street Journal , 24 September 2023.
• Margarita Konaev and Owen Daniels, “The Russians Are Getting Better,” Foreign Affairs , 6 September 2023.
• Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds, Stormbreak: Fighting Through Russian Defences in Ukraine’s 2023 Offensive (London: Royal United Services Institute, 2023), 15–19.
• Bryan Frederick et. al., Escalation in the War in Ukraine: Lessons Learned and Risks for the Future (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2023), 77.
• “Bluffing or Not, Putin’s Declared Deployment of Nuclear Weapons to Belarus Raises Tensions,” Associated Press , 27 July 2023.
• “Russia’s Medvedev Warns of Nuclear Response if Ukraine Hits Missile Launch Sites,” Reuters , 11 January 2024.
• “Ukraine War: Putin Confirms First Nuclear Weapons Moved to Belarus,” BBC News , 17 June 2023.
• Steve Gutterman, “The Week in Russia: Carnage and Clampdown,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty , 19 January 2024.
• Samantha de Bendern et al., “Prigozhin May Be Dead, but Putin’s Position Remains Uncertain,” Chatham House , 24 August 2024.
• Gutterman, “The Week in Russia: Carnage and Clampdown.” 
• Robert Picheta et al., “Pro-War Putin Critic Igor Girkin Sentenced to Four Years in Prison on Extremist Charges,” CNN , 25 January 2024.
• Robert Coalson, “How the Russian State Ramped Up the Suppression of Dissent in 2023: ‘It Worked in the Soviet Union, and It Works Now,’” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty , 31 December 2023.
• Ben Hodges, “Ukraine Update with Lieutenant General (Retired) Ben Hodges,” Revolution in Military Affairs [podcast], 1 January 2024.
• Sven Gunnar Simonsen, “Putin’s Leadership Style: Ethnocentric Patriotism,” Security Dialogue 31, no. 3 (2000): 377–380. 
• Hodges, “The Ukraine Update.” 
• Jack Watling and Nick Reynolds, Meatgrinder: Russian Tactics in the Second Year of Its Invasion of Ukraine (London: Royal United Services Institute, 2023), 3–8.
• The Kyiv Post keeps a running tally of these figures and other Russian losses in a ticker across the top of their homepage: https://www.kyivpost.com .
• Christopher Miller, “Kyrylo Budanov: The Ukrainian Military Spy Chief Who ‘Likes the Darkness,’” Financial Times , 20 January 2024.
• “Ukraine in Maps: Tracking the War with Russia,” BBC News , 20 December 2023.
• Constant Meheut, “Russia Makes Small Battlefield Gains, Increasing Pressure on Ukraine,” New York Times , 22 December 2023.
• Jaroslav Lukiv, “Ukraine Seeks Extra Soldiers – President Zelenskyy,” BBC News , 19 December 2023.
• Lukiv, “Ukraine Seeks Extra Soldiers.”
• Lukiv, “Ukraine Seeks Extra Soldiers.” 
• Miller, “Kyrylo Budanov: The Ukrainian Military Spy Chief Who ‘Likes the Darkness.’” 
• Christopher Cavoli, “SACEUR Cavoli – Remarks at Rikskonferensen, Salen, Sweden,” NATO Transcripts , 8 February 2023.
• Olivia Olander, “Ukraine Intends to Push Russia Entirely Out, Zelenskyy Says as Counteroffensive Continues,” Politico , 11 September 2022; Guy Davies, “Zelenskyy to ABC: How Russia-Ukraine War Could End, Thoughts on US Politics and Putin’s Weakness,” ABC News , 9 July 2023.
• Angela Charlton, “Ukraine’s a Step Closer to Joining the EU. Here’s What It Means, and Why It Matters,” Associated Press , 14 December 2023.
• Visual Journalism Team, “Ukraine in Maps: Tracking the War with Russia,” BBC News , 20 December 2023.
• “Russia-Ukraine Tensions: Putin Orders Troops to Separatist Regions and Recognizes Their Independence,” New York Times , 21 February 2022.
• John Mearsheimer, “Assessing the Conventional Balance: The 3:1 Rule and Its Critics,” International Security 13, no. 4 (1989): 65–70; Michael Kofman, “Firepower Truly Matters with Michael Kofman,” Revolution in Military Affairs [podcast], 3 December 2023.
• Vladimir Isachenkov, “Putin Warns West: Moscow Has ‘Red Line’ About Ukraine, NATO,” Associated Press , 30 November 2021.
• Maria Kostenko et al., “As the War Grinds On, Ukraine Needs More Troops. Not Everyone Is Ready to Enlist,” CNN , 19 November 2023.
• Valerii Zaluzhnyi, “Modern Positional Warfare and How to Win It,” Economist , accessed 24 January 2024.
• Trevor Dupuy, Numbers, Predictions, and War: Using History to Evaluate Combat Factors and Predict the Outcome of Battles (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1979), 12.
• Army Training Publication 3-06, Urban Operations (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2022), 5-23.
• Zaluzhnyi, “Modern Positional Warfare and How to Win It.” 
• Olena Harmash and Tom Balmforth, “Ukrainian Troops Face Artillery Shortages, Scale Back Some Operations – Commander,” Reuters , 18 December 2023.
• Kofman, “Firepower Truly Matters”; Franz-Stefan Gady, “A Russo-Ukrainian War Update with Franz-Stefan Gady,” Revolution in Military Affairs [podcast], 30 November 2023.
• Joseph Ataman, Frederick Pleitgen and Dara Tarasova-Markina, “Russia’s Relentless ‘Meat Assaults’ Are Wearing Down Outmanned and Outgunned Ukrainian Forces,” CNN , 23 January 2024.
• David Brennan, “Avdiivka on Edge as Russians Proclaim ‘Breakthrough,’” Newsweek , 24 January 2024.
• “Ep 106: John McManus on the U.S. Army’s Pacific War,” School of War [podcast], 16 January 2024.

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

A nation must think before it acts.

• America and the West
• Middle East
• National Security
• Central Asia
• China & Taiwan
• Expert Commentary
• Conversations
• Intern Corner
• Newsletters
• Press Contact
• Upcoming Events
• People, Politics, and Prose
• Briefings, Booktalks, and Conversations
• The Benjamin Franklin Award
• Event and Lecture Archive
• Ties That Bind: NATO at 75 and Beyond
• Chain Reaction
• Bear Market Brief
• Baltic Ways
• Report in Short
• Our Mission
• Board of Trustees
• Board of Advisors
• Research Programs
• Audited Financials
• PA Certificate of Charitable Registration
• Corporate Partnership

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

You May Also be Interested in

Engaging russia over syria: managing peripheral conflict and narrowing interests.

  Executive Summary The United States is examining how to narrow core objectives in the Middle East to focus...

Russia’s Forever Wars: Syria and the Pursuit of Great Power Status

September 2021 marks the sixth anniversary of the Russian Federation’s intervention in the Syrian civil war. A patient, flexible...

Zapad 2021 and Russia’s Potential for Warfighting

  According to press information, on 10 September 2021, the Russian Armed Forces plan to start the one-week-long active...

PUBLICATIONS

Through its publications, INSS aims to provide expert insights, cutting-edge research, and innovative solutions that contribute to shaping the national security discourse and preparing the next generation of leaders in the field.

Publications

Russia's war in ukraine: identity, history, and conflict.

By Jeffrey Mankoff CSIS

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine constitutes the biggest threat to peace and security in Europe since the end of the Cold War. On February 21, 2022, Russian president Vladimir Putin gave a bizarre and at times unhinged  speech  laying out a long list of grievances as justification for the “special military operation” announced the following day. While these grievances included the long-simmering dispute over the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the shape of the post–Cold War security architecture in Europe, the speech centered on a much more fundamental issue: the legitimacy of Ukrainian identity and statehood themselves. It reflected a worldview Putin had long expressed, emphasizing the deep-seated unity among the Eastern Slavs—Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians, who all trace their origins to the medieval Kyivan Rus commonwealth—and suggesting that the modern states of Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus should share a political destiny both today and in the future. The corollary to that view is the claim that distinct Ukrainian and Belarusian identities are the product of foreign manipulation and that, today, the West is following in the footsteps of Russia’s imperial rivals in using Ukraine (and Belarus) as part of an “ anti-Russia project .”

Throughout Putin’s time in office, Moscow has pursued a policy toward Ukraine and Belarus predicated on the assumption that their respective national identities are artificial—and therefore fragile. Putin’s arguments about foreign enemies promoting Ukrainian (and, in a more diffuse way, Belarusian) identity as part of a geopolitical struggle against Russia echo the way many of his predecessors refused to accept the agency of ordinary people seeking autonomy from tsarist or Soviet domination. The  historically minded Putin  often invokes the ideas of thinkers emphasizing the organic unity of the Russian Empire and its people—especially its Slavic, Orthodox core—in a form of what the historian  Timothy Snyder  calls the “politics of eternity,” the belief in an unchanging historical essence.

The salience that Putin and other Russian elites assign to the idea of Russian-Ukrainian-Belarusian unity helps explain the origins of the current conflict, notably why Moscow was willing to risk a large-scale war on its borders when neither Ukraine nor NATO posed any military threat. It also suggests that Moscow’s ambitions extend beyond preventing Ukrainian NATO membership and encompass a more thorough aspiration to dominate Ukraine politically, militarily, and economically.

Read the rest of the report at CSIS - 

Jeffrey Mankoff  is a Distinguished Research Fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies, Center for Strategic Research at National Defense University. 

The views expressed are the authors own and do not reflect those of the National Defense University, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government. 

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.

Editorial: Adam Lammon, Ted Reinert, Constanze Stelzenmüller

Web design: Rachel Slattery

• Media Relations
• Terms and Conditions
• Privacy Policy

Russia’s war in Ukraine, explained

Putin’s invasion in February began Europe’s first major war in decades.

by Jen Kirby and Jonathan Guyer

Russia is bombarding major cities in Ukraine, more than a week into a war where Moscow has faced setbacks on the battlefield — yet seems undeterred from its campaign to take Ukraine.

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.

On March 4, Russia seized Zaporizhzhia , one of Europe’s largest nuclear power plants. Russian shelling of the southeastern Ukraine facility set off a fire , which Ukrainian officials warned could set off a nuclear disaster. It took hours, but the fire was extinguished, and international monitors said that they do not detect elevated radiation levels and that the fire did not damage “essential” equipment. US officials have said Russia now appears to be in control of the plant.

But the incident was a reminder of how dangerous this war in Ukraine is becoming, and how uncertain and confusing things still are on the ground. Russian troops were advancing toward Kyiv, and thousands and thousands are fleeing in advance of a possible siege on the city.

The Russian military has made advances in the south, and are gaining in the area of Kherson, a port city on the Black Sea whose control is reportedly contested , and Mariupol, on the Sea of Azov. Russian bombardment of these cities has resulted in humanitarian issues , with bridges and roads damaged by the fighting and dwindling access to food, clean water, medicine, and electricity in certain areas. Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, experienced heavy Russian fire this week, and strikes have heavily damaged residential areas .

Ukrainian and Russian officials met in early March, and tentatively agreed on the need to humanitarian corridors — basically, safe zones for civilians to flee and supplies to pass through — but did not reach agreements on a larger ceasefire. As of March 6, multiple attempts to evacuate Ukrainian civilians have been halted because of Russian shelling.

Putin’s attempt to redraw the map of Europe risks becoming the most devastating conflict on the continent since World War II. Already, it is causing an astounding humanitarian crisis: Hundreds, perhaps thousands , of civilians have died, and more than 1.5 million people have fled the violence so far, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, making it the fastest-growing refugee crisis in Europe since World War II.

The battle for Ukraine began in the early morning hours, local time, on February 24, when Russian President Vladimir Putin launched what he called a “special military operation” into the country of about 40 million. He claimed the Russian military seeks “demilitarization and denazification” but not occupation; attacks shortly followed from multiple fronts and targeted toward multiple cities.

Ukraine’s resistance has complicated Russia’s efforts to seize the country. Russian forces have not made the progress they likely thought they would at the start of the campaign. The Russian military’s early strategy has perplexed some experts and observers . But the more protracted this war becomes, the more catastrophic it will be.

The United States and its allies in Europe and the United Kingdom imposed the toughest financial sanctions ever on Russia after the first incursion, and have only built on these penalties since. On February 26, the United States and European countries agreed to block some Russian banks from SWIFT, a global messaging system, which will essentially prevent those institutions from doing any global transactions, a punishment that allies had previously hesitated to pursue . Already, Russia’s economy is reeling from the impact of these penalties .

This sustained international pressure, and Ukraine’s resistance, may still not be enough to force Russia to end its military campaign. That leaves Ukraine — and the world — in a perilous and unpredictable moment.

Ukraine is under siege

After months of Putin building up tens of thousands of troops near the Ukrainian border and a series of failed diplomatic talks, Russia is now waging a full-out war on Ukraine.

Tensions escalated quickly when, on February 21, Putin delivered an hour-long combative speech that essentially denied Ukrainian statehood . He recognized the independence of two breakaway regions in eastern Ukraine where Moscow has backed a separatist rebellion since 2014 and sent so-called peacekeeping forces into the region. As experts said , that was likely just the beginning, setting the stage for a much larger conflict.

Days later, that larger conflict materialized. On February 24, Putin announced he was launching an assault “to defend people who for eight years are suffering persecution and genocide by the Kyiv regime,” a reference to a false claim about the government in Ukraine. He demanded Ukraine lay down its weapons or be “ responsible for bloodshed .”

Soon after Putin’s speech, reports emerged of explosions around cities, including Kharkiv in eastern Ukraine and the capital Kyiv . The Ukrainian foreign minister called it “a full-scale invasion of Ukraine.” By the afternoon in Ukraine, Russian troops and tanks had entered the country on three fronts : from Belarus in the north, from the east of Ukraine, and from the south.

The Russian military has targeted critical infrastructure, like airports, with airstrikes and has launched more than 400 missiles , as of March 1. As a senior US defense official said on February 26, “There’s no doubt in our mind that civilian infrastructure and civilian areas are being hit as a result of these barrages.”

The main battlefronts are in Kyiv’s outskirts; in southern Ukraine, including the major city of Mariupol; and in eastern Ukraine around Kharkiv, the country’s second-largest city.

“They had maximal war aims,” Michael Kofman, research director in the Russia studies program at CNA, said in an interview posted on Twitter on February 25. “They had a military operation that’s now in progress, first to try to achieve regime change, encircle the capital, and try to overthrow the Ukrainian government, and then a much larger set of pincer movements to encircle and envelope Ukrainian forces. Try to do this quickly and force surrender of isolated pockets.”

But the Russian army has not been able to completely roll over Ukrainian forces, and some analysts have suggested Moscow may have been surprised at Ukraine’s resistance. Pentagon officials said that, as of March 4, Russia has committed about 92 percent of its combat power so far. Ukraine’s airspace remains contested.

Samuel Charap, a senior political scientist at RAND Corporation, told a panel of reporters on February 28 that Russia’s military performance has been odd. “In other words, some of the things that I would have expected — like the air force taking a major role — have not happened.”

“Seems to me there was a lot of war optimism and a sense that the [Ukrainian] government would fall with just a little push,” Charap continued. “And that didn’t happen. I wouldn’t read too much into that about the ultimate course of the war, though. This is still a situation where the deck unfortunately is stacked against the Ukrainians, despite their bravery.”

Putin himself has called on the Ukrainian army to “take power into their own hands and overthrow” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, a sign that Putin remains focused on regime change. “According to the available intelligence, the enemy marked me as a target No. 1 and my family as the target No. 2,” said Zelenskyy, speaking on the night of February 24.

Efforts to stop the fighting have so far failed. On February 28, high-level officials from Russia and Ukraine met at the Ukraine-Belarus border, and again on March 3. Russia has continued to insist that a ceasefire requires “demilitarization” and neutrality for Ukraine, but Ukraine has only continued to push for more military aid and ascension into Western bodies like the EU, even signing an EU membership application amid the fighting .

Both Ukraine and Russia have suggested they will hold another round of talks in coming days. Across conflicts, there is usually a severe escalation in fighting before ceasefires, as everyone attempts to maximize their leverage. “I think that they want to inflict maximum damage to pressure the Ukrainian government to seek some sort of ceasefire that is effectively a surrender,” said Margarita Konaev, associate director of analysis and research fellow at Georgetown’s Center for Security and Emerging Technology.

The toll of this young conflict is growing. The UN has said that, as of March 6, more than 350 civilians have been confirmed killed and hundreds more have been wounded; Ukraine’s emergency services puts the civilian death toll at 2,000 people as of March 2 . Ukrainian officials have said about 11,000 Russian troops have been killed in the fighting, as of March 6, but American and European estimates of Russian casualties have been substantially lower . The Russian government has reported nearly 500 soldier deaths . Experts said all these statistics should be treated with a great deal of caution because of the fog of war and the incentives both Russia and Ukraine have to push a particular narrative.

• Why is Putin attacking Ukraine? He told us.

Ukrainian officials have also accused Russia of war crimes after reports of a shelling of an orphanage and kindergarten outside of Kyiv . Across Ukraine, thousands of civilians of all ages are enlisting to fight . Ukrainian officials called on residents to “make Molotov cocktails” to defend against the invasion. More than 1.5 million Ukrainians have fled to neighboring countries like Poland since the conflict began, according to a United Nations estimate .

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

Russia’s invasion contravenes security agreements the Soviet Union made upon its breakup in the early ’90s. At the time, Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, had the third-largest atomic arsenal in the world. The US 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.

But the very premise of a post-Soviet Europe is 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

Last year, 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 also made other demands for “security guarantees” around NATO.

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,” Steven Pifer, who from 1998 to 2000 was ambassador to Ukraine under President Bill Clinton, told Vox in January. “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.”

Ukraine 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. But Ukraine isn’t joining NATO in the near future, and President Joe Biden has said as much. Still, Moscow’s demand was largely seen as a nonstarter by the West, as NATO’s open-door policy says sovereign countries can choose their own security alliances.

Though Putin has continued to tout the threat of NATO, his speech on February 21 showed that his obsession with Ukraine goes far beyond that. He does not see the government in Ukraine as legitimate.

“Ukraine is not just a neighboring country for us. It is an inalienable part of our own history, culture and spiritual space,” he said, per the Kremlin’s official translation . “Since time immemorial, the people living in the south-west of what has historically been Russian land have called themselves Russians.”

The two countries do have historical and cultural ties, but as Vox’s Zack Beauchamp explained , Putin’s “basic claim — that there is no historical Ukrainian nation worthy of present-day sovereignty — is demonstrably false .”

As experts noted, it is difficult to square Putin’s speech — plus a 2021 essay he penned and other statements he’s made — with any realistic diplomatic outcome to avert conflict. It was, essentially, a confession that this wasn’t really about NATO, said Dan Baer, the acting director of the Europe program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a former ambassador to the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. “It was about that he doesn’t think Ukraine has a right to exist as a free country,” he said before Putin’s escalation on the night of February 23.

This is the culmination of eight years of tensions

This isn’t the first time Russia has attacked Ukraine. In 2014, Russia annexed the Crimean Peninsula, invaded eastern Ukraine, and backed Russian separatists in the eastern Donbas region. That conflict has killed more than 14,000 people to date .

Russia’s assault grew out of mass protests in Ukraine that toppled the country’s pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych, which began 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.”

Since then, corruption has persisted in the Ukrainian government, and the country ranks in the bottom third of the watchdog group Transparency International ’s index.

Ukraine’s far-right presence has grown and become somewhat normalized, and there are government-aligned fascist militias in the country. But Moscow has drawn out those issues to advance false claims about genocide and other attacks on civilians as a way to legitimize the separatist movement in eastern Ukraine and to create a pretext for invasion. In his prerecorded speech shared on the eve of the bombardment of Ukraine, Putin said he sought the “ denazification ” of Ukraine.

To be clear: The Ukrainian government is not a Nazi regime and has not been co-opted by the far right. Zelenskyy is Jewish; he speaks proudly of how his Jewish grandfather fought against Hitler’s army .

Yet, days earlier, Putin used these sorts of claims as part of his explanation for recognizing as independent the so-called Luhansk People’s Republic and the Donetsk People’s Republic, the two territories in eastern Ukraine where he has backed separatists since 2014. “Announcing the decisions taken today, I am confident in the support of the citizens of Russia. Of all the patriotic forces of the country,” Putin said before moving troops into the regions for “peacekeeping” purposes.

At the time, most experts Vox spoke to said that looked like the beginning, not the end, of Russia’s incursion into Ukraine.

“In Russia, [it] provides the political-legal basis for the formal introduction of Russian forces, which they’ve already decided to do,” Kofman, of CNA, told Vox on February 21 . “Secondarily, it provides the legal local basis for Russian use of force in defense of these independent republics’ Russian citizens there. It’s basically political theater.”

It set “the stage for the next steps,” he added. Those next steps are now clear.

How the rest of the world is responding

The United States and its allies around the world have condemned Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and have since announced increasingly tough sanctions, intended to completely isolate Russia from the international community and inflict real economic costs.

Biden announced on the afternoon of February 24 that the United States would impose sanctions on Russian financial institutions, including cutting off Russia’s largest banks from the US financial system, and on Russian elites in Putin’s inner circle. America will also implement export controls on certain technologies . The United Kingdom and Europe added their own sanctions, imposing the “ massive ” penalties the West had been warning Putin about.

The US and its allies have only amped up the pressure since then. On February 25, the EU and US imposed sanctions on Putin himself . On February 26, the US and European countries announced an agreement to cut some (but not all) Russian banks off from SWIFT, the global messaging system that enables most international transactions, which will make it very difficult for Russia to make transactions beyond its borders. (Japan also signed on to SWIFT actions on February 27.) The US and its allies have said they will target Russia’s central bank , specifically its foreign reserves that Moscow needs to help support its currency. The US has continued to add penalties, including joining other countries in closing US airspace to Russian aircraft , and sanctioning more than a dozen oligarchs.

The United States has said it will not involve troops in any Ukrainian conflict, though more US military aid to Ukraine is on its way and the US has shored up its presence on NATO’s eastern flank. On February 24, the Pentagon said it would send 7,000 additional troops to Germany , and Secretary of State Antony Blinken said on February 26 that he was authorizing “up to $350 million” in additional military aid to Ukraine, including “further lethal defensive assistance to help Ukraine address the armored, airborne, and other threats it is now facing.”

Such aid, according to a February 26 tweet by State Department spokesperson Ned Price, will be provided “immediately” and include “anti-tank and air defense capabilities.” Other European and NATO countries are also stepping up their assistance, including Germany , which reversed a long-standing policy of not sending lethal aid to conflict zones.

• How to punish Russia for Ukraine

Russia knows that the US and its partners do not want to commit themselves militarily, and, as Putin launched his invasion, he offered an ominous warning as he touted Russia’s nuclear arsenal : “There should be no doubt that any potential aggressor will face defeat and ominous consequences should it directly attack our country.” On February 27, Putin escalated that threat by putting the country’s nuclear deterrent forces on high alert .

NATO has vowed to protect its members from any Russian aggression. On February 25, NATO announced that it was activating part of its NATO Response Force — a 40,000-troop unit modernized after the 2014 Crimea invasion — to protect allies on NATO’s eastern flank. “We are now deploying the NATO Response Force for the first time in a collective defense context. We speak about thousands of troops. We speak about air and maritime capabilities,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said .

Yet these are largely defensive measures, which means most of the punishment against Russia will come in the form of economic sanctions. Still, the West is starting to shift from an original hesitancy to impose the most severe costs on Russia over fears of what it might mean for Europe, the US, and the rest of the global economy — and what Russia might do to retaliate.

They’re not all the way there, however. For example, even the SWIFT action is expected to leave some carve-outs so Russia can still export gas to Europe . The tougher the sanctions on Russia, the harder it will hit the US and especially European economies, so leaders are still trying to soften the impact. But the fallout from these punishments — along with other measures, like the EU and United States barring Russia from their airspace — is being felt in Russia, as the ruble crashes and analysts warn of a deep recession .

• Prepare for higher gas prices thanks to Russia — and more inflation

A way out of this war is difficult to contemplate as bombs are falling on Ukraine, but the US and its allies are going to have to do careful diplomacy to isolate and put pressure on Russia in the long term — and create incentives for Moscow to stop its assault on Ukraine . The US and its allies are also likely going to have to decide how much they want, or can, support Ukraine as it battles Russia.

“The real question, I think, is going to come down to what extent the West can and will try to support and supply a long-term insurgency against Russia,” said Paul D’Anieri, an expert on Eastern European and post-Soviet politics at the University of California Riverside. “And what level of success does Russia have in fighting back against? Unfortunately, it seems like the best strategy for peace right now is when enough Russians die, that the Russians decide it’s not worth it anymore.”

• Russia-Ukraine war
• World Politics

More in this stream

Most Popular

• Why is everyone mad at Blake Lively?
• The US government has to start paying for things again
• How Raygun earned her spot — fair and square — as an Olympics breaker
• Take a mental break with the newest Vox crossword
• I feel stuck in the middle class. Will a loan help me build generational wealth?

Today, Explained

Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day.

This is the title for the native ad

More in Explainers

The truth behind the ongoing controversy over the highly memeable dancer.

The FBI is now investigating the former president’s claim of Iranian interference with his campaign.

Rumors and disinformation have fueled violence across the country.

What the attack on US troops in Iraq says about a wider Middle East war.

Bangladesh’s Sheikh Hasina is out. What comes next?

The semiconductor manufacturer announced huge job cuts and a dividend pause after losing out on AI.

Find anything you save across the site in your account

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.

[ Support The New Yorker’s award-winning journalism. Subscribe today » ]

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.

More on the War in Ukraine

How Ukrainians saved their capital .

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

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

The profound defiance of daily life in Kyiv .

The Ukraine crackup in the G.O.P.

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

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

Home — Essay Samples — War — Russia and Ukraine War

Essays on Russia and Ukraine War

Writing an essay on the war between Russia and Ukraine is of utmost importance in order to bring awareness to this ongoing conflict and its impact on the global community. This topic is particularly significant as it not only sheds light on the political and military aspects of the war, but also highlights the humanitarian crisis and human rights violations that have arisen as a result.

When writing an essay on this topic, it is crucial to thoroughly research and gather information from reliable sources in order to present a well-informed and balanced perspective. The use of credible sources such as academic journals, news articles, and official reports is essential to ensure the accuracy and reliability of the information presented in the essay.

Additionally, it is important to consider the historical, cultural, and geopolitical context of the war in order to provide a comprehensive analysis. This may involve examining the historical relationship between Russia and Ukraine, the cultural and ethnic dynamics at play, and the broader geopolitical implications of the conflict.

Furthermore, it is essential to approach this topic with sensitivity and empathy, considering the human impact of the war on individuals and communities. This may involve incorporating personal testimonies, humanitarian reports, and accounts of human rights violations in order to provide a human-centric perspective on the conflict.

Overall, writing an essay on the war between Russia and Ukraine is an opportunity to raise awareness and facilitate a deeper understanding of this complex and multifaceted issue. By approaching this topic with diligence, empathy, and a commitment to accuracy, writers can contribute to a more informed and nuanced discourse on this critical global issue.

What Makes a Good Russia and Ukraine War Essay Topics

When it comes to choosing a compelling topic for an essay on the Russia and Ukraine War, it's important to consider a few key factors. First and foremost, the topic should be relevant and timely, addressing current events and ongoing conflicts. Additionally, it's crucial to choose a topic that is both interesting and thought-provoking, allowing for in-depth analysis and critical thinking. To brainstorm and choose the best essay topic, consider the various aspects of the conflict, such as political, social, and economic implications. It's also important to think about the audience and their level of familiarity with the topic, as well as the potential for original research and unique insights. Ultimately, a good essay topic on the Russia and Ukraine War will be one that is impactful, relevant, and intellectually stimulating.

Best Russia and Ukraine War essay topics

• The role of propaganda in shaping public opinion during the Russia and Ukraine War
• The impact of the conflict on the geopolitical landscape of Eastern Europe
• The humanitarian crisis in Ukraine and its implications for international intervention
• The use of hybrid warfare and unconventional tactics in the Russia and Ukraine War
• The role of energy politics in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine
• The portrayal of the conflict in popular media and its influence on public perception
• The implications of the Russia and Ukraine War on global security and stability
• The historical and cultural roots of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine
• The role of international organizations in mediating the Russia and Ukraine War
• The impact of the conflict on the economy and infrastructure of Ukraine

Russia and Ukraine War essay topics Prompts

• Imagine you are a journalist embedded in a war zone. Describe the challenges and ethical considerations you would face in reporting on the Russia and Ukraine War.
• Write a fictional account of a civilian's experience living in a war-torn region of Ukraine, exploring the psychological and emotional toll of the conflict.
• Create a persuasive argument for or against international military intervention in the Russia and Ukraine War, considering the potential consequences and implications.
• Imagine you are a diplomat tasked with negotiating a ceasefire between Russia and Ukraine. Outline your strategy and approach, considering the competing interests and demands of both parties.
• Write a comparative analysis of the Russia and Ukraine War and another historical conflict, exploring the similarities and differences in terms of tactics, motivations, and outcomes.

Russo-ukrainian War: Unraveling The Complexities of The War in Ukraine

Russia's aggression against ukraine: a historical analysis, made-to-order essay as fast as you need it.

Each essay is customized to cater to your unique preferences

+ experts online

Reflections on Post-war Reconstruction in Ukraine

Russia's invasion of ukraine: un involvement and solutions, russia-ukraine conflict 2014-2024: motives and solutions, is russia's invasion of ukraine - the start of world war, let us write you an essay from scratch.

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

The Impact of Strategic Confrontations in The Russia-ukraine War

How russia's invasion of ukraine caused the wave of protests, the ukraine-poland border amidst conflict, how russia's invasion of ukraine affects the us, get a personalized essay in under 3 hours.

Expert-written essays crafted with your exact needs in mind

Navigating The Intricacies of Ukraine and Poland Relations

Russia's invasion of ukraine: how this destroys south africa, navigating independence: ukraine amidst and post-war, ukraine-russia war: challenges for today and solution for tomorrow, independence post-war: glimpsing into ukraine’s future, leading in war: zelensky’s strategic and humanitarian approaches, the russia-ukraine war: current status and future implications, the russian war in ukraine, exploring the russia-ukraine war: implications, independence day in the shadows of war, the geopolitical context involving nato, ukraine, and russia, post-war challenges and opportunities in ukraine-poland cooperation, united states support for ukrainian independence, the long-term implications of the russia-ukraine war on ukraine-poland relations, relevant topics.

• Vietnam War
• The Spanish American War
• Syrian Civil War
• Israeli Palestinian Conflict
• Atomic Bomb
• Nuclear Weapon
• Effects of War
• Nuclear War

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

How Russia looked the wrong way as Ukraine invaded

• Medium Text

• Attack sowed panic as thousands fled, some went missing
• Acting governor issued false reassurances
• Army chief was focused on next moves inside Ukraine
• Putin silent for whole of incursion's first day

"WE ADVISE PEOPLE TO LEAVE"

"UNDER CONTROL"

Dragon's teeth.

SHARED RESPONSIBILITY

Sign up here.

Reporting by Mark Trevelyan in London, Anastasiia Malenko in Kyiv, Gleb Stolyarov in Tbilisi; Additional reporting by Felix Light in Tbilisi and Lucy Papachristou in London, Jonathan Landay and Idrees Ali in Washington; Writing by Mark Trevelyan; Editing by Frank Jack Daniel

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. , opens new tab

Thomson Reuters

Chief writer on Russia and CIS. Worked as a journalist on 7 continents and reported from 40+ countries, with postings in London, Wellington, Brussels, Warsaw, Moscow and Berlin. Covered the break-up of the Soviet Union in the 1990s. Security correspondent from 2003 to 2008. Speaks French, Russian and (rusty) German and Polish.

Blinken arrives in Middle East seeking Gaza ceasefire, Hamas says Israel thwarts efforts

The talks to strike a deal for a truce and return of hostages held in Gaza were now at an "inflection point", a Biden administration official told reporters en route to Tel Aviv.

Advertisement

Supported by

Ukraine’s Incursion Into Russia Flips the Script on Putin

The reality of 130,000 displaced Russians and a chaotic official response may begin to puncture the official line that Russia is steadily heading toward victory.

• Share full article

By Anton Troianovski and Alina Lobzina

Anton Troianovski reported from Berlin, and Alina Lobzina from London.

Families fleeing invading Ukrainian troops sought shelter from strangers. Russian parents feared that their children might be sent into battle for the first time.

And in a televised crisis meeting on Monday, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia flipped through a white legal pad, reading aloud from handwritten notes, suggesting that his aides did not have the time to type up a speech for him as they usually do.

Ukraine’s surprise incursion into a sliver of Russia’s Kursk region last week has not shifted the overall course of the war, but it has already struck a blow well beyond the few hundred square miles of Russia that Ukraine now controls: It has thrust a Russian government and society that had largely adapted to war into a new phase of improvisation and uncertainty.

Mr. Putin has said nothing about the incursion since meeting with security and regional officials, a tense gathering in which the president at one point berated the Kursk governor for revealing the depth and breadth of Ukraine’s advance into Russia. Near the border, where, the authorities say, more than 130,000 people have fled or been evacuated, regional officials appeared unprepared for the crisis — prompting grass-roots aid initiatives to jump in.

To opposition-minded politicians, including some of the few remaining inside Russia, Ukraine’s incursion has offered a rare chance to puncture the Kremlin’s narrative that Russia is steadily heading toward victory — even if it was far from certain that Russians would blame Mr. Putin for their ills. One opposition figure, Lev Shlosberg, in the western city of Pskov, compared the state of Russian society to magma gathering beneath a volcano in which it was unclear when or how it would burst to the surface.

“Current events are, of course, intensifying the crisis,” Mr. Shlosberg said in a phone interview. “But we don’t know where and how this energy of dissatisfaction will go.”

Held by Ukraine

as of Aug. 13

Sverdlikovo

Sievierodonetsk

Area controlled

Zaporizhzhia

Sea of Azov

Ukrainian incursion

Source: Institute for the Study of War with American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project

By Veronica Penney

We are having trouble retrieving the article content.

Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and  log into  your Times account, or  subscribe  for all of The Times.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access.

Already a subscriber?  Log in .

Want all of The Times?  Subscribe .