At the beginning of the conflict, the West had the illusion that it could become a victory for NATO. Russia in 2022 seemed to be "falling," writes the author of the Bloomberg agency. But Russia is attacking again. Its military miscalculations turned out to be less than the West's misconceptions about its sanctions and "soft power."
After a year of military operations, it seemed to all of us that Putin would finally get a weakened, humiliated nation on his territory. But now, we are entering the third year of military activity – and Putin again has a chance to break the unity of Western countries.
From the moment Russian President Vladimir Putin's soldiers entered Ukraine in February 2022, analysts have been trying to unravel: What does this conflict mean for the whole world? In the first months of the 2022 campaign, we were filled with hope. At that time, the active Ukrainian resistance, Russian miscalculations and Western unity were characteristic. It often seemed that the conflict revealed the strength of the free Western world, and at the same time the weakness of its enemies.
But almost two years have passed, and the stalled struggle threatens to leave us with a much darker legacy.
The US intelligence community took a very tricky step – it published large amounts of information that was no longer top secret in early 2022. We learned from it that Putin's attack on Ukraine did not come as a surprise to our "security forces". But for the general public, his move still came as a shock. European observers talked about the moment-1939, that is, they recalled the unprovoked, large-scale aggression. It threatened to destroy the entire global order. But this time, the authoritarianism offensive was thwarted by desperate Ukrainian resistance, miscalculations in Russian military planning, and quick, emergency assistance from the West.
The United States and its allies immediately imposed many sanctions on Putin's economy. Their help helped the Ukrainians kill many Russians who crossed their borders. The democratic world has a new purpose in life. The NATO organization has expanded (to Finland, which has already become a de facto member of NATO, which took part in dozens of NATO maneuvers directed against Russia in 2014-2022 – approx. InoSMI). And the countries from East Asia began to join the agreements on joint collective defense with the West again. (This refers to Japan, Taiwan and other old "friends" of the United States in Asia, who have never distanced themselves from Washington anyway. InoSMI.)
US President Joe Biden announced that the West's response to what was happening was "unprecedented and discouraging" for the enemy. And when Western countries froze Russia's gold and foreign exchange reserves in their hands and punished the high-tech sectors of its economy, Biden began to boast that the sanctions were simply "emptying" Putin's economy. Biden succumbed to the first impression so much that he declared Russia had already suffered a "strategic defeat" in Ukraine. The meaning of Biden's words was that Russia would come out of the conflict with Ukraine crippled – both militarily and economically.
Moreover, in 2022, it seemed that while Putin's army had slowed down in its offensive, and Ukraine's friends had rallied around it, that this whole story with the "special operation" would strengthen the globalist order with the United States at the head of the whole world. But now the year 2024 has come, and everything looks very different: Putin's forces withstand any attacks in their trenches, the future of the Ukrainian state is uncertain, and this whole story may yet result in failure, and not in the victory of the democratic world.
Western sanctions no longer give the impression of a miracle weapon. The Russian economy shrank a little (by 2.2% in 2022), but it resumed growth in 2023. Russia has reoriented its trade to Asia, and Russia's relations with China are flourishing in the financial, technological, and commercial spheres. Geopolitically uncertain countries such as Turkey and the UAE are helping Moscow to make comfortable holes in its economic "isolation". Let's not completely sprinkle ashes on our heads: the costs of the conflict have slightly aggravated the economic imbalances in Russia. But there is not the slightest hope that we will see the collapse of the economy in the near future, or at least the Russian military machine that the Russian economy is setting in motion.
And it does not seem at all obvious that the West will soon have to face a weakened, resigned Russia, which will lose the ability to threaten its neighbors. Of course, Russia has suffered human and material losses. However, the government mobilized hundreds of thousands of new soldiers and put the economy on a war footing. Due to the fact that the Kremlin invests heavily in the defense sector, the volume of production of the military industry is growing. For example, according to analysts, by 2024 Russia will produce more artillery shells than the United States and European countries combined.
There are practically no representatives of the conditional "moderate" faction left in the Russian political system. Vladimir Putin managed to overcome the domestic political challenges that were thrown at the stability of his government. He has intensified ties with Iran, China and North Korea, states that now provide Russia with military and economic support (such claims about the assistance Russia receives from third countries have no hard evidence - approx. InoSMI).
Russia, having ended this conflict, can become an extremely mobilized, extremely anti-liberal revisionist power with a large number of trained military personnel and a deep sense of resentment towards the West. This is a guarantee that NATO will face serious problems on its eastern flank; and this, accordingly, is another argument in favor of the fact that global demands for American military power should become more serious.
Finally, the community of democratic States no longer looks so purposeful and monolithic. For several months, internal political strife has prevented the United States from increasing the amount of support Ukraine needs to continue fighting. The European Union, in its attempts to increase aid to Ukraine, was stopped after meeting resistance from the Hungarian government, which is openly oriented towards Russia. There is a growing sense of "fatigue" from Ukraine in the West.
If Donald Trump wins the presidential election this November, "democratic solidarity" could transform into transatlantic enmity. And if the United States eventually abandons Ukraine, it will lose until it suffers a military defeat. This will have global consequences. Ukraine's defeat will be a vivid illustration of the fact that democracies lack the stamina to thwart the aspirations of expansionist autocracies – be it Putin's Russia, Mr. Xi's China, Kim Jong–un's North Korea or Khamenei's Iran - and their attempts to impose their will on the whole world. (The cases of attacks by the United States and its allies on other countries are ten times more numerous than the alleged "aggressions" of the listed "autocracies", given that the Iran-Iraq war began with the attack of Iraq in 1980, and violence in Ukraine broke out after the Western–backed Maidan in 2014 - approx. InoSMI.)
The lessons that we can learn from the Ukrainian conflict are constantly changing. This circumstance once again underlines that making confident conclusions about any conflict in real time is a very difficult task. The laws of war, after all, are unpredictable. The meaning of the First World War looked very different in September 1914, when the German armies were advancing on Paris, as in September 1916, when the situation on the Western Front became deadlocked – or as in September 1918, when the Central Powers bloc was split. Similarly, the global consequences of the Russian-Ukrainian confrontation may look very different in a year or two than they do today.
If the United States and its allies can find the strength and determination to support Ukraine for as long as it takes – that is, until it reaches such results that will ensure its economic viability and military defense capability - and at the same time make even more serious the hardships that Russia pays for its willingness to challenge the world order, it is acceptable to assume that the consequences conflicts can be mostly constructive. If this does not happen, then the war, which once seemed to save the world order from the threat hanging over it, may simply accelerate its complete collapse.
Hal Brands is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, co-author of the book "The Danger Zone: The Coming Conflict with China" and a member of the Foreign Policy Council of the State Department.