argumentative essay russia and ukraine

Russia and Ukraine Explained and Analyzed

Smoke enveloped a Ukrainian air base in Mariupol after a Russian strike Thursday, part of Vladimir Putin’ invasion of his neighbor. Photo by AP/Evgeniy Maloletka

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

Rich barlow.

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

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

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

With Igor Lukes and Vesko Garčević

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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There are 12 comments on Russia and Ukraine Explained and Analyzed

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The War in Ukraine Is a Colonial War

By Timothy Snyder

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The realists were right

As the much-hyped counteroffensive against Russian forces stalls, the West is asking hard questions about the war in Ukraine.

By Lily Lynch

Eighteen months into the war in Ukraine the breathless hype that characterised early media coverage has curdled into doom. This is the deepest trough of despair that the wartime media has entered yet: the past month of reporting has given us new admissions about a war that increasingly appears to be locked in bloody stalemate, along with a portrait of Ukraine and its leadership shorn of the rote glorification and hero worship of the conflict’s early days. The deadlock has increasingly resembled brutal, unabating, First World War-style combat, with the Ukrainian army rapidly depleting artillery ammunition supplied by the West. Distant audiences, who always treated the war as a team sport, and Ukraine as an underdog defying the odds against a larger aggressor, are thinning out; surely many will soon turn their attention to the partisan conflict of the forthcoming US presidential election. Optimists say the change in the media’s tone is indicative of little more than the inevitable pendulum swings of war and that Ukraine may yet emerge victorious. But such a view elides a host of unavoidable realities.

At the centre of this cascade of disappointment lies Ukraine’s poor performance in the overhyped “spring counteroffensive” , which arrived several months late. Boosters in the press set expectations so high that Ukraine was practically set up for failure. “We’re about to see what a decentralised, horizontal, innovative high-tech force can do,” Jessica Berlin, a German and American political analyst, wrote in May. “Ukraine may be underfunded, undermanned and underequipped compared to Russia . But those tactical, adaptive Ukrainian strengths deliver what money can’t buy and training can’t teach. Get ready for some stunners.” In the Daily Telegraph , the soldier-turned-civilian-military-expert Hamish de Bretton-Gordon was effusive as recently as June: “As a former tank commander, I can say one thing for certain: Putin’s demoralised conscripts are utterly unprepared for the shock action now hitting their lines.”

But by most accounts, the counteroffensive has been a profound letdown. A Washington Post article published on 17 August cited a classified assessment by the US intelligence community which said that Ukraine’s counteroffensive would “fail to reach the key southeastern city of Melitopol”, meaning that Kyiv “would not fulfil its principal objective of severing Russia’s land bridge to Crimea”. Other analyses have testified to the same. As Roland Popp, strategic analyst at the Swiss Military Academy at ETH Zurich told me, “The main cause for the change in [the media’s] tune is certainly general disappointment about Ukrainian military performance in the much-anticipated ‘counteroffensive’. Military experts in Western think tanks had whipped up high expectations based on Ukrainian successes in Kharkiv and Kherson last year. They ignored the Russian ability to adapt – which is historically the main factor explaining the changing odds during wars – and overstated the effects of Western weapons technology and doctrine.”

It is said that “success has a hundred fathers but failure is an orphan”, and a rush to allocate blame for the underwhelming counteroffensive is now under way. Some Western military experts blame the Ukrainian Armed Forces’ failures on its “Soviet legacy” . And several recent articles have condemned Ukraine for refusing to follow US instruction. “The thinly disguised criticism of Ukrainian operational decision-making is also intended to distract from [their] own misjudgments,” Popp said. American officials have complained through media that Ukraine has focused too much on the city of Bakhmut and other points in the East, wasting Western-furnished artillery in crushing barrages, and asserted that Kyiv should concentrate its forces in an area around Tokmak in the south of the country and its artillery fire only on the most important targets. Through unnamed sources and leaks to the press, a story of a more frustrated US-Ukraine relationship has emerged in recent weeks. “We built up this mountain of steel for the counteroffensive. We can’t do that again,” one disappointed former US official is quoted as telling the Washington Post. “It doesn’t exist.”

[See also: History offers Ukraine slender hope for a decisive victory ]

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“They are clearly trying to show some distance from Ukraine’s decision-making even as the official line is ‘we’re with them 100 per cent’,” Ben Friedman, policy director at Defense Priorities, a foreign policy think tank, said. The Ukrainian side, on the other hand, blames the West for its reluctance to furnish it with weapons and supplies. To cite but one of many examples communicated through the press, an anonymous source in the general staff recently told the Economist that Ukraine had received just 60 Leopard tanks despite having been promised hundreds. Adding to the irritation was the disappointment at the Nato summit in Vilnius in July, where Ukraine was not granted a much hoped-for timeline for accession to the military alliance. Volodymyr Zelensky , the Ukrainian president, responded to the news in a series of furious tweets, calling the decision “unprecedented and absurd”.

But the stage was set for these deflated hopes in the war’s first weeks in 2022. Early on, reporters framed the war as one of David vs Goliath, in which Ukrainian grandmothers downed Russian drones with jars of pickles. Ukraine’s astonishing performance in Kharkiv fuelled expectations. Early mythmaking has made recent disappointments all the more bitter. “There were wishful expectations that Russia would collapse, fold early on, especially after Ukraine heroically survived the first round, and people got carried away,” Patrick Porter, the realist scholar of international relations, said.

Compounding the disillusionment is the fact that the early shock of the war has worn off, meaning it’s lost some of its initial sense of urgency – especially as war takes its toll far beyond Ukraine. “There was the initial widespread feeling of revulsion; then, people were naturally drawn towards ‘we must not compromise’, and moral and strategic maximalism,” Porter said. “That’s easier to hold when you’re not yet feeling the pain. Now, materially, there are costs everywhere.” And while the immediate convulsion of fear that accompanied the full-scale invasion was so strong that it prompted Sweden and Finland to apply to join Nato, the initial panic has since faded, and evolved into a more ambient dread about a long war of attrition, rising inflation, recession and food insecurity.

Recently, Ukraine itself has also been depicted in a more complicated light. On 19 August the New York Times published a story about Kyiv’s wartime policy of jailing conscientious objectors . Meanwhile, Zelensky’s new proposal to equate corruption with treason, transferring cases from anti-graft agencies to the security service, was met with unusually harsh condemnation in Politico . And this summer both the Guardian and BBC have published articles about Ukrainian deserters and men employing other means to avoid conscription, including barricading themselves inside their homes and using Telegram channels to warn other men about the location of roving military recruitment officials. On 24 February 2022 a presidential decree imposed martial law which forbade men aged between 18 and 60 from leaving Ukraine. But according to a BBC report in June this year , tens of thousands of men have crossed the Romanian border alone, and at least 90 men have died attempting to make the perilous crossing, either freezing to death in the mountains or by drowning in the Tisa River.

Further, the Economist recently published an article about the Ukrainian public’s waning morale. Most men eager to defend Ukraine joined the armed forces long ago, and many are now dead. The country now recruits among those effectively forced. Individually, stories about conscientious objectors, deserters, those hiding from conscription, and a war-weary public can appear anecdotal, but taken together, they begin to undermine one of the foundational tenets of the war: that Ukrainians want to fight, in the words of Joe Biden , the US president, “for as long as it takes”. And as expectations are dramatically scaled back, one cannot help but ask: for as long as it takes to do what?

As a more sober reality sets in, it’s worth asking why Western governments and the media were such effusive boosters of Ukraine’s war effort. The writer Richard Seymour has suggested that part of it was about identity formation, wherein Ukraine is emblematic of an “idealised Europe” or even democracy itself, while Russia represents Oriental despotism and authoritarianism. The war thus embodies the supposed civilisational struggle theorised by Samuel Huntington between democracies and autocracies, promoted by the Biden administration through initiatives such as its Summit for Democracy. That annual event aims to “renew democracy at home and confront autocracies abroad”, underlining the continuity between liberal opposition to the putative authoritarian affinities of Donald Trump and Russia’s war in Ukraine.

But beyond the merely symbolic there was a practical rationale for the kinds of coverage we saw in the war’s early months: the conflict in Ukraine has revived a waning Atlanticism – a long-sought aim of proponents of Nato enlargement. Just a few years ago Emmanuel Macron , the French president, declared Nato “braindead”; the war in Ukraine has brought it back to life. Finland and Sweden applied to join. Critics say that the governments of both countries used “shock doctrine” tactics to convince their respective populations to abandon their policy of neutrality, making the decision to apply for membership while the war was top news and the public was still afraid.

Some have wondered whether the media’s shift in tone – and all the anonymous messages transmitted by official US sources – presage an imminent change in policy: negotiations, a peace settlement, or ceasefire. But most experts agree that it is still too early for that. “Russia’s invasion has been a particularly brutal war, one with many atrocities,” Porter explained. “Ukrainians are unlikely to accept peace negotiations yet.” For both Russia and Ukraine, the war is a primal one, and nowhere near its end. But the new crop of articles does mark a return of a sceptical tone largely suppressed until recently. In November last year General Mark A Milley, chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, proposed a negotiated settlement to the war. Following Ukraine’s successes in Kharkiv and Kherson, he asserted that “you want to negotiate from a position of strength” and that “Russia right now is on its back”. The Biden administration promptly distanced itself from the idea. Publicly, the US pledged support for Ukraine’s total victory, but privately, many in the administration were said to have shared Milley’s scepticism. Late last month, some in media started revisiting the general’s remarks, suggesting that perhaps he had been right all along.

[See also: Putin has declared war on Russia ]

Realists, most infamously John Mearsheimer , who are highly controversial among liberal boosters of Ukraine, have long warned of the dangers of the exalted rhetoric and mythmaking among Western governments and media. In an op-ed for Politico published in spring 2022 , Porter, along with the grand strategy experts Friedman and Justin Logan, cautioned against the risk of “giving Ukraine false hope”, and stressed that “the rhetoric-policy gap could also raise excessive Ukrainian expectations of support”. Eighteen months into the war, with a dejected Zelensky chastising Nato for insufficient support, their unheeded warnings look prescient.

Instead of total victory, at summer’s end the media now appears to be girding the Western public for a long, protracted war of attrition . The editorial board of the Washington Post , citing US statistics of nearly half a million killed or injured, recently cautioned that “no end to the carnage is in sight, and calls for a negotiated solution are wishful thinking at this point”. The editorial asserts grimly that “the war could continue for years – waxing, waning or frozen”. The Centre for Strategic and International Studies has also recently warned that “the most probable outcome… is a war of attrition that has no clear outcome or time limit”. Le Monde also reported that in July a French general, Jacques Langlade de Montgros, warned that the conflict in Ukraine “is a war of attrition, set for the long term” like “two boxers in a ring, exhausting each other blow by blow, not knowing which one will call first”.

Also hanging over the grim media coverage is the 2024 US presidential election. “The Biden administration now has the difficult task of convincing the public that an attritional approach, that is, opting for a long war, can still lead to some kind of Ukrainian victory or at least a standstill in order to maintain support for continued financial and military assistance for Ukraine,” Popp said. The war in Ukraine has polarised US public opinion. According to a recent poll by CNN, 71 per cent of Republicans are against new funding for Ukraine; among Democrats, 62 per cent support it. Significantly, the war has also divided the Republican Party. At the first Republican presidential candidate debate on 23 August, the cracks in the party were on full display: the insurgent populist right, embodied in the millennial figure of Vivek Ramaswamy, hopes to see such aid diminished or eliminated entirely, while more conventional Republicans like Chris Christie and former vice-president Mike Pence expressed a commitment to continuing it. Ramaswamy said: “I think that this is disastrous, that we are protecting against an invasion across somebody else’s border, when we should use those same military resources to prevent… the invasion of our own southern border here in the United States of America.” He also mocked American deference to Zelensky, referring to him as some politicians’ “pope” to whom they paid pilgrimage while ignoring domestic catastrophes. Trump, who was not on the debate stage, called for an end to the war in an interview with Tucker Carlson, saying “that’s a war that should end immediately, not because of one side or the other, because hundreds of thousands of people are being killed”. And now, it appears that most Republicans agree with the positions of the populist candidates: 59 per cent say they believe that the US has “already done enough to support Kyiv”.

But for some, hope is not yet lost. There is new talk of a “reset” of Ukrainian strategy. In a Washington Post op-ed co-authored by David Petraeus, a retired US army general, and Frederick W Kagan, of the American Enterprise Institute, readers were cautioned against excess pessimism. The authors argued that major breakthroughs could happen at any moment, and that Ukraine is indeed making slow, steady progress, field by field. Those with similarly optimistic views argue that the media always vacillates wildly between unrealistic claims of imminent victory and maudlin pronunciations about catastrophic losses, both territorial and human, and the spectre of a war without end. But that the increasingly exhausted public – in Ukraine and the West – will be eager to accede to more war with the same enthusiasm it did in the war’s early months appears less likely by the hour.

[See also: What if Ukraine loses? ]

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This article appears in the 06 Sep 2023 issue of the New Statesman, Crumbling Britain

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War in Ukraine

Russia's invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has produced an outpouring of international support for Kyiv. The United States has led these efforts. Even before Russian forces surged across the border, the United States and many of its allies signaled their opposition to Moscow’s predatory ambitions by warning of a range of potential sanctions Russia would incur, working to mobilize a potential diplomatic coalition against Moscow, and bolstering Ukraine’s military forces. Since the invasion, the United States has taken the lead in providing Ukraine with military equipment and training, economic aid, a near-blank check of diplomatic support, intelligence of use for stymying Russia’s offensive, and threatening draconian consequences should Russia use nuclear weapons in its campaign. Increasingly fervent bipartisan calls to penalize Russia, Ukraine’s lobbying efforts for additional aid, mounting calls from many think tankers and pundits to do more on Kyiv’s behalf, and the Biden administration’s gradual increase in support for Kyiv since February all suggest the American commitment may only grow in the future.

Nevertheless, the Biden administration and other proponents of current U.S. policy have so far failed to offer a strategic argument on behalf of the costs and risks that current U.S. policy incurs in the Russia-Ukraine War. To be sure, many have defined specific objectives vis-à-vis Ukraine itself. Still, definition and discussion of how U.S. efforts in Ukraine contribute to overarching U.S. national objectives and interests are broadly lacking, reduced primarily to gesticulations toward broad principles that might justify the American response in Ukraine so far. Amid the continuing war and ongoing calls for the United States to “do more,” the question remains: what, if any, are the United States’ strategic interests in Ukraine—and how might the United States best service them?

Although often lost amid the rush of events, policymakers and pundits have been quick to imply an abiding American interest in Ukraine. Without fully elaborating on the argument or issues at hand, these claims broadly fall into two camps.

One line holds that the United States cannot tolerate Russian aggression in Ukraine because it will only encourage further aggrandizement and expanding threats to the United States. This claim comes in two forms. The narrow version holds that the danger of future aggression is from Russia specifically—that is, if Russia goes unchallenged in Ukraine, then Moscow will simply expand its ambitions, challenge the United States’ North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) allies, and ultimately threaten European security writ large. Along these lines, former ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul argues that “we have a security interest in [helping Ukraine defeat Russia]. Let’s just put it very simply: if Putin wins in Donbas and is encouraged to go further into Ukraine, that will be threatening to our NATO allies.” Likewise, former National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley asserts that the United States has an abiding concern in deterring Russian president Vladimir Putin “from thinking he can in the next five or ten years repeat this performance.” This particular concern helps explain why at least some in the Biden administration call for “weaken[ing] Russia” by bleeding it in Ukraine: as a National Security Council spokesperson put it , “one of our goals has been to limit Russia’s ability to do something like this again” by undercutting “Russia’s economic and military power to threaten and attack its neighbors.”

The broad version links the Ukraine War not to Russia per se but to potential aggrandizement by other actors, especially China. President Joe Biden himself advanced a version of this argument , writing in March that, “If Russia does not pay a heavy price for its actions, it will send a message to other would-be aggressors that they too can seize territory and subjugate other countries”; elsewhere, he asserts that “Throughout our history, we’ve learned that when dictators do not pay the price for their aggression, they cause more chaos and engage in more aggression.” Nor is this concern Biden’s alone: suggesting its bipartisan appeal , Representative Michael McCaul of Texas offers that failing to act in Ukraine would “embolden Vladimir Putin and his fellow autocrats by demonstrating the United States will surrender in the face of saber-rattling,” concluding that “U.S. credibility from Kyiv to Taipei cannot withstand another blow of this nature.”

Distinct from concerns with future aggrandizement, a second set of arguments holds that the United States has an abiding interest in Ukraine because it affects the so-called “liberal international order.” As Secretary of State Antony Blinken asserts , “the international rules-based order that’s critical to maintaining peace and security is being put to the test by Russia’s unprovoked and unjustified invasion of Ukraine.” The logic here looks to be two-fold. First, failing to back Ukraine would call into question American support for democracies worldwide, thereby undermining the viability of democracy as a way of organizing any society’s political life. As Biden explained , Ukraine was part and parcel of an ongoing “battle between democracy and autocracy, between liberty and repression”; by implication, not aiding Ukraine would set the United States back in this contest. Second, Russian aggrandizement is itself a challenge to key principles—mostly unspecified, but seemingly notions that powerful states should not use force to impose their will on weaker actors and that violations of state sovereignty should not be tolerated—upon which the liberal order supposedly rests. To ignore Russian aggression would call into question the future operation of the U.S.-backed system. As Anne Applebaum argues , the United States must be invested in the conflict since

the realistic, honest understanding of the war is an understanding that we now face a country that is revanchist, that seeks to expand its territory for ideological reasons, that wishes to end the American presence in Europe, that wishes to end the European Union, that wishes to undermine NATO and has a fundamentally different view of the world from the one that we have.

Put simply, inaction risks empowering alternate principles upon which international order would rest and which, presumably, would harm the United States.

Disturbingly, however, these claims have gone broadly unremarked. Again, the United States has run real risks—most dramatically, possible military escalation and thus a nuclear exchange with Russia—and borne real costs— including aid equivalent to the budgets of the U.S. Transportation, Labor, and Commerce Departments combined—for the sake of helping Ukraine. Many analysts claim that the escalation risks involved are lower than one might think as, for instance, Russia would not be so suicidal as to risk war with the United States and its allies. Still, billions of dollars remain at stake at a time of rising domestic resource demands, and the fact that policymakers and analysts are debating how threatening American responses are likely to be viewed in Moscow suggests the risks being run are not negligible. It may be impolitic, but sound statecraft means we ought to ask whether the game is worth the candle.

The truth is that none of the avowed U.S. interests in Ukraine stand up to scrutiny. As importantly, believing they are U.S. interests contradicts core tenets of long-established U.S. grand strategy; making policy based on such concerns risks creating further strategic dilemmas for the United States, Ukraine, and Russia in ways that may only worsen the consequences of the present conflict.

Read the full article here in The National Interest .

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Recent gains point to a growing Russian advantage in the Ukraine war

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The ongoing war in Ukraine is not featuring as prominently in western news media these days as it was earlier in the war, because it has been overshadowed by the unfolding human tragedy of the war in Gaza .

However, the war in Ukraine is still very much ongoing, and both sides are clearly suffering significant losses. Yet it appears that slowly but surely Russia is gaining ground on and off the battlefield.

The recent Ukrainian withdrawal from the stronghold of Avdiivka did make the headlines . On that sector of the front near the city of Donetsk, Russian forces have pushed beyond Avdiivka and continue to gain ground .

Russian forces have also made limited gains on other sectors of the front line .

Meanwhile, the Russian economy is increasingly mobilized for war , and the government has been able to obtain some military resources from abroad , circumventing western sanctions.

All of this means that Russia is, relative to Ukraine, in an increasingly strong position as the war enters its third year.

Russian advantage

While Russian advances are clearly costing their forces heavy losses , the Ukrainian side too is taking significant losses , often when defending increasingly untenable defensive positions. Russian forces typically have a numerical advantage in terms of numbers of troops, artillery and their munitions . In terms of drones — where Ukrainian forces once had an advantage — Russian forces seem to have caught up or even outpaced Ukraine .

Some western commentators have portrayed Russian tactics as mindless attacks with hordes of infantry — sometimes derogatorily described as orcs . The reality is that the Russian army has adapted to the nature of the war today. It is now much better at co-ordinating the activities of artillery, drones and small groups of infantry. Even Ukrainian sources highlight how at least some Russian troops are well-trained and capable .

Western support for Ukraine

There is strong evidence of western intelligence personnel already on the ground in Ukraine — who were there long before February 2022. On top of NATO’s more overt military assistance, such revelations feed into the Russian narrative that the war in the Ukraine is a proxy war between NATO and Russia .

A growing challenge for Ukraine is decreasing western public support for military assistance. In a Gallup poll from November 2023 , 41 per cent of U.S. respondents said that the United States is doing too much to support Ukraine — an opinion that rose to 62 per cent among Republican voters. Back in August 2022, these figures were 24 and 43 per cent respectively. This trend is evident in different polls too, as a recent Pew poll highlights .

Read more: Ukraine war: what the US public thinks about giving military and other aid

While there is still strong support within the European Union for providing humanitarian aid to Ukraine, surveys find that support for military assistance is decreasing .

The Ukrainian government has stated its army’s problems can be solved with more western equipment and munitions . Certainly, more of both would improve the Ukrainian position. However, western equipment is not a universal panacea for Ukraine’s problems. Recent reports suggesting Russian forces have destroyed a number of U.S.-supplied Abrams tanks on the Avdiivka sector of the front highlight, unsurprisingly, that western equipment is far from infallible.

NATO countries continue to commit additional military assistance to Ukraine , although additional U.S. assistance is being held up in Congress . The recent scandal in Germany regarding the possible supply of Taurus missiles to Ukraine highlights that a further escalation of western commitments to Ukraine is not a given.

Whether western countries are willing to commit their own personnel to increasingly active roles in the war is unclear. French President Emmanuel Macron recently stated that sending French combat troops to Ukraine remains an option . However, most other NATO leaders seem resolute that sending combat troops to Ukraine should not happen.

Yet, Macron’s position is apparently not without some support . Such a step would undoubtedly increase the possibility not only of a direct NATO-Russia war, but also the use of nuclear weapons .

A man in a dark sweater and beard enters a building. U.S. flags are seen around him.

Manpower issues

Availability of personnel is also a significant problem for Ukraine. Western-supplied equipment still has to be crewed. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy recently stated that 31,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed since February 2022 , however, this at best only tells part of the story. This figure is less than half U.S. estimates of Ukrainian troops killed , likely does not include those missing in action, and certainly not those taken prisoner by Russia, nor the tens of thousands of wounded. Replacing such losses is proving increasingly difficult .

Zelenskyy recently gave permission for conscripts who have been serving since February 2022 to move into the reserves for at least 12 months without further callup. Such a step will help improve wider morale, but won’t help with the recruitment crisis.

A significant number of Ukrainians seek to avoid the draft by fleeing to neighbouring countries . This is reminiscent of how young Russians fled to avoid being conscripted in late 2022, although many have now returned .

The sinking of Russian ships in the Black Sea has to some extent replaced less positive news for Ukraine from the front line. The loss of warships such as the large patrol ship Sergei Kotov to Ukrainian naval drone are setbacks for Russia. However, the war for the Donbas is primarily being fought on land, and such Ukrainian victories are unlikely to have a meaningful impact on the ground war.

As the Russian army advances, albeit slowly, the available evidence suggests that resolve remains strong on both the Russian and Ukrainian sides. Outwardly, the majority of NATO leaders retain their commitments to support Ukraine . Both sides are clearly still only willing to consider negotiations on their own terms . How much longer that will continue to be the case remains to be seen.

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Europe divided over how far to push Putin

Deep Read ( 4 Min. )
By Ned Temko Columnist

March 7, 2024 | London

With further U.S. aid to Ukraine blocked in Congress, the pressure is on Europe to step up its supply of badly needed weapons to Kyiv. And that has added urgency to a debate over whether and how to do so.

At the heart of the argument are deep strategic questions: How important for Western Europe’s future is the war in Ukraine? And if, as some European leaders fear, a Russian victory would embolden Vladimir Putin to threaten other neighbors, how might they deter him?

Why We Wrote This

Vladimir Putin will win the upcoming Russian elections. But who will win the argument in Europe over just how assertively to defend Ukraine and guard against future Russian aggression?

Would diplomacy be best? Firm warnings, calibrated arms deliveries to Ukraine, and a reliance on a mutual interest with Mr. Putin to avert a head-on conflict?

Or a more assertive response, stepping up Europe’s own military preparedness, expenditure, and arms production to build a long-term bulwark against potential Russian attack?

France takes the latter stance, supported by countries closest to Russia, such as Poland. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz is more cautious, reluctant to be drawn into direct conflict with Moscow.

Mr. Putin might be confident of the results of next weekend’s Russian elections. But he can be far less certain of the outcome of Europe’s current deliberations. And it is those choices that could decide the outcome of the Ukraine war.

Vladimir Putin is facing a critical referendum on his war in Ukraine. And it is unclear whether he will get the result he has been trying to engineer.

That’s because the “voters” in this contest aren’t the millions of Russians poised to hand him a further six years in the Kremlin at next weekend’s presidential election; anti-war candidates have been barred from running.

This audience is tougher and, for Mr. Putin’s war, more consequential: the leaders of Western Europe.

Over the past 10 days, they’ve been locked in an intensifying debate over whether, and how, to ratchet up military support for Ukraine – even if that means ignoring Mr. Putin’s warnings of a wider conflict.

And as Ukraine’s key ally, U.S. President Joe Biden, finds it ever harder to win bipartisan backing for aid to Kyiv, the European debate could prove decisive in the war.

The immediate issue is arms, like the artillery shells Kyiv desperately needs and longer-range missiles capable of hitting targets far from the front lines. That includes the Kerch Bridge, the multibillion-dollar span between Russia and Crimea that Mr. Putin inaugurated after seizing the peninsula from Ukraine in 2014.

At the core of the debate, however, are deeper strategic questions: How important for Western Europe’s future is the Ukraine war? And if, as some European leaders fear, a Russian victory would embolden Mr. Putin to threaten other neighbors, how might they deter him?

Through diplomacy? Firm warnings, calibrated arms deliveries to Ukraine staving off major Russian gains, and a reliance on a mutual interest with Mr. Putin to avert a head-on conflict?

Or a more assertive response? That would mean both arming Ukraine better and stepping up Europe’s own military preparedness, expenditures, and arms production to build a long-term bulwark against potential Russian attack.

The debate has been bubbling for months, as countries nearest to Russia – such as Poland and the former Soviet Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania – have tried to nudge other European leaders toward the more assertive Option 2.

This week, the debate erupted into a public tug of war between Europe’s leading political players, Germany and France.

Germany favors the more cautious approach.

It’s not that Chancellor Olaf Scholz wants Russia to prevail. Within days of Mr. Putin’s invasion, he called it a Zeitenwende – a turning point – for Germany and committed to meeting NATO’s target of spending at least 2% of gross domestic on the military.

Germany has been the second-largest provider of military aid to Ukraine, behind only the United States.

Yet Mr. Scholz has repeatedly delayed sending key weaponry – first battle tanks and now Europe’s longest-range missile, the German Taurus.

His concern is to avoid anything that might draw Germany into direct conflict with Russia.

That’s partly for historic and political reasons: the legacy of two world wars in which Germany battled Russia, and a distinct lack of popular support, especially in the former East Germany, for deeper Ukraine involvement.

Mr. Scholz has been withholding the Taurus despite pressure not just from other Europeans, but also from some other German politicians.

That’s where France has now entered the fray.

President Emmanuel Macron has made no secret of his frustration over Germany’s reluctance to deliver a missile that no other European country can provide.

But his aim in convening a Paris summit on Ukraine late last month was wider: to make the case for Option 2, a more assertive, longer-term recalibration of Europe’s security policy in response to Russia’s aggression.

Germany was quick to point out that Mr. Macron seemed an unlikely standard-bearer.

Early in the war, he continued to talk to Mr. Putin, hoping to negotiate an end to the fighting. He urged Western leaders not to “humiliate” Russia, arguing that this would make a diplomatic exit harder.

And France’s military assistance to Ukraine has been but a small fraction of Germany’s.

Yet Mr. Macron’s view of the war, and of the longer-term security threat that he fears Mr. Putin represents, has been steadily hardening.

After the summit, he said Russia “has its eyes not just on Ukraine, but other countries as well.” For the first time, he insisted that Europe’s interests required more than preventing Mr. Putin from winning. An outright Russian defeat, he said, was “indispensable for stability and security in Europe.”

This debate – not to mention the kind of major European security overhaul Mr. Macron wants – will take many months to play out, and Mr. Putin is clearly watching.

Listening, too. This week, the Kremlin-backed overseas network RT released a leaked tape of supposedly private discussions among senior German military officers about how they might convince Mr. Scholz to approve the provision of Taurus – complete with references to its ability to take out the Kerch Bridge.

Russian officials promptly played up the potential threat, and the wider repercussions, if that happened. And for now, the leak and Moscow’s response may well harden Mr. Scholz’s view.

Still, Mr. Macron’s longer-term argument resonates strongly in other European countries, especially those closest to Russia. It is unlikely to go away.

And while Mr. Putin will have no doubts about the outcome of Russia’s upcoming presidential election, when it comes to Europe’s Ukraine debate, he can be far less certain.

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Argument: How Deep Does Corruption Run in Ukraine?

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How Deep Does Corruption Run in Ukraine?

Ukraine has made significant progress fighting graft, but its record continues to haunt it..

During a recent off-the-record think tank discussion on Ukraine, a respected journalist raised the issue of the damaging effects that Ukraine’s ongoing corruption issues have had on U.S. congressional Republican support for the country as it resists Russia’s invasion. The journalist’s comment, of course, was not the first about what has become a bugbear for Ukraine’s friends and enemies alike. Indeed, corruption in Ukraine’s economy, and more recently within its military structures, is a problem that needs to be addressed forcefully and forthrightly by Ukraine’s leaders.

But context and nuance about Ukrainian corruption are also crucial. After all, support for Ukraine’s heroic resistance to Russia’s brutal invasion is a strategic and moral imperative. How, then, should Ukraine’s corruption problems be understood?

First, it’s necessary to be precise about the scale of the problem. Because corruption is hidden, estimating its scale is always problematic. According to the most widely cited source—the annual ranking of corruption by Transparency International (TI)—Ukraine has scored poorly for decades. As late as 2016, amid major anti-corruption reforms, TI’s survey still judged Ukraine to be as corrupt as Russia. The most recent TI index suggests that Ukraine has made some strides since then, but it still ranks 104th among 180 countries. Denmark is ranked first—meaning that it is perceived as cleanest—while Russia ranks 141st.

TI’s ranking—called the Corruption Perceptions Index—does not measure actual corruption, but rather the perception of corruption based on international studies, public opinion polls, and responses from businesspeople and experts. Such sources are subjective by definition. What’s more, perceptions can be significantly influenced by the level of corruption-related information and debate, including public awareness campaigns, extensive investigative reporting, media discussion of corrupt practices, and comments by public figures.

In Ukraine’s case, Western governments, the European Union, and international agencies such as the World Bank have often highlighted the fight against corruption as a top priority, and their aid programs have invested heavily in anti-corruption nongovernmental organizations, public awareness campaigns, and promotion of transparent governance. These efforts helped to produce, for example, one of the world’s most stringent requirements for the declaration of income and assets by civil servants, legislators, and government officials. But such a persistent focus on corruption also heightens the perception that it is widespread—and it takes a while for that perception to turn around.

While Ukraine still carries an international reputation for endemic corruption, it has made major strides in the past decade. A 2018 report by the Kyiv-based Institute for Economic Research and Policy Consulting (IER), refereed by leading Western experts, documented four years of major anti-corruption reforms in the aftermath of the 2013-2014 Maidan protests, which ousted uber-corrupt President Viktor Yanukovych.

The reforms, including transparent government procurement and the deregulation of the notoriously corrupt energy sector, were estimated to have reduced grand corruption—a category that excludes petty corruption, such as police bribes—by a total of approximately $6 billion, or some 6 percent of Ukraine’s official GDP. Reforms of the state tax and revenue authorities also pared the size of the shadow economy, which dropped from an estimated 43 percent of GDP in 2014 to 33 percent in late 2017.

With few exceptions—such as the reintroduction of fixed gas prices to protect consumers during wartime—the reforms introduced during the administration of former President Petro Poroshenko were retained and expanded under current President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Before the reforms, Ukraine’s notoriously corrupt gas market alone had sucked billions of dollars in shady profits out of the state treasury. In the years before the all-out war, gas sector reforms added approximately $3 billion to the state budget. And these efforts are ongoing: Last year, Ukrainian authorities opened a criminal case against Dmytro Firtash, an oligarch also wanted in the United States for corruption, alleging that his group embezzled $484 million from the Ukrainian state treasury in a scheme involving gas transit fees.

Tax administration reforms and an enforcement crackdown have eliminated tax losses amounting to at least $1 billion per year. The reforms included electronic filing for value-added tax, which helped curb graft. Investigators exposed and eliminated a widespread network of corrupt tax evasion—established under Yanukovych—that diverted cash to tax inspectors, who accepted falsified income and expense records in return for 6 to 12 percent of the evaded taxes.

Another landmark anti-corruption reform came in 2016, when Ukraine unveiled a transparent electronic system for public procurement, ProZorro , which has drastically reduced corruption in bidding for government contracts. Funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, the system has saved Ukraine almost $6 billion in public procurement costs since 2017, according to a 2021 U.S. government report. The system has been promoted by Transparency International and was recently recognized by the World Bank.

Other open-data reforms eliminated many rent-seeking schemes and lowered procurement costs from ongoing contracts by a further $700 million. Since the 2022 Russian invasion, procurement related to national security is now conducted in secret, but ProZorro continues to operate for other bidding.

In all, IER calculates that anti-corruption reforms eliminated nearly $4 billion a year in formerly misappropriated revenues. The number is conservative, since it does not include related efforts to clean up Ukraine’s economy, such as banking reforms that eliminated so-called zombie banks that had misappropriated citizens’ savings and other assets to bank managers and owners.

In addition, Ukraine seized $1.5 billion in suspicious assets controlled by what Ukraine’s prosecutor general called an “organized crime group led by Yanukovych” and returned the assets to the state treasury. Ukrainian authorities also temporarily nationalized the banking assets of oligarch Ihor Kolomoysky and began the legal process to restore more than $5 billion that PrivatBank, the bank he co-owned and controlled , is alleged to have stolen through fraudulent loans to foreign shell companies and accounts.

The wave of anti-corruption reforms that began with Yanukovych’s ouster in 2014 continued when Zelensky came into office in 2019. That fall, the new High Anti-Corruption Court launched its first cases; by late 2023, it had convicted 157 government officials and other perpetrators. Since the 2022 invasion, Zelensky’s government has also stepped up asset seizures from companies and individuals in business that had been working with Russia and financing pro-Russian media and political parties in Ukraine. In September 2023, Ukrainian authorities arrested Kolomoysky on a wide range of criminal charges, including forgery and major fraud.

There is no question that Ukraine has made great strides combating corruption, with 11 consecutive years of improving its ranking in the TI Corruption Perception Index.

This leads us to the most recent arena of corruption—and, in the context of Ukraine’s need for Western support, the most sensitive one: the defense and national security sector. Since the start of the full-scale Russian invasion, scandals related to the military have included price gouging on foodstuffs for the armed forces, overpriced (and possibly flimsy) winter gear, and an unfulfilled contract for mortar shells. All of these are serious and deserve prosecution, especially when they carry a cost in lives in the ongoing war.

It’s important, however, to set the scale of these cases in relation to the war. The abuses involved amount to millions or tens of millions of dollars—and while these are large numbers, they are an exceedingly miniscule percentage of Ukraine’s vast military expenditures. Since Russia’s invasion, Ukraine has increased its military budget from $6 billion in 2021 to $35 billion in 2023 and up to $42 billion this year. Together with foreign security assistance, its total military resources have climbed to roughly $75 to $80 billion annually.

This scaling up occurred amid a blistering multifront Russian attack. In short, Ukraine’s military spending grew exponentially to something approaching half of its 2022 GDP—all while its officials scrambled to purchase, arm, equip, and integrate a rapidly expanding force; had to find ways to replace fast-depleting Soviet-era munitions; and faced massive Russian attacks on the country’s defense industry. All the while, Russia was snatching up as many of Soviet era munitions as it could find on the international arms market in order to deny Ukraine access. In this context, Ukraine turned to various domestic and international middlemen, some of whom were not properly vetted.

Even as it was hunting globally for stores of Soviet-era munitions and weapons, Ukraine also gave priority to systems that would ensure that Western weapons did not become part of corrupt schemes that could threaten Western support. Given the urgency of moving weapons to the front, it is hardly surprising that in January, the Pentagon’s inspector general found that some $1 billion of U.S.-supplied weapons had not been properly tracked. At the same time, however, Pentagon spokesperson Maj. Gen. Patrick Ryder said that there was “no credible evidence of illicit diversion of U.S.-provided, advanced conventional weapons from Ukraine.”

Nevertheless, with so much cash and equipment in play—and a multiplicity of vendors, contractors, and subcontractors involved—there will likely be some instances of fraud, corruption, or incompetence. Such cases should be measured against the scale and complexity of aid. The fact that no evidence of significant abuses of Western military aid has emerged over the past two years—despite systematic efforts by the Kremlin and its sympathizers in the West to discredit Ukraine—is itself an encouraging sign.

Finally, there is the question of the standard to which Ukraine is being held. In his famous 1982 article in Commentary , “Why We Need More,” the strategic analyst Edward Luttwak highlighted inefficient spending, botched contracts, and failed weapons systems in the U.S. defense budget. His point was that the Reagan administration’s dramatic increase in military spending would necessarily come with substantial inefficiency. Moreover, Luttwak argued that the main objective of the defense establishment should be wise strategy, better operational methods, and more ingenious tactics—all areas in which Ukraine’s military and defense officials have thus far excelled. Luttwak asserted that if the price for strategic, operational, and tactical success is the neglect of “micro-management,” then a little more “waste, fraud, and mismanagement” in the Pentagon would be a reasonable price to pay.

No one wishes to see corruption or mismanagement of public resources, but Luttwak’s point is that whenever there are massive and rapid government spending increases, there will inevitably be failures in the systems that monitor them, no matter the country. Compared to the United States in peacetime, this point is even more relevant in Ukraine, which in a single year saw a more than 1,000 percent increase in its military resources in the middle of an unprovoked invasion by a powerful enemy.

As Ukraine’s war against Russia proceeds, policymakers and the public should expect further corruption scandals. These must be addressed, and their perpetrators punished, but they must also be seen in the proper context. Occasional lurid headlines notwithstanding, Ukraine has made major progress in tackling grand corruption, reducing the power of oligarchs, and managing a vast increase in defense spending without scandals on a massive scale. That in itself is testament to how much has changed in Ukraine since a decade ago.

Shining a light on corruption while being honest about its scale is not merely a matter of accuracy—it is a matter of Ukraine’s survival.

Adrian Karatnycky is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, the founder of Myrmidon Group, and the author of Battleground Ukraine: From Independence to the War with Russia , to be published by Yale University Press in June 2024.

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The dangerous new phase of Russia’s war in Ukraine, explained

Vladimir Putin’s war is still raging, signaling a frightening escalation on the ground.

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Russia’s war in Ukraine has stretched on for more than three weeks, a relentless bombardment of the country’s cities and towns that has led to more than 800 civilian deaths , destroyed civilian infrastructure , and forced more than 3.3 million people to flee Ukraine, creating a new humanitarian crisis in Europe.

The devastation is far from over.

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.

The scale of the Russian invasion — the shelling of major cities like Kyiv, the capital, and Kharkiv, in the east — hinted at Russian President Vladimir Putin’s larger aims: Seizing control of Ukraine, with the goal of regime change. Though its military is far bigger than Ukraine’s, Russia’s apparently confounding strategic decisions and logistical setbacks , combined with the ferocity of Ukraine’s resistance , have stymied its advance.

That has not stopped a catastrophe from unfolding within Ukraine, even as it has prompted Western allies to effectively wage economic warfare against Moscow with unprecedented sanctions .

It will only get worse as this war grinds on, experts said. “Despite the surprisingly poor military performance of the Russian military to date, we’re still in the early opening phase of this conflict,” said Sara Bjerg Moller, an assistant professor of international security at Seton Hall University.

This toll is expected to climb, especially as the Russian offensive intensifies around Ukrainian cities, where shelling and strikes have hit civilian targets , and as efforts at high-level Ukraine-Russia negotiations have so far failed . All of this is happening as Russian forces appear to be preparing to lay siege to Kyiv .

“This war is about the battle of Kyiv,” said John Spencer, a retired Army officer and chair of urban warfare studies at the Madison Policy Forum.

Taking Kyiv would mean taking control of Ukraine — or at least deposing the government of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, the Ukrainian president whose defiance has galvanized the Ukrainian resistance. Most experts believe Russia will prevail, especially if it can cut off Kyiv, and the Ukrainian resistance, from supplies.

Just because Russia may ultimately succeed militarily does not mean it will win this war. A Ukrainian insurgency could take root. The political, domestic, and international costs to Russia could challenge Putin’s regime. The West’s sanctions are throttling Russia’s economy, and they could do lasting damage. Russia’s war has strengthened the Western alliance in the immediate term, but that political will could be tested as energy prices spike and as the war and refugee crisis wear on.

“War is never isolated,” Zelenskyy said in a video address Thursday. “It always beats both the victim and the aggressor. The aggressor just realizes it later. But it always realizes and always suffers.”

The war in Ukraine is likely going to become more violent

Russia’s strategic setbacks have undermined its mission to take Ukraine, but it has only exacerbated the brutal and indiscriminate war, not even a month old.

The longer and harder the Ukrainian resistance fights, the more likely Russia may deploy more aggressive tactics to try to achieve their aims. “This is what we would call a war of attrition. They are trying to grind down the Ukrainian people’s morale, and unfortunately, that includes the bodies of Ukrainians,” Moller said.

Urban warfare is particularly calamitous, as civilians who have not evacuated are often caught in the middle of battles that happen block-by-block. Russia’s military tactics in cities — witnessed in places like Syria and Grozny in Chechnya in 1999 — have shown little regard for civilian protection. Spencer, the urban warfare specialist, said even Putin is limited, to a degree, by the rules of war, and so he is likely to claim that civilian infrastructure — like hospitals — are also military targets.

NEW campaign update from @TheStudyofWar and @criticalthreats : #Russian operations to continue the encirclement of and assault on #Kyiv have likely begun, although on a smaller scale and in a more ad hoc manner than we expected. https://t.co/tt5uYJacyg pic.twitter.com/ZoQRaOwNHF — ISW (@TheStudyofWar) March 9, 2022

But urban warfare is, by nature, murky and complex and often far more deadly. Even if Russia attempts precision attacks, it can have a cascading effect — Russia bombs alleged military targets, those operations move, Russia bombs again. “You’re going to use so many of them, the end result is the same as if you just used indiscriminate, mass artillery barrage,” said Lance Davies, a senior lecturer in defense and international affairs at the UK’s Royal Military Academy.

Even in the early days of this war, Russia’s efforts are already having this effect. “They’re causing tremendous damage to civilian infrastructure,” said Rachel Denber, the deputy director of the Europe and Central Asia division at Human Rights Watch. “They’re taking many, many civilian lives.” Denber pointed to the use of weapons in heavily populated areas, including those that are explicitly banned, like cluster munitions. Human Rights Watch documented their use in three residential areas in Kharkiv on February 28. “You put that in a city like Kharkiv, and if it’s a populated area, no matter what you were aiming at, no matter what the target, it’s going to hurt civilians,” she said.

The United Nations has confirmed at least 2,149 civilian casualties, including 816 killed as of March 17, though these numbers are likely undercounts, as intense fighting in some areas has made it difficult to verify statistics.

All of this is exacerbating the humanitarian catastrophe on the ground in Ukraine, as shelling cuts off power stations and other supply lines, effectively trapping people within war zones in subzero temperatures without electricity or water, and with dwindling food, fuel, and medical supplies. In Mariupol, a city of 400,000 that has been under Russian siege for days, people were reportedly melting snow for drinking water . Humanitarian groups say the fighting is making it difficult to deliver aid or to reach those civilians left behind — often elderly or disabled people, or other vulnerable populations that didn’t have the ability to flee.

Ukrainian and Russian officials agreed to a temporary ceasefire to establish humanitarian corridors out of six cities on March 9, but the enforcement of those safe passages has been spotty, at best. According to the United Nations, on March 9, evacuations did happen in some places, but there was “limited movement” in the vulnerable areas, like Mariupol and the outskirts of Kyiv. Ukrainian officials have accused Russia of shelling some of those routes , and have rejected Russia’s calls for refugees to be evacuated to Russia or Belarus. Russian officials have blamed disruption on Ukrainian forces .

The fighting across Ukraine has forced about 9.8 million people to flee so far, according to the United Nations . Nearly 6.5 million people are internally displaced within Ukraine, although tens of thousands of Ukrainians were already forcibly displaced before Russia’s invasion because of the eight-year war in the Donbas region. Many have taken refugee in oblasts (basically, administrative regions) in western and northwestern Ukraine.

Another 3.3 million Ukrainians have escaped, mostly to neighboring countries like Poland, Romania, and Moldova. It is Europe’s largest refugee crisis since World War II, and host countries and aid agencies are trying to meet the astounding needs of these refugees, most of whom are women and children.

“They need warmth, they need shelter, they need transportation to accommodations,” said Becky Bakr Abdulla, an adviser to the Norwegian Refugee Council who is currently based in Poland. “They need food, they need water. Many need legal aid — their passports have been stolen, they’ve forgotten their birth certificates.”

How the war in Ukraine began, and what’s happened so far

For months, Russia built up troops along the Ukrainian border , reaching around 190,000 on the eve of the invasion. At the same time, Russia issued a series of maximalist demands to the United States and NATO allies, including an end to NATO’s eastward expansion and a ban on Ukraine entering NATO, among other “security guarantees.” All were nonstarters for the West.

But the short answer to why Russia decided to follow through with an invasion: Vladimir Putin.

From Putin’s perspective, many historians of Europe have said, the enlargement of NATO , which has moved steadily closer to Russia’s borders, was certainly a factor. But Putin’s speech on the eve of his invasion offers another clue: the Russian president basically denied Ukrainian statehood , and said the country rightfully belongs to Russia.

But Russia’s history of incursions, invasions, and occupations under Putin — including Chechnya, Georgia, and Crimea — have foreshadowed a new, even more brutal war. Seen through this lens, he is not a madman, but a leader who came to power with the lethal siege of Grozny in Chechnya in 1999, who has pursued increasingly violent policy, and who has been willing to inflict civilian casualties to achieve his foreign policy goals.

In 2014 , Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine that culminated in the occupation of the Crimea peninsula in the south. Later that year, Russia deployed hybrid tactics, such as proxy militias and soldiers without insignia, to attack the Donbas region, where 14,000 people have died since 2014. On February 22, in the days before Putin launched a full-fledged war on Ukraine, he sent Russian troops into Donbas and declared two provinces there independent.

This time, according to former State Department Russia specialist Michael Kimmage, Putin miscalculated the difficulty of taking over Ukraine. Still, as the days go on, this war could escalate to unimaginable levels of violence. “If Putin really is feeling very threatened, it’s possible that he will dig in his heels, double down and take a lot of risks in order to prevent any potential loss of power,” said Andrea Kendall-Taylor, a former intelligence officer who’s now a senior fellow and director of the Transatlantic Security Program at the Center for a New American Security.

Russia is committing possible war crimes in Ukraine, and Ukrainians are responding with their full military force. They have also developed a strong civil resistance enabled by volunteers of all stripes. “All the nation is involved, not only the army,” said a Ukrainian person who has been supplying medicines.

According to a conservative estimate by US intelligence , around 7,000 Russian personnel have died so far — more troops than the US lost over two decades of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But Russia’s initial setback could lead to increasingly brutal tactics. “We’re looking at World War II kinds of atrocities. Bombing of civilians, rocket fire and artillery, smashing cities, a million refugees; that what looked impossible before now looks within the realm,” said Daniel Fried, a former ambassador to Poland and current fellow at the Atlantic Council.

How the West has responded so far

In the aftermath of Russia’s Ukrainian invasion, the United States and its allies imposed unprecedented sanctions and other penalties on Russia, acting with a swiftness and cohesion that surprised some observers, including, most likely, Putin himself .

“The US and the Western reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is essentially blowing the lid off of sanctions,” said Julia Friedlander, director of the Economic Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council. “Never in the past have we accelerated to such strong sanctions and economic restrictions in such a quick period of time — and also considered doing it on one of the largest economies in the world.”

There’s a lot of sanctions, and the US and its partners have only increased the pressure since. President Joe Biden announced on March 8 that the US would place extreme limits on energy imports from Russia — the kind of last-resort option that few experts thought might happen because of the shock to energy prices and the global economy. (Europe, far more dependent on Russian energy imports, has not joined these sanctions.) On March 11, Biden pushed Congress to strip Russia of its “most favored nation” status, which would put tariffs on Russian goods, though it’s likely to have limited impact compared to the slew of sanctions that already exist.

Ukraine’s resistance in the face of Russian aggression helped push Western leaders to take more robust action, as this fight became framed in Washington and in European capitals as a fight between autocracy and democracy. A lot of credit goes to Zelenskyy himself, whose impassioned pleas to Western leaders motivated them to deliver more lethal aid to Ukraine and implement tougher sanctions.

Among the toughest sanctions are those against Russia’s central bank. The US and European Union did this in an effort to block Russia from using its considerable foreign reserves to prop up its currency, the ruble, and to undermine its ability to pay for its Ukraine war. Russia had tried to sanction-proof its economy after 2014, shifting away from US dollars, but the EU’s decision to join in undermined Russia’s so-called “ fortress economy .”

The US and the EU also cut several Russian banks off from SWIFT, the global messaging system that facilitates foreign transactions. As Ben Walsh wrote for Vox , more than 11,000 different banks use SWIFT for cross-border transactions, and it was used in about 70 percent of transfers in Russia . Even here, though, certain banks were excluded from these measures to allow energy transactions, and EU countries, like Germany, are so far blocking efforts to expand these penalties .

The US has targeted numerous Russian banks, including two of Russia’s biggest, Sberbank and VTB . The US, along with other partners, have put bans on technology and other exports to Russia, and they’ve placed financial sanctions on oligarchs and other Russian officials, including Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Putin himself . Russian oligarchs have had their yachts seized in European vacation towns because of these sanctions, and the US has launched — and, yes, this is real — Task Force Kleptocapture to help enforce sanctions, although oligarchs’ actual influence on Putin’s war is limited .

These penalties are widespread — besides Europe, partners like South Korea and Japan have joined in. Even neutral countries like Switzerland have imposed sanctions ( though there are loopholes .) Big Tech companies, cultural institutions , and international corporations , from Mastercard to McDonald’s , are pulling out of the country.

Experts said there are still some economic penalties left in the toolbox, but what’s already in place is massively damaging to the Russian economy. Russia’s economy is expected to dramatically shrink; its stock market remains closed . And even if these sanctions are targeted toward Russia’s ability to make war, the damage done to the Russian economic system will inevitably trickle down to ordinary Russians.

The fallout will not be limited to Russia. Biden’s announcement of an oil embargo against Russia has increased energy prices ; what Biden, at least, is calling “Putin’s price hike.” And Russia may still engage in some sort of countermeasures, including cyberattacks or other meddling activity in the West.

How we get out of this

The US is doing almost everything it can without officially being a party to the conflict. The US has funneled 17,000 anti-tank missiles so far, including Javelins missiles , to Ukraine. On March 16, the US announced $800 million in additional military aid , including thousands of anti-armor weapons and small arms, 800 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles, and millions of rounds of ammunition.

Biden rejected the US enforcement of a no-fly zone in Ukraine , a military policy that polls surprisingly well among Americans but essentially means attacking any Russian aircraft that enters Ukrainian airspace. Seventy-eight national security scholars came out against a no-fly zone, saying that scenario would edge the US too close to a direct conflict with Russia.

So far, negotiations between Russia and Ukraine have faltered . Dmitry Peskov, the Kremlin spokesperson, has said that the fighting could stop if Ukrainians agreed to neutrality (and no NATO membership), and agreed to recognize Crimea as Russian and the Donbas region as independent. “Is this a serious offer?” said Fried, the former ambassador who had experience working with Peskov. “It could be posturing. The Russians are liars.”

Zelenskyy has signaled some openness to neutrality , but Ukraine is going to want some serious security guarantees that it’s not clear Russia is willing to give.

The US’s absolutist rhetoric has complicated those efforts. Biden, in his State of the Union address , framed this conflict as a battle between democracy and tyranny. Even if a strong argument can be made in favor of that, given Putin’s actions, such language poses challenges for Western diplomats who must forge an off-ramp for Putin to end this war.

“If it’s good against evil, how do you compromise with evil?” said Thomas Graham, a Russia expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “Putin does need a face-saving way to back down from some of his demands. But if we have a compromise solution to this conflict, we’re going to need off-ramps as well, to explain why we accept that less than a total defeat for Putin.”

In a Politico essay , Graham and scholar Rajan Menon proposed a framework for a negotiated outcome that begins with confidence-building measures between the US and Russia, rebuilding arms control treaties. The US and NATO would pledge that neither Ukraine nor Georgia will join NATO in the next several years or decades, though the possibility may be open someday. This would culminate in a “new security order for Russia,” they write . Russian academic Alexander Dynkin circulated a similar idea in the lead-up to the war.

Gavin Wilde, a former director for the National Security Council who focused on Russia during the Trump administration, says the opportunities for a diplomatic resolution have not yet been exhausted. “The conundrum we found ourselves in quite a lot with Russia is, you have to talk to them. Because lives are at stake. These are two nuclear powers, and you have to keep talking,” he said.

What a Russian victory would mean for the world

The world has been galvanized by Ukraine’s small victories in this conflict.

Still, Ukraine faces long odds. By the numbers , the Russian military budget is about ten times that of Ukraine. The Russian military has 900,000 active troops, and the Ukrainian military has 196,000. Ukrainians may have the tactical advantage and the spirit to persevere, but structural factors weigh in Russia’s favor.

This all presages what could be a long, drawn-out war, all documented on iPhones. “It’s not going to be pretty,” says Samuel Charap, who studies the Russian military at RAND. A siege of major Ukrainian cities means “cutting off supply lines to a city and making it intolerable for people to resist — to engender surrender by inflicting pain.”

Still, Russia’s performance so far has been so poor that the scales may ultimately tip toward Ukraine. Mark Hertling, who was the top commander of the US Army’s European forces before retiring in 2013, says that the corruption within the Russian military has slowed down the advance.

“Unless it’s just a continuous shelling — but I don’t think Russia can even sustain that with their logistics support. They have already blown their wad quite a bit in terms of missiles and rockets,” Hertling said. “They’re having trouble moving, they’re having trouble resupplying. And when you have those two things combined, you’re going to have some big problems.”

However this plays out, the cruel effects of this war won’t just be felt in Ukraine. It’s truly a global crisis . The comprehensive sanctions on Russia will have massive implications for the Russian economy, hurting citizens and residents who have nothing to do with their autocratic leader. There will also be vast knock-on effects on the world economy, with particularly frightening implications for food security in the poorest countries. Those effects may be most visceral for stomachs in the Middle East; Egypt and Yemen depend on Russian and Ukrainian wheat.

The unprecedented sanctions may have unprecedented impact. “We don’t know what the full consequences of this will be, because we’ve never raised this type of economic warfare,” Graham said. “It’s hard to overestimate the shock that the Russian military operation has caused around the world and the fears that it has stoked about wider warfare in Europe.”

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Analysis A defensive strategy is Ukraine's best plan to confront Russia in 2024. So why is a counteroffensive being discussed?

A Ukrainian solider holds a gun while looking at the camera. In the background, several soldiers are climbing on to a truck

The potential for a Ukrainian counteroffensive in 2024 has been openly discussed by the Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as well as by the commander of the Ukrainian ground forces Lieutenant General Oleksandr Pavlyuk.

Zelenskyy referred to Ukrainian plans for a 2024 counteroffensive in a late February interview, noting: "We will prepare a new counteroffensive, a new operation."

More recently, General Pavlyuk described how Ukraine would rotate frontline forces in the near future and, in doing so, create a new group of forces to conduct "counteroffensive actions".

To plan, prepare for and execute a large-scale counteroffensive in 2024 will be an enormous undertaking for Ukraine. There are three key challenges.

1. A shortage of military personnel

First, Ukraine has a shortage of personnel in its military. The shortages in frontline soldiers are most acute, and this has contributed to the Russians being able to slowly advance in the east and the south over the past couple of months.

Without a resolution to this problem, which would necessitate a wider mobilisation of people in Ukraine, building a reserve of ground forces for offensive actions will be very difficult.

2. A shortage in firepower

A second challenge is the shortage in firepower. Ukraine is currently experiencing shortfalls in artillery ammunition — for Soviet era and western weapons — as well as shortages in air defence munitions. This was a contributing factor in the recent withdrawal from Avdiivka.

Without a new aid package from the United States, there is little hope of current shortfalls being addressed and even fewer prospects of being able to build up the stocks needed for any large-scale counteroffensive.

3. Russia has the manpower

A third and final challenge is the current ascendancy of Russian ground forces. As a recent assessment by the Lithuanian State Security Department has described: "Russia has financial, human, material, and technical resources to continue the war at a similar intensity in at least the near term … Military industry is becoming a driving force of Russia's economy at the expense of other sectors."

Russia has the manpower and munitions to continue its current offensive operations, and potentially expand them as spring arrives. It also has the capacity in the short to medium term to replenish losses in both. This is a situation that does not hold true for the Ukrainians.

Why a counteroffensive if a defensive strategy is the realistic option?

There are major obstacles to Ukraine being able to assemble the formations and firepower that would be key elements of any 2024 counteroffensive. A defensive strategy is the only realistic option for Ukraine to minimise Russian gains, attack Russian forces and reconstitute the Ukrainian military.

If this is the case, why are political and military leaders speculating publicly about the potential for Ukrainian counteroffensives this year?

There are several possible reasons.

1. Ukraine is still prepared to fight

First, the fight has not gone out of Ukraine even if it has from some of its backers in the West. One of the key lessons of this war is that for a nation to receive help, it must first help itself.

So, in speculating about a possible counteroffensive in 2024, Zelenskyy may be messaging to Ukraine's supporters — especially those who are wavering — that Ukraine is not giving up and that it continues to plan to liberate territory captured by Russia. It also reminds both its friends and enemies that it has pulled off the impossible before and intends to do so again in the future.

In a recent report from the Institute for the Study of War, Russia's approach to its occupation of Ukrainian territory has been described as the elimination of "Ukrainian identity by forcibly integrating occupied Ukraine into Russia socially, culturally, linguistically, politically, economically, religiously, and bureaucratically".

2. Provide hope to Donbas and Crimea

A second reason for counteroffensive speculation is that Zelenskyy might wish to provide hope to those in Russian occupied areas that their situation is not permanent — and to resist full integration with Russia. In doing so, he also reminds the world that despite the pronouncements of Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Donbas, Crimea and southern Ukraine are not integral parts of Russia.

But there is some peril in messaging this to foreign audiences.

The build-up in expectations for the failed 2023 counteroffensive should be a salutary lesson for the Ukrainians. Expectation management around any offensive action it conducts this year is essential.

3. Seed doubt in Russia's military leaders

Third, the Ukrainians may wish to seed doubt in the minds of Russian military leaders, who will have to ensure they are prepared for any Ukrainian offensive, however unlikely.

No matter how unlikely a Ukrainian counteroffensive in 2024, Russian commanders with an ounce of sense will recall that Ukrainians have surprised them throughout this war. They will need to hold back reserves of troops just in case the Ukrainians are able, against the odds, to launch offensive operations.

The follow on from this is that the Ukrainians can then detect and target concentrations of Russian troops with their longer-range strike weapons. It is a win-win for the Ukrainians.

4. Even a defensive strategy cannot rely on passivity

Fourth, the speculation may provide deliberate insights into how Ukraine will implement a defensive strategy this year. While shortfalls in people and firepower point towards a defensive military strategy, no defensive strategy rests entirely on passivity.

To that end, Zelenskyy and Pavlyuk's comments may imply Ukraine's intention to conduct an aggressive defence, where local counterattacks are undertaken to exploit areas where the Russians are weak, and to pre-empt Russian attacks. This approach, one of conventional asymmetry, accords with how Ukraine has sought to corrode Russian military capabilities throughout this war.

Russia holds the upper hand

For now, Russian forces hold the strategic initiative in Ukraine. Their ground forces are able to attack where and when they wish. They are making small gains in their eastern and southern area operations, and these slowly but surely add up over time.

While the Ukrainians may speculate about a counteroffensive, in the short term only the Russians are likely to conduct large scale attacks across Ukraine. It's why the coming months will see considerable flux in the conduct of the war.

Mick Ryan is a strategist and retired Australian Army major general. He served in East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan, and as a strategist on the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff. He is also a non-resident fellow of the Lowy Institute and at the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies.

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Russia’s opposition and Ukraine find it impossible to unite against Putin

MOSCOW — Ukraine and the liberal Russian opposition share a common enemy. Both want to see an end to President Vladimir Putin’s reign and his war against Ukraine.

But the Ukrainian reaction to the death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, Putin’s greatest opponent, has highlighted the depth of the disconnect between the two sides. It has also underscored the complexities of achieving lasting reconciliation between the two neighbors, even if Putin were no longer around.

As tens of thousands of Russians inside the country and around the world flocked to pay their respects to the late politician, grieving the loss of what many saw as Russia’s last remaining democratic hope, in Ukraine the response was muted — if not actively hostile at times — for a man many viewed with heavy skepticism.

The announcement by his widow, Yulia Navalnaya, that she would take up the reins in the fight against Putin, produced a similarly dismissive response. Many Ukrainians do not see Navalny as the democratic standard-bearer he is considered to be in the West.

In one hint of the discomfort and mistrust, Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, declined an invitation to President Biden’s State of the Union, in part — according to officials familiar with the discussions — because of plans to seat her near to Navalnaya, who also turned down the invitation, citing fatigue.

The roots of the friction are multifaceted.

Many in Ukraine view this war as the latest chapter in centuries of oppression at the hands of Russian rulers and see liberal Russians, including the Navalnys, as just part of Russian society — and its imperial project.

“Relations between Ukrainians and Russians are strained in general. You cannot blame Ukrainians for hating Russia, and in many cases this extends to all Russians,” said Vladimir Ashurkov, a close associate of the Navalnys.

Russia’s liberals, however, are walking a tightrope. Their opposition to the war puts them at odds with much of their own society, including the thousands of families whose husbands, sons and brothers have been sent to fight in a conflict that Putin and his regime constantly tell them is crucial for Russia’s survival.

As such, many Ukrainians still feel that the Russian opposition has not gone far enough in condemning the killing of Ukrainians and occupation of their lands, instead opposing the war from a Russian viewpoint, focused predominantly on the losses of Russian soldiers and the conflict’s impact on the Russian population.

Navalny, who spent summers with his Ukrainian grandparents, had historically espoused the idea that Russians, Ukrainians and Belarusians are one people and that Crimea, illegally annexed by Putin in 2014, was historically a part of Russia. Navalny, a self-described Russian patriot, at one point courted ultranationalist groups in an unsuccessful bid to form a broader anti-Putin coalition.

But Navalny had walked back these statements, most recently with the publication last year of a 15-point plan to dismantle Putin’s dictatorship and return Ukraine to its pre-1991 borders, including Crimea. The plan proposed to pay compensation to Ukraine and investigate Russian war crimes.

Still, many Ukrainians are unconvinced, and while President Volodymyr Zelensky was quick to condemn Navalny’s death as the latest evidence of Putin’s murderous regime, there was no outpouring of condolences. Some even delighted at the news, cheering the death of someone whom several people called “an imperialist chauvinist.”

“Navalny’s life has brought no benefit to the Ukrainian victory; instead, he has caused considerable harm. He fueled the illusion in the West that democracy in Russia is possible,” wrote Valeriy Pekar , a prominent lecturer at the Kyiv-Mohyla Business School, on Facebook.

Ukrainian philosopher and essayist Volodymyr Yermolenko told The Washington Post that he believes Russian liberals have “a long way to go” before they see eye-to-eye with Ukrainians. “There should be a greater self-criticism, an understanding of the imperial past and present, on what the Russian idea actually means. We don’t see that at all in Russia.”

Ukrainians have also been disappointed by what they perceive as Russian society’s failure to remove Putin. After all, it was a decade ago that Ukrainians took to the streets and toppled their own pro-Russian president , Viktor Yanukovych, with more than 100 people dying at the hands of Kyiv’s riot police in pitched battles. Before that, in 2004, Ukrainians staged the Orange Revolution to protest election fraud.

Why can’t the Russians just do the same, many Ukrainians ask.

“History isn’t made in prisons. Change is forged through resistance to violence, weapons, and the establishment of new institutions,” wrote Petro Okhotin, a Ukrainian political scientist serving in Ukraine’s armed forces, on social media.

In an emotional speech just hours before Russia’s full-scale invasion, Zelensky appealed to the Russian people to rise up. “Who can stop this war? The people! … It is time to stop it now, before it is too late,” he said in Russian.

Russians, however, did not revolt. The tiny minority of those who came out publicly against the war were swiftly arrested and given long jail sentences. According to OVD-Info, a Russian political watchdog, there are 901 criminal cases against antiwar protesters.

A handful of Russians joined Ukrainian battalions to fight against their own people — but this remains a point of contention among the Russian opposition, as does fundraising for the Ukrainian army.

Russian liberals say they have no more tools left with which to fight. Their opposition leaders are dead or jailed. Even teenagers have been arrested for protesting the war. In the weeks since Navalny’s death, the simple act of laying flowers has become a show of political defiance, with scores of people arrested at memorials and following the funeral.

Alexei Navalny’s mourners also grieve for a democratic Russia

“Everything is getting worse and worse — we need a miracle. Everyone is waiting for something unexpected to happen — without their influence. They don’t feel they have power anymore,” said Anna, 47, who came to lay flowers at Navalny’s grave in Moscow on March 2, declining to give her full name for fear of reprisals.

Moscow-based Russian human rights defender Alexandra Popova, whose husband, Artyom Kamardin , was sentenced to seven years in jail last year for public readings of antiwar poetry, said the opposition inside Russia is intimidated and isolated from each other.

“What the Russian opposition really lacks is sympathy from Ukraine — I have noticed a lot of aggressive rhetoric, such as: ‘You Russians are to blame for what is happening here.’ But there are a lot of people here who have been jailed, tortured and killed. … People in Russia suffer, too.”

A successful Russian opposition would probably have to prioritize domestic issues over the plight of Ukrainians, drumming up support from more neutrally minded parts of the Russian population — including those who support the war and do not sympathize with Ukrainians’ plight.

“I think we have to understand that Alexei was a Russian politician. Focused on political struggle and political achievements in Russia, and that was the angle from which he chose his words,” Navalny associate Ashurkov said. “Yulia is also a Russian politician, so she would focus on things from this standpoint.”

Navalny himself dismissed the idea that all Russians have an imperial consciousness, blaming instead Putin’s dictatorship and urging the defeat of those who hold imperialist views through elections and peaceful protests.

But without proper acknowledgment that Russian imperialism was a driving force behind the war, Ukrainians say, uniting against Putin is a far-off dream.

“Such conversation, however, is almost nonexistent in Russian anti-Putin circles,” Ukrainian Afghan writer Mariam Naiem wrote. “In light of this, it is essential to acknowledge that dialogue between the offender and the victim is unattainable as long as the violence persists.”

Morgunov reported from Kyiv.

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The Ukraine Crisis: What to Know About Why Russia Attacked

Here’s why Ukraine’s importance extends far beyond its borders.

By Patrick Kingsley

Follow live coverage on Russia ’s invasion of Ukraine .

President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia launched an invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, just as diplomats at the United Nations Security Council were calling on him to refrain from war and hours after Ukraine’s president made an impassioned bid for peace, appealing to the Russian people to remember their ties to his country.

It is not just Ukraine’s 44 million people whose lives have been upended. In the coming days, many others far from the field of battle maybe find themselves buffeted by ripple effects. The fate of Ukraine has enormous implications for the rest of the continent, the health of the global economy and even America’s place in the world.

Moscow’s move against Ukraine, once a member of the Soviet Union, is sure to increase fears over the security of other former Soviet countries in Eastern Europe. It will heighten concerns about the strength of the post-1989 international order and America’s ability to influence it. It could also raise fuel prices across the world.

Here’s how Ukraine ended up at the center of a global crisis.

Why do Russia, the U.S. and Europe care so much about Ukraine?

Both Russia and the West see Ukraine as a potential buffer against each other.

Russia considers Ukraine within its natural sphere of influence. Most of it was for centuries part of the Russian Empire, many Ukrainians are native Russian speakers and the country was part of the Soviet Union until winning independence in 1991.

Russia was unnerved when an uprising in 2014 replaced Ukraine’s Russia-friendly president with an unequivocally Western-facing government.

Most former Soviet republics and allies in Europe had already joined the European Union or NATO. Ukraine’s lurch away from Russian influence felt like the final death knell for Russian power in Eastern Europe.

To Europe and the United States, Ukraine matters in part because they see it as a bellwether for their own influence, and for Russian intentions in the rest of Europe.

Ukraine is not part of the European Union or NATO. But it receives considerable financial and military support from Europe and the United States. Russia’s invasion suggests that Moscow might feel empowered to turn up the pressure on other former Soviet republics that are now members of the Western alliance, like Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

Maps: Tracking the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Here’s where Ukraine has mounted multiple attacks this week in the apparent beginning of its long-planned counteroffensive.

The war could also further threaten American dominance over world affairs. By winning the Cold War, the United States established great influence over the international order, but that influence has waned in the past decade, and the Russian invasion might accelerate that process.

Ukraine was often in the news during the Trump administration. Why?

Ukraine was central to the impeachment of President Donald J. Trump in 2020.

Several months before impeachment proceedings, Mr. Trump blocked $391 million in military aid to Ukraine . Soon after, Mr. Trump asked the newly elected Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky , to investigate discredited corruption allegations involving Joseph R. Biden Jr., then the likeliest Democratic challenger to Mr. Trump.

As a result, Mr. Trump was accused of illegally asking a foreign entity — Ukraine — to intervene in the American political system, and of changing state policy to help himself personally. The impeachment vote passed, but Mr. Trump was acquitted of the charges in the Senate.

Ukraine was also at the heart of a scandal involving Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort . In 2018, Mr. Manafort was jailed for concealing more than $30 million worth of consultancy fees he received from Ukrainian oligarchs and government officials to promote the political fortunes of Viktor Yanukovych, the pro-Russian Ukrainian president ousted in the 2014 uprising. Mr. Manafort advised Mr. Yanukovych between 2006 and 2014, before he fled to Russia, and before Mr. Manafort began working for Mr. Trump.

Didn’t Russia already invade parts of Ukraine?

Yes. After the uprising in 2014, Russian troops wearing unmarked uniforms invaded Crimea, a strategically important peninsula on the Black Sea. In a referendum condemned as illegal by most of the world, the region then voted by an overwhelming majority to join Russia.

Later in 2014, pro-Russian separatists backed by Russian troops and military hardware captured parts of eastern Ukraine, setting up two rebel republics — in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions — that remain unrecognized by any other state.

This week, Mr. Putin recognized the independence of those two territories and then dispatched Russian troops into the area, a move that became a prelude to the broader invasion. To many Ukrainians, the Russian intervention is merely the latest episode of a war that has been going on for eight years.

Why is Ukraine so vulnerable?

Though given money and arms by the West, Ukraine is not actually a NATO member, and so cannot count on the direct military support of the United States and its allies. And for all the hundreds of millions of dollars in Western aid its military has been given in recent years, it is still no match for Russia’s.

Ukraine is also surrounded by Russian allies and proxies — and by Russia itself.

During the lead-up to the invasion, Russian troops massed not only along Ukraine’s eastern border with Russia, but also along the Belarusian border, a little more than 50 miles north of Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital. Russian troops were also stationed in Transnistria, a small and unrecognized breakaway region from Moldova, to Ukraine’s west. That set the stage for an invasion from multiple directions.

What could the economic effects of the invasion be?

Some of the world’s main grain supplies are routed through the Black Sea, which borders both Russia and Ukraine, two major wheat producers. Military action could disrupt both grain production and distribution, raising food costs for consumers across the world.

Russia supplies about a third of Europe’s gas, much of which is currently shipped through Ukraine. Any disruption at either end of that supply chain would force European countries to look elsewhere for fuel, most likely raising world oil prices.

Before the invasion, President Biden stepped up sanctions against Russia, blocking two of its large financial institutions from Western finance and limiting Russia’s access to debt markets. He said the new measure was aimed at a subsidiary of Gazprom, the Russian energy giant, which built the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline. The European Union also took aim at President Putin’s inner circle with an array of sanctions.

An earlier version of this story described incorrectly Mr. Trump’s first impeachment trial. The House voted to impeach him, and the Senate acquitted him of the charges.

How we handle corrections

Patrick Kingsley is the Jerusalem bureau chief, covering Israel and the occupied territories. He has reported from more than 40 countries, written two books and previously covered migration and the Middle East for The Guardian. More about Patrick Kingsley

Debating the debate over the Russian war in Ukraine

Weaponising the media normalises war and undermines democracy.

The war in Ukraine, like all wars, was born of sin – a terrible sin that has so far led to the death of thousands, the destruction of entire cities and the displacement of millions, with untold ramifications for global security.

But whose sin was it?

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It was certainly not Ukraine’s. The insistence of its inexperienced president on NATO membership may have been unwise, but it was no crime.

It must have been Russia’s, obviously. Or was it – albeit not so obvious – America’s sin?

Washington and its pundits regard Putin’s Kremlin as the source of all evil. They accuse the Russian president of harbouring authoritarian and imperial ambitions reminiscent of those seen in 19th century imperial Russia, and waging a bloody war to dismember or annex large parts of a sovereign state, Ukraine. They claim in the process he is destabilising Europe and changing the world order.

Quite the feat.

Moscow and its pundits, on the other hand, see Washington as the source of all international malevolence, interfering in Ukraine politics and using Kyiv to undermine Russia’s security. They claim the expansion of NATO right up to its borders left Moscow with no choice but to intervene to defend its vital interests and protect Russian nationals against Western supported “Ukrainian Nazis”.

Quite the stretch.

So, who is right and who is wrong here?

The answer lies in an old parable about a man who goes to the village elder to complain about his neighbour. “You are right,” says the elder. And when the neighbour comes to make similar complaint, the elder declares that he is “right, too”. But “how could both be right?” protests the elder’s son, “when only one can be!” “You are right too, my son,” proclaims the elder.

Though not an elder, I also reckon both sides may be right, as I too hope to be.

Russia has indeed invaded under false pretences. If it had any real grievances against Kyiv or Washington, Moscow could have taken the UN or the international legal route. It had the clout to do so effectively. Instead, it chose war – a crude and antiquated conventional war.

The Kremlin knows all too well that a good deal of the trouble in Ukraine is of its own doing. It helped trigger this episode by annexing Crimea, and encouraging secession in the eastern provinces to destabilise the country after Kyiv turned westward in early 2014.

The Russian leader has made clear on a number of occasions that Ukraine holds a particularly special place in Russia’s heart, and that he was not going to let go of it.

Putin believes, as he explained in an article published last summer, “Russians and Ukrainians were one people – a single whole”. This would have been a lovely sentiment if only it were not also imperial at heart.

It is sadism masquerading as “ tough love “. In short, Ukraine is indispensable for Russian imperial revival.

What is happening in Ukraine is also part of a pattern. The Kremlin intervened in former republics of the Soviet Union like Georgia, Moldova and Kazakhstan as part of the same imperial ambition.

For his part, Putin claims to be acting defensively against hostile US intervention in Russia’s sphere of influence. He has criticised, even condemned the Western-led “rules-based world order”, or rather disorder driven by unrelenting US violations of international law, including interference in the internal affairs of states, the world over.

He has accused the US of insisting on putting Ukraine and Georgia on an immediate path towards NATO membership back in 2008, and then instigating the so-called Maidan revolution in Ukraine that deposed Russia’s ally, Viktor Yanukovych, in 2014. Today, he blames Washington for cynically prolonging the war by arming Ukraine in a proxy war to weaken Russia and its military.

But Putin is adamant on putting a stop to the so-called “colour revolutions” against Russian allies in the former Soviet Republics.

It is on this particular point that Putin finds a strategic ally in China’s strongman, Xi Jinping, who has also been unhappy with constant US prodding and interference in Chinese as well as wider Asian political and security affairs, in the name of democracy and human rights.

Moreover, and to give America a taste of its own medicine, Russia went on to meddle in the US’s own elections, putting Western democracies on the defensive following the victory of Donald Trump.

In other words, Putin has been doing everything he accuses the US of doing, but more crudely. Yes, the US has cynically used Ukraine against Russia, but it seems to me that US meddling was more of an excuse than a reason for Russia to invade Ukraine.

All to say, there is clearly some truth and much exaggeration in both the American and Russian positions. All of which raise questions about the media’s performance in such a polarised and militarised environment.

After all, only a free press is able to interrogate state power and propagate the facts about the war.

I am in no way surprised that in authoritarian Russia, the government has intimidated and silenced critics of its war, but I am rather shocked by the venomous attacks on critics of US foreign policies by their fellow journalists and citizens, accusing them of acting as a “fifth column” on “Putin’s payroll”.

I am not sure which is worse, journalists forced to toe the official line, or doing it voluntarily, even enthusiastically, in order to get ahead in Washington or London.

Unfortunately, we are witnessing a repeat of the disastrous Gulf War coverage of two decades ago, where much of the influential Anglo Saxon mainstream media sided rather blindly and foolishly with the official line.

For some reason, many of the same gung-ho armchair journalists and chickenhawk pundits, who got it all wrong about the disastrous Iraq War, feel the need, yet again, to incite Western establishments and enlighten them with military insights.

But why do these “opinion makers” continue to peddle information or rather disinformation from military and intelligence services? Again and again?

Why should any journalist, no less a desk journalist, give advice on the type of weapons needed against the Russians in Ukraine, when in reality all that journalists know about the military side of the ongoing war in Ukraine comes from the US and Western military and intelligence services – the same services that provided falsehoods on “Iraq nuclear weapons”?

The real reason hides in plain sight: they are addressing the public, not the generals or even the decision makers; normalising the US support for the war and molding the public opinion in its stead. That is a self-inflicted crime against journalism that undermines public trust in liberal democracy.

When Western governments express moral outrage, these “opinion makers” demand even greater outrage over Russia. When the US government makes a huge military and financial contribution to Ukraine, the latest of which is $33bn, an influential media outlet asks the administration to make an even bigger contribution and take greater risks – knowing all too well, that a nuclear war is a risk?

Likewise, when President Biden calls Putin a war criminal and that he has to go, media pundits outdo him by calling Putin evil – pure evil – and urge the white House not to walk back Biden’s comment on regime change, insisting that the slip is a necessary slap down.

None of this is to say that media pundits should not advocate for the principle of resistance, liberation and justice. They must. Or, that journalists have not excelled in their coverage of the war tragedies. More than a few have.

When it comes to war, the media is indispensable to shine a light, not turn on the heat; provide more fact, less hype; offer analysis of the war, not battlefield strategies; and, yes, promote peace, not incite violence.

Weaponising the media is more fitting of an authoritarian regime than it is for a democracy. It weakens the chances for diplomacy and makes it ever harder to reach or accept a peaceful settlement when the time comes, as it must. For the sake of all Ukrainians. For all our sakes.

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Putin is set to win 6 more years in power. Here’s how it will affect the war and Russia’s relations

This week’s election in Russia is expected to cement Russian President Vladimir Putin’s grip on power until at least 2030. (Mar. 13)

FILE – Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with servicemen at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, on Tuesday, June 27, 2023. Putin is poised to sweep to another six-year term in the March 15-17 presidential election, relying on his rigid control of Russia established during his 24 years in power — the longest Kremlin tenure since Soviet leader Josef Stalin. (Mikhail Tereshchenko, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

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FILE - In this photo taken from video and released by the Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on Thursday, Feb. 8, 2024, a Russian tank fires in an undisclosed location in Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin has focused his reelection campaign in the March 15-17 balloting on a pledge to fulfill his goals in Ukraine, describing the conflict as a battle against the West for Russia’s very survival. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP, File)

FILE - A couple embrace as other soldiers recently mobilized by Russia for service in Ukraine stand at a ceremony before boarding a train at a railway station in Tyumen, Russia, on Friday, Dec. 2, 2022. Hefty payments to hundreds of thousands of men who signed military contracts have helped boost consumer demand, contributing to economic growth. (AP Photo, File)

FILE - Russian President Vladimir Putin, center, speaks to a soldier while visiting a military training center of the Western Military District in the Ryazan region of Russia as Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, right, stands nearby, on Thursday, Oct. 20, 2022. With the fighting in Ukraine now in its third year, Putin hopes to achieve his goals by biding his time and waiting for Western support for Ukraine to wither while Moscow maintains its steady military pressure along the front line. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kemlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

FILE - People buy fruit at a market in Moscow, Russia, on Nov. 3, 2023. The shelves at Moscow supermarkets are full of fruit, vegetables, cheese and meat, but many shoppers look at the selection with dismay as inflation drives up their price. (AP Photo)

FILE - New buildings rise in the Degunino district on the outskirts of Moscow, Russia, on Friday, March 8, 2024. Government-subsidized mortgages are supporting apartment buyers in a powerful kick to Russia’s booming construction sector. (AP Photo)

FILE - Relatives and friends pay their last respects at the coffin of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in the Church of the Icon of the Mother of God Soothe My Sorrows, in Moscow, Russia, on Friday, March 1, 2024. Navalny’s death at age 47 at an Arctic prison where he was serving a 19-year sentence on extremism charges caused global outrage. (AP Photo, File)

FILE - Russian opposition activist Vladimir Kara-Murza gestures while standing in a defendants’ cage at the Moscow City Court in Moscow, Russia, on July 31, 2023. Kara-Murza, 42, was convicted of treason for publicly denouncing the war in Ukraine and sentenced to 25 years in prison earlier this year. (AP Photo, File)

FILE - Police detain a man laying flowers in tribute to the late Alexei Navalny at the Memorial to Victims of Political Repression in St. Petersburg, Russia, on Friday, Feb. 16, 2024. Navalny, the fiercest political foe of Russian President Vladimir Putin who crusaded against official corruption and staged massive anti-Kremlin protests, died while in prison. He was 47. (AP Photo, File)

FILE - Russian President Vladimir Putin, center, visits the Uralvagonzavod factory in Nizhny Tagil, Russia, on Thursday, Feb. 15, 2024. Military industries have become a key engine of Russia’s economic growth, with defense plants churning out missiles, tanks and ammunition. (Ramil Sitdikov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

FILE - Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with residents following a visit to the Solnechniy Dar greenhouse complex, part of the ECO-Culture agro-industrial holding, outside Stavropol, Russia, on Tuesday, March 5, 2024. Putin is poised to sweep to another six-year term in the March 15-17 presidential election, relying on his rigid control of the country established during his 24 years in power — the longest Kremlin tenure since Soviet leader Josef Stalin. (Mikhail Metzel, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

Vladimir Putin is poised to sweep to another six-year term in this week’s presidential election , even though Russians are dying in Ukraine in a war grinding through its third year and his country is more isolated than ever from the rest of the world.

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The all-but-certain outcome comes through his rigid control of Russia established during his 24 years in power — the longest Kremlin tenure since Soviet leader Josef Stalin.

Putin, 71, has silenced virtually all dissent through harsh new laws that impose heavy fines or prison on independent voices. Critics have succumbed to unexplained deaths or fled abroad. The ballot features three other token candidates who publicly support his policies.

FILE – Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with servicemen at the Kremlin in Moscow, Russia, on Tuesday, June 27, 2023. (Mikhail Tereshchenko, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

How is the war affecting the election?

Putin has focused his campaign on a pledge to fulfill his goals in Ukraine, describing the conflict as a battle against the West for the very survival of Russia and its 146 million people.

Vladimir Putin, center, attends a Christmas service in Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow, Jan. 8, 2000. (AP Photo/Misha Japaridze, File)

In a state-of-the-nation address last month, he charged that the U.S. and its NATO allies “need a dependent, waning, dying space in the place of Russia so that they can do whatever they want.”

Putin has repeatedly argued that he sent in the troops in February 2022 to protect Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine and prevent Kyiv from posing a major security threat to Moscow by joining NATO. Ukraine and its allies describe the Russian invasion — the largest conflict in Europe since World War II — as an unprovoked act of aggression by the major nuclear power.

FILE - In this photo taken from video and released by the Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on Thursday, Feb. 8, 2024, a Russian tank fires in an undisclosed location in Ukraine. Russian President Vladimir Putin has focused his reelection campaign in the March 15-17 balloting on a pledge to fulfill his goals in Ukraine, describing the conflict as a battle against the West for Russia's very survival. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP, File)

He says Russian forces have the upper hand after the failure of Ukraine’s counteroffensive last year, arguing that Ukraine and the West will “sooner or later” have to accept a settlement on Moscow’s terms. Putin praised his troops fighting in Ukraine and promised to make them Russia’s new elite.

Ordinary Russians know little of their military’s many setbacks in the war, with casualties out of view and state-run media carrying accounts only of Moscow’s successes.

How is the economy affecting the election?

The economy’s resilience in the face of bruising Western sanctions is a big factor behind Putin’s grip on power in Russia, a major player in the global energy sector. The economy is expected to grow 2.6% this year, according to the International Monetary Fund, compared with the 0.9% expansion predicted in Europe. Inflation is forecast at more than 7% but unemployment remains low.

Military industries have become a key growth engine, with defense plants churning out missiles, tanks and ammunition. Hefty payments to hundreds of thousands of men who signed contracts with the military have helped boost consumer demand, contributing to economic growth.

FILE - People buy fruit at a market in Moscow, Russia, on Nov. 3, 2023. The shelves at Moscow supermarkets are full of fruit, vegetables, cheese and meat, but many shoppers look at the selection with dismay as inflation drives up their price. (AP Photo)

In his campaign, Putin has promised to extend cheap mortgages subsidized by the government to help young families, particularly those with children, boosting his popularity and energizing the booming construction sector.

He also pledged to pour more government funds into health care, education, science, culture and sports, while continuing efforts to eradicate poverty.

What impact is the crackdown having?

Putin has methodically tightened control on Russian politics since becoming president in 2000, pushing through constitutional changes that can keep him in power until 2036.

The Kremlin’s crackdown on dissent reached unprecedented heights after the invasion of Ukraine, leaving a scorched-earth political landscape ahead of the vote.

A repressive new law approved days after the invasion criminalized any public criticism of the war, and protests have become effectively impossible with police swiftly dispersing unauthorized gatherings. The number of arrests, criminal cases and trials has soared, and long prison terms are more common.

FILE - Relatives and friends pay their last respects at the coffin of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in the Church of the Icon of the Mother of God Soothe My Sorrows, in Moscow, Russia, on Friday, March 1, 2024. Navalny's death at age 47 at an Arctic prison where he was serving a 19-year sentence on extremism charges caused global outrage. (AP Photo, File)

Putin has denigrated opposition activists and war critics as spoiled Western stooges, once describing them as “foam washed away” by his “special military operation.”

His biggest critic, Alexei Navalny , was serving a 19-year sentence on extremism charges when he died at age 47 in an Arctic penal colony. Other leading opposition figures also got long prison terms comparable to those given to “enemies of the people” during Stalinist repressions. Prominent Kremlin foe, Vladimir Kara-Murza got the harshest sentence of 25 years on treason charges over an anti-war speech.

But even minor critics were muzzled. A St. Petersburg artist got seven years for replacing supermarket price tags with anti-war slogans, while a Moscow poet was sentenced to seven years for reciting verses against the war in public.

Most independent news outlets were shut and many moved their operations abroad, while the state-controlled media relentlessly hammered home the Kremlin’s narratives.

How will Russia’s policies be affected?

Putin will likely use his predictable victory as proof of overwhelming public support for the war.

Many observers expect him to toughen his course and escalate the war. Some say the Kremlin could launch another round of mobilizing reservists to swell the military’s ranks and try to extend its gains in a big, new offensive.

FILE - Russian President Vladimir Putin, center, visits the Uralvagonzavod factory in Nizhny Tagil, Russia, on Thursday, Feb. 15, 2024. Military industries have become a key engine of Russia's economic growth, with defense plants churning out missiles, tanks and ammunition. (Ramil Sitdikov, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

The Kremlin is set to ramp up its war rhetoric, casting the country as a besieged fortress facing Western aggression. Repression against opposition activists and war critics is likely to expand, with authorities abandoning any semblance of decorum in their ruthless efforts to eradicate signs of dissent.

Moscow’s foreign policy is likely to become even more aggressive, and Russian authorities may increasingly try to deepen divides in the West with disinformation and propaganda, as well as appealing to conservative circles in the West by promoting the image of Russia as a bulwark of traditional values.

In Moscow’s relations with China, India and countries of the Global South, Putin’s election victory will help cement existing alliances by reinforcing the message of his firm control over Russian politics.

FILE - Russian President Vladimir Putin meets with residents following a visit to the Solnechniy Dar greenhouse complex, part of the ECO-Culture agro-industrial holding, outside Stavropol, Russia, on Tuesday, March 5, 2024. Putin is poised to sweep to another six-year term in the March 15-17 presidential election, relying on his rigid control of the country established during his 24 years in power — the longest Kremlin tenure since Soviet leader Josef Stalin. (Mikhail Metzel, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

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[STUDENT ESSAY] The role of social media platforms in the current Russo
Geography, identity, nationality: mental maps of contested Russian
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In a Gallup poll from November 2023, 41 per cent of U.S. respondents said that the United States is doing too much to support Ukraine — an opinion that rose to 62 per cent among Republican ...
Opinion: Who a 'stalemate' in Ukraine really benefits
If recent warnings of a stalemate war between Ukraine and Russia come to fruition, along with the West's absent resolution for Ukraine's win, Russian President Vladimir Putin will benefit ...
Undermining Ukraine: How Russia widened its global information war in
After Prigozhin, Russia clamps down online. By the Digital Forensic Research Lab. Russia rolled out a new internet surveillance system in 2023 to crack down domestically on anti-war content, while pushing false narratives to undermine Ukraine at home and abroad. Civil Society Disinformation. Issue Brief.
Europe divided over how far to push Russia
Germany has been the second-largest provider of military aid to Ukraine, behind only the United States. Yet Mr. Scholz has repeatedly delayed sending key weaponry - first battle tanks and now ...
How Deep Does Corruption Run in Ukraine?
March 6, 2024, 2:54 PM. During a recent off-the-record think tank discussion on Ukraine, a respected journalist raised the issue of the damaging effects that Ukraine's ongoing corruption issues ...
The dangerous new phase of Russia's war in Ukraine, explained
Russia's war in Ukraine has stretched on for more than three weeks, a relentless bombardment of the country's cities and towns that has led to more than 800 civilian deaths, destroyed civilian ...
A defensive strategy is Ukraine's best plan to confront Russia in 2024
In a recent report from the Institute for the Study of War, Russia's approach to its occupation of Ukrainian territory has been described as the elimination of "Ukrainian identity by forcibly ...
Putin enemy for Ukraine and Russian opposition but not enough to unite
7 min. MOSCOW — Ukraine and the liberal Russian opposition share a common enemy. Both want to see an end to President Vladimir Putin's reign and his war against Ukraine. But the Ukrainian ...
The Ukraine Crisis: What to Know About Why Russia Attacked
Ukraine's lurch away from Russian influence felt like the final death knell for Russian power in Eastern Europe. To Europe and the United States, Ukraine matters in part because they see it as a ...
Debating the debate over the Russian war in Ukraine
The Russian leader has made clear on a number of occasions that Ukraine holds a particularly special place in Russia's heart, and that he was not going to let go of it. Putin believes, as he ...
Russia and Ukraine: 'One People' as Putin Claims?
In July, Russian President Vladimir Putin published an extraordinary essay denying Ukraine's independent history, an argument amplified in a later Q&A.Former President Dmitry Medvedev followed this up with an open letter, using undiplomatic language to brand Ukrainians as 'people who do not have any stable self-identification', 'prey to rabid nationalist forces', and 'absolutely ...
Russia elections: How key issues will be affected by the poll results
How key issues in Russia will be affected by the election set to give Putin 6 more years in power. This week's election in Russia is expected to cement Russian President Vladimir Putin's grip on power until at least 2030. (Mar. 13) Vladimir Putin is poised to sweep to another six-year term in this week's presidential election, even though ...