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Can Ukraine Still Win?

By Keith Gessen

Long before it was reported, at the end of January, that Volodymyr Zelensky had decided to replace his popular Army chief, Valery Zaluzhny, the Ukrainian counter-offensive of 2023 had devolved from attempted maneuvers to mutual recriminations. The arrows pointed in multiple directions: Zelensky seemed to think that his commander-in-chief was being defeatist; Zaluzhny, that his President was refusing to face facts. And there were arguments, too, between Ukraine and its allies. In a two-part investigation in the Washington Post , in early December, U.S. officials complained that Ukrainian generals did not follow their advice. They tried to attack in too many places; they were too cautious; and they waited too long to launch the operation. The Ukrainians, in turn, blamed the Americans. They delivered too few weapons and did so too late; they insisted on their tactics even when it was clear these were unsuitable for the terrain and the opponent; and they did all this from the comfort of Washington and Wiesbaden, rather than from the trenches, tree lines, and open fields where Ukrainian soldiers gave their lives.

The arguments were painful and significant. Was Zelensky right that, given the wobbliness of Western support, Ukraine had to keep up a brave face and the so-called military momentum, no matter the cost? Or was Zaluzhny right that a change of strategy and more troops were needed, no matter how unpopular these choices might be? The argument with the U.S. was significant, too. Was the failure of the counter-offensive, as the Americans argued, one of strategy or, as the Ukrainians counter-argued, one of equipment?

There was a third option: neither. The dominant factor was the Russian military. It was better than people had given it credit for, after its disastrous performance in the first year of the war. It was not demoralized, incompetent, or ill-equipped. Russian soldiers and their officers were fighting to the death. They had executed a brutal and effective defense and, despite all the losses they had incurred, they still had attack helicopters, drones, and mines. “People came to very strong conclusions based off the first month of the war,” Rob Lee, a former marine and an analyst of the Russian military at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, said. “And I think a lot of those conclusions were wrong.”

Being wrong about war can be disastrous, yet it is extremely common. The political scientist Stephen Biddle’s influential book, “ Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle ,” begins by listing a century of analytical mistakes. “In 1914,” he writes, “Europeans expected a short, decisive war of movement. None foresaw a nearly four-year trench stalemate—if they had, the war might never have happened. In 1940 Allied leaders were astonished by the Germans’ lightning victory over France. They had expected something closer to the trench warfare of 1914-18; even the victors were surprised.” Biddle goes on to describe the debate over the tank, deemed obsolete after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War and then resurrected by its awesome performance in the Gulf War, in 1990 and 1991. Biddle’s book came out in 2004; since then, two major American wars, in Afghanistan and Iraq, have not gone as anyone had planned.

“It’s impossible, basically, to predict a future war,” Bettina Renz, an international-security professor at the University of Nottingham and an expert on the Russian military, said. “Most people who start a war think it will be over quickly. And, of course, nobody starts a war that they think they can’t win.”

Once a war ends, or even earlier, military historians begin to describe what happened and who was right. Some debates remain unsettled, because the war they theorize never takes place. A famous instance is a debate many years ago, on the pages of the journal International Security , over whether NATO was adequately prepared for a Soviet invasion of Western Europe. The political scientists John Mearsheimer and Barry Posen, having calculated the relative balance of forces, said that it was; the defense intellectual Eliot Cohen, who had worked in the Pentagon’s famous Office of Net Assessment, said that it was not. The debate stretched over several months, in 1988 and 1989. A short while later, the Soviet Union ceased to exist.

The war in Ukraine has led to more than its share of arguments. In the run-up, the U.S. spent months warning skeptical allies that an invasion was imminent. This argument was mirrored inside Ukraine: Zaluzhny became convinced that the Russians were coming, and spent the weeks before the war urging a mobilization; Zelensky remained uncertain, and resisted the advice, worried that it would panic the population and give Russia an excuse to invade. There was widespread consensus that, in the event of an invasion, Russia would quickly win. General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told congressional leaders in early February of 2022 that the Russian military might take Kyiv in as little as seventy-two hours.

When this did not happen, in part because Zaluzhny repositioned some of his forces without authorization and moved or camouflaged the country’s military hardware, a new round of arguments broke out. Was Russia a paper tiger, or did it simply fight in the stupidest possible way? Was China also overrated? Was the tank dead (again)?

Some of the figures in the argument were familiar: Eliot Cohen was back, urging the West to take a harder line with Russia (and China); so were Mearsheimer and Posen, counselling caution. (Mearsheimer sometimes went further, blaming the West for provoking the Russian bear and for violating the tenets of his books, which posit that great-power conflict is inevitable.) Both sides invoked Carl von Clausewitz, the nineteenth-century Prussian military theorist. Cohen cited Clausewitz’s observation that intangible “moral factors,” like the will to fight, are the most important thing in war; Cohen’s opponents held up Clausewitz’s arguments that defense always has the advantage, and also that war is the realm of contingency and chance. (“Clausewitz is like the Bible,” the American University international-relations scholar Joshua Rovner told me. “You can pull out parts of it to suit basically any argument.”)

Among analysts who had studied the Russian military and thought it would do much better than it did, there was some soul-searching. Russian units turned out to be shorthanded, and neither their cyberattacks nor their Air Force were as dominant as expected. The Ukrainian military had better cyber defenses than people realized, and they fought tenaciously. Importantly, they also had the full support of U.S. intelligence, which was able to tell them when and where Russian forces would try to land, and to help them prepare for it. But the biggest surprise was Vladimir Putin’s terrible war plan, which assumed that Ukrainians would not resist, and which he kept secret from his own Army until the eve of the invasion. “No one would have done a Ukraine war game that was set with the political and strategic starting conditions of the Ukraine conflict,” Scott Boston, a defense analyst at the RAND Corporation who often “plays Russia” in the think tank’s war games, said. “You’d be kicked out of the room.”

So, was the Russian military as bad as it seemed, and would Russian lines collapse if subjected to a bit of pressure? Or was it a fundamentally competent military that had been given an impossible task? Boston said he kept thinking of the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, between Somali militants and American special forces, in which two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down and eighteen Americans were killed in a misbegotten snatch-and-grab mission inside the Somali capital: “You can take the best soldiers on the planet , and, if you throw them in a bad enough situation, it’s not going to go well.” Russian soldiers were not the best on the planet, but they were probably not as bad as they looked in that first month of the war, running out of gas for their tanks and asking locals for directions to Kyiv.

The very successful Ukrainian counter-offensive in the fall of 2022 presented evidence for both sides. In the Kharkiv region, thinly defended Russian lines collapsed when confronted with mobile Ukrainian units, allowing Ukraine to take back significant amounts of territory and cut off key Russian supply lines. But along the other axis of attack, in the city of Kherson, Russian forces held out for a long time and then made a large and orderly retreat, saving much manpower and matériel. The question became which army Ukraine would face in the summer and fall of 2023: the undermanned and demoralized one they saw in Kharkiv, or the organized and capable one they saw in Kherson?

The answer, unfortunately, turned out to be the latter. “The Russian military adapted,” Lee said. “They often require some painful lessons, but then they do adapt.” Lee agrees with some of the criticisms lobbed by both sides in the aftermath of the offensive. Strategically, he thinks the defense of Bakhmut was carried out for too long by Ukrainian forces, for political reasons; materially, he agrees that the West should have got its act together a little sooner to provide more advanced weaponry to the front. But, for him, these are secondary matters: “Most of it came down to the Russian side.” A failure to appreciate this was a major problem in U.S. discussions of the war. Dara Massicot, of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me that the emphasis on Russian incompetence in the first months of the war created unrealistic expectations and complacency. “The narratives that the Russian military is an incompetent clown car, incapable of learning, that they are about to collapse, and so on, are unhelpful and have done real damage,” Massicot said. “They have not collapsed. They’re still there. They have stood in the field and absorbed billions’ worth of Western weapons and aid over two years.”

In early November, the behind-the-scenes disagreements over Russian capabilities broke out into the open, in the form of an extraordinary essay by Zaluzhny and accompanying interview published in The Economist . Zaluzhny admitted that the counter-offensive had stalled and that the war was now in what he called a stalemate. He identified several factors—technological breakthroughs, achieving air superiority, improving electronic-warfare capabilities—that, he hoped, might move the war into a new phase. But Zaluzhny had lost faith in the idea that, by imposing devastating casualties on the invader, he would be able to take them out of the fight: “That was my mistake. Russia has lost at least 150,000 dead. In any other country such casualties would have stopped the war.” Zelensky, in turn, was frustrated that the commander-in-chief was making his views public—worsening an already tense relationship between the two.

Some analysts hope that the upcoming introduction of the American F-16 fighter to the Ukrainian side will change the course of the war. (Most predict that the F-16 will be helpful but not decisive.) Some believe that dropping a requirement that Western weaponry not be used to strike inside Russia could help. (Others, while agreeing, caution that deep strikes cannot be a substitute for conventional warfare; ultimately, Ukraine will have to take back territory in a ground offensive.) Many are concerned about the fact that Oleksandr Syrsky, Zelensky’s new choice for commander-in-chief, is the general who insisted on defending Bakhmut even after it became indefensible; they are even more concerned about the military-assistance package that is being held up in the U.S. Congress. But if, as Zaluzhny told The Economist , there will be no “deep and beautiful breakthrough,” what will happen instead?

The political-science literature on war duration (as opposed to war outcomes) is pretty clear: If a war is not over quickly, then it will last a long time. This is because incentives change. Blood and treasure have been expended. Society has been mobilized, the enemy vilified. People are angry. The war must go on.

There is a wrinkle to this story, however, when it comes to regime types. The standard work is “ Democracies at War ,” by Dan Reiter and Allan C. Stam, from 2002. Reiter and Stam argue, based on a slew of examples, that democracies have a better war-fighting record than autocracies. The reason is that they are better at fighting (the soldiers are more motivated) and that they start fewer dumb wars of choice. In a late chapter of the book, however, Reiter and Stam sound a cautionary note. For the same reason that democracies tend to start fewer wars, they tend to grow weary of them faster: “When the promised quick victory does not materialize . . . the people may reconsider their decision to consent to the war at hand and actively withdraw their support.” According to Reiter and Stam, this is the main reason that Harry Truman decided to drop two atomic bombs on Japanese cities in the summer of 1945. When wars drag on, democracies’ chances of victory diminish. In fact, Reiter and Stam write, “ The longer a war continues, the more likely autocracies are to win .”

Putin has probably not read Chapter 7 of “Democracies at War,” but he has long been counting on the dynamics it describes. He has what he likes to think of as stability—he can decide on a policy and stick with it—whereas Western democracies are constantly changing their leaders and their minds. It was apparently his calculation, in the run-up to the war, that European voters would not long stand for the high energy prices that a war with Russia would entail; he believed, too, that the U.S. was preoccupied with its own difficulties and would not mount a sustained response. For nearly two years, he was wrong. Western democracies rallied to the side of Ukraine, and Russia seemed a lot less stable than Putin had supposed: a partial mobilization in the fall of 2022 was unpopular, and, in the summer of 2023, one of Putin’s longtime loyal oligarchs, Yevgeny Prigozhin, gathered a column of men and started marching toward Moscow. But Prigozhin was assassinated , and, in recent months, Putin’s expectations of Western disarray have finally begun to be met. Largely owing to Hungarian recalcitrance, the European Union took months to agree on a large aid package to Ukraine; more worrisome still, a group of Republicans has been able to stall a similarly large aid package in the U.S. Congress. And inside Ukraine, too, politics have reappeared. It is widely thought that Zelensky decided to remove Zaluzhny because he worried that Zaluzhny was becoming a political rival. (Zaluzhny’s public disagreements with his boss did not help.)

Hamas’s violent incursion into Israel on October 7th of last year, followed by Israel’s hugely disproportionate response , has scrambled the international map. It has also occupied the time of senior U.S. officials and weakened Joe Biden politically. Then there is this year’s U.S. Presidential election. The fact that, back in 2019, Donald Trump appeared to attempt to extort Zelensky —conditioning military aid on Ukraine’s willingness to investigate the Biden family—is not an encouraging sign for supporters of Ukraine. Neither is Trump’s long-standing skepticism of NATO , expressed most recently in his comment that he would encourage Russia “to do whatever the hell they want” to NATO countries that did not “pay.”

Most military analysts believe that, in the coming year, even if U.S. aid finally comes through, Russia has the advantage. Russia has used continued revenues from the sale of oil and gas to pay for weapons manufacturing: it’s producing munitions, missiles, and tanks at rates double and triple what they were before the war. Though Ukrainian forces have driven drone innovation on the battlefield, Russia, over the past year, has produced more drones. And the state has managed, by hook and by crook, to continue recruiting men into the armed forces. “Let’s be honest,” Zaluzhny told The Economist , “it’s a feudal state where the cheapest resource is human life.”

Ukraine has some advantages. Western-supplied long-range missile systems possess precision and evasion capabilities that Russian missiles cannot match. These have allowed Ukraine to strike Russian airfields, barracks, and weapons depots well behind the front lines, including in Crimea; they have also helped Ukraine break the blockade of its Black Sea shipping lanes. Ukrainian soldiers have a better sense of what they’re fighting for, and the Army is the most respected institution in the country. Though Zaluzhny has been replaced, there is reason to believe that the reforms he’s been advocating, including a substantial increase in troop mobilization, will be carried out without him.

Military analysts are, however, a little hard-pressed to describe an actual military victory for Ukraine. Boston says he has not heard anyone discussing the equipment and firepower Ukraine would need. “Let’s say I want to have a breakthrough operation against Russian forces,” he said. “I need to have substantial artillery superiority at the point of the attack. I need to find a way to introduce land forces in sufficient numbers and have a way that they will not all get blown up by enemy artillery. The enemy artillery needs to be suppressed, needs to be destroyed, or needs to be blinded so that you can get enough of the land forces to punch the hole.” This needs to happen, furthermore, at multiple points, and Ukraine needs to have forces in reserve so that, if a breakthrough is achieved, those troops can take advantage of it. “That all, to me, sounds remarkably expensive,” Boston said. In a situation where a roughly base level of support is having trouble making it through a divided Congress, Boston found it hard to see a way toward an even greater level.

“Ukraine needs to prepare for a long war,” Olga Oliker, a former RAND analyst and Pentagon staffer who is now the head of the Europe and Central Asia program at the International Crisis Group, told me. Oliker believes that a long war could be won, but it may not look like the victory some maximalists have been promising. “You have to create the space for Ukraine to claim victory under less-than-ideal conditions,” she said. “Because, if you say the only thing that is victory is the Russians go home entirely from Crimea and Donbas, Ukraine is in NATO , and Moscow somehow disappears off the face of the earth—that’s an unrealistic goal. To me, Ukrainian victory is a situation in which Russia can’t do this again or at least is going to have a very hard time doing it again.”

This could mean that the Russian military is constrained by some agreement that it’s been forced into, but it could also mean that Ukraine’s defenses are sufficiently bolstered, and its allies sufficiently clear in their resolve, that the cost to Russia of a renewed offensive would simply be too high. There is also the hope, not entirely illusory, that Russian vulnerabilities will eventually become too much for the Putin regime to handle. “There’s a certain amount of instability that’s built into the Russian system that the Russians worry about,” Oliker said. “At some point, if they’re worried enough, they might be willing to negotiate.”

A senior Biden Administration official who has helped develop sanctions against Russia expounded on this theory. He said that, for some time, the Administration’s view has been that Russia can continue its current level of war expenditures into the spring of 2025, at which point it will run into trouble. He pointed to the freezing of Russian assets abroad, the running down of its hard-currency reserves, and the increasingly complex supply lines that Russia needs to evade Western sanctions. “It’s like a top that’s slowing down,” the official said. “They’re going to have to start making harder and harder choices, faster and faster, as we get into 2025. That’s a far cry from whatever Putin’s aim was in this war—which was, you know, reinstating Catherine the Great’s empire or something.”

The Administration official was painting an optimistic picture—one that depends on continued Western support. When I asked whether there was a contingency plan if the aid did not come through, he said there wasn’t one: “The contingency plan, frankly, is that the Ukrainians will keep fighting with less and less.” Ukraine is already running short of artillery shells, and it could eventually run out of air-defense interceptors. “So it’s a very stark choice in terms of the security assistance,” the official said. He estimated that, with the help of Western air-defense systems, Ukrainian forces could shoot down as many as ninety per cent of Russian air-attack assets. “Without it, that number will be zero soon.”

There is a third option for how the war might develop, beyond a “mutually hurting stalemate,” as it’s known in the literature, and a measured Ukrainian victory. As Michael Kofman, a longtime analyst of the Russian military who is now at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, stressed to me, Ukraine could start to lose. That could mean a breakthrough by Russian forces, though they have so far been unable to achieve one, or just enough wearing down of Ukrainian and Western will that Ukraine is forced to negotiate concessions from a position of weakness. The question then becomes what, aside from the catastrophic humanitarian and political consequences in Ukraine, a Russian victory would mean for the world. If Putin wins, or feels like he has won, what will he do next?

Some argue that he would do nothing—that Ukraine is a special case, more central to Russia’s conception of itself as an imperial power than any other country. The counter-argument is that we don’t know. “In Moscow, they have all sorts of assessments of NATO power,” Massicot said. “I don’t think they can confront it directly. For one thing, the Russian Army is partially destroyed. The Russian Air Force has not exactly covered themselves in glory in this war. But they will downgrade their assessment of NATO as a cohesive alliance on the basis of our political will. From their point of view, they will feel that they have won a proxy war with NATO . And they’re going to be angry, they’re going to want revenge, and now they think we’re weaker than we are. That’s a dangerous situation.” Right now, the U.S. has about a hundred thousand troops in Europe; in 1989, there were three times that many. An ambiguous result in Ukraine, which leaves Russia capable of further offensive action, could mean a movement toward old troop levels. And Mearsheimer, Posen, and Cohen would have to dust off their essays on NATO preparedness.

It feels, in fact, like all the old Cold War arguments are back. Clearly, the Russian leadership is capable of brutal expansionist aggression. But just how far are they willing to go, and what exactly will they think of next? “The problem that I see is that the Russian economy has undergone a structural transition and is now on a militarized footing,” Kofman said. “So the Russian government is probably going to be focussed on regenerating military power for some time, both because it’s a matter of strategy but also because the militarized economy is going to be producing military goods and they will not have an easy way to transition it back.” This, Kofman concluded, means “that they could be in a position sooner than people think to actually contest the security and stability of Europe.”

Kofman, Lee, and Massicot recently published an article on the national-security Web site War on the Rocks in which they outlined a strategy for Ukrainian victory. “ Hold, Build, and Strike ,” they called it. In the essay, they urged Ukraine to hold the line of contact in the coming months, spend 2024 building up its forces, and then strike, in 2025, when they could see an advantage. These ideas were not far from what Zaluzhny had been advocating over the past several months. “You shouldn’t fight a war till your first failed offensive,” Kofman said. “That’s not how most conventional wars go. If that’s how they went, they’d all be over really fast.” He went on to give an example from the Second World War. “You know Stalin’s famous ten blows?” These were ten major offensives, several of them on Ukrainian territory, that the Soviets undertook against Germany in 1944. But there were, in fact, far more than ten offensives, Kofman said: “They just don’t include all the offensives that failed.” Last summer was a good opportunity for Ukraine to take back territory from the Russian Army, but it will not, Kofman believes, be the last such opportunity.

Oliker, whose job at the International Crisis Group is to seek ways to end conflicts, does not see how this one can end just yet. She admitted that, in the aftermath of the failed counter-offensive, in the midst of a long cold winter, and with Western support in doubt, Ukraine is facing a very difficult moment. “But it was not a good moment for Russia in spring and summer of 2022,” Oliker said. “That’s war. If it is, in fact, a long war, prepare for a few more back-and-forths.” ♦

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By Dexter Filkins

By David Remnick

By Susan B. Glasser

War, peace, and the international system after Ukraine

Subscribe to the center on the united states and europe update, jeffrey feltman jeffrey feltman john c. whitehead visiting fellow in international diplomacy - foreign policy , strobe talbott center for security, strategy, and technology.

March 28, 2023

• 26 min read

This article is drawn from the inaugural James N. Mattis Lecture at the American Academy in Berlin, delivered by Jeffrey Feltman on February 22, 2023. The speech has been lightly edited for clarity, length, and minor updates. It is part of the Talbott Papers , a series that assesses the broader implications of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

Today, when we talk about global order, we often lament the divisions inside the United Nations Security Council. This year marks the 50th anniversary of important unity: when the U.N. Security Council unanimously recommended German membership in the United Nations. The German Democratic Republic and the Federal Republic of Germany both entered the U.N. in September 1973.

Germany today is the U.N.’s fourth-largest financial contributor and has been elected to six different Security Council rotations. Germany, along with Namibia, is currently facilitating consultations for the U.N.’s 2024 “Summit of the Future,” to consider how the multilateral system should address old and new challenges.

My own career had two primary chapters: as a U.S. diplomat, mostly serving overseas, and then as the U.N. under-secretary-general for political affairs. Those two jobs put me in touch with different types of folks.

I will draw from both of those experiences in discussing the impact of the war on Ukraine in four areas:

First, an overview of the existing multilateral system and why Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is almost unprecedented in its breach of the “rules of the road” that have guided post-World War II interstate relations.

Second, for comparison, two examples from the 20th century of how the U.N. responded to earlier challenges to peace and security.

Third, my analysis of how the U.N. has reacted to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (spoiler alert: so far, the U.N. response to the challenges created by that invasion has been better than I anticipated, despite our collective failure to prevent war).

Fourth, how we should think about the future of the U.N. and the multilateral system more generally, in light of the war on Ukraine? Russia’s invasion creates new challenges and exacerbates existing concerns about the global order.

First, the existing multilateral system.

The multilateral system, or the global order, rests on a number of overlapping and intersecting mechanisms that work in tandem.

The multilateral system, or the global order, rests on a number of overlapping and intersecting mechanisms that work in tandem. We’ve inherited most of these from the post-World War II and Cold War periods: the U.N. with peace and security at its heart; the International Monetary Fund and World Bank; NATO; the European integration project that became the European Union; the World Trade Organization that evolved from the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade; the Helsinki process that eventually became the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE); and others.

These institutions, treaties, and alliances have different purposes and governing structures, along with distinct yet often overlapping memberships. Some, like the U.N., have enormous bureaucratic reach. Others, like the Group of Seven, have no permanent secretariat. Their legal statuses vary considerably. But together, these comprise the so-called rules-based international order. “Guidelines” is probably a more accurate description than “rules,” as states choose voluntarily to sign up, out of recognition of reciprocal benefit.

Even if not always followed, these guidelines are more or less universally accepted as legitimate. In increasing predictability, they reduce risks for all. And the system has been sufficiently flexible to endure through three distinct geopolitical phases: the Cold War, the immediate post-Cold War years when the United States dominated the agenda, and the emerging more multipolar environment of today.

We all know examples where this international order has failed — Srebrenica and Rwanda, to name two notorious examples. But the system has succeeded at its most fundamental level: there has been no World War III. That is not nothing. Indeed, that was the primary objective in 1945 of the key architects of the international system.

But is that sufficient? Even before February 24, issues such as economic inequality, the climate crisis, and the pandemic prompted nagging questions about how effective institutions created in a different geopolitical climate are in today’s world. Russia’s war has hyper-charged that debate.

Shivshankar Menon, India’s former national security advisor, argued recently in Foreign Affairs that the war in Ukraine is seen by many to be about the future of Europe, not the future of the world order. Indian Foreign Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar went further, claiming that Europe thinks its problems are the world’s problems, but that the world’s problems are not considered to be Europe’s problems.

These are thought-provoking charges. And it is indisputable that Russia’s war unhelpfully distracts us from urgent problems elsewhere. But let’s not understate the impact of Russia’s invasion. Russia dropped a barrel bomb on the fundamental principle of the international system: respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity.

To quote the preamble of the charter, the U.N. aims to “save succeeding generations from the scourge of war.” Whatever else it may do, the irreducible purpose of the U.N. is peace and security.

Article 2 of the charter offers clarity: “All Members shall settle their international disputes by peaceful means … All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.”

Unlike murky diplomatic language, including things I’ve drafted in my career, this is unambiguous. And this is key to the entire international order.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is not the first violation of the charter, but it’s a particularly egregious example. Since World War II, there have been very few examples of states attempting to steal territory and change borders by force. Contrast that with the frequency of wars of territorial conquest before 1945. How many times did the frontiers in Central and Eastern Europe shift because of wars prior to 1945? The 2003 U.S.-U.K.-led invasion of Iraq made a mockery of international law, with an estimated 200,000 Iraqi civilians slaughtered in the civil strife and terrorism unleashed by the war. But the intention was never to erase Iraq from the map. Washington and London did not cite history to annex Iraqi territory. Countries have overwhelmingly accepted that respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity is at the heart of today’s multilateral system. The U.N. Charter signaled that the era of imperial conquest had ended.

Article 51 of the U.N. Charter does permit the use of force for self-defense. But Ukraine in February 2022 posed no military threat to the Russian Federation. As for NATO, U.S. forces stationed in Europe prior to Russia’s invasion were one-seventh their size compared to their Cold War presence.

Martin Kimani, Kenya’s ambassador to the United Nations, gave an African perspective from his Security Council seat:

“Today, across the border of every single African country, live our countrymen with whom we share deep historical, cultural, and linguistic bonds. At independence, had we chosen to pursue states on the basis of ethnic, racial, or religious homogeneity, we would still be waging bloody wars these many decades later. Instead, we agreed that we would settle for the borders that we inherited, but we would still pursue continental political, economic, and legal integration. Rather than form nations that looked ever backward into history with a dangerous nostalgia, we chose to look forward to a greatness none of our many nations and peoples had ever known. We chose to follow the rules of the Organisation of African Unity and the United Nations charter, not because our borders satisfied us, but because we wanted something greater, forged in peace.”

Let’s now consider two earlier U.N. reactions to threats to international peace and security.

First, the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, when the world came alarmingly close to direct superpower war and possible nuclear Armageddon.

Much of the story is well-known. But the role of the United Nations is largely overlooked, at least in the United States. Throughout the crisis, U Thant was acting U.N. secretary-general — Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjöld had been killed in a plane crash in 1961, as he tried to bring peace to the Congo. U Thant was in direct communication with U.S. President John Kennedy and Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and their advisors.

Exchanging letters and calls, adjusting proposals based on the U.S. and Soviet reactions, U Thant personally brokered the face-saving trade-off — suspending U.S. invasion plans in return for the removal of Russian missiles from Cuba and (as we found out later) U.S. missiles from Turkey. U Thant went to Cuba to mollify Fidel Castro — this was not the first or last time that great powers worked behind the backs of affected clients. The U.N. verified the withdrawal of the missiles. The world exhaled.

This was preventive diplomacy at its best, averting superpower conflict and possible escalation to a disastrous nuclear showdown.

To close the file, the United States and the Soviet Union submitted a joint letter to U Thant expressing appreciation for his “efforts in assisting our Governments to avert the serious threat to the peace which recently arose in the Caribbean area.” (Fun fact: the negotiators tasked with coming up with agreed text were, for the Americans, John J. McCloy — former U.S. high commissioner for occupied Germany — and, for the Soviets, Vasily Vasilyevich Kuznetsov, then first deputy foreign minister. Kuznetsov, in a quirk of history, later became, on three different and brief occasions, the head of state in the Soviet Union’s dying days: he became acting chair of the presidium of the Supreme Soviet after the deaths of Leonid Brezhnev, then Yuri Andropov, then again Konstantin Chernenko.)

The point is the critical, effective role that U Thant played in the most significant threat to international peace and security since World War II. (Later, the U.S. relationship with U Thant cooled considerably. U Thant criticized the U.S. war in Vietnam and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. This may explain American amnesia about U Thant’s 1962 peacemaking.)

My second example is the U.N.’s reaction to Saddam Hussein’s August 1990 invasion of Kuwait. In this case, the action moves from the U.N. Secretariat to the U.N. member states.

In speeches leading up to the invasion, Saddam rejected the very concept of Kuwait’s independence, citing shared history and culture. After seizing Kuwait by force, he initially, and briefly, set up a puppet regime before announcing the annexation of Kuwait as Iraq’s 19th province.

The Security Council immediately demanded withdrawal, imposed sanctions, and declared Iraq’s annexation of Kuwait null and void. In November 1990, the Security Council authorized force to liberate Kuwait, should Iraq not withdraw by January. In April 1991, the council mandated that shares of Iraqi oil revenues would be used to pay reparations to Kuwait. Thirteen Iraq-related resolutions between August 1990 and April 1991 alone, all defending the territorial integrity of a U.N. member state. The Russian Federation voted in favor of all of them.

After Kuwait’s liberation, the U.N. assumed the task of delineating and verifying the international border and overseeing the reparations payments.

As in the Cuban missile crisis, the U.N. acted effectively to a threat to international peace and security.

That brings me to the third point: evaluating the effectiveness of the U.N.’s response to the war on Ukraine, especially in light of the previous examples cited.

As we remember, Washington in late 2021 began sharing intelligence about the Kremlin’s invasion plans. Skepticism was understandable as citing distorted intelligence as a pretext to invade Iraq in 2003 had damaged American credibility. Leaders questioned whether Russia would really violate the most fundamental understanding of the global order that Moscow itself had helped establish in 1945.

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But the U.N. could have checked the warnings of Russian troop deployments via commercial satellite imagery, as the media did. Whatever he might have been doing discretely, I wish that U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres had — before the invasion — briefed the Security Council, using the drama of Article 99 of the U.N. Charter allowing the secretary-general to bring to the council’s attention “any matter which in his opinion may threaten the maintenance of international peace and security.” Guterres could have demanded an explanation from the Russian Federation about the troops positioned at Ukraine’s doorstep. He might have used his council presentation to remind all member states of their obligations to settle disputes peacefully. He might have traveled to Moscow to offer his good offices.

On the one hand, none of that would have been likely to prevent the Russian invasion. But the U.N. would have been caught trying. Even when member states behave badly, the secretary-general should have a responsibility to represent the principles of the charter.

Yet, on the other hand, had someone asked me a year ago to predict the U.N.’s impact on Russia’s invasion, I would have been dead wrong. I would have assumed that such a breach of international norms by a major power would propel the U.N. into utter irrelevance, like the League of Nations in the 1930s. After Japan’s invasion of Manchuria, Italy’s attacks on Ethiopia, and Nazi Germany’s rise, the league ceased to matter. That has not happened to the U.N. today. There is more resilience in this 78-year-old institution than many suspected.

Yes, the Security Council is gridlocked on Ukraine. But the council has continued other work: renewing and updating mandates of peace operations and adopting in December a landmark resolution exempting humanitarian deliveries from U.N. sanctions. Russia’s invasion may have exacerbated the council’s differences on contentious issues such as how to address the threat of North Korea’s nuclear and weapons programs — but it did not create them.

Action regarding the war itself shifted to the General Assembly, which voted 141 out of 193 to condemn Russia’s invasion. The assembly later rejected Russia’s annexation announcement by 143 out of 193 votes, or about 75% of the membership.

In April, responding to Russian vetoes of Ukraine-related Security Council drafts, Liechtenstein successfully pushed a General Assembly resolution to raise the political costs of vetoes . Now, a veto by any of the five permanent members (the P5) triggers a General Assembly meeting where the P5 member must defend its veto. This doesn’t change veto privileges. But it makes the P5 more accountable to the U.N. membership as a whole. While sad to say, this is the most significant reform to the Security Council since its membership was expanded from 11 to 15 in the 1960s.

The Security Council and General Assembly are member state organs. What about the U.N. as an institution? It, too, has reacted to the war with more creativity and effectiveness than many would have predicted: The International Atomic Energy Agency’s inspections and reports on, and presence in, Zaporizhzhia. The evacuation of civilians from Mariupol, which included the secretary-general’s personal engagement with Russian President Vladimir Putin. Rapid assistance to displaced persons, refugees, and the communities that host them. The World Food Program’s early warning about potential food insecurity — creating the international pressure that enabled the Black Sea Grain Initiative. Work is still underway on restarting Russian exports of ammonia, a key component of fertilizers. The U.N.’s establishment of direct and indirect channels to Moscow and to Kyiv to troubleshoot humanitarian and other issues.

For the Black Sea Grain Initiative, the U.N. showed unusual internal coherence for a notoriously decentralized bureaucracy. This is essentially two deals linked: one set of U.N. officials worked to overcome constraints in terms of sanctions, financing, shipping, and reputational risk to the export of Russian grains and fertilizers. Another U.N. team worked to broker an understanding on the export of Ukrainian commodities from Odesa, to transcend the Russian naval blockade. The U.N. Conference on Trade and Development transcended Washington’s dismissive perception of its utility through rapid, creative trade-related initiatives. Other parts of the U.N. worked on technical issues, such as how to use existing maritime law for inspections (to avoid needing Security Council authorization). The U.N. worked closely with a private foundation on initial arrangements, and a Russian oligarch helped troubleshoot. U.N. officials privately established ongoing communications with key capitals, including Washington, to brainstorm, develop ideas, and garner support. Turkish outreach to both Moscow and Kyiv was essential. A joint operations center between the United Nations, Ukraine, Russia, and Turkey in Istanbul keeps all this working. In summary, it is a complicated but successful arrangement of political mediation and technical competence wrapped up in humanitarian imperatives. (Update: On March 18, the date the Black Sea Grain Initiative was scheduled to expire, the U.N. announced its extension but, curiously, made no reference to its longevity. The Turks, Ukrainians, and United Nations had all pushed for a six-month technical rollover, while the Russians offered only two months. It is not clear what happens in two months if the Russians refuse a further extension.)

Other parts of the U.N. system have also reacted well: the International Court of Justice, the high commissioner for human rights, the U.N. Human Rights Council, and others.

So, good marks for the U.N. in reacting to the consequences of the war. This is not like the League of Nations in the 1930s. But none of these responses address the United Nations’ irreducible peace-and-security purpose. For even if Guterres were to jump into peacemaking the way U Thant did (and be welcomed by key capitals in doing so), the U.N. is unlikely to serve as the peace broker that ends the war. But whenever the fighting stops, the U.N. will likely be needed. The Security Council remains the only universally accepted body that could endorse an agreement and make it universally applicable. Who knows what Russia and Ukraine will require in terms of guarantees or third-party monitoring, verification, and compliance mechanisms? The formula should be for parties to hammer out arrangements outside the U.N., and then take any agreement to the U.N. as part of codification and implementation. This applies whether the war ends or whether it morphs into a stalemate and frozen conflict.

This is exactly the formula used with the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on Iran’s nuclear program and the 2016 peace agreement ending five decades of conflict between the government of Colombia and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia: negotiations did not take place around the Security Council table or via shuttle diplomacy by U.N. officials. But the Security Council and U.N. officials were instrumental in making the agreements work in practice.

And that brings me to my last point: how to think about the multilateral system going forward in light of Russia’s war? Of those legacy institutions, we’ve seen NATO re-energized, while the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, with its consensus rules, is paralyzed. What about the U.N. and the international order more generally considering the most serious threat to peace and security since the Cold War? And at a time of rising Chinese-U.S. tensions and a closer Chinese-Russian relationship expressly designed to push back against a values-based international order?

As I said, nearly 75% of the U.N.’s membership rejected Russia’s annexation of Ukrainian territory. But the 25% or so that did not — most abstained — account for about 50% of the world’s population, including states like India and South Africa. It’s unlikely that these countries applaud stronger countries invading and stealing their neighbors’ lands or stronger states changing recognized borders via military force. This is also not an example of countries pledging allegiance to Moscow. Even the Cubans, surely thinking of their giant northern neighbor, abstained rather than voted with Russia in favor of the latter’s annexation of Ukrainian sovereign territory.

So, what’s going on? Many countries may have had specific reasons, such as India’s aspirations to be an acceptable mediator. (If New Delhi abstained to retain its access to Russian military exports, one hopes that Indian defense officials are paying attention to the poor performance of Russian arms in Ukraine.) But more generally, these are protest votes. This is hedging. These countries are annoyed at being badgered to choose sides in a European war that they do not see as posing a threat to themselves. And part of Russia’s message probably sounds compelling: that the current, U.S.-dominated international order has not delivered sufficient results for the Global South. That it is skewed toward “the West” rather than providing equivalent benefits for “the rest.”

“The rest” resent vaccine hoarding and border closures during the pandemic. They see the failure of rich countries to adequately fund climate mitigation measures, while quickly cobbling together resources for Kyiv. They are receptive to Moscow and Beijing’s arguments that the focus on individual political rights and freedoms is accompanied by the West’s alleged downplaying of the economic and social needs also required for a dignified life. They suspect that concepts such as “conflict prevention” and “the responsibility to protect” have become new euphemisms for the old game of external interference by the Global North into the internal affairs of the Global South, license for the strong to patronize and pressure the weak.

Some argue that Russia’s war on Ukraine is such a shock to the system that it creates an opportunity similar to June 1945 when representatives of 50 governments gathered in San Francisco to conclude the U.N. Charter. There is certainly an argument to be made, even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that we need to radically reimagine the global order, as indeed happened in 1945.

We cannot create a new U.N. or a new global order based on shared understandings in this political climate.

But I disagree, not on the argument’s merits but on its practicality. San Francisco was characterized by a sense of unity forged by two devastating wars in a quarter century. Today, the world is polarized. Global North vs. Global South, East vs. West, China vs. the United States. 193 governments as opposed to 50 represented in San Francisco. Polarization abroad and populism at home. We cannot create a new U.N. or a new global order based on shared understandings in this political climate. The atmosphere simply is not conducive for a “San Francisco” moment.

And yet our collective action in the current system has been inadequate in so many areas. There’s a risk that the multilateral architecture, unless it is refreshed, simply deteriorates, with behavior between states no longer mostly moored in shared understandings.

So, what can we do? First, let’s go back to basics and relearn some history. During the Cold War — which was not anticipated when the U.N. Charter was signed — the United States and the Soviet Union, despite whatever else was happening, cooperated on nuclear non-proliferation, the eradication of smallpox, arms control, the development of peace operations tools such as peacekeeping, and other issues. We’ve forgotten that great powers can confront each other and cooperate simultaneously.

Second, let’s be serious about addressing weaknesses in the current system. I mentioned the Global South’s resentments that risk eroding support for the rules of the road. Those countries will probably remain unaligned regarding the war on Ukraine and the U.S.-China rivalry. But we want them to stay committed to the principles of the international system: imagine the territorial wars that might occur otherwise. Imagine the risks of dangerous misunderstandings if the predictability of interstate relations deriving from the current architecture evaporates.

International Monetary Fund Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva reports that 60% of low-income countries are in or near debt distress. The financial crisis of 2008 provoked important changes to the international financial system. The Global North traditionally emphasizes the importance of internal reforms and aggressive anti-corruption efforts as keys to successful development; the Global South insists on more equitable financial distribution. Perhaps India, as chair of the G-20 this year, can find mechanisms to achieve balance between these approaches.

As part of fixing the system, intergovernmental organizations need to reach out beyond governments. Multilateral institutions need to work with civil society, scientists, businesses, and others when it comes to issues such as antibiotic resistance, species extinction, or artificial intelligence. Some governments resist the idea of “diluting” interstate discussions with non-state participants. But the U.N. itself has already — wisely, if gingerly — moved toward a more inclusive approach in practice. The Black Sea Grain Initiative would not have come together without the support of outside, non-state actors. And international work on climate change incorporates civil society, city governments, scientists, geographers, and others. Now, only about one-third of those working on international climate initiatives are purely intergovernmental. In terms of process, this is a model for other issues.

And then there’s the Security Council, discredited by inaction not only on Ukraine but on Syria and elsewhere. Article 27 of the U.N. Charter notes that “a party to a dispute shall abstain from voting.” If one can strip Russia of the right to shield itself, great. But it’s a mistake to advocate expelling Russia from the Security Council or United Nations. Consider the International Criminal Court: how strong can the court really be when the United States, China, Russia, and India have not joined? (As principled as the March 17 indictments of Putin and the Russian commissioner for children’s rights are for accountability, the court’s lack of universality blunts their practical effectiveness.) One of the reasons the League of Nations descended into irrelevance is that Japan and Germany withdrew, and the United States never joined. The Russian Federation, perhaps remembering the Soviet Union’s experience when it boycotted the Security Council as war in Korea broke out, has not withdrawn from the U.N., despite condemnation from the General Assembly. The universality of the UN remains an asset.

President Joe Biden, in his September address to the U.N. General Assembly, called for Security Council expansion. Good. The current Security Council membership does not reflect current economic, political, or demographic realities. And while Biden did not “name names,” Germans surely know that his reference to “nations we’ve long supported” includes Germany. Unfortunately, Security Council expansion so far is another example where governments agree in theory but fail to rally around a single proposal. But we need to push. And let’s see what China does when faced with potential council membership for Germany, Japan, and India.

What do we need to address specific challenges not covered by the existing architecture?

But in addition to trying to save and improve the current system, let’s also fill in the gaps. What do we need to address specific challenges not covered by the existing architecture? This, too, is kind of a “back to the future” proposal. I noted earlier that the multilateral system includes layers of organizations with different mandates and memberships that, in practice, work in tandem. This layered multilateralism is not frozen in amber. The financial crises of the late 1990s prompted the creation of the G-20. The more recent Quadrilateral Security Dialogue — between the United States, India, Japan, and Australia — does not undermine the U.N.’s universality and is focused on the specific issue of promoting a free and open Indo-Pacific. Other new mechanisms to deal with issues related to emerging technologies and the environment can embrace participation from beyond governments.

In essence, then, I advocate a three-part agenda: We save what we have. We try to fix the system — improve what we save — including by addressing the global inequality that leads to so much understandable resentment in the Global South. And we overlay the current global order with new institutions and mechanisms that will have varied memberships and mandates depending on the problems to be addressed.

These proposals may sound like I’m merely tinkering, when we are facing multiple global crises, from Russia’s aggression to the climate emergency and inequality, crying for radical new approaches. Putin’s February 21 speech announcing Russia’s suspension from the New START Treaty reminded us that even the arms control achievements of past decades are now in the past. It is conceivable that the entire edifice of the postwar multilateral architecture crashes down. And even if it doesn’t, the institutional arrangements, of course, exist in a time when great power competition will increase, not decrease.

But think about Brexit as an example of the unintended consequences of abandoning existing institutions. By preserving and improving the prevailing institutions but adding new layers to address specific challenges, we can promote a turning point in the multilateral system that is less disruptive than Brexit was to the U.K. but more serious than previous reform efforts.

Still, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine raises a fundamental question: can we count on Article 2 of the charter, cited at the beginning of this talk, remaining a guiding principle of the international system? Without any sense of irony, in July 2021 — that is, seven months before Russia’s violation of Article 2 by invading Ukraine — Russia was one of the founders of the “Group of Friends in Defense of the Charter of the United Nations.” With Belarus, China, North Korea, Syria, Eritrea, and other like-minded countries, it’s an interesting club for sure. Let’s pocket this as evidence, notwithstanding the horrors Russia is inflicting on Ukraine, that peaceful resolutions of disputes remain the accepted default in international relations, even if not always followed. It’s frightening to think about how the vacuum will be filled if we lose that altogether. Preventing Russia from winning its war on Ukraine helps us preserve this fundamental principle, without which we are back in what Brookings scholar Robert Kagan has described as a geopolitical jungle. Without shared respect for sovereignty and territorial integrity and a universal aspiration for the peaceful settlement of disputes, the risk of World War III escalates.

Let me close with a 1954 quote from the U.N.’s second secretary-general, Dag Hammarskjöld, that, while often repeated, is worth keeping in mind: “The United Nations was not created in order to bring us to heaven, but in order to save us from hell.”

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The consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for international security – NATO and beyond

• Robert Pszczel
• 07 July 2022

February 24, 2022, is likely to engrave itself on the history template of the contemporary world. Russia’s unprovoked, unjustified and barbaric invasion of Ukraine is not only a manifestation of a huge security danger that has shattered peace in Europe.

More structurally, it has broken the entire security architecture built patiently on the continent over many decades, including international commitments agreed in the last 30 years. As the top UK general recently observed, it is dangerous to assume that the war on Ukraine is a limited conflict. This could be “ our 1937 moment “, and everything possible must be done in order to stop territorial expansion by force, thereby averting a war similar to the one that ravaged Europe 80 years ago. Mobilising our resources must start today.

The magnitude of damage resulting from the ongoing conflict in Ukraine is immense and still increasing. Whole cities – like Mariupol – are being razed to the ground. Pictured: City of Mariupol © CNN

This is also a war against the West

The magnitude of damage is immense and still increasing. Ukrainians (military and civilians alike) are being killed simply because they are Ukrainians. Whole cities – like Mariupol – are being razed to the ground. Evident atrocities fitting the criteria of war crimes are being perpetrated and accompanied by genocidal talk on Russian state TV. Hundreds of thousands of people, including children, have been forcefully deported to Russia. Over six million (at the time of writing) have had to flee Ukraine; many more have been internally displaced. Hospitals, infrastructure, cultural treasures, private homes and industrial centres are either destroyed or pillaged , with stolen goods being sent to Russia in an organised manner.

The suffering of Ukraine presents a moral challenge to Europe and the world. Human rights and the UN Charter have been trampled upon and our values mocked. Indifference is simply not an option. As convincingly explained by Nicholas Tenzer: this is a war against the West too.

According to its own terminology, Putin’s regime has chosen confrontation with the “collective West”, irrespective of the costs for Russia itself. All efforts comprising security and confidence-building measures, or institutional arrangements designed to preserve peace, suddenly look very fragile when faced with blunt force. After many months of Moscow engaging in sham dialogue and blatantly lying to other countries and institutions, including NATO and the OSCE, all trust has been eroded. Moreover, by creating economic shocks in the energy markets and weaponising famine as a political instrument, Russia has further globalised the consequences of its war.

Russian threats

Russia has also purposefully raised the level of risk for the possible use of nuclear weapons, the main goal primarily being to discourage Western Allies from offering military support to Ukraine and to instil fear in decision-makers. A long-held taboo that made an actual application of nuclear force unthinkable has been verbally discarded. While many experts calculate that risk to be low - not higher than five percent - Putin and his aides have chosen to abandon the rational caution exercised by the majority of his Soviet predecessors. Compared to Cold War practice, today, Kremlin propagandists and officials engage in highly irresponsible rhetoric advocating for the use of Russia’s nuclear arsenal against Ukraine, and possibly even against NATO states. This is backed by exercises (at least two this year) openly testing the Russian military’s ability to fire nuclear warheads at Western targets and protect Russia from possible counter-strikes. The Russian president has even shown his willingness to bring Belarus into the nuclear equation. Such brinkmanship has contributed to the return of nuclear arms into the power competition on a global stage.

Russia tests nuclear-capable intercontinental ballistic missile Sarmat on 20 April 2022. © Reuters

With or without a nuclear threat dimension, Russia’s neighbours already have valid reasons to fear the Russian predator. They feel that, if not stopped in and by Ukraine, Putin may entertain aggression against other territories. The historic decision by both Finland and Sweden to apply for NATO membership points to the gravity of this threat. Small countries, such as Moldova and Georgia, but also Moscow’s formal allies such as Kazakhstan, may fear becoming Putin’s next target. The Kremlin has not made any attempt to assuage these fears, but has instead amplified them via direct menaces, propaganda and intimidation levers. Latest examples include curtailing gas supplies for political reasons, violating the airspace of a NATO country, threatening Lithuania, and using economic blackmail against Collective Security Treaty Organization member, Kazakhstan .

International response – good and not so good news

NATO and the European Union have, to a large extent, responded effectively in the first months of the war. US leadership has once again proven essential in successfully mobilising international efforts, especially in coordinating military support to Ukraine. NATO’s response to the war, balancing increasingly strong support to Ukraine with a justified reluctance to avoid open conflict with Russia, has been more or less vindicated. The majority of European countries turned to the tried and tested protective security umbrella of NATO, backed by American military capabilities. The G7 and EU have proven agile in tightening sanctions.

But, as the aggression continues, with Russia concentrating its efforts on gaining control of eastern and southern Ukraine via a war of attrition, Western unity is being tested. Divergent interpretations over sanctions that affect the transport of prohibited goods to Kaliningrad illustrate this problem.

The United Nations and the OSCE have not been able to offer meaningful responses, mainly due to the paralysing effect of Russia’s veto. Moreover, solidarity with Ukraine is not yet universal among all UN members.

Russia's long-term prospects are dim, but the threat is present

The myth of the invincible Russian military machine has evaporated in the space of a few weeks. The initial goals of the invasion have clearly not been achieved. Russian forces had to withdraw from the vicinity of Kyiv and were beaten off in many other locations. Ukrainian bravery and excellent use of limited resources (reinforced by foreign assistance) have so far proven a strong match against the badly led, poorly motivated and organised opponent, who are also experiencing logistic and technical problems, like faulty equipment. Corruption, a disease at the heart of the Russian state, displayed itself on a grand scale in the conduct of the military operation. Russia’s human losses are enormous and, in spite of censorship, becoming known to the Russian public.

The West can attempt to facilitate the export of grain from Ukraine in order to undermine the Russian blockade of Ukrainian Black Sea ports. Picture © Euromaidan Press

After more than four months of fighting, it is Russia that is experiencing manpower shortages. Fearing protests, the Kremlin is reluctant to call for mobilisation and is forced to take extraordinary steps (e.g. extending the age limit for volunteers ready to join the war), opting for a covert form of recruitment, like through the use of reservists. Numerous cases of conscription offices being set on fire in Russia suggest strongly that many young people are opposed to being sent to the frontlines in Ukraine. Almost four million Russians have travelled away from Russia so far in 2022, many choosing not to return for the time being. It is the largest such exodus since the Bolshevik revolution and could result in an enormous country-wide brain drain; something that is already being experienced in the IT sector.

Furthermore, the war has proven costly. On 27 May, Finance Minister Siluanov admitted that “money, huge resources are needed for the special operation”. He also confirmed that 8 trillion roubles (USD $120b) were required for the stimulus budget. Sanctions are starting to bite and will set the Russian economy - which is not able to produce a huge range of goods without foreign technology or parts – back for decades. Overall, unemployment is set to rise while GDP is unlikely to grow.

Putin has turned Russia into an international pariah and the country will not recover its reputation for a long time. In spite of the totalitarian nature of the Russian political system today, some signs of dissent (even amongst high ranking diplomats ) show a growing recognition of these facts. As one astute Russian expert put it, Putin has “amputated Russia’s future”. Russia is bound to be a weaker, less influential actor for the foreseeable future.

But barring Putin’s sudden departure - which would trigger a political transformation in Moscow - Russia will still present a dangerous threat to security in Europe. The regime, led by a delusional and ageing dictator, is prone to irrational decision-making. But the ruthless conduct of the military campaign (e.g. indiscriminate use of blanket shelling) means that even incompetent Russian forces can achieve gains against the Ukrainian military , though it is being modernised at record pace.

A transformative Madrid Summit, but the clock is ticking

Ukraine’s ability to contain Russian aggression will shape the security environment for years to come. At its Summit in Madrid in June 2022, NATO recognised this and offered an upgraded package of support. The volume and speed with which more sophisticated weapons systems (including heavy artillery, missile systems, armoured vehicles, and air defence systems) are supplied to Ukraine in the coming weeks will be decisive in preventing Russia from overrunning Ukraine’s defences. The onus is on individual Allies to ensure such help now.

Norwegian troops arrive to reinforce NATO Enhanced Forward Presence in Kaunas, Lithuania, on 27 February 2022. © Reuters

Special funding assistance will be required for long-term training and the modernisation of Ukrainian forces, de facto bringing them to NATO standards. This is necessary, as Ukrainian weapon stocks composed of Soviet-standards equipment are depleted, and availability of such arms outside Ukraine is limited too. Crowdfunding military equipment for Ukraine – already successful in Lithuania – shows that the general international public is sympathetic and wants to play its part in this process. To help Kyiv to counterbalance Russia’s size advantages and scorched earth tactics, Allies should consider more military exercises to show NATO’s readiness and strength. Creative solutions are also quickly needed to undermine the Russian blockade of Ukrainian Black Sea ports, facilitating the export of grain.

While the NATO-Russia Founding Act of 1997 – though effectively torn to shreds by Russia – was not formally revoked at the Summit, any self-restrictions which NATO took on as part of the agreement should now be considered null and void. Crucially, Allies have finally attributed responsibility where it lies, calling Russia “the most significant and direct threat to Allies’ security” in their new Strategic Concept.

Putin’s war has not yet tested the credibility of NATO’s Article 5 collective defence guarantees. Thus far, the very existence of Article 5, coupled with NATO’s Enhanced Forward Presence (which now includes more than 40 000 forces under direct NATO’s operational command), have offered sufficient deterrence. But Putin’s increasingly irrational behaviour together with Moscow’s readiness to use the most destructive missiles and weapons systems against foreign territory targets (something practiced in Syria) in the immediate vicinity of NATO territory creates a new reality. Moscow has shown its readiness to use indiscriminate force for no justifiable military reasons and to engage in war crimes, all while Putin openly discusses the reclamation of lands held by tsarist Russia. Not surprisingly, NATO Allies bordering Russia are concerned by the potential loss – even temporary - of parts of their territory, and having seen the obliteration of Mariupol and Kharkiv, have become alarmed by direct missile threats to their cities and critical infrastructure.

Sanctions are starting to impact the Russian economy. Pictured: Russians queue up to withdraw cash from an ATM in St Petersburg. © Reuters

A more ruthless form of deterrence, by denial rather than punishment, based on a beefed-up forward defence seems the only appropriate response. The new NATO Strategic Concept , which was adopted in Madrid on 29 June, explicitly takes NATO in that direction (para. 21). Substantial and persistent military presence, backed by the prepositioning of equipment and strategic pre-assigning of combat forces is now part of the new NATO Force Model. The goal of massively increasing the availability of troops at high readiness is essential for effective deterrence. But concrete pledges of national contributions, like those announced by US President Biden on 29 June, must follow quickly from all Allies.

The credibility of collective defence will also depend on the quick implementation of already-announced pledges for increased defence spending and the prioritisation of defence planning efforts based on the scenario of large-scale conflict in Europe. In this context, appropriate stockpiles of military equipment are essential. As current levels are eminently insufficient, procurement practices and defence industry production capacity must be adapted, and stocks augmented quickly.

Paragraphs 28 and 29 of the new Strategic Concept leave no ambiguity on the continued role played by nuclear weapons as the ultimate guarantee of Allied security. But to disable the corrosive effect of Moscow’s nuclear blackmail against Allies, a more robust declaratory nuclear policy by NATO is in order. Moreover, the use of nuclear weapons against targets in Ukraine – however improbable - cannot be ruled out. Allies should thus consider, as a matter of urgency, persuasive signalling to Russia about possible conventional military responses (e.g. a disabling of Russian military targets in the Black Sea) that would come as a result of such acts. Only the certainty of retaliation can dissuade the Kremlin from seriously contemplating such an option.

Concrete decisions will matter more than any new organisational organigrams, and sophisticated plans or strategies are valuable only as long as they are made real. Russia has started to relish its role as a predator, and it is using brutal force to achieve its imperialist goals. Even weakened, Russia remains capable of inflicting heavy damage upon others. Only strong deterrence and credible force will be able to stop it. Counter-intuitively, preparing for a possible war with Russia is the best approach to prevent it.

Meeting of the North Atlantic Council at the level of Heads of State and Government – NATO Summit in Madrid, Spain, 29 June 2022. © NATO

The collective West (and specifically NATO) can count on its likely ability to contain an aggressive Russia, at least in the long run. But Ukraine’s defeat of the aggressor is the indispensable goal in this context as it would severely limit Russia’s ability to attack other countries, provide time to augment collective defence and consolidate international unity against aggression. Madrid Summit decisions have supplied key elements of the required strategy. There is no time to lose in implementing them.

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Peace in Ukraine I: A European War

To help Ukraine find peace, the EU, NATO, and member states must seek new approaches to arms control discussions with Russia and European security as a whole. They should also consider a more flexible sanctions policy, such that progress in Ukraine may lead to incremental easing.

What’s new?  Russia’s Ukraine policy, including its military intervention, is driven both by Moscow’s goals in Ukraine itself and its longstanding desire to revise Europe’s security order. Western responses are similarly driven by both Ukraine-specific and Europe-wide interests. A sustainable peace plan must address both sets of factors.

Why does it matter?  Efforts to make peace in Ukraine by solving problems specific to Ukraine only will fail, because the causes of the conflict are both local and geostrategic. A truly sustainable peace should address European security as a whole to make Russia, its neighbours and the entire continent safer.

What should be done?  European states should engage Russia in discussions of European security, including regional and sub-regional arms limitations. They should also consider adjusting the current sanctions regime to allow for the lifting of some penalties if Russia contributes to real progress toward peace.

Crisis Group conducted the field work for this Report before the COVID-19 pandemic. Some dynamics examined in this publication may have changed in the meantime. Moving forward, we will be factoring the impact of the pandemic into our research and recommendations, as well as offering dedicated coverage of how the outbreak is affecting conflicts around the world.

Executive Summary

This report is first in a Crisis Group series that will examine various dimensions of the war in Ukraine and chart possible pathways to its resolution. The initial instalment focuses on the conflict’s geostrategic underpinnings and their implications for any settlement.

The war in Ukraine is a war in Europe. It is also a war about European security. Russia’s military intervention on its neighbour’s territory was undertaken in large part to guarantee that Ukraine did not align with Western economic and security institutions. Russia’s belief that such alignments would do it tremendous damage is rooted in its overall dissatisfaction with the European security order as it has evolved over the last three decades. Although any peace settlement will need to address Ukraine-specific matters, it also needs to address broader European-Russian security concerns in order to be sustainable. The EU, NATO and their member states, including the U.S., should begin exploring new approaches to European security with Moscow, including new arms control measures, even as they support Kyiv’s efforts to end the fighting in Ukraine. In the meantime, the EU should also consider adopting a more flexible approach to its sanctions policy, offering incremental relief in exchange for incremental progress by Russia instead of today’s all-or-nothing posture.

Since the end of the Cold War, the Kremlin consensus has held that Western countries represent a hostile U.S.-led bloc, intent on limiting Russian power and influence and encroaching on what Moscow considers its natural sphere of influence, defined as most of the countries on its immediate periphery. Russia has been most neuralgic about Ukraine, with which it shares a complex and intertwined history. Although the popular uprising that resulted in the 2014 overthrow of then-Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych surprised Brussels and Washington as much as it did Moscow, the Kremlin saw it as one more Western attack. In response, Russia annexed Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula and supported a violent separatist movement in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, beginning a war that continues to this day.

For Ukraine, Western support has been crucial to withstanding Russian aggression as repeated efforts to negotiate with Moscow to end the war have yielded scant results. Maintaining that backing, however, has meant accepting at least one component of Moscow’s argument: that the war in Ukraine is a standoff between East and West, and that if Western states do not resist Russia in Ukraine, they will eventually face Russia elsewhere.

Western states have also accepted this argument, to a point. Uninterested in getting involved in the armed conflict itself, they have sought to compel Moscow to back down mainly through the use of sanctions. Some of those levied by the U.S. and EU have been directly linked to the war in Donbas. Washington and Brussels both argue that once the commitments Moscow made by signing onto the Minsk agreements, negotiated with Kyiv and the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe in 2014 and 2015, are fulfilled, those sanctions will be lifted. Russia, for its part, sees the Minsk implementation as Ukraine’s responsibility, and the sanctions as another instance of Western aggression. These competing interpretations have contributed to the impasse, and continuing war, that is now in its sixth year.

Volodymyr Zelenskyy, elected president of Ukraine in April 2019, has sought to break the logjam. Having campaigned on a platform of peace, prosperity and an end to corruption, he reached out to Moscow and to people living in separatist-controlled territory, looking to stop the shooting, exchange prisoners and find a way to reintegrate Donbas. But despite prisoner exchanges and new ceasefires, peace remains elusive.

The geostrategic nature of Moscow’s motivations and the West’s response is one reason for the impasse. Because the problem extends beyond Ukraine and reflects deep structural mutual suspicions, the solution must also encompass those external elements to be sustainable. To be sure, a peace plan for Ukraine is a prerequisite for peace. Future publications in this series will address several elements any such plan will have to include. But those almost certainly will not suffice if European security as a whole is not also part of the approach.

In this sense, sustainable peace in Ukraine will require a dialogue on European security and Russian relations with the West. EU members, Russia and their neighbours ought to start addressing broader European security issues, including through regional arms control discussions, to lower tensions and alleviate all sides’ security fears. These talks will neither end the war nor, in all likelihood, result in quick agreements. But they will send a signal to Russia that its threat perceptions are taken seriously and that discussions with European states offer a promising way forward.

To strengthen the case that European-Russian dialogue holds real potential, the EU also should consider making its sanctions policy more flexible. Allowing some incremental sanctions relief for Russia in exchange for progress in eastern Ukraine would be in line with sanctions best practices and counter Moscow’s narrative that they merely reflect a punitive strategy. By contrast, the current rigid, all-or-nothing approach has limited Russian incentives to change behaviour.

Critics of a more flexible sanctions policy understandably point to risks. The first is to EU unity, which has been a crucial feature of Europe’s Ukraine policy and has helped convey seriousness to Moscow. But ironically, that unity could weaken if Russia were to take some conciliatory steps. A well-planned, agreed and more flexible approach would render Europe better prepared to act together if Russia changes tack. Preserving consensus will also require the EU to maintain its most severe sanctions linked to the Donbas war as long as Ukraine does not control all of its Donbas territory, and those related to Crimea for as long as Moscow continues to control the peninsula. A second risk is that of Russian backsliding. This can be mitigated by developing and clearly communicating the intent of the EU Council to reimpose sanctions within the framework of the Common Foreign and Security Policy if progress is reversed.

The war in Ukraine is local, and some of its roots are specific to Ukraine. The road to peace in Ukraine leads through Moscow, as only Moscow can cut off support to fighters in the east, withdraw weapons and ensure that Kyiv regains control of its territory. But the road to Moscow also leads through Europe: Moscow’s decision to annex Crimea and support armed fighters in Donbas was driven as much by its view of European and global security as by its interests in Ukraine itself. The steps outlined in this report will not in themselves end the conflict. But they could create a framework that gives peace in Ukraine a chance.

Kyiv/Moscow/Brussels, 28 April 2020

C. Ukraine’s Western Saviours?

Contrary to Russian narratives, the so-called West is far from monolithic. [fn] See, for example, “ What Next for EU Russia Policy? ”, European Council on Foreign Relations, n.d. Hide Footnote  Where U.S. administrations, for example, have been prone to support Ukraine’s NATO membership, many European governments, including those of France and Germany, have historically been wary. [fn] See Andrew T. Wolff, “NATO’s Enlargement Policy to Ukraine and Beyond: Prospects and Options”, in Rebecca R. Moore and Damon Coletta (eds.), NATO’s Return to Europe: Engaging Ukraine, Russia and Beyond (Washington, 2017), pp. 71-95. See also Aaron Mehta, “ Ukraine sees two paths for joining NATO: will either work? ”, Defense News , 13 January 2020. Hide Footnote  When sanctions on Russia were first proposed, they were also deeply controversial in several European capitals, including Athens, Rome, Sofia, Madrid and Vienna. [fn] Georgi Gotev, “ Russia counts on EU ‘friends’ to avert further sanctions ”, Euractiv, 9 July 2014. See also “Ukraine: EU fails to agree on new Russia sanctions”, BBC, 17 November 2014. Hide Footnote  Still, the prevailing view in Washington, Brussels and allied capitals is that Russia’s policies in Ukraine as elsewhere are deeply hostile. [fn] “What Next for EU Russia Policy?”, op. cit.; Crisis Group interviews (some in staff member’s previous capacity), Western officials, Washington, Brussels and London, 2015-2020. Hide Footnote  If Russia sees itself as pushing back against dangerous and coercive Western efforts to expand influence and reach, Western officials tend to see Russia as a revisionist power. In their view, Russia’s annexation of Crimea and military involvement in eastern Ukraine challenge the longstanding rules-based international order. [fn] The notion of a “liberal international order” is, of course, highly contested, as is the West’s consistency in upholding its norms. For descriptions of that order from a Western vantage point, see, eg, Hans Kundani, “ What is the Liberal International Order ”, German Marshall Fund, 3 May 2017; G. John Ikenberry, “ The Plot against American Foreign Policy: Can the Liberal Order Survive ”, Foreign Affairs (May-June 2017); Thomas Wright, “ The return to great-power rivalry was inevitable ”, The Atlantic , 12 September 2018; Mira-Rapp-Hooper and Rebecca Friedman Lissner, “ The Open World: What America Can Achieve after Trump ”, Foreign Affairs (May-June 2019). Hide Footnote  That Russia’s military aggression is occurring in Europe is of particular concern: if it were to succeed, they fear, it could set a precedent and upend decades of relative peace (the Balkan wars excepted). [fn] See F. Stephen Larrabee, Peter A. Wilson and John Gordon IV, The Ukrainian Crisis and European Security (Santa Monica, 2015). Hide Footnote

All of this is exacerbated by the fact that the war in Ukraine does not exist in a vacuum. It is taking place amid instances of alleged Russian efforts to influence elections in Euro-Atlantic countries; a substantial Russian military modernisation program; Russian military intervention in Syria and, more recently, Libya; bellicose rhetoric; suspected government targeted killings of Russian citizens abroad; and the occasional incident when Western and Russian military vessels and aircraft operate in close proximity. [fn] For Western discussions of these various activities, see James Kirchick, “ Russia’s plot against the West ”, Politico , 17 March 2017; and Mieke Eoyang, Evelyn Farkas, Ben Freeman and Gary Ashcroft, “ The Last Straw: Responding to Russia’s Anti-Western Aggression ”, The Third Way, 14 June 2017. Hide Footnote

Taken as a whole, as many Western leaders see it, these activities suggest a growing Russian threat beyond Ukraine. In response, and alongside sanctions, they have sought to strengthen deterrence and reassure the most nervous of their NATO allies. The Western response has involved both military manoeuvres and force deployments, particularly what NATO terms “enhanced forward presence” in the Baltic and Poland. [fn] For details, see “ Enhanced Forward Presence/About EFP ”, NATO website, n.d.; See also “Decades after the end of the cold war, Russia is showing new aggression”, The Economist , 14 March 2019.

If Russia is not to be emboldened by its Ukraine experience, it follows that the war there must not be resolved in Russia’s favour. The best-case scenario for Western leaders would be a lasting peace that returns Ukraine’s Donbas territory to Kyiv’s control; optimally, this arrangement would include Crimea as well, although privately, and even as they refuse to recognise Moscow’s annexation, Western officials tend to acknowledge that the peninsula will remain in Russian hands for the foreseeable future. [fn] Crisis Group staff member’s interviews in a previous capacity, Washington and European capitals, 2016-2019. Hide Footnote  As a corollary, Ukraine ought to be free to make its own choices regarding political and institutional affiliation – with the caveat that the institutions in question would need to accept Ukraine as a member.

That said, the U.S. and its European allies remain cautious about escalation risks. No NATO or EU country has an alliance commitment to defend Ukraine and none seems prepared to risk armed conflict with Russia over this issue. Their efforts to achieve their goals in Ukraine have therefore taken the form of sanctions on Russia coupled with rhetorical, economic and military support for Ukraine. [fn] Iain King, “ Not Contributing Enough? A Summary of European Military and Development Assistance to Ukraine since 2014 ”, Center for Strategic and International Studies, 26 September 2019. Hide Footnote  Should Minsk be implemented and Ukraine regain control over its eastern border, European states are unlikely to maintain sanctions on Moscow, save those linked directly to Crimea or non-Ukrainian issues (eg, sanctions placed on Russian officials in response to the attempted murder of Sergei and Yuliya Skripal in the UK). [fn] The Skripals survived the poisoning attempt, but Dawn Sturgess, a UK citizen exposed to the poison, died. Jennifer Rankin, “ Skripal poisoning suspects put on EU sanctions list ”, The Guardian , 21 January 2019. Hide Footnote  The U.S. is an outlier insofar as a large number of its sanctions are simultaneously tied to Ukrainian and non-Ukrainian issues, including election interference and Russian policy in Syria. The intermingling of reasons for the sanctions, high political costs of lifting them, and the variety of legislative and administrative procedures required to do so make the situation in the U.S. far more complex.

III. European Security: Necessary if Not Sufficient for Peace in Ukraine

Enlarging the discussion to broader security concerns is a controversial proposition. Many Europeans fear it could lead to questioning principles of territorial integrity or the right to choose one’s allies; they fear, too, that it could give rise to a “grand bargain” that trades Ukrainian sovereignty for promises of Russian restraint elsewhere. Neither of these outcomes is desirable. Instead, broadening the conversation should mean honestly acknowledging Russia’s security concerns and being willing to seek ways to work with Moscow to alleviate them, on the one hand, while mitigating the fears other countries – Ukraine included – have regarding Russian intentions on the other. If such conversations are successful, Ukraine, Russia and all their European neighbours would feel far safer.

In thinking of how to conduct such discussions, several considerations are in order. First, if Russia’s concerns are on the table, so, too, must be those of other European countries. For example, conversations regarding limitations on weapons deployments are one way of reassuring Russia. In return, however, Russia would need to accept limits on its own deployments. All sides would need to agree on mechanisms for verification and sanctions for eventual violations.

Secondly, the parties might be well served by beginning with less divisive topics. European countries have sought to promote cooperation with Russia on climate change and counter-terrorism; today, they might also seek common ground in responding to the COVID-19 pandemic. They could also start with more targeted security issues. Discussions could be carried out on a sub-regional rather than continent-wide level, for instance focusing on the Black Sea, the Baltic Sea, and other narrower ground and maritime environments. In itself, European states’ willingness to come to the table, acknowledging Russian concerns while also voicing their own, could send an important signal. Once discussions are under way, they may help temper antagonistic rhetoric on all sides.

Some argue that such conversations, occurring even as war continues in Ukraine, would reward Russia. [fn] See Jamie Dettmer, “Macron’s courtship of Putin alarming Russia’s near neighbors”, Voice of America, 11 September 2019; and Janusz Bugajski, “Beware another Russia reset”, CEPA, 20 February 2020. Hide Footnote  Western governments shut down many existing dialogues and other forms of cooperation in response to Moscow’s aggression, signalling they would restart or be reconsidered only once Ukraine regained control of its border. [fn] Endeavours that have been curtailed include “practical” NATO and member state cooperation with Russia, notably in Afghanistan and on counter-terrorism as well as EU funding for most cooperative projects other than people-to-people exchanges. See “ NATO-Russia Relations: The Facts ”, NATO, 9 August 2019; “ The EU’s Russia Policy: Five Guiding Principles ”, European Union Briefing, February 2018. Hide Footnote  But suspending these talks has not helped move Russia and, besides, progress on broader continental concerns is as important to the rest of Europe as it is to Russia. A more secure Europe is also better for Ukraine, diluting its role as battleground between Russia and the West and making a sustainable peace more realistic.

Even if they occur, regional security discussions will take time to produce visible results. Although they could encourage greater Russian flexibility, Moscow is unlikely to compromise on Ukraine today in exchange for the promise of sub-regional weapons limits at some point in the future. In the longer term, progress in security dialogues almost certainly would make peace in Ukraine more sustainable; by contrast, in the shorter term, the absence of visible results could undermine the prospect of advances in Ukraine.

Thirdly, therefore, there should be more immediate incentives tied to the conflict in Ukraine itself. These should aim at building faith in Moscow that Western states would be more cooperative if Russia were to show greater willingness to compromise on Ukraine. Sanctions arguably are the most promising area in this regard: linking incremental steps by Moscow to incremental relaxation of sanctions is likely to be more effective than today’s all-or-nothing approach. [fn] Much of the research on the effectiveness of sanctions argues for flexible sanctions strategies when seeking behaviour change rather than containment. See O’Sullivan, Shrewd Sanctions , op. cit., especially pp. 284-320. Hide Footnote  Under current circumstances, were Moscow to shift tack and be more constructive (for example, by pressuring separatists to respect ceasefires and provide access to monitors or by seriously reciprocating Zelenskyy’s peacemaking efforts), European governments would have few if any effective tools to respond positively; Russia would face the same sanctions as they do today. Such an outcome would reinforce Moscow’s narrative that sanctions are detached from Russian behaviour. It might also spur dissent within EU ranks, with some members refusing to extend sanctions when the six-month renewal comes up.

An alternative to the current framework would be for Europe to develop a plan clearly linking the lifting of specific sanctions to specific steps by Russia. The bulk of sanctions would remain tied to the most important components of any peace deal, namely restoration of Ukraine’s control over its territory (with the exception of Crimea, whose status is linked to a different set of sanctions). For instance, Russia could be granted access to some capital markets or limited technologies and services in the oil sector in exchange for Moscow’s success in pressuring its proxies to provide access to monitors and to honour any ceasefire. In so doing, Europe would be sending a credible signal to Moscow that sanctions can be eased, without sending a message either of weakness or of desperation.

Presented with this suggestion, several European officials raise the concern that any progress by Moscow would be easily reversible. [fn] Crisis Group interviews, EU and member state representatives, Brussels, Moscow and New York, 2019-2020. Hide Footnote  They also fear that any loosening of the sanctions regime could jeopardise the European unity that has prevailed until now. [fn] Crisis Group interviews, EU and member state representatives, Brussels, Moscow and New York, 2019-2020. Hide Footnote  Despite early rumblings of discontent, member states have displayed remarkable consensus on the sanctions regime and any adjustment could weaken it. Were some sanctions eased in response to specific steps from Moscow, officials fear that reaching agreement on reimposing them were Russia to backtrack, which would require consensus from all EU member states, would be near impossible. These concerns are certainly valid.

That said, the failure of the current policy to get Russia to reverse course means consensus alone may not be a sufficient reason to maintain the status quo; indeed, to the extent the current approach forecloses providing partial incentives for partial concessions from Moscow, it could be deemed counterproductive. Moreover, it is unclear how long the existing consensus will endure in any case, as frustration with the current policy paralysis could grow, especially if Moscow begins to make some concessions, potentially at least in part with the intent of dividing Europe. All options entail risks, but on balance developing a plan that incentivises meaningful compromise from Moscow and prepares Europe to act in unison in the event that happens seems the better path. Clearly this should be done cautiously and incrementally, ideally making clear that the European Council will reimpose restrictive measures within the framework of the Common Foreign and Security Policy in the event of backsliding and, as best possible, securing support across European capitals for that idea. [fn] EU sanctions guidelines are clear that the Council can decide not to continue restrictive measures even if the criteria or specific objectives of the measure have not been met, including if there has been a change in the political context. Likewise, the Council always retains the option to reimpose sanctions by adopting a CFSP Decision under Article 29 of the Treaty of the European Union. See paragraphs 34 and 7, respectively. Hide Footnote

Optimally, a revised sanctions approach would include those imposed by the U.S. and reflect coordination between Brussels and Washington. That does not currently seem achievable. U.S. sanctions related to Ukraine would be difficult to lift or alter, as such steps would require legislative action at a time of polarisation and gridlock in Washington when neither Republicans nor Democrats will want to risk appearing weak on Russia. Furthermore, U.S. sanctions would be hard to disentangle: some are clearly linked to Russian policy in Crimea or Donbas; others to a wider range of issues. [fn] U.S. sanctions against Russia related to its involvement in the conflict in Ukraine were initially imposed through a series of Executive Orders (13660, 13661, 13662 and 13685) and were enshrined into law by the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA). The law also established a Congressional review process for any action the president takes to ease or lift a wider variety of Russia-related sanctions, including those linked to Ukraine. Though some, including President Donald Trump, have questioned CAATSA’s constitutionality (Donald J. Trump, “Statement by President Donald J. Trump on the Signing of H.R. 3364”, The White House, 2 August 2017), the legislation makes these sanctions at a minimum harder to reverse if only because of the political cost such an action would incur. The scope and scale of Ukraine-related sanctions are wide-ranging. See Kristin Archick and Dianne Rennack, “U.S. Sanctions on Russia”, Congressional Research Service, 17 January 2020. For a good explainer on U.S. sanctions on Russia, see Jeffrey Mankoff and Cyrus Newlin and Jeffrey Mankoff, “U.S. Sanctions against Russia: What You Need to Know”, Center for Strategic and International Studies, 31 October 2018. Hide Footnote

IV. The Local Still Matters: Components of Ukraine’s Peace

New approaches to European security will not, in and of themselves, end the war in Ukraine. The subsequent instalments in this series will unpack the necessary components of any peace package. To an extent, they align with those of the Minsk Agreements, which for all their inadequacies lay out much of what needs to be resolved to enable peace and the territories’ reintegration, including ending the fighting, withdrawing weapons and forces, resuming social and economic ties with separatist-controlled territories; holding elections, defining governance structures and relationships, and deciding whom to amnesty as well as how. But Crisis Group will also explore issues not explicitly addressed in the Minsk Agreements:

Stopping the shooting.  Ceasefires have been often agreed but short-lived, with each new incident of violence further undermining prospects for a peaceful settlement. This briefing will assess progress to date and the challenges that must be overcome to move forward on disengagement, a ceasefire and withdrawal of heavy weapons as well as foreign forces. It will address domestic opposition to disengagement and ceasefire within Ukraine, its implications and the challenges posed by fighting flare-ups. It will also examine potential roles of outside actors, such as existing or additional monitors and peacekeepers.

Restoring ties across the line of contact.  Rebuilding relationships between communities divided by the war will be critical to livelihoods in the short term and reintegration in the long term. This briefing will describe actions taken to date by the Zelenskyy administration to restore social and economic ties between government-controlled Ukraine and the statelets. It will assess ways to sustainably reverse the line of contact’s increasing resemblance to a state border and outline additional potential humanitarian actions, while addressing challenges of outreach to territory Kyiv does not control.

Holding elections.  Local elections, a critical component of Minsk, pose thorny problems. The thorniest is that Minsk calls for Kyiv to resume control of its eastern border only after elections, even as these are to be held under Ukrainian law. Zelenskyy insists that this provision means Ukraine must first control all or most of the border, which in turn implies that all foreign forces and their weapons will have departed and that fighters will have laid down their arms. This briefing will lay out various options for breaking the impasse.

Reintegration.  In line with the Minsk Agreements, reintegration of separatist-held areas into Ukraine should go hand in hand with decentralisation and special status for all or part of Donbas. But the parties define these concepts differently. This briefing will outline prospects for resolving disagreements and consider policy steps necessary to effectively govern Donbas as reintegration is under way, including accommodations for returning refugees and internally displaced people (IDPs), economic and social support, and policing.

Amnesty.  Minsk calls for an amnesty law that precludes prosecution and punishment of those who took part in fighting and other “events”. Determining who will be amnestied and what it entails will pose significant challenges and is likely to prove divisive. This briefing will examine different approaches to amnesty, including eligibility, restrictions and limitations as well as approaches to war crimes committed by both separatist fighters and those who fought as part of or alongside Ukrainian government forces.

V. Conclusion

The costs of continued war, even if accompanied by decreased levels of violence, is high for all parties – for Ukraine, Russia and European security. Zelenskyy came into office promising peace and prosperity; should he fail to deliver, his government risks being replaced not by new reformers but by members of the old guard that failed Ukraine for many years prior to 2014. Russia, although it has weathered the sanctions, nonetheless has suffered their effects; absent progress on Ukraine, those will remain in full. Finally, a persistent conflict risks locking Russia and the West into a worsening spiral of tensions at a time of new and unpredictable geopolitical challenges. Resolving the conflict would redound to all sides’ benefit.

Although any viable and sustainable solution will need to address Ukraine-specific issues, it almost certainly also will need to take into account the broader European security context in which the conflict began and that has helped fan its flames. Conflict in Ukraine means conflict in Europe, and its implications spread far beyond that country’s borders. Today, under Zelenskyy’s leadership, Kyiv appears to genuinely be seeking a way to end the war. Its Western partners can help by starting to build a broader framework for peace on the continent as a whole.

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• What is America's interest in the Ukraine war?

MIT Security Studies Program affiliate Joshua Shifrinson provides an evaluation of US strategic interests in Ukraine. An excerpt is featured below. Read the full article here in The National Interest .

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 .

• A few members of the Russian Parliament speak out against the war.
• A major Ukrainian internet provider reports a cyberattack.
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Global impact: 5 ways war in Ukraine has changed the world

FILE - A Ukrainian volunteer Oleksandr Osetynskyi, 44 holds a Ukrainian flag and directs hundreds of refugees after fleeing from the Ukraine and arriving at the border crossing in Medyka, Poland, Monday, March 7, 2022. War has been a catastrophe for Ukraine and a crisis for the globe. One year on, thousands of civilians are dead, and countless buildings have been destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of troops have been killed or wounded on each side. Beyond Ukraine’s borders, the invasion shattered European security, redrew nations’ relations with one another and frayed a tightly woven global economy. (AP Photo/Visar Kryeziu, File)

FILE - Ukrainian military’s Grad multiple rocket launcher fires rockets at Russian positions in the frontline near Bakhmut, Donetsk region, Ukraine, Thursday, Nov. 24, 2022. War has been a catastrophe for Ukraine and a crisis for the globe. One year on, thousands of civilians are dead, and countless buildings have been destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of troops have been killed or wounded on each side. Beyond Ukraine’s borders, the invasion shattered European security, redrew nations’ relations with one another and frayed a tightly woven global economy. (AP Photo/LIBKOS, File)

FILE - Firefighters extinguish flames outside an apartment house after a Russian rocket attack in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city, Ukraine, Monday, March 14, 2022. War has been a catastrophe for Ukraine and a crisis for the globe. One year on, thousands of civilians are dead, and countless buildings have been destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of troops have been killed or wounded on each side. Beyond Ukraine’s borders, the invasion shattered European security, redrew nations’ relations with one another and frayed a tightly woven global economy. (AP Photo/Pavel Dorogoy, File)

FILE - People lie on the floor of a hospital during shelling by Russian forces in Mariupol, Ukraine, Friday, March 4, 2022. War has been a catastrophe for Ukraine and a crisis for the globe. One year on, thousands of civilians are dead, and countless buildings have been destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of troops have been killed or wounded on each side. Beyond Ukraine’s borders, the invasion shattered European security, redrew nations’ relations with one another and frayed a tightly woven global economy. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka, File)

FILE - Russian President Vladimir Putin puts on protective glasses as he visits a military training center of the Western Military District for mobilized reservists in Ryazan Region, Russia, Thursday, Oct. 20, 2022. (Mikhail Klimentyev, Sputnik, Kremlin Pool Photo via AP, File)

FILE - People walk past part of a rocket that sits wedged in the ground in Lysychansk, Luhansk region, Ukraine, Friday, May 13, 2022. War has been a catastrophe for Ukraine and a crisis for the globe. One year on, thousands of civilians are dead, and countless buildings have been destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of troops have been killed or wounded on each side. Beyond Ukraine’s borders, the invasion shattered European security, redrew nations’ relations with one another and frayed a tightly woven global economy. (AP Photo/Leo Correa, File)

FILE - The dead body of a person lies covered in the street in Mariupol, Ukraine, Monday, March 7, 2022. War has been a catastrophe for Ukraine and a crisis for the globe. One year on, thousands of civilians are dead, and countless buildings have been destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of troops have been killed or wounded on each side. Beyond Ukraine’s borders, the invasion shattered European security, redrew nations’ relations with one another and frayed a tightly woven global economy. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka, File)

FILE - Sand bags protect the Monument to Princess Olga, St. Andrew the Apostle and the educators Cyril and Methodius in Kyiv, Thursday, June 16, 2022. War has been a catastrophe for Ukraine and a crisis for the globe. One year on, thousands of civilians are dead, and countless buildings have been destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of troops have been killed or wounded on each side. Beyond Ukraine’s borders, the invasion shattered European security, redrew nations’ relations with one another and frayed a tightly woven global economy. (Ludovic Marin, Pool via AP, File)

FILE - U.S. President Joe Biden, center, arrives for a round table meeting during an extraordinary NATO summit at NATO headquarters in Brussels, Thursday, March 24, 2022. War has been a catastrophe for Ukraine and a crisis for the globe. One year on, thousands of civilians are dead, and countless buildings have been destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of troops have been killed or wounded on each side. Beyond Ukraine’s borders, the invasion shattered European security, redrew nations’ relations with one another and frayed a tightly woven global economy. (AP Photo/Markus Schreiber, File)

FILE - In this photo provided by the Ukrainian Presidential Press Office, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, center, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, left, Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal, EU and Ukraine official pose for a photo during the EU-Ukraine summit in Kyiv, Ukraine, Thursday, Feb. 2, 2023. War has been a catastrophe for Ukraine and a crisis for the globe. One year on, thousands of civilians are dead, and countless buildings have been destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of troops have been killed or wounded on each side. (Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via AP, File)

FILE - In this image provided by the Ukrainian Presidential Press Office, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, left, and Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson, shake hands during their walk in downtown Kyiv, Ukraine, Saturday, April 9, 2022. War has been a catastrophe for Ukraine and a crisis for the globe. One year on, thousands of civilians are dead, and countless buildings have been destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of troops have been killed or wounded on each side. Beyond Ukraine’s borders, the invasion shattered European security, redrew nations’ relations with one another and frayed a tightly woven global economy. (Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via AP, File)

FILE - Ukrainians crowd under a destroyed bridge as they try to flee crossing the Irpin river in the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Saturday, March 5, 2022. War has been a catastrophe for Ukraine and a crisis for the globe. One year on, thousands of civilians are dead, and countless buildings have been destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of troops have been killed or wounded on each side. Beyond Ukraine’s borders, the invasion shattered European security, redrew nations’ relations with one another and frayed a tightly woven global economy. (AP Photo/Emilio Morenatti, File)

FILE - A Ukrainian serviceman smokes a cigarette at his position on the frontline near Bakhmut, Donetsk region, Ukraine, Wednesday, Jan. 11, 2023. War has been a catastrophe for Ukraine and a crisis for the globe. One year on, thousands of civilians are dead, and countless buildings have been destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of troops have been killed or wounded on each side. Beyond Ukraine’s borders, the invasion shattered European security, redrew nations’ relations with one another and frayed a tightly woven global economy. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka, File)

FILE - Ukrainian soldiers fire at Russian positions from a U.S.-supplied M777 howitzer in Kherson region, Ukraine, Jan. 9, 2023. War has been a catastrophe for Ukraine and a crisis for the globe. One year on, thousands of civilians are dead, and countless buildings have been destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of troops have been killed or wounded on each side. Beyond Ukraine’s borders, the invasion shattered European security, redrew nations’ relations with one another and frayed a tightly woven global economy. (AP Photo/Libkos, File)

FILE - An abandoned car lies on the ground in a heavily damaged grain factory where Russians forces gathered destroyed vehicles at the recaptured town of Lyman, Ukraine, Tuesday, Oct. 11, 2022. War has been a catastrophe for Ukraine and a crisis for the globe. One year on, thousands of civilians are dead, and countless buildings have been destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of troops have been killed or wounded on each side. Beyond Ukraine’s borders, the invasion shattered European security, redrew nations’ relations with one another and frayed a tightly woven global economy. (AP Photo/Francisco Seco, File)

FILE - A dump track unloads grain in a granary in the village of Zghurivka, Ukraine, Tuesday, Aug. 9, 2022. War has been a catastrophe for Ukraine and a crisis for the globe. One year on, thousands of civilians are dead, and countless buildings have been destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of troops have been killed or wounded on each side. Beyond Ukraine’s borders, the invasion shattered European security, redrew nations’ relations with one another and frayed a tightly woven global economy. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky, File)

FILE - Jennifer Jones sorts her bills at her small flat in London, Thursday, Aug. 25, 2022. The war’s economic impact has been felt from chilly homes in Europe to food markets in Africa. War has been a catastrophe for Ukraine and a crisis for the globe. One year on, thousands of civilians are dead, and countless buildings have been destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of troops have been killed or wounded on each side. Beyond Ukraine’s borders, the invasion shattered European security, redrew nations’ relations with one another and frayed a tightly woven global economy. (AP Photo/Frank Augstein, File)

FILE - A flock of sheep graze in front of a coal-fired power plant at the Garzweiler open-cast coal mine near Luetzerath, western Germany, Oct. 16, 2022. War has been a catastrophe for Ukraine and a crisis for the globe. One year on, thousands of civilians are dead, and countless buildings have been destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of troops have been killed or wounded on each side. Beyond Ukraine’s borders, the invasion shattered European security, redrew nations’ relations with one another and frayed a tightly woven global economy. (AP Photo/Martin Meissner, File)

FILE - A shopkeeper sells wheat flour in the Hamar-Weyne market in the capital Mogadishu, Somalia Thursday, May 26, 2022. War has been a catastrophe for Ukraine and a crisis for the globe. One year on, thousands of civilians are dead, and countless buildings have been destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of troops have been killed or wounded on each side. Beyond Ukraine’s borders, the invasion shattered European security, redrew nations’ relations with one another and frayed a tightly woven global economy. (AP Photo/Farah Abdi Warsameh, File)

FILE - In this photo taken from video released by Russian Defense Ministry Press Service on Wednesday, Oct. 26, 2022, a Yars intercontinental ballistic missile is test-fired as part of Russia’s nuclear drills from a launch site in Plesetsk, northwestern Russia. War has been a catastrophe for Ukraine and a crisis for the globe. One year on, thousands of civilians are dead, and countless buildings have been destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of troops have been killed or wounded on each side. (Russian Defense Ministry Press Service via AP, File)

FILE - Residents gathering at an aid distribution point receive supplies in downtown Kherson, southern Ukraine, Friday, Nov. 18, 2022. War has been a catastrophe for Ukraine and a crisis for the globe. One year on, thousands of civilians are dead, and countless buildings have been destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of troops have been killed or wounded on each side. Beyond Ukraine’s borders, the invasion shattered European security, redrew nations’ relations with one another and frayed a tightly woven global economy. (AP Photo/Bernat Armangue, File)

FILE - A woman cries in front of the building which was destroyed by a Russian attack in Kryvyi Rih, Ukraine, Friday, Dec. 16, 2022. War has been a catastrophe for Ukraine and a crisis for the globe. One year on, thousands of civilians are dead, and countless buildings have been destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of troops have been killed or wounded on each side. Beyond Ukraine’s borders, the invasion shattered European security, redrew nations’ relations with one another and frayed a tightly woven global economy. (AP Photo/Evgeniy Maloletka, File)

FILE - Victor Rosenberg, 81, looks out of a broken window in his home destroyed by the Russian rocket attack in the city centre of Bakhmut, Donetsk region, Ukraine, Friday, July 1, 2022. War has been a catastrophe for Ukraine and a crisis for the globe. One year on, thousands of civilians are dead, and countless buildings have been destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of troops have been killed or wounded on each side. Beyond Ukraine’s borders, the invasion shattered European security, redrew nations’ relations with one another and frayed a tightly woven global economy. (AP Photo/Efrem Lukatsky, File)

FILE - Nila Zelinska holds a doll belonging to her granddaughter, she was able to find in her destroyed house in Potashnya, Ukraine, Tuesday, May 31, 2022. War has been a catastrophe for Ukraine and a crisis for the globe. One year on, thousands of civilians are dead, and countless buildings have been destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of troops have been killed or wounded on each side. Beyond Ukraine’s borders, the invasion shattered European security, redrew nations’ relations with one another and frayed a tightly woven global economy. (AP Photo/Natacha Pisarenko, File)

File - A Ukrainian serviceman stands amid destroyed Russian tanks in Bucha, on the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, April 6, 2022. War has been a catastrophe for Ukraine and a crisis for the globe. One year on, thousands of civilians are dead, and countless buildings have been destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of troops have been killed or wounded on each side. Beyond Ukraine’s borders, the invasion shattered European security, redrew nations’ relations with one another and frayed a tightly woven global economy. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana, File)

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LONDON (AP) — War has been a catastrophe for Ukraine and a crisis for the globe. The world is a more unstable and fearful place since Russia invaded its neighbor on Feb. 24, 2022.

One year on , thousands of Ukrainian civilians are dead, and countless buildings have been destroyed. Tens of thousands of troops have been killed or seriously wounded on each side. Beyond Ukraine’s borders, the invasion shattered European security, redrew nations’ relations with one another and frayed a tightly woven global economy.

Here are five ways the war has changed the world:

THE RETURN OF EUROPEAN WAR

Three months before the invasion, then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson scoffed at suggestions that the British army needed more heavy weapons. “The old concepts of fighting big tank battles on European landmass,” he said, “are over.”

Johnson is now urging the U.K. to send more battle tanks to help Ukraine repel Russian forces.

Despite the role played by new technology such as satellites and drones, this 21st-century conflict in many ways resembles one from the 20th. Fighting in eastern Ukraine’s Donbas region is a brutal slog , with mud, trenches and bloody infantry assaults reminiscent of World War I.

The conflict has sparked a new arms race that reminds some analysts of the 1930s buildup to World War II. Russia has mobilized hundreds of thousands of conscripts and aims to expand its military from 1 million to 1.5 million troops. The U.S. has ramped up weapons production to replace the stockpiles shipped to Ukraine. France plans to boost military spending by a third by 2030, while Germany has abandoned its longstanding ban on sending weapons to conflict zones and shipped missiles and tanks to Ukraine.

Before the war, many observers assumed that military forces would move toward more advanced technology and cyber warfare and become less reliant on tanks or artillery, said Patrick Bury, senior lecturer in security at the University of Bath.

But in Ukraine, guns and ammunition are the most important weapons.

“It is, for the moment at least, being shown that in Ukraine, conventional warfare — state-on-state — is back,” Bury said.

ALLIANCES TESTED AND TOUGHENED

Russian President Vladimir Putin hoped the invasion would split the West and weaken NATO. Instead, the military alliance has been reinvigorated . A group set up to counter the Soviet Union has a renewed sense of purpose and two new aspiring members in Finland and Sweden, which ditched decades of nonalignment and asked to join NATO as protection against Russia.

The 27-nation European Union has hit Russia with tough sanctions and sent Ukraine billions in support. The war put Brexit squabbles into perspective, thawing diplomatic relations between the bloc and awkward former member Britain.

“The EU is taking sanctions, quite serious sanctions, in the way that it should. The U.S. is back in Europe with a vengeance in a way we never thought it would be again,” said defense analyst Michael Clarke, former head of the Royal United Services Institute think tank.

NATO member states have poured weapons and equipment worth billions of dollars into Ukraine. The alliance has buttressed its eastern flank, and the countries nearest to Ukraine and Russia, including Poland and the Baltic states, have persuaded more hesitant NATO and European Union allies, potentially shifting Europe’s center of power eastwards.

There are some cracks in the unity. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Putin’s closest ally in the EU, has lobbied against sanctions on Moscow, refused to send weapons to Ukraine and held up an aid package from the bloc for Kyiv.

Western unity will come under more and more pressure the longer the conflict grinds on.

“Russia is planning for a long war,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said at the end of 2022, but the alliance was also ready for the “long haul.”

A NEW IRON CURTAIN

The war has made Russia a pariah in the West . Its oligarchs have been sanctioned and its businesses blacklisted, and international brands including McDonald’s and Ikea have disappeared from the country’s streets.

Yet Moscow is not entirely friendless . Russia has strengthened economic ties with China, though Beijing is keeping its distance from the fighting and so far has not sent weapons. The U.S. has recently expressed concern that may change.

China is closely watching a conflict that may serve as either encouragement or warning to Beijing about any attempt to reclaim self-governing Taiwan by force.

Putin has reinforced military links with international outcasts North Korea and Iran, which supplies armed drones that Russia unleashes on Ukrainian infrastructure. Moscow continues to build influence in Africa and the Middle East with its economic and military clout. Russia’s Wagner mercenary group has grown more powerful in conflicts from the Donbas to the Sahel.

In an echo of the Cold War, the world is divided into two camps, with many countries, including densely populated India, hedging their bets to see who emerges on top.

Tracey German, professor of conflict and security at King’s College London, said the conflict has widened a rift between the “U.S.-led liberal international order” on one side, and angry Russia and emboldened rising superpower China on the other.

A BATTERED AND RESHAPED ECONOMY

The war’s economic impact has been felt from chilly homes in Europe to food markets in Africa.

Before the war, European Union nations imported almost half their natural gas and third of their oil from Russia. The invasion, and sanctions slapped on Russia in response, delivered an energy price shock on a scale not seen since the 1970s.

The war disrupted global trade that was still recovering from the pandemic. Food prices have soared, since Russia and Ukraine are major suppliers of wheat and sunflower oil, and Russia is the world’s top fertilizer producer.

Grain-carrying ships have continued to sail from Ukraine under a fragile U.N.-brokered deal, and prices have come down from record levels. But food remains a geopolitical football. Russia has sought to blame the West for high prices, while Ukraine and its allies accuse Russia of cynically using hunger as a weapon.

The war “has really highlighted the fragility” of an interconnected world, just as the pandemic did, German said, and the full economic impact has yet to be felt.

The war also roiled attempts to fight climate change, driving an upsurge in Europe’s use of heavily polluting coal. Yet Europe’s rush away from Russian oil and gas may speed the transition to renewable energy sources faster than countless warnings about the dangers of global warming. The International Energy Agency says the world will add as much renewable power in the next five years as it did in the last 20.

A NEW AGE OF UNCERTAINTY

The conflict is a stark reminder that individuals have little control over the course of history. No one knows that better than the 8 million Ukrainians who have been forced to flee homes and country for new lives in communities across Europe and beyond.

For millions of people less directly affected, the sudden shattering of Europe’s peace has brought uncertainty and anxiety.

Putin’s veiled threats to use atomic weapons if the conflict escalates revived fears of nuclear war that had lain dormant since the Cold War. Fighting has raged around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, raising the specter of a new Chernobyl.

Patricia Lewis, director of the international security program at think-tank Chatham House, said Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling had provoked “more anger than fear” in the West. But concerns about nuclear escalation were heightened by Putin’s Feb. 21 announcement that he was suspending Russia’s participation in its sole remaining nuclear arms control treaty with the U.S.

Putin stopped short of withdrawing completely from the New START treaty and said Moscow would respect the treaty’s caps on nuclear weapons, keeping a faint glimmer of arms control alive.

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

Analysis: The Realist Case for a Ukraine Peace Deal

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The Realist Case for a Ukraine Peace Deal

Conflict resolution isn’t just for woolly-headed idealists..

• Stephen M. Walt

Russia’s War in Ukraine

Understanding the conflict two years on.

More on this topic

War is on everyone’s lips and laptop screens these days. Each day, we pore over the latest news from Ukraine, read opinions from real (or imagined) experts, and try to figure out who’s winning on the ground and in the air. Not surprisingly, it’s easy to find both optimistic and pessimistic forecasts.

All the attention on the fighting is understandable, but what matters in the end is how the conflict is resolved. It may be emotionally satisfying to proclaim that the only acceptable outcome is Russia’s capitulation, regime change in Moscow , and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s prosecution for war crimes , but none of those outcomes is likely. Making these goals our war aim is also a good way to prolong the fighting and raise the risk of escalation even higher.

If we care about Ukraine, our immediate goal should be to end the war before even more damage is done. There are thoughtful pieces by Thomas Graham and Rajan Menon , Michael O’Hanlon , Anatol Lieven , and others that begin to wrestle with this difficult topic, but they all recognize that getting there will not be easy. Moreover, the ultimate goal should be conflict resolution—not just an end to the fighting but a political arrangement that makes a replay later on less likely.

You might think that a realist would regard conflict resolution as a naive and idealistic notion popular among woolly-headed academics and largely divorced from real-world concerns. After all, doesn’t realism emphasize the competitive tendencies that are hard-wired into an anarchic political order? Yes, but it’s a mistake to think that realists see no interest in resolving conflicts when one can. Properly understood, there is a hard-nosed realist case for resolving conflicts whenever possible. Let me lay it out for you.

The most obvious reason for great powers to try to resolve ongoing conflicts is to remove existing problems from the current foreign-policy agenda. Realists recognize that new troubles are always lurking around the next corner, and every problem or conflict that you can shut down now is something you won’t need to worry about when a new crisis erupts.

The nuclear deal with Iran is an obvious case in point. When it was in effect, the United States did not have to worry very much about Iran’s nuclear potential and didn’t have to devote a lot of time or bandwidth to negotiating a new agreement. So long as Iran remained in compliance (and the International Atomic Energy Agency repeatedly certified that it was), the problem could be left on the back burner. By leaving the agreement, however, then-U.S. President Donald Trump put Iran’s nuclear program back near the top of America’s foreign-policy agenda. Not only did his blunder fuel regional violence in ways that undermined U.S. interests, but leaving the nuclear deal forced the Biden administration to devote time, energy, and bandwidth to negotiating a new agreement to reverse Iran’s renewed progress toward a bomb. I’ll bet President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, and the rest of their team wishes they didn’t have to spend a minute on this issue right now.

A second reason to resolve conflicts is to protect allies and friends who are involved in a regional dispute or likely to get drawn into one. By making them more secure, they will be in a better position to help you in other ways. It’s a win-win, especially for a country such as the United States, which has partners in many places and defines its interests broadly.

Third, by definition, resolving conflicts reduces the risk of unwanted escalation. When any war is underway, there is always a chance that third parties will enter it voluntarily or get drawn in as the protagonists try to prosecute the conflict more effectively. The Congo wars in Africa eventually involved nearly all the states bordering the Democratic Republic of the Congo; the Vietnam War expanded into Laos and Cambodia (with especially horrific effects on the latter); and the Iran-Iraq War led to attacks on foreign oil tankers and eventually led the United States and others to respond militarily. Stopping the fighting made that problem disappear virtually overnight.

Moreover, wars invariably produce a lot of nasty unintended consequences, even for the winners. Supporting the Afghan mujaheddin against the Soviet Union during the 1980s may have seemed like a great idea at the time, and one can argue that it was worth it to bring the Soviet empire down. But it also sowed the seeds of the terrorist movements that attacked Americans from the 1990s onward and eventually provoked the United States into the long and disastrous global war on terrorism. And it certainly did nothing positive for the people of Afghanistan, who have endured more than 40 years of near-constant warfare. Instead of fueling the conflict, maybe doing more to settle it way back then would have left everyone—including the United States—better off.

Fourth, helping to stop an ongoing war is an ideal way for a great power to demonstrate its influence and its ability to work for the greater good. In the first decade of the 20th century, for example, President Theodore Roosevelt’s successful mediation of the Russo-Japanese War enhanced America’s status as a newly influential actor on the world stage. Seventy years later, President Jimmy Carter’s stewardship of the Camp David Accords and Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty had similar effects. By contrast, the repeated failure to broker a final Israeli-Palestinian peace deal under the Clinton, Bush, and Obama administrations undermined America’s image as a competent and objective mediator.

From this perspective, we may one day look back on Russia’s war in Ukraine as a giant missed opportunity for Chinese President Xi Jinping. Imagine the prestige China might have garnered if Xi stepped in and got the Russians and Ukrainians to come to terms. Not only would this action have reinforced Chinese aspirations to be the leading global power of the 21st century, but it would also have underscored its stated commitment to the principle of national sovereignty. Beijing could have boasted to others that the war had demonstrated that decadent and declining great powers such as the United States, its European allies, and Russia simply couldn’t handle their disagreements without fighting, while China’s approach to world affairs could deliver peace. Xi’s failure to seize this opportunity suggests he simply cannot admit that backing Putin so strongly over the past several years was a bad bet. If so, he is displaying the same self-defeating rigidity that helped bring the war about in the first place.

Fifth, a world where conflict and war are endemic is a world where trade and investment cannot flow as safely or as freely. Just look at what is happening now, as the war in Ukraine accelerates the retreat from globalization that was already underway. As my colleague Dani Rodrik told the New York Times , the war has “probably put a nail in the coffin of hyperglobalization.” Liberals often argue that economic interdependence promotes peace—and there is some evidence for that proposition —but it may be even more accurate to say that peace facilitates interdependence . Countries at war are generally not attractive investment opportunities, and they must divert resources away from enhancing their citizens’ lives and pour them onto the battlefield instead. Realism’s emphasis on the conflictive elements of world affairs does not preclude it from seeing the material benefits of more integrated global economy, and reaping these benefits requires a world with less war.

Last but by no means least, resolving conflicts is desirable because it reduces human suffering and enhances human dignity. Nothing in the realist approach to foreign policy says these things are unimportant, even if states often ignore such concerns when vital interests are at stake. But realists see this situation as part of the tragedy of power politics and welcome practical steps to mitigate it. Conflict resolution is one of the most obvious.

These points are not an argument for “peace at any price.” Nor do they prescribe accepting settlements that are just an intermission until the next act of violence, although temporary cease-fires can allow civilians to escape and facilitate humanitarian relief. And to be fair, sometimes fomenting conflict, baiting adversaries into costly quagmires, or otherwise playing geopolitical hardball can make another country more secure. To recognize the virtues of conflict resolution is not to deny that states sometimes benefit from the opposite.

And as I’ve noted before, the United States has a greater interest in conflict resolution than any other major power. America’s position in the world is still extraordinarily favorable despite the self-inflicted wounds of recent years, and the only things that can really damage it are misguided policies and poisonous politics at home, climate change, and really big conflagrations abroad. From a hard-nosed, selfish, flag-waving perspective, peace is almost always in the U.S. national interest.

And as George W. Bush learned to his sorrow and Putin may—repeat, may—be discovering today, rolling the iron dice of war can take a nation into situations its leaders never intended or imagined. There’s no shortage of potential trouble in the world, and wiser leaders try to avoid it, to settle conflicts where and when they can, and to enter conflicts only when necessary and only after much thought, a careful weighing of alternatives, and with considerable trepidation.

What does this mean for the war in Ukraine? Now that Russia has been denied the swift victory it expected going in, the war is likely to turn into a grinding and costly stalemate that won’t end until the protagonists realize that they cannot achieve all their original goals and will have to accept a less-than-ideal outcome. Russia won’t get a compliant Ukrainian satellite or a Moscow-centered “Eurasian empire” that includes it. Ukraine won’t get Crimea back or full membership in NATO. The United States will have to give up trying to bring other states into NATO someday. But the real trick will be to devise a settlement that the parties will be willing to live with in perpetuity and not seek to overturn at the first opportunity. That is a formidable challenge, and the sooner smart people start trying to figure out what such an agreement might entail, the better.

Stephen M. Walt is a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University. Twitter:  @stephenwalt

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Home ▶ Publications

Preventing Violent International Conflict

Tuesday, April 27, 1999

Publication Type: Teaching and Learning Guide

This guide from the 1999 National Peace Essay Contest uses case studies from Poland in 1815 and Czechoslovakia in 1938 to examine the effectiveness of the international diplomacy in preventing violent international crises. It also contains a review of basic concepts and bibliographic materials.

Teaching Guide on Preventing Violent Conflict Introduction In this teaching guide students examine two cases of preventing violent conflict, Poland in 1815 and Czechoslovakia in 1938, as a means of developing an understanding of conflict and conflict prevention. The teaching guide is designed specifically to help students develop analytical writing skills on this topic. The objective of this guide is to provide lessons aimed at helping students to:

• Develop an understanding of principal concepts regarding conflict and conflict prevention.
• Formulate thesis statements to inform the structure of an essay.
• Use primary source materials in addition to secondary sources.
• Reinforce analytical writing skills in sample case studies.

This guide will fulfill these objectives through five suggested lessons: Lesson I acquaints the students with the writing prompt, presenting crucial concepts used in the writing prompt with exercises designed to activate student understanding. Lesson II presents two case studies with background information and primary sources to illustrate success and failure in preventing violent international conflict. Teachers can use this lesson to explain how to use primary source materials as evidence to support or refute a thesis statement. Lesson III reinforces the analytical skills developed in the previous lesson through small group and class discussions. the writing prompt is reintroduced in Lesson IV , allowing class members to compose sample essays integrating the concepts and case study materials. Finally, Lesson V prepares students to write individual essays on "Preventing Violent International Conflict." Lesson I: Concept Development Lesson I will take approximately two class periods. Have the students read the writing prompt, "Preventing Violent International Conflict" and list any questions students have pertaining to concepts, themes, or tools contained in the writing prompt. The objective of this lesson is for students to acquire an active understanding of key concepts beyond rote memorization of definitions. Victor Rentel developed a five-step system for concept development that will be adapted to the key concepts in the writing prompt. Students will learn to label, compare and contrast, categorize, and apply information inherent in each concept to the particular context in which the concept is used in individual essays. To reinforce key concepts and integrate them successfully into essay composition, students will apply various approaches to thoroughly understand each concept. The following outline of these approaches uses the concept "balance of power" as an example. Establish a label for the concept. Connect the concept with particular word associations for clarity and understanding. For example, balance of power, defined as a "relatively equal distribution of military power between states, allowing no single state or coalition of states to dominate the others," can be associated with the European power system resulting from the Congress of Vienna (1814-15), called the Concert of Europe. Emphasize attributes of the concept. Identify the characteristics of a concept that make it similar to or different from other concepts. To develop attributes of a balance of power, one might compare and contrast the characteristics of the Concert of Europe with those of the hegemonic system of Napoleonic Europe. Provide both positive and negative examples of the concept. Through examples and counter-examples, discuss state systems that represent a balance of power or an imbalance of power (such as a state of chaos or hegemony), and explain how certain historical and contemporary alliances represent positive and negative examples of the concept. Discover the essence of the concept by categorizing it and relating it to other concepts. By categorizing various forms of balance of power arrangements, link the concept to collective security systems and coalitions, and to other concepts mentioned in this lesson or brought up by students. Apply the concept to historical topics or current issues. Once the students understand the key concepts in the writing prompt, integrate each concept into issues discussed in class. For example, did the balance of power agreed upon at the Congress of Vienna ensure peace in Europe (with only isolated bilateral conflicts) between 1815 and 1914? If so, why did it fail in 1914?

Key Concepts The following concepts are taken from the writing prompt "Preventing Violent International Conflict" and are intended to give the students a better understanding of the topic. Power : The ability to influence or control the behavior of others, events, outcomes, or the rules of the game. Strength, resources, leadership, and moral persuasion are attributes necessary to exercise power. Balance of Power : A relatively equal distribution of military power between states, allowing no single state or coalition of states to dominate the others. Coalition : A group of states that cooperate with each other on a short-term basis to achieve a common goal or work against a common threat. Hegemony : The possession by one state of a preponderance of military and economic power in the international system. This state can create and enforce rules and impose its will on other states. Alliance Systems : A formal commitment between states to coordinate a political or military response against a specific enemy or specific contingencies. Low-level disputes : Conflicts between independent political units in which the violence is below the threshold of all-out military combat but above peaceful competition between states. Escalation : An increase of military or political efforts to achieve one's goals by raising the stakes and expanding the existing or perceived limits of the conflict, often making it harder to control any resulting violence. Violent International Conflict (War) : A major armed conflict between organized military forces of independent political units to achieve political advantage over other combatants. Preventive Diplomacy : Measures taken to keep low-level or long-festering disputes from escalating into significant violence between parties and to limit the spread of violence if it does occur. Preventive Measures : Specific actions taken to keep disputes from arising or escalating.

• Early Warning System : A set of indicators based on information and intelligence to help identify where and when the most harmful conflicts and crises might occur.
• Hot-line : A direct and open communications link between heads of state in order to facilitate fast communication during emergencies or crises.
• Economic Assistance : Bilateral or multilateral aid to provide resources for economic development, hasten economic recovery or transformation, or supply basic humanitarian needs.
• Economic Sanctions : The limitation or interruption of economic relations between countries to bring about a change in the policies of the target country.
• Diplomatic Sanctions : Actions such as denial of visas, withholding of political support, and lessening of military commitments, taken by governments against other states in order to bring about a change in the policies of the target country.
• Fact-finding Mission : Representatives of international organizations dispatched to an area of conflict to establish the facts and root causes of the conflict in order to assist with conflict prevention.

Coercive Measures : The use of threats or limited force to compel an adversary to take a course of action it might not otherwise take. Deterrence: The use of threats or limited force to dissuade a state from taking a particular course of action. International Organizations: Intergovernmental structures that develop cooperative activities among states and create agreed rules, norms, and procedures for specific state behavior. Diplomacy (Diplomats) : The management of international relations in general and, specifically, the conduct of relations between states through communication and negotiation, as well as promises, threats, and force. Mediation (Mediators) : The use of an outside party to help disputants to resolve differences without violence by facilitating communication, re-framing the discussion, or offering incentives or disincentives to negotiate or come to agreement. Preventive Deployment : Deployment in a conflict area of military or police personnel representing the United Nations or a regional organization such as NATO in order to prevent an outbreak of violence. Peacekeeping (Peacekeepers) : The use of military forces under United Nations or regional organization auspices to function as a buffer between disputants to prevent fighting or enforce a cease-fire. Demilitarized Zone : An area in which parties to a conflict agree after a cease-fire that military weapons and personnel will not be permitted, in particular as a means to separate potential belligerents or create a buffer zone that will make attack less likely by a neighboring country.

Lesson II: Building Analytical Skills through Sample Essays Lesson II will take two class periods, and requires an overnight homework assignment. Now that the students have a better understanding of the concepts and tools found in the writing prompt, apply this new understanding to writing analytical sample essays. Review two historical case studies: Poland in 1815 and Czechoslovakia in 1938. Divide the class into two groups. One group will write an analytical essay that illustrates success in preventing violent international conflict: the case of Poland in 1815. The other group will write an analytical essay that illustrates failure in preventing violent international conflict: the case of Czechoslovakia in 1938. Each essay should have a clear thesis, a statement of the problem and efforts made to prevent violent conflict, a concise presentation of the evidence as found in the primary source documents, an original analysis explaining why peaceful preventive measures were successful or unsuccessful, suggestions of efforts that might have been successful, and concluding remarks. At this point, the students should remain focused on primary source documents. Do not allow the students to conduct any additional research on the topic they are assigned. Students may look up terms they do not understand (for example, Third Reich) in the glossary of a history book, but beyond term clarification, no other materials should be used in this exercise. Students should write the essays individually, preferably as a homework assignment. The essays should be no longer than two pages. The emphasis here is on analytical writing, not description. Case Studies Have selected students read the writing prompt and apply it to the case study of Czechoslovakia. Hand out the background materials and primary source documents for Poland and Czechoslovakia. Make sure the students include the following concepts and tools in their essays. Success in Preventing Violent International Conflict: Poland, 1815

• Balance of Power
• Alliance System
• Collective Security

Failure to Prevent Violent International Conflict: Czechoslovakia, 1938

• Diplomatic Sanctions
• Fact-finding Mission
• Preventive Measures
• Coercive Measures

Lesson III: Group Discussions of Analytical Essays Lesson III builds on the analytical skills developed in Lesson II by focusing on small group class discussions. Group discussions will last one to two class periods. After the students have completed their assigned essays on Poland, 1815, and Czechoslovakia, 1938, divide them into small groups of two, four, or six, with half the members of each group having done Poland, the other half, Czechoslovakia. Have the students read and discuss thesis statements with their peers, asking questions such as why they chose particular pieces of evidence to support their thesis statements. Have the students discuss the analytical aspects of their essays, sharing original ideas. The purpose here is to illustrate the discipline of the thesis statement and primary source evidence, but also to reward original analysis. Analysis must, however, be based on evidence. Have students make the leap from primary sources to analysis without depending on pre-digested secondary source analyses to do the hard work of thinking through questions and answering them. In the course of small group discussions, students should discuss their choices of concepts, noting the use of some of the same concepts in each case study. Make sure students understand how evidence and concepts are used to make each case, and how one learns from failures in thinking about future successes. Gather the students together as an entire class and discuss the two essays, constructing on the black/whiteboard for each case study a class thesis statement, suggestions of the strongest evidence, and collective analyses. The notes collected during this class discussion should be recorded and distributed to class members for use in Lesson IV of this guide.

Lesson IV: Writing a Sample Essay Lesson IV revisits the writing prompt "Preventing Violent International Conflict," allowing students to compose sample essays and integrate concepts and case study materials. The lesson will take one to two class periods in either a full-class or small-group arrangement. Now that the students have reviewed concepts and tools crucial for understanding the writing prompt, and have written and discussed case studies illustrating the success and failure of preventive diplomacy, they are ready to re-examine the writing prompt and write a sample outline and essay with the case study information already presented and analyzed. To participate in this lesson, the students should have their initial notes after they read the writing prompt, their case study essay, and a copy of the collective notes assembled by teacher and students in discussions of the sample case study essays. Diagram the writing prompt on the blackboard, with student input. The objective here is to make sure the writing prompt is understood and to build student confidence in writing an essay on the topic. Re-read with the class the first two paragraphs of the writing prompt. Use the examples of Poland and Czechoslovakia to address the issues discussed. Remind the students of the partitions of Poland and the rights allotted the Poles by Napoleon. What were the objectives of Congress representatives? What problems were festering in the Polish issues, and how did the diplomats approach these problems? Do the same in the discussion of Czechoslovakia, discussing the Versailles Treaty and the notion of "self-determination" to understand the emergence of the Czech crisis. This should be a quick discussion, as the students already possess this information. The objective here is to apply already-known information to the writing prompt. Discuss the second two paragraphs of the writing prompt, using the knowledge accrued through the study of concept development in Lesson I. The students should feel confident in discussing the terms and should be able to categorize the concepts and tools useful to writing an essay on the topic. Develop a sample outline of an essay, using the case studies of Poland, 1815, and Czechoslovakia, 1938. Have the class develop a thesis statement. The presentation of the evidence should be straightforward. The emphasis here is the value of primary source documentation. The students should have a vigorous discussion of the analytical features of an essay. Encourage creativity in thinking, while reminding students of the importance of linking creative analysis to evidence.

Lesson V: Choosing an Essay Topic Lesson V is the starting point for students to write individual essays. The time frame for this lesson can be adapted to fit your course schedule. The objective of this lesson is to prepare students to write individual essays and encourage original thought and analysis. As a homework assignment, have the students make a list of case study topics they might choose to pursue when writing the individual essay. Students should think creatively and can use cases and tools that are not detailed in the writing prompt. Instruct the students to list the concepts and tools relevant to each case study as they note why they have chosen each case study. Keep in mind that one example of preventive action must be a success, one a failure, and one of the two cases must be post-World War II. Discuss student case study choices in class, emphasizing student-proposed concepts and tools to be integrated into the research and outline of the question. Guide students to bibliographic sources, including primary source materials. The U.S. Department of State series Current Documents and American Foreign Policy, as well as the Department of State's Bulletin, are useful starting points.

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Eurovision winner Jamala says Ukraine ‘cannot afford’ to boycott contest

Singer says her country needs the opportunity to remind Europe of Russia’s invasion

Ukraine’s former Eurovision winner Jamala has said her country “cannot afford” to boycott the song contest because it needs the opportunity to remind Europe of Russia’s invasion.

There have been calls for artists to refuse to participate over Israel’s inclusion in the music competition while the war in Gaza continues.

The opening round begins on Tuesday in Malmö, Sweden, after the singer Loreen won in Liverpool last year.

Jamala, who won the contest for Ukraine in 2016, said a boycott over the Israel-Hamas war was not an option for her country. She said that artists needed to be “loud and creative” to remind the world about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine when the public was “getting tired” of hearing about it.

The question of whether to withdraw over Israel’s involvement has also plagued the UK’s entrant, Olly Alexander. In a BBC documentary that will air on Tuesday, he said reaction to his decision to participate had been “very extreme”, with people branding him complicit in genocide.

Jamala said Ukraine needed to take opportunities to raise awareness after the war had dropped in prominence from the news since the Russian invasion in February 2022.

“Some countries may refuse to participate [in the contest], but we don’t. Especially we cannot afford to give up such a contest in time of war,” she told PA Media. “There are many wars now in the world and, of course, it is not easy to constantly keep attention on yourself so that people do not get tired of our war.

“But that is our task, people who remain in Ukraine, people who are fighting, to be as loud and creative … this is the task of artists to find new ways of how to reveal and show their country.”

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Ukraine’s entry this year is the rapper and singer duo Alyona Alyona and Jerry Heil. Jamala, 40, whose real name is Susana Alimivna Jamaladinova, said she hoped they would give many interviews “and talk about the fact that the war in Ukraine continues”.

Before being chosen as the UK’s Eurovision entrant, Alexander had signed an open letter calling for a ceasefire in the Israel-Hamas war and describing Israel’s actions in Gaza as “genocide”.

Queers for Palestine launched a petition calling for him to boycott Eurovision in March over the inclusion of Israel, saying the event was “cultural cover” for an “ongoing genocide”.

Speaking in a BBC documentary about him to be broadcast on Tuesday, the singer said: “A lot of the contestants and myself have been having a lot of comments that are like ‘You are complicit in a genocide by taking part in Eurovision,’ which is quite extreme. It’s very extreme.”

In an interview with the Times , Alexander reportedly began to cry when discussing the fallout from his decision to go ahead. “Obviously, I wish there wasn’t a war or this insane humanitarian crisis. I wish for peace and I have found this experience, at times, extremely … I’ve just felt really sad and distressed,” he said.

“But I still believe it’s a good thing when people come together for entertainment. That’s why I wanted to do Eurovision.”

The Irish entrant, Bambie Thug, had also previously backed “an immediate and lasting ceasefire” but declined to boycott the event. Alongside Alexander and the Danish entrant, Saba, the artists said in a statement: “It is important to us to stand in solidarity with the oppressed and communicate our heartfelt wish for peace, an immediate and lasting ceasefire, and the safe return of all hostages.

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Turkey has suspended trade with Israel. The world’s top court is considering whether Israeli leaders have committed genocide. Protests have overtaken cities and campuses worldwide. Ireland and Spain say they will recognize Palestine as a state by the end of the month.

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Of greatest concern to Israel: splintering relations with the United States. President Biden, once quiet about his expectations that Israel limit civilian deaths and increase access to humanitarian aid, has become more vocal amid partisan political pressure in an election year. This week, Mr. Biden said the United States was withholding delivery of 3,500 high-payload bombs.

His warning on Wednesday that the pause could extend to more weapons was his greatest break yet with Israel’s government. It suggested that the outrage coursing through capitals and campuses would continue to spread, and it has. On Friday, in a largely symbolic gesture, the United Nations General Assembly backed Palestine’s bid for U.N. membership, and thousands of demonstrators in Sweden protested against Israel’s participation in the Eurovision Song Contest on Saturday.

“If we need to stand alone,” Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said Thursday, both acknowledging and seeking to defy his country’s growing isolation, “we will stand alone.”

The backlash, which also extends to Israeli athletes and academics facing boycotts and protests, has stunned and confused Israelis, who are still reeling from Hamas’s October attacks and mostly see the war as justified. Many blame unchecked antisemitism and American party politics for Israel’s isolation. Others struggle to parse reasonable critique from selective virtue signaling.

They ask why more attention is not paid to Israeli victims, and why there are no protests against China’s persecution of Uyghurs or Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine.

“Most Israelis, and this includes the leadership, are perplexed about the attitude of the world,” said Eytan Gilboa, a communications professor at Bar-Ilan University.

He argued that Israelis have a hard time understanding why some people at the protests on American campuses combine support for a Palestinian state with what he described as “calls for the elimination of Israel.”

“It’s the slow-motion formation of a pariah state,” said Alon Pinkas, a former Israeli diplomat.

But the complex, layered reproof from around the world cannot be ignored as just the whims of anti-Israel activists. Israel is facing real consequences, from security to economics.

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Israel has endured the world’s glare before, shrugging off frequent criticism at the U.N. and an Arab boycott that lasted decades. Though Israel governs a spit of land no bigger than Maryland, it has always had a centripetal pull, placing its wars at the emotional center of global politics. But this is not 1948, 1967, 1973, 1982, 2006 or 2014 — years with previous conflicts.

Before Oct. 7, most of Israel’s allies in the West were focused on Ukraine’s fight with Russia and the challenge of a more assertive China. The Middle East had largely fallen off the radar. Climate change was driving a retreat from oil. Israel and Saudi Arabia were openly discussing normalized relations even as Israel’s democracy had become more polarized and parochial.

At exactly that moment, Hamas struck and Israel retaliated.

Mr. Biden’s first response was complete solidarity: “My administration’s support for Israel’s security is rock solid and unwavering,” he said on the day of the attacks. Other world leaders followed suit. The Israeli flag and its colors were projected on the Brandenburg Gate, 10 Downing Street and the Sydney Opera House.

Yet even as horrific details of Hamas’s murders and mutilation sowed nightmares, there were signs of concern about the government of Mr. Netanyahu and its absolutist approach.

Mr. Netanyahu’s promise to “demolish Hamas” struck many military strategists as too broad to be effective. And when Israeli forces began to pummel Gaza’s crowded cities with huge bombs, toppling buildings on families along with militants, support for Israel weakened.

Washington had been warning Israel to better protect civilians. Israel continued bombing. The United States and other countries pushed Israel to create corridors for aid. They demanded a plan for governing Gaza after the fighting. Israel intensified its assault on a territory roughly the size of Philadelphia, densely packed with two million people, many of them children, while keeping out most independent journalists, leaving image sharing to those under attack.

The results were dire: By late November, people were being killed in Gaza more quickly, according to experts , than in even the deadliest moments of the American-led attacks in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, which were widely criticized by human rights groups.

Less than two months in, Israel was losing support in Europe and the United States — before student protests escalated into clashes with the police, before calls for divestment, before polling showed the war’s unpopularity affecting Mr. Biden’s chances for re-election.

After seven aid workers, many of them foreigners, from the World Central Kitchen were killed on April 1 and with children in Gaza dying of starvation , words like “genocide” and “evil” became more commonly applied to the campaign that Israel insisted was simply self-defense.

“The poor and impoverished people of Palestine were sentenced to death by Israel’s bombs,” President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey said on Thursday, when he announced that his country, once Israel’s closest Muslim partner, would suspend trade.

Nimrod Novik, a former senior Israeli official and an analyst at the Israel Policy Forum, said there was no denying the government ignored both a moral and political imperative by pursuing a “stingy approach” to aid and a war plan with no vision for peace.

“Our government policy failed to live up to its claim that our war is with Hamas, not the Palestinian people,” Mr. Novik said.

The military says aid is slowed by security measures intended to restrict weapons smuggling. On Sunday, Hamas attacked one of the few border crossings from which aid is permitted to enter, killing four Israeli soldiers.

For many, it was a reminder that the context of Israeli life is still colored by the country’s own suffering. What Israelis discuss at dinner are friends called up to fight. What they see are cities and towns covered with the portraits of hostages unreturned, apps sending alerts for regular rocket attacks from Hezbollah along the northern border, and graffiti in Tel Aviv that reads, “Hamas = ISIS.”

“There is a total disconnect between how Israelis view the situation and how the world does,” Mr. Novik said. “Mentally, we are not in the seventh month since Oct. 7. Mentally, we are in Oct. 8.”

Many Israelis believe the international community is willfully ignoring their plight, with soldiers dying and groups widely viewed as terrorists firing on the country. In northern Israel, more than 100,000 people have been displaced from their homes by regular rocket fire. Children are not in school. Deep inside Israel’s borders, air-raid sirens pierce daily routines.

Genine Barel, a New Yorker who moved to Israel in the ’90s and now lives in Safed, the home of Kabbalah, or mystical Judaism, said it hurts to lose international sympathy.

“It would be bad enough if we were just going through this war, and the losses and the heartbreak,” she said, sitting in the empty restaurant of the hotel she owns with her husband where business has completely dried up. “But we are being vilified at the same time.”

“It’s as if you’re being picked on,” she added, “and accused of being a bully at the same time.”

Nathalie Rozens, 37, an actor and writer who grew up in Europe, said the discussion within Israel about the war had evolved to include more criticism. (A poll published Friday showed declining trust in Israel’s military leadership since March.) But outside the country, she said, Israelis are flattened into caricatures.

In her view, Israel’s critics fail to understand its nuances, that this is a place where many people loathe Mr. Netanyahu and lament the killing of innocents in Gaza, but have a sibling fighting there and are just two generations from the Holocaust’s attempted destruction of global Jewry.

Banning Israeli artists from festivals, protesting singers at Eurovision, refusing to fund Israeli films — “the pressure, in a way, hits the wrong people,” she said.

“I don’t feel aligned with this government and I’m Israeli,” she said. “There is no space for my voice inside the country and also not abroad.”

However dangerous Hamas or Hezbollah might be, many believe dwindling U.S. support for Israel would be far more catastrophic for the country. Israel needs America as a patron, and this government has “no patience, no consideration, no understanding of Israel’s status in the world,” said Nahum Barnea, a veteran columnist for Yedioth Ahronoth, an Israeli daily newspaper. “So they choose to ignore it.”

Total isolation still seems a long way off. Israel is not North Korea. Mr. Biden has said he would keep Israel supplied with defensive weapons, and Republicans have sided even more strongly with Israel. However, according to many international analysts, what Israelis want to see as a tremor may become a fault line as agitation with Israel continues to build.

“They’ve lost the young people,” said Ian Bremmer, an adjunct professor of international and public affairs at Columbia and the president of Eurasia Group, a political risk consultancy. “They weren’t around and don’t know the Holocaust. What they see is an incredibly powerful Israel that is engaging in a war for seven months and is indifferent to the suffering of the Palestinians.”

Johnatan Reiss contributed reporting.

Damien Cave is an international correspondent for The Times, covering the Indo-Pacific region. He is based in Sydney, Australia.  More about Damien Cave

Our Coverage of the Israel-Hamas War

News and Analysis

Around 300,000 Palestinians in southern and northern Gaza were being forced to flee once again , the U.N. said, just as Israel issued new and expanded evacuation orders.

The flow of aid to Gaza through border crossings has come to a near-total stop , first closed off by Israel and then further restricted, officials say, by Egypt. Here is a look at the major routes for aid into Gaza and their status .

A White House spokesman told Israel that an assault on Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza where more than one million people are sheltering, would not eradicate Hamas . For months, the United States has urged Israel to do more to protect Palestinian civilians .

A Key Weapon: When President Biden threatened to pause some weapons shipments to Israel if it invaded Rafah, the devastating effects of the 2,000-pound Mark 84 bomb  were of particular concern to him.

A Presidential Move: Ronald Reagan also used the power of American arms to influence  Israeli war policy. The comparison underscores how much the politics of Israel have changed in the United States since the 1980s.

Netanyahu’s Concerns: Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, under pressure from all sides, is trying to reassure his many domestic, military and diplomatic critics. Here’s a look at what he is confronting .

Al Jazeera Shutdown: The influential Arab news network says it will continue reporting from Gaza and the West Bank, but its departure from Israel is a new low in its long-strained history with the country .

International Essay Contest for Young People: Call for Essays by 15 June

Young people from around the world are invited to enter the 2016 International Essay Contest for Young People organized by the Goi Peace Foundation, a GAP Key Partner.

The annual contest is organized in an effort to harness the energy, imagination and initiative of the world's youth in promoting a culture of peace and sustainable development. It also aims to inspire society to learn from the young minds and to think about how each of us can make a difference in the world.  

The theme for this year's contest is: EDUCATION TO BUILD A BETTER FUTURE FOR ALL We live in a world with many complex problems, both local and global. What kind of education and learning would help us address these challenges and create a sustainable world and a better life for all? Describe your concrete ideas for an ideal education. 

First Prize winners will be invited to Tokyo, Japan, and will receive the Minister of Education Award at the Goi Peace Foundation Forum in November 2016.

The deadline for entry is 15 June 2016.  

For more information, please see:

• 2016 International Essay Contest for Young People
• The Goi Peace Foundation

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