Ukraine, a year after the Russian invasion

It has been more than a year since Vladmir Putin, the Russian president, sent his troops into Ukraine. He took that step in the belief that the mighty Russian army would not face much resistance, walk into Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, and install a puppet regime that would do whatever Moscow wanted. The West – the United States and the nations in Western Europe – saw Putin’s move as the fulfillment of his long-held dream i.e. a Russia that would expand its domain to the East and reclaim the land that it considered to be its own and whose people were essentially Russian. Since the breakup of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the USSR, Russia has been confined into unnatural borders. Real Russia went beyond the borders that resulted in 1989. Putin and his conservative colleagues believed that the Ukrainians were wrong to interpret their ethnic and geographic identity as separate from that of Mother Russia. Ukraine and Ukrainians should be part of Greater Russia.

Putin and those close to him did not expect that the invasion of Ukraine would be resisted with extraordinary courage and determination by the people of the country they had invaded. They wanted their country to be part of Western Europe and not an extension of Russia. Moscow did not expect that the United States would be able to work closely with Western Europe and supply the besieged Ukrainians with modern weapons and train their people to use them effectively. While no firm estimates are available at this time about the extent of Russian losses in men and equipment, these were colossal. Tens of thousands of Russians have died in the battlefield.

The West’s reaction went beyond providing military support. Russia was put under a variety of sanctions that seriously affected the country’s economy and the outlook of the younger parts of the population. The country’s economy suffered a serious recession while hundreds of thousands of young and well-trained people left the country and sought refuge in Western Europe. Russia’s loss was Western Europe’s gain. It will take time before the full impact on Russia of what is appropriate to call “Putin’s folly” can be fully assessed. That said, the response to it from different parts of the world have created lasting impressions on the global economic and political systems. The world economy as well as the political system that evolved after the end of the Second World War has been seriously disturbed by Putin.

It could be argued that Russia did not participate in the creation of the post-World War system. Then it was part of the USSR which was not invited to attend the 1944 Bretton Woods conference at which the countries that won the Second World War by defeating Germany, Italy and Japan established new institutions to manage the global economy and the political system. On the political side, the United Nations and its agencies were tasked to regulate transactions among the states while the International Monetary Fund, the IMF, and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD, now the World Bank) were to look after global finance and provide capital for development. Russia joined the United Nations and acquired the right to veto the resolutions moved in the Security Council in which it was one of the five permanent members. However, it took decades before Moscow was invited to join the IMF and the World Bank Group.

This new global order was based on a series of international laws member countries were obliged to follow. One of the more important ones was the agreement among the states that they will not use force to alter internationally accepted state boundaries. There were several violations of this principle but on a limited scale such as the invasions of Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria by the United States. But Washington did not take these actions to acquire land for its expansion as the Russians have done in the case of the invasion of Ukraine. This brings us to two questions. One, how would the war in Ukraine end? And two, could the old global order return to where it was on February 24, 2022 when the Russians sent in its troops into Ukraine? At this stage it is difficult to answer either question with confidence. That said, the Russian invasion has altered the global order. It has affected three parts of the world: Western Europe, East and Central Asia. Two of these three areas will impact Pakistan. In the article today I will focus on the impact on Western Europe, taking later the consequences for other parts of the world.

There are a number of analysts who are trying to understand how the world is going to change as a result of the Russian intervention in Ukraine. Focusing on the impact on Europe, I will quote from the analysis of Roger Cohen who sent a dispatch from Helsinki which was carried by The New York Times on its front page in late February. “A year ago, the day Russia invaded Ukraine and set in motion a devastating European ground war, President Sauli Niinistö of Finland declared: ‘Now the masks are off. Only the cold face of war is visible’,” he wrote. “The 27-nation European Union was built over decades with the core idea of extending peace across the continent. The notion that economic exchanges, trade and interdependence were the best guarantees against war lay deep in the post war European psyche, even with an increasingly hostile Moscow. That Mr. Putin’s Russia had become aggressive, imperialist, revanchist – as well as impervious to European peace politics – was almost impossible to digest in Paris or Berlin, even after the annexation of Crimea in 2014,” he added.

The war in Ukraine has brought about enormous change in thinking in Europe more than any event since the Cold War’s end in 1989. A peace mentality, most prominent in Germany, has given way to a dawning recognition that military strength is needed in the pursuit of security and strategic objectives.

In an article contributed to The New York Times, Janet Yellen, the United States Treasury Secretary, maintained that giving aid to Ukraine was not charity. Since the start of the war in February 2022, the United States had provided close to $50 billion in economic, security and humanitarian assistance. The United States will maintain its involvement hoping to humble Moscow and Putin.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 6^th, 2023.

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