The world as we knew it, in its geopolitical dynamics, is not the same as 100 days ago. The Ukraine War, started by Vladimir Putin’s Russia in the early hours of February 24, has gone through three distinct phases, but its outcome remains unpredictable.
At first, Putin appeared to think he would overthrow Volodymyr Zelensky’s government with an ambitious assault on several fronts. Indeed, within two days he was fighting on the outskirts of Kiev, causing Western governments to predict the end of the war in perhaps a week.
Military errors centered on the binomial insufficient force-lack of focus surprised analysts, who saw Russia in an obvious superior position. Western anti-tank weapons began to flow in and spoil the Kremlin illusion.
The next phase was the spread of this initial offensive, with Russian conquests in the south of the country, marked by the brutal siege of Mariupol, the most symbolic so far. And with the Russian failure around Kiev and in the north of the country.
This led to Moscow’s unilateral announcement: the war would now be in Donbass, the Russian-speaking east of Ukraine that since 2014 has been in a separatist conflict. With that, the defeat around Kiev became a quick retreat to do what analysts took for granted: concentrate strength on one goal at a time.
This third stage of the carnage has been ongoing since April 18, and appears to be at a culmination, with the virtual fall of Lugansk province to Moscow and the predicted final takeover of Donbass, in the form of neighboring Donetsk — which has perhaps half of its territory still under Ukrainian control.
In any case, as Zelensky said when asking for more military aid this Thursday (2), 20% of his country is already occupied.
Putin’s military problems are not over. There are serious doubts about Moscow’s ability to continue its war of attrition with a lack of registered infantry in the field, as two of the best Western analysts of the conflict, Americans Michael Kofman (CNA) and Rob Lee (King’s College) noted in a article this Thursday on the blog War on the Rocks.
According to a Russian military analyst, who requested anonymity, this assessment is realistic and could be the password for Putin to end the campaign and declare some kind of victory. But, as he continues, the unpredictability is such that Russia following the war to the Ukrainian Black Sea coast is just as plausible.
Parallel to the battlefield is the economic and political earthquake, which has just begun. The West has applied unprecedented sanctions against Putin, in many ways isolating the Russian economy. The affluent middle class found itself a pariah in the world, prevented from traveling or from properly relating to the outside world.
Putin counterattacked with reasonable effectiveness and maintains his popularity, defending the ruble with maneuvers based on its greatest asset: oil and gas. By forcing his clients to pay in local currency, he was able to get the quote back on track and has yet to see an inflationary catastrophe, despite the obvious signs of trouble.
The delay of months for Europe to rehearse an embargo on oil, but not on gas, Russian, says a lot about the weight of this energy weapon. The proverbial €1bn daily payment to Putin for the continent will decrease, but the bureaucratic details could bring surprises in the medium term.
The Kremlin, after all, has what German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock called “war fatigue” among Westerners.
To combat evidence of fatigue, the United States, the main player in the team that wants to see Putin humiliated, has stepped up the quality of arms supply to Kiev in stages. After the initial need for light weapons against armored columns had passed, it was time for howitzers and other heavier systems.
There are pranks. The much-vaunted approval of the deployment of artillery missile launchers, which has put Russia on alert and raised already high tensions between the nuclear powers, is for now a mere four units that will take perhaps five weeks to enter the game.
But it says more about the central geopolitical substratum of the war, with the forgiveness of victims on the ground: a kind of terminal confrontation proposed by Washington to Moscow. For all the talk of avoiding World War III, Joe Biden has been just as aggressive as Putin, with the obvious advantage that he didn’t start this fight.
In the Russian view, however, the West is to blame: it expanded NATO (the US-led military alliance) to the east and threatened to integrate Ukraine into it, one of the causes of the war.
This turned out to be overrated, given that objectively Kiev would have a hard time getting into the club, just as France has already made clear about the decades-old process to absorb it into the European Union. Furthermore, Putin lost as he saw Finland and Sweden ask to join, burying their neutrality.
Biden and Putin, however, test themselves every week using Ukrainian stage soil. The Russian’s repeated nuclear threats are just that in principle, but it is undeniable and uncomfortable that the world has become a place where such bravado can be made by whoever has the largest stockpile of atomic bombs on the market.
There is, finally, the general picture marked by the position of China, which maintains its support for its ally Putin and has even joined him in signaling its dissatisfaction with Biden by flying strategic bombers on joint patrol in the Sea of ​​Japan while the American met with Pacific allies to admonish Beijing not to treat Taiwan like Ukraine.
This intersection puts the European conflict, with Americans and Russians seeing who blinks first, within the scope of Cold War 2.0 between the US and China, strategic rivals of the 21st century. Putin declared an alliance with Xi Jinping 20 days before invading the neighbor, and the Chinese ambiguity in calling for peace is mixed with renewed signals to Moscow. It’s a waiting game.
Peace may or may not come in some negotiated form over the difficult agreement the Russians and Ukrainians drew up in Istanbul on March 29. He envisioned a system of mutual guarantees that included Russia, similar to what Europeans did in the 19th century with Belgium — only to see German forces breaching the border in 1914.
Likewise, Putin may or may not be satisfied in the Donbass. Kiev may continue the fight, encouraged by the US, despite European warnings. Everything can escalate, and the global recession looks set for 2023 due to the confusion. The reality of February 23 is past, as the uncertain thousands of civilians and military dead and 4.7 million refugees bear witness to the suffering account.
