Previous Subchapter → 10.1 Curveball
Ultimately, whose victory really is this? Well, no one’s, and everyone’s.
The Russians have expanded their territory and outlasted their enemies, but this territory is only something like 20% of Ukraine, containing less than 10% of its population, they failed in their ultimate goal of bringing Ukraine back into Russkiy Mir, the “Russian World”, and in the process they’ve alienated the entire Western World and encouraged remilitarisation, even if the war ends that hostility could last for decades, and all this is at the cost of hundreds of thousands of Russians killed or wounded.
The obsession with the frontlines in the Ukraine has also left Russia vulnerable elsewhere, too, since the invasion the Ukrainians have dabbled in their own proxy war games to weaken their arch enemy, first in Mali and Sudan, gutting Russian contractors and their allies, and most recently in Syria, where they allegedly helped train the Syrian rebels who launched a lightning offensive that collapsed the government of Bashar Al-Assad in just 10 days, a government which Russia had been working to prop up for 9 years.
With so many Russian troops scraping at Donetsk, Kharkiv and other corners of Ukraine when Assad dialled for help he wasn’t backed up with soldiers, all he got was a one way ticket to Moscow, a humiliation worthy of the rapid defeat of the US backed forces in Afghanistan 4 years earlier, or South Vietnam’s Saigon in the 1970s.
The Ukrainians on the other hand have preserved their independence under intense pressure, but they’ve lost even more land than the 7% lost in the Donbas War and they’ve failed to achieve that true Westward pivot they hoped for. While their newfound allies talked a big game and were able to be continually pushed on the boundaries of aid for several years, the biggest requests like a NATO enforced no fly zone, “closing the skies”, always received a resolute “no”, the West was not willing to risk a World War over Ukraine like the British did over Poland in World War 2.
Large sects of Western world, and the entire world, saw an outpouring of sympathy for Ukraine, but that sympathy didn’t go as far as a willingness to go to war for Ukrainians, they tested their limits and they didn’t budge, most of the West has had peace at home for a very long time and is unwilling to give it up, especially when we’re conscious that a miscalculation, going a step too far, could start and end a war very quickly with casualty numbers the likes of which the world has never seen, scorching the world into a wasteland. Putin’s nuclear threats went nowhere when it came to his supposed red lines surrounding weapons deliveries but when it comes to the idea of a direct NATO-Russia conflict, there Western leaders and populations are much more cautious of the risks.
The Western World has blunted the Kremlin’s war goals in its own backyard without having to go on the war footing itself, the Kremlin had to draft hundreds of thousands of its own citizens and orient its purse towards the conflict to persevere with its own slimmed down ambitions, while the average Western citizen didn’t even have to get off the sofa. But ultimately the West’s big brother wasn’t in it for the long game, and that could create a long lasting fracture that could upend a geopolitical balance that has lasted ever since the end of the Second World War.
The consequences of this trade are yet to be seen, with the US becoming a wildcard untied to the Western Bloc, a Bloc it leads and created, the rest of the West will have to think about what to do now that its big brother is leaving the family.
Right now, at least publicly, world leaders are trying to pretend nothing is amiss, the UK foreign secretary who once called Trump a deluded tyrant, a Neo-Nazi sympathiser and someone who was “no friend of Britain” is now calling him a gracious host and talking about “common interests”, but behind the scenes European leaders have been considering the possibility of going it alone.
Back in February the then German finance minister talked about British and French weapons forming the pillar of Europe’s nuclear umbrella, rather than America’s, the French President Emmanuel Macron said in a recent summit “We must not delegate forever our security to America. […] The world is made up of herbivores and carnivores. If we decide to remain herbivores, then the carnivores will win and we will be a market for them.”, there is a clear recognition that 80 years of the US taking the lead in the West are about to come to an end, all the talk about a “special relationship”, of shared interests and values, was a mirage, and the fog is starting to clear, sadly this is happening too late to ensure a better future for Ukraine.
For Ukrainians, the aftermath of this conflict will be key, when the bombs stop falling the issues that have been set aside will be reopened, how to address the remainders of the Volunteer Battalions, those which are still very much politicised and hold a dubious level of loyalty to the state, how to form a healthy sense of nationalism, and differentiate this from the normalisation of toxic nationalism, rooted in the whitewashing figures like Stepan Bandera, how to reconcile the divisions resurfaced since 2013, where Maidan and Anti Maidan activists found themselves on opposite sides of the barricades.
There will also be new questions to tackle too, how to reckon with the prospects of an uncomfortable peace and who to manage it, the terms of Zelensky’s Presidency and Ukraine’s parliament have both expired but elections have been prevented by martial law, when the time comes to release the country from those conditions the debates will truly begin over his legacy and who should follow it, he gambled on marching Westward and that gamble has failed, despite public statements he was given a lukewarm reception, no rapid integration into the EU, or to NATO, support with arms but not troops and a boatload of hesitancy, reservations and skepticism.
Russia controlling 20% of Ukraine is better than 50 or 100%, and Zelensky’s refusal to yield in the early days of the war likely saved it from reaching those kinds of numbers, but the raw truth is that hundreds of thousands have died, millions have been wounded or traumatised, cities, towns and villages turned to rubble, in a war that has made Ukraine smaller.
What lessons will be learned from that? Will Ukrainians feel betrayed by the West as a whole or will they lay blame purely on the US? Will they still try to integrate with the Western world so their sacrifices weren’t in vain or will they stake a claim of their own? Will they try to restore some sense of peacetime normality or will they remain on a war footing indefinitely, wary of the failure of past peace agreements to hold and dreaming of reuniting with the lost of Donbas, Zaporizhia, Kherson and Crimea?
Ukrainians have gone through many intense tests to achieve recognition and cohesion, and it may be that the greatest of these tests is yet to come, the path to peace can sometimes be a greater challenge than surviving in wartime.
I hope the Ukrainians survive and thrive throughout these tests, and that they maintain the recognition they deserve, the fact that there are separatists and those who would rather be Russian in these disputed lands does not change the fact that the Ukrainian people, culture and language exist, Ukraine is not “Little Russia” or “New Russia”, nor should it be, it is Ukraine.
And for Russia’s people, we can only hope that they too can survive the upcoming tests to their nation, they will also have to reckon with this war, and ask themselves if it was worth it for their people to be sacrificed in their hundreds of thousands for the sake of calming Vladimir Putin’s anxiety, will they identify with that anxiety too and feel that he’s saved them in the nick of time or will they scream at how much they have been expected to suffer for a pathetic lunge of imperialism?
With Russia ending this war larger than before and having seen off its arch enemies in Washington the first option is more likely, but there will still be many who aren’t true believers, will those more independently minded Russians try to fight for a place in their homeland? Or will they continue the exodus so many have already gone through?
We can only hope that in the long term Russia’s people come to disavow the war that has been perpetuated in their name and form a new blueprint for their nation, with a nationalism based on celebrating the great culture they hold dear, rather than attempts to reform the empires and power blocs of old.
Russia should be an influential and valued country, one which can act as a counterweight to other powers and help prevent a new monopolisation over the world, but this can’t be based on purely power, there has to be some real substance to things beyond vague appeals to a nationalism that relies on subjugating others, and the end goal of this counterweight can’t take the form of a bipolar world like the past century, bipolarity isn’t a solid foundation for a new world order, it’s a mental illness.
The Eastern European family is a dysfunctional one for certain, badly in need of some serious therapy, the wounds can be mended, not just by time but by people, well meaning people. These changes are yet to come, but history moves fast these days, we’ll be following it, and hopefully you will too.
For now we just want to say thank you for sticking with us throughout this series, thank you for giving us your support, and thank you for reading MEGA.