Russia in Global Affairs

The future of the world order will not be decided on the battlefields of Ukraine – unless, of course, events spiral into a nuclear catastrophe, a scenario that cannot be entirely ruled out. The outcome of this war will determine the future relationship between Russia and its neighbors, as well as Russia’s role in the international system. And one thing is certain: no one is interested in a draw.

Ukraine is the West’s largest geopolitical asset whose use in war against Russia does not automatically lead to a direct armed (and potentially nuclear) conflict between Russia and NATO. There is no other such asset.

The time has come for the Russian academic community to initiate a broad discussion on the rationality of its attempts to stay within a ‘global’ academia that is actually under the structural control and ideological hegemony of the West.

It would be wrong to confine oneself to asserting international law where it is far from the ethnic and human realities.

On 24 February 2022, the Russia-Ukraine conflict broke out. Now, two years on, it still rages. On the second anniversary of this geopolitical conflict, one should look at what lessons we can learn from the perspective of forms of warfare, the international order, and wartime narratives.

In the spring of 2024, we can confidently say that the West has been unable to defeat Russia as it wanted and now it is concerned with ensuring that Russia “does not win.” So, in the future, for years, if not decades to come, security in Europe will be determined by the balance of power along the line of contact between Russia and NATO. Russia will do everything to maintain this balance for its part.

Creating the space for bridge states to flourish can provide more predictable contours for great power competition and increase the likelihood of compromise in a dangerous world. And by helping to elaborate this feature of the emerging global tapestry, Moscow would demonstrate its status as an order-shaping power of the first degree.

After the end of the “previous” Cold War, the armed forces in different countries considered scenarios of large ground operations during armed conflicts with an equal or superior enemy, but such plans largely remained a theory. Hostilities in Ukraine have put these theories to the ruthless test.

The failure of their proxy war bet is now motivating Western figures to consider negotiating a ceasefire in Ukraine with Russia, on the line of the current status quo and without firm political commitments. Will the US-led bloc try to turn Ukraine into a Cold War-style ‘frontier’ state or is there something else in the works?