On February 24, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin announced his decision to launch a military operation in eastern Ukraine. He called on the Ukrainian army to lay down its arms and expressed no intention of occupying Ukrainian territory. Now, a year into that military operation, President Putin has failed to disarm Ukraine.
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After a year of violent clashes, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy still refuses to cede Ukrainian territory in a possible peace agreement with Russia. Zelenskyy claims the Russian spring offensive has already begun, indicating that his country's forces may continue to resist the Russian advance in order to launch a counteroffensive.
After a year of the war, the world is not what it was before February 24, 2022. A changed global geopolitical reality has hit. Talk of a new world order is unavoidably in the air, having been speculated about since the outbreak of the coronavirus. War has become a strategic lever to posit a new structure of international relations. The war in Ukraine marked the capper of a historical phase that began with the collapse of the former Soviet Union around the end of the last quarter of the twentieth century. Now, a year later this war is gradually becoming a forgotten war.
Nobody is really interested in the events in Ukraine anymore, not because it is an inconsequential war, but because it is an absurd war with no foreseeable end. In time, this war will fade into the backstage of international events. No one bothers about this war and its outcome, except for the desire to stop the economic downturn it has wreaked on most of the world's economies. This is a war that no one wants to watch. But no one wants it to go on either, except the handful of parties that profit from this disastrous and destructive passage of arms.
The war has gone from one with limited goals and motives to a proxy war between Russia and the West, clinging to its position of unconditional support for Ukraine, gradually escalating because the West fears a Russian military victory that could trigger a major geostrategic reshuffle of global, not just European, order. Russian threats to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine have led to global anxiety. Specifically, Russian politicians' and officials' statements on this issue connect this option to Russia's national security, a condition with no clear-cut definition. The West also refuses any alternative for defeating Russia in the war in Ukraine. What we saw at the meeting of NATO defense ministers at Germany's Ramstein base was a reflection of an escalation in the West's determination to inflict military defeat on Russia.
Most startling and disconcerting about this convoluted dispute is the lack of any international resolve to rein in either side of the conflict. The UN is completely absent from the management of the conflict. They are barely heard in this Post-WWII crisis for global security and stability.
Even more troubling is Russia's failure to use its usual military might to defeat Ukraine in what the Kremlin saw as a picnic, where it would decommission the Ukrainian army. This adds to the hypothesis or possibility of resorting to nuclear force to save the Kremlin's face and prevent Putin's political demise.
But here's the rub: the West does not want Putin to get out of Ukraine with minimal human and material losses. In fact, there is a strong Western tendency to drag Russia into a protracted war that will deprive the Russian state of a return as an international power capable of supporting a Chinese ally in the event of a military conflict with the US.
The question now on the minds of many revolves around the chances of achieving peace and ending the war in Ukraine. In this context, it is worth mentioning the signal President Putin gave about a month ago when he agreed to enter the negotiation process to find an acceptable solution to the Ukrainian crisis, which some thought was an imminent breakthrough in the crisis. But that quickly fizzled out. It did not resonate in the West because it also contained reasons for quick rejection, as President Putin made dialogue conditional on Kyiv accepting what he called new realities on the ground, namely the subordination of Ukrainian territory to Russian sovereignty.
President Zelenskyy then set tougher conditions and announced a three-point plan for negotiations with the Kremlin: complete withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine, rejection of concessions by Kyiv, and guarantee of Ukraine's security and territorial integrity. A key puzzle in the political solution to the Ukraine crisis is how long the war will drag on.
As the casualties get heavier, either side moves further away from backing down on their own terms. Ukraine will take many years to recover. Russia, which has constitutionally annexed four regions of Ukraine (on top of Crimea, which it annexed in 2014), is more hesitant to cave in. So there is no way out unless one or both sides feel enfeebled, or the West's military and financial support for Ukraine peters out. This is hard to foretell, with NATO realizing that a defeat of Ukraine is the defeat of the entire West, and what negative consequences a possible Russian victory scenario would have for Europe.
As it turns out, the alternatives for both sides of the Ukraine crisis are getting scarcer and the diplomatic room for maneuver is narrowing. There is no safe solution other than for Russia to end the war with a face-saving formula or for Ukrainian President Zelenskyy to step aside, for whatever reason, leaving a new face to emerge who agrees to a political solution with the Kremlin that is aware that time is on its side: mighty America, which has dominated international decision-making, is not at the top of the deck anymore.
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