Finally, at dawn on February 24, 2022, Russian President Vladimir Putin revealed the truth about his plans. After months of military build-up on Ukraine's eastern, southern and northern borders and repeated denials of U.S. accusations that Russia was ready to invade Ukraine, Russian troops began a full-scale military operation deep into neighboring Ukraine, which its leaders call a brotherly country.
On the first day of the war, the Russian army seemed to be making rapid progress, with Russian armored forces advancing rapidly in the southeast and north of the Ukrainian capital, and the two sides engaged in a chase battle in Kharkiv, Ukraine's second largest city. On the second and third days of the war, it became clear that Ukraine's resistance was stronger than the Russian leadership had expected, with a marked slowdown in the movement of Russian troops; while Western sources said: Russia's military operations have so far failed to achieve the goals set for it.
At the same time, after European hesitation, britain, the United States and EU countries began to announce extremely severe financial and economic sanctions against Russian institutions and individuals, President Putin, and the defense and foreign ministers, in addition to an almost complete ban on Russian civil aviation through its airspace. On the evening of February 26, it was reported that Western powers had agreed to exclude Russia's major banks from the SWIFT system and prevent Russia from exchanging a variety of international currencies such as the us dollar, the euro, the british pound and the Japanese yen.
Of course, while the stripping from the SWIFT system, which was considered a financial nuclear weapon, was not fully implemented, the sanctions announced three days before the war would not be the west's last anti-Russian measure.
Russian-Ukrainian relations have begun to deteriorate since last fall, but war is not necessarily inevitable. How and why did Russia make the decision to go to war, and its impact on the international system was similar to Nazi Germany's invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939, or the fall of the Berlin Wall? Why do the Western powers, especially the United States, bear no small responsibility for the outbreak of war? Whether Putin succeeds or his army falters in terms of quick victory, what regional and international impact can be expected to have in this war?
Putin's path to war
According to monitoring images, Russian troops began deployment to the Ukrainian border in November 2021. When Washington began to question the truth about the Russian buildup, Russia's reaction reflected apparent political turmoil. Moscow has repeatedly said that Russian troops are conducting regular training inside Russia and have no hostile intentions against Ukraine. On other occasions, Russian officials have defended the build-up of troops over fears that Kiev would ignore its obligations under the Minsk Agreement to resolve the conflict in the Donbass region. However, once the United States and Russia began to engage directly, it was nothing new that Russia linked military build-up to security needs at the level of foreign ministers and presidents of both countries. Russia's security needs are particularly related to obtaining a written and unequivocal commitment from the West that Ukraine will not join NATO now and in the future, as well as the withdrawal of anti-missile systems from Romania and Bulgaria, which Moscow says could easily be transformed into an offensive system in a short period of time.
On January 28, 2022, the U.S. Embassy in Moscow relayed Washington's response to a request for documents from Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov to U.S. Foreign Minister Anthony Blinken. Obviously, the content of the US response was not satisfied with the Russian side, which was confirmed at the beginning of the meeting between President Putin and French President Macron.
In the days that followed, Russia escalated its operations around Ukraine through large-scale military exercises with Belarusian troops; on February 2, Putin came to talks with the great powers, which ended with a statement promising that the two countries would cooperate indefinitely, in language closer to an alliance than just an expression of reconciliation and friendship.
On February 15, the countdown to an invasion of Ukraine began after Moscow realized that the West would not respond to its security demands, even partially. The Russian parliament passed a bill recommending that the executive branch recognize the independence of the separated regions of eastern Ukraine of the Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk, which are effectively protected by Russia.
It is clear that, given that the separatists control only 40 percent of the administrative border between Donetsk and Luhansk, the decision of the Russian parliament is aimed at providing political cover that can justify the war and thereby drive Ukrainian troops out of the divided areas under its control.
On February 19, residents near the front lines of the cities of Donetsk and Luhansk began to evacuate after separatist leaders accused Ukrainian troops of intensifying their bombing of civilian targets in their regions. The evacuation process was filmed and sometimes broadcast live on Russian television; but a survey of the significant difference between the number of potential refugees announced and the size of the reception on one side of the Russian border showed that the number of refugees was greatly exaggerated.
On Feb. 21, Putin convened an emergency meeting of Russia's National Security Council, which appeared to have been fully documented and broadcast hours later, purely for propaganda purposes. The scene was eerie, with senior Russian officials lined up in front of their presidents, a few meters apart, sitting behind tables slightly lower than their superiors.
The real purpose of the meeting was to convince the Russian commander-in-chief of the need for senior politicians to agree to a series of measures, in particular the approval of the decision to recognize the Donetsk and Luhansk republics. But what the Russians see is actually a different position on the members of the National Security Council, a clear lack of consensus, especially the position of the head of Russian intelligence and the prime minister.
In any case, a few hours after the National Security Council meeting aired, the Russian president delivered a lengthy speech filled with anger and much of it was written by him himself. Putin repeated the same words in an article he published on the Kremlin website in July 2021, in particular his conviction that Russians and Ukrainians are in fact a people, linked by blood, history and culture, and that Ukraine is an entity lenin created after the leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union disagreed over ethnic issues.
Ukraine should not become an independent state. Putin spoke in detail about the strategic risks facing Russia from the West's breach of NATO's promise not to expand eastward, and announced that he would sign a resolution in a matter of moments recognizing two separatist republics in eastern Ukraine.
He did it, broadcasting it live to the Russian people and the whole world. In the hours that followed, the presidential palaces in Moscow, as well as in Donetsk and Luhansk, did not stop issuing statements saying that the separatist regions were constantly bombarded with heavy weapons by Ukrainian troops.
On the morning of February 24, President Putin gave a relatively brief speech defending the decision to declare war, although he did not use the word war, but used special military operations, noting that Ukraine is not an independent country, it is completely subject to the West, ruled by a small number of Nazis, and it has become a real threat to the Russian state and its survival.
This is neither necessary nor inevitable
According to the New York Times, the Biden administration has received information about Russia's mobilization plans around Ukraine since September 2021, that is, at least a month before the report confirming the existence of these mobilizations spread, the U.S. government directly or indirectly informed the Russian side of what it knew. Of course, this is not excluded, because since before the end of the Cold War, the United States has maintained intelligence resources at all levels of the Russian state.
But neither the Biden administration has shown a willingness to negotiate the nature of Russia's security demands, either before or after the development of the crisis, as the U.S. and Russian foreign ministers began to engage, or during biden's engagement with Putin. Washington stressed more than once, including that on the night of February 25, 2022, the day after the war, NATO membership was open to all European countries, and that joining NATO was a decision of alliances rather than a decision of the United States.
Neither the Russians nor the Americans have released the contents of the Biden administration's response to Russia's request for documents, but there are reports that the Americans have gone further and proposed back-up security arrangements, such as establishing military coordination and early communication channels between NATO countries close to Russia, Washington and Moscow.
Putin and French President Emmanuel Macron held a long summit in Moscow, and from the content of the talks, it can be understood that the Western powers said that Ukraine's accession to NATO is not a problem in the foreseeable future. But this does not mean that, from Moscow's point of view, the issue will not be raised in the future.
In other words, what the Russians are asking for, at least in relation to Ukraine, are certain modest assurances that the Americans had previously provided to President Gorbachev on the eve of German reunification in 1991, but the West rejected those assurances and continued to expand NATO's sphere of influence in the Warsaw Pact countries and the former Soviet Union.
Most likely, Putin ordered his military leadership early on to prepare for an invasion of Ukraine, but hoped that the declared build-up around Ukraine and heightened tensions would prompt the United States and other Western powers to accept his demands. More likely, he made the decision to go to war after he was sure that he had met even the minimum requirements.
In response, the Biden administration has repeatedly announced that the date of the invasion is approaching, providing defensive military aid to Ukraine, threatening Russia with economic and financial sanctions, while stressing that neither the United States nor other NATO countries will push its forces toward Ukraine. The U.S. position, even if it is not, seems to have avoided adopting a policy of containing the Russians, avoiding taking sufficient measures to deter them, and may actually encourage them to invade.
As for the motives for indifference to the deterioration of the war crisis, it remains a matter of speculation. For example, even before Biden entered the White House, the United States did not hide its concerns about Europe's growing dependence on Russian energy, and the fact that European powers have embraced Russia and tried to integrate it into the European sphere over the past decade, at least financially and economically. Britain certainly has the same concerns as the United States.
However, Russia's invasion of Ukraine would not only build a strong wall between Russia and other European countries, but would also lead Europe back to the United States, accept U.S. leadership, gradually reduce its dependence on Russian energy, withdraw Russia from European institutions, including the Council for European Cooperation, and increase its armament and defense budgets.
War, on the other hand, is unnecessary for neither Putin nor Russia. The legitimacy of Russia's demands does not mean that war is the only means of fulfilling those demands. Over the past few years, Russia has been able to regain its influence in Syria without deep military involvement, consolidated its presence in the Caucasus after taking a balanced stance in the Azerbaijan-Armenian war, and tightened its grip on Kazakhstan after a brief people's revolution.
In these cases, as in Ukraine between 2004 and 2014, Russia does not need war to maintain its influence and interests. There is no doubt that it is possible to retake Ukraine without resorting to war and invasion, especially as long as the Ukrainian State faces problems of sovereignty over all its territories, the possibility of its joining NATO is very small and unlikely;
The end of the post-Cold War era
No one can predict how far the war will unfold, not even the Russian leadership itself. This time, the classic rule that "all war plans collapse immediately after the first engagement" also applies. No one knows exactly what the Russian war is really for: does Putin intend to control eastern and southeastern Ukraine, the heartland of Ukrainian industry and Russia's safe land route to Crimea, and then wait for Kiev to surrender or the fall of the ruling regime, or he seeks to enter Kiev, as well as a full-scale occupation of Ukraine?
To be sure, the war that entered the fourth day did not proceed as the Russian leadership had expected: it would not be a quick, clean war, and even if Russia finally succeeded in occupying Ukraine, gaining control of it would seem out of reach. Putin's decision on Feb. 27 to put Russia's nuclear arsenal on high alert for the first time since the Cuban missile crisis in the early 1960s shows the weakness of Russia's position rather than strength and self-confidence.
The two sides reached a preliminary agreement to hold Ukrainian-Russian talks with low-level officials in the border cities between Belarus and Ukraine, without preconditions. Without U.S. involvement, however, it is hard to imagine that these talks would yield tangible results in the first round. It was unclear whether Moscow would abandon its early demands for Ukraine, which included the surrender of weapons by Ukrainian troops and ukraine's complete neutrality.
Looking further ahead, at the international and Middle Eastern level, the outcome of this war is predictable in a number of variables that are predictable and only preliminary:
If Russia can achieve a quick and complete victory, this is doubtful, and there is no doubt that Putin will go far beyond Ukraine and seek to establish an independent or neutral security belt in Russia's European, Caucasus and Asian neighbors. Russia's success will give its Middle East allies, especially Iran and Syria, more confident, whether the former takes a regional move or the latter seeks greater influence on Syrian territory.
However, regardless of the success of Russia's adventures in Ukraine, the process of Russia's integration into the European realm has stopped. Europe is divided again, albeit along very different borders along the Cold War. Russia lost most of its former allies in the Warsaw Pact, as well as the former Soviet republics in Europe, all of which fell to nato and the European Union.
Europe is the epicenter of the greatest war in modern human history, and the peace that the continent has experienced over the past few decades has been extraordinary. However, while the European crisis is the most complex since World War II, it is still possible to save face on both sides through negotiations.
If not resolved through negotiations, the entire international arena is likely to converge on three spheres of influence: Russia, the great powers, and the Euro-Atlantic (because it is too early to expect Russia and a great power alliance to emerge). But as parties try to attract new allies, the boundaries between these circles will remain relatively fluid.
Energy producers in the Middle East, from Qatar to Algeria, must regain a more prominent position in the global balance of power, especially as European countries begin to shed their dependence on Russian energy. As long as a balanced stance is taken in the confrontation between Russia and the West, even if the NATO commitment is maintained, Turkey will regain strategic weight in the eyes of all parties in the international scramble.
On the other hand, if the West's tendency to isolate Russia is clear, how the West, especially the U.S. policy toward the great powers, will evolve is unknown, and since Obama adopted the policy of the Asian axis, the great powers have become a high concern of the United States' global strategy, and the economic and financial ties between the two sides are much more complex than those between Russia and the Western powers.