Ukraine, a Retrospective

Since assuming power, Putin has made decisions that went unquestioned, with institutions merely endorsing his personal will. He captivated the Western world with his unchallenged authority—despite harboring overt disdain for the very democratic freedoms that defined the West. By restoring the Soviet trajectory, Putin garnered the support of the far left and emerged as a global icon for the extreme right. One in five German voters now supports Nazis, many with roots in the former Soviet orbit.

Even within Putin’s first five years in office (2000–2004), the world witnessed a growing fatigue with democracy. Globalization granted legitimacy to authoritarian regimes eager to trade freely. The internet became a vessel for distortion—half-truths, falsehoods, and conspiracy theories. When confronted with abrupt and multifaceted challenges, Western democracies revealed themselves to be overly complex, slow-moving, and indecisive. Instead of managing crises as opportunities—the only viable counterweight to present weakness—the West surrendered each one to Putin: the financial collapse of 2008, the Ukrainian crisis of 2014, the migrant crisis of 2015, Brexit, and the election of Donald Trump in 2016.

Since Vladimir Putin’s ascent to power—and especially following the major EU and NATO enlargement into Eastern Europe in 2004—Russia established three key axes of strategic pressure: the Baltics, Ukraine, and the Western Balkans. NATO provided protection to Eastern Europe and the Baltic states, yet the West relinquished both Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014 to Russian aggression, retreating before Moscow’s nuclear threats and the imperative of affordable energy for European economies.

Ukraine’s Maidan Revolution was intolerable for the Kremlin. Ukraine’s freedom to choose Europe and democracy—likely in that order—represented a personal humiliation for Putin. Russia could not abide a pro-European, democratic government on territory it has long considered its own. It claimed, moreover, that the United States had, during the negotiations on German reunification in 1990, supposedly made a verbal promise to the Soviets that NATO would not expand. This was but one in a string of falsehoods. In reality, the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union were still in existence, and NATO enlargement was not even on the agenda. On the contrary, the United States did everything in its power to assist Russia in building institutions and reviving its economy. Thanks to direct American support, Russia secured $20 billion in loans from the International Monetary Fund during the 1990s. With the backing of the United States and the United Kingdom, Russia signed the Budapest Memorandum in 1994, whereby Ukraine’s and Belarus’s nuclear arsenals were transferred to Russia in exchange for guarantees of their territorial integrity. Despite failing to meet the economic or institutional standards of excellence, the Russian Federation was admitted in 1998 to the G7—the exclusive group of the world’s most industrialized nations, thereby becoming the G8. From the onset of the global financial and economic crisis in 2008, Russia continued to enjoy the support of the European Union. In their determination not to offend Russia, France and Germany opposed any prospect of NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia. As early as 1991, Russia and NATO had formed their first strategic partnership, and in 1994, Russia joined the Partnership for Peace program. Far from being humiliated, as Putin so often claims to mask his true intentions, Russia enjoyed equal and respectful treatment on every key point, undeservedly so.

In response to the Maidan uprising, the Ukraine’s decisive turn toward Europe, Putin resolved in 2014 to occupy the Donbas and annex Crimea, confident that the United States had lost its strategic authority. Just nine months into his presidency, Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on the grounds that he had fostered a new climate in international relations and promoted multilateral diplomacy. For those who remembered the Cold War all too well—and understood that Russia would not relinquish its imperial ambitions soon—this award appeared naïve, if not absurd. In European mindset, Obama was held in high regard, but the trust invested in his personality would prove misplaced. He was neither willing nor able to respond effectively to global challenges—some he failed to grasp, others he simply disregarded. His pacifism created a void that was quickly filled by renewed bloodshed in the Middle East, specifically in Syria, Iraq, and Afghanistan. To Putin, he meekly ceded responsibility for the supposed dismantling of Syria’s chemical weapons. The American intervention in Iraq in 2003 had also marginalized Syria, then the epicenter of terror and terrorism, and the Assad regime as the archetype of others to follow—including Putin’s own. Putin counted on Obama’s true nature, on his limitations. He attacked Ukraine in 2014 and, openly entered the Syrian conflict on Assad’s side in 2015, precipitating a migrant crisis in Europe. Then, in 2016, through the manipulation of Russian intelligence and its influence over social media and conservative media outlets, Donald Trump won the American presidency. Britain made the ill-conceived and profoundly mistaken decision to pursue Brexit. Not even Trump’s eventual defeat would deter Putin. The new American president, Joe Biden, born in 1942, assumed office under chaotic circumstances. As Obama’s former vice-president, Biden appeared to Putin as sufficiently indecisive and frail, while his administration seemed equally hindered—unwilling and incapable of responding decisively and in time. Putin also counted on Lukashenko, who had lost the 2020 Belarusian elections and remained in power solely due to Russian covert support. In the summer of 2021, the United States withdrew from Afghanistan, effectively handing the country over to the Taliban. To Putin, this was further evidence of America’s decline. Another episode that emboldened him was China’s seizure of Hong Kong, in blatant violation of international agreements. Putin had every reason to expect Trump’s return. He had entrenched himself deeply within the structures of the US Congress and Senate, gained influence over major media outlets, and poisoned a third of the American public with conspiracy theories, half-truths, and all manner of delusion.

The invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, was launched under the guise of a “denazification”—massive attack against a neighboring “brotherly nation” said to have been unjustly severed from its natural motherland. Russian propaganda further claimed that a preemptive strike was necessary to avert an inevitable seizure of Ukraine, allegedly a mere NATO vassal territory. Among the stated objectives was also the arrest of the “drug addict” in power in Kyiv—above all, President Volodymyr Zelensky.

Europe stood paralyzed. Putin did not consider any potential European response. The only recourse Europe knew was sanctions—an instrument Putin held in utter contempt.

The European Union, at its core, is not designed for strategic confrontation, conceived in more comfortable times—during the era of Fukuyama’s “end of history”—when liberal democracy was believed to be the natural and sole outcome of social transformation in the wake of the Berlin Wall’s collapse. Putin dismissed the European Union entirely, doing so through a combination of his most effective and most disturbing qualities. He is a predator—and a serial killer. Putin’s glaring personal crudeness and his status as a caricature of himself deceived many who underestimated Russia’s capacity to contaminate the Western world through manipulation, disinformation, relativization, and fear. While buying time through diplomatic maneuvers and quietly preparing for war, Putin regarded only NATO or the United States as interlocutors—never Europe, which he views as a symbol of decadence, incapable of facing death squarely. His mental framework, by this point, had descended into primal terrain—shaped by ageing, pandemic isolation, and perhaps a regression to youthful frustrations when he sought dominance in the hierarchy of a neighborhood gang. He has always acted the grotesque role of the alpha male. He resurrected the culture of the Gulag, governed by a system of “dominant domination,” in which prisoners policed each other as a strategy for survival. Putin applied this model to Russian society. At the pinnacle of a criminal oligarchy, he cast himself as the intermittently visible warden of a camp. He left all others—the condemned—to take on the roles of guards, victims, informants, and executioners, each based on their abilities or merit.

The Ukrainian resistance from the very first days—when the country had already been written off—came as a profound shock to Putin. Ukraine reawakened Europe to its own forgotten ideals: freedom and defiance in the face of tyranny. A Europe lulled into complacency by prosperity had neglected these values; Ukraine, in sacrifice, embodied them. Its resistance was not merely fearless—it was intelligent, imaginative, and ingenious. The resistance that Putin did not count on, the force that he despised, that he does not understand, has become a horizontal network woven through Ukrainian society, one that dispersed the defense effort so thoroughly that its structure and principles no longer depended on any single individual—not even on President Zelensky himself, who nonetheless shouldered the burden of defense without compromise. The deep, civic resistance exposed and dismantled the fundamental essence of the aggressor and his aggression, particularly the historical code: the paranoid obsession with the perceived superiority of Russian culture and the persistent legacy of militant, exclusionary Marxism-Leninism. It is a legacy that has preserved the feudal hierarchy of privileged boyars and resigned muzhiks.

Ukraine was shielded from total catastrophe by two particular circumstances. The first was that Putin, if only temporarily, brought Russia back to the forefront of the United States’ strategic priorities. From the very outset of the Russian aggression, Ukraine and Europe operated under the protection of the American security shield—Ukraine, in order to establish a system of resistance,  Europe, to reassess its foreign and security policy. The second significant development was the perhaps unexpected response of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who was acutely aware of the malign influence of Russia and Syria in the region and who found himself compelled to confront Russia’s threat to the Straits. As early as 2019, Turkey had offered Ukraine the Bayraktar drone—a formidable weapon, the “star of drones.” This was followed by a joint production of next-generation unmanned systems. For the first time, the West benefitted from the Cypriot paradigm—only in reverse. The Kremlin was forced to recognize that certain roles had been twisted.

With his assault on Ukraine, Putin sought to swing the pendulum back in the opposite direction, following the wave of EU and NATO enlargement between 2004 and 2020, when Eastern Europe joined the Western world. EU accession opened prospects for dynamic development, while NATO membership provided the security guarantees enshrined in Article 5—an attack on one is an attack on all—particularly in anticipation of future Russian ambitions. The Western Balkans—the former Yugoslavia alongside Albania, with access to the Mediterranean—remains incompletely integrated, affording Putin yet another useful counterbalance to Ukraine’s detriment. Germany abandoned its longstanding pacifism and commenced rearmament. The European Union, a political community founded on the values of free trade, democracy, and the rule of law, was not expected by Putin to seek emancipation from Russian energy dependence, a relationship steeped in both economic and political corruption. Yet in the face of Putin’s aggression, the Visegrád Group—long a source of political and strategic fragmentation within Europe—ceased to function. Only Hungary and Slovakia remained at the margins of the emerging political, strategic, and normative consensus.

Drawing on Soviet experience, Putin sought legitimacy in the “Third World”—in Africa, Central Asia, Latin America, and the Middle East. (In a similar vein, Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito was avoiding membership in the European Economic Community.) Putin believed he was not isolated, that the greater part of the “world” stood with him.

In global terms, the specter of nuclear warfare was once again openly raised—directed against “Western degenerates,” as Vladimir Zhirinovsky phrased it. In 2014, Russia entered Ukraine in the firm belief that NATO would remain passive in the face of nuclear threats. It then set about consolidating its conquests: the russification of minds, mass passport distribution, and the integration of occupied territories into the Russian financial system (notably, Serbia remains the only country in the region outside the SEPA European payments infrastructure). A Soviet-style referendum led to the annexation of Crimea, with unmarked Russian special forces guarding polling stations. The Kremlin replicated this scenario in four eastern Ukrainian regions—Luhansk, Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, and Kherson. Any attempt by Ukraine to reclaim these territories or any NATO intervention would be met with Russia’s nuclear doctrine. At that point, the conflict in Ukraine was effectively frozen—mirroring Serbia’s approach, increasingly supported by Russian covert networks, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, and Kosovo.

Even during the most fraught moments of the Cold War, Soviet leaders refrained from issuing direct threats of nuclear apocalypse (although the possibility loomed during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962). In contrast, Putin’s media openly proclaim that Russian missiles could strike Berlin or Paris within minutes, that London—ironically the haven for the looted fortunes of Putin’s oligarchs—could be wiped out in a second. In the vicinity of Chernobyl—the site of the 1986 nuclear disaster—Russian troops occupied the infamous “Red Forest,” an ultra-radioactive zone where pine trees had changed color due to radiation exposure. Without protective gear, they dug trenches and hunted wild animals. The Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant has become another pawn in Russia’s blackmail campaign, a looming threat of nuclear catastrophe.

On the ground, Russian forces often resemble a disorganized and undisciplined mob. In several towns and willages in northern Ukraine, Russian soldiers raped, tortured, and executed civilians—defenseless human beings, women, and the elderly. Convinced they were exterminating “Nazi” Ukrainians, “non-men,” they enacted barbarity with impunity. Putin has compressed the Russian nation into a tribal entity, unleashing a primitive, atavistic form of anthropological expression.

From the very first days of the assault on Ukraine, Putin’s strategic objectives and ontological ambitions were clear. To seize Kyiv—the cradle of the first Russia from a distant past. To establish direct control over the Donbas. To secure Crimea by land, occupying the entirety of Ukraine’s Azov and Black Sea coastlines. To erase every trace of distinctiveness, statehood, sovereignty, and identity from Ukraine. He continued to issue threats toward Moldova, the Baltic states, and Poland, while sustaining tension and animosity throughout the former Yugoslavia by stoking identity-based conflicts. Convinced of NATO’s weakness and unwillingness to respond, Putin was certain that he could swiftly and safely install a puppet government in Kyiv and proceed to dismantle Western unity. Instead of installing a puppet government in Kyiv, he installed one in Washington. With Donald Trump’s return to power in 2025, NATO ceased to exist in its original form and purpose.

The era of cheerful globalization is drawing to a close. European nations are only beginning to realize that domestic prosperity depend on Russia. The world finds itself in a state of unprecedented uncertainty. Until recently, Vladimir Putin was regarded as the greatest threat to global peace; currently, that threat is embodied by Donald Trump, who is systematically dismantling institutions and the constitutional order while issuing threats to America’s allies. The only potential factor of global equilibrium may be the rivalry between the United States and China, though this cannot be assumed to apply in the context of Russia’s relations with Ukraine and Europe. For China, Ukraine represents a precedent—a mirror of Taiwan—especially following the occupation of Hong Kong. China hopes, one day, to purchase Russia itself and secure access to its energy resources and raw materials. In the meantime, it maintains a pragmatic understanding with its neighbor—two states united by their totalitarian essence: the cult of personality, lifetime presidencies, the absence of democratic rights, a lack of free elections, total control over the lives of citizens, and a system of camps for deportation, re-education, and brutal punishment. Kissinger’s once-heralded China paradigm now stands inverted. Adrift in the vastness of American liberties, Kissinger, in any case, consistently operated in reverse—but the need for a new balance of power has become starkly apparent. One of Putin’s undeniable successes has been the wasting of Europe’s time and wisdom.