Ukraine War, a Year On

As the Ukraine war completes its first year, Andrew Sullivan’s article asks the pragmatic question:

“It (the war) is indeed right and just. But is it prudent?”

Ironically though, both sides (West and Russia) believe the war is “right and just”. Russia views a Ukraine that joins NATO as an unacceptable, existential risk. The West considers the invasion of a European country as unacceptable.

 

Sullivan wonders about the wisdom or folly of Biden’s declaration that Ukraine “must triumph”. Won’t any attempt to retake all of Ukraine, he asks, inevitably mean the war will spill over into “Russia proper at some point”?

“My worry is that the West is committing itself to an end-goal — the full liberation of all of Ukraine — that no Russian government could accept, without regime change in Moscow itself. Which means, as Biden’s gaffes sometimes reveal, that this is ineluctably a war for regime change in a nuclear-armed country — which is an extremely hazardous enterprise. It’s righteous but dangerous.”

 

Besides, says Sullivan, the West seems to be so obsessed with this war that they seem to be losing track of the bigger picture. Russia isn’t collapsing economically:

“For all of 2022, Russia managed to increase its oil output 2 percent and boost oil export earnings 20 percent, to $218 billion ... Russia also raked in $138 billion from natural gas, a nearly 80 percent rise over 2021 as record prices offset cuts in flows to Europe.”

Nor is Russia isolated:

“India has increased Russian imports by 400 percent. But the real game-changer is China. Its initial neutrality is clearly shifting.”

 

Sullivan cites Noah Smith’s worries about Biden’s all-in declaration:

“In a long war of attrition, as this is becoming, mass production of weapons matters. And China has a much bigger manufacturing base than the West. Will they use it? It must be tempting to pin the West down in Europe. We’ll learn more when Xi visits Putin this spring.”

 

Even if China going “all in” support of Russia is very far-fetched, there are simply too many unknowns on how things will play out:

“Wars are dynamic and unpredictable. Will Putin invade Moldova? Will Belarus go all-in against Ukraine? Will this war cement a Russia-China alliance and deepen Russia-India ties? Or will battlefield success for Ukraine lead to some kind of breakthrough, as the current strategy seems to be aiming at? I don’t know, and none of us know.”

 

Europe is again the place where an obscure place can set off massively destructive wars with unpredictable consequences. The assassination in Sarajevo set of World War I. The second World War led to the end of empires.