thesis statement about ukraine and russia

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War in Ukraine

How will the war in Ukraine shape international politics? In principle there are two ways to address this question. The first is simply to extrapolate into the future any actions or reactions that we can observe today. The second, which is explored below, is to organize our thinking theoretically, to ask what may turn out to be the long-term effects of the major causes set in motion by the war. I organize the discussion in terms of a theory of international politics—realism, mainly structural realism. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine serves as another reminder that war remains an ever-present danger in an international system that is anarchic—ie, devoid of any central authority with the wherewithal to protect states from aggression. States must therefore prepare to defend themselves. In the heady aftermath of the liberal West’s victory over the Soviet empire, and the apparent triumph of the US-led, liberal world order, many instead believed that interstate war would become a thing of the past. States now face strong incentives to reembrace tried and tested tools of self-preservation developed in earlier times.

Full story by Barry Posen is available here: https://www.defensepriorities.org/explainers/hypotheses-on-the-implications-of-the-ukraine-russia-war

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thesis statement about ukraine and russia

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News and Statements by President Bacow

Statement on the Russian Invasion of Ukraine

Let me begin by offering my thanks to the Davis Center and the Ukrainian Research Institute, its co-sponsors, and our panelists. Universities are built to bring people together, and technology has increased our capacity to draw audiences from around the world. This gathering exemplifies our convening strength—and its tremendous value.

On Friday, I wrote the director and executive director of the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute of my deep concern about the capricious and senseless invasion of Ukraine. Since then, the situation has deteriorated further. Over the weekend, members of our community rallied at the heart of our campus and spoke clearly and forcefully against the crisis.

Now is a time for all voices to be raised.

The deplorable actions of Vladimir Putin put at risk the lives of millions of people and undermine the concept of sovereignty. Institutions devoted to the perpetuation of democratic ideals and to the articulation of human rights have a responsibility to condemn such wanton aggression.

Harvard will continue to support in whatever ways we can members of our community who face grave uncertainty. We will continue to share knowledge of Ukraine and advance understanding of its culture, history, and language. And we will continue to speak against cruelty, and to act with compassion as we hold to hope for resolution—and for liberation.

Today the Ukrainian flag flies over Harvard Yard. Harvard University stands with the people of Ukraine.

Opening remarks at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies and Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University event, Rapid Response Panel: Ukraine Under Attack .

Statement on Russia’s War against Ukraine

We at the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University are horrified by the Russian military attack on Ukraine and the pain and suffering it is imposing on Ukrainians and all those who hold them dear.

The attempt by the Russian president to resolve longstanding grievances with both the Ukrainian government and the post–Cold War international order through violence is a grave mistake. The future historians of Russia, Europe, and Eurasia will describe this dark moment as a regrettable, avoidable turning point of twenty-first century geopolitics.

Since our founding as the Russian Research Center, the Davis Center has sought to understand Russia and the broader Eurasian region with all the tools scholarship has to offer. Not surprisingly, in 75 years we have grown into a community with close ties to the region we study. The social scientists, humanists, and artists in our midst have spent time, energy, and emotion building relationships with these countries and the people who love them. It is devastating to see the Russian government turn against its neighbor Ukraine, with whom it shares part—though far from all—of its history.

The present-day Davis Center fosters understanding through dialogue, research, and scholarly exchange. Although geopolitical harmony has eluded us for many decades, we have always hoped for and promoted peaceful mutual understanding. Simmering violence in eastern Ukraine and elsewhere in the post-Soviet world has been alarming for years, but the Russian invasion of Ukraine marks a definitive change in the political trajectory of the region.

The Davis Center stands with the people of Ukraine and with the many people around the world who are and will be harmed by this war.

Rawi Abdelal Herbert F. Johnson Professor of International Management, Harvard Business School Director, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies

Alexandra Vacroux Executive Director, Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies

February 25, 2022

See also: Statement on Suspension of Linkages with Russian Institutions of Higher Education (March 9, 2022)

Russia’s assault on Ukraine and the international order: Assessing and bolstering the Western response

Subscribe to the center on the united states and europe update, fiona hill fiona hill senior fellow - foreign policy , center on the united states and europe.

February 2, 2022

21 min read

Fiona Hill testifies before the U.S. Commission on Security and Cooperation in Europe on Russia’s assault on Ukraine and the international order. A video of the testimony can be found here . Read the full testimony below.

This current critical phase of the crisis in Ukraine has been manufactured by Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Kremlin. Russian troops, artillery, armored vehicles, tanks and other equipment encircle Ukraine: they are along the Russian border with Ukraine and in the annexed territory of Crimea as well as in Belarus, threatening a major military confrontation. It is hard to identify a specific trigger for Russia’s decision in 2021 to move thousands of personnel and their armaments close to Ukraine or for the sudden escalation of events in December 2021. The Kremlin’s policy toward Ukraine has towed a hard line since the early 2000s; and we can certainly point to an accumulation of factors since Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, annexed Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula and set off the ongoing war in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region that has now cost the lives of more than 13,000 Ukrainians. Nonetheless, the timing seems in many respects driven more by Vladimir Putin’s own political predilections and perceptions of developments and reactions in Ukraine, Europe, and the United States rather than by events on the ground in the contested Donbas region.

Russia’s latest preparation for what now seems like a potential large-scale invasion of Ukraine was in part sparked by the current Ukrainian government inviting American and NATO forces to conduct joint exercises and engage in other military cooperation to boost Ukraine’s defensive capabilities against further Russian aggression. Despite the flurry of talks between and among Russia, the U.S., NATO and other allies—including offers to discuss Russian security concerns—since President Biden met with President Putin in Geneva in June 2021, Moscow has shown no sign of releasing the pressure. Indeed it has ramped up its military presence in recent weeks.

Emboldened in Eurasia

Several factors are at play for Moscow and Putin. First of all, the past two years have seen significant changes in Eurasia, where developments seem to have reached a tipping point. Thirty years since the dissolution of the Soviet Union in December 2021, and 22 years since Vladimir Putin came to power, Moscow has successfully reasserted itself as the dominant political force and security provider in the region. Only Ukraine and the three Baltic States that achieved membership in both NATO and the European Union in 2004 have managed to stay beyond Moscow’s grip. The United States never recognized the Baltic states as part of the USSR after their forcible reincorporation during World War II.

In this context, forcing Kyiv and its leadership back into Russia’s orbit is unfinished business for Moscow and Vladimir Putin. Ukraine is the regional outlier in what Russia considers to be its “privileged sphere of interests.” Kyiv continues to pursue NATO membership, close ties with Europe and its own economic, political, and foreign policy path, as well as building up its military forces in evident opposition to Russia.

In contrast, other former Soviet states have either been pressured into closer political and security relations with Moscow or into a neutral, marginal international status—by Russia leveraging economic and military ties or exploiting a territorial conflict. As one notable example, Georgia’s current government treads more carefully with Russia than its predecessor. Russia, of course, invaded Georgia in August 2008. Georgia’s then president, Mikheil Saakashvili, a perennial thorn in Moscow’s side, saw his popularity plummet in the aftermath and was eventually ousted in an election in 2013. He had a second political career in exile in Ukraine, but now sits in jail in Tbilisi after an ill-advised return to Georgia in October 2021. Russian officials and commentators frequently use Saakashvili and his fate as a cautionary tale. In November 2021, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov warned Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of the risks of following Saakashvili’s path. And according to reports from the British government and intelligence agencies, Moscow has been scheming over the course of the current crisis potentially to replace Ukrainian President Zelenskyy with a pro-Kremlin puppet government.

Next door to Georgia, in Armenia, in summer 2020, President Nikol Pashinyan—another leader out of favor with Moscow—saw his domestic position and foreign policy autonomy crushed by war with Azerbaijan. Given the fact that Russia and Armenia have a long-standing defense pact and Russian forces are permanently based in Armenia, Azerbaijan’s military assault to retake territory occupied by Armenia for three decades is unlikely to have been feasible without a green light from Moscow. Both Armenia and Azerbaijan resisted the imposition of Russian forces on the frontlines in Nagorno-Karabakh after a ceasefire was brokered in 1994, preferring that an international force oversee the implementation of any final resolution of the conflict. Russia exploited the 2020 war to introduce its military forces into Nagorno-Karabakh under the guise of peacekeepers. Russia has now moved to broker and manage Armenia’s future relations with both Azerbaijan and Turkey, sidelining the OSCE Minsk Group that previously managed international diplomacy in Nagorno-Karabakh.

Elsewhere, in 2020-2021, Belarussian strongman Aleksandr Lukashenko, who infuriated Moscow with his frequent political overtures to Brussels and Washington at Russia’s expense, was forced back into the fold frightened by the wrath of his own disgruntled population. Lukashenko and Belarus now host new contingents of Russian military forces and war game exercises on Ukraine’s northern border. Similarly, in January 2022, Russia and its regional security alliance, the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), were called in to quash protests and quell a political power struggle in Kazakhstan. This was the first time that the CSTO was deployed to the territory of a member country.

Russia feels emboldened by these developments in Eurasia. The United States played no significant role in addressing the upheavals. It was conspicuous in its absence. From Russia’s perspective, the United States seems grievously weakened at home and abroad. For Vladimir Putin, America’s political disarray, President Biden’s difficulties in achieving his domestic agenda, combined with China’s rise at the expense of the United States since the global financial crisis of 2008-2009 seem to mirror Russia’s predicament immediately after the dissolution of the USSR. In the 1990s, the United States and NATO pressed a politically and economically beleaguered Russia to withdraw its military forces from Eastern Europe. In Putin’s view, America’s predicament offers a rare opportunity. If the United States really is in a state of collapse at home and in retreat abroad, as the Kremlin assesses, then perhaps Russia can overturn the last 30 years of American dominance in European security, in addition to constricting Ukraine’s independence.

Seeing Opportunity in Europe

Moscow also sees ample opportunity to take advantage of developments in western and eastern Europe. The reverberations from Brexit, Poland and Hungary’s disputes with the EU, the legacy of four years of rifts between the U.S. and its European allies during the tumult of the Trump presidency, the departure of long-serving German Chancellor Angela Merkel from the political scene, preparations for presidential elections in France and Washington’s precipitous withdrawal from Afghanistan, have exacerbated other frictions and fractures in NATO and the EU that Russia can exploit.

European military spending and operational readiness have declined over the last decades relative to the U.S. and Russia. Despite an uptick in spending and deployments since Russia annexed Crimea, the two other significant European military actors, the UK and France, are increasingly at loggerheads , while Turkey is preoccupied with Syria and the Middle East. Russian saber rattling has fueled European anxieties about their ability to protect NATO and EU member states from Russian aggression let alone non-members like Ukraine.

In addition, Europe’s punitive financial tools, along with the political will to deploy them, have been weakened. Moscow has effectively moved over the past decade of Putin’s rule to shore up the Russian economy against Western sanctions, including through paying off state debts and making strategic direct investments in companies across Europe in critical infrastructure, energy, and metallurgy. As soon as the United States and Europe imposed sanctions on Russia in response to the annexation of Crimea in 2014, Putin moved to adopt explicit import substitution policies in defense, food and other critical sectors. Despite the friction with their governments, Putin notably still encouraged close business cooperation with all foreign corporations previously invested in Russia, including American companies.

Putin has long made it clear that he sees the global economy as a battlefield where he must defend Russia’s economic interests and maximize Moscow’s options and leverage. He has instructed Russian oligarchs in his innermost circle to “de-offshore” or repatriate their key operations and assets, and diversified Russia’s trade relations away from Europe and the U.S. But he has also assiduously courted international corporations to give them a direct stake in the Russian economy. Putin continues to try to deepen ties with the private sectors of key European countries even at the height of this crisis to off-set any retaliatory economic actions the West might take.

Putin and the Kremlin believe that European and American investors in Russia, and those who manage or work in Russian-owned companies in Europe, will always work in Russia’s and their own corporate interests rather than in support of their governments’ positions. They will serve as Russian allies and advocates for limited sanctions, and they will push for a speedy reconciliation with Russia, limiting their government’s appetites and capacity for confrontation.

For Putin, trade and investment are means of securing political leverage, along with offering lucrative positions on Russian corporate boards to former high-ranking Western politicians and grandees. Putin, for example, recently met with the heads of leading Italian companies to discuss their business in Russia, seeing Italy as a potential weak link in European unity. Putin has now been at this a long time, seeking to create a new version of the Cold War era mutually assured nuclear destruction in the advent of a political and economic standoff. If the West pulls the economic sanctions trigger, Western interests will suffer too.

Maximalist Positions

Russia’s assessment of its opportunities for action in Eurasia and Europe became clear in twin documents submitted to NATO and the U.S. on December 17, 2021. Moscow laid out maximalist positions on three sets of issues: 1) Ukraine; 2) NATO, and the future expansion of the alliance; and 3) the role of the United States in European security and internationally.

Against the backdrop of threats and wargames, the December 17 documents reinforced Moscow’s much-emphasized demand for an ironclad guarantee from NATO that Ukraine and other former republics of the USSR will not at any point become members of the alliance. Russia’s December 17 documents also demanded an end to further NATO expansion (which would preclude close Alliance partners like Sweden and Finland seeking membership); NATO pulling back forces and weapons deployed in Eastern Europe since its first round of expansion to Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary in 1999; and the withdrawal of U.S. nuclear weapons from Europe. The U.S. and NATO recently provided written responses to these demands—maintaining their long-held position that Moscow’s demands for a veto over NATO expansion are non-starters, but underscoring that they are open to discussions on reforming and refurbishing European security institutions as well as to negotiations on the disposition of conventional and nuclear forces in Europe.

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As far as NATO is concerned, Russia sees the institution as an extension of the United States, not an alliance based on mutual interest, collective defense, and voluntary association. Moscow continues to view the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Cold War terms, as the equivalent of the Warsaw Treaty Organization that USSR created as a mirror image and coerced Eastern Europe into. Russian officials and commentators routinely deny any agency or independent strategic thought to any NATO member other than the United States. Note, for example, that Russia has not sent any similar documents to our North American neighbor, Canada, challenging its role in European security, despite its membership in both NATO and the OSCE and close ties to Ukraine. Canada and other countries barely exist in Russia’s calculations.

In terms of Russia’s opposition to NATO expansion, Vladimir Putin first put the U.S. and NATO on notice in a speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007. Putin asserted that Russia was rankled by the post-Cold War emergence of a unipolar world dominated by the United States and by NATO in Europe. Putin emphasized that Russia could not, and would not, countenance any further expansion of the Alliance beyond the Baltic states and the seven East European countries that joined NATO together in 2004. Russia made good on Putin’s “notice” to the Munich Security Conference in August 2008. The Russian military moved into Georgia in the aftermath of NATO’s April 2008 Bucharest Summit, where both Georgia and Ukraine were promised eventual membership. Russia would have made a similar move against Ukraine then had the government in Kyiv not stepped back from Ukraine’s NATO bid after seeing what happened to Georgia. But, of course, in 2014, Russia annexed Crimea and sparked off a war in Donbas, when Moscow thought Ukraine was trying to find an alternative route to NATO by concluding an association agreement with the European Union.

Confronting the United States

As far as the United States is concerned, Putin has taken Russia’s ambitions and positions beyond Eurasia and Europe. Russia is consolidating relationships with U.S. adversaries with the blatantly signaled goal of challenging America’s global posture. At the end of January, for example, President Putin met with Iranian President Ebrahim Raisi to discuss economic, political and military ties. On January 21, Russia, Iran and China also began joint naval drills in the northern Indian Ocean, performing joint tactical maneuvering and practicing artillery fire at naval targets, as well as conducting search and rescue missions at sea. This week, on February 4, presidents Putin and Xi will meet in Beijing at the start of the Winter Olympics to discuss the current situation in and around Ukraine. These are just a few of many instances of Russian efforts to up the ante and draw our attention in other theaters.

Putin has been quite explicit that successive Russian threats to deploy new nuclear weapons systems, or undermine the current international order are a gambit to get the U.S. to the negotiating table. Russia has long sought a commitment from the U.S., NATO and the Europe Union that it will have a clearly defined role in post-Cold War European security institutions and decision-making power whenever developments or events run counter to its interests. Russian officials have expressed frustration about the slow response from the United States to Moscow’s repeated requests to engage since 2008, when then President Dmitry Medvedev made a proposal for a new European security order in Berlin .

From Moscow’s perspective, successive American administrations have dropped the ball on engaging with Russia to focus on other foreign policy priorities. Indeed, many observers believed that the Biden Administration also sought to sideline Russia to concentrate on China, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change. Putin was evidently dissatisfied with the slow pace of bilateral discussions after the first increase of tensions around Ukraine in spring 2021 and his meeting with President Biden in Geneva in June. He clearly believes that he needs to escalate the situation to keep us focused on Russia’s demands and get ahead of the U.S. 2022 midterm elections when our attention will necessarily be diverted to domestic issues. Putin is also mindful of 2024 when we have our presidential election, and he must submit himself for reelection at home. In many respects, time is of the essence for Putin to achieve resolution well before 2024. His public opinion ratings are not what they used to be. The last time Putin’s popular approval fell significantly was before the annexation of Crimea. Annexation proved universally popular in Russia, boosting Putin’s popularity to stratospheric levels. Putin may hope for a similar boost ahead of 2024 by showing the Russian people that he can take decisive action against Ukraine, NATO and the United States.

In the meantime, at home in Russia, Putin has done a good job of making the United States and NATO look like the aggressors and perpetrators of crisis. Abroad, he is bent on convincing the rest of the world that Ukraine is either an internal matter for Russia to resolve or the object of a Cold War-style dust up with the United States—a proxy war like Korea or Vietnam in the worst case scenario. In recent Russian polling , half of Russians believed that the U.S. and NATO were to blame for the crisis, and only a tiny fraction thought that Russia itself was to blame. In stark contrast, slightly more than 70 percent of Ukrainians viewed Russia as a hostile state by December 2021 as a result of the rising tensions – up from 60 percent in spring 2021.

Losing Hearts and Minds in Ukraine

This latter point could prove problematic for Putin. The Russian President is a student of history. He knows Russian history inside out, but he also has his very own version of history. The Kremlin and Putin have long deployed Russia values and Russian history as weapons in their conduct of information warfare, especially when it comes to Ukraine. For Putin, every aspect of the Ukraine conflict has been made personal. He has touted and invoked his own connections to Ukraine and Crimea at every possible opportunity. Every move has been on his timetable and every Russian official and commentator stresses that the ultimate decisions in Ukraine are up to him and a very small group in his inner circle who share his views.

In the summer of 2021, Putin published an essay laying out his interpretation of Ukrainian and Russian history: the two countries are one people, state and culture, and they share the same heritage and religion. This essay was in effect an elaboration on his March 2014 address marking the annexation of Crimea, and also on earlier statements and writings. Indeed, almost a decade ago, in 2013, Putin abruptly turned his focus toward Ukraine and its relations with Russia as he worked on shaping a new Russian national narrative. Putin’s new narrative rejected the West as a model and put Russia firmly on its own path. And the territory of post-Soviet Ukraine, including Crimea, played a key role in a series of events that Putin selected and spotlighted. Putin depicted Ukraine as Kievan or “holy” Rus’ , the birthplace and antecedent of the Russian state. He frequently referred to the customary story that his own namesake, “Grand Prince Vladimir of Kiev,” had assumed Christianity on behalf of “all of Russia” through his baptism in Khersones in Crimea—to become the holy prince Vladimir. Putin also declared that Ukrainians and Russians were not just fraternal peoples: they were one single, united people, part of the same civilization.

This decade old narrative has become a central feature in the current crisis. Putin has asserted that Russia and Ukraine are historically, culturally, linguistically—and inextricably—tied together. They have only been separated by an accident of history, the collapse of the USSR. In this narrative context, the mere prospect of any kind of formal relationship between Ukraine and NATO, the EU or the U.S. is considered a direct threat to Russia. And so, Putin has used military force against Ukraine in response to its engagement with the West since 2014. His recent orders to move thousands of men and equipment across Russia, including thousands of miles from the Russian Far East to Ukraine’s borders, even if they are not ultimately deployed into Ukraine are not cost free. This is an expensive endeavor. One way or another, Putin means business.

Indeed, Putin has now tethered himself to the futures of both the Russian and the Ukrainian states. Any perceived move against Russia or political shift in Ukraine becomes a threat to his position of power ahead of the 2024 Russian presidential election. When Putin himself threatens, he usually acts. But in acting against Ukraine, Putin and Russia could create an eternal enemy out of a neighboring country, as well as destabilize European and global affairs for years to come.

Acts of aggression against another country, no matter what the motivation, have lasting consequences. They create resentments and new grievances that persist for decades and shape the attitudes and policies of subsequent generations. This was something Putin, in fact, reflected upon at the beginning of his presidency. In a quasi-autobiography issued in January 2000, Putin was asked by one of the journalists interviewing him whether the Soviet interventions in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968 were big mistakes. Yes, they were, he replied. “And you didn’t even mention that we used force in East Germany in 1953… They were all big mistakes, in my opinion. And the Russophobia that we have today in Eastern Europe, that’s the result of those mistakes.”

Countering Putin

Russophobia or negative attitudes towards Russia today in Ukraine and elsewhere are the direct result of Russia military interventions, cyber-attacks and intrusions and political influence operations in the 2000s. In countering Putin on this occasion, we have to demonstrate to Putin that today’s actions in and around Ukraine are as significant a mistake as they were in the 1950s and 1960s. We should continue to make it clear to Moscow that we are open to negotiation on a range of stated issues related to strategic stability and our own bilateral relations, but not under current coercive circumstances. Ukraine should not be held hostage to push Russian demands for either a sit-down or a show-down with the United States and NATO.

We need to reframe this crisis for what it is. It is not the result of some hostile act by the United States and NATO. Nor is it a proxy conflict, nor some ‘righteous’ effort to correct some great historic wrong . This is an act of post-colonial revisionism on the part of Russia. Yes, Ukraine and the other former republics of the Soviet Union were just as much Russian colonies—territories subject to foreign rule—as Ireland and India were for the British Empire, or as constituent states were for the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires. Ukraine has been an independent country for 30 years, like the rest of the former Soviet republics. Scores of countries from Europe, to the Middle East and Asia secured their independence from the disintegration of empires and the fracturing of other states in the 20 th century, across a long period from the end of World War I through to the end of the Cold War. The facts that many Ukrainian citizens speak Russian and parts of Ukrainian territory were incorporated into the Russian Empire in earlier centuries are irrelevant . The United States won its independence from Great Britain and remains separate despite shared linguistic and cultural heritage. Australia, Canada and New Zealand were settled by British citizens and have English as their official language. And we also do not view German-speaking Austria as part of Germany and rejected attempts during World War II to join them together.

If Putin launches a further incursion into Ukraine on this basis with no international condemnation or backlash, then this will set a global precedent for other countries engaged in territorial disputes and threatening their neighbors’ sovereignty. What happens in Ukraine and how we react will have international consequences. Other countries’ foreign calculations will be ruptured, especially those trying to balance relations among the U.S., China and Russia, such as India and Japan.

The U.S. government has taken this issue to the United Nations Security Council in the last few days to shine a light on Russian activity. We must press ahead to secure international condemnation of Russian threats and actions at the UN and in other fora. Yes, Russia has a veto on the UNSC and will likely reject this effort. They will also hold the UNSC chairmanship for the entire month of February. But even if Russia vetoes any resolution condemning Moscow’s conduct, the U.S. will have already called Russia out and made efforts to hold Putin to account.

The United States and its European allies have also discussed wide-ranging sanctions in the event of a Russian invasion. But these will not bite unless the private sector also steps up in some fashion. As long as Putin and Russian oligarchs continue to sidestep business and personal sanctions and find alternative ways to conduct their business in the West, economic and financial sanctions will not be effective. Businesses and prominent individuals in the U.S. and Europe need to consider curtailing or downgrading their activities with high-profile Russian oligarchs or Kremlin-linked companies connected to Russian malign activity, including declining to attend scheduled Russian investment conferences and meetings. If international corporations and investors signaled their unease and concern with Russian activities, this could give President Putin pause and open further space for diplomacy. Another Russian invasion and expanded war in Ukraine will be deeply destabilizing for markets and the global economy. It will be bad for business, not just for European and international security.

Article Contents

Situating mearsheimer's ukraine analysis within the realist paradigm, the problem of power differentials, the problem of determining interest and rational objectives, denied status and anger, fear of revolution.

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Offensive ideas: structural realism, classical realism and Putin's war on Ukraine

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Harald Edinger, Offensive ideas: structural realism, classical realism and Putin's war on Ukraine, International Affairs , Volume 98, Issue 6, November 2022, Pages 1873–1893, https://doi.org/10.1093/ia/iiac217

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Controversy has surrounded realist explanations of the causes of Russia's war against Ukraine, particularly John Mearsheimer's charge of western responsibility. This article seeks to clarify and contextualize his argument, situating it within the broader paradigm. Realism, and even its narrower offensive sub-school, offers a wide range of contrasting interpretations, depending on which major actors are studied and what characteristics they are endowed with. Like its classical predecessor, structural realism is premised on implicit views of human nature. In an effort to explicate some of these assumptions about the behavioural micro-foundations of states and their leaders, the article investigates main components of structural theory—including power differentials, ‘rational’ interests and states as unitary actors—and connects these concepts to base emotions like fear and anger. It argues that realists do well to differentiate between the aspirations of states and individual leaders' quest for power and status. In the same vein, reference to Russian security concerns may be emblematic of elites' perceived challenges of cultural subordination, and Putin's personal fears for the stability of his regime. Engagement with realist thought is essential, in part because of its continuing influence on policy-making (particularly in Russia) and in order to forestall improper co-option of caricaturized versions of realist arguments.

It is not often that International Relations (IR) theorists occupy a central place in public discourse on matters of foreign and security policy. John Mearsheimer does so regularly, even though he likes to point out that the United States’ foreign policy establishment ‘does not listen’ to him and other structural realists. 1 Mearsheimer's analysis of the causes of Russia's war against Ukraine has nevertheless attracted attention far beyond academic IR and Washington think tanks.

His argument—or, in some cases, a caricature of it—has found fierce critics as well as unlikely supporters across the political spectrum. Far-left opponents of American imperialism are comforted by his criticism of NATO enlargement, while followers of ‘Make America Great Again’ republicanism see appeal in the isolationist and ‘might makes right’ elements of his thesis. Many supporters of Ukrainian sovereignty have equated Mearsheimer's thesis with an elaborate way of rationalizing defeatism and making concessions more palatable—in essence, forcing an unwanted settlement on Ukrainians that includes recognizing Russian claims over Crimea, possibly even over Donetsk and Luhansk. Ukrainians, in such interpretations of Mearsheimer, are seen less as a key actor in the unfolding tragedy and more as an unfortunate casualty of great power politics. The same reflexive dismissal applies to other arguments promoted by representatives of realpolitik , such as Henry Kissinger, 2 or commentators seizing on George Kennan's 1997 caution against NATO expansion. 3

In some cases, Mearsheimer's critics might do more harm than good (including to themselves). In early March, Anne Applebaum publicly wondered whether ‘the Russians didn't actually get their narrative from Mearsheimer et al.’. American academics, she suggested, ‘provided the narrative’ to justify Russian ‘greed and imperialism’. 4 Students at the University of Chicago joined in the outrage, insinuating in an open letter that Mearsheimer might be on the Russian payroll. As Adam Tooze observes, rage aimed at the most outspoken champion of the structural realist theory of international politics, John Mearsheimer, may be more reflective of ‘liberal frustrations over the West's limited power to prevent Russia's war’, rather than the product of genuine engagement with his argument. 5 Examples of ostracizing academics (and banishing Russian media) may also be illustrative of a greater risk to democracy and free speech. 6 And they speak to a persistent aversion towards realism, as Mearsheimer himself has been busy to point out.

Apart from a policy debate on the appropriate kind of military aid to be offered to Ukraine and the future configuration of the transatlantic alliance, the controversy surrounding structural realist assessments of the war has raised some crucial questions for theory, foreign policy analysis and the IR field more broadly. What lies at the core of the brand of realism that Mearsheimer and other structural realists, like Stephen Walt, are espousing? What are its intellectual origins? What does it add to our understanding of the reasons for Russia's invasion of Ukraine? And in what ways might it cloud or obfuscate impartial analysis of the crisis? A tweet by the Russian ministry of foreign affairs on 28 February, pointing to Mearsheimer's 2014 Foreign Affairs piece for reasons why the current crisis could be blamed on the ‘US and its European allies’, 7 raises an additional question: are academics responsible for the use and possible misappropriation of their theories, or should they at least try to account for the possible ramifications of their ideas?

This article can, at best, offer partial answers to these questions. The first section attempts to clarify Mearsheimer's analysis of the Ukraine war and contrasts it to other applications of structural realism, both ‘offensive’ and ‘defensive’. The article then moves on to deconstruct some of the main components of structural realist theory—including power differentials, ‘rational’ interests and states as unitary actors. The concluding sections trace these concepts to the base emotions of anger and fear, suggesting that structural theory, too, is premised on the same assumptions about human nature that classical realists identified.

Following the Russian invasion of Ukraine on 24 February 2022, John Mearsheimer appears to have doubled down on his 2014 assessment of the political crisis in Ukraine, 8 suggesting that the current war, too, was the fault of the West; 9 or at least, that the West is principally but not exclusively responsible. As in 2014, Mearsheimer points to a ‘deep cause’ for the crisis in Ukraine and ‘precipitating causes’, including factors pertaining to Russian nationalism, Putin's revisionist world-view and Ukrainian domestic politics. The latter part, on precipitating conditions, is often overlooked in popular characterizations of his argument.

With respect to the deep cause of the crisis (or crises), Mearsheimer's analysis is provocative but coherent. By insisting on a continuing eastward expansion of NATO, the United States and its European allies had needlessly provoked Russia, even backed it into a corner. While it had been too weak throughout the 1990s to prevent western intervention in the Balkans, or to prevent the Baltic states from joining NATO in 2004, Russia drew a hard line after NATO's 2008 Bucharest summit, which promised eventual membership to both Georgia and Ukraine. The rigidity of Mearsheimer's argument remains the exception among IR theorists. Perhaps only Walt has taken a similar position. Before the Russian ‘special operation’ had even begun, he argued that what was most tragic about it is that it could have been avoided, if not for the mix of ‘hubris, wishful thinking, and liberal idealism’ displayed by the United States and its European allies. 10

A more nuanced reading of Mearsheimer suggests that the West's culpability goes deeper than reckless provocation. 11 Ultimately, the United States and its European allies, after having played a leading role in negotiating the surrender of Soviet nuclear weapons left on Ukraine's territory, failed to provide the country with adequate security guarantees. Repeated promises of NATO membership, on which few members of the western coalition intended ever to deliver, were just one link in a chain of misguided policy decisions that led Ukraine down a primrose path and triggered a Russian response. As early as 1993, he suggested that for Ukraine to keep its nuclear deterrent would be in the long-term security interests of the European continent. 12

Mearsheimer has been consistent in pointing out the West's responsibility for Ukraine's malaise since 2014. One aspect that remains somewhat unclear throughout the various iterations of his argument is what is driving US plans to turn Ukraine into a western bulwark. The self-evident explanation is that balance of power politics promote the hegemon's aggressive and expansionist tendencies. At other times, however, Mearsheimer seems to suggest that pushing for NATO expansion was a strategic blunder, committed either because the United States had neglected the imperatives of power politics, or because its foreign policy-makers had bought into their own narratives about democracy promotion. Do ‘liberal delusions’ merely serve as a justification for American empire-building, or are they indicative of an ill-conceived foreign policy agenda?

Mearsheimer's account of the Russian invasion and its precedents may be the most prominent realist interpretation, but it is not the only possible one. 13 Mearsheimer refers to himself as a structural realist. 14 Yet his realism differs markedly from the structural realism first formulated by Kenneth Waltz in his landmark Theory of international politics . 15 While both Waltz and Mearsheimer trace state behaviour to the security incentives imposed on them by an anarchic international system, the two theorists arrive at different policy recommendations. The reason, this article argues, lies mainly with theorists’ different implicit assumptions pertaining to the nature of humans and, by extension, states.

Both authors consider international politics to be an arena defined primarily by the activities of great powers, but Mearsheimer supports Waltz's assertion that structural realism also has relevance for smaller powers. 16 Mearsheimer further introduces a distinction between global and regional hegemons. 17 These nuances might explain why Mearsheimer's brand of realism has attracted more popular appeal for analysts of foreign and security policy than Waltz's.

Mearsheimer wrote the definitive textbook on offensive realism. However, it has been questioned how well his analysis of the Ukraine crisis corresponds to the version of realism laid out in The t ragedy of great power politics . In a series of tweets, his University of Chicago colleague Paul Poast argues that Mearsheimer's take on Ukraine more closely corresponds to his 2018 text, The great delusion , which was not representative of offensive realist thought. 18 Poast reminds us that Mearsheimer's offensive realism—as he himself acknowledges—is rooted in the ideas of G. Lowes Dickinson, particularly his 1916 monograph The European anarchy . 19

Trying to understand the causes of the ongoing First World War, Dickinson suggested that because they existed in a condition of anarchy, states would inherently seek ‘supremacy’ over one another. Crucially, however, according to Dickinson, anarchy is not an abstract deus ex machina —a catch-all category to explain the occurrence of international conflict—but merely describes the root condition which gives rise to the causal mechanism, based on ‘mutual fear’ and ‘mutual suspicion’ that precipitate conflict. States, in other words, strive to dominate other states not because the structure compels them to but because they are afraid and suspicious.

The difference may seem trivial but is important, as later interpretations of anarchy—among which we might count the defensive realism of Kenneth Waltz or Stephen Walt's Origins of alliances , which seem to suggest that war happens simply because there is nothing to prevent it—is that Dickinson's understanding of anarchy actively promotes aggressive behaviour and military intervention. According to Poast, Mearsheimer built on this logic and placed a focus on regional domination. With the Monroe Doctrine and the United States’ dominance over the North American continent in mind, Mearsheimer suggested that the only way for a state to survive was to dominate its region of the world.

The Soviet Union tried to implement a similar model, although the cost of maintaining its empire ultimately proved too high, hastening its collapse. Any efforts at resurrecting the Russian ‘empire’ were subdued, because Russia, for much of the two decades following the Soviet collapse, simply lacked the power to dominate its ‘near abroad’—until around 2008. During all that time, the fear of Russian reassertion, however, never subsided—especially in the countries of eastern Europe that had, in one form or another, lived under the Russian yoke for centuries. Knowing that Russia, once it had the power, would seek to regain regional dominance, countries to its east and south-east did the one thing offensive realism would dictate in such a situation: they rushed to join NATO.

According to Poast and others, Mearsheimer's assessment of the Ukraine crisis does not correspond to his own offensive realist logic, or at least fails to take into account the role of east European states as a crucial determinant of a shifting balance of power in the region. If anything, offensive realism would suggest that NATO should have expanded sooner. Had Ukraine already had article 5 guarantees then, Crimea would not have been annexed in 2014 and Ukraine would not have been attacked in early 2022. It may also be worth challenging the counterfactual scenario, which appears to underlie Mearsheimer's argument. 20 Walt put it more explicitly, even before the Russian invasion began: had NATO not been expanded, ‘Russia would probably never have seized Crimea, and Ukraine would be safer today’. 21 That, however, is merely an assertion. Had NATO not been enlarged in 2004 and passed the Bucharest declaration in 2008, who is to say that Russia would not have attacked Georgia and Ukraine?

According to the logic outlined in The tragedy of great power politics , neither the Bucharest summit declaration nor any later statements of intended NATO expansion should have made a difference to Russia's assessment of its security situation. Moscow should have already factored in America's expansionist intentions, irrespective of any benign or aggressive signals Washington was sending. Similarly, a logic based purely on balance of power considerations tells us only why Russia was able to attack Ukraine (because it was finally powerful enough), while the main thrust of Mearsheimer's explanations consists of reasons why it was willing or determined to attack (because an alleged coup in Kyiv and NATO expansion had provoked it).

As Mearsheimer himself might acknowledge, structural factors present necessary but not sufficient causes to explain the Ukraine crisis. What he refers to as ‘precipitating causes’ might play a more important role in carrying his argument than titles or straw men versions of his statements suggest. Among these are Putin's ‘authoritarian and thuggish tendencies’, 22 Russian nationalism, 23 Putin's non-recognition of Ukrainian statehood, 24 ‘fascist’ groups in Ukraine, 25 and, perhaps most importantly, Putin's aversion to an agenda of ‘democracy promotion’ and fear of regime change. 26 In a June 2022 lecture, Mearsheimer also spends much time detailing how a series of questionable moves by Volodymyr Zelensky prompted Russian aggression. 27

More broadly, he makes assumptions—some explicit, some implicit—about the characters of the main players. The United States, in this interpretation, was hell-bent on both dominating its hemisphere and denying any rising challengers equal claims to their own regions of the world. Those motives were the result of systemic imperatives, but also what Kenneth Waltz referred to as ‘socialization pressures’— which were self-perpetuating, because the American foreign and defence policy communities had institutionalized their state's imperialistic agenda.

While the introductory section of Mearsheimer's The tragedy of great power politics takes up Waltz's conception of the international system, in which the primary objective of states is to survive, 28 the remainder of the volume departs from that parsimonious logic and introduces assumptions pertaining to the capability and motives of states. Most importantly, great powers are deemed to be inherently aggressive and expansionist. Never certain about the intentions of potential rivals, which might resort to the use of force at any time, states would logically resort to maximizing their own power, i.e. their offensive capabilities, and seek to dominate their parts of the world. 29 According to Jack Snyder, both ‘defensive’ and ‘aggressive’ realists believe that states are primarily motivated by security considerations. Where they differ is with respect to how security is best attained. In the eyes of ‘aggressive’ realists, the ‘international system creates powerful incentives for aggression’. 30 As with more general attempts to distinguish between realist and liberal theory, probing an argument for optimistic or pessimistic thinking—or a focus on change versus continuity—offers a practical way of telling offensive and defensive strands of realism apart.

It has been argued—most systematically by Annette Freyberg-Inan—that all realist theories, including structural realism, are based on ‘assumptions about the motives of political actors, which represent beliefs about individual psychology’. As a result,

the relationships between the central motivating forces of fear, self-interest, and the desire for power have not been systematically specified by realist theory. Neither has the degree of influence that the operation of these motives, as compared to that of constraints imposed by the environment, is expected to have on foreign policy decisions. 31

Dominic Johnson and Brad Thayer offer yet another way to think of the behavioural micro-foundations of structural theory. They suggest that the three core assumptions about behaviour made by Mearsheimer and other offensive realists—self-help, power maximization and out-group fear—are not only evolutionarily adaptive but also empirically common in primate and human societies. States behave the way offensive realists predict, not because of an anarchical international system but because of the adaptive traits with which evolving in that system has equipped us. 32 Their evolutionary take on structural realism also offers us an explanation of why individual leaders themselves, and not just states, seek power.

Both traditions of structural realism explain foreign policy with reference to an anarchic international system, where only power maximization or alliances can ensure a state's survival. Strictly speaking, neo-realism, according to its progenitor, Kenneth Waltz, claims to be able to explain not any one state's foreign policy but only broader patterns in international politics. 33 Where foreign policy analysis is, nonetheless, guided by structural theory, it has traced changes in Russia's place and relative power in the state system and drawn strategic implications from them. There is a direct link between changes in the distribution of power and policy outcomes, irrespective of domestic politics or the motivation of individual decision-makers. In spite of this seemingly straightforward logic, conclusions drawn by structural realists, and policy recommendations based on their analysis, have been all but uniform.

A main determinant of the thrust of the argument is which ‘side’ is thought to have embraced the lessons of power politics, and which ‘side’ to have ignored them for the sake of ideological maxims. Taking stock of broader patterns in Russian–western relations, John Mearsheimer has argued that the United States provoked Russian aggression by ignoring the imperatives of power politics. In a similar vein, Bock and colleagues applied balance-of-threat theory to the 2014 Ukraine crisis and found that that western policy-makers had failed to see how their actions could be seen as a threat to Russian interests. 34 Alexander Korolev views Russia's actions in Ukraine as part of a broader ‘hard balancing response’ to US hegemony. 35 Stephen Sestanovich applies an analogous logic but turns the argument on its head, asserting that American and European leaders had no alternative with respect to major decisions they took in respect of the European order since the end of the Cold War, even if they meant alienating Russia. Equally, Russia had no choice but to respond in kind. 36

More fundamentally, power differentials—or different interpretations of shifts in the balance of power—frequently lie at the core of contradictory conclusions. Russia's power base had appreciated significantly since 1999 as oil prices rose. While the country suffered from a recession brought on by the 2009 financial crisis, its military expenditure kept climbing. By contrast, the United States, which also felt the effects of the economic crisis, had to bear the additional cost of prolonged military operations in the Middle East. Using different quantitative metrics, Simon Saradzhyan and Nabi Abdullaev argue that Russian relative power was rising against that of the US and European states between 1999 and 2016. 37

Mearsheimer's assessment is premised in part on Russia's improved power position (although he still does not consider it to be a ‘peer competitor’ of the US). In 2014, Russia had both the will and the ability to react to efforts to turn Ukraine into a western stronghold and eventually expand a hostile military alliance up to Russia's doorstep. Mearsheimer attaches little value to claims of democracy promotion and economic cooperation, apart from as exculpatory rhetoric. American and European leaders had made the mistake of ignoring the facts of realpolitik and how their actions would be perceived in Russia.

Other proponents of realpolitik have reached similar conclusions for fundamentally different reasons, suggesting that Russia acted not out of an improved power position, but out of weakness or desperation, trying to cement its status and influence while it still could, even at disproportionate cost. 38 In an early formulation of hegemonic stability theory, Robert Gilpin challenged the basic logic of states acting more aggressively the more powerful they become by pointing out that declining powers might take greater risks in trying to defend their relative position. This fundamental condition also applied to nuclear powers:

A nation still might start a war for fear that its relative strength will diminish with time, and an accident still might precipitate unprecedented devastation. It is not inconceivable that some state, … [such as] a declining superpower, might one day become so desperate that it resorts to nuclear blackmail in order to forestall its enemies. 39

Because of internal contradictions, arguments based on power differentials were ‘nearly tautological and unfalsifiable’, as Elias Götz and Neil MacFarlane observe. 40 According to the vantage-point—i.e. assuming either a ‘strong’ or a ‘weak’ Russia—the relative power of western states shifts with the Russian position. An assertive Russia could have either been emboldened by western weakness or acted as a challenger to the global hegemon.

In his take on the 2014 crisis, Joe Nye suggested that Russia was ‘a very real threat to the international order’ because it was in ‘long-term decline’, and declining states had a tendency to ‘become less risk-averse’. 41 The work of Hal Brands also suggests that Vladimir Putin has been haunted by the ‘spectre of decline’, making Russia more dangerous as a result. 42 Trying to make sense of Putin's decision to invade the whole of Ukraine, Henry Kissinger has made a similar point: apart from an effort to reconstruct the empire, you could also interpret Russia's move as ‘recognition of growing Russian relative weakness’. The West was approaching via Ukraine, and Putin's war was essentially ‘a last act to show that there were limits to what Russia could tolerate’. 43

Another point of criticism frequently levelled against structural realism is that its parsimonious nature—zeroing in on a narrow set of variables at the level of the international system—absolves the analyst from engaging with historical, cultural, institutional and personal specificities. Any theory-driven approach to foreign policy analysis—realist or liberal—runs the risk of oversimplification. Templates from western strategic thought are occasionally applied to the Russian context without accounting for idiosyncracies of the case; or simply treat Russian foreign policy as a ‘dark double’ or inverse template of US policy. In other instances, Russian strategy is improperly characterized as an enigma or an impenetrable black box; or the entire defence-industrial complex is portrayed as a monolith, serving only the grand design of one man. Yet another set of explanations seem to suggest that Russian defence and security policy are so peculiar that they do not lend themselves to rigorous analysis. These may be indicative of either intellectual laziness or the romanticized verbiage of would-be Kremlinologists.

By focusing on material power and the structure of the system, structural realist explanations accentuate the causal relevance of great powers—the United States and, by extension, NATO—while downplaying the role of other actors and the variety of their motives: the EU, a supranational organization, which played a key role both in the start of the 2014 crisis (through extending an association agreement to Ukraine, as Mearsheimer himself points out) and in setting the stage for its potential resolution (through Germany's and France's role in drafting the Minsk agreements); powerful EU member states with their own diverging economic and security interests; different factions within American politics, ranging from pro-Russian right-wingers to former Cold Warriors; and separatists in Ukraine.

Rather than objective power differentials, what appears to matter most is how a state perceives its relative power position. Putin may have been emboldened by a concatenation of circumstances that had weakened Russia's competitors. Its main rival, the United States, had been humiliated by the hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan, and President Biden had been grappling with low approval ratings since coming into office. Equally important, the political landscape in Europe had undergone substantial changes. Brexit had arguably weakened Europe's collective security arrangement, and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson had already come under criticism for alleged violations of COVID restrictions. In France, Emmanuel Macron was in the midst of a fervid re-election campaign, and the retirement of Germany's Angela Merkel had removed an element of stability and continuity in EU politics.

Its innate indeterminism is part of the reason why realism has earned the unfortunate epithet of the ‘stuff happens’ theory of IR. 44 What ‘happens’, however, is also dependent on the analyst and whether their work is directed at a particular audience. Structural realism, in this sense, tends to have an answer ready not only when things go wrong but also when a wager pays off for one of the conflicting parties. In that way, the theory may rationalize the irrational and frame risky behaviour as advantageous even when it appears to be self-defeating.

Compared to Russia's current invasion, the Ukraine crisis of 2014 was a field day for structural realism, which might explain why Mearsheimer's assessment of the situation has fewer supporters in 2022 than it did eight years earlier. While the main mechanics of the explanation are similar, the outcomes are manifestly different. The annexation of Crimea was a strategic success—swift, efficient, bloodless—creating a fait accompli that failed to generate a unified western response and was popular with domestic audiences in Russia. 45 The current invasion is a strategic disaster. Announced weeks in advance by American intelligence services (although believed by few), it has killed thousands of Russian soldiers who did not want to be there, turned the country into a pariah on the world stage, crippled its economy, polarized Russian public opinion and driven many intellectuals into exile. With the benefit of hindsight, the annexation of Crimea seems like a ‘rational’ move for Putin. It is hard to interpret his 2022 invasion in that way.

This assessment muddles different concepts of rationality. It is laid out here because, at times, structural realists are guilty of ex-post rationalization. Evidently, whether or not we judge Putin to be rational matters a great deal. If he cannot be convinced that the costs of his invasion are going to far outweigh any potential gains, he might be driven to escalate further or drag other states into the war. First, we need to specify the time-frame. Are we judging the rationality of the Russian leadership's decision to invade on the basis of the information it had available at the time, or on the basis of their capacity to adapt their actions in the light of new information? Putin's unwillingness to negotiate may seem irrational considering the long-term costs inflicted on Russia. At the same time, Russia's withdrawal from western Ukraine in the absence of the desired military successes is not the handwriting of a deluded warlord.

Second, we need to determine whether we take Putin's ends for granted, or question the rationality of his objectives themselves, as Dale Copeland argues. 46 If Putin thought he needed to prevent Ukraine's westward orientation for some predetermined reason—e.g. to avoid humiliation, to stay in power or to ensure the survival of ‘Russian’ civilizational values—and believed he would be able to take control of the country quickly (a belief which may itself be cited as evidence of irrationality), his decision might indeed have been rational. Miscalculation (about the likely success of the military operation) is not evidence of irrationality. 47 Even Putin's seemingly outlandish rationale—that Ukraine was a ‘brother nation’ but he would rather see it completely destroyed than fall to the West—may be rational in his own frame of reference, in which a western encroachment on Ukraine is tantamount to the destruction of both Ukraine and Russia. A more comprehensive concept of rationality, however, asks not whether Putin's means were suitable to meet his ends but whether his ends made sense in the first place. That is, whether a rational decision-maker, if put in Putin's shoes, would have arrived at a similar view of reality based on the information available. This understanding of rationality carries little insight, however. If we cannot presume objectives, how are we supposed to evaluate policy?

Assuming that Copeland is right in saying that most realists ‘believe his [Putin's] action is at least understandable given his declining geopolitical position vis-à-vis NATO and the relative firepower advantage everyone thought the Russian army possessed’, then they have chosen the former conception of rationality, i.e., taking Putin's ends as a given and questioning his means. Making that assessment is itself difficult, as the costs and risks associated with a certain course of action cannot be known in advance. Whether Putin was right to assume that, because he got off lightly in 2008 and 2014, the consequences of an invasion in 2022 would be similarly negligible is anyone's guess.

Thinking of Putin's actions as representing a geostrategic ‘gain’ or ‘loss’ is fraught with additional problems. ‘Why did Putin attack Ukraine?’ might be the wrong question to ask, because it frames his choices as a strategic gambit. In 2014, Putin seemed to score a ‘win’ by harnessing turmoil in Ukrainian politics and annexing Crimea. This ignores the widespread perception among Russian elites that Crimea, despite having been gifted to Ukraine in 1954 by Khrushchev, was still considered part of Russia. 48 To Putin, Crimea and Ukraine were his to lose. This has implications for his decisions, as interdisciplinary research has shown that political operatives tend to have a perceptual bias towards negative information. 49 The dread of losses is a much stronger motivating factor than the possibility of gains. 50 Put differently, a Russian president who fears a loss of the preferred status quo is more motivated to take action than a leader who merely seeks to make a dubious territorial gain. While allowing us a more differentiated representation of relative preference hierarchies, however, prospect theory does not stipulate a mechanism by which framing occurs. 51

Assessments of Putin's rationality since the beginning of his invasion of Ukraine have been accompanied by a process of introspection on the part of some observers, who might have previously viewed the Russian leader as a capable strategist. It is safe to say that Russia's lacklustre military performance has been the source of some cognitive dissonance, if not disappointment, about its commander-in-chief. Eliot Cohen put it very clearly: Putin was no longer a ‘chess master’ but simply an ageing dictator—paranoid, brutal and in mental decline. ‘Putin's behaviour shocked many people because they bought into his image as a grand master of intricate policy manoeuvres, which assumes intentionality, adroitness, and cunning.’ 52

John Mearsheimer, too, once described Putin as a ‘first-class strategist’. His actions corresponded to those of a decision-maker who has taken the imperatives of power politics into account and acts accordingly. In keeping with the parameters of structural realism, personality should not matter. Personality, however, does matter. Walt suggests that structure might tell us most of what we need to know about the reasons for Russia's war in Ukraine, but cannot tell us everything. International politics cannot be fully understood without accounting for misperception and miscalculation. ‘[Structural] realist theories are less helpful here,’ he admits,

as they tend to portray states as more or less rational actors that calculate their interests coolly and look for inviting opportunities to improve their relative position … Even when information is plentiful, perceptions and decisions can still be biased for psychological, cultural, or bureaucratic reasons. 53

Given the degree to which Vladimir Putin personally exerts control over foreign policy-making in his country, it appears that insights into his character and psychology are particularly called for. To be clear, any such assessments may be no better than what used to be known derisively as Kremlinology: ‘the art of second-guessing the inner dynamics of an opaque system’. 54 However, it is also clear that there is no alternative to engaging in some kind of ‘Putinology’. Making a determination about the rationality of his aims in Ukraine is impossible for the time being, and may well never be possible. Perhaps he himself does not know what actually drives his actions.

To circumvent the problem of dealing with subjective categories such as personality, perception or individual motives, we may turn to universal or ‘generalizable’ human phenomena such as emotions, patterns of risk perception, or other mental shortcuts or behavioural heuristics. Hans Morgenthau referred to these as ‘repetitive patterns’ of the mind. 55 Compared to the ‘actual’ motives of state leaders, which were impossible to deduce, we could draw on these phenomena, which have been comprehensively studied across psychology, linguistics and neuroscience, and which offer a way to hypothesize about the likely behavioural responses they promote.

Affect and emotion have been of particular interest to mid-twentieth-century classical realists. 56 Neuroscience has since offered more insights into their role in decision-making. As Damasio argues, information must first be affectively valenced to enable rational thought and decision-making. 57 At the same time, an affective response cannot be generated without prior cognitive appraisal. In spite of this, most of the work on emotion in IR still situates the phenomenon within a rational choice framework and assumes that decision-makers operate according to the logic provided by computational theories of mind.

Emotions, as predictive tools, 58 represent the mechanism which causes decision-makers to treat negative scenarios as more likely, because the consequences of negative outcomes would be felt more severely. Emotions and affectively charged experiences shape our expectations of the future even before we have become fully cognizant of our environment, and might be sufficiently intense to uphold these expectations even if new information runs counter to them. In that way, our affective disposition not only prepares us for the worst but also selects for the kind of information that would affirm our expectations—thereby enhancing existing biases. As a result, decision-makers over time may come to experience hypervigilance, conspiratorial thinking, paranoia or even persecutory delusions.

The remaining sections of this article will deal with some of these phenomena and their potential ramifications for the case of the Ukraine war. Specifically, it addresses the consequences of perceived status denial at the collective and individual levels, and what might lie beneath Russians’ supposed fear of NATO.

A re-engagement with classical texts suggests that political realism goes beyond detached power calculations. Morgenthau emphasizes the importance of the pursuit of prestige to bolster the state's power base (‘prestige in support of a policy of the status quo or of imperialism’). 59

Status concerns, particularly the consequences of perceived status denial, add an important facet to our understanding of Russian foreign policy. While it may not be able to provide a self-contained explanation, the concept makes many aspects of Russian behaviour more intelligible. First, status accentuates the role of Ukraine as a determinant of Russia's role as the regional hegemon. 60 This is echoed by Larson and Shevchenko: ‘Great-power status carries with it the expectation that … smaller states, especially within its region, will defer to its wishes on foreign policy.’ 61 When such expectations are frustrated, some form of ‘angry’ reaction is the result. Forsberg and colleagues suggest that ‘anger about the West and its perceived ignorance over Russia's social status during the past make Russia's resentfulness vis-à-vis the West and its attempts to create new “rules of the game” in the relationship more comprehensible’. Lastly, status highlights how the Russian leadership came to view the use of military force in Ukraine (in 2014, although a similar argument could be made about the current war) as a ‘necessity’ rather than a reckless wager. 62

Arguments based on status face several challenges. First, as Larson and colleagues suggested, because of its stickiness and fungibility, and because intangibles are at stake, status conflicts are more difficult to resolve. 63 Second, the literature on Russian status aspirations incorporates a seeming inconsistency. It is based on the assumption that Russian foreign policy is primarily directed westwards at its ‘significant other’—Europe, the US or ‘the West’ more broadly. 64 Why, in that case, would a Russian leader choose a course of action that is sure to outrage those by whom he seeks to be recognized?

The issue matters for explanations not just of Russia's invasion of Ukraine but also its annexation of Crimea and support for separatists in eastern Ukraine, its earlier invasion of Georgia, and its backing of a universally despised despot in Syria. More fundamentally, it relates to the question whether the use of force reinforces or runs counter to a state's status claims. Nicholas Onuf suggested that the relationship was inverse: ‘Military capability, as a crucial measure of standing, should not be treated as an asset, to be expended in the pursuit of some other interest like security, because its depletion will adversely affect one's standing.’ 65 Military power, in other words, can enhance status only when it is not used.

One way to disentangle the status paradox can be found in Morgenthau's writings on prestige. He distinguishes between prestige to bolster the state's power base (‘prestige in support of a policy of the status quo or of imperialism’) and the pursuit of prestige for its own sake (or for ‘the personal glory of the ruler’) while being ‘neglectful of the national interests at stake and of the power available to support them’. 66 Mearsheimer's work on lying in international politics makes a similar distinction between selfish and strategic lying. 67 In his work on narcissism and nationalism, Morgenthau further elaborates on the interconnections between a leader's personality and foreign policy. Nationalism, he suggests, may be thought of as an expression of individuals’ search for vicarious fulfilment of their emotional needs through the state. 68

The status paradox can also be broken down to how theories of status account for perceptual differences regarding the impact of certain behaviours on status. Jonathan Renshon provides a conceptualization of status that integrates material factors and perceptions. 69 One way in which states actively seek status, as the title of Renshon's book suggests, is through fighting. Taking a rationalist approach, he explains how conflictual behaviour can be aimed at enhancing status, and suggests another way of looking at Moscow's Crimean calculation as far from irrational. Forsberg and Pursiainen offer a similar interpretation: ‘There is a fine line between assertiveness and anger in Russia, and hence displays of anger often reflect superiority and determination, convey an image of effectiveness and can also increase a politician's domestic popularity.’ 70

Renshon's argument draws on other (mainly social–psychological) perspectives on status as well as general IR theory. With respect to the latter, Renshon adopts one of the core propositions from the structural realism of Robert Gilpin. The ‘most prestigious members of the international system’, Gilpin suggests, ‘are those states that have most recently used military force or economic power successfully’. 71 In the absence of economic output befitting a great power, resorting to force to assert itself in the region might seem like an expedient option for contemporary Russia.

It is also important to recognize that anger, as a consequence of status denial, comes in different forms and accordingly promotes tendencies towards different types of action. There are indications that the character of anger, as displayed by Putin over the perceived denial of Russian status, has changed over time. It may now be best described as contempt—for the western model, for the Ukrainian government and, more broadly, for those who oppose him. What distinguishes contempt from other forms of anger—such as defiance or resentment—is one's self-perceived position in the social hierarchy. While resentment, for example, is targeted at those thought to be higher up in the hierarchy, contempt is felt for those perceived to be lower than one's own in-group. Psychologist Ian Robertson has long observed markers of contempt in Putin's behaviour:

Contempt must be considered as one of the most important elements of [Putin's] psychology. It is not only contempt for what he almost regards as weak—and, possibly in his macho world view, effeminate—Western leaders. More important is his contempt for their institutions. 72

In terms of likely behaviours resulting from an affective experience, contempt is more problematic than other variants of anger: first, because the probable action tendencies promoted by contempt are distinctly more aggressive; and second, because contempt negates empathy—the ability to take the other side's view. 73 That ability, however, is a cornerstone of successful diplomacy. In the absence of empathy, establishing trust and finding compromise solutions becomes virtually impossible. As Robertson writes in his psychological profile of Vladimir Putin, ‘contempt negates the other perspective and the object of contempt is just that—an object. Objects do not have a point of view.’ 74 Action tendencies do not accurately predict future behaviour. However, much as ‘societal debates do not determine foreign policy moves, … the general tenor of policy debates has the effect of making certain moves easier to legitimate than others’. 75

The literature on status concerns holds important lessons in setting the agenda for future dealings with Russia. The question continues to be ‘whether Russia can be induced to seek prestige by exercising more responsibility for global stability. Continued indifference to Russia's status aspirations will encourage Russian elites’ sense of injury and humiliation, possibly leading to further conflict.’ 76 An affective perspective may prove insightful. It is worth considering, for example, the hierarchy of affective concerns, which delineates the range of policy choices a Russian leader will consider. As Forsberg argues, Russia may be quite willing to ‘understand its relative status when military or economic issues are at stake’. However, when its interpretations of ‘international norms and questions of justice’ are disputed, Russia is likely to act defensively. 77

A literal reading of structural realist theory might suggest that threats are objective phenomena, emanating from attempts to alter the balance of power. Failures to interpret threat (or what might appear threatening to the other side) correctly are down to systemic ‘fuzziness’ or ineffective communication. Theoretical innovation has introduced a range of amendments and exceptions to this simple logic. The self-declared disregard for how political actors come to make their choices becomes problematic when affective, cognitive or social–psychological claims are elevated to constitute central components of the theory. Stephen Walt's balance of threat theory, for example, introduces ‘hostile intentions’ to explain outcomes in international politics that escape strictly balance of power-based analyses. 78 By attempting to deconstruct the transmission mechanism between power and state behaviour, however, additions to structural theory might not just modify but rupture the simple logic outlined by Kenneth Waltz.

There is, however, another conclusion to be drawn from the way fear features in offensive realist explanations. Mearsheimer's perspective highlights an obvious, yet crucially important, point made previously by Robert Jervis: while states (and political commentators in these states) might view their own actions as benign, others might perceive them entirely differently. 79 Both Jervis's spiral model and Mearsheimer's offensive realism are rooted in the anarchic nature of the international system and the fear it instils in states. Both frameworks therefore offer ways to study that system and the outcome of particular configurations of it—by way of psychological mechanisms such as fear—and how that might lead to a regional conflict, an arms race or great power war.

What matters most in Jervis's model is not the objective nature of the threat that is being issued, but how it is perceived. That makes it necessary to engage with the process of how individual leaders come to develop certain fears. Mearsheimer's reference to precipitating causes, too, suggests that what really makes the difference in international politics is how certain moves are interpreted by leaders on either side. After all, substantial shifts in the balance of power occur very rarely, while the defining condition of the system itself, anarchy, is a constant.

Freyberg-Inan has directly related the emotion of fear to realist theory. The pursuit of power, when viewed through the prism of fear, is not an end in itself but a means to an end, which is survival. Thinking of assertive foreign policy action thus need not be ‘part of a proactive strategy motivated by a lust for power and domination’, she notes. It is just as plausible to view it ‘as part of a reactive strategy, as responses to a more basic motive, which is the emotion of fear’. 80

Asked whether Putin's fear of democracy would not provide a better or equally suitable explanation for the Ukraine crisis, Mearsheimer acknowledged, in a lecture in June 2022, that indeed, he must have ‘a mortal fear of colour revolutions’. 81 Without accounting for changes in Russians’ threat perceptions, the central part of his explanation, ‘fear of NATO expansion’, rings somewhat hollow. Mearsheimer and other realists make an important point by highlighting how certain actions taken by the West may have seemed threatening to Russia. For one thing, NATO did not keep to its mutually agreed boundaries, 82 launched an extraterritorial war in 1999 despite Russian protest, and placed ballistic missile defence systems in eastern Europe.

Nonetheless, it must be called into question whether Russians—even the president and his closest advisers—truly believe that a land invasion by the North Atlantic alliance is on the cards. Initially, Russians viewed NATO as a relic of the Cold War. Potential enlargement was not deemed threatening, and some analysts blamed the initiative on organizational inertia. 83 Even after the most recent phase of enlargement, NATO forces on the Russian border hardly posed a credible deterrent. 84

The problem with NATO now appears to be not what it is but what it has come to represent. As former prime minister Yevgeny Primakov once suggested, enlargement was not a ‘military problem’ but a ‘psychological one’. 85 ‘NATO's growth in post-Cold War Europe served as a symbol of Western accomplishment and Russian defeat.’ 86 More recently, the North Atlantic alliance has been associated with an even more far-reaching assault on Russian values and cultural sovereignty. The threat from the West, as Mark Galeotti argues, might not be one ‘borne by tanks and missiles but [by] cultural influences, economic pressure, and political penetration’. This, in the eyes of the Russian leadership, amounts to a ‘civilizational threat aimed at making Russia a homogenized, neutered, subaltern state’. 87 The way the ‘special operation’ has come to be framed in official statements and state television—as part of a civilizational struggle between Europe and Russia—may itself testify to Putin's fear of competing models for societal development.

Putin's fear may also be rooted in deeper, socio-cultural foundations. Through a process of socialization, the historical precedent of multiple land invasions has implanted a sense of insecurity in Russians. In part, this has been, and continues to be, reinforced by the size of the country and the associated challenge of protecting its vast borders. In education, culture, folklore, religion and state customs, narratives of Russia as a ‘besieged fortress’ have created an image of the encircled state as an ‘embodied condition’, as stipulated by Gerard Toal's concept of affective geopolitics. 88 This suggests that territorial security matters to Russians in ways for which western analytical paradigms fail to account.

Research at the intersection of IR, psychology and neuroscience has identified possible consequences of fear. Among the most damaging biases elicited by a ‘fearful’ experience is a tendency to identify future threats—including ones that do not exist—and impaired risk assessment faculties. As a result, decision-makers might behave in a way that, even if intended as defensive, is seen as threatening by others. Once fear grips the political apparatus, it can become self-sustaining through narratives, doctrines, practices and institutions emphasizing enmity or aggression. In that way, the colour revolutions, various western interventions and the events of late 2013—leading to the banishment of Yanukovych—may have imprinted a lasting fear on Putin and his associates.

Did Russia invade Ukraine because structural factors acted on it, or because of its leader's aggressive tendencies? In all likelihood, a mix of both sets of variables was at play. A diligent reading of Mearsheimer and other structural realists suggests that structure does not explain everything. In fact, depending on the case, precipitating factors may do most of the explanatory work. The vigorous debate generated by Mearsheimer's analysis of the Ukraine crisis has highlighted some frequent misunderstandings accompanying both academic and public discourse on applications of realist theory:

Misinterpretation. Mearsheimer sets out a coherent case of western responsibility for the Ukraine crisis. That is laudable in and of itself, if only because few others in academic IR have been willing to make that argument and stick to it. However, a look beyond the headlines suggests that while US designs to turn Ukraine into a western bulwark on Russia's doorstep constituted the root cause of the crisis, a host of other factors—including economics, demographics and Putin's mystical notion of Russian–Ukrainian unity—also feature in his explanation.

Misapplication. Conventional wisdom holds that IR theory offers simple, uniform lessons for interpreting a crisis such as the war in Ukraine and deriving policy responses. Liberal theory is thought to view Russian foreign policy as an outgrowth of Putin's increasingly authoritarian domestic rule. Accordingly, it promotes a tough and unwavering stance to counter the Russian leader's revisionist agenda. Social constructivists argue that the present state of Russian–western relations and the representation of both sides’ interests are all in our heads, and that increased attention to identity formation, the diffusion of norms and the creation of common values might salvage what is left of the relationship. Structural realists, in a simplistic reading, seem to add little value but to deflect blame from Russia by blaming the West.

There is much variation within realism, however. Even structural theory presents a range of contrasting explanations—especially when applied to east European states’ quest for NATO membership. It has been called into question whether Mearsheimer's analysis of the Ukraine crisis even fits the theoretical postulates outlined in The tragedy of great power politics . An alternative interpretation seems equally valid: Russia was expected to try to reassert itself as the regional hegemon. Its neighbours saw it clearly, tried to warn the rest of Europe and to prepare as best they could. By the time Russia became powerful enough to take aggressive action, most of the countries at risk had managed to join NATO—leaving Georgia and Ukraine to bear the brunt of Russia's quest for regional hegemony. The West, accordingly, should not be faulted for having caused the tragedy of Ukraine by expanding NATO. If anything, the way to prevent it would have been to expand NATO further, and do so more quickly.

Misperception. Could a better understanding of Russia's security concerns, and of how Russian officials perceived (or misperceived) actions taken by the United States and European states, have averted the annexation of Crimea or the 2022 invasion? Perhaps. In any event, it is the analyst's responsibility to keep in mind the multitude of causal forces that generate a particular foreign policy. As Eliot Cohen notes, ‘some observers missed the power of personality in a different way, thanks to a belief in structural causes and forces—what passes for “realism,” which is indeed often highly unrealistic’. 89 As Jervis's writings on the security dilemma taught us, what we should be concerned with is not actual changes in the balance of power but how leaders might perceive them.

It is also helpful to think of Russian foreign policy not through the lens of realism but as an outgrowth of realist thinking. Since 2014, its foreign policy orientation has been shown to have solidified around a realpolitik understanding that emphasizes the necessity of regional dominance and borrows from geopolitical theory as well as Eurasianist narratives promoted by the likes of Alexander Dugin. 90 This orientation is more uncompromising than in the past, and views liberal values and democratic development not only as a deception based on underlying western strategic objectives but, in and of themselves, as a threat of cultural homogenization. Putin, it seems, feels called to carve out a counter-concept that protects Russian sovereignty and cultural self-determination—a vision that many among the country's ruling elite still appear to share.

Misgivings . Mearsheimer likes to point out that there is a strong bias against realist ideas in public discourse and scholarship. This was felt most strongly inside universities, ‘where dislike of realism is widespread and often intense’. 91 More recently, Stephen Walt argued that their unpopular truths on the Ukraine crisis have been renewed cause for hatred of realists. 92 The phenomenon is worthy of further investigation, because investigating the reasons for aversion towards realism—which arguably still exists—offers a promising avenue for disciplinary introspection.

It is important to remember that the chief purpose of theory, including structural realism, is not to condone acts of aggression but to make us understand—ideally, even anticipate and mitigate—the consequences of power politics, which may, at times, be tragic indeed. Morgenthau reflected that his realism was aware of the moral significance of political action, just as it recognized that good morals and the ‘requirements of successful political action’ would frequently clash with one another. Realism, therefore, should not make it appear ‘as though the stark facts of politics were morally more satisfying than they actually are, and the moral law less exacting than it actually is’. 93

One might argue that now is not the time to place substantive blame on actors who had very little to do with the suffering that is currently being inflicted on civilians. One might also note that a perspective like Mearsheimer's systematically downplays the agency of Ukrainians, who have, through their bravery and perseverance, animated and united much of the world in condemnation of the Russian attack. Yet one cannot help but show some appreciation for the minimalism and internal consistency exhibited by Mearsheimer's explanation of the crisis. Even those opposed to Mearsheimer's conclusions should be appreciative of his talent for putting the finger on weaknesses and inconsistencies in the foreign and security policies of the United States and its European allies, and in so doing ultimately help to strengthen the western position.

When studying the possible causes of Russian foreign policy, it is worth keeping in mind that there is usually not one simple truth, or monocausal explanation, to be discovered. Russia's intervention in Ukraine in 2014, much like Putin's current war, was not reducible to geopolitics, domestic power struggles, ideology or personal whims, but derived from a combination of these and other factors. Russian philosophers of science have have described the phenomenon of kon'yunktura . 94 The term denotes, among other things, ways in which researchers adapt to the current political regime or intellectual environment—at worst inhibiting them from even considering interpretations of events not supported by the prevailing climate of thought. Those dismissing analytical eclecticism as a ‘laundry list’ explanation should at least be cautious of the fallacies of pre-eminent narratives.

e.g. in the Question & Answer portion of a 2015 lecture at the University of Chicago: ‘Why is Ukraine the West's fault?’, 25 Sept. 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4 (at 47:00).

Timothy Bella, ‘Kissinger says Ukraine should cede territory to Russia to end war’, Washington Post , 24 May 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/05/24/henry-kissinger-ukraine-russia-territory-davos/ . (Unless otherwise noted at point of citation, all URLs cited in this article were accessible on 4 Aug. 2022.)

George F. Kennan, ‘A fateful error’, New York Times , 5 Feb. 1997, https://www.nytimes.com/1997/02/05/opinion/a-fateful-error.html .

Anne Applebaum, Twitter post, 1 March 2022, https://twitter.com/anneapplebaum/status/1498623804200865792 .

Adam Tooze, ‘John Mearsheimer and the dark origins of realism’, New Statesman , 8 March 2022, https://www.newstatesman.com/ideas/2022/03/john-mearsheimer-and-the-dark-origins-of-realism .

Mark MacCarthy, Why a push to exclude Russian state media would be problematic for free speech and democracy , Brookings, 14 April 2022, https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2022/04/14/why-a-push-to-exclude-russian-state-media-would-be-problematic-for-free-speech-and-democracy/ .

Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Twitter post, 28 Feb. 2022, https://twitter.com/mfa_russia/status/1498336076229976076?s=20&t=a50X-F03elOvF88Ooz7skg .

John J. Mearsheimer, ‘Why the Ukraine crisis is the West's fault: the liberal delusions that provoked Putin’, Foreign Affairs 93: 5, 2014, pp. 77–127. His thoughts on the causes of the crisis are perhaps even more eloquently formulated in the 2015 lecture mentioned in footnote 1.

Isaac Chotiner, ‘Why John Mearsheimer blames the US for the crisis in Ukraine’, New Yorker , 1 March 2022, https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/why-john-mearsheimer-blames-the-us-for-the-crisis-in-ukraine .

Stephen M. Walt, ‘Liberal illusions caused the Ukraine crisis’, Foreign Policy , 19 Jan. 2022, https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/01/19/ukraine-russia-nato-crisis-liberal-illusions/ .

The author would like to thank Michael C. Williams for pointing this out during a discussion of a draft version of this paper at the 2022 ISA annual convention.

John J. Mearsheimer, ‘The case for a Ukrainian nuclear deterrent’, Foreign Affairs 72: 3, 1993, pp. 50–66.

Emma Ashford has been an authority on realist applications to foreign policy. She reflects on different realist interpretations of the Russia–Ukraine war in an appearance on the Ezra Klein podcast: ‘A realist take on how the Russia–Ukraine war could end’, New York Times , 18 March 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/18/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-emma-ashford.html .

e.g. in this short video appearance, in which Mearsheimer introduces his understanding of structural realism and its policy implications, and describes himself as a ‘structural realist, like Ken Waltz’: John J. Mearsheimer, ‘Structural realism’, The Open University introduction to International Relations , 3 Oct. 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXllDh6rD18 .

Kenneth N. Waltz, Theory of international politics (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1979).

John J. Mearsheimer, The tragedy of great power politics (New York: Norton, 2001), p. 403, n. 5.

Mearsheimer, The tragedy of great power politics , p. 40.

Paul Poast, Twitter post, 4 April 2022, https://twitter.com/profpaulpoast/status/1511075001897693188 ; John J. Mearsheimer, The great delusion: liberal dreams and international realities (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018).

G. Lowes Dickinson, The European anarchy (New York: Macmillan, 1916).

As argued by Jan Smoleński and Jan Dutkiewicz, ‘The American pundits who can't resist “Westsplaining” Ukraine’, The New Republic , 4 March 2022, https://newrepublic.com/article/ 165603/carlson-russia-ukraine-imperialism-nato.

Walt, ‘Liberal illusions caused the Ukraine crisis’.

Mearsheimer, ‘Why is Ukraine the West's fault?’.

Chotiner, ‘Why John Mearsheimer blames the US for the crisis in Ukraine’.

John J. Mearsheimer, ‘Wrecking Ukraine: the cost of winning the war’, interview, 19 June 2022, https://youtu.be/q4TV4_taLzE .

John J. Mearsheimer, ‘The causes and consequences of the Ukraine war’, lecture at European University Institute, Florence, 16 June 2022, https://youtu.be/qciVozNtCDM .

Mearsheimer, The tragedy of great power politics , pp. 29–32.

Mearsheimer, The tragedy of great power politics , pp. 30–31.

Jack L. Snyder, Myths of empire: domestic politics and international ambition (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), p. 12, n. 36. The full note reads: ‘Walt, Origins of alliances , is the quintessential example of what I call the defensive Realist position. Mearsheimer, ‘Back to the future’, comes close to the aggressive Realist position … Waltz, Theory of international politics , has a foot in both camps.’

Annette Freyberg-Inan, What moves man: the realist theory of international relations and its judgment of human nature (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2004), p. 4.

Dominic Johnson and Bradley Thayer, ‘The evolution of offensive realism’, Politics and the Life Sciences 35: 1, 2016, pp. 1–26.

Kenneth N. Waltz, ‘International politics is not foreign policy’, Security Studies 6: 1, 1996, pp. 54–7.

Andreas M. Bock, Ingo Henneberg and Friedrich Plank, ‘“If you compress the spring, it will snap back hard”: the Ukrainian crisis and the balance of threat theory’, International Journal 70: 1, 2015, pp. 101–109.

Alexander Korolev, ‘Theories of non-balancing and Russia's foreign policy’, Journal of Strategic Studies 41: 6, 2018, p. 889.

Stephen Sestanovich, ‘Could it have been otherwise?’, The American Interest 10: 5, 2015, https://www.the-american-interest.com/2015/04/14/could-it-have-been-otherwise/ .

Simon Saradzhyan and Nabi Abdullaev, ‘Measuring national power: is Putin's Russia in decline?’, Europe–Asia Studies 73: 2, 2021, pp. 291–317.

See e.g. Andrej Krickovic, ‘The symbiotic China–Russia partnership: cautious riser and desperate challenger’, Chinese Journal of International Politics 10: 3, 2017, pp. 299–329.

Robert Gilpin, ‘The theory of hegemonic war’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 18: 4, 1988, p. 613.

Elias Götz and S. Neil MacFarlane, ‘Russia's role in world politics: power, ideas, and domestic influences’, International Politics 56: 6, 2019, p. 718. As Neil MacFarlane pointed out to me in conversation, the contradictory nature of assessments of Russia's power position tends to resolve itself if one considers the possibility of Russia operating from a strong position regionally and from a weak position in the international system as a whole.

Joseph S. Nye, Jr, ‘The challenge of Russia's decline’, Project Syndicate , 14 April 2015, https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/russia-decline-challenge-by-joseph-s--nye-2015-04 .

Hal Brands, ‘Danger: falling powers’, The American Interest , 24 Oct. 2018, https://www.the-american-interest.com/2018/10/24/danger-falling-powers/ .

Fareed Zakaria, interview with Henry Kissinger, 10 July 2022, https://transcripts.cnn.com/show/fzgps/date/2022-07-10/segment/01 .

A slightly adapted quote from a discussion at an annual convention of the ISA, as recounted by Stefano Guzzini, Realism as a critique of militarism and national primacy , Danish Institute for International Studies, 8 Dec. 2017, https://www.diis.dk/en/research/realism-as-a-critique-of-militarism-and-national-primacy .

On the other hand, it can be argued that by annexing Crimea, Russia forfeited any chance of ever exerting influence over Ukrainian domestic politics again.

Dale Copeland, Is Vladimir Putin a rational actor? , Miller Center, 10 March 2022, https://millercenter.org/vladimir-putin-rational-actor .

We also need to be careful not to ‘conflate high-stakes gambles—and the unsuccessful policy they have spawned in this case—with irrationality’. I would like to thank two of my anonymous reviewers for emphasizing this.

Ted Hopf, ‘“Crimea is ours”: a discursive history’, International Relations 30: 2, 2016, pp. 227–55.

Dominic D. P. Johnson and Dominic Tierney, ‘Bad world: the negativity bias in international politics’, International Security 43: 3, 2018, pp. 96–140.

This is the central premise of applications of prospect theory in IR. See Jeffrey W. Taliaferro, ‘Prospect theory and foreign policy analysis’, in Robert A. Denemark, ed., The international studies encyclopedia (Hoboken, NJ: Blackwell, 2010).

Tuomas Forsberg and Christer Pursiainen, ‘The psychological dimension of Russian foreign policy: Putin and the annexation of Crimea’, Global Society 31: 2, 2017, p. 229.

Eliot A. Cohen, ‘Putin's no chess master’, The Atlantic , 26 Jan. 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/01/russia-ukraine-putin-nato/621370/ ; Eliot A. Cohen, ‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man’, 1 March 2022, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/03/putin-ukraine-invasion-military-strategy/622956/ .

Stephen M. Walt, ‘An International Relations theory guide to the war in Ukraine’, Foreign Policy , 8 March 2022, https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/03/08/an-international-relations-theory-guide-to-ukraines-war/ .

Forsberg and Pursiainen, ‘The psychological dimension of Russian foreign policy’, p. 223.

Hans J. Morgenthau, Politics among nations: the struggle for power and peace , sixth ed. (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1985), pp. 7–8.

See Andrew A. G. Ross, ‘Realism, emotion, and dynamic allegiances in global politics’, International Theory 5: 2, 2013, pp. 273–99.

Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ error: emotion, reason, and the human brain (New York: Avon Books, 1994), pp. 34–51.

On the underlying logic, see Lisa Feldman Barrett, How emotions are made: the secret life of the brain (London: Pan, 2018).

Morgenthau, Politics among nations , p. 94.

Tuomas Forsberg, Regina Heller and Reinhard Wolf, ‘Status and emotions in Russian foreign policy’, Communist and Post-Communist Studies 47: 3–4, 2014, p. 267.

Deborah Welch Larson and Alexei Shevchenko, Quest for status: Chinese and Russian foreign policy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2019), p. 233.

Forsberg et al., ‘Status and emotions in Russian foreign policy’, p. 267.

T. V. Paul, Deborah Welch Larson and William C. Wohlforth, Status in world politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), p. 19.

Iver B. Neumann, Russia and the idea of Europe: a study in identity and international relations , 2nd edn (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016).

Nicholas G. Onuf, World of our making: rules and rule in social theory and international relations (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1989), p. 281.

John J. Mearsheimer, Why leaders lie: the truth about lying in international politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2013).

Hans Morgenthau and Person Ethel, ‘The roots of narcissism’, Partisan Review 45: 3, 1978, pp. 337–47.

Jonathan Renshon, Fighting for status: hierarchy and conflict in world politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).

Forsberg and Pursiainen, ‘The psychological dimension of Russian foreign policy’, p. 240. See also Mark N. Katz, ‘Assertive, but alone’, The World Today 63: 11, 2007, pp. 29–30.

Robert Gilpin, War and change in world politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 32.

Ian H. Robertson, ‘The danger that lurks inside Vladimir Putin's brain’, Psychology Today , 17 March 2014, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-winner-effect/201403/the-danger-lurks-inside-vladimir-putins-brain .

Nancy Eisenberg, Altruistic emotion, cognition, and behavior (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1986); Nancy Eisenberg, ‘Empathy and sympathy’, in Michael Lewis and Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones, eds, Handbook of emotions , second ed. (New York: Guilford Press, 2000), pp. 677–91.

Ian H. Robertson, ‘Inside the mind of Vladimir Putin’, Telegraph , 24 Feb. 2015, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ukraine/11431850/Inside-the-mind-of-Vladimir-Putin.html .

Iver B. Neumann, ‘Russia's Europe, 1991–2016: inferiority to superiority’, International Affairs 92: 6, 2016, p. 1394.

Deborah Welch Larson and Alexei Shevchenko, ‘Status seekers: Chinese and Russian responses to US primacy’, International Security 34: 4, 2010, pp. 70 and 93.

Tuomas Forsberg, ‘Status conflicts between Russia and the West’, Communist and Post-Communist Studies 47: 3–4, 2014, p. 323.

For example, why, in the 1940s, states with a significantly greater aggregated power base allied against the perceived threat of Nazi Germany. See Stephen M. Walt, The origins of alliances (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987).

Robert Jervis, Perception and misperception in international politics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), ch. 3.

Freyberg-Inan, What moves man , p. 3.

Mearsheimer, ‘The causes and consequences of the Ukraine war’.

The controversy surrounding alleged promises that NATO would not expand is complex and perhaps best summarized in M. E. Sarotte, Not one inch: America, Russia, and the making of post-Cold War stalemate (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2021).

Nikolai Patrushev, ‘Vyzov prinyat’, Rossiyskaya Gazeta , 22 Dec. 2005, in Sarotte, Not one inch , p. 102.

Jorge Benitez, NATO summit special series: Estonia and Latvia , Atlantic Council, 3 July 2016, https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/natosource/nato-summit-special-series-estonia-and-latvia .

Yevgeny Primakov, quoted in Leonid M. Mlechin, Ministry inostrannykh del: romantiki i tsiniki (Moscow: Tsentr poligraf, 2001), p. 620. Similarly, broader security concerns, such as the historically founded ‘encirclement thesis’, may also be framed in psychological terms.

Kari Roberts, ‘Directions: the United States’, in Andrei P. Tsygankov, ed., Routledge handbook of Russian foreign policy (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018), p. 240.

Mark Galeotti, ‘NATO is a symbol that Russia is always an outsider’, Intellinews , 11 July 2016, https://www.intellinews.com/stolypin-nato-is-a-symbol-that-russia-is-always-an-outsider-101714/ .

Gerard Toal, Near abroad: Putin, the West, and the contest over Ukraine and the Caucasus (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 46–7.

Cohen, ‘Cometh the hour, cometh the man’.

Aleksandr Dugin, Osnovy geopolitiki: geopoliticheskoe budushchee rossii (Moscow: Arktogeya, 1999).

John J. Mearsheimer, ‘Realism, the real world, and anarchy’, in Michael Brecher and Frank P. Harvey, eds, Realism and institutionalism in international politics (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2002), p. 29.

Stephen M. Walt, ‘Why do people hate realism so much?’, Foreign Policy , 13 June 2022, https://foreignpolicy.com/2022/06/13/why-do-people-hate-realism-so-much/ .

Morgenthau, Politics among nations , p. 12.

See e.g. Ivan A. Gobozov, ‘Istoriya i moral’, Filosofiya i Obshchestvo 1: 57, 2010, pp. 10–11, https://www.socionauki.ru/journal/files/fio/2010_1/istoriya_i_moral.pdf .

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The russia-ukraine war: the second cold war.

Madeline Levine , Scripps College Follow

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2023 Madeline P Levine

Under the guise of a “special military operation,” Russian forces invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The immediacy with which the United States rallied support for Ukraine within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (“NATO”), the United Nations (“UN”), and the European Union (“EU”) raised speculation: Is Russia-Ukraine the beginning of a second Cold War? Did the Cold War actually end in the 1990s? Is Ukraine the first proxy war in a series of more to come between the United States and Russia? This thesis will address the first question by identifying and analyzing the characteristics that distinguished the Cold War from earlier conflicts, how the Russia-Ukraine War compares, and the implications of the Russia-Ukraine war on the global order.

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Levine, Madeline, "The Russia-Ukraine War: The Second Cold War?" (2023). Scripps Senior Theses . 2208. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/2208

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The War in Ukraine Is a Colonial War

By Timothy Snyder

When Vladimir Putin denies the reality of the Ukrainian state, he is speaking the familiar language of empire. For five hundred years, European conquerors called the societies that they encountered “tribes,” treating them as incapable of governing themselves. As we see in the ruins of Ukrainian cities, and in the Russian practice of mass killing, rape, and deportation, the claim that a nation does not exist is the rhetorical preparation for destroying it.

Empire’s story divides subjects from objects. As the philosopher Frantz Fanon argued, colonizers see themselves as actors with purpose, and the colonized as instruments to realize the imperial vision. Putin took a pronounced colonial turn when returning to the Presidency a decade ago. In 2012, he described Russia as a “state-civilization,” which by its nature absorbed smaller cultures such as Ukraine’s. The next year, he claimed that Russians and Ukrainians were joined in “spiritual unity.” In a long essay on “historical unity,” published last July, he argued that Ukraine and Russia were a single country, bound by a shared origin. His vision is of a broken world that must be restored through violence. Russia becomes itself only by annihilating Ukraine.

As the objects of this rhetoric, and of the war of destruction that it sanctions, Ukrainians grasp all of this. Ukraine does have a history, of course, and Ukrainians do constitute a nation. But empire enforces objectification on the periphery and amnesia at the center. Thus modern Russian imperialism includes memory laws that forbid serious discussion of the Soviet past. It is illegal for Russians to apply the word “war” to the invasion of Ukraine. It is also illegal to say that Stalin began the Second World War as Hitler’s ally, and used much the same justification to attack Poland as Putin is using to attack Ukraine. When the invasion began, in February, Russian publishers were ordered to purge mentions of Ukraine from textbooks.

Faced with the Kremlin’s official mixture of fantasy and taboo, the temptation is to prove the opposite: that it is Ukraine rather than Russia that is eternal, that it is Ukrainians, not Russians, who are always right, and so on. Yet Ukrainian history gives us something more interesting than a mere counter-narrative to empire. We can find Ukrainian national feeling at a very early date. In contemporary Ukraine, though, the nation is not so much anti-colonial, a rejection of a particular imperial power, as post-colonial, the creation of something new.

Southern Ukraine, where Russian troops are now besieging cities and bombing hospitals , was well known to the ancients. In the founding myth of Athens, the goddess Athena gives the city the gift of the olive tree. In fact, the city could grow olives only because it imported grain from ports on the Black Sea coast. The Greeks knew the coast, but not the hinterland, where they imagined mythical creatures guarding fields of gold and ambrosia. Here already was a colonial view of Ukraine: a land of fantasy, where those who take have the right to dream.

The city of Kyiv did not exist in ancient times, but it is very old—about half a millennium older than Moscow. It was probably founded in the sixth or seventh century, north of any territory seen by Greeks or controlled by Romans. Islam was advancing, and Christianity was becoming European. The Western Roman Empire had fallen, leaving a form of Christianity subordinate to a pope. The Eastern (Byzantine) Empire remained, directing what we now call the Orthodox Church. As Rome and Constantinople competed for converts, peoples east of Kyiv converted to Islam. Kyivans spoke a Slavic language that had no writing system, and practiced a paganism without idols or temples.

Putin’s vision of “unity” relates to a baptism that took place in this setting. In the ninth century, a group of Vikings known as the Rus arrived in Kyiv. Seeking a southbound route for their slave trade, they found the Dnipro River, which runs through the city. Their chieftains then fought over a patchwork of territories in what is now Ukraine, Belarus, and the northeast of Russia—with Kyiv always as the prize. In the late tenth century, a Viking named Valdemar took the city, with the help of a Scandinavian army. He initially governed as a pagan. But, around 987, when the Byzantines faced an internal revolt, he sensed an opportunity. He came to the emperor’s aid, and received his sister’s hand in marriage. In the process, Valdemar converted to Christianity.

Putin claims that this messy sequence of events reveals the will of God to bind Russia and Ukraine forever. The will of God is easy to misunderstand; in any case, modern nations did not exist at the time, and the words “Russia” and “Ukraine” had no meaning. Valdemar was typical of the pagan Eastern European rulers of his day, considering multiple monotheistic options before choosing the one that made the most strategic sense. The word “Rus” no longer meant Viking slavers but a Christian polity. Its ruling family now intermarried with others, and the local people were treated as subjects to be taxed rather than as bodies to be sold.

Yet no rule defined who would take power after a Kyivan ruler’s death. Valdemar took a Byzantine princess as his wife, but he had a half a dozen others, not to mention a harem of hundreds of women. When he died in 1015, he had imprisoned one of his sons, Sviatopolk, and was making war upon another, Yaroslav. Sviatopolk was freed after his father’s death, and killed three of his brothers, but he was defeated on the battlefield by Yaroslav. Other sons entered the fray, and Yaroslav didn’t rule alone until 1036. The succession had taken twenty-one years. At least ten other sons of Valdemar had died in the meantime.

These events do not reveal a timeless empire, as Putin claims. But they do suggest the importance of a succession principle, a theme very important in Ukrainian-Russian relations today. The Ukrainian transliteration of “Valdemar” is “Volodymyr,” the name of Ukraine’s President. In Ukraine, power is transferred through democratic elections: when Volodymyr Zelensky won the 2019 Presidential election , the sitting President accepted defeat. The Russian transliteration of the same name is “Vladimir.” Russia is brittle: it has no succession principle , and it’s unclear what will happen when Vladimir Putin dies or is forced from power. The pressure of mortality confirms the imperial thinking. An aging tyrant, obsessed by his legacy, seizes upon a lofty illusion that seems to confer immortality: the “unity” of Russia and Ukraine.

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In the Icelandic sagas, Yaroslav is remembered as the Lame; in Eastern Europe, he is the Wise, the giver of laws. Yet he did not solve the problem of succession. Following his reign, the lands around Kyiv fragmented again and again. In 1240, the city fell to the Mongols; later, most of old Rus was claimed by the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, then the largest state in Europe. Lithuania borrowed from Kyiv a grammar of politics, as well as a good deal of law. For a couple of centuries, its grand dukes also ruled Poland. But, in 1569, after the Lithuanian dynasty died out, a Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth was formalized, and the territories of Ukraine were placed under Polish jurisdiction.

This was a crucial change. After 1569, Kyiv was no longer a source of law but an object of it—the archetypal colonial situation. It was colonization that set off Ukraine from the former territories of Rus, and its manner generated qualities still visible today: suspicion of the central state, organization in crisis, and the notion of freedom as self-expression, despite a powerful neighbor.

During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, all the forces of Europe’s globalization seemed to bear down on Ukraine. Polish colonization resembled and in some measure enabled the European colonization of the wider world. Polish nobles introduced land-management practices—along with land managers, most of whom were Jewish—that allowed the establishment of profitable plantations. Local Ukrainian warlords rushed to imitate the system, and adopted elements of Polish culture, including Western Christianity and the Polish language. In an age of discovery, enserfed peasants labored for a world market.

Ukraine’s colonization coincided with the Renaissance, and with a spectacular flowering of Polish culture. Like other Renaissance thinkers, Polish scholars in Ukraine resuscitated ancient knowledge, and sometimes overturned it. It was a Pole, Copernicus, who undid the legacy of Ptolemy’s “ Almagest ” and confirmed that the Earth orbits the sun. It was another Pole, Maciej of Miechów, who corrected Ptolemy’s “ Geography ,” clearing Ukrainian maps of gold and ambrosia. As in ancient times, however, the tilling of the black earth enabled tremendous wealth, raising the question of why those who labored and those who profited experienced such different fates.

The Renaissance considered questions of identity through language. Across Europe, there was a debate as to whether Latin, now revived, was sufficient for the culture, or whether vernacular spoken languages should be elevated for the task. In the early fourteenth century, Dante answered this question in favor of Italian; English, French, Spanish, and Polish writers created other literary languages by codifying local vernaculars. In Ukraine, literary Polish emerged victorious over the Ukrainian vernacular, becoming the language of the commercial and intellectual élite. In a way, this was typical: Polish was a modern language, like English or Italian. But it was not the local language in Ukraine. Ukraine’s answer to the language question was deeply colonial, whereas in the rest of Europe it could be seen as broadly democratic.

The Reformation brought a similar result: local élites converted to Protestantism and then to Roman Catholicism, alienating them further from an Orthodox population. The convergence of colonization, the Renaissance, and the Reformation was specific to Ukraine. By the sixteen-forties, the few large landholders generally spoke Polish and were Catholic, and those who worked for them spoke Ukrainian and were Orthodox. Globalization had generated differences and inequalities that pushed the people to rebellion.

Ukrainians on the battlefield today rely on no fantasy of the past to counter Putin’s. If there is a precursor that matters to them, it is the Cossacks, a group of free people who lived on the far reaches of the Ukrainian steppe, making their fortress on an island in the middle of the Dnipro. Having escaped the Polish system of landowners and peasants, they could choose to be “registered Cossacks,” paid for their service in the Polish Army. Still, they were not citizens, and more of them wished to be registered than the Polish-Lithuanian parliament would allow.

The rebellion began in 1648, when an influential Cossack, Bohdan Khmelnytsky, saw his lands seized and his son attacked by a Polish noble. Finding himself beyond the protection of the law, Khmelnytsky turned his fellow-Cossacks toward revolt against the Polish-speaking, Roman Catholic magnates who dominated Ukraine. The accumulated cultural, religious, and economic grievances of the people quickly transformed the revolt into something very much like an anti-colonial uprising, with violence directed not only against the private armies of the magnates but against Poles and Jews generally. The magnates carried out reprisals against peasants and Cossacks, impaling them on stakes. The Polish-Lithuanian cavalry fought what had been their own Cossack infantry. Each side knew the other very well.

In 1651, the Cossacks, realizing that they needed help, turned to an Eastern power, Muscovy, about which they knew little. When Kyivan Rus had collapsed, most of its lands had been absorbed by Lithuania, but some of its northeastern territories remained under the dominion of a Mongol successor state. There, in a new city called Moscow, leaders known as tsars had begun an extraordinary period of territorial expansion, extending their realm into northern Asia. In 1648, the year that the Cossack uprising began, a Muscovite explorer reached the Pacific Ocean.

The war in Ukraine allowed Muscovy to turn its attention to Europe. In 1654, the Cossacks signed an agreement with representatives of the tsar. The Muscovite armies invaded Poland-Lithuania from the east; soon after, Sweden invaded from the north, setting off the crisis that Polish history remembers as “the Deluge.” Peace was eventually made between Poland-Lithuania and Muscovy, in 1667, and Ukraine was divided more or less down the middle, along the Dnipro. After a thousand years of existence, Kyiv was politically connected to Moscow for the first time.

The Cossacks were something like an early national movement. The problem was that their struggle against one colonial power enabled another. In 1721, Muscovy was renamed the Russian Empire, in reference to old Rus. Poland-Lithuania never really recovered from the Deluge, and was partitioned out of existence between 1772 and 1795. Russia thereby claimed the rest of Ukraine—everything but a western district known as Galicia, which went to the Habsburgs. Around the same time, in 1775, the Cossacks lost their status. They did not gain the political rights they had wanted, nor did the peasants who supported them gain control of the black earth. Polish landowners remained in Ukraine, even as state power became Russian.

Whereas Putin’s story of Ukraine is about destiny, the Ukrainian recollection of the Cossacks is about unfulfilled aspirations. The country’s national anthem, written in 1862, speaks of a young people upon whom fate has yet to smile, but who will one day prove worthy of the “Cossack nation.”

The nineteenth century was the age of national revivals. When the Ukrainian movement began in imperial Russian Kharkov—today Kharkiv , and largely in ruins—the focus was on the Cossack legacy. The next move was to locate history in the people, as an account of continuous culture. At first, such efforts did not seem threatening to imperial rule. But, after the Russian defeat in the Crimean War, in 1856, and the insult of the Polish uprising of 1863 and 1864, Ukrainian culture was declared not to exist. It was often deemed an invention of Polish élites—an idea that Putin endorsed in his essay on “historical unity.” Leading Ukrainian thinkers emigrated to Galicia, where they could speak freely.

The First World War brought the principle of self-determination, which promised a release from imperial rule. In practice, it was often used to rescue old empires, or to build new ones. A Ukrainian National Republic was established in 1917, as the Russian Empire collapsed into revolution. In 1918, in return for a promise of foodstuffs, the country was recognized by Austria and Germany . Woodrow Wilson championed self-determination, but his victorious entente ignored Ukraine, recognizing Polish claims instead. Vladimir Lenin invoked the principle as well, though he meant only that the exploitation of national questions could advance class revolution. Ukraine soon found itself at the center of the Russian civil war, in which the Red Army, led by the Bolsheviks, and the White Army, fighting for the defunct empire, both denied Ukraine’s right to sovereignty. In this dreadful conflict, which followed four years of war, millions of people died, among them tens of thousands of Jews.

Though the Red Army ultimately prevailed, Bolshevik leaders knew that the Ukrainian question had to be addressed. Putin claims that the Bolsheviks created Ukraine, but the truth is close to the opposite. The Bolsheviks destroyed the Ukrainian National Republic. Aware that Ukrainian identity was real and widespread, they designed their new state to account for it. It was largely thanks to Ukraine that the Soviet Union took the form it did, as a federation of units with national names.

The failure of self-determination in Ukraine was hardly unique. Almost all of the new states created after the First World War were destroyed, within about two decades, by Nazi Germany, the Soviet Union, or both. In the political imaginations of both regimes, Ukraine was the territory whose possession would allow them to break the postwar order, and to transform the world in their own image. As in the sixteenth century, it was as if all the forces of world history were concentrated on a single country.

Stalin spoke of an internal colonization, in which peasants would be exploited so that the Soviet economy could imitate—and then overtake—capitalism. His policy of collective agriculture, in which land was seized from farmers, was particularly unwelcome in Ukraine, where the revolution had finally got rid of the (still largely Polish) landholders. Yet the black earth of Ukraine was central to Stalin’s plans, and he moved to subdue it. In 1932 and 1933, he enforced a series of policies that led to around four million people dying of hunger or related disease. Soviet propaganda blamed the Ukrainians, claiming that they were killing themselves to discredit Soviet rule—a tactic echoed, today, by Putin. Europeans who tried to organize famine relief were dismissed as Nazis.

The actual Nazis saw Stalin’s famine as a sign that Ukrainian agriculture could be exploited for another imperial project: their own. Hitler wanted Soviet power overthrown, Soviet cities depopulated, and the whole western part of the country colonized. His vision of Ukrainians was intensely colonial : he imagined that he could deport and starve them by the millions, and exploit the labor of whoever remained. It was Hitler’s desire for Ukrainian land that brought millions of Jews under German control. In this sense, colonial logic about Ukraine was a necessary condition for the Holocaust .

Between 1933 and 1945, Soviet and Nazi colonialism made Ukraine the most dangerous place in the world . More civilians were killed in Ukraine, in acts of atrocity, than anywhere else. That reckoning doesn’t even include soldiers: more Ukrainians died fighting the Germans, in the Second World War, than French, American, and British troops combined.

The major conflict of the war in Europe was the German-Soviet struggle for Ukraine, which took place between 1941 and 1945. But, when the war began, in 1939, the Soviet Union and Germany were de-facto allies, and jointly invaded Poland. At the time, what is now western Ukraine was southeastern Poland. A small group of Ukrainian nationalists there joined the Germans, understanding that they would seek to destroy the U.S.S.R. When it became clear that the Germans would fail, the nationalists left their service, ethnically cleansed Poles in 1943 and 1944, and then resisted the Soviets. In Putin’s texts, they figure as timeless villains, responsible for Ukrainian difference generally. The irony, of course, is that they emerged thanks to Stalin’s much grander collaboration with Hitler. They were crushed by Soviet power, in a brutal counter-insurgency, and today Ukraine’s far right polls at one to two per cent. Meanwhile, the Poles, whose ancestors were the chief victims of Ukrainian nationalism, have admitted nearly three million Ukrainian refugees , reminding us that there are other ways to handle history than stories of eternal victimhood.

After the war, western Ukraine was added to Soviet Ukraine, and the republic was placed under suspicion precisely because it had been under German occupation. New restrictions on Ukrainian culture were justified by a manufactured allocation of guilt. This circular logic—we punish you, therefore you must be guilty—informs Kremlin propaganda today. Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, has argued that Russia had to invade Ukraine because Ukraine might have started a war. Putin, who has said the same, is clearly drawing on Stalin’s rhetoric. We are to understand that the Soviet victory in the Second World War left Russians forever pure and Ukrainians eternally guilty. At the funerals of Russian soldiers, grieving parents are told that their sons were fighting Nazis.

The history of the colonization of Ukraine, like the history of troubling and divisive subjects in general, can help us get free of myths. The past delivers to Putin several strands of colonial rhetoric, which he has combined and intensified. It also leaves us vulnerable to a language of exploitation: whenever we speak of “the Ukraine” instead of “Ukraine,” or pronounce the capital city in the Russian style , or act as if Americans can tell Ukrainians when and how to make peace, we are continuing imperial rhetoric by partaking in it.

Ukrainian national rhetoric is less coherent than Putin’s imperialism, and, therefore, more credible, and more human. Independence arrived in 1991, when the U.S.S.R was dissolved. Since then, the country’s politics have been marked by corruption and inequality, but also by a democratic spirit that has grown in tandem with national self-awareness. In 2004, an attempt to rig an election was defeated by a mass movement. In 2014, millions of Ukrainians protested a President who retreated from the E.U. The protesters were massacred, the President fled, and Russia invaded Ukraine for the first time. Again and again, Ukrainians have elected Presidents who seek reconciliation with Russia; again and again, this has failed. Zelensky is an extreme case: he ran on a platform of peace, only to be greeted with an invasion.

Ukraine is a post-colonial country, one that does not define itself against exploitation so much as accept, and sometimes even celebrate, the complications of emerging from it. Its people are bilingual, and its soldiers speak the language of the invader as well as their own. The war is fought in a decentralized way , dependent on the solidarity of local communities. These communities are diverse, but together they defend the notion of Ukraine as a political nation. There is something heartening in this. The model of the nation as a mini-empire, replicating inequalities on a smaller scale, and aiming for a homogeneity that is confused with identity, has worn itself out. If we are going to have democratic states in the twenty-first century, they will have to accept some of the complexity that is taken for granted in Ukraine.

The contrast between an aging empire and a new kind of nation is captured by Zelensky, whose simple presence makes Kremlin ideology seem senseless. Born in 1978, he is a child of the U.S.S.R., and speaks Russian with his family. A Jew, he reminds us that democracy can be multicultural. He does not so much answer Russian imperialism as exist alongside it, as though hailing from some wiser dimension. He does not need to mirror Putin; he just needs to show up. Every day, he affirms his nation by what he says and what he does.

Ukrainians assert their nation’s existence through simple acts of solidarity. They are not resisting Russia because of some absence or some difference, because they are not Russians or opposed to Russians. What is to be resisted is elemental: the threat of national extinction represented by Russian colonialism, a war of destruction expressly designed to resolve “the Ukrainian question.” Ukrainians know that there is not a question to be answered, only a life to be lived and, if need be, to be risked. They resist because they know who they are. In one of his very first videos after the invasion, when Russian propaganda claimed that he had fled Kyiv, Zelensky pointed the camera at himself and said, “The President is here.” That is it. Ukraine is here.

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Harriman Institute Statement

The Harriman Institute strongly condemns the Russian invasion of Ukraine. This attack on the Ukrainian people and on Ukrainian sovereignty violates the principles of international law and has inflicted deplorable suffering and instability across the region. In these tragic times, we will continue to inform and educate, particularly in an atmosphere of authoritarianism and amplified disinformation, as articulated by Columbia University’s President Lee Bollinger. We stand with all who are so terribly affected by this crisis. Please check back as we continue to announce initiatives and projects to support people and scholars of Ukraine. Suggestions for where to donate can be found at Razom for Ukraine .

Fellowships

In recognition of the need for urgent support of Ukraine’s intellectual community in the face of Russia’s war of aggression, the Harriman Institute, along with partner organizations, has created two new fellowship programs.

Non-residential Fellowships

Recognizing the need for ongoing support of Ukraine’s intellectual community in the face of Russia’s war of aggression, the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM Vienna), the Ukrainian Research Institute at Harvard University (HURI), and the Harriman Institute at Columbia University are partnering to offer non-residential fellowships for Ukrainian scholars in the humanities and social sciences.

We have jointly awarded 35 fellowships , which provide a one-time stipend of 5000 EUR to support recipients’ intellectual activities and carry a 5-month affiliation with the IWM from February-June 2023.

Residencies in Paris

The Harriman Institute, the Institute for Ideas and Imagination , and Global Centers | Paris , with a gift from the Ukrainian Studies Fund , sponsored four 12-month residencies for Ukrainian writers, journalists, and creative artists for the 2022-23 academic year. Meet the fellows >

Residency in Vienna

The Harriman Institute and the Austrian Society for Literature, in partnership with the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, Austria, are sponsoring a six-month residency for a displaced Ukrainian writer from January 1, 2024 to June 30, 2024. Olesya Yaremchuk , a freelance journalist and writer based in Lviv, has been named the Spring 2024 Harriman Resident

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Ukraine and Russian: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War by Paul J. D’Anieri (Cambridge University Press, 2019)

The Famine of 1932-1933 in Ukraine: An Anatomy of the Holodomor by Stanislaw Kulchytsky (Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies Press, 2018)

My Final Territory: Selected Essays by Yuri Andrukhovych (University of Toronto Press, 2018)

Red Famine: Stalin’s War on Ukraine by Anna Applebaum (Penguin Random House, 2018)

Ukraine and Europe , edited by Giovanna Brogi Bercof, Marko Pavlyshyn, Serhii Plokhy (University of Toronto Press, 2017)

The White Chalk of Days: The Contemporary Ukrainian Literature Series Anthology compiled and edited by Mark Andryczyk (Academic Studies Press, 2017)

Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine edited by Oksana Maksymchuk & Max Rosochinsky (Academic Studies Press, 2017)

Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder (Basic Books, 2010)

Also check out the Ukraine Event Archive on the Harriman YouTube Station.

Questions about Ukrainian Studies at Columbia University?

For more information about courses or the Ukrainian Studies Program, please contact Mark Andryczyk or send us an email. With questions about the Ukrainian Film Club reach out to Yuri Shevchuk .

Privacy Overview

Security Council

Marking Two Years Since Russian Federation’s Full-Scale Invasion, Secretary-General Stresses Charter, International Law Guides to Peace in Ukraine

Ukraine’s sovereignty, independence, territorial integrity must be upheld, he adds.

The ultimate path to peace in Ukraine lies in upholding the Charter of the United Nations and international law as guides to a world free of war, the Organization’s top official told the Security Council today, declaring that the Russian Federation’s full-scale invasion of its neighbour — started two years ago — directly violated both.

“It is high time for peace — a just peace, based on the United Nations Charter, international law and General Assembly resolutions,” said Secretary-General António Guterres, adding: “Scorning the Charter has been the problem. Honouring it is the solution.”

Detailing the war’s consequences — more than 10,500 lives lost, nearly 4 million people displaced, infrastructure destroyed and 14.5 million people in need of humanitarian aid — he urged a future-oriented solution. “All borders are the result of history,” he observed, adding that, while agreeing on the past is difficult, agreeing on the future is both “less difficult” and “more important”.

He stressed that it is therefore time to recommit to the Charter, underscoring the need to uphold the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders.

Today’s meeting featured the participation of 24 countries, including non-Council members — many of whom were represented by ministers dispatched from their capitals. In the ensuing debate, speakers took stock of the conflict two years on, discussing both its direct consequences for people living in the two warring States as well as its spillover effects on those living beyond their borders.

Dmytro Kuleba, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, said that, as he spoke, another air raid was taking place in Ukraine, with a residential building in Odesa hit less than an hour ago. Two years since its invasion, Moscow’s name is synonymous with aggression, war and barbarism. Ukraine wants peace more than any other nation. However, he declared: “We will not allow Russia to kill us freely on the road to peace, nor will we ever accept any offer to surrender or to concede our lands and freedoms under the guise of peace.”

The Russian Federation’s representative reiterated that the special military operation began two years ago, after 14,000 people in Donbas became the victims of the neo-Nazi regime installed in Kyiv in 2014. He depicted the ongoing conflict as a proxy war, where the United States, European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) are using Ukrainian hands against his country. Ukraine is losing, but “perhaps, the most important loser is the European Union itself”, he said, noting that the countries in the bloc risk becoming theatres for military confrontation.

On that, China’s representative said that the situation that Europe faces today is closely linked with repeated NATO expansion since the end of the cold war, encouraging the bloc “to do some soul-searching” and refrain from instigating confrontation. He also emphasized that the spillover effects of the crisis must be proactively managed, noting that “it is wrong to instrumentalize or weaponize the world’s economy”.

“This is not only a European issue, nor just an issue of the so-called ‘Russia and the West’ — any attempt to unilaterally change the status quo by force must not be tolerated anywhere in the world,” said Tsuji Kiyoto, State Minister for Foreign Affairs of Japan. While respecting countries’ peace-seeking efforts, he stressed that it is inappropriate “to equate the aggressor and the victim, and to demand diplomatic efforts on both sides as if both sides are at fault”.

Similarly, the representative of the United States emphasized that only one party is the aggressor in this war, and only one party can end it. If the Russian Federation puts down its weapons today, the war would end. “If Ukraine puts down its weapons, Ukraine would be over,” she emphasized, adding: “The list of Russian violations and abuses could unfortunately go on and on.” On that, Tanja Fajon, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign and European Affairs of Slovenia, declared: “We will spare no effort in pursuing full accountability for the painfully long list of atrocities and other international crimes.”

Meanwhile, David Cameron, Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs of the United Kingdom, observed that Moscow’s military is being drained of modern equipment, stating: “You’re having to rely on poor quality shells from Pyongyang. And you’ve sent a generation of Russian boys into the meat-grinder.” Adding that, on 22 February, his country imposed further sanctions against the Russian Federation’s military-industrial complex and those enablers seeking to keep it running, he declared that “Britain will not falter” in its support to Ukraine.

Ecuador’s delegate, for his part, warned that worsening geopolitical tensions raise the possibility of escalation into a global conflict — “the most serious threat to our existence”. While demanding that the Russian Federation immediately, completely and unconditionally withdraw its military forces, he urged the parties involved to consider, in good faith, all possibilities leading to a peaceful resolution.

MAINTENANCE OF PEACE AND SECURITY OF UKRAINE

Point of Order

The representative of the Russian Federation , raising a point of order, said that the list of speakers is crowded with non-members of the Council calling themselves the Foreign Ministers of European Union countries. However, in that bloc — with rare exceptions — there are no independent national foreign policies. Accordingly, there are no Foreign Ministers — just officials who pretend to be such. The bloc’s entire foreign policy is in the hands of Brussels, which in turn is in the hands of Washington, D.C., he said, asking: “What added value will the carbon copies of the speeches of these officials have, except for the opportunity to show off on the TV screens of their countries, expressing support for their clients in Kyiv?”

ANTÓNIO GUTERRES, Secretary-General of the United Nations , emphasized the importance of the Organization’s Charter and international law as the “guide to creating a world free from the scourge of war”. The Russian Federation’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine directly violated both. Two years on, and a decade since Moscow’s attempted illegal annexation of the Autonomous Republic of Crimea and the city of Sevastopol, the war in Ukraine remains an open wound at the heart of Europe. “It is high time for peace — a just peace, based on the United Nations Charter, international law and General Assembly resolutions,” he declared, underscoring the Charter’s unequivocal principle of sovereign equality between all Member States, as well as its prohibition against the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any State. Rather, mechanisms to settle disputes peacefully are set out in Chapter VI of the instrument.

“All borders are the result of history,” he said, noting that many people living on one side have strong ethnic, cultural or other links to communities on the other. Colonial Powers divided the continent of Africa with the stroke of a pen — as they did in other parts of the world — but post-independence leaders understood that trying to change borders would open a Pandora’s box of bloodshed and feed even greater grievances. People agreeing on the past is extremely difficult, he observed, adding: “What is more important — and less difficult — is to help them agree on the future.” To do that, international law and Charter principles, including respect for territorial integrity and the political independence of States, are fundamental. “That is why the Russian invasion of Ukraine is such a dangerous precedent,” he asserted.

Noting that over 10,500 people have been killed — though the true figure is likely much higher — he reported that the UN has documented widespread and disturbing brutality: the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on Ukraine found that civilians and prisoners have been tortured, and more than 200 cases of sexual violence have been perpetrated, mostly by Russian Federation forces. All perpetrators must be held to account. Further, over 14.5 million people inside Ukraine need humanitarian assistance, he deplored, urging donors to fully fund the $3.1 billion appeal to put the humanitarian response plan for Ukraine into practice. He also pointed out that the war is hurting the people of the Russian Federation, as thousands of young Russians are dying on the front lines and civilians hit by strikes in Russian Federation cities are also suffering.

The war is deepening geopolitical divides, fanning regional instability, shrinking the space available to address other urgent global issues and undermining the shared norms and values that make all safer, he warned, adding that the conflict also accelerated a global cost-of-living crisis that has hit developing countries the hardest. Further, the prospect of nuclear accident sends chills down spines around the world. Both warring parties must take all possible measures to prevent this, and in addition, the freedom and safety of navigation in the Black Sea must be ensured so that badly needed food and fertilizers can reach the global market. Two years on, enough is enough. “Scorning the Charter has been the problem; honouring it is the solution,” he said, underscoring the need to uphold the sovereignty, independence, unity and territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders. Also stressing that “it is time to recommit to the Charter and renew respect for international law,” he concluded: “That is the path to peace and security — in Ukraine and around the world.”

TANJA FAJON, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Foreign and European Affairs of Slovenia , condemned the Russian Federation’s aggression as a blatant violation of the UN Charter and the Helsinki Final Act on the inviolability of borders in Europe, also expressing full support for Ukraine’s independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity. “While Ukraine has been attacked with artillery shells, drones and ballistic missiles, the rest of the world has been attacked with narratives,” she said. However, there is just one narrative: that of civilian suffering, detained civilians, sexual violence, deported children and destroyed infrastructure. “Regardless of our vicinity, we did not see this war coming,” she said, nevertheless declaring: “We will spare no effort in pursuing full accountability for the painfully long list of atrocities and other international crimes.” Applauding Ukraine for its bravery and resolve, she reiterated Slovenia’s commitment to standing with that country until it reaches a just, lasting and sustainable peace.

STÉPHANE SÉJOURNÉ, Minister for Europe and Foreign Affairs of France , stated that the Russian Federation has been waging a full-scale war of aggression against Ukraine and its people for two years, in addition to seeking its territory for 10 years. Moscow alone chose war — and therefore bears sole responsibility — and is also violating Council resolutions by using drones purchased from Iran and missiles supplied by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, as well as by illegally occupying the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant while mining its surroundings. The war is also inhumane, he emphasized, condemning massacres of civilians, the use of rape and torture as weapons of war and the deportation of Ukrainian children. These crimes must not go unpunished, and this sentiment underpins the two arrest warrants issued in 2023 by the International Criminal Court. While Ukraine defends its very survival, it offers peace through Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s peace formula. He underscored that, for its part, the Council must support the victory of the Charter of the United Nations.

DAVID CAMERON, Secretary of State for Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Affairs of the United Kingdom , recalled scenes of brave Ukrainians kissing their loved ones goodbye as they left to defend their homeland, as well as Russian mothers bidding farewell to their sons. This is occurring because Russian Federation President Vladimir V. Putin believes he can take territories, re-draw borders and exercise force to build his empire. He asked those present: “Will we let this stand?” Ukraine’s answer is evident in the courage that its President showed in 2022, as well as in the perseverance demonstrated by its people. And, while they continue to push the Russian Federation back, Moscow’s military is being drained of modern equipment, he observed, stating: “You’re having to rely on poor quality shells from Pyongyang. And you’ve sent a generation of Russian boys into the meat-grinder. What do you tell their mothers they died for?” He added that, on 22 February, his country imposed further sanctions against the Russian Federation’s military-industrial complex and those enablers seeking to keep it running. “Britain will not falter,” he declared.

IGNAZIO CASSIS, Federal Councillor and Head of the Federal Department for Foreign Affairs of Switzerland , echoed the Secretary-General’s vision that “peace is our raison d'être”. Unfortunately, over the past two years, the Security Council has not fully assumed its responsibility to guarantee peace and security for Ukraine and its people. “Today, the loss of life runs into the thousands, the displaced number in the millions and the families torn apart are countless,” he said, noting that the repercussions — both in Europe and worldwide — are now evident in terms of food, energy and security. “What are we doing to ensure that the UN Charter is respected, the Geneva Conventions are no longer violated, humanity in war is assured and peace is restored?”, he asked, stressing that, despite all the frustration caused by this war “we must not give in to pessimism” but analyse and act on the facts to find any path to peace. To this end, in January 2023, Switzerland expressed its commitment to organizing a high-level conference on peace in Ukraine, he said, underscoring the need “to find the common denominator for our nations” and “to find a way of eventually bringing Ukraine and Russia on board”.

CHO TAE-YUL, Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Korea , noted that, two years after Russian Federation tanks crossed into Ukraine, there are no signs of Moscow’s unlawful actions abating as a generation of young Ukrainians and Russians perish. He recalled that his country’s President visited Ukraine in July 2023 to launch the “Ukraine Peace and Solidarity Initiative”, which provided $140 million in humanitarian assistance, including demining equipment and emergency medical vehicles. Starting this year, Seoul will provide an aid package of $2.3 billion over several years. Expressing concern over emerging military cooperation between Moscow and Pyongyang, he pointed out that, if the latter receives advanced military technology or oil shipments exceeding limits under Council resolutions in exchange, this would increase its ability to threaten security on the Korean Peninsula and beyond. He strongly urged both parties to comply with relevant Council resolutions, all of which were unanimously adopted.

The representative of the United States recalled that her country and Albania called a late-night emergency meeting two years ago to discuss the imminent risk of the Russian Federation’s invasion of Ukraine. Secretary of State Antony Blinken came to the Council to lay out, in exacting detail, concerns that Moscow would soon invade its sovereign neighbour. Then, on 24 February 2022, while Council members called for diplomacy and de-escalation, President Putin openly chose war. “The list of Russian violations and abuses could unfortunately go on and on,” she deplored, stating that this senseless war has worsened global food and energy crises, caused incalculable environmental damage and undermined the global non-proliferation regime. If the Russian Federation puts down its weapons today, the war would end. “If Ukraine puts down its weapons, Ukraine would be over,” she emphasized. Only one party is the aggressor in this war, and only one party can end it — that was true two years ago, and it is true today. The United States has imposed new sanctions against the aggressor, she added.

TSUJI KIYOTO, State Minister for Foreign Affairs of Japan , condemning the Russian Federation’s aggression against Ukraine, stressed: “This is not only a European issue, nor just an issue of the so-called ‘Russia and the West’ — any attempt to unilaterally change the status quo by force must not be tolerated anywhere in the world.” Moscow’s attacks on critical infrastructure are not just destroying the Ukrainian people’s present, but also threaten their future. Additionally, he emphasized that Moscow’s procurement and use of ballistic missiles from the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is “absolutely unacceptable”. Any transfer of weapons or related equipment between the two countries clearly violates relevant Council resolutions, he underscored, also voicing concern over any possible transfer of nuclear or ballistic-missile technology to Pyongyang. While respecting countries’ peace-seeking efforts, he stated that it is inappropriate “to equate the aggressor and the victim, and to demand diplomatic efforts on both sides as if both sides are at fault”.

The representative of Malta noted that the number of civilian casualties in Ukraine has significantly increased recently, with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) verifying that 158 civilians were killed and 483 injured solely in January. Since the beginning of the war, there have been over 30,000 civilian casualties and more than 14 million people in need of humanitarian assistance in Ukraine, while over 19,000 children have been deported or forcibly displaced. Further citing the impact on women and girls, she reaffirmed strong support for all ongoing accountability processes. Turning to Moscow’s termination of its participation in the Black Sea Grain Initiative — and its blocking of Ukrainian grain exports and theft of grain from occupied Ukrainian territories — she spotlighted the European Union’s “Solidarity Lanes Action Plan”, which has allowed Ukraine to export 67 million tons of grain, oilseeds and related products since May 2022.

The representative of the Russian Federation said that another year has passed, Ukraine has completely failed in its loudly broadcast counter-offensive, and yet the West continues to pump weaponry into the Kyiv regime and encourage it to throw more Ukrainian lives into the flames of conflict. Spotlighting the “pseudo peace formula” being discussed in Copenhagen and Davos, he claimed that the West uses various tricks to drag countries from the Global South and East into these events. Asking what 2024 has brought for Ukraine, he said that the answer is hundreds of thousands of senseless victims, a looming collapse of its economy and a deep crisis of statehood and governance. Young people are “being nabbed on the streets, like animals, and are thrown into meat-grinder assaults to show the Western sponsors that their investments are bringing returns,” he said.

However, the truth is that the West is not interested in helping Ukraine, he stated, quoting the editor-in-chief of The Economist : “Giving Ukraine money is the cheapest way for the United States to strengthen its security. It is the Ukrainians who are fighting, it is they who are being killed. The US and Europe are supplying them with weapons. And in doing so, we are pushing back against Putin.” In this proxy war, where the United States, the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) are using Ukrainian hands against the Russian Federation, it is Ukraine that loses. But, “perhaps, the most important loser is the European Union itself”, he added, as the countries in the bloc risk becoming theatres for military confrontation. Adding that 14,000 people in Donbas became victims of the neo-Nazi regime installed in 2014 in Kyiv, he insisted that this was the main reason for the start of the special military operation.

The representative of China underscored that efforts towards ending the compounded crisis in Ukraine should remain focused on a political settlement. The most pressing priorities are to cease hostilities, launch peace talks and restore peace, he observed, adding that any action conducive to peace is worth the collective effort. Nevertheless, “regional security cannot be guaranteed by strengthening or expanding a military bloc”, and he said that the legitimate security concerns of all countries must be taken seriously and addressed properly. The situation that Europe faces today is closely linked to repeated expansion by NATO since the end of the cold war, and he therefore encouraged NATO “to do some soul-searching” and refrain from instigating confrontation. He also emphasized that the spillover effects of the crisis must be proactively managed, noting that “it is wrong to instrumentalize or weaponize the world’s economy”.

The representative of Ecuador noted that the Russian Federation’s aggression against Ukraine has devastated its people, disrupted economies and compromised global energy and food security. Further noting that it “has unleashed an unfathomable humanitarian crisis”, with psychological impact and trauma that will negatively affect several generations, he also reiterated the need to comply with the seven pillars of nuclear security. He spotlighted the adoption of six General Assembly resolutions that have reaffirmed the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine, calling for a cessation of hostilities and demanding that the Russian Federation immediately, completely and unconditionally withdraw all its military forces. Urging the parties involved to consider, in good faith, all possibilities leading to a peaceful resolution, he stressed that worsening geopolitical tensions raise the possibility of escalation into a global conflict — “the most serious threat to our existence”.

The representative of Mozambique observed that, two years since the conflict between the Russian Federation and Ukraine intensified into a large-scale war in February 2022, the far-reaching impact of the ensuing global distress and instability cannot be overstated. Despite the substantial resources the Council has allocated to address this issue, the hard reality is that the conflict appears to be veering towards uncertainty as the severity of its consequences escalate ominously, he said, calling for a “significant course adjustment” with diplomacy assuming a central role. Therefore, he strongly encouraged a negotiated settlement of the conflict in line with the Charter of the United Nations. To this end, he urged the parties to cease hostilities without delay, to resume direct negotiations without preconditions and to engage in dialogue in good faith.

The representative of Algeria cautioned that reaching a sustainable peace in Ukraine “remains unattainable”. Voicing concern over the deteriorating humanitarian situation and the impact of ongoing hostilities on civilians, he said that the loss of civilian lives and the suffering of refugees and internally displaced persons are “profoundly worrying”. As well, critical infrastructure — such as energy facilities and agri-food systems — were heavily impacted, with global consequences, notably in developing countries. Spotlighting the Council’s failure to pave the way for a consensual way out of this crisis, he underscored the need to deploy the efforts necessary to de-escalate tensions between the concerned parties. To achieve tangible progress, political will and more coordinated action by the international community are vital. “Equally important is the consistency of this Council in upholding its responsibility in the protection of civilians,” he said.

The representative of Sierra Leone cited the high cost of the conflict: according to OHCHR, civilian casualties in Ukraine have exceeded 30,000, with over 10,000 killed and 19,000 injured. Meanwhile, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) has reported that the destruction of residential buildings has left nearly 720,000 people with no access to adequate, safe housing. With the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs estimating that there are over 14.6 million people in dire need of humanitarian assistance, he urged the parties to the conflict to allow unhindered access for humanitarian personnel. He further called for good-faith diplomatic efforts in pursuit of a peaceful resolution, with meaningful steps taken towards the immediate cessation of the hostilities and the parties engaging constructively to find a political and diplomatic solution as envisaged by Article 33 of the Charter of the United Nations.

The representative of Guyana , Council President for February, spoke in her national capacity to observe that the toll of what Moscow termed a “special military operation” has been the lives of over 10,000 civilians, the displacement of over 6 million Ukrainians and the violation of the United Nations Charter. All countries have felt the impact of this war to some degree, she said, pointing to challenges to the rules-based order; disruptions in food and energy prices, logistics and supply chains; and worsening hunger in the most vulnerable regions of the globe. She therefore called on the parties to respect the principles of distinction, precaution and proportionality and to comply with their legal obligations. As well, she reiterated the call for the Russian Federation to withdraw its military forces from the internationally recognized territory of Ukraine and urged the parties to commit to a serious political and diplomatic process to end the conflict.

DMYTRO KULEBA, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Ukraine , said that, as the Council meets, “there is another air raid on Ukraine taking place right now”. A residential building in Odesa was hit less than an hour ago, and two civilians are heavily wounded. Two years since its invasion, Moscow’s name is synonymous with aggression, war and barbarism. “Russia’s ugly face is the direct result of its impunity,” he said, noting that the country has no legal right to be present at the Council’s table. President Putin’s regime, which has been in place for 24 years, has already ruined millions of lives and launched or joined at least three major wars — approximately one war every eight years. “Russia acted every time this Council failed to act,” he asserted, noting that Moscow now trumpets what its propaganda calls “the liberation of Avdiivka”.

The city’s streets are covered with the corpses of the Russian Federation’s soldiers, he noted — “conquer at any cost, that is their strategy”. Stating that Moscow “has paid for the ruins of Avdiivka with the lives of at least 17,000 soldiers since October 2023”, he pointed out that “this is more casualties in a few months than in 10 years of the Soviet war in Afghanistan”. Immediately after occupying the city, Moscow committed new war crimes there, including killing or heavily wounding at least five Ukrainian prisoners of war. He also rejected Moscow’s attempts to evade responsibility by spreading lies regarding the recent ruling of the International Court of Justice. Ukraine wants peace more than any other nation. However, he declared: “We will not allow Russia to kill us freely on the road to peace, nor will we ever accept any offer to surrender or to concede our lands and freedoms under the guise of peace.”

XAVIER BETTEL, Deputy Prime Minister, Minister for Foreign Affairs and Foreign Trade and Minister for Development Cooperation and Humanitarian Action of Luxembourg , emphasized that comments claiming that the Russian Federation is liberating Ukraine from Nazis are “an affront to the Russians who died during World War Two to defeat Nazis”. To compare Ukrainians to Nazis is to rewrite history, and the military operation “is ‘special’ because it is unjustified”, he stressed. Recalling that, as part of a generation born after the war, “today, Germany is my friend, my partner”, he noted that those in the Republic of Korea must wonder every morning “what the dictator in the north is going to think or do”, and called it “sad” that the security situation depends upon where one is born. Pointing to his Russian and Polish background, he lamented that “today, many Russians are ashamed of their origins”, stating that it is never too late for that State to recognize its mistakes.

ANNALENA BAERBOCK, Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs of Germany , recalling that the Russian Federation’s representative asked why European representatives were participating in the meeting, responded: “You, Russia, broke the peace in Europe.” She cited Ukrainian victims of the war — including Oksana, “a surgeon who decided to operate on her own father when he was injured in Bucha” — as representing the bravery and resilience of millions of Ukrainians “who know that if they end defending their country, Ukraine ends”. While they see what the brutal reality of Russian Federation occupation means to their compatriots amid calls for negotiating with President Putin, she stressed that “he is making it very clear that he does not want to negotiate peace — he wants to complete his ‘conquests’”. As Moscow wants a sovereign State to give up its right to exist, she asked: “Where would we be if this principle were to prevail?” For its part, Berlin has signed a bilateral security agreement that offers Ukraine long-term support and “will stand with Ukraine for as long as it takes”, she stated.

RADOSŁAW SIKORSKI, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Poland , aligning himself with the statements made by Ukraine and the European Union, said that he was “amazed” by the tone and content of the statement delivered by the representative of the Russian Federation. Recalling that such representative stated that Kyiv is a client of the West, a criminal regime and comprised of Nazis, he said that Kyiv fights to be independent, that Ukraine has a democratically elected Government and that its President is Jewish while its Defence Minister is Muslim. That representative also said that the Russian Federation has always only beaten back aggression. Asking whether its troops at the gates of Warsaw in 1920 were on a “topographical excursion”, he underscored: “The truth is that, for every time Russia has been invaded, she has invaded 10 times.” Also recalling the statement that the West is waging a proxy war, he urged the Russian Federation not to fall into the Western trap — “withdraw your troops to the international border and avoid this Western plot”.

GABRIELIUS LANDSBERGIS, Minister for Foreign Affairs of Lithuania , also speaking for the Czech Republic , Estonia and Latvia , stated: “However loud and eloquent we are, our protests and outrage will barely register in Moscow, and rockets will continue to rain down on Ukrainian homes, hospitals and schools.” Today, the international community faces choices that might define this century. “Do we continue to appease the aggressor who is patient and meticulous in his attempts to turn everything this Organization holds dear into a mockery?”, he asked, urging the Council: “For all our sakes, wake up.” If the international community fails, the rules-based order will crumble. Ukraine’s sovereignty, Europe’s security and the success of global efforts for human rights, accountability, food security and nuclear safety will all be in the hands of those who benefit from disruption and chaos. The war in Ukraine must be won decisively, he asserted, adding that “it is not just Europe’s war, it is a challenge to the international order, which — while imperfect — aims to ensure that law, rather than military might, determines our borders and sovereignty”.

GORDAN GRLIĆ RADMAN, Minister for Foreign and European Affairs of Croatia , stressed that, instead of ending its senseless war, the Russian Federation is intensifying it — putting entire societies around the world at risk by exposing them to food insecurity and energy shortages. He noted that Croatia has provided almost €60 million in urgent humanitarian assistance to Ukraine, while some 25,000 Ukrainians have found temporary protection in the country. Recalling Croatia’s own experience of the costs and threats of mine contamination, he noted that it hosted the first-ever high-level International Donors’ Conference on Humanitarian Demining in Ukraine in October 2023. Co-organized by the Governments of Croatia and Ukraine, the conference confirmed support to Ukraine’s demining efforts, with 34 countries pledging €500 million. He called on the Russian Federation to withdraw its troops from Ukraine’s internationally recognized borders, cease its illegal procurement of arms and ammunition, and uphold its responsibilities as a permanent member of the Council.

HANKE BRUINS SLOT, Minister for Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands , speaking on behalf of the Group of Friends of Accountability following the Aggression against Ukraine, consisting of 49 Member States and the European Union, shared a strong conviction: “We don’t accept that might makes right.” While UN Member States have repeatedly underlined the need for a comprehensive, just and lasting peace, the Russian Federation has turned a deaf ear to these pleas, she said. She went on to commend efforts towards holding Moscow accountable, including the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission; the Commission of Inquiry established by the Human Rights Council; and the Team of Experts on the Rule of Law and Sexual Violence. As well, she voiced support for the Ukrainian Prosecutor General, the work carried out by the International Criminal Court, the International Centre for the Prosecution of the Crime of Aggression, and the Register of Damage for Ukraine.

Stressing that the Russian Federation’s act of aggression violates the United Nations Charter, she reiterated her call on that country to comply with its international obligations. “We will keep demanding Russia withdraw all of its forces and respect the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders,” she said, reiterating the group’s unconditional support for Ukraine.

HELENA CARREIRAS, Minister for National Defence of Portugal, underscored that the war in Ukraine not only jeopardizes the foundations of international security, it has also sent shockwaves around the world, disrupting global food and energy markets and affecting the most vulnerable countries. Reiterating Portugal’s full and unwavering support to Ukraine, both bilaterally and collectively, she said that, from day one, her country has been unequivocal about where it stands: “side-by-side with Ukraine”. In addition to its political support, Portugal has provided training to Ukrainian soldiers and donated military equipment and humanitarian aid. It has also made financial contributions to the European Union and NATO’s assistance mechanisms. “Ultimately, the goal is one and the same: to defend and uphold the rules, principles and values […) enshrined in the United Nations Charter,” she stated. This can only happen with a just and sustainable solution that is in accordance with Ukraine’s Peace Formula, and that holds accountable those responsible for the ongoing atrocities. She, therefore, called on the Russian Federation to cease all operations and retreat from Ukraine.

BUJAR OSMANI, Minister for Foreign Affairs of North Macedonia , again urged the Russian Federation to end its senseless war and withdraw its troops from the sovereign territory of Ukraine — “the only way to restore peace”. Emphasizing the resilience and extraordinary courage shown by the people of Ukraine in their fight for freedom, independence and mere existence, he stressed: “Every day we continue to hear reports of more civilian deaths, destruction and suffering, especially in the communities near the active conflict zones in eastern and southern Ukraine.” He reiterated the importance of investigating the war crimes on the territory of Ukraine to bring the perpetrators to justice, voicing support for creation of a Special Tribunal regarding the crime of aggression against Ukraine. Affirming that North Macedonia will continue to stand by Ukraine and its people, hopeful that reason will prevail and that life will soon be back to normal, he called for multilateralism to overcome militarism.

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"Hide the girls": Sexual Violence in the Russia-Ukraine War

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April 28, 2023
Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Curriculum in Global Studies
This thesis is based on twenty public accounts of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV) in the Russia-Ukraine war. This project aimed to answer one question: Why have Russian soldiers committed sexual violence against Ukrainian civilians since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine? After reviewing the literature on CRSV and conducting a thematic analysis of firsthand accounts of sexual violence during the war, I evaluate competing arguments for understanding Russian CRSV in Ukraine as genocide, ethnic cleansing, or military strategy. I theorize about the roles of unit subcultures, commander tolerance, and moral disengagement. Ultimately, I argue that Russian soldiers committed CRSV because they knew they would likely die in Ukraine, blamed Ukrainians for the war and thus for their circumstances, sought to forge troop cohesion among units of disorganized and often drunk strangers, were desensitized to the atrocity of their actions, and did not expect to face the consequences.
March 31, 2023
https://doi.org/10.17615/n0dh-vs64
Honors Thesis
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Affiliation: College of Arts and Sciences, Department of Political Science
Bachelor of Arts

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Ukraine's getting more longe-range missiles that leave the Russians with 'nowhere to hide'

Ukraine's Western allies have promised to send it more long-range missiles.
Kyiv has already demonstrated it can use ATACMS and Storm Shadows to hit high-value Russian targets.
Former US military officers say more of these missiles will expose Russia on the battlefield.

NATO countries are outfitting Ukraine with additional long-range precision missiles that have already been used by the country to strike Russian airfields, naval headquarters, bridges, and other high-value targets.

These Western-provided missiles give Ukraine's deep-strike capability a major firepower boost. Former US military officers told Business Insider that the munitions could help Kyiv go after locations that are essential to Russia's operations, and leave its combat and support forces with "nowhere to hide."

Ukraine is facing Russian offensives that may get more intense going into the summer, but these weapons could help hamstring Moscow's efforts.

"If you're worried about Russian forces overrunning your defenses, you want to go after the headquarters and you want to go after the logistics that would enable Russian attacks," said Ben Hodges, a retired lieutenant general and former commander of US Army Europe.

The US last month acknowledged that it had secretly shipped Ukraine a number of MGM-140 Army Tactical Missile Systems, also known as ATACMS — earlier this spring as part of a $300 million weapons package it announced in March. The number of missiles isn't publicly known, but ATACMS missiles average about $1.3 million each.

Jake Sullivan, the Biden administration's national security advisor, said in late April that the US would send Ukraine more ATACMS after passing a $61 billion aid package that spent months held up by Republicans in Congress. The legislation required that Washington transfer the munitions.

ATACMS are tactical ballistic missiles that come in several variants. Ukraine previously received ones that have a range of 100 miles and can disperse nearly 1,000 submunitions over a large area, making them particularly damaging to airfields . Last fall, Kyiv used the missiles for that exact purpose.

The US also has ATACMS that can travel up to 190 miles; one variant has a unitary warhead, while the other can scatter some 300 submunitions. Ukraine has long pressed Washington for these extended-range missiles, though it's unclear what Kyiv has actually obtained.

Around the same time, in late April, the UK announced it would send Ukraine additional Storm Shadow cruise missiles as part of the country's largest-ever weapons package (£500 million, or $633 million), which included over 1,600 strike and air-defense munitions.

Days later, Britain's defense minister Grant Shapps disclosed for the first time that Italy had, at some point, also supplied Kyiv with Storm Shadow cruise missiles (France has sent Kyiv its own version of the munition called SCALP-EG).

These air-dropped missiles can fly at low altitudes to avoid detection and have been used to strike Russian naval headquarters and vehicle-repair depots in the occupied Crimean peninsula. Their 155-mile range puts them in between the ATACMS variants.

Watch: Russia fires 120 missiles across Ukrainian cities

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Ukraine Fights to Hold Off Fierce Russian Assaults in Northeast

While Ukrainian officials and analysts said that a Russian advance across the border appeared to be slowing, President Volodymyr Zelensky canceled his participation in international events.

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By Constant Méheut

Reporting from Kyiv, Ukraine

Ukrainian forces on Wednesday were putting up a fierce defense in Vovchansk, a village in northeastern Ukraine about five miles from the Russian border, engaging in what appeared to be street fighting as they tried to contain the Russian advance in the area.

In a sign of heightened concern over Ukraine’s deteriorating military situation, President Volodymyr Zelensky canceled his participation in all international events for the coming days, including a visit on Friday to Spain where he was expected to sign a bilateral security agreement.

Ukraine’s General Staff said in a statement that its forces had “partially pushed the enemy” out of Vovchansk. A few hours earlier, it had acknowledged that its troops had withdrawn from positions in two villages, including Vovchansk, allowing Russian forces to gain a foothold.

“Active fighting is ongoing,” Oleksiy Kharkivskiy, the police chief in Vovchansk, said on Wednesday in a video published on Facebook from the village, in which heavy gunfire could be heard in the background. He added that Russian troops had taken positions in several streets in the village and that the situation “is extremely difficult.”

Ukrainian officials and military analysts said Ukraine’s position on the battlefield in recent days has seriously worsened, as the government in Kyiv tries to repel a new Russian offensive push in the northeast that is stretching its already outnumbered and outgunned forces.

Russia has timed its new offensive, which started on Friday, at an opportune moment. Ukraine is short of manpower and is struggling to recruit more soldiers. It is also running out of ammunition because of delays in Western military aid, in particular America’s $60.8 billion package which was passed in Congress three weeks ago, after months of political wrangling.

Wrapping up a two-day visit to Kyiv, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said at a news conference on Wednesday that the U.S. was “rushing ammunition, armored vehicles, missiles, air defenses” to the front lines.

Mr. Blinken added that the Biden administration had allocated $2 billion for Ukraine’s military, much of it to be invested in the country’s defense-industrial base to help Ukraine produce its own weapons over the long term.

Ukrainian officials and military analysts say that Russia’s Army now appears to be advancing more slowly in the northeast, six days into its offensive, partly because they have reached more urbanized areas, like Vovchansk, which makes rapid progress more difficult.

Gen. Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukraine’s military intelligence agency, told Ukrainian television on Tuesday that conditions in the area under attack were moving “toward stabilization,” with additional Ukrainian units being rushed in to repel Russian advances. But he added that “the situation is quite tense and is changing very quickly.”

The assessments by the Ukrainian officials and analysts appeared to be supported by open-source maps of the battlefield compiled by independent groups analyzing combat footage. Those maps showed that Russian troops had gained footholds in two settlements in the past day, a slower rate of advance than before, when they were capturing up to five settlements a day.

Russia’s Ministry of Defense said on Wednesday that it had captured two settlements in the northeast, a claim that could not be independently confirmed and did not match what the open-source maps showed.

Russia also said it had seized the village of Robotyne in the south. The claim could also not been independently verified and Ukrainian officials denied it . “They are only on the outskirts, our positions are still in the village,” Lt. Serhii Skibchyk, the spokesperson for the 65th Brigade, said in a comment to Ukrainian Pravda. “Both Ukrainian and Russian troops have fire advantage over the village simultaneously. But the majority of the village is still our position.”

Robotyne was recaptured by Ukrainian troops last summer, in one of the few gains of Ukraine’s unsuccessful counteroffensive at the time. Should it fall back into Russian hands, it could deal a blow to the morale of the Ukrainian Army.

Vovchansk has been heavily bombed since the start of Russia’s offensive operations on Friday, including with powerful guided weapons known as glide bombs that deliver hundreds of pounds of explosives in a single blast. Almost all the residents of the village, which had a prewar population of 17,000, have fled, local authorities said.

Oleh Syniehubov, the head of the Kharkiv region’s military administration, said on Wednesday that nearly 8,000 civilians had been evacuated from villages and settlements in the region. These include residents of villages on the immediate outskirts of Kharkiv that have come under increasing shelling in recent days.

Krystyna Havran, a member of the village council of Lyptsi, about 10 miles north of Kharkiv’s outer ring, said she had been scrambling to evacuate residents in recent days as the fighting got closer. “No one imagined that there would be an offensive,” she said.

Most of the evacuees have streamed into Kharkiv, hoping that the city, Ukraine’s second largest after the capital, Kyiv, would provide them with more security. But Kharkiv has been the target of numerous Russian airstrikes for several weeks , making life for its residents increasingly difficult.

Mr. Syniehubov said that Kharkiv had been targeted six times on Tuesday, including with glide bombs that hit the northern part of the city, causing heavy damage to a 12-story apartment building and injuring 22 people. A video released by the national police shows officers walking on piles of rubble inside a building and firefighters putting out a blaze.

Mykola Bielieskov, a military analyst at the government-run National Institute for Strategic Studies in Ukraine, said the strikes were designed “to instill fear and make people flee from frontline urban areas.” But to force Kharkiv’s 1.2 million residents to flee, he added, Russia would have “to systematically target the city — weeks of strikes.”

Analysts say this could explain why Russia is pushing north of Kharkiv. If Russian troops secured positions in a village like Lyptsi, they would be within artillery range of the city, allowing them to pound it with shells.

Russia has also targeted power plants and substations in the Kharkiv region and other areas of Ukraine since March, part of a campaign to cut off electricity to large areas of the country and make life miserable for civilians.

The strikes have severely limited Ukraine’s available generating capacity. As a consequence, Ukrenergo, the country’s national transmission system operator, introduced emergency blackouts for households and businesses in several regions on Tuesday night and Wednesday morning, in an effort to save energy.

Power outages were limited in Kyiv, affecting only 10 percent of the consumers, according to local authorities . But Ukrenergo warned that new blackouts were likely to be introduced again on Wednesday night.

Ukrainian officials have urged their Western allies to provide them with more air defense weapons and ammunition to shoot down Russian missiles and drones. Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s foreign minister, reiterated this demand during a meeting with Mr. Blinken on Wednesday, asking him to help Ukraine obtain more U.S.-made Patriot air defense systems.

Mr. Blinken also said that the U.S. and Ukraine were close to completing a security agreement, one of dozens that Kyiv is negotiating with NATO members as it lobbies for admission into the alliance. He said it could be signed “in a matter of weeks.” Such an agreement would not guarantee significant funding but would include things like intelligence sharing and military interoperability.

Michael Crowley and Daria Mitiuk contributed reporting from Kyiv.

Constant Méheut reports on the war in Ukraine, including battlefield developments, attacks on civilian centers and how the war is affecting its people. More about Constant Méheut

Our Coverage of the War in Ukraine

News and Analysis

Ukraine asked the Biden administration to provide more intelligence on the position of Russian forces and military targets inside Russia, according to U.S. and Ukrainian officials.

President Volodymyr Zelensky signed into law a bill allowing some Ukrainian convicts to serve in the country’s military in exchange for the possibility of parole at the end of their service, a move that highlights Kyiv’s desperate attempts to replenish its forces.

NATO allies are inching closer to sending troops into Ukraine to train Ukrainian forces . The move would be another blurring of a previous red line and could draw the United States and Europe more directly into the war.

World’s Nuclear Inspector: Rafael Grossi took over the International Atomic Energy Agency five years ago at what now seems like a far less fraught moment. With atomic fears everywhere, the inspector is edging toward mediator .

Frozen Russian Assets: As much as $300 billion in frozen Russian assets is piling up profits and interest income by the day. Now, Ukraine’s allies are considering how to use those gains to aid Kyiv .

Rebuilding Ukrainian Villages: The people of the Kherson region have slowly rebuilt their livelihoods since Ukraine’s military forced out Russian troops. Now they are bracing for another Russian attack .

How We Verify Our Reporting

Our team of visual journalists analyzes satellite images, photographs , videos and radio transmissions to independently confirm troop movements and other details.

We monitor and authenticate reports on social media, corroborating these with eyewitness accounts and interviews. Read more about our reporting efforts .

German minister: Ukraine needs long-range weapons to defend Kharkiv

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Tourist couple injured in militant shooting in India's Kashmir amid elections

A tourist couple was injured in India's Kashmir after militants fired on them late on Saturday night, police said, ahead of voting scheduled in the volatile region for India's ongoing election.

Press briefing at the White House in Washington

Putin and Xi vow to deepen 'no limits' partnership as Russia advances in Ukraine

HONG KONG — They’ve already declared it has “no limits,” and on Thursday Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping vowed to deepen a partnership increasingly characterized by their countries’ clash with the West.

The two autocratic leaders met in Beijing in a show of unity between the two U.S. rivals as Putin wages a new offensive in his war on Ukraine .

Putin’s two-day state visit to China is his first overseas trip since he began a fifth term in office with a shake-up of his military leadership. It comes as Russia has seized the initiative in the war, now in its third year, and as the United States intensifies pressure on China to do more to stop it.

In February 2022, days before Putin invaded Ukraine, he and Xi declared a “no limits” partnership , and the two longtime leaders are personal friends. On Thursday, they signed a joint statement deepening the comprehensive strategic partnership between their two countries.

That is not the same as a formal alliance, but the possibility that China and Russia could one day form one serves as a kind of “strategic ambiguity” that can constrain the U.S. and others, said Natasha Kuhrt, a senior lecturer in international peace and security at King’s College London.

“They can keep us guessing about whether they will or won’t escalate, whether they will or won’t strengthen the partnership and the direction of an alliance and that in itself is a kind of deterrent,” she told NBC News.

Relations between China and Russia, which are celebrating 75 years of diplomatic relations during Putin’s visit, have been strongly tested by the war in Ukraine and Putin’s growing international isolation amid Western opposition to it.

Though China has strived to portray itself as neutral in the conflict, it has provided Russia with diplomatic support as well as advanced technology with both civilian and military uses. It is also an increasingly important economic partner for Russia, becoming one of the top markets for its Western-sanctioned oil and gas.

China has also put forward a vague, 12-point peace plan that would allow Russia to retain its territorial gains in Ukraine and has been dismissed by the West.

On Thursday, Putin said he was “grateful” for China’s initiatives to resolve the war in Ukraine, while Xi said China “hopes for the early return of Europe to peace and stability and will continue to play a constructive role toward this.”

Though still willing to show support for his “dear friend” Putin, Xi also has to consider what it might cost him in his relations with the U.S. and Europe.

Russian President Vladimir Putin in Beijing

The U.S., which last month approved $60 billion in military aid for Ukraine that is just starting to arrive, has imposed a series of sanctions on Chinese companies accused of aiding the Russian war effort, and is also threatening to sanction Chinese banks.During a visit to Beijing last month, Secretary of State Antony Blinken said “Russia would struggle to sustain its assault on Ukraine without China’s support,” and that he had told Chinese officials that “if China does not address this problem, we will.”

Xi, who is seeking to retain or expand overseas markets amid an economic slowdown at home , is also reluctant to alienate leaders in Europe. Last week, during his first visit to the continent in five years , Xi was pressured by French President Emmanuel Macron and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to use his influence over Putin to end the war in Ukraine.

Xi rejected their criticism of his country’s relationship with Russia, and said China was not a participant in the war. But the pressure may be having an effect: After a record $240 billion in overall trade between China and Russia last year, Chinese exports to Russia fell in March for the first time since 2022.

Both Xi and Putin have also moved away from the term “no limits” when it comes to talking about their ties.

“Xi basically doesn’t really talk about it in those terms anymore. He talks about a good neighborly relationship, comprehensive strategic coordination and mutually beneficial cooperation,” Kuhrt said. “And Russia talks about flexible strategic partnerships.”

Victor Gao, vice president of the Beijing-based Center for China and Globalization, said China did not have to choose between Russia and the West.

“I think China should make continuous efforts to improve the relationship between China and the West. In fact, this is not contradictory to improving relations between China and Russia,” said Gao, who is also chair professor at Soochow University.

Russian President Vladimir Putin visits China

Putin arrived in the Chinese capital early Thursday and was greeted with full military honors outside the Great Hall of the People next to Tiananmen Square, where he shook hands with Xi before heading inside for talks.In addition to Beijing, Putin is expected to visit the northeastern city of Harbin, near the two countries’ 2,600-mile border, which is holding a China-Russia trade fair this week.

In an interview Wednesday with Xinhua , China’s state-run news agency, Putin cited the “unprecedented level of strategic partnership between our countries” as his reason for making China the first stop of his fifth term.

Among those traveling with Putin is Andrei Belousov, an economist who was named the Russian defense minister this week in a surprise shake-up. His predecessor, Sergei Shoigu , is also on the trip.

Russia’s new offensive in northern Ukraine has made early gains, worrying Kyiv and its allies that Putin’s military may be able to make decisive progress in the coming weeks.

Xi, 70, and Putin, 71, have met more than 40 times, either in person or virtually. Putin was last in Beijing in October , while Xi was in Moscow days after he secured an unprecedented third term as Chinese president in March 2023.

Jennifer Jett is the Asia Digital Editor for NBC News, based in Hong Kong.

Larissa Gao is a fellow on NBC’s Asia Desk, based in Hong Kong.

Mithil Aggarwal is a Hong Kong-based reporter/producer for NBC News.

COMMENTS

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