What Conflicts Continue as Russia Moves to Dominate Again

A adult female walks outside a motherhood hospital that was damaged by shelling in Mariupol, Ukraine, March 9, 2022.

Evgeniy Maloletka/AP

ix big questions about Russia'southward war in Ukraine, answered

Addressing some of the most pressing questions of the whole war, from how it started to how it might end.

By Mar 30, 2022, 6:30am EDT

The Russian war in Ukraine has proven itself to exist one of the most consequential political events of our time — and one of the almost confusing.

From the outset, Russia'south conclusion to invade was difficult to understand; it seemed at odds with what most experts saw every bit Russia's strategic interests. Every bit the war has progressed, the widely predicted Russian victory has failed to emerge as Ukrainian fighters have repeatedly fended off attacks from a vastly superior force. Around the globe, from Washington to Berlin to Beijing, global powers have reacted in striking and fifty-fifty historically unprecedented fashion.

What follows is an effort to make sense of all of this: to tackle the biggest questions anybody is request nigh the war. It is a comprehensive guide to understanding what is happening in Ukraine and why it matters.

one) Why did Russia invade Ukraine?

In a televised speech announcing Russian federation'due south "special military machine functioning" in Ukraine on February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin said the invasion was designed to stop a "genocide" perpetrated past "the Kyiv regime" — and ultimately to reach "the demilitarization and de-Nazification of Ukraine."

Though the claims of genocide and Nazi rule in Kyiv were transparently fake, the rhetoric revealed Putin's maximalist war aims: regime change ("de-Nazification") and the elimination of Ukraine's condition as a sovereign country outside of Russian control ("demilitarization"). Why he would want to do this is a more than complex story, one that emerges out of the very long arc of Russian-Ukrainian relations.

Ukraine and Russia accept significant, deep, and longstanding cultural and historical ties; both date their political origins back to the ninth-century Slavic kingdom of Kievan Rus. But these ties do not make them historically identical, as Putin has repeatedly claimed in his public rhetoric. Since the ascent of the modern Ukrainian national movement in the mid- to late-19th century, Russian rule in Ukraine — in both the czarist and Soviet periods — increasingly came to resemble that of an purple power governing an unwilling colony.

Russian majestic dominion ended in 1991 when 92 percent of Ukrainians voted in a national plebiscite to secede from the decaying Soviet Union. Almost immediately later, political scientists and regional experts began warning that the Russian-Ukrainian border would exist a flashpoint, predicting that internal divides between the more pro-European population of western Ukraine and relatively more pro-Russian east, contested territory like the Crimean Peninsula, and Russian desire to reestablish control over its wayward vassal could all lead to conflict between the new neighbors.

Information technology took most 20 years for these predictions to be proven right. In late 2013, Ukrainians took to the streets to protest the authoritarian and pro-Russian tilt of incumbent President Viktor Yanukovych, forcing his resignation on February 22, 2014. 5 days later, the Russian military swiftly seized control of Crimea and alleged it Russian territory, a brazenly illegal move that a majority of Crimeans yet seemed to welcome. Pro-Russia protests in Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine gave way to a vehement rebellion — one stoked and armed by the Kremlin, and backed by disguised Russian troops.

In November 2013, thousands of pro-Europe protesters in Ukraine attempted to storm the government building in the capital of Kiev.

Anatoliy Stephanov/AFP via Getty Images

The Ukrainian uprising against Yanukovych — called the "Euromaidan" motion because they were pro-EU protests that most prominently took identify in Kyiv's Maidan foursquare — represented to Russian federation a threat not but to its influence over Ukraine simply to the very survival of Putin's regime. In Putin's mind, Euromaidan was a Western-sponsored plot to overthrow a Kremlin ally, part of a broader plan to undermine Russia itself that included NATO's postal service-Common cold War expansions to the due east.

"We understand what is happening; we understand that [the protests] were aimed confronting Ukraine and Russia and confronting Eurasian integration," he said in a March 2022 speech on the annexation of Crimea. "With Ukraine, our Western partners have crossed the line."

Beneath this rhetoric, according to experts on Russian federation, lies a deeper unstated fearfulness: that his regime might fall prey to a similar protestation movement. Ukraine could not succeed, in his view, because it might create a pro-Western model for Russians to emulate — 1 that the United States might eventually attempt to covertly consign to Moscow. This was a central part of his thinking in 2014, and it remains then today.

"He sees CIA agents behind every anti-Russian political motility," says Seva Gunitsky, a political scientist who studies Russia at the Academy of Toronto. "He thinks the West wants to subvert his regime the way they did in Ukraine."

Beginning in March 2021, Russian forces began deploying to the Ukrainian edge in larger and larger numbers. Putin'southward nationalist rhetoric became more aggressive: In July 2021, the Russian president published a 5,000-discussion essay arguing that Ukrainian nationalism was a fiction, that the state was historically e'er part of Russia, and that a pro-Western Ukraine posed an existential threat to the Russian nation.

"The germination of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state, aggressive towards Russia, is comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against united states of america," as he put it in his 2022 essay.

Why Putin decided that merely seizing part of Ukraine was no longer enough remains a matter of significant debate amidst experts. I theory, advanced by Russian journalist Mikhail Zygar, is that pandemic-induced isolation drove him to an extreme ideological place.

But while the immediate crusade of Putin's shift on Ukraine is not clear, the nature of that shift is. His longtime belief in the urgency of restoring Russian federation'southward greatness curdled into a neo-imperial want to bring Ukraine back under direct Russian control. And in Russia, where Putin rules basically unchecked, that meant a full-scale war.

two) Who is winning the war?

On newspaper, Russia'due south military vastly outstrips Ukraine'due south. Russia spends over 10 times as much on defense annually as Ukraine; the Russian military has a little under three times as much artillery as Ukraine and roughly 10 times equally many fixed-wing aircraft. As a effect, the general pre-invasion view was that Russia would easily win a conventional war. In early Feb, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley told members of Congress that Kyiv, the capital, could fall within 72 hours of a Russian invasion.

But that'southward non how things take played out. A month into the invasion, Ukrainians still agree Kyiv. Russia has fabricated some gains, especially in the east and due south, just the consensus view amid military experts is that Ukraine'southward defenses accept held stoutly — to the point where Ukrainians have been able to launch counteroffensives.

A soldier walks in front of a destroyed Russian tank in Kharkov, Ukraine, on March 14.

Diego Herrera Carcedo/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

The initial Russian plan reportedly operated under the supposition that a swift march on Kyiv would run across only token resistance. Putin "really actually idea this would be a 'special military operation': They would exist done in a few days, and information technology wouldn't be a real war," says Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian armed services at the CNA recall tank.

This program fell autonomously within the first 48 hours of the war when early operations like an airborne assault on the Hostomel drome ended in disaster, forcing Russian generals to develop a new strategy on the fly. What they came up with — massive artillery bombardments and attempts to encircle and besiege Ukraine'due south major cities — was more effective (and more brutal). The Russians made some inroads into Ukrainian territory, especially in the south, where they have laid siege to Mariupol and taken Kherson and Melitopol.

Assessed territory in Ukraine controlled past Russian military (in red).

Institute for the Study of War

But these Russian advances are a scrap misleading. Ukraine, Kofman explains, made the tactical conclusion to trade "infinite for fourth dimension": to withdraw strategically rather than fight for every inch of Ukrainian land, confronting the Russians on the territory and at the time of their choosing.

As the fighting continued, the nature of the Ukrainian choice became clearer. Instead of getting into pitched large-calibration battles with Russians on open terrain, where Russia'south numerical advantages would prove decisive, the Ukrainians instead decided to appoint in a series of smaller-scale clashes.

Ukrainian forces have bogged down Russian units in towns and smaller cities; street-to-street combat favors defenders who can utilize their superior knowledge of the city'south geography to hibernate and comport ambushes. They take attacked isolated and exposed Russian units traveling on open roads. They have repeatedly raided poorly protected supply lines.

This approach has proven remarkably effective. By mid-March, Western intelligence agencies and open up source analysts concluded that the Ukrainians had successfully managed to stall the Russian invasion. The Russian military all just openly recognized this reality in a late March briefing, in which elevation generals implausibly claimed they never intended to have Kyiv and were ever focused on making territorial gains in the east.

"The initial Russian entrada to invade and conquer Ukraine is culminating without achieving its objectives — it is being defeated, in other words," armed services scholar Frederick Kagan wrote in a March 22 brief for the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) call up tank.

Currently, Ukrainian forces are on the offensive. They take pushed the Russians farther from Kyiv, with some reports suggesting they take retaken the suburb of Irpin and forced Russian federation to withdraw some of its forces from the expanse in a tacit admission of defeat. In the s, Ukrainian forces are contesting Russian control over Kherson.

And throughout the fighting, Russian casualties have been horrifically high.

Information technology'south difficult to get accurate information in a war zone, but 1 of the more authoritative estimates of Russian war dead — from the U.s. Defense force Department — concludes that over 7,000 Russian soldiers have been killed in the start three weeks of fighting, a figure almost three times as large as the full US service members expressionless in all 20 years of fighting in Afghanistan. A split up NATO gauge puts that at the low end, estimating between 7,000 and xv,000 Russians killed in action and every bit many as forty,000 total losses (including injuries, captures, and desertions). 7 Russian generals have been reported killed in the fighting, and materiel losses — ranging from armor to aircraft — take been enormous. (Russia puts its death price at more than 1,300 soldiers, which is almost certainly a meaning undercount.)

This all does not hateful that a Russian victory is impossible. Any number of things, ranging from Russian reinforcements to the fall of besieged Mariupol, could give the state of war attempt new life.

Information technology does, nevertheless, mean that what Russia is doing right at present hasn't worked.

"If the indicate is just to wreak havoc, then they're doing fine. But if the point is to wreak havoc and thus accelerate further — exist able to hold more than territory — they're not doing fine," says Olga Oliker, the program director for Europe and Central Asia at the International Crunch Grouping.

three) Why is Russia'southward military performing so poorly?

Russian federation's invasion has gone awry for two basic reasons: Its military wasn't ready to fight a war similar this, and the Ukrainians have put up a much stronger defence force than anyone expected.

Russian federation's problems brainstorm with Putin'south unrealistic invasion plan. Merely even afterwards the Russian high command adjusted its strategy, other flaws in the army remained.

"We're seeing a country militarily implode," says Robert Farley, a professor who studies air ability at the University of Kentucky.

One of the biggest and virtually noticeable problems has been rickety logistics. Some of the most famous images of the war have been of Russian armored vehicles parked on Ukrainian roads, seemingly out of gas and unable to advance. The Russian forces accept proven to exist underequipped and badly supplied, encountering issues ranging from poor communications to inadequate tires.

Part of the reason is a lack of sufficient preparation. Per Kofman, the Russian armed forces simply "wasn't organized for this kind of war" — meaning, the conquest of Europe'south second-largest land past area. Another part of it is corruption in the Russian procurement arrangement. Graft in Russia is less a problems in its political organisation than a characteristic; i way the Kremlin maintains the loyalty of its aristocracy is by allowing them to profit off of government action. Military procurement is no exception to this pattern of widespread corruption, and it has led to troops having substandard access to vital supplies.

The same lack of preparation has plagued Russia'southward air force. Despite outnumbering the Ukrainian air force past roughly 10 times, the Russians have failed to found air superiority: Ukraine'due south planes are still flying and its air defenses more often than not remain in place.

Perhaps almost chiefly, close observers of the state of war believe Russians are suffering from poor morale. Because Putin'southward program to invade Ukraine was kept underground from the vast majority of Russians, the government had a limited power to lay a propaganda background that would go their soldiers motivated to fight. The current Russian force has lilliputian sense of what they're fighting for or why — and are waging war against a country with which they have religious, indigenous, historical, and potentially even familial ties. In a military that has long had systemic morale problems, that's a recipe for battlefield disaster.

"Russian morale was incredibly depression BEFORE the state of war broke out. Brutal hazing in the military, second-course (or worse) condition by its conscript soldiers, ethnic divisions, corruption, you name information technology: the Russian Army was not prepared to fight this state of war," Jason Lyall, a Dartmouth political scientist who studies morale, explains via email. "High rates of abased or captured equipment, reports of sabotaged equipment, and large numbers of soldiers deserting (or simply camping out in the forest) are all products of low morale."

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy delivers a spoken communication via videoconference to the US Congress at the Capitol on March 16.

J. Scott Applewhite/Xinhua via Getty Images

The contrast with the Ukrainians couldn't exist starker. They are defending their homes and their families from an unprovoked invasion, led past a charismatic leader who has made a personal stand in Kyiv. Ukrainian high morale is a key reason, in improver to advanced Western armaments, that the defenders take dramatically outperformed expectations.

"Having spent a clamper of my professional person career [working] with the Ukrainians, nobody, myself included and themselves included, had all that high an interpretation of their military chapters," Oliker says.

Once again, none of this will necessarily remain the case throughout the war. Morale can shift with battlefield developments. And even if Russian morale remains low, it's still possible for them to win — though they're more than likely to exercise and then in a brutally ugly mode.

4) What has the state of war meant for ordinary Ukrainians?

As the fighting has dragged on, Russia has gravitated toward tactics that, by design, hurt civilians. Nigh notably, Russia has attempted to lay siege to Ukraine's cities, cut off supply and escape routes while bombarding them with artillery. The purpose of the strategy is to wear downward the Ukrainian defenders' willingness to fight, including past inflicting mass pain on the noncombatant populations.

The result has been nightmarish: an astonishing outflow of Ukrainian refugees and tremendous suffering for many of those who were unwilling or unable to leave.

According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, more than 3.8 million Ukrainians fled the state between February 24 and March 27. That's about eight.eight pct of Ukraine's full population — in proportional terms, the crude equivalent of the entire population of Texas being forced to flee the United States.

Another signal of comparing: In 2015, 4 years into the Syrian civil war and the summit of the global refugee crisis, at that place were a petty more than iv million Syrian refugees living in nearby countries. The Ukraine state of war has produced a similarly sized exodus in merely a month, leading to truly massive refugee flows to its European neighbors. Poland, the main destination of Ukrainian refugees, is currently housing over 2.3 one thousand thousand Ukrainians, a figure larger than the unabridged population of Warsaw, its capital and largest city.

YouYou Zhou and Christina Animashaun for Vox

For those civilians who accept been unable to flee, the situation is dire. There are no reliable estimates of decease totals; a March 27 UN estimate puts the figure at 1,119 merely cautions that "the actual figures are considerably higher [because] the receipt of data from some locations where intense hostilities have been going on has been delayed and many reports are still awaiting corroboration."

The UN assessment does non blame one side or the other for these deaths, but does annotation that "virtually of the civilian casualties recorded were caused past the use of explosive weapons with a wide touch on area, including shelling from heavy artillery and multiple-launch rocket systems, and missile and airstrikes." It is the Russians, primarily, who are using these sorts of weapons in populated areas; Human Rights Watch has announced that there are "early on signs of war crimes" being committed past Russian soldiers in these kinds of attacks, and President Joe Biden has personally labeled Putin a "state of war criminal."

Nowhere is this devastation more visible than the southern metropolis of Mariupol, the largest Ukrainian population center to which Russian federation has laid siege. Aeriform footage of the city published by the Guardian in late March reveals entire blocks demolished past Russian bombardment:

In mid-March, three Associated Press journalists — the terminal international reporters in the metropolis earlier they likewise were evacuated — managed to file a dispatch describing life on the ground. They reported a death total of 2,500 merely cautioned that "many bodies can't be counted because of the endless shelling." The state of affairs is impossibly dire:

Airstrikes and shells have hit the motherhood hospital, the fire department, homes, a church building, a field outside a school. For the estimated hundreds of thousands who remain, at that place is quite simply nowhere to become. The surrounding roads are mined and the port blocked. Food is running out, and the Russians accept stopped humanitarian attempts to bring it in. Electricity is mostly gone and water is thin, with residents melting snow to drink. Some parents have fifty-fifty left their newborns at the hospital, possibly hoping to requite them a take a chance at life in the one place with decent electricity and h2o.

The battlefield failures of the Russian military have raised questions virtually its competence in hard cake-to-block fighting; Farley, the Kentucky professor, says, "This Russian army does non look like it can conduct serious [urban warfare]." As a result, taking Ukrainian cities ways besieging them — starving them out, destroying their will to fight, and only moving into the city proper after its population is unwilling to resist or outright incapable of putting upwards a fight.

5) What practise Russians retrieve about the war?

Vladimir Putin's government has ramped up its already repressive policies during the Ukraine conflict, shuttering contained media outlets and blocking access to Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. It'south now extremely difficult to get a sense of what either ordinary Russians or the country's elite think about the war, as criticizing information technology could lead to a lengthy stint in prison house.

But despite this opacity, expert Russia watchers have developed a broad idea of what'south going on there. The state of war has stirred up some opposition and anti-Putin sentiment, but it has been confined to a minority who are unlikely to change Putin's mind, let solitary topple him.

The bulk of the Russian public was no more prepared for state of war than the bulk of the Russian armed services — in fact, probably less so. Later on Putin announced the launch of his "special military operation" in Ukraine on national television, there was a surprising amount of criticism from loftier-contour Russians — figures ranging from billionaires to athletes to social media influencers. I Russian journalist, Marina Ovsyannikova, bravely ran into the background of a authorities broadcast while holding an antiwar sign.

"Information technology is unprecedented to see oligarchs, other elected officials, and other powerful people in society publicly speaking out against the war," says Alexis Lerner, a scholar of dissent in Russia at the Us Naval Academy.

There take also been antiwar rallies in dozens of Russian cities. How many have participated in these rallies is hard to say, only the human rights group OVD-Info estimates that over 15,000 Russians have been arrested at the events since the war began.

Could these eruptions of antiwar sentiment at the elite and mass public level suggest a coming insurrection or revolution against the Putin regime? Experts circumspection that these events remain quite unlikely.

Putin has done an effective job engaging in what political scientists call "coup-proofing." He has put in barriers — from seeding the military machine with counterintelligence officers to splitting up the state security services into different groups led by trusted allies — that get in quite difficult for anyone in his authorities to successfully move against him.

"Putin has prepared for this eventuality for a long time and has taken a lot of concerted actions to make sure he's not vulnerable," says Adam Casey, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan who studies the history of coups in Russia and the one-time communist bloc.

Similarly, turning the antiwar protests into a total-blown influential motion is a very tall social club.

"It is hard to organize sustained collective protest in Russian federation," notes Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard who studies protestation movements. "Putin's government has criminalized many forms of protests, and has close down or restricted the activities of groups, movements, and media outlets perceived to be in opposition or associated with the Due west."

Underpinning it all is tight government control of the information surround. Nearly Russians get their news from government-run media, which has been serving up a steady diet of pro-war content. Many of them announced to genuinely believe what they hear: 1 independent opinion poll found that 58 percent of Russians supported the state of war to at least some caste.

Prior to the war, Putin also appeared to be a genuinely popular figure in Russian federation. The elite depend on him for their position and fortune; many citizens see him equally the human being who saved Russia from the chaos of the firsthand postal service-Communist menstruum. A disastrous state of war might end up changing that, but the odds that even a sustained driblet in his back up translates into a coup or revolution remain low indeed.

half dozen) What is the US role in the conflict?

The war remains, for the moment, a conflict between Ukraine and Russia. Merely the United States is the well-nigh of import third party, using a number of powerful tools — short of direct military intervention — to aid the Ukrainian cause.

Any serious assessment of US involvement needs to start in the post-Cold State of war 1990s, when the US and its NATO allies made the decision to open up alliance membership to one-time communist states.

Many of these countries, wary of once once more being put under the Russian boot, clamored to join the alliance, which commits all involved countries to defend whatever member-state in the result of an attack. In 2008, NATO officially announced that Georgia and Ukraine — two onetime Soviet republics right on Russian federation's doorstep — "will become members of NATO" at an unspecified hereafter date. This infuriated the Russians, who saw NATO expansion as a directly threat to their own security.

There is no doubt that NATO expansion helped create some of the groundwork weather condition nether which the current conflict became thinkable, generally pushing Putin's foreign policy in a more than anti-Western direction. Some experts encounter it as one of the primal causes of his decision to set on Ukraine — just others strongly disagree, noting that NATO membership for Ukraine was already basically off the tabular array before the war and that Russia's declared war aims went far beyond just blocking Ukraine's NATO bid.

"NATO expansion was deeply unpopular in Russia. [Only] Putin did not invade because of NATO expansion," says Yoshiko Herrera, a Russia expert at the Academy of Wisconsin-Madison.

Regardless of where one falls on that argue, US policy during the conflict has been exceptionally articulate: support the Ukrainians with massive amounts of military assistance while putting force per unit area on Putin to back down by organizing an unprecedented array of international economic sanctions.

Antiwar activists march during a protest confronting the Russian invasion of Ukraine in Times Foursquare, New York Metropolis, on March 26.

Jimin Kim/VIEWpress via Getty Images

On the military side, weapons systems manufactured and provided by the Us and Europe have played a vital role in blunting Russia's advance. The Javelin anti-tank missile organisation, for case, is a lightweight American-fabricated launcher that allows one or two infantry soldiers to take out a tank. Javelins have given the outgunned Ukrainians a fighting chance confronting Russian armor, condign a pop symbol in the procedure.

Sanctions have proven similarly devastating in the economic realm.

The international punishments have been extremely wide, ranging from removing key Russian banks from the SWIFT global transaction organization to a U.s.a. ban on Russian oil imports to restrictions on doing business with particular members of the Russian elite. Freezing the assets of Russia'south central depository financial institution has proven to be a specially damaging tool, wrecking Russia's ability to deal with the collapse in the value of the ruble, its currency. As a upshot, the Russian economy is projected to contract past fifteen percent this year; mass unemployment looms.

In that location is more America can exercise, particularly when information technology comes to fulfilling Ukrainian requests for new fighter jets. In March, Washington rejected a Smooth plan to transfer MiG-29 aircraft to Ukraine via a The states Air Force base in Germany, arguing that it could be too provocative.

But the MiG-29 incident is more the exception than it is the rule. On the whole, the The states has been strikingly willing to have aggressive steps to punish Moscow and aid Kyiv'south war endeavour.

vii) How is the rest of the world responding to Russia's actions?

On the surface, the world appears to be fairly united behind the Ukrainian cause. The United nations General Associates passed a resolution condemning the Russian invasion by a whopping 141-5 margin (with 35 abstentions). Simply the UN vote conceals a great deal of disagreement, especially among the world's largest and about influential countries — divergences that don't always fall neatly along democracy-versus-autocracy lines.

The near ambitious anti-Russian and pro-Ukrainian positions tin can, possibly unsurprisingly, be found in Europe and the broader Westward. EU and NATO members, with the partial exceptions of Republic of hungary and Turkey, take strongly supported the Ukrainian state of war effort and implemented punishing sanctions on Russian federation (a major trading partner). It's the strongest bear witness of European unity since the Cold State of war, one that many observers encounter equally a sign that Putin's invasion has already backfired.

Frg, which has important trade ties with Russia and a post-Globe War 2 tradition of pacifism, is peradventure the most hit instance. About overnight, the Russian invasion convinced center-left Chancellor Olaf Scholz to support rearmament, introducing a proposal to more than triple Deutschland's defense budget that's widely backed past the German public.

"It'south actually revolutionary," Sophia Besch, a Berlin-based senior inquiry fellow at the Centre for European Reform, told my colleague Jen Kirby. "Scholz, in his oral communication, did abroad with and overturned so many of what we idea were certainties of German language defense policy."

Thousands of people have part in an antiwar demonstration in Dusseldorf, Federal republic of germany, on March v.

Ying Tang/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Though Scholz has refused to outright ban Russian oil and gas imports, he has blocked the Nord Stream two gas pipeline and committed to a long-term strategy of weaning Germany off of Russian energy. All signs signal to Russia waking a sleeping giant — of creating a powerful military and economical enemy in the heart of the European continent.

China, by contrast, has been the about pro-Russia of the major global powers.

The ii countries, spring by shared animus toward a Usa-dominated earth order, have grown increasingly shut in recent years. Chinese propaganda has largely toed the Russian line on the Ukraine state of war. US intelligence, which has been remarkably authentic during the crisis, believes that Russian federation has requested military machine and financial assistance from Beijing — which hasn't been provided still just may well exist forthcoming.

That said, it'southward possible to overstate the caste to which China has taken the Russian side. Beijing has a strong stated commitment to state sovereignty — the boulder of its position on Taiwan is that the island is actually Chinese territory — which makes a full-throated backing of the invasion ideologically awkward. There's a notable amount of debate amidst Chinese policy experts and in the public, with some analysts publicly advocating that Beijing adopt a more neutral line on the disharmonize.

Most other countries around the world fall somewhere on the spectrum between the Westward and Red china. Outside of Europe, merely a scattering of mostly pro-American states — like S Korea, Japan, and Australia — have joined the sanctions authorities. The bulk of countries in Asia, the Eye Due east, Africa, and Latin America do not support the invasion, just won't do very much to punish Russia for it either.

India is perhaps the most interesting country in this category. A rising Asian commonwealth that has violently clashed with China in the very recent by, it has practiced reasons to present itself as an American partner in the defense of freedom. Yet India also depends heavily on Russian-made weapons for its own defense and hopes to apply its human relationship with Russia to limit the Moscow-Beijing partnership. It'due south as well worth noting that Republic of india's prime government minister, Narendra Modi, has potent autocratic inclinations.

The result of all of this is a balancing act reminiscent of Bharat's Cold War approach of "non-alignment": refusing to side with either the Russian or American positions while attempting to maintain decent relations with both. India's perceptions of its strategic interests, more ideological views about democracy, appear to exist shaping its response to the state of war — equally seems to exist the example with quite a few countries around the world.

eight) Could this plow into World State of war III?

The bones, scary respond to this question is yeah: The invasion of Ukraine has put u.s.a. at the greatest adventure of a NATO-Russia war in decades.

The somewhat more comforting and nuanced answer is that the absolute risk remains relatively low and then long equally in that location is no straight NATO interest in the conflict, which the Biden administration has repeatedly ruled out. Though Biden said "this man [Putin] cannot remain in power" in a late March voice communication, both White House officials and the president himself stressed afterward that the United states policy was not regime change in Moscow.

"Things are stable in a nuclear sense right now," says Jeffrey Lewis, an skillful on nuclear weapons at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies. "The minute NATO gets involved, the scope of the war widens."

In theory, US and NATO military assist to Ukraine could open the door to escalation: Russian federation could assault a armed forces depot in Poland containing weapons bound for Ukraine, for instance. Only in do, it's unlikely: The Russians don't appear to desire a wider war with NATO that risks nuclear escalation, and so have avoided cross-edge strikes even when it might destroy supply shipments bound for Ukraine.

In early March, the The states Department of Defense opened a direct line of advice with its Russian peers in order to avert any kind of accidental conflict. It'southward not clear how well this is working — some reporting suggests the Russians aren't answering American calls — just there is a long history of effective dialogue between rivals who are fighting each other through proxy forces.

"States frequently cooperate to keep limits on their wars fifty-fifty as they fight ane another clandestinely," Lyall, the Dartmouth professor, tells me. "While in that location's always a risk of unintended escalation, historical examples like Vietnam, Afghanistan (1980s), Afghanistan once again (postal service-2001), and Syria bear witness that wars can be fought 'inside bounds.'"

President Biden meets NATO allies in Poland on March 25 as they coordinate reaction to Russia's war in Ukraine.

Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images

If the United States and NATO heed the phone call of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to impose a so-called "no-fly zone" over Ukrainian skies, the situation changes dramatically. No-fly zones are commitments to patrol and, if necessary, shoot down military shipping that fly in the alleged area, generally for the purpose of protecting civilians. In Ukraine, that would mean the Usa and its NATO allies sending in jets to patrol Ukraine'south skies — and being willing to shoot down any Russian planes that enter protected airspace. From at that place, the risks of a nuclear conflict become terrifyingly high.

Russia recognizes its inferiority to NATO in conventional terms; its military doctrine has long envisioned the use of nuclear weapons in a war with the Western alliance. In his speech declaring war on Ukraine, Putin all but openly vowed that whatsoever international intervention in the conflict would trigger nuclear retaliation.

"To anyone who would consider interfering from the exterior: If you practice, you will confront consequences greater than any you have faced in history," the Russian president said. "I hope you hear me."

The Biden administration is taking these threats seriously. Much as the Kremlin hasn't struck NATO supply missions to Ukraine, the White Business firm has flatly rejected a no-fly zone or any other kind of straight armed forces intervention.

"We will not fight a state of war confronting Russian federation in Ukraine," Biden said on March 11. "Direct disharmonize between NATO and Russia is Earth War III, something nosotros must strive to prevent."

This does not mean the hazard of a wider war is zero. Accidents happen, and countries can be dragged into war against their leaders' best judgment. Political positions and risk calculi tin can besides change: If Russia starts losing badly and uses smaller nukes on Ukrainian forces (chosen "tactical" nuclear weapons), Biden would likely experience the demand to reply in some fairly aggressive manner. Much depends on Washington and Moscow continuing to show a certain level of restraint.

9) How could the war end?

Wars do not typically end with the full defeat of ane side or the other. More commonly, there's some kind of negotiated settlement — either a ceasefire or more than permanent peace treaty — where the 2 sides agree to end fighting under a set of mutually agreeable terms.

It is possible that the Ukraine disharmonize turns out to be an exception: that Russian morale collapses completely, leading to utter battlefield defeat, or that Russia inflicts so much pain that Kyiv collapses. But most analysts believe that neither of these is especially likely given the mode the war has played out to date.

"No matter how much military firepower they pour into it, [the Russians] are not going to be able to achieve regime modify or some of their maximalist aims," Kofman, of the CNA think tank, declares.

A negotiated settlement is the most likely manner the conflict ends. Peace negotiations between the two sides are ongoing, and some reporting suggests they're begetting fruit. On March 28, the Financial Times reported significant progress on a draft agreement covering problems ranging from Ukrainian NATO membership to the "de-Nazification" of Ukraine. The adjacent twenty-four hours, Russian federation pledged to subtract its employ of force in Ukraine's north as a sign of its delivery to the talks.

American officials, though, have been publicly skeptical of Russia's seriousness in the talks. Even if Moscow is committed to reaching a settlement, the devil is always in the details with these sorts of things — and there are lots of barriers continuing in the way of a successful resolution.

Ukrainian evacuees stand in line as they wait for further send at the Medyka border crossing near the Ukrainian-Smoothen border on March 29.

Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP via Getty Images

Take NATO. The Russians want a simple pledge that Ukraine will remain "neutral" — staying out of foreign security blocs. The current draft agreement, per the Financial Times, does preclude Ukrainian NATO membership, but it permits Ukraine to join the EU. It also commits at least 11 countries, including the United States and People's republic of china, to coming to Ukraine's assistance if it is attacked again. This would put Ukraine on a far stronger security basis than it had earlier the war — a victory for Kyiv and defeat for Moscow, one that Putin may ultimately conclude is unacceptable.

Another thorny upshot — perhaps the thorniest — is the status of Crimea and the two breakaway Russian-supported republics in eastern Ukraine. The Russians desire Ukrainian recognition of its annexation of Crimea and the independence of the Donetsk and Luhansk regions; Ukraine claims all three as office of its territory. Some compromise is imaginable hither — an internationally monitored plebiscite in each territory, perchance — but what that would look similar is non obvious.

The resolution of these bug volition likely depend quite a fleck on the war's progress. The more each side believes it has a decent hazard to better its battlefield position and gain leverage in negotiations, the less reason either will accept to make concessions to the other in the name of ending the fighting.

And fifty-fifty if they do somehow come up to an agreement, it may not end up holding.

On the Ukrainian side, ultra-nationalist militias could work to undermine any agreement with Russian federation that they believe gives away as well much, every bit they threatened during pre-war negotiations aimed at preventing the Russian invasion.

On the Russian side, an agreement is simply equally good equally Putin'south discussion. Even if it contains rigorous provisions designed to raise the costs of hereafter assailment, like international peacekeepers, that may non concur him back from breaking the agreement.

This invasion did, later on all, offset with him launching an invasion that seemed bound to hurt Russia in the long run. Putin dragged the world into this mess; when and how it gets out of information technology depends just equally heavily on his decisions.

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Source: https://www.vox.com/22989379/russia-ukraine-war-putin-zelenskyy-us-nato-explainer-questions

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