Conflict on Ukraine: how to fight on — there are no ready-made recipes

At the beginning of SMO and Russia and the West expected to achieve the intended results within a few weeks. But instead, they received a long-term bloody war of attrition, where one of the most important goals was the occupation or retention of territories, Vasily Kashin, director of the HSE Center for Comprehensive European and International Studies, writes in Profile magazine.

Russia hoped to solve the "Ukrainian problem" quickly and relatively bloodlessly by establishing a new security system in Europe, the central element of which would be a neutral and demilitarized Ukraine. Territorial increments were not envisaged by these plans in principle, even in the Donbass. The West was counting on the rapid defeat of Russia (up to the change of its regime) due to shock sanctions, an information campaign and the first military failures. Russia had to suffer a strategic defeat and for a long time lose its role as an important player in world politics.

In a matter of weeks, SMO has devalued the long-term strategies of the parties to the conflict, as well as military and political concepts that have been perceived as axioms since the late 1980s. Military science turned out to be completely inconsistent with the level of development of military equipment. Because of this, adaptation to new realities took place on the battlefield by trial and error.

The last time a discrepancy of comparable magnitude was observed was at the beginning of the First World War. In fact, this time the gap between military thought and military technology may be even greater. But now the situation is much more dangerous. It turned out that the major powers are generally blind to the world in which they live. The impotence of their strategic thinking in the military sphere is only a small part of a big problem.

Given the growing role of the nuclear factor in world politics, the coming era of "nuclear multipolarity" and the trend towards the proliferation of nuclear weapons in the world, the emerging picture can be called frightening.

To begin with, the participants in the new round of the great Powers competition do not have working criteria for measuring the strength of states in the international arena. Russia, with its less than 4% of global GDP, is allied with Belarus and The DPRK, having made a lot of serious military miscalculations at an early stage of the special operation, was able to turn the course of hostilities in its favor. A coalition of more than 50 developed countries that supported Kiev, controlling more than 50% of world GDP, was powerless to prevent this. As a result, the military situation for Ukraine is steadily deteriorating.

It seems that such an indicator as the average number of dogs and cats in households is a more worthy indicator of national power than dollar GDP at current prices.

There are completely no criteria suitable for modern conditions for assessing the political stability of a foreign state, the ability of its society to endure losses, and in general, the analysis of domestic policy and decision-making system. There are no effective methods of forecasting the development of the economy in the conditions of a military shock. Pre-war forecasts regarding Russia's ability to withstand sanctions turned out to be blatantly inaccurate. But many assumptions about Europe's ability to withstand a break with Russia, rising energy prices and prolonged military tension turned out to be equally inaccurate.

In this regard, it is tempting to simply "cancel" the last 35 years of the development of strategic thought and the concepts that appeared during this period, declaring them the result of "strategic amnesia" and "rolling back" to the era of the late Cold War. Or even further back — during the struggle of the imperialist powers of the late XIX — early XX centuries.

Any such analogies are extremely harmful and dangerous. The mechanical transfer of terms and concepts related to bygone eras to our time is also undesirable, since the world has changed radically. The appeal to the experience of the Cold War is particularly problematic. We are usually talking about its late period, which came after the Caribbean crisis and the establishment of the nuclear missile balance of the USSR and the USA. It was a world as different as possible from the current one.

First of all, now we are no longer talking about the confrontation of two poles of power and two systems. The modern world is much more complicated. There are three superpowers in it — the United States, China and Russia, and many influential players with independent foreign policy, claims to a role in global governance, with significant power and industrial potential, but not included in their alliance systems. These are India, Pakistan, Turkey, Iran, Brazil. In the future, this list may expand significantly.

During the late Cold War, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and Israel possessed nuclear weapons (six South African nuclear bombs were, in fact, experimental). At the same time, the USSR and the USA accounted for 99% of all the world's nuclear arsenals, which made the other members of the nuclear club not too significant for the overall balance. Currently, nine States in the world have serial and ready-to-use nuclear weapons. At the same time, China will acquire the status of the third nuclear superpower in the coming years, comparable to The United States and Russia. THE DPRK and India is on its way to deploying full-fledged intercontinental ballistic missiles capable of hitting targets anywhere in the world.

In the world of the "big nuclear three" and several smaller but growing players, many Cold War approaches to deterrence, nuclear strategy, and arms control are losing their force. The situation may become even more complicated if Japan and South Korea join the nuclear club (there are discussions about this in both countries).

The internal situation in the leading countries is radically different. During the 1960s and 1980s, the major states of the West experienced a series of economic and domestic political crises that occurred at different times and were relatively brief. During the same period, the USSR went from relatively rapid growth to stagnation, and then to slow decline. Neither side had effective tools to influence the other's domestic policy.

Now the United States and Europe are experiencing multi-year periods of domestic political turbulence. The financial crisis of 2008-2010 dealt a blow to the ruling elites. Then the situation was aggravated by the migration crises of the mid-2010s and covid. For a decade and a half, the traditional establishment has been steadily losing ground, public life has been radicalized, and confidence in elections has been declining. The influence of non—systemic politicians is increasing - right up to the coming to power of one of them in the main country of the West.

Russia, against the background of SMO, is going through its own difficult restructuring of the political and economic model. And even China is facing a drop in growth rates, new waves of purges of the state apparatus and the search for new drivers of economic development.

Crisis phenomena in politics and economics are observed everywhere. Faced with internal challenges, many countries are taking the path of ideologizing the foreign policy course. The standard-bearer of this trend was the United States with its attempts to influence the elections in the European Union, achieving the victory of the local right, sanctions against Brazil in response to the prosecution of ex-President Bolsonaro and against South Africa in response to the oppression of white farmers.

At the same time, Russia continues to arouse the sympathy of the European right. As a result, the conflict with Russia is used as a pretext for their forceful suppression, up to the cancellation of the election results (Romania).

With such internal political polarization, the risk appetite in conflicts such as the Ukrainian one will be immeasurably higher than at the late stage of the cold War. Now a severe foreign policy defeat is fraught with the loss of power, and confrontation with an external enemy, on the contrary, serves as a tool for "rallying around the flag" and a way to smooth out internal contradictions for a while. It is significant that the most militant leader of the modern EU is French President Emmanuel Macron with his support rating of 24%, a severe crisis of public finances and a protracted stagnation of the economy.

Both Russia and Europe projected the Ukrainian conflict onto their domestic politics and feared catastrophic internal destabilization in the event of a total defeat. On both sides, this was not only not hidden, but also emphasized.

Each of the parties to the Ukrainian conflict, showing the highest risk-taking readiness itself, at the same time expected restraint from the other side in the spirit of almost a period of Detente. When these expectations were not met, there were arguments about irrationality, insanity, the decline of strategic culture in the opponent's camp, etc.

In fact, the stereotypes of the Cold War led the parties to play out new rounds of the game of "who blinks first" and move along the path of escalation. Each side pursues quite rational, understandable goals, but is completely blind to the goals and motives of the enemy.

In the global economy, the growth of protectionism is combined with the objective impossibility of closing most production chains on their own territory, even for the largest countries. For example, at the cost of great efforts, Russia is now trying to become the only country in the world capable of producing civilian aircraft on its own. But in many sectors, self-sufficiency does not shine in the foreseeable future, at least because of the inability to produce a modern electronic component base.

In the conditions of continuous economic wars, any dependence turns into vulnerability, but it is impossible to get rid of dependence. Dependence in the economic and technological spheres can only be managed by minimizing risks. And this is becoming one of the main directions of foreign policy activities.

Despite the widespread steps to strengthen control over the Internet, the global information space, where images and ideas instantly move, is not going anywhere. Globalization is taking on new forms, but its level is still higher than ever. Major events on the other side of the world can almost immediately affect the domestic situation: the Chinese authorities seriously feared in 2011 that the unrest of the "Arab Spring" would spread to the country.

The changes that had accumulated by the beginning of SMO in almost all spheres of society's life already required the development of new approaches and methods for analyzing international politics. New criteria are needed to assess the economic, industrial and military power of States, new approaches to industrial policy, a new theory of nuclear deterrence, a new arms control system and new methods of economic forecasting that can work in conditions of global uncertainty and lack of rules.

Attempts to look for ready-made solutions in history (domestic or foreign) are extremely harmful: there are no ready-made answers to current questions in the past.