What Conflicts Continue as Russia Moves to Dominate Again

A woman walks outside a maternity hospital that was damaged by shelling in Mariupol, Ukraine, March 9, 2022.

Evgeniy Maloletka/AP

9 large questions about Russia's war in Ukraine, answered

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

By Mar 30, 2022, 6:30am EDT

The Russian state of war in Ukraine has proven itself to be one of the nearly consequential political events of our time — and one of the about confusing.

From the outset, Russia's decision to invade was hard to sympathise; it seemed at odds with what most experts saw every bit Russian federation's strategic interests. As 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 world, from Washington to Berlin to Beijing, global powers have reacted in striking and even historically unprecedented fashion.

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

1) Why did Russia invade Ukraine?

In a televised speech announcing Russia'south "special military functioning" in Ukraine on February 24, Russian President Vladimir Putin said the invasion was designed to finish a "genocide" perpetrated by "the Kyiv regime" — and ultimately to achieve "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: authorities alter ("de-Nazification") and the elimination of Ukraine's status equally a sovereign state outside of Russian command ("demilitarization"). Why he would want to practice this is a more than complex story, one that emerges out of the very long arc of Russian-Ukrainian relations.

Ukraine and Russia have 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 non make them historically identical, as Putin has repeatedly claimed in his public rhetoric. Since the rise of the modern Ukrainian national motion in the mid- to late-19th century, Russian dominion in Ukraine — in both the czarist and Soviet periods — increasingly came to resemble that of an majestic power governing an unwilling colony.

Russian majestic rule concluded in 1991 when 92 per centum of Ukrainians voted in a national referendum to secede from the decomposable Soviet Union. Nigh immediately later, political scientists and regional experts began alert 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 disharmonize between the new neighbors.

It 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 Feb 22, 2014. V days later, the Russian military swiftly seized command of Crimea and declared it Russian territory, a brazenly illegal motility that a bulk of Crimeans yet seemed to welcome. Pro-Russia protests in Russian-speaking eastern Ukraine gave way to a violent rebellion — ane stoked and armed by the Kremlin, and backed past disguised Russian troops.

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

Anatoliy Stephanov/AFP via Getty Images

The Ukrainian uprising confronting Yanukovych — chosen the "Euromaidan" movement because they were pro-Eu protests that most prominently took identify in Kyiv'southward Maidan square — represented to Russia a threat not just to its influence over Ukraine merely to the very survival of Putin's authorities. 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-Cold War expansions to the east.

"We understand what is happening; we understand that [the protests] were aimed against Ukraine and Russia and against Eurasian integration," he said in a March 2014 speech communication on the annexation of Crimea. "With Ukraine, our Western partners accept crossed the line."

Beneath this rhetoric, according to experts on Russia, lies a deeper unstated fear: 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 — one that the United States might eventually try to covertly export to Moscow. This was a cardinal part of his thinking in 2014, and information technology remains and so today.

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

Beginning in March 2021, Russian forces began deploying to the Ukrainian border in larger and larger numbers. Putin'due south nationalist rhetoric became more aggressive: In July 2021, the Russian president published a five,000-give-and-take essay arguing that Ukrainian nationalism was a fiction, that the country was historically ever part of Russia, and that a pro-Western Ukraine posed an existential threat to the Russian nation.

"The formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state, aggressive towards Russia, is comparable in its consequences to the utilize of weapons of mass devastation confronting u.s.a.," every bit he put it in his 2021 essay.

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

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

2) Who is winning the war?

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

Just that'southward not how things have played out. A month into the invasion, Ukrainians even so hold Kyiv. Russia has made some gains, especially in the east and due south, but the consensus view among military experts is that Ukraine'southward defenses have held stoutly — to the betoken where Ukrainians accept 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 programme reportedly operated under the assumption that a swift march on Kyiv would meet only token resistance. Putin "actually really idea this would exist a 'special armed forces operation': They would be washed in a few days, and it wouldn't exist a real war," says Michael Kofman, an skillful on the Russian military at the CNA retrieve tank.

This program savage apart within the first 48 hours of the war when early on operations similar an airborne attack on the Hostomel drome concluded 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's major cities — was more effective (and more brutal). The Russians made some inroads into Ukrainian territory, specially in the south, where they have laid siege to Mariupol and taken Kherson and Melitopol.

Assessed territory in Ukraine controlled by Russian military machine (in red).

Institute for the Study of War

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

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

Ukrainian forces have bogged down Russian units in towns and smaller cities; street-to-street combat favors defenders who can use their superior knowledge of the city's geography to hibernate and deport 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 constructive. 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 armed services all only openly recognized this reality in a late March briefing, in which height generals implausibly claimed they never intended to take Kyiv and were always 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 existence defeated, in other words," armed services scholar Frederick Kagan wrote in a March 22 cursory for the Establish for the Study of State of war (ISW) recollect tank.

Currently, Ukrainian forces are on the offensive. They have pushed the Russians further from Kyiv, with some reports suggesting they accept 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.

It'south difficult to get accurate information in a war zone, merely ane of the more authoritative estimates of Russian war dead — from the US Defense Section — concludes that over seven,000 Russian soldiers take been killed in the first three weeks of fighting, a effigy about three times as large as the total US service members dead in all 20 years of fighting in Transitional islamic state of afghanistan. A split NATO judge puts that at the low end, estimating between vii,000 and 15,000 Russians killed in activity and as many as 40,000 total losses (including injuries, captures, and desertions). Seven Russian generals take been reported killed in the fighting, and materiel losses — ranging from armor to aircraft — take been enormous. (Russia puts its death toll at more than 1,300 soldiers, which is most certainly a significant undercount.)

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

Information technology does, even so, mean that what Russia is doing right now hasn't worked.

"If the point is just to wreak havoc, and so they're doing fine. Only if the betoken is to wreak havoc and thus accelerate farther — exist able to hold more territory — they're not doing fine," says Olga Oliker, the program director for Europe and Central Asia at the International Crisis Grouping.

3) Why is Russian federation's military performing so poorly?

Russian federation's invasion has gone amiss for two basic reasons: Its military wasn't ready to fight a war like this, and the Ukrainians accept put up a much stronger defense than anyone expected.

Russian federation's problems begin with Putin'southward unrealistic invasion plan. Simply even later the Russian high control adjusted its strategy, other flaws in the army remained.

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

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

Part of the reason is a lack of sufficient grooming. Per Kofman, the Russian military simply "wasn't organized for this kind of war" — significant, the conquest of Europe'due south 2nd-largest country by area. Another part of information technology is abuse in the Russian procurement system. Graft in Russia is less a problems in its political organisation than a feature; ane way the Kremlin maintains the loyalty of its elite is by allowing them to turn a profit off of government activity. Military procurement is no exception to this pattern of widespread abuse, and it has led to troops having substandard access to vital supplies.

The same lack of preparation has plagued Russia's air forcefulness. Despite outnumbering the Ukrainian air forcefulness by roughly ten times, the Russians have failed to plant air superiority: Ukraine'due south planes are still flying and its air defenses generally remain in place.

Perhaps most importantly, close observers of the state of war believe Russians are suffering from poor morale. Because Putin'south plan to invade Ukraine was kept secret from the vast bulk of Russians, the government had a limited ability to lay a propaganda groundwork that would become their soldiers motivated to fight. The current Russian force has petty sense of what they're fighting for or why — and are waging war against a country with which they have religious, ethnic, historical, and potentially fifty-fifty familial ties. In a military that has long had systemic morale problems, that's a recipe for battlefield disaster.

"Russian morale was incredibly low Earlier the war broke out. Brutal hazing in the military, second-class (or worse) status by its conscript soldiers, ethnic divisions, corruption, y'all name it: the Russian Army was not prepared to fight this war," Jason Lyall, a Dartmouth political scientist who studies morale, explains via email. "Loftier rates of abandoned or captured equipment, reports of sabotaged equipment, and big numbers of soldiers deserting (or simply camping out in the woods) are all products of low morale."

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy delivers a speech 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 be starker. They are defending their homes and their families from an unprovoked invasion, led by a charismatic leader who has made a personal stand in Kyiv. Ukrainian loftier morale is a key reason, in addition to advanced Western armaments, that the defenders have dramatically outperformed expectations.

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

Again, none of this volition necessarily remain the case throughout the war. Morale can shift with battlefield developments. And fifty-fifty if Russian morale remains low, information technology's still possible for them to win — though they're more likely to do so in a brutally ugly fashion.

four) What has the war meant for ordinary Ukrainians?

As the fighting has dragged on, Russia has gravitated toward tactics that, by design, hurt civilians. Nearly notably, Russia has attempted to lay siege to Ukraine's cities, cutting off supply and escape routes while bombarding them with artillery. The purpose of the strategy is to article of clothing downwards the Ukrainian defenders' willingness to fight, including by inflicting mass hurting on the civilian 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 Un High Commissioner for Refugees, more three.eight million Ukrainians fled the state between February 24 and March 27. That's about viii.viii percent of Ukraine'due south total population — in proportional terms, the rough equivalent of the entire population of Texas beingness forced to flee the United States.

Another point of comparison: In 2015, four years into the Syrian ceremonious war and the height of the global refugee crunch, there were a trivial more than than 4 one thousand thousand Syrian refugees living in nearby countries. The Ukraine war has produced a similarly sized exodus in just a month, leading to truly massive refugee flows to its European neighbors. Poland, the primary destination of Ukrainian refugees, is currently housing over two.three million Ukrainians, a figure larger than the entire population of Warsaw, its uppercase and largest urban center.

YouYou Zhou and Christina Animashaun for Vox

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

The UN cess does not blame one side or the other for these deaths, merely does annotation that "most of the civilian casualties recorded were acquired by the use of explosive weapons with a wide bear on expanse, 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; Homo Rights Watch has announced that in that location are "early signs of war crimes" being committed by Russian soldiers in these kinds of attacks, and President Joe Biden has personally labeled Putin a "war criminal."

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

In mid-March, three Associated Printing journalists — the concluding international reporters in the city before they too were evacuated — managed to file a dispatch describing life on the ground. They reported a death total of 2,500 but cautioned that "many bodies tin can't be counted considering of the endless shelling." The situation is impossibly dire:

Airstrikes and shells have hit the maternity hospital, the burn down section, homes, a church, a field outside a school. For the estimated hundreds of thousands who remain, there is quite simply nowhere to go. The surrounding roads are mined and the port blocked. Food is running out, and the Russians have stopped humanitarian attempts to bring it in. Electricity is mostly gone and water is thin, with residents melting snow to drinkable. Some parents have even left their newborns at the hospital, perhaps hoping to give them a run a risk at life in the ane place with decent electricity and water.

The battlefield failures of the Russian military have raised questions near its competence in hard block-to-block fighting; Farley, the Kentucky professor, says, "This Russian ground forces does not look like it can conduct serious [urban warfare]." As a result, taking Ukrainian cities means besieging them — starving them out, destroying their will to fight, and simply moving into the city proper after its population is unwilling to resist or outright incapable of putting upwards a fight.

v) What do Russians think about the war?

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

But despite this opacity, skillful Russian federation watchers have adult a broad idea of what's going on there. The state of war has stirred up some opposition and anti-Putin sentiment, only it has been confined to a minority who are unlikely to change Putin'southward mind, let alone topple him.

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

"It 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.

In that location have 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 state of war began.

Could these eruptions of antiwar sentiment at the aristocracy 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 with counterintelligence officers to splitting upwardly the state security services into different groups led by trusted allies — that make information technology quite hard for anyone in his government 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 certain he's not vulnerable," says Adam Casey, a postdoctoral young man at the University of Michigan who studies the history of coups in Russian federation and the old communist bloc.

Similarly, turning the antiwar protests into a full-blown influential motion is a very tall order.

"It is difficult to organize sustained collective protest in Russia," notes Erica Chenoweth, a political scientist at Harvard who studies protest movements. "Putin'due south regime has criminalized many forms of protests, and has shut down or restricted the activities of groups, movements, and media outlets perceived to exist in opposition or associated with the West."

Underpinning it all is tight government control of the data environment. Near Russians get their news from government-run media, which has been serving up a steady diet of pro-state of war content. Many of them appear to genuinely believe what they hear: One independent opinion poll plant that 58 percentage of Russians supported the war to at to the lowest degree some degree.

Prior to the war, Putin also appeared to be a genuinely popular figure in Russia. The aristocracy depend on him for their position and fortune; many citizens see him equally the man who saved Russian federation from the anarchy of the immediate mail service-Communist period. A disastrous war might finish up changing that, just the odds that even a sustained drib in his support translates into a coup or revolution remain low indeed.

6) What is the United states of america role in the conflict?

The state of war remains, for the moment, a conflict between Ukraine and Russian federation. Merely the U.s.a. is the nearly important third party, using a number of powerful tools — curt of direct armed forces intervention — to assist the Ukrainian cause.

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

Many of these countries, wary of once again being put nether the Russian boot, clamored to join the alliance, which commits all involved countries to defend any member-state in the event of an attack. In 2008, NATO officially announced that Georgia and Ukraine — two former Soviet republics right on Russian federation's doorstep — "will go members of NATO" at an unspecified future engagement. This infuriated the Russians, who saw NATO expansion as a direct threat to their own security.

There is no incertitude that NATO expansion helped create some of the background conditions nether which the current disharmonize became thinkable, generally pushing Putin's foreign policy in a more anti-Western direction. Some experts see it every bit one of the fundamental causes of his determination to assault Ukraine — just others strongly disagree, noting that NATO membership for Ukraine was already basically off the table before the war and that Russian federation'south declared war aims went far beyond simply blocking Ukraine'due south NATO bid.

"NATO expansion was deeply unpopular in Russia. [But] Putin did not invade considering of NATO expansion," says Yoshiko Herrera, a Russian federation expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Regardless of where one falls on that fence, US policy during the conflict has been exceptionally clear: support the Ukrainians with massive amounts of armed services assistance while putting pressure on Putin to back down by organizing an unprecedented array of international economic sanctions.

Antiwar activists march during a protest against the Russian invasion of Ukraine in Times Square, New York City, on March 26.

Jimin Kim/VIEWpress via Getty Images

On the armed forces side, weapons systems manufactured and provided past the US and Europe have played a vital part in blunting Russian federation'southward accelerate. The Javelin anti-tank missile organization, for instance, is a lightweight American-made launcher that allows 1 or two infantry soldiers to take out a tank. Javelins have given the outgunned Ukrainians a fighting adventure against Russian armor, becoming a popular symbol in the process.

Sanctions have proven similarly devastating in the economic realm.

The international punishments take been extremely broad, ranging from removing key Russian banks from the SWIFT global transaction system to a U.s. ban on Russian oil imports to restrictions on doing business with particular members of the Russian elite. Freezing the avails of Russia's central bank has proven to be a particularly damaging tool, wrecking Russia's power to deal with the collapse in the value of the ruble, its currency. As a result, the Russian economy is projected to contract by 15 percent this year; mass unemployment looms.

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

But the MiG-29 incident is more than the exception than it is the rule. On the whole, the United States has been strikingly willing to take aggressive steps to punish Moscow and aid Kyiv'south war try.

7) How is the rest of the globe responding to Russia's deportment?

On the surface, the world appears to be fairly united behind the Ukrainian cause. The UN General Assembly passed a resolution condemning the Russian invasion by a whopping 141-five margin (with 35 abstentions). Merely the United nations vote conceals a great deal of disagreement, especially amidst the world'due south largest and virtually influential countries — divergences that don't ever fall neatly along republic-versus-autocracy lines.

The most aggressive anti-Russian and pro-Ukrainian positions can, mayhap unsurprisingly, be found in Europe and the broader West. Eu and NATO members, with the partial exceptions of Hungary and Turkey, have strongly supported the Ukrainian war effort and implemented punishing sanctions on Russia (a major trading partner). Information technology's the strongest show of European unity since the Cold State of war, one that many observers see equally a sign that Putin's invasion has already backfired.

Federal republic of germany, which has important trade ties with Russia and a postal service-Globe State of war II tradition of pacifism, is perchance the virtually striking case. Near overnight, the Russian invasion convinced center-left Chancellor Olaf Scholz to support rearmament, introducing a proposal to more than triple Germany's defense budget that'southward widely backed by the German public.

"It's really revolutionary," Sophia Besch, a Berlin-based senior research young man at the Center for European Reform, told my colleague Jen Kirby. "Scholz, in his spoken communication, did abroad with and overturned so many of what we thought were certainties of German language defense policy."

Thousands of people accept part in an antiwar demonstration in Dusseldorf, Frg, on March 5.

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 point to Russian federation waking a sleeping giant — of creating a powerful military and economic enemy in the heart of the European continent.

Prc, past contrast, has been the most pro-Russia of the major global powers.

The 2 countries, jump by shared animus toward a The states-dominated world order, have grown increasingly shut in recent years. Chinese propaganda has largely toed the Russian line on the Ukraine war. US intelligence, which has been remarkably accurate during the crisis, believes that Russia has requested military and financial assist from Beijing — which hasn't been provided yet just may well be forthcoming.

That said, it'south possible to overstate the degree to which China has taken the Russian side. Beijing has a stiff stated commitment to country sovereignty — the bedrock of its position on Taiwan is that the island is actually Chinese territory — which makes a full-throated bankroll 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 conflict.

Most other countries effectually the earth fall somewhere on the spectrum between the West and People's republic of china. Outside of Europe, only a handful of mostly pro-American states — like South Korea, Nihon, and Australia — take joined the sanctions authorities. The majority of countries in Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America do not support the invasion, only won't exercise very much to punish Russian federation for it either.

Bharat is perhaps the near interesting state in this category. A rising Asian commonwealth that has violently clashed with Cathay in the very contempo past, information technology has good reasons to present itself as an American partner in the defence force of freedom. Yet Bharat likewise depends heavily on Russian-made weapons for its own defense force and hopes to employ its human relationship with Russia to limit the Moscow-Beijing partnership. Information technology'south besides worth noting that Bharat'southward prime minister, Narendra Modi, has potent autocratic inclinations.

The result of all of this is a balancing deed reminiscent of Bharat'south Common cold War approach of "non-alignment": refusing to side with either the Russian or American positions while attempting to maintain decent relations with both. Republic of india'southward perceptions of its strategic interests, more than ideological views nearly democracy, announced to be shaping its response to the war — as seems to be the case with quite a few countries effectually the world.

viii) Could this turn into World War III?

The bones, scary answer to this question is yes: The invasion of Ukraine has put us at the greatest risk of a NATO-Russia state of war in decades.

The somewhat more comforting and nuanced answer is that the accented risk remains relatively low so long as at that place is no directly NATO involvement in the conflict, which the Biden administration has repeatedly ruled out. Though Biden said "this human [Putin] cannot remain in power" in a late March speech, both White Business firm officials and the president himself stressed afterwards that the US policy was not regime change in Moscow.

"Things are stable in a nuclear sense correct now," says Jeffrey Lewis, an expert on nuclear weapons at the Middlebury Found of International Studies. "The infinitesimal NATO gets involved, the telescopic of the war widens."

In theory, Usa and NATO military aid to Ukraine could open the door to escalation: Russian federation could attack a military depot in Poland containing weapons leap for Ukraine, for instance. Merely in practice, information technology'southward unlikely: The Russians don't appear to want a wider war with NATO that risks nuclear escalation, and then have avoided cross-edge strikes even when it might destroy supply shipments bound for Ukraine.

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

"States oft cooperate to keep limits on their wars even as they fight one some other clandestinely," Lyall, the Dartmouth professor, tells me. "While at that place's always a risk of unintended escalation, historical examples similar Vietnam, Afghanistan (1980s), Afghanistan again (post-2001), and Syrian arab republic show that wars can be fought 'within 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 mind the call of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy to impose a then-called "no-fly zone" over Ukrainian skies, the situation changes dramatically. No-fly zones are commitments to patrol and, if necessary, shoot down armed services aircraft that fly in the declared expanse, generally for the purpose of protecting civilians. In Ukraine, that would mean the United states of america and its NATO allies sending in jets to patrol Ukraine's skies — and being willing to shoot downward whatsoever Russian planes that enter protected airspace. From there, the risks of a nuclear conflict become terrifyingly loftier.

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 brotherhood. In his speech declaring war on Ukraine, Putin all simply openly vowed that whatsoever international intervention in the disharmonize would trigger nuclear retaliation.

"To anyone who would consider interfering from the outside: If you do, yous volition face consequences greater than any you have faced in history," the Russian president said. "I promise you hear me."

The Biden administration is taking these threats seriously. Much every bit the Kremlin hasn't struck NATO supply missions to Ukraine, the White House has flatly rejected a no-fly zone or any other kind of direct military intervention.

"We will not fight a state of war against Russia in Ukraine," Biden said on March eleven. "Direct conflict between NATO and Russia is Earth War III, something we must strive to prevent."

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

9) How could the war end?

Wars do non typically end with the total defeat of one side or the other. More commonly, there's some kind of negotiated settlement — either a ceasefire or more permanent peace treaty — where the two sides concord to stop fighting nether a fix of mutually agreeable terms.

It is possible that the Ukraine conflict turns out to be an exception: that Russian morale collapses completely, leading to utter battlefield defeat, or that Russian federation inflicts so much pain that Kyiv collapses. But about analysts believe that neither of these is specially likely given the way the war has played out to engagement.

"No affair how much war machine firepower they pour into it, [the Russians] are not going to be able to achieve government change or some of their maximalist aims," Kofman, of the CNA remember tank, declares.

A negotiated settlement is the nearly likely way the disharmonize 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 roofing issues ranging from Ukrainian NATO membership to the "de-Nazification" of Ukraine. The adjacent twenty-four hours, Russia pledged to decrease its employ of force in Ukraine'due south 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 standing in the way of a successful resolution.

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

Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP via Getty Images

Accept NATO. The Russians want a elementary pledge that Ukraine will remain "neutral" — staying out of foreign security blocs. The electric current draft agreement, per the Fiscal Times, does preclude Ukrainian NATO membership, but information technology permits Ukraine to join the EU. It likewise commits at least 11 countries, including the United states and China, to coming to Ukraine's aid if it is attacked again. This would put Ukraine on a far stronger security footing than it had earlier the state of war — a victory for Kyiv and defeat for Moscow, ane that Putin may ultimately conclude is unacceptable.

Some other thorny issue — peradventure the thorniest — is the status of Crimea and the two breakaway Russian-supported republics in eastern Ukraine. The Russians want 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 here — an internationally monitored referendum in each territory, perhaps — merely what that would look similar is not obvious.

The resolution of these issues will probable depend quite a fleck on the war's progress. The more each side believes information technology has a decent chance to improve its battlefield position and gain leverage in negotiations, the less reason either will have to make concessions to the other in the name of ending the fighting.

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

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

On the Russian side, an understanding is only as proficient as Putin's word. Even if it contains rigorous provisions designed to raise the costs of hereafter aggression, similar international peacekeepers, that may not hold him back from breaking the understanding.

This invasion did, afterward all, start 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 it depends only as 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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