How Putin has unleashed the most globalized war since 1945 | International

On February 24, 2022, before dawn broke over Kyiv and Moscow, Vladimir Putin announced in a televised speech that a full-scale invasion of Ukraine had been launched in what the Russian president called a “special military operation.” Tens of thousands of Russian troops swept into the neighboring country from the north, east and south; dozens of missiles hit various targets. The war, a year later, remains confined to the territory of one country with two combatant nations. However, there are military, economic and geopolitical reasons to argue that the Ukraine war holds the largest global significance of any conflict since 1945.

“It is not a world war, but it is a globalized war,” the EU’s High Representative for Foreign Policy and Security, Josep Borrell, said during a conversation with EL PAÍS last week at the Munich Security Conference. “There has not been a more globalized one since 1945, with so many people who have openly taken sides. At meetings of the Ukraine support group, there are more than 50 countries present. When 50 countries back one side, it is a globalized war.” Meanwhile, Kyiv’s Western allies point out that countries such as Iran and North Korea are providing Russia with military aid.

There have, of course, been terrible conflicts of huge international scope since the end of the Second World War: The Korean War, with the active involvement of both the US (and military aid from others) and China (with Soviet support), and a profound strategic and ideological significance; the Vietnam War, another grueling conflict involving the US and with China heavily involved, which had cultural and political ramifications for many countries; and more recently the Gulf, Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria wars, involving many countries and causing enormous human suffering and huge political consequences.

But there is an argument that none meets the same set of global characteristics as the current war in Ukraine, not only because of the number of countries involved, but because of its ratios, its context and its consequences. “This war is the attempt of a revisionist power – Russia – to reverse the international order,” says Mira Milosevich-Juaristi, senior researcher for Russia, Eurasia and the Balkans at the Elcano Royal Institute in Madrid. “We are at a tipping point where revisionist powers believe they have a chance to build a safer world for autocracies, and Ukraine is a theater of all these tectonic movements. In my opinion, there has been no war since 1945 with the same weight of global consequences that this one carries,” she says.

“It is a war with global impact, beyond doubt,” says Sergey Radchenko, a professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies and an expert on the Cold War and Russian and Chinese foreign policy, who points to some distinguishing features between Ukraine and other major wars in recent decades.

“The war in Syria involves major countries and has caused terrible suffering, but it is clearly smaller in scale than Ukraine. It’s a local war with regional impact,” he says. “A large number of countries were involved in the Gulf, but the political context was very different; it had limited objectives, was brief and did not have as many consequences. Afghanistan and Vietnam were very prolonged but largely of a counterinsurgency character, not conventional conflicts like this one,” Radchenko continues. The Iraq war caused a huge international political storm“ and strong consequences in the Muslim world,” the professor points out, but it did not involve a nuclear power facing an enemy supported and armed by an alliance of dozens of other countries.

The Korean War is in many ways the most comparable to Ukraine. It was a brutal conflict in a defined territory between two opposing world views, led to escalation of the Cold War and presented the prospect of conflict between democratic-capitalist and communist powers in third-party countries. There was large-scale international involvement, with several countries as active combatants, and a subsequent race to rearm. And there are those who fear – or hope – that the Ukraine war will end as the Korean conflict did, with a nation divided by a line drawn on a map.

The Korean War, though, did not affect major nerve centers of energy and food production and it did not take place in a context as globalized as Ukraine. Neither was there the backdrop of a geopolitical scenario destabilized by the spectacular rise of a new power – China – which, although not directly involved in the conflict, is an ally of one of the two sides and is closely monitoring the war’s evolution as a key part of its own future decisions in a potential contest that could be extraordinarily turbulent. The China of the 21st century will become significantly stronger than the Soviet Union of the 20th.

The war in Ukraine is therefore profoundly global for several reasons: because it represents an armed challenge to the world order by a declining power, Russia, that is forging closer ties with an emerging one, China, which in turn is also seeking a reconfiguration of balances for its own purposes.

It is a global conflict because a nuclear power has attacked a country that is defending itself with weapons provided by some 30 countries on an official basis, among them three other nuclear-armed nations, raising atomic concerns linked to a conflict without clear parallels. It is also global in scale because 40 countries have imposed an unprecedented raft of sanctions on a major power like Russia, causing turbulence in the energy and food markets coupled with rising inflation and generalized restrictive monetary policies. It is a conflagration that has also had a terrible human impact with global consequences: there are currently more than eight million registered Ukrainian refugees in 43 countries and food insecurity is growing throughout the world.

Below is a look at the first year of the invasion through the prism of its global significance.

Military dimension

The military aspect of the conflict has global dimensions. More than 50 countries are participating in the support group for Ukraine meetings held at the US military base in Ramstein, Germany. Of these, around 30 provide war materiel, as well as training and intelligence services. The list of those directly involved in support of Kyiv covers the geographical spectrum from Canada to Australia.

Military support to from these countries to Ukraine from January 2022 through January 2023 amounts to more than $60 billion, roughly equivalent to Russia’s annual defense budget for 2021. Initially, aid consisted of weapons of limited range, such as portable Javelin anti-tank weapons or Stinger anti-aircraft missiles. The West was cautious about its arms deliveries – concerned about the potential for uncontrolled retaliation by Russia – but has gradually escalated its support to include advanced weaponry such as Himars rocket systems, Patriot surface-to-air missile systems and advanced battle tanks.

On the other hand, Western governments believe that Iran and North Korea are supplying military aid to Moscow, while some media reports suggest that Belarus has also been supplying ammunition to the Kremlin. Moreover, the conflict is moving pieces on the geopolitical chessboard. Most notably there are two new candidates for NATO membership: Sweden and Finland.

Additionally, many are observing the combat performance of Russian forces and drawing their own conclusions – and not only China, which will have noted the difficulties inherent in an invasion provoking the kind of response the West has demonstrated. “India is moving away from Russia, and may be tempted to reduce its military dependence on Moscow, especially considering the poor performance of Russian weapons and systems in the Ukraine war,” says Zaki Laïdi, a professor of international relations who advises the EU’s high commissioner for foreign policy and security.

A few days ago, the Kremlin announced the suspension of its participation in the New START nuclear weapons treaty with the US, a serious blow to the already moribund architecture of arms control agreements.

Economic dimension

The economic consequences of the war carry some unique features, not least because today’s world is more interconnected than ever. Around 40 countries representing more than half of the world’s GDP have imposed a series of unprecedented sanctions on Russia, a country that is highly relevant in the global system due to its pre-eminent role in the energy and raw materials sectors, triggering a rise in prices on these markets. Food markets have also been impacted, as both Russia and Ukraine are major producers.

This has exacerbated previous tensions in global supply chains caused by the coronavirus pandemic, unleashing an inflationary wave without similar precedents in recent decades. This has forced the hand of the world’s major central banks, which have adopted restrictive monetary policies that not only affect the economies of the countries in which they are applied but have a global impact, most notably by eroding debt sustainability in the most fragile countries.

In parallel, the war in Ukraine has caused setbacks on the path to energy transition. In the short term there have been negative developments in the fight against climate change, including a return to the use of coal in some cases. But in the medium and long term, there is evidence that the conflict, together with Europe’s need to eliminate its energy dependence on Russia and its desire to gain more autonomy from hydrocarbon producers – many of them autocracies – have all contributed to greater investment in green energies.

In a broader perspective, the war has provided a wake-up call to reconsider the need for strategic autonomy across a vast spectrum. The pandemic had already triggered collective reflection, and the Russian onslaught has doubled it. Beyond decoupling from Moscow, a review of areas of Chinese dependence is also underway in the West. The White House is pushing for a major reorientation of supply chains. The EU is outlining a more surgical roadmap but is also moving in tangible ways, for example, through its plans to reduce its dependence on strategic raw materials.

Geopolitical dimension

The invasion is a challenge to a world order that the authoritarian powers perceive as created and unacceptably dominated by the United States. Shortly before the invasion, Russia and China signed a joint statement to that effect. Putin has been making reference to this viewpoint since at least 2007, when he delivered his famous speech at the Munich Security Conference, and has been taking action with the invasion of Georgia in 2008 and the Kremlin’s operations in Ukraine since 2014 and in Syria since 2015.

For its part, China has not taken any military action of its own and it is not on record as having so far provided military support to Russia. “China does not want to cross red lines that would mean breaking the flow of trade with Western countries, but it does not want Russia to lose, because that would be a victory for the US, its main rival,” says Milosevic-Juaristi.

As such, while exercising caution in sensitive areas, Beijing has been clearly reiterating its alignment with Russia following the invasion, as demonstrated by the Moscow visit of Wang Yi, China’s top diplomat, after he delivered a harsh speech against the US a few days earlier, precisely at the Munich Security Conference.

Russia is also forging closer ties with Iran and is trying to bolster its presence in Africa. But enormous military difficulties and a weakening economy call into question Moscow’s ability to project its influence that far afield, and even in Central Asia.

The war has also led to consequences among the democracies, with a closing of ranks between the US and the EU after the turbulent era of Donald Trump, as well as new alliances between Western advanced democracies and their Eastern counterparts such as Japan, South Korea or Australia. However, many experts note that while the West has galvanized it has failed to get the rest of the world on board – that vast galaxy of countries that are neither clearly on one side or the other.

The UN resolution condemning the Russian invasion was adopted by 141 votes in favor, 35 abstentions and only 5 against. But the active stance against Russia does not stretch beyond the threshold of 50 countries and there are many others which, while condemning the invasion, also reproach the West on many issues with accusations of multiple cases of double standards – with particular attention paid to the unjustified invasion of Iraq – and of having contributed to the Russian invasion via the continuous expansion of NATO, as well as being jointly responsible through its policy of sanctions for the pernicious effects on the energy and food markets and, ultimately, inflation.

“There is a large group of countries that do not want to be caught in the middle of what they see as a confrontation between Russia and NATO, and who also do not want to become involved in the competition between the US and China,” says Laïdi. “Some fear being marginalized, manipulated, or that focus on the war in Ukraine will push key issues on the agenda for them aside, such as energy transition or sustainable development goals. There are some who align, others who remain on the margins, and others who seek to exploit the contradictions between the West and Russia for their own benefit. When there are conflicting forces, it is normal to weigh the stakes.”

In addition to the geopolitical shake-up, there are also ideological aspects in play, such as the ultra-conservative nationalist dimension of Putin’s policy, which for some time provided a connecting factor with like-minded parties in the West but has now been broken as a result of the invasion.

Humanitarian dimension

The catastrophic impact of the war on the Ukrainian people also has international repercussions. Significantly, because of what a diaspora of over eight million people spread across more than 40 countries means. But also because of the global message of Europe’s open-doors policy toward these refugees as opposed to the tremendous difficulties imposed on those fleeing other conflicts, a very strong argument in the rhetoric of double standards being wielded against Western democracies.

In addition, the conflict has contributed significantly to the worsening global food security situation. The World Food Program estimates that 349 million people are acutely food insecure, 62 million more than in 2021.

The invasion of Ukraine has caused a huge shock wave on the global scale, but it may still be too early to properly assess how far it will spread.

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