The Ukraine War anniversary’s big question: ‘Tell me how this ends?’

This week, world leaders will solemnly note the one-year anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the worst state-on-state aggression in Europe since World War II. 

According to some estimates, already the war has seen more than 300,000 killed and wounded, severely disrupted global food and energy supplies and led to a profound refugee crisis with over 10 million Ukrainians externally and internally displaced. Recently, the fighting has devolved into a gruesome stalemate in eastern Ukraine reminiscent of the trench warfare of World War I, with both sides preparing for offensives and continued bloodletting, and no obvious end in sight. 

Given the uncertainties and profound stakes involved, it’s worth contemplating at the war’s one-year mark the question posed by Gen. David Petraeus, the preeminent U.S. commander in the post-911 conflicts, at the outset of the long Iraq War: “Tell me how this ends?” 

The sobering answer is that whatever becomes of Ukraine — and a frozen conflict along the dividing lines of post-war Korea is possible — the era of hot and cold conflict between aggressive authoritarians and Western democracies that this war heralds could span generations. Indeed, while many experts have drawn parallels to the Cold War, the current era most closely resembles the dark, early days of that epoch that saw missteps and bloody miscalculations such as the Berlin Blockade, the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War push the major powers to the brink. 

If that sounds alarmist, consider that the United States has already committed a nearly unprecedented $27 billion-plus in security assistance to Ukraine, and the Biden administration has set ambitious goals for how the war ends. Besides strengthening Ukraine’s position at the bargaining table for any future peace talks, for instance, the administration also intends to inflict a defeat on Russia.  

“We believe it is our strategic objective to ensure that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is not a strategic success for [Russian President Vladimir], that it is a strategic failure for Putin,” said National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan, speaking at last summer’s Aspen Security Forum. “The lesson that goes forth to would-be aggressors needs to be that if you try something like this, it will come at a cost that is not worth bearing,” he added.

However, achieving a strategic failure for the tyrant in the Kremlin carries the risk of escalation with the world’s largest nuclear weapons power. Some of the experts who have studied Putin the closest also believe that inflicting failure on the Kremlin will require defeating the deeply entrenched ideology of “Putinism,” which holds that Russia’s destiny is to once again rule a Eurasian empire like the Tsars and Soviet Premiers of old. That could prove a generational challenge.  

“The biggest problem the West has in analyzing Russia is this decades-old assumption that at some point it will change and get better and become less of a threat, and that optimism has led to some catastrophic misjudgments,” said Keir Giles, a senior consulting fellow on Russia for the British think tank Chatham House, speaking recently at the Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress (CSPC) in Washington, D.C.

Today that misplaced optimism manifests itself, he said, in the belief that once the Ukraine War ends a chastened Russia will finally evolve into a more responsible stakeholder in a liberal international order.  

“In reality, there is no reason to expect Russia to stop being a threat — the only question is the nature of that threat,” said Giles, who is also the author of the recent book, “Russia’s War on Everybody: And What It Means for You.” Russian leaders and security elite have a deep-seated view of their place in the world that is fundamentally incompatible with ours, he noted, and that worldview is accompanied by a zero-sum take on security which holds that any development harmful to the United States and the West is good for Russia. 

“That’s why Russia was attacking the West and waging hybrid or ‘sub-threshold’ war long before invading Ukraine and it will likely continue attacking the West long after Ukraine is decided,” Giles said.  

In retrospect, the United States’ assumption that Russia would eventually accommodate itself to a post-Cold War, rules-based international order based on democratic principles, such as the right to self-determination of sovereign nation-states, proved impervious to the Kremlin’s serial rejection of that order and those principals.  

Western optimism about Russia’s evolution thus survived Putin’s declaration that the collapse of the Soviet Union was the “greatest tragedy of the 20th century,” and his bellicose 2007 speech at the Munich Security Conference explicitly rejecting the post-Cold War order as one elevating the United States as “one master.” That rose-colored view of Russia largely persisted despite its invasion of Georgia in 2008 and the illegal annexation by force of Crimea and support for separatists in Ukraine in 2014, in both instances to stop those countries’ outreach towards the West. Remarkably, even the Kremlin’s “hybrid war” of election interference, cyberattacks and assassinations targeting the West over the past decade failed to quell optimism that someday Russia would come around to accepting civilized norms and a rules-based international order.  

Little wonder that Putin judged the West as weak, and the time ripe for achieving the Kremlin’s ultimate goal of reestablishing a Russian empire by coercion and military force if necessary, beginning with Ukraine.

So as the Ukraine War reaches its one-year anniversary, it’s finally time to face reality when considering Gen. Petraeus’s question: “Tell me how this ends?” At least in terms of the greater conflict between the West and Russia in which Ukraine is the current front, this struggle doesn’t end in any foreseeable future. It certainly can’t end in a future still blighted by “Putinism,” and the fever dreams of an empire of its namesake. 

The real lesson of this sorrowful anniversary is that there is no going back to some “golden age” of positive and normal relations between the West and Russia, however much we might desire it because time has revealed that golden hue as a figment of post-Cold War optimism. In the harsh light of Moscow’s continuing atrocities in Ukraine, that interim looks in retrospect like a brief pause in a long twilight struggle.  

James Kitfield is a senior fellow at the Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress. He is a three-time recipient of the Gerald R. Ford Award for Distinguished Reporting on National Defense.