In the night between 23 and 24 February 2022the Armed Forces of the Russian Federation began what is still defined in Russia today “Special Military Operation” but which for the rest of the world is there “Russian-Ukrainian War”. Originally intended as a “blitzkrieg” aiming to subvert the constitutional order in Kiev, the conflict soon degenerated into an exhausting military and geopolitical tug of war between Russia and the entire broader West, which has supported Ukraine from a political, economic-financial point of view (in these four years Europe has paid Ukraine more than 194 billion euros), military and humanitarian, thus avoiding its defeat to date but at the same time condemning the rest of the world to a prolonged period of uncertainty and tension.
2022: the year of the Russian invasion and Ukrainian resistance
There Russo-Ukrainian War formally began in night between 23 and 24 February 2022at the height of a period of tensions that began as early as 2014 with the Euromaidan events and the following annexation of Crimea and the outbreak of War in Donbasswith the grand invasion of Republic of Ukraine on the part of Armed Forces of the Russian Federation and those of the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics with the de facto connivance of the Republic of Belarus which – although not directly participating in the military operations – however made its territory and airspace available to Moscow.
The Russian military action, despite the violence and speed with which it developed, has however failed in its objective overthrow the government of President Volodymyr Zelensky and has actually started one unnerving war of attritionlocated mostly in the southern and southeastern areas of the country where the Russians continued to maintain the tactical initiative while advancing at a snail’s pace. The success of the Ukrainian resistance in this first phase of the war allowed President Zelensky on the one hand to galvanize the internal front and on the other to accredit himself as a strong man and undisputed leader of the Ukrainian cause as well as an ideal candidate to benefit from a generous military, economic-financial and humanitarian aid program at 360 degrees.
2023-2025: the years of endless battles
In the period between 2023 and 2025, except for some sensational events such as the Ukrainian counteroffensive on the southern front in summer 2023 And the Ukrainian offensive on Russian territory (to be precise in the Kursk area) in the late summer of 2024the fighting has mostly acquired the characteristics of trench warfare, or in any case characterized by very expensive operations in terms of losses of men and equipment and dragged out over time, with the contenders engaged in exhausting battles lasting many months to conquer what, before the war, were small towns of little strategic weight.
This period also saw the use of both contenders grow exponentially drones of all types and sizes and electronic warfare systems to saturate battlefield communications and make tactical maneuvers impossible. Starting from the winter of 2022-2023 Russia has also inaugurated a methodical aeroballistic campaign aimed at destroying the Ukrainian energy grid. This effort never really ended, and continues today, and has seriously impaired Ukraine’s ability to produce and distribute energy. On the other side the Western sanctions aimed at hitting the Russian economy have achieved mixed results, making the country pay a very high cost but completely failing in the objective of making Russia collapse or even just stopping its war machine.
What to expect in the future: forecasts
Four years after the start of the war, the time has come make some assessments.
Far from being associated with the short and limited conventional wars that had characterized the panorama of the military world in the thirty years following the end of the Cold Warthe Russo-Ukrainian War took the form of a very long and extremely costly conflict in terms of human, material, economic-financial and political-ideological-moral costs. Russia has blatantly violated international law and order but it did so to protect what it considered to be its inalienable national interests.
On the other hand, the broader West has thrown all its strategic weight behind Ukraine but to date has failed in its objective of turn the tide of the war and make Russia desist from persevering in its strategy with the result that if at the beginning of the conflict some important names in international geopolitics such as the deceased Henry Kissinger they warned about “what could have happened to Russia in the event of defeat”, the new reality that is appearing before our eyes (also thanks to the political changes that are taking place in USA) must indeed make us reflect on the possibility that the “defeat of the West” (to use an expression of the demographer and sociologist Emmanuel Todd) leads, on the contrary, to a complete dislocation of our Western societies.
