Russia in Global Affairs

“I don't expect a huge Russian victory, but the West will end up weakened. My guess is that Russia hoped to carry out an elegant and bloodless military operation in Ukraine in 2022, as it did in Crimea in 2014”.

The world continues to be driven by three famous elements of Realism: “self-help, statism, and survival”.

The growing bitterness of Western countries towards Russia is consistent with the logic of ‘preventive war’ in the initiation of armed conflicts. Rather than linking interstate confrontations with aggressive opportunism, this model views escalation as a product of fears about the future. Throughout history, major wars, as a rule, became the product of precisely this preventive logic – the desire to strike in advance of an expected weakening.

Leaders of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) gathered in Washington, DC, on July 9–11 to mark the alliance’s seventy-fifth anniversary and discuss security assistance for Ukraine, taking a more strategic approach to Russia. Council of Councils experts react to the NATO commitments made at the summit. Fyodor Lukyanov, Editor-in-Chief of Russia in Global Affairs, Chairman of the Presidium of the Council on Foreign and Defense Policy (SVOP), is among them.

We will continue to strike at the Ukrainian army, because it is basically a mercenary army, but our main goal is to sober up the West and make it retreat strategically. The best way to do that is to give the West, at least the Americans, a chance to retreat without losing face. Otherwise, they will have to flee in shame or/and suffer huge losses, Sergei Karaganov told Ukraina.ru.

It is ironic that NATO, an alliance ostensibly committed to preserving peace in Europe, has once again made war the ultima ratio, the only effective way for a state to preserve its security. But such an outcome was essentially predetermined almost as soon as the USSR collapsed, when the U.S. decided to expand NATO into Ukraine.

Moscow joined the NATO’s Partnership for Peace program 30 years ago, but today there is neither partnership nor peace.

In the spring of 2024, we can confidently say that the West has been unable to defeat Russia as it wanted and now it is concerned with ensuring that Russia “does not win.” So, in the future, for years, if not decades to come, security in Europe will be determined by the balance of power along the line of contact between Russia and NATO. Russia will do everything to maintain this balance for its part.

We must again tread the path to stabilization and peaceful coexistence. But we will first need to set foot on that path.