Although the propaganda exaggerations peddled by Western mainstream media and Western officials about Russian losses in soldiers and war material are not true, they are significant. This, however, is one side of the coin, and anyone who focuses only on this counts statically, missing the possibility of reading the political dynamics that this war produces.
If Russia were on the verge of a military defeat in Ukraine, or even an economic collapse, obviously this kind of casualty arithmetic would add to the negative political dynamic and make it worse. Today, however, everyone in the West has been forced to admit that the Russian economy has not only withstood the barrage of sanctions, but is also growing at an impressive rate.
As far as the military side is concerned, Western experts who do not operate in a propaganda way, agree that the scale of the war is tipping in Russia’s favor. And this is not expected to change qualitatively with the approval of American aid to Kiev. The main reason Ukraine keeps losing ground is that unlike Russia it is running out of both soldiers and ammunition. The only way to turn the tide of the war is for NATO to get involved directly. If this happens, however, it will likely lead to a nuclear path.
The political dynamic
Let us now turn to the Western claim that the war is weakening Russia. As I mentioned above, the Russian losses are one side of the coin and not the most important one. The other is political dynamics. And this concerns not only the image of Russia in the international system, but also the way in which the Russian leadership and the Russian people perceive the role of their country. It is obvious that if – as everything indicates – Russia emerges victorious we will have the following consequences:
- First, it will have territorially expanded into Ukrainian regions where the Russian element was strong.
- Secondly, it will impose its terms in a peace treaty, mainly it will have definitively prevented Ukraine from joining NATO and will have canceled its “squeeze”, as Washington attempted.
- Third, the “Global South” will rightly consider the Russian victory in Ukraine as a defeat of the “Total West”. This fact will not only catapult Russia’s prestige internationally, but conversely it will seriously damage the prestige of the US and NATO with what this implies for the geopolitical balances internationally.
- Fourthly, the Europeans, as well as the Americans, will be forced – sooner or later – by the geopolitical facts to do a geostrategic somersault, changing their attitude towards Moscow, unless we go into a generalized conflict.
As a result of all of the above, Russia gains a new national pride and self-confidence, the value of which overwhelmingly outweighs the cost of any human losses in the war. Above all, however, Russia definitively overcomes the fixation syndrome, which essentially pushed it to seek a place in the Western framework, sometimes complaining and sometimes pushing.
Since the tsarist era, Russia has experienced its internal contradiction between its European and Asian selves. Historically, however, Russian elites have been oriented toward the West. They felt a complex towards Europe, which they had roughly as a model. Strange as it may sound, this complex revived in a very special way in the last two decades of the Soviet Union and contributed invisibly – perhaps decisively – to its collapse. A typical product of this climate of Western lust is the election of Gorbachev to the leadership and the way he politicized.
On the same path
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Yeltsin’s Russia went to its knees and effectively surrendered to the West. Putin rose to the top as a follower of Yeltsin. But when he gained control of the state machinery, he focused on relegating Russia and returning it to great power status. To achieve this he has shrunk the scope for Western intervention in Russian affairs, which has made him disliked, if not outright hostile, by Washington and many European capitals.
So, Putin may have drawn red lines to the West, shrinking their margins of intervention in Russian affairs, but he remained on the same path: seeking for his country a certain place in the Western context. He reached the point of asking for Russia’s accession to NATO and nevertheless did everything he could to find a modus vivendi with the West both at the level of a security architecture, but also at the level of economic and political relations. In other words – in different circumstances and on different terms – he remained trapped in the same traditional orientation of the Russian elites. In other words, Putin was not the bearer of another strategic view of his country’s role.
However, since he expelled the Westerners from Russia, they gradually turned him into a “black sheep”. At the same time and despite the promise they had made to Gorbachev, NATO expanded with successive enlargements towards the East. Moscow protested but was powerless to react. A turning point was Putin’s speech at the Munich Security Conference in 2007, in which he essentially issued an appeal-warning to the West to respect the sensitivities and rights of Russia as a great power.
His appeal-warning fell on deaf ears. The West was possessed by the arrogance of the winner and continued to “squeeze” Russia with the main vehicle being the expansion of NATO to the East. The knot came to a head when at the beginning of 2014 – as has been proven by an independent Canadian investigation – a bloody coup was organized under the supervision of American services in Kiev with the perpetrators of the far-right Ukrainian armed organizations and mercenaries. The overthrow of the corrupt but legitimately elected President Yanukovych paved the way for Ukraine to become an anti-Russian outpost of the West.
The annexation of Crimea
Faced with the danger of its access to the Black Sea shrinking to a small strip of coast, Russia responded in two ways: First, it annexed Crimea, also relying on the fact that the vast majority of the population is Russian. Second, he gave the green light to the Russian separatists of Donbass to secede from Ukraine. This second move triggered a protracted informal war between the forces of Kiev and the separatists, which cost the latter many thousands of casualties. Russia supported the separatists all those years, but avoided getting directly involved.
Putin hoped he could avoid a break with the West. Zelensky’s Ukraine, however, although it had not yet joined NATO, functioned largely as his outpost. To avert what even his opponents saw as an immediate threat to Russian national security, Putin ordered the invasion in February 2022, seeking to topple the Zelenskyi government and impose a pro-Russian regime in Kiev, or at least coerce it into denying expansion. of NATO.
In fact, even then Putin had not abandoned the traditional Russian strategic concept. He sought some compromise with the US that would allow Russia to continue to look west, but without threatening its national security. In fact, he believed that by invading he would oblige the West to negotiate with him the neutrality of Ukraine. This was also shown by the draft agreement reached in Istanbul 2-3 months after the Russian invasion.
When Washington and London torpedoed the Istanbul deal – as they had done with the Minsk 1 and Minsk 2 accords in 2014-15 – but also when Putin found the painful way that his forces were facing an organized Ukrainian defense, which he did not expect, came to a crisis of strategy. Still realizing the resolute stance of the “Total West” assemblage, the Russian president landed uneventfully. It took him some time to adjust to the political level, but he did. The same thing happened at the military level, when General Surovikin took over the general command.
The strategic review
The establishment of power in Moscow was forced to carry out an invisible, but of great strategic importance, a revision of the way it saw Russia’s place and role in the international system. It became clear that the expectations that had been invested in the West were delusions. What was developing was not the product of misunderstandings or even simple geopolitical competition. It was kind of a proxy war.
This realization brought about a radical intellectual change in Moscow, which was partly reflected in a relevant document signed by Putin in 2023. Russian culture is no longer defined as a component of the wider Western culture, but as a distinct culture. And the emphasis in foreign policy is no longer on the West, but on Eurasia and the “Global South”.
It is true that this shift had been rhetorically announced in the 2010s, but it had mostly remained lip service. The war in Ukraine, due to the sanctions, also radically restructured Russian foreign trade. Trade with Europe shrank well below half, while conversely trade with Asia nearly tripled. Equally important, Russia has completely abandoned efforts to adapt to the American-branded international order.
Focus on BRICS+
Now, it is leading the effort to build an alternative and de facto competitive pole in the international system to the West. BRICS+ and the Shanghai Organization are initiatives in this direction. On the contrary, Russia is moving away from institutions (Council of Europe, OSCE, etc.), which are dominated by the West, which gives them an anti-Russian sign. In fact, Russia has almost stopped caring what Westerners say about it.
As I have mentioned above, all of the above constitute a change of historical importance, which is not limited to foreign policy and foreign trade, but goes much deeper. Russia, therefore, no longer feels like the eastern end of Europe, but a pillar of Eurasia. This intellectual change existed before, but the war in Ukraine gave it a much more intense dimension and dynamic.
The strategic shift also poses a dilemma for Russian wealth magnates, who have had a two-way street: with both the Putin regime and the West. Those who choose to remain in Russia are bound to become more Russian and less cosmopolitan. I repeat that this historical change would not have taken place and certainly would not have gained such momentum if the Russians (as a leadership, but also as a people) had not been convinced that the West has engaged in an informal but not substantive war against their country. This is regardless of what any of us believe is actually happening.
