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Members of the Ukrainian Territorial Defense Forces watch the FIFA World Cup 2022 qualification playoff semi-final soccer match between Scotland and Ukraine.
1: With their homeland ravaged by war, Ukraine’s national soccer team is putting up a stunning fight of its own at the World Cup qualifiers – the “yellow-blues” are now just one win away from qualifying for a ticket to the 2022 World Cup in Qatar later this year. They play Wales on Sunday.
170: The Central African Republic has become the latest of about 170 countries to abolish the death penalty. Last year executions around the world jumped by about 20%, though overall use of the death penalty has been declining for more than a decade.
20: Croatia will officially join the Eurozone next year, making it the 20th country to adopt the euro as its currency. Croatia has been a member of the European Union since 2013.
12: South Korea's conservative People Power Party of recently elected President Yoon Suk-yeol won 12 out of 17 races for big-city mayors and governors in a significant boost for Yoon’s power just three weeks into his tenure.
200: Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has handed out a number of medals to service members fighting against the Russian onslaught. The latest recipient of a war-time accolade? A brave soul named Patron, a petite Jack Russell Terrier and bomb sniffer who has identified more than 200 explosive devices.
11: A weekend attack by IS operatives in the Sinai Peninsula left 11 Egyptian soldiers dead, injuring several more. Sinai, a hotbed of terrorism after the Muslim Brotherhood was ousted in 2013, had become less volatile since Egyptian President Abdel Fatah El-Sisi launched a military operation there in 2018 to root out terror groups.
17: Haitian gang members have kidnapped at least 17 people traveling on a bus outside the capital. The group includes Haitians, Turks, and Dominican nationals. Kidnappings for ransom have become common in Haiti since the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse last summer. Since then, rival gangs have been fighting over large swaths of the country.
30: At least 30 people were killed in a hotel explosion in Havana, the Cuban capital, after the top-tier Hotel Saratoga – which has hosted guests including Beyonce and Madonna – was rocked by a suspected gas leak. The hotel was about to reopen after a pandemic-related two-year closure and signals yet another blow for Cuba’s economy, which has become increasingly reliant on tourism.
More than a month into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it’s important to take stock of how we got here.
The easy answer: President Vladimir Putin singlehandedly decided to start a war in an evil and crazed attempt to subjugate an innocent neighbor that posed no threat to his country or his regime, other than by setting an example of what a successful, democratic former Soviet republic could look like.
That is undoubtedly true. President Putin bears 100% of the blame for this war.
Not the Ukrainian government, which contrary to Putin’s claims did not commit acts of genocide against ethnic Russians in the Donbas. Not the West, which despite what Putin and certain foreign policy scholars say did not threaten Russia’s security with NATO enlargement.
Make no mistake, this isn’t a just war or a defensive war. It’s a war of choice, a war of aggression. Putin, and Putin alone, is responsible for it.
But what historical and geopolitical circumstances made this war possible (albeit not inevitable) in the first place? To answer that, we can’t just talk about Putin’s actions—we have to talk about the West’s, too. Not to justify Putin’s destructive behavior but to understand it, to hold ourselves accountable for our role in the crisis, and to prevent us from making the same mistakes again in the future.
Once the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War ended, Central and Eastern European states that were previously in the Warsaw Pact were welcomed with open arms into the West, with most eventually joining the European Union and NATO. Integration with the global economy allowed these countries to transition to democratic market economies and achieve high levels of economic development within a single generation. Just look at Poland, which went from communist wasteland to growth miracle in less than 30 years. Meanwhile, NATO membership freed these countries from the instability and insecurity they had historically faced.
What did Russia get? Shock therapy. Privatization. A little bit of economic aid, but not nearly enough and most of it stolen by the new oligarchs privatization had created. There was no Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of Russia. There was no real Western effort to integrate Russia into the US-led global order, even though Russia’s first post-war president Boris Yeltsin was eager to draw closer to the West.
This was a huge missed opportunity. Just as the Marshall Plan served to prevent the spread of communism in Europe, our best bet to permanently lower the odds of conflict with Russia in the future was to integrate it fully into global institutions and give it a proper stake in the European security architecture. Helping Russia flourish was in the West’s self-interest.
But instead of trying to help it transition to a democratic market economy and making its prosperity, partnership, and cooperation a top priority like they did (successfully) with the defeated Germans and Japanese after World War II, Americans and Europeans mostly ignored Russia. They had just won the Cold War without firing a single shot, so they figured they were playing with house money. Why spend any of the newfound peace dividend to help Russia succeed? After all, the Soviet Union had just spent the better part of the 20th century fighting the West; it wasn’t on us to make sure the Russians landed on their feet, and the inexorable pull of democratization and globalization would surely lead them there eventually, anyway. Or at least that’s what many in the foreign policy establishment thought.
They were wrong. There is nothing automatic about democratization and liberalization. This miscalculation led the West to squander a historic chance to turn Russia into another post-war Germany or Japan. As a result, we are now facing a nuclear-armed kleptocratic dictatorship with imperial designs and a chip on its shoulder.
The West ignored Russia’s grievances
Russians spent the 1990s and early 2000s watching the US shape the terms of the post-Cold War order as it pleased while they stood by, powerless to claim what they saw as their rightful role as their neighbors and erstwhile vassal states one by one joined the EU and NATO.
This was humiliating to Russia, not least because it believes that in 1990 Western leaders promised Moscow that NATO would expand “not one inch” eastward beyond Germany’s borders. According to Putin, the Soviet Union only agreed to German reunification and to the end of the Cold War because NATO had committed not to admit any members of the former Soviet bloc. The West has alwaysdisputed that there was ever a binding promise not to expand, instead maintaining that NATO has an “open-door” policy allowing any European country that meets the pact’s membership criteria to join. However, it was clear since the mid-1990s that the Russians took the alleged promise seriously.
In Russia’s view, the West betrayed its pledge when it invited the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary to join NATO in 1997, and then added insult to injury when it admitted the Baltic states in 2004. Back then, Russia was too weak to do anything about it. But in 2008, when NATO declared that Georgia and Ukraine would eventually become members, Putin drew a “red line” as he viewed this prospect as a direct threat to Russia’s security.Russians spent the 1990s and early 2000s watching the US shape the terms of the post-Cold War order as it pleased while they stood by, powerless to claim what they saw as their rightful role as their neighbors and erstwhile vassal states one by one joined the EU and NATO.
This was humiliating to Russia, not least because it believes that in 1990 Western leaders promised Moscow that NATO would expand “not one inch” eastward beyond Germany’s borders. According to Putin, the Soviet Union only agreed to German reunification and to the end of the Cold War because NATO had committed not to admit any members of the former Soviet bloc. The West has alwaysdisputed that there was ever a binding promise not to expand, instead maintaining that NATO has an “open-door” policy allowing any European country that meets the pact’s membership criteria to join. However, it was clear since the mid-1990s that the Russians took the alleged promise seriously.
In Russia’s view, the West betrayed its pledge when it invited the Czech Republic, Poland, and Hungary to join NATO in 1997, and then added insult to injury when it admitted the Baltic states in 2004. Back then, Russia was too weak to do anything about it. But in 2008, when NATO declared that Georgia and Ukraine would eventually become members, Putin drew a “red line” as he viewed this prospect as a direct threat to Russia’s security.Ultimately, while it was the Eastern European nations themselves that demanded to join NATO and the EU, it was the West’s failure to meaningfully include Russia in the European security architecture (of which Russia is undeniably a stakeholder) and to anticipate Russia’s reaction to enlargement that fed Russia’s already-high sense of insecurity and contributed to the current crisis.
The West failed to respond to prior Russian aggression
When Russia invaded Georgia in August 2008, partly in response to the Bucharest Declaration’s promise that the country would one day join NATO, the West did nothing. There was no massive international outcry, no crippling economic sanctions imposed against Russia, no advanced weapons systems delivered to Georgia.
When Russia then invaded eastern Ukraine and annexed Crimea in 2014, the West did little. Some limited sanctions and military aid, but not nearly enough to change the course of the war or alter Putin’s calculus. This inaction was also a breach of a promise the US made in 1994 along with the United Kingdom and Russia to defend Ukraine’s territorial integrity—a promise that got Ukraine to give up its nuclear weapons and make itself vulnerable to aggression in the first place.
By failing to act forcefully in 2008 and 2014, the West gave Russia good reasons to believe that it could get away with invading Ukraine a second time.
The West set a bad example
Russia witnessed America’s lawless behavior in Kosovo, Iraq, and Afghanistan and drew the conclusion that despite high-minded Western talk about the importance of international law, might still makes right.
America’s recognition of Kosovo’s independence may have been justified from a human rights perspective, but it was a breach of international law. In fact, Russia borrowed a lot of the language used by the US to justify the Kosovo decision when it annexed Crimea in 2014. Iraq and Afghanistan were wars of choice started by the US and its allies and plagued with illegality.
This is not to say that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, a democratic country whose only crime was to demand sovereignty and self-determination, is in any way morally equivalent to America’s war in Afghanistan, a brutal regime under the Taliban theocracy that harbored Osama bin Laden, or in Iraq, which under Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and committed horrific human rights abuses. Objectionable and unjust as these American wars were, they are not comparable to what Russia is doing right now to Ukraine. Still, the West’s repeated failure to hold itself to its own standards further emboldened Russia to act in disregard for international law, in 2008, in 2014, and today.
To be clear, none of this absolves Vladimir Putin of moral responsibility for Russia’s bloody attack on Ukraine. The West may have made choices that contributed to the emergence of this crisis, but nothing it did or didn’t do forced Putin’s hand. The blame lies entirely with him.
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In the early morning of March 4, Russian forces seized the Zaporizhzhia power station, Europe’s largest nuclear plant. Two days before, Russian troops gained control over the southern Ukrainian port city of Kherson, the first major city Russia has seized since it began its unprovoked invasion of Ukraine more than a week ago. Kherson’s strategic location on the Black Sea and the Dnieper River will serve as a launching pad for further Russian incursions into central, west, and east Ukraine.
Meanwhile, Russian missiles and airstrikes continue to indiscriminately hammer residential areas in Kyiv and Kharkiv, Ukraine’s capital and its second-largest city. And the strategic port city of Mariupol, which connects Crimea with the Donbas, remains under a brutal siege.
More than 2,000 civilians have died, about a million people have been displaced, and over a million have fled the country since last Thursday, according to the Ukrainian government and the United Nations.
Despite Ukrainians’ formidable resistance and Russia’s initial battlefield underperformance, much of east and south Ukraine will surely fall to Russian control in the coming weeks. Moscow’s numerical and material superiority is too overwhelming.
Make no mistake, though: Russia may “win” the battle for Ukraine, but it has already lost the war. President Vladimir Putin’s grave miscalculations have resulted in a geopolitically feebler Russia, an emboldened Ukraine, an invigorated West, an economy in shambles, and heightened risk of political instability.
Putin has embroiled his country in a decades-long quagmire that has diminished Russian power and strengthened Russia’s adversaries, and that will sap his regime of legitimacy—at home and abroad.
After 30 years of listlessness, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has “given NATO a reason to live again.” Never since the end of the Cold War had the trans-Atlantic alliance been more united or more galvanized.
Europeans have been woken up to the realities of hard power and are showing themselves willing to sacrifice sacred cows in areas like financial sanctions, weapons transfers, defense spending, and energy decoupling to rise to the occasion. Germany broke with eight decades of policy orthodoxy overnight, not only halting the Nord Stream 2 pipeline but also delivering lethal weapons to Ukraine, doubling its defense budget, and taking immediate steps to reduce its dependence on Russian natural gas. Even Putin admirer Viktor Orban’s Hungary supported the EU sanctions on Russia, and long-standing havens like Monaco and Switzerland have jumped on the bandwagon.
Putin has also managed to stir the United States to (briefly) overcome its political division to confront a common enemy, a feat not even the Covid-19 pandemic could achieve.
Moreover, Ukraine is now firmly and irrevocably aligned with the West, with the European Commission openly discussing its admission to the EU. Georgia and Moldova followed Kyiv in applying for membership. Historically neutral Finland and Sweden are now considering joining NATO, despite Moscow’s warnings.
It’s not just Russia’s neighbors that are drawing away from Moscow. Of the United Nations General Assembly’s 193 members, only North Korea, Eritrea, Syria, and Belarus voted against a resolution condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (35 members abstained). Kazakhstan, one of Russia’s closest partners, recently refused Moscow’s request for troops. And China, Russia’s largest strategic ally, has consistently called for a negotiated settlement and disapproves of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Economic sanctions, cultural boycott will hurt all Russians
As a result of Putin’s actions, Russia’s economy and financial system are on the verge of collapse.
Owing to crippling Western sanctions on Russian banks, companies, and individuals, the ruble is getting weaker by the day, most banks have been blocked from making transactions, the central bank’s reserves have been frozen, the government is set to default on its debt, and Russian companies have lost nearly all of their value.
Beyond sanctions, a growing number of Western companies are refusing to do business in or with Russia, with Microsoft, Apple, Google, Intel, AMD, TSMC, Oracle, HP, Dell, Ford, BMW, Volvo, Harley-Davidson, Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, Boeing, Airbus, MSC, Maersk, FedEx, UPS, Airbnb, IKEA, Adidas, and Nike, among the multinationals corporations announcing they are divesting from Russia or halting their Russian operations. Mind you, many of these same companies did not bat an eye when the Soviet Union was threatening nuclear war at the peak of the Cold War, so this boycott is unprecedented in its scale and severity.
All of this means that most trade with the US and Europe is about to grind to a halt, as Russia will find it increasingly hard to export the commodities it relies on for revenue (most notably, oil and gas) and to import both intermediate and manufactured goods from much of the world. The rapid forced decoupling of the Russian economy from the global trade and financial system will push it towards severe stagflation (i.e., double-digit recession and inflation), impoverishing ordinary Russians and oligarchs alike.
Putin’s political legitimacy and hold on power at home are under greater threat now than at any other time before. The more he escalates and the longer the war goes on, the more domestic disapproval of his regime will grow, as evidence of the violence inflicted on Ukrainians, economic pain, lifestyle disruptions, asset seizures, and cultural isolation turn the general population and the elites against him.
While state media continues to obscure the extent and destructiveness of the Russian “military operation” in Ukraine, history shows that the truth has a way of getting out—especially in the age of social media. Several prominent Russian influencers, athletes, artists, and politicians have voiced their opposition to their followers, and more than 6,500 Russians have already been arrested across multiple cities for protesting the war.
The millions of Russians with Ukrainian loved ones, or with relatives and friends deployed to fight there, will soon hear of the pointless bloodshed being unleashed by their government. Many of them will not stay quiet.
Putin still has a stranglehold over Russia’s security services and military. As long as that remains true, his seat at the Kremlin will remain safe. That’s why the risk of a palace coup is still low. At the same time, the threat is also the highest it’s ever been. Even his loyal silovikihave their red lines, and this war of choice could come close to crossing it.
A pyrrhic “victory”
All of this is Putin’s doing. For a leader who sought to chip away at NATO’s unity, weaken the European Union, divide the United States, prevent NATO and the EU from closing in on his "near-abroad," make Russia strong, and tighten his grip on power, he has accomplished the opposite in one fell swoop.
He failed to bully Ukraine and NATO into giving in to his demands. He underestimated the Ukrainian military and overestimated both Ukrainian pro-Russian sentiment and his own military’s abilities, miscalculating how swiftly, easily, and bloodlessly Kyiv would fall, the Ukrainian government could be deposed, a puppet regime could be installed, and occupied territory could be held. He misjudged Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s ability to inspire external support and domestic resistance.
He was unprepared for the ferocity and cohesion of the West’s response, especially Europe’s. He was overconfident in Russia’s ability to evade and withstand sanctions. And he did not imagine the extent of international backlash, diplomatic isolation, and corporate blacklisting his invasion would trigger.
In hindsight, Putin’s strategic blunder will be seen as comparable to the Soviet-Afghan War that ultimately precipitated the collapse of the USSR (and, incidentally, also to the Afghanistan War that eroded America’s standing and undermined its global leadership).
Unfortunately, all of Putin’s missteps don’t make it any less likely that Ukraine will suffer a tremendous amount of death and destruction. By sheer force of numbers, Russia will achieve its military objectives. The battle will be protracted. Ukrainians will mount a fierce insurgency that will drain Russia of blood and treasure, and thousands of innocent people on both sides will die. Putin will fail to subjugate the Ukrainian people. But eventually, Russian forces will take Kyiv, establish a puppet government, and forcibly occupy part of the country.
Yet Putin’s likely “victory” on the battlefield guarantees that he will never achieve his core political objective and the one reason he chose to invade Ukraine in the first place: to make Russia great again.
Russia will come out of this war significantly—and, possibly, existentially—weakened.
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The United States and its allies are now at war with Russia.
American troops may not—and most assuredly will not—be on the ground in Ukraine, but the US and NATO allies are sending Ukrainians an enormous amount of the world’s most sophisticated war-fighting equipment, not just to help them defend themselves but to help them kill Russians more effectively. Yes, Russian President Vladimir Putin started the war when he invaded Ukraine without provocation. But in the eyes of the Kremlin, vastly more Russians will come home in body bags as a direct result of NATO’s intervention.
The United States and its allies are also imposing crushing financial sanctions on Russia—including blocking Russian banks from the global messaging platform SWIFT and freezing its central bank reserves—in an explicit attempt to cripple the country’s economy and force Moscow to capitulate or, barring that, to foment regime change. While actively bringing down the Russian government may not be a stated goal of Western sanctions, Putin sees it that way.
Western leaders do not believe that they’ve declared war against the Russians; the Kremlin believes that they have, and unjustifiably so. However laughable you might find the Russian perspective, this misalignment of understanding over what’s happening is dangerous.
For a man like Putin who has spent several years in isolation, surrounded only by sycophants, and for whom things are currently not going as well as he expected, this perceived existential threat to his regime—and to his own survival—makes it more, not less, likely that he will lash out in return. That could mean anything from staging more false-flag attacks as a pretext to massacre Ukrainian civilians, to conducting major cyberattacks on US and European critical infrastructure, to unilaterally cutting off Europe’s energy supply, to threatening nuclear use (again). In other words, the sorts of desperate steps that are deeply escalatory and hard to come back from.
Western leaders need to understand that the kind of fight they’re bringing to Russia—a country that may not have the largest economy but whose military and nuclear capabilities are still top 3 in the world—could have very significant knock-on implications for global security, far beyond its effects on global markets. Given the potential for miscalculation, backing an unpredictable autocrat into a corner is a risky bet.
To be clear, I am not recommending that the West leave Putin alone. We most certainly should not do that. What I am saying is that we need to be deliberate in our response and consider not only what Putin deserves but also how he might react, lest we increase the risk of major escalation. When Putin orders Russia’s nuclear forces onto high alert in response to NATO statements and sanctions, we need to take that seriously. Not in the sense that we should fold to avoid triggering him or go all DEFCON 1 ourselves, but rather that we need to be cautious not to precipitate what could be another Cuban Missile Crisis.
“It’s not that we should be intimidated and scared,” former US National Security Council official and long-time Putin expert Fiona Hill told POLITICO recently. “We have to prepare for those contingencies and figure out what is it that we’re going to do to head them off.”
The good news is that the United States and Europe are much more motivated and aligned than they have been in ages. As former CIA boss David Petraeus put it to me, Putin has “given NATO a reason to live again.” The EU today is unspeakably stronger today than it was two weeks ago. Germany has gone from shy pacifist to providing lethal weapons and doubling its defense spending. Finland is considering doing away with its long-standing neutrality in favor of joining NATO. Putin admirer Viktor Orban’s Hungary supported the bloc’s sanctions. Even historically hands-off nations like Monaco and Switzerland are getting into the act. For the first time since 1991, the trans-Atlantic alliance has clarity of purpose. All of this makes it much harder for President Putin to get a win.
But preventing Russia from winning is not necessarily the same as winning ourselves. After all, there are such things as lose-lose situations. All it takes is a spoiler—a role Putin has been playing to perfection for two decades.
That’s the bad news: might Putin rather burn the world down than accept defeat? As he ominously warned back in 2018 and Russian state media recently reiterated, “Why do we need a world if Russia is not in it?” That leads me to think that, at least for now, we're heading towards more escalation in Ukraine. Meaning a lot more troop deployments, a lot more bombings, and a lot more civilian casualties. And the worse that escalation gets, the more the relationship between the US, Europe, and Russia will be broken irreparably.
For the last 30 years, we've been reaping a peace dividend from the end of the Cold War, one that all nations benefited from. That peace dividend is gone now. What does that mean? How much is that going to hurt us? We're about to find out.
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105: At least 105 people have been killed in mudslides and floods in Brazil. The disaster saw streets “turned into rivers” in the city of Petropolis, 40 miles north of Rio de Janeiro. Hundreds are now expected to be facing homelessness in the wake of the floods.
2: For the second time this month, Israel has conducted missile strikes against targets in Syria. The target this time was reportedly a building where unknown military officials were meeting, according to the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.
28,000: A railway company has received 28,000 applications from Saudi women seeking a very cool job: driving bullet trains between Mecca and Medina. But only 30 positions for female train drivers are open. Women weren’t allowed to drive in the Kingdom until 2018.
92: Roughly 92 percent of all escaped pets in New Zealand are exotic parrots from other countries. Authorities now say this is a “real problem” as the birds introduce new diseases and crowd out native birds for nest space and food.
An employee is seen while people undergo PCR tests for COVID-19 upon their arrival at Beijing Capital International Airport ahead of the 2022 Winter Olympics. The 24th Winter Olympic Games are scheduled to take place in Beijing on February 4-20, 2022.
34: The organizers of the Beijing Winter Olympics reported on Sunday 34 new COVID infections within the "bubble" set up for the Games, where athletes can only compete if they test negative twice in 24 hours. Troubling news for China's zero-COVID policy.
8: After eight rounds of secret voting, Italian lawmakers on Saturday "elected" Sergio Mattarella to serve another seven-year term as president. Mattarella, 80, agreed to postpone his retirement so Mario Draghi could stay on as PM.
2,000: According to the UN, almost 2,000 child soldiers recruited by Houthi rebels died fighting in Yemen's civil war from January 2020 to May 2021. GZERO World recently reported on the Yemeni conflict, the biggest humanitarian crisis you've probably never heard of.
12,000: Peru has barred execs from Spanish energy giant Repsol charged with "ecocide" from leaving the country, while authorities investigate an oil spill that leaked almost 12,000 barrels of crude into the sea. Repsol says the accident was caused by the tsunami triggered by a massive volcanic eruption in Tonga.
5: US manufacturers now have on average less than five days' worth of semiconductor supplies, down from 40 days before the pandemic. There's growing pressure for America to produce more chips as a global shortage drags on.
2.5 billion: The Biden administration has approved the sale of $2.5 billion worth of US-made arms to Egypt, despite some opposition in Congress. A few Democratic senators wanted the Egyptians to meet certain conditions on human rights in order to get American weapons.
3.1: Parts of Greece and Turkey have been blanketed by a rare snowstorm, leaving thousands of people stuck in traffic for hours and forced to evacuate. Usually balmy Athens received 3.1 inches of snow on Monday, almost three times its annual average, while flights at Istanbul's airport have been suspended for two days. The storm is now heading to Israel.
50 billion: Remittances sent home by Mexican migrants in 2021 are expected to exceed $50 billion for the first time, in part due to pandemic stimulus money from the US. Mexico receives about 6 percent of global remittance payments, behind only India and China.
