"The world was bracing for the fall of Ukraine": after a year of the war Analysis by Serhey Bohdan

On February 24, 2023, exactly one year after the start of the war, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy announced preparations to retake Crimea by military means. It sounded ambitious, but the first year of the Russo-Ukrainian conflict is ending quite successfully for Kyiv - given that many influential politicians have already written it off more than once.

A few days earlier, US President Biden said, "When Putin launched his invasion almost a year ago, he thought Ukraine was weak and the West was divided... he was deeply wrong... That dark night, one year ago, the world was literally … bracing for the fall of Kyiv … perhaps even the end of Ukraine. A year later, Kyiv is standing. Ukraine is standing."

However, the outcome of the war is ambiguous for all sides, an early victory for none of them seems possible.

Capturing strategically important villages

The Russian-Ukrainian war has brought many surprises to everyone - the Kremlin, Kyiv, and the West. Let's start with the expectations of Russia and the West: that the Ukrainian state would collapse without Western arms and other support - in fact, that is what Biden admitted to.

This is a rather strange expectation after what happened in 2014 - when the Ukrainian government (yes, which came to power by no means through elections, but legitimacy is not always linked to elections, sometimes, as Mao said, "the rifle gives birth to power") stood firm and Ukrainian troops foiled an attempt to destabilise the country through covert Russian intervention in eastern Ukraine and support for separatism.

In 2022, the Ukrainian government's position and the state of the Ukrainian army were much better. It was due to the will to resist, the Ukrainians stood their ground, with minimal Western support in the first weeks of the war and minimal stocks of Western weaponry until the autumn. The Ukrainian leadership clearly hoped for more. It was not until the end of the first year of the war that President Biden announced during his visit to Kyiv that the US and its allies had agreed to supply Kyiv with 700 tanks, over 1,000 armoured vehicles, and 2 million artillery shells and missiles. And all this month, NATO politicians have been bemoaning their empty arsenals.

The Kremlin has also overestimated its military capabilities, as evidenced by the last six to seven months, during which the Russian army has not actually achieved a single notable success and has even retreated at times. A prime example of the Russian army's current ability to defeat Ukrainian forces was how the Russian Ministry of Defence recently presented the capture of a village in Kharkiv Oblast as a success.

The Kremlin started this campaign as an experiment - trying to avoid unpopular mobilisations, it decided to involve a private military company and Chechen volunteers. These forces have been involved in campaigns in the Middle East, Africa, and eastern Ukraine since the early 2010s and seem to have proven themselves. But in those campaigns, they fought with their own kind - insurgents, volunteer battalions, etc.

When confronted with the regular army, in many respects still Soviet-type, not even the best trained and armed, such armed formations simply got bogged down in the fighting. The Ukrainian army is not an insurgency, and in Syria, the Wagnerians suffered a crushing defeat as soon as they clashed with Kurdish units - relatively trained, armed, and supported by the US army.

Having stepped on the same rake in Ukraine, but on a much larger scale, the Kremlin began to wind down these experiments, realising that it had to field one against the regular army. Kadyrov, who had been actively sending his fighters to Ukraine, began to talk about leaving his post. The Wagnerians were first banned by the Russian authorities from recruiting prisoners, and on February 20 Prigozhin, the founder of Wagner revealed that after the change of commander of the Russian forces, his units were no longer given ammunition, despite their availability. Russia even had to carry out a partial mobilisation in the autumn, but seeing the lack of readiness to go to the front, the Kremlin has been extremely cautious in sending the mobilised to the battlefield and has not extended the mobilisation.

However, the Kremlin is not inclined to stop the war. As German intelligence chief Bruno Kahl recently noted, Moscow does not intend to negotiate about Ukraine but is trying to "use as many advantages as possible" at the front. Currently, the Russian Foreign Ministry says that Russia is ready to negotiate with Ukraine "on the basis of the reality that exists", i.e. with the recognition of the annexation of the territories.

At the moment, both Russia and Ukraine are preparing offensives from which they expect a turning point in the war. The Ukrainian leadership speaks of the need to reach the 1991 lines and, as noted above, is discussing the return of Crimea. When, on January 20, Mark Milley, head of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, questioned the AFU's ability to dislodge Russian troops from all of Ukraine by the end of the year, the Zelenskyy administration went on a rampage, declaring that US intelligence had consistently mistaken about AFU. Shortly after Milley's statement, a closed-door hearing on the Russia-Ukraine war was held in the US parliament, at which Pentagon officials reiterated doubts about Ukraine's ability to retake Crimea now.

French President Macron also stated that neither side in the Russo-Ukrainian war could win the battlefield, and therefore "what we need now is for Ukraine to launch a military offensive that will push the Russian front back to open the way for a return to negotiations". Indeed, at a recent trilateral Franco-German-Ukrainian meeting, Macron and German Chancellor Scholz urged Zelenskyy to consider peace talks and reminded him that even such arch-enemies as Germany and France eventually made peace. Given the extent of Kyiv's dependence on the support of Western allies, such a view of the West will not be ignored by the Ukrainian leadership.

More war?

West's opinion is very complicated. This week, the EU almost failed to pass the 10th package of sanctions against Russia. During its preparation, the more radical position, as always, was taken by Poland and the Baltic countries. Their motivation is clear: the war is turning into a protracted regional conflict. Despite the involvement of NATO and the "global West" in it, the confrontation is still confined to Eastern European themes. Russia and the West are not yet inclined to escalate relations in other landmark areas - as can be seen, for example, in Afghanistan and Iran.

Eastern Europe risks becoming a battleground for years to come - with all the detrimental consequences for the countries of the region. Because of the danger of this, many in the establishment of these countries may find it acceptable to raise the stakes in order to prevent the Ukrainian war from turning into a multi-year regional conflict. The risks of a prolonged regional conflict were illustrated by the recent "Great African War" in the Congo, with nine countries explicitly involved and many more secretly involved, including the United States. Between 1998 and 2003, this war claimed the lives of some 5.4 million people. The threat of a repeat of such a scenario worries Eastern European leaders.

And meanwhile, the key countries of the "collective West" are not inclined to turn up the heat in the confrontation and press on Russia. What they want is not to turn up the heat; there is no talk of reconciliation with Putin: a few days ago the deputy head of the US State Department, Victoria Nuland, declared that the very idea of ending hostilities is now "cynical" and will only benefit Moscow.

On February 24, Poland threatened to block a new EU sanctions package because of its "softness", which was insisted upon by far from the smallest EU members Germany and Italy. But it's not just them - there are also forces in the US that are inclined to "go easy on it". At a January meeting in Kyiv, CIA chief William Burns warned the Ukrainian leadership of the possibility of cutting military aid, pointing to the need in this regard to "make progress on the battlefield as quickly as possible". Zelenskyy's unnamed adviser even complained to US journalists that both in parliament and in the US presidential administration "there are people who want to calibrate security assistance in order to encourage Ukrainians to make some kind of deal with Russia". Indeed, the speaker of the US National Security Council, John Kirby, openly talks about the need to avoid escalation despite, they say, the fact that Putin has encroached on some key things.

China's peace plan

If Ukraine has proved somewhat disappointed in the West, Russia has been disappointed in the East, more specifically China. The EU marked the first anniversary of the war with a nearly failed sanctions package, the US with a $2 billion military supply package to Ukraine, while China presented its principles for a peace settlement on February 24. In it, Beijing again tried to stay above the fray: it demands both the preservation of the countries' territorial integrity (important for Kyiv) and the abandonment of unilateral sanctions (important for Moscow). In the spring, Chinese President Xi Jinping intends to travel to Moscow himself - to call for peace talks and to declare the inadmissibility of the use of nuclear weapons - a possibility that Moscow has hinted at.

President Zelenskyy welcomed the Beijing peace initiatives with the words "the fact that China is already talking about it, it's already some first steps, it's very good" and added that the Ukrainian side has sent Beijing a proposal for a meeting. But the Chinese initiative has no chance - the US desire for global hegemony precludes meaningful peacemaking by other states, especially outside NATO. On February 25, Biden condemned Beijing's proposals, saying they were pro-Russian.

The US has long accused the PRC of a pro-Russian stance, although it is more of a neutral position than many neutral states have previously taken. Last Sunday, the US foreign secretary accused China of providing non-lethal military supplies to Russian forces fighting a war in Ukraine. Moreover, Beijing, they say, intends to start supplying lethal weapons and ammunition. Wang Yi, head of the office of the CPC Central Committee's Foreign Affairs Commission, immediately assured European Union diplomatic chief Josep Borrell that the Chinese "are not giving Russia weapons and will not do so".

Western politicians argue that in China there is no difference between private companies and the state. Therefore, for example, the transfer of satellite images of Wagner by Chinese firms should be regarded as an example of cooperation between Beijing and Moscow. However, a much more interesting example is the military supplies from North Korea. The latter tacitly plays in the system of international alliances of China a role similar to that played in the US camp by radical Eastern European states like Poland - sometimes probing the ground for risky steps and doing dangerous work for their powerful patrons.

In any case, China's position can by no means be called pro-Russian. That can be seen in the economy as well - the reduced activity of Chinese firms in Russia (for example, the sales of electronics by Chinese Huawei declined against the background of increased sales by Taiwanese MSI) is added to Beijing's refusal to increase its purchases of cheap Russian energy above certain limits allegedly due to the need for diversification.

Ukraine: demographics turning to geopolitics

But if other parties to the conflict faced disappointment, Ukraine faced catastrophe. Yes, it survived the first year of the war, and international support for Kyiv increased, but this is little consolation amid the destruction of the very foundations of a viable statehood. It seemed that it was possible to turn a certain state into ruins only somewhere in Somalia, Afghanistan, or Yemen... Now, something similar is already happening in south-eastern Europe. The powerful (despite post-Soviet degradation) industrial core of Ukraine in the Donbas began to be destroyed in 2014 and was completed by the Russian invasion last year. Since autumn, Russian forces have been engaged in the destruction of basic civilian infrastructure.

Alongside, there was the exodus of the population. In 2022, EU countries accepted 4 million applications from Ukrainian citizens for temporary protection - in which they are immediately given the right to work and every opportunity to integrate into a foreign country. In other words, they quickly start building a new life. As a rule, younger and more active people - and there have been fewer of them in Ukraine as a result of its aging population. Even if the war ends soon, many will not return, but rather relatives who are still in Ukraine will go to them. If the war drags on, an absolute majority will not go back. This peculiarity of refugee processes is witnessed by countless examples of contemporary conflicts; in Ukraine's case settling in new places is accelerated many times over by the legal regime.

If in 2001 the population of Ukraine was about 42 million people, now it is somewhere around 30 million. The decline will continue, and even in the case of Kyiv's unrealistic victory, there will be neither people nor interested forces to rebuild the country to the same extent. There would be no money either (the mythical reparations, if any, would be exacted from Russia by the West, and they would go mainly to the accounts of the Western governments and businesses, as happened with the assistance for the reconstruction of Afghanistan in 2002-2022).

Despite the unrealistic military victory of the sides and the detrimental consequences of the war for Ukraine and the region, the war will not simply continue. Many influential forces in Eastern Europe see the solution as an escalation of the war, which would achieve a turning point through the entry of additional players into the war - some want to involve the US, and some want to engage the PRC. China has started talking about a peace plan to prevent this scenario. Beijing had to take up the cause, because the Turkish leadership, due to well-known circumstances, is not yet able to continue its mediation efforts to the same extent. However, despite the Chinese initiative, the threat of an "even bigger war" scenario remains real.