![]() “Just as Ukrainians are determined in their defense, Vladimir Putin is determined to win.” “He is not in a place politically where he can afford to accept a humiliating defeat,” Kofman said. Anything but victory in Ukraine could be seen by Putin as an existential threat, not only to Russia, but to his own grasp on power. Putin showed his willingness to deploy scorched-earth tactics in Syria and Chechnya, where arguably far less was at stake. Having failed to achieve its objectives in the early days of its invasion, Kofman said that the Russian military now appears to be settling in for a much longer war that would result in the attrition of forces and the destruction of cities. The brutality of Russia’s bombardment of Ukraine, even at this relatively early stage in the war, “has strong 1999–2000 Grozny vibes,” Michael Kofman, an expert on the Russian military at the Center for Naval Analyses, told me. Olena Halushka: The West isn’t doing enough to save my homeland Moscow’s shelling of Ukrainian cities and towns, as well as its targeting of civilians, has already drawn parallels to its previous bombardments of Aleppo at the height of the Syrian civil war and its destruction of Grozny, the Chechen capital, which at one point the UN considered “ the most destroyed city on Earth.” That the Russian president has already threatened to use his nuclear arsenal is just one concern that he could deploy brutal military tactics similar to those used by Russia in Syria and Chechnya is another. This risk is compounded by the unpredictability of Vladimir Putin, who represents not only a permanent, veto-wielding member of the UN Security Council (a position that Moscow regularly uses to its advantage), but a nuclear-armed state. The longer the Russian invasion continues, the greater the refugee crisis that Europe is likely to face, and the riskier the situation becomes for NATO, which has gone to great lengths to avoid being drawn into direct conflict with Russian troops. Ukraine, after all, is situated at the doorstep of the European Union and NATO, both of which have a vested interest in ensuring that the country’s sovereignty is maintained and that Russia’s aggression is curtailed. While Ukraine’s location has afforded it outsize attention relative to other conflicts, it’s also what makes the prospect of a drawn-out war even more likely. ![]() That the war has now escalated beyond the two countries’ de facto border has raised the stakes of the conflict, threatening both Ukraine’s sovereignty and that of its neighbors, many of which are now justifiably asking whether they could be next. The country has been engaged in armed conflict with Russia since Moscow’s illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, which even before Russia’s invasion last month had resulted in the deaths of more than 14,000 people, many of them civilians. In some ways, Ukraine was already in the midst of a long-running crisis. But that gap in coverage is likely to become even more striking the longer the conflict continues, because the factors that make a long war in Ukraine seemingly inevitable are the same ones that make it unlikely to slip from the world’s collective radar. ![]() The fickle nature of the international media means that protracted conflicts quickly lose the world’s attention, if they ever had it to begin with.Īt the moment, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has riveted the world, drawing more attention than the ongoing slaughters in other nations-a double standard that has been widely noted. ![]() If conflicts in places such as Ethiopia, Palestine, Kashmir, Syria, and Yemen have proved anything, it’s that wars are easy to start, but are also brutal, intractable, and difficult to end.
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