• Geopolitics
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• Russia
• Ukraine

January 13, 2025, 6:00 AM View Comments ()

From its outset, Russia’s February 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine had two objectives.

The first was to annex as much Ukrainian territory as possible: ideally, all of Chernihiv, Sumy, Kharkiv, Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson, and Zaporizhzhia provinces. That would have been—and nearly was—complemented by the seizure of the capital city of Kyiv and the replacement of Ukraine’s government with one beholden to Russia. The invasion’s second, larger purpose was to use these gains to absorb Ukraine into Russia’s sphere of influence and transform the European balance of power.

Despite the Russian army’s advances in 2024, there is no scenario in which Russian President Vladimir Putin achieves either objective. Though Russia will likely hive off at least one-fifth of Ukrainian territory and perhaps retain it forever, what remains of Ukraine will not be bound to Russia. Putin’s invasion thus will likely yield a military success—one well short of his declared territorial objectives—but not a strategic one.

Putin’s determination to subordinate Ukraine and end its Westward trajectory stems from a widespread belief among Russian nationalists that Ukraine’s separation from Russia was unnatural. By Putin’s own account, no country matters more to Russia because the two have been united by shared culture for more than a thousand years. He and other Russian nationalists still find it difficult to accept Ukraine’s 1991 independence.

As former Russian Deputy Prime Minister Vladislav Surkov put it in 2020: “There is no Ukraine. There is Ukrainianism. … But there is no nation.”

Though it’s certainly possible that Putin will be able to negotiate Moscow holding on to vast amounts of Ukrainian territory, he cannot coerce or bargain his way back to a Ukraine that is culturally or politically unified with Russia. After years of Russian revanchism, Ukrainian identity is now defined by a determination to have as little to do with Russia as possible.

Though Russian is still spoken widely in central, southern, and eastern Ukraine, the Ukrainian language has become central to national identity. This trend, particularly pronounced among younger Ukrainians, will accelerate; for those yet to be born, it will become something so natural that it is unremarkable.

Similarly, though Orthodox Christianity has united Ukrainians and Russians for more than a thousand years, last year, a Ukrainian law required parishes to cut ties with the Moscow Patriarchate, which has become a full-throated supporter of Putin’s war.

Today, when Ukrainians ponder their security, they no longer see it as tied to Russia’s. Any deal that ends the war will include a provision prohibiting Ukraine’s entry into NATO, at Russia’s insistence; nevertheless, Ukraine’s substantial security ties with Europe will continue to increase. European states are already supplying arms to Ukraine, training its troops, and investing in its defense industries. Their role will continue to expand, and Ukraine—which now has the most experienced, battle-tested army in Europe—will be militarily aligned with European countries for the long run, even without a formal alliance.

Taken together, these developments indicate that no matter the outcome of the war, Putin will have failed to achieve his foremost goal of retaining Ukraine within Russia’s sphere of influence. Nor will the conflict leave Russia better off in other respects.

A common interpretation of Russia’s full-scale invasion is that it was triggered by the prospect of Ukraine joining NATO. From the outset, it seemed self-evident that any Russian leader would regard such an expansion as a threat, just as any U.S. leader would be alarmed by, say, the rise of a Chinese-led alliance in the Western Hemisphere.

That said, Ukraine’s membership in NATO was no more likely in 2022 than it was in 2008, when U.S. President George W. Bush prodded a divided alliance into expressing its support for the idea of admitting Ukraine during the alliance’s Bucharest summit—though at an undefined date. But these divisions persisted, and by 2022, Kyiv had been waiting for 14 years with no accession in sight.

The irony is that Putin’s war has led to NATO expansion and increased defense spending in Europe. Finland and Sweden, which showed no interest in joining the alliance prior to 2022, signed up soon after Russia invaded Ukraine. Even Switzerland, with its hallowed tradition of neutrality, has taken steps to boost military spending—by up to 19 percent through 2028—and increase its defense ties with Europe. The Swiss still strongly favor continued neutrality, but it was telling (and to some, startling) that a 2024 report from a commission created by the Swiss Defense Department included the idea of rethinking this stance.

Though European defense has a long way to go before it is truly autonomous, Russia’s war in Ukraine—along with U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s electoral victory in November—has been a wake-up call. Europeans are now serious about increasing defense spending and boosting their defense industries. They will still contend with collective action problems, free-riding, and backsliding, but Putin’s war has focused European attention on providing for the continent’s security to an unprecedented degree.

The European Union may lack the will and unity to rapidly achieve military self-sufficiency, but it does have greater military-relevant resources than Russia—such as a population more than three times larger, a GDP roughly nine times bigger, technological capabilities incomparably more advanced, and a world-class defense industry—that are now being mobilized like never before.

Gen. Christopher Cavoli, the commander of U.S. military’s European Command, stated recently that the postwar Russian army will be even “stronger than it is today.” It’s hard to square his assessment with the facts. Russia’s army has suffered some 700,000 casualties, including what’s estimated to be between 79,000 and 120,000 deaths.

Add to that the economic costs of the war, which the Pentagon estimated last February to be up to $211 billion. (By now, the sum is of course even larger.) To put this figure in perspective, Russia’s entire defense budget for 2025 will total less than $140 billion. Moreover, military expenditure is set to increase by 25 percent for next year and will consume nearly one-third of the state budget.

Russia’s losses in military equipment have also been staggering. It will take many years to replace the thousands of tanks, artillery, armored personnel carriers, and infantry fighting vehicles that Ukraine has destroyed.

Remarkably, Russia has sustained losses of this magnitude in a war against an adversary that is far weaker and that nevertheless continues to fight as the war’s three-year mark nears, defying the prognoses of military experts. Recall that in the days before the full-scale invasion, Gen. Mark Milley, then the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, was among those who believed that Kyiv would fall in a matter of days, while many others estimated that it wouldn’t take much longer.

Putin’s war has exposed the hollowness of Russia’s claim to be a military superpower, its nuclear arsenal aside. Some commanders have been fired following complaints from pro-war Russian bloggers about their lackluster leadership or for filing false reports touting their units’ successes. The Russian army has been forced to rely on prisoners, private militias, and mercenaries from such places as Cuba, Nepal, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan—and now, some 50,000 North Korean troops.

The surprise, then, is not that Ukraine is struggling on the battlefield, but that Russia’s army has performed so badly.

The invasion of Ukraine has also contributed directly to at least one substantial economic loss. In 2021, a year before the war, Europe was the destination for nearly three-fourths of Russia’s natural gas exports. Russia’s market share of EU gas imports was 45 percent, providing Moscow with tens of billions of dollars annually. Now, following Ukraine’s recent termination of Russian gas flows to Europe through a pipeline that traverses Ukraine, Russia’s share of imports has dwindled to around 8 percent. This loss will likely be permanent.

Losses may also be felt on the geopolitical front. Though much has been made of the accelerated strategic alignment between Russia and China since the war’s outbreak, the net result is that it could turn Moscow into a ward of Beijing. The longer that the conflict in Ukraine drags on, the less Russia will be able to offer China—whether it’s oil, gas, or weapons. As China invests heavily in green energy, its demand for oil has increased at a slower pace. This does not bode well for Russia, given that oil, gas, and their related products comprise nearly three-fourths of its exports to China. Nor does China’s recent slowdown in economic growth, which could reduce its demand for Russian gas.

Though trade between China and Russia reached a record $240 billion in 2023, that amounted to less than half of the trade between China and the United States that year, as well as one-third of China’s trade with Japan and Europe that same year. Furthermore, whereas over the past two decades Russia accounted for around 75 percent of China’s weapons imports, the rapid modernization of Chinese defense industries has reduced Beijing’s dependence on foreign suppliers—especially Moscow.

Given China’s growing economic and military power, there is no doubt which country will have the upper hand in the Beijing-Moscow alignment. Russia is not in a good position: increasingly reliant on China and estranged from the West. A rapprochement with Europe and the United States would boost Russia’s bargaining power against China, but it’s not likely that Moscow’s frayed relationship with the West can be repaired even after the war in Ukraine ends.

Though Trump’s return to the White House tends to be seen as a net gain for Russia, if U.S.-China relations deteriorate further, Moscow will find backing Beijing while trying to repair the relationship with Washington to be a nonexistent choice.

Based on the battlefield realities, it is difficult to see Russia’s war in Ukraine ending on terms that favor Kyiv. Ukraine will have to sacrifice territory and abandon its cherished goal of joining NATO or at least defer it indefinitely.

Yet even though Russia may achieve a military victory over Ukraine by virtue of the territory it will likely gain, Putin’s war will have failed to secure preponderant influence in Ukraine and a stronger long-term position in Europe, leaving Russia worse off in the long run both internally and externally.