Four years of the Ukraine war

How attempts by America and her NATO allies to weaken Russia in this proxy war may wreck the alliance

THE LAST WORD | ANDREW M. MWENDA |  As a new war rages on in the Middle East, we must not forget that it is four years since Russia invaded Ukraine. The war in the Middle East is pitting the United States and Israel alongside their client states in the Persian Gulf against Iran. With the UK and France joining in the fight, the balance of power is heavily tilted in favour of the American side. Yet, as has happened with Russia, an outgunned and underfinanced Iran may prove a much more deadly adversary than the Americans and their Israeli allies thought. Using asymmetric tactics, the Iranians may lay bare the weakness of empire.

The two wars in Ukraine and Iran are closely related and will shape the new and emerging global order in startling ways. That is why we need to take stock of the impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on the global order. As I said at the beginning of that conflict in 2022, it is not a war over Ukrainian sovereignty as Western governments and their media have presented it. It is a war between NATO and Russia, with Ukraine being used as a proxy.

Since the invasion in February 2022, the Western powers’ openly stated objective was to “defeat” Russia. They never explained what that defeat entailed, let alone the consequences of such an outcome. Be that as it may, Western powers led by the United States imposed what they called “crippling” sanctions on Russia, i.e., an economic blockade. They cut it from the international payment system, SWIFT, confiscated its foreign exchange reserves worth $600 billion and began providing Ukraine with money and weapons. As I write this article, the US and her client states in the European Union have provided Ukraine with over $500 billion in assistance. This money is three times the size of the Ukrainian economy and more than three times the size of Russia’s annual defence budget.

To drive the point home, Western leaders have made it clear what this war in Ukraine really is about. Former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said in an interview that it is a proxy war by NATO against Russia. US senators Mitt Romney and Lindsey Graham have both said the same thing: that the USA, without losing a single life, is sponsoring the defeat of a major rival. Indeed, Romney added that this has been the most cost-effective and cost-efficient use of American power in any war Washington has ever fought. Western powers have also used their control of traditional and social media to demonise Russia and its president, Vladimir Putin.

What have they achieved after four years? First, the crippling sanctions have not crippled the Russian economy. On the contrary, Russia’s economy has been growing faster than all the economies of EU nations. Today, Russia is the fifth-largest economy in the world after China, the USA, India and Japan using Purchasing Power Parity (PPP), according to the IMF. Secondly, the sought military victory over Russia in Ukraine has not materialised. Instead, the Ukrainian army has been beaten badly, the country’s infrastructure destroyed, and eight million of its citizens forced into exile. Today, Ukraine is finding it hard to raise soldiers to fight on the front, and many are deserting the front line in droves.

It is difficult to see a good future for Ukraine in this war. America, the main funder of Ukraine’s war effort, is facing severe challenges. At a strategic level, the Donald Trump regime wants to pivot to Asia in order to confront a rapidly growing and increasingly assertive China. At a tactical level, the Trump regime will be forced by its involvement in the war with Iran to rapidly scale down support for Ukraine, a policy it had already begun anyway. The Europeans, who had lived under the US security umbrella for a very long time, had not built a security architecture of their own to ensure stability on the continent. Neither did they invest much in their own defence.

The crisis of Europe is that they are waking up too late to realise the mistakes they made. They placed all their eggs in the American basket. Trump and his cohorts are teaching them an open lesson: that alliances are only sustained when they are mutually beneficial. The USA was spending too much on European security and getting little in return. In fact, the expanded NATO has increasingly become a liability to the USA. It now includes many small countries of little or no strategic value to the alliance which are very difficult to defend if attacked. Instead, they impose costs and risks on the USA that cannot be justified by any strategic reasons.

Therefore, the US is being forced by circumstances to dump Ukraine. It is unlikely Europe will be able to fill the gap left by the US withdrawal. This will lead to a defeat of Ukraine because Kyiv cannot sustain the war against Russia without overwhelming NATO support. If Ukraine is lost, and as China becomes more assertive in Asia, the USA will scale down its security guarantees to Europe. If these predictions materialise, it will also spell doom for NATO. Thus, the war NATO provoked over Ukraine with the aim of destroying Russia may have the opposite effect – wrecking the alliance alongside Ukraine.

If European countries were not irrational, they would seek to build an independent security architecture. For such to be successful, they would have to integrate Russia at its heart. This would achieve the dream Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev had of building a “common European home”. If Europe stopped looking at Russia as an adversary and saw it as an ally, it would join hands for its own security. Such a partnership would make Europe an independent pole of power and enhance its power and prestige in the world. For now, its reliance on the USA for security and economic sustenance has turned European countries into US satellites, always forced to support their patron’s forever wars even when these wars are detrimental to European security and economic interests.

One lesson is clear from the Ukraine war: Western hegemony is over. The idea that the West can dictate the course of history and achieve its aims is dead. The failure to knock Russia out of the ranks of big powers by a combined Western economic blockade only demonstrates how much the global economy has shifted. But it also means that military power is also shifting.

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amwenda@ugindependent.co.ug