Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
The global nuclear order—built on policies of nuclear deterrence, nonproliferation, and disarmament—is unjust. Russia’s war against Ukraine proves that the distribution of the costs and benefits of nuclear deterrence is particularly discriminatory.
By creating a legislative fog and handing over power mechanisms from official institutions to interim emergency structures at both federal and regional levels, Putin is in effect acknowledging that the power vertical system he created is extremely inefficient.
The deployment clearly marks the continued erosion of Belarus’s sovereignty, which the country’s neighbors increasingly consider the new normal.
For many years now Russia's grand strategy has always been that the West will fall apart, the United States will lose interest in the war, there will be divisions between the United States and its European allies, and all the socioeconomic pressures emerging from this war will hem in Western leaders' resolve and determination to stand by Ukraine.
The oil and shipping market will almost certainly end up in turmoil, and Russia will need its own dedicated pariah fleet of tankers.
Concerns and public resentment over the influx of Russians cannot be seen any other way than through the prism of the long colonial history between the Central Asian states and the Russian (and later Soviet) empire.
President Obama and Vice President Biden wanted to ensure that we had the support of top-level leaders and former leaders on both sides of the aisle, and so they picked out who would be extremely influential and one of them was Colin Powell.
The bombings look like an attempt by the Russian establishment to convince itself and others that Russia still has enough determination and resources to regain the military initiative.
Which of these or other dominoes will fall—and when and how? It is too soon to predict the ultimate fallout of Russia’s certain strategic defeat, partly because it is not clear how severe the defeat will be. And although dominoes certainly fall in geopolitics, they don’t always fall how one expects.
Russia’s latest escalation of attacks against Ukraine appears to be driven by Putin’s desperation to end the war quickly. By contrast, these actions have further boosted Ukrainians’ morale in their fight for sovereignty.