Russia’s war against Ukraine, which President Vladimir Putin began in 2014 and expanded in February, has taken a dramatic turn following Ukrainian forces’ liberation, in less than a week, of some 8,800 square kilometres of territory in the country’s northeastern Kharkiv district. Russian strategists, apparently focused on the ongoing Ukrainian counteroffensive in the south, were unprepared for the attacks, and Russia’s poorly trained and poorly led troops were no match for their highly competent and motivated Ukrainian counterparts.

What happened was a turn, but not yet a turning point, in the war. It’s too soon to extrapolate from Ukraine’s gains in one area, much less conclude that what happened in Kharkiv is a harbinger for the entire country. Russia still occupies the vast majority of the territory it seized in 2014 and afterwards, and many Russians regard Crimea in particular as being theirs. This suggests that taking it back would prove extremely difficult, especially as more military force is required to conduct offensive operations than to defend.

Still, what Ukraine has accomplished is significant by any measure and has led to a major shift in thinking within the Ukrainian government, as I learned firsthand in Kyiv. Months ago, the goal for many Ukrainians was the survival of an independent, viable Ukraine—even if the state wasn’t in possession of all its territory. But the government’s war aims—the definition of what constitutes victory—are becoming more ambitious, owing to Russian brutality and Ukrainian forces’ recent territorial gains. In response to my question, Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov called for the return of all the country’s land, including what Russia took in 2014. To this he added a call for economic reparations to finance a reconstruction bill estimated at US$350 billion. And he insisted that those in Russia responsible for this act of aggression and associated war crimes be held legally accountable.

Recent military developments will also influence the politics of European countries, where surging energy prices have kindled opposition to providing Ukraine with arms and money. But the argument that Russian military superiority made support for Ukraine useless has now been proven wrong. With Russia cutting off gas supplies, Ukraine’s recent military success will make it easier for European governments to justify economic and personal sacrifice during what promises to be a difficult winter.

Ukraine’s counteroffensive is having a powerful impact on Russian politics as well. Putin, facing growing criticism from conservative, nationalist forces at home, will have to decide whether to double down on the war effort and, if so, how to go about it. Doing more and asking more of the Russian people isn’t without domestic political risks, but arguably it could be less risky for him than a course of action that leads to additional, cascading military defeats.

For now, there’s the prospect of several more months of intense fighting in the northeast and south of the country. Eventually, though, the scale will diminish as a result of frigid weather and the inability of either side to sustain large military operations.

A reduction in the fighting will provide time for reflection. Ukraine’s leaders will need to consider their expanding war aims and whether they are of equal priority. Here, a major consideration will be the war’s growing economic costs: loss of an estimated one-third of output, double-digit inflation, a sinking currency, skyrocketing debt and ever-greater dependence on foreign aid. Economic reconstruction will be slowed by uncertainty over whether the conflict will continue.

Then there are the human costs. Ukraine has suffered a high number of casualties among its armed forces and civilian population, while nearly 13 million Ukrainians are internally displaced or living as refugees across Europe. Ukraine will press for a complete military victory, but hanging over this objective is the question of whether some compromise on goals, perhaps on an interim basis, might need to be explored.

Russia also faces choices. Putin retains many options that would make it more difficult for Ukraine to regain more Russian-occupied territory. Up to now, Putin has refused to acknowledge that Russia is in a war that requires widespread conscription and mobilisation, because he either underestimated his foe or worried about domestic political reactions. That could change at any time, as could the Kremlin’s avoidance of attacking a NATO country or using chemical or even nuclear weapons. What Putin has to weigh is the likely military and economic response from the West and whether it would leave him better or worse off at home.

The West, for its part, should continue to provide Ukraine with the quality and quantity of military and economic support it requires. There are strong strategic reasons for doing so, including to deter future aggression by Russia, China or anyone else. In addition, Putin and others in Russia should be made to understand the price they would pay for expanding the war geographically or introducing weapons of mass destruction. Plans to implement such responses need to be readied if deterrence fails.

We are thus facing a winter not only of discontent (as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky described it at a meeting in Kyiv last week) but also of decision. What seems certain is that the war will go on for the foreseeable future. It’s inconceivable that Putin will agree to Ukrainian demands, just as it’s impossible to see Ukraine settling for much (if anything) less. What remains to be seen is how decisions made away from the battlefield this winter affect the course of the war come spring.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it’s fair to say, has already profoundly shaped the global discourse on nuclear weapons. In the deliberations at the inaugural meeting of the states parties of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in Vienna last month, the Ukraine war cast a long shadow over the utility and limits of nuclear weapons as a deterrent and as a tool of coercive diplomacy, the wisdom of having given them up, the incentives to either acquire them or shelter under another country’s nuclear umbrella and, above all, the cataclysmic risks of an all-out nuclear war that no one wants but everyone dreads.

This, then, is the first and in some ways the most important lesson. The existence of 11,405 nuclear weapons in the Russian and US arsenals (90% of world totals), far from helping to stabilise the crisis and calm the tensions, has added to the dangers and threats of the Ukraine war.

At an event in Vienna the day after the conference finished, on a panel he and I shared, the host and president of the conference, Alexander Kmentt, said with evident pride that the Vienna declaration (plus a 50-point action plan) adopted by the states parties was exceptionally strong for a multilaterally negotiated document. It was neither an activist text nor a bland statement of trite platitudes, but a declaration that demonstrated the seriousness of the new treaty.

Although some countries had wanted to censure Russia’s actions in Ukraine, the Vienna declaration adopted a more neutral and even-handed tone. In paragraphs 4 and 5, participants expressed alarm and dismay at the ‘threats to use nuclear weapons and increasingly strident nuclear rhetoric’. They condemned unequivocally ‘any and all nuclear threats, whether they be explicit or implicit and irrespective of the circumstances’, and also their use ‘as instruments of policy, linked to coercion, intimidation and heightening of tensions’ rather than to preserve peace and security.

A popular pastime, going back to the Euromaidan revolution in 2014 and the annexation of Crimea, is to claim that the Russians wouldn’t have dared to attack and dismember Ukraine if it hadn’t given up its nuclear arsenal after the Soviet Union imploded. The claim doesn’t withstand serious scrutiny. Like the US’s nuclear-sharing arrangements with some NATO allies (and in the past, South Korea), the bombs weren’t owned by the host, but by Russia, which retained exclusive operational control and launch authority.

Not one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, who are also the only five recognised nuclear-weapon states under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, would have tolerated the emergence of another nuclear power with a stockpile of 1,900 strategic and 2,500 tactical nuclear weapons—several-fold more than Britain, China and France combined. Ukraine would have struggled to survive as an international pariah state and the whole history of the region would have been so different that the deterrence claim for the events of 2014 and 2022 is simply not a credible counterfactual.

Five months into the war, what I find most striking with respect to nuclear weapons is their near complete lack of utility. The presence of nearly 6,000 bombs in Russia’s arsenal as a back-up for the biggest ground war in Europe since 1945, and none in Ukraine’s, failed to intimidate Ukraine into surrendering. Kyiv has simply got on with the job of valiantly defending its territory confident that, having failed as a tool of coercive diplomacy, nuclear weapons are not militarily useable. Having already suffered severe damage from the illegal invasion, Russia’s reputation would tank completely were it to use the bomb. Nor could Russia protect its own troops, the Russian-speaking enclaves of Ukraine and even parts of Russia proper from the radioactive fallout.

It’s true that President Vladimir Putin repeatedly reminded NATO of his formidable nuclear arsenal, publicly placed them on ‘special alert’ and warned of ‘unpredictable consequences’ if outsiders dared to intervene. None of that has stopped NATO from providing increasingly lethal and by all accounts very effective arms to Ukraine that have taken a deadly toll on Russia’s military.

Of course, NATO has refrained from introducing its own ground troops or declaring and enforcing a no-fly zone over Ukraine. Yet it’s debatable how much of this caution rests in consciousness of Russia’s nuclear capability and how much arises from internalised memories of the failure of NATO military operations in Africa, the Middle East and Asia since the end of the Cold War. These operations against minor regional opponents have mostly dramatically worsened the volatility, violence and regionwide instability. Who would want to own the chaos of the vast Russian landmass even if battlefield military victory was achieved? The catastrophic miscalculations of Napoleon and Hitler too, surely, play some role in injecting caution into rushing into a direct military fight with Russia, nukes or no nukes.

Yet, the Ukraine crisis is likely to damage the already enfeebled efforts to promote nuclear arms control and disarmament. Russia has clearly broken its pledge under the 1994 Budapest memorandum to respect Ukraine’s territorial integrity and borders in return for Ukraine giving up the nukes.

This will not reassure the 184 non-nuclear weapon states about their security concerns. On the contrary, it might confirm North Korea in the strategic foresight of having gone down the nuclear path and encourage Iran to do the same. It has already reopened debates in some NATO and Pacific allies about joining in nuclear-sharing arrangements as an insurance policy, in the belief that the presence of US bombs on their territory, even if they remain in American hands and control, will create new facts on the ground and serve as tripwires against aggression.

And the fact that Finland and Sweden—the latter a major champion of nuclear disarmament and the former of a regional nuclear-weapon-free zone in the past—will become the latest to join NATO is yet more evidence that history does irony. For, as I have argued elsewhere, the alliance’s unbroken eastward expansion is a major explanation for Russia’s actions in Ukraine. NATO’s northward expansion into the Baltic in turn becomes a major consequence of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.

The destruction of hundreds of Russian tanks in Ukraine does not signal the end of the need for armoured vehicles in future warfare, says one of the Australian Army’s key capability specialists.

Brigadier Ian Langford, the army’s acting head of land capability, used a speech at the Australian Defence Magazine conference this week to set out the case for the purchase of up to 450 infantry fighting vehicles (IFVs) to replace the army’s 60-year-old M113 armoured personnel carriers.

The war in Ukraine demonstrated the need for the army to be able to fight and survive in intense, high-threat combat, Langford said.

Langford noted that while the army had to prepare for such contingencies, its wide range of duties included responding at home to pandemics and disasters such as fires and floods flowing from climate change—’a demand we can expect to increase over time, especially within our region.’

On the human cost of the conflict, Langford referred to a report on The Strategist that one-third of Ukraine’s population has been internally or externally displaced, that the war has resulted in thousands upon thousands of dead and wounded soldiers and civilians, and that this year alone, Ukraine’s GDP is expected to collapse by 45%. ‘These numbers should belong to history,’ Langford said. ‘Regrettably, they do not.’

He quoted Alex Vershinin of the Royal United Services Institute arguing that the Ukraine war proved that the age of industrial level warfare is still here and the West’s recent legacy of low-intensity conflict has distorted the notion that wars can be won through a single technology or domain.

Langford said the war was providing unique insights into the nature and character of war and Australia’s army was studying this conflict very closely. ‘Of particular note, the army’s future investments in capabilities to include operational-level, long-range offensive fires, a resilient digital battle management system, a world-class aviation system and a credible close combat system are being informed by these real-world events.’

He said the IFV was at the core of the Australian Defence Force’s ability to deploy and sustain a land force as part of a joint, integrated team. A decision on the IFV project is due to be made by the government this year. This important decision would bear on the ADF’s ability to generate a credible land combat system, Langford said.

‘It will determine to a certain degree how government chooses to project military power, operate in high-threat environments, prepare for all ranges of contingencies, achieve deterrence, balance its force structures and prepare for the type of future conflicts envisioned like those currently being witnessed in Ukraine,’ he said.

‘Just this week, British PM Boris Johnston predicted that this conflict will likely lengthen in duration and increase in intensity over the coming months. Russia’s forced adjustments to its war aims, originally designed around a short, rapid seizure of the Ukrainian capital followed by the rapid defeat of its military, now instead plan on a long, bloody conflict. The ensuing rate of high civilian casualties and significant destruction to Ukraine’s infrastructure are ultimately intended to exhaust Ukraine into a negotiated settlement which might include Russia’s reclamation of Ukrainian territory, allowing the pyrrhic victory that it now seeks in order to justify its “special military operation”.’

Langford said the IFV appealed to the promise of unprecedented firepower, protection and mobility for the army and could be employed alongside a combination of tanks, infantry, and a range of other joint capabilities and emerging technologies.

The future IFV did not represent the totality of the army’s land capabilities—which included combat aviation, land combat, protected manoeuvre, amphibious and littoral forces, engineer, ground-based air defence, offensive strike, logistics, health, special forces and domestic security task forces, he said.

‘This capability nonetheless is the core of the close combat team as it relates to the task of closing with and killing or capturing enemy forces, and its existence in part acknowledges the myriad of threats that now exist on the battlefield, including the presence of improvised explosive devices like those experienced in Afghanistan through to the prevalence of loitering munitions which, according to some, may pose an entirely new lethal threat to soldiers who lack the levels of protection, manoeuvre and firepower necessary to survive in modern warfare.

‘Many either see this role as confronting, distasteful or no longer relevant to war with the advent of modern technology. And yet, what we see in theatres such as Ukraine suggests otherwise. The army must be able to fulfil this role given that there is no viable alternative in the short to medium term.’

Langford asked rhetorically if the conflicts in Ukraine and earlier between Azerbaijan and Armenia meant modern armoured vehicles were at such risk of defeat by a lightly armed foe with drones and modern guided weapons that they should be abandoned.

‘The short answer is no,’ he said.

‘Drones and anti-armour systems are contributing to this war, but so are the infantry, armour and artillery as well as the naval, air, space and informational power of both sides. Equally, it is hardly surprising that late-model drones and the best anti-armour weapons that the Western world manufactures, designed with sophisticated target-acquisition sensors, guidance systems and advanced warheads, are defeating tanks and IFV developed four decades ago, if not earlier.’

Langford said the majority of Russian vehicles in Ukraine lacked equipment that enabled modern armour to survive such as soft- and hard-kill active protection systems (APSs) and the benefits of integrated command, control and communications systems, which were vital for mobile forces to operate under an effective air-defence umbrella.

‘There has not been a single APS-active armoured vehicle destroyed in Ukraine,’ Langford said.

Russian tactics there were conceived around numbers with less regard to survival, he said. ‘Additionally, Russian vehicles are so obviously poorly sustained, maintained and operated it is little wonder that they are presenting so many targets to Ukrainian forces who are being well equipped by the collective capacity of NATO and others to destroy these antiquated Soviet-era capabilities.’

Langford quoted analysis by Jack Watling of the Royal United Services Institute highlighting the doctrinal and procedural issues hampering Russian combat performance:

Russian military performance has been spectacularly poor in Ukraine. At the tactical level, Russian units have showed an inability to follow basic military procedures. They have failed to prove routes, have advanced in densely packed groups of vehicles, have tended to lose momentum when engaged, and been road bound, neither screening their flanks with patrols nor setting up their air defences. The force has shown a very limited capacity to operate in combined arms groupings.

‘The ADF’s land force is not the Russian Army,’ Langford said. ‘It operates in a different way which leverages strengths, and offsets weaknesses.’

Looking at the 2020 Armenian conflict, the Center for Strategic and International Studies identified that armour and other heavy ground units would remain vulnerable to drones until mobile short-range air-defence systems improved and proliferated. But it warned that while drones played a large role, their capabilities ought to not be exaggerated and they were highly vulnerable to air defences designed to counter them.

They were not necessarily the ‘wonder weapons’ they appeared to be at first glance, Langford said.

‘As a first-world nation, the acquisition of both tanks and IFVs reflects on a nation that understands that it must conduct these inherently dangerous roles but that it also places high value on protecting the lives of the soldiers that it asks so much from in high-threat environments.’

As we reflect on the 100-day mark of the Russo-Ukrainian war and what we’ve learned, we need to understand that the West has fundamentally misunderstood Russia and continues to do so, argues Kyle Wilson, visiting fellow at the Centre for European Studies and former Australian diplomat who had postings in Russia, China and Poland.

This is why many in the commentariat are failing to appreciate that Russian President Vladimir Putin is probably happy with how his invasion of Ukraine is turning out, he says.

The Western foreign policy community has assumed for a long time that Russia under Putin had similar notions of what it means to be a world power, had more or less accepted the rules of the post–World War II international order, and was moving—albeit with setbacks—on a similar neo-liberal economic trajectory.

But, argues Wilson, something completely different has been going on in Putin’s mind. He has only been marginally interested in building stability and prosperity as the West would understand it.  Rather, his entire project has been about building Russia’s ability to be a coercive, expansionist and undeniably great power, with control concentrated in the hands of one person.

The Russian translation of ‘great power’ is velikaya derzhava, the second part of which is a cognate of a verb that means to seize or to hold, and Putin’s worldview represents a continuum of Russia’s imperial mythos.

Wilson points to the work of historian Stephen Kotkin, who has calculated that, over a period of about 450 years, Russia expanded outwards at a rate of 100 to 150 square kilometres a day, in the process engulfing 184 different nationalities or ethnic groups.

And that expansion continues, Wilson says: Russia now claims roughly half of the Arctic.

This imperial worldview has always been in evidence, he says.

For example, in 2005, Putin established a commission to rewrite Russian history textbooks. ‘It produced a textbook for history teachers. In that book was the remarkable paragraph that said most of the Russian politically conscious class rejects the present boundaries of the Russian Federation. They are inadequate to protect Russia’s security.’

Then, in 2008, Putin invaded Georgia and seized territory. And the Russians continue to ‘gradually move their barbed wire further and further into Georgia,’ says Wilson.

Six years later, in 2014, Putin invaded Ukraine for the first time, and Russian forces shot down a Malaysian commercial passenger jet, Malaysia Airlines flight MH17, in the process.

‘Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who was then the secretary-general of NATO, goes to Moscow, and says to Mr Putin, “I’ve come with a package of proposals to reform Russian NATO relations.” And Putin says to him on camera, “I don’t want to reform Russian NATO relations. I want NATO abolished.”’

Also in that year, Wilson notes, a senior Russian official came to Chatham House in London. The official said, ‘Putin is not so silly as to think that he can recreate the Soviet Union, but there is a core of the former Soviet Union that is properly ours—Belarus, Ukraine and northern Kazakhstan. And it would be nice to have it back.’

In 2018, Putin unveiled what Wilson describes as a ‘rather frightening array of new doomsday weapons, including a nuclear-armed torpedo that says, “You didn’t listen to us. Look at these weapons and listen to us now.”’

All of this was accompanied by ‘lurid and strident propaganda 24/7 on Russian television, pushing anti-Western messages,’ explains Wilson. An important part of this propaganda campaign was the idea that Ukraine is not a country or a people. ‘Putin said that very early on to George Bush. Again, we didn’t listen,’ he says.

During the past decade, Putin also accelerated the remilitarisation of Russia.

‘Under Putin, the military receives one in five roubles of revenue, but the security services and the national guard—a 350,000-strong riot police—also receive the same. So essentially three out of every five roubles of state revenue is going to control: an army to smite your foreign enemies and a domestic army to smite the traitors, the fifth column within.’

It’s therefore likely that Russia believes it is now demonstrating strength on its own terms by being able to wage what Wilson refers to as the ‘Russian way of war’.

‘There’s an expression in Russian that translates as “To be tender-hearted does not become a sword”,’ says Wilson. What this means in practice is the exercise of extreme brutality towards civilians, combined with an indifference to Russia’s own casualties.

Putin is likely to be equally indifferent, at least in the medium term, to Russia’s sanctions-induced economic suffering. Wilson argues that we shouldn’t be defining the health of the Russian economy in GDP terms.

‘Russia occupies about a fifth or a sixth of the world’s land surface. According to BHP Billiton, Russia sits on between 5% and 25% of almost everything on the planet, with exceptions like uranium and rare earths. Lake Baikal contains one-sixth of the world’s fresh water.

‘Oil and gas will remain important sources of revenue for the next 30 years. And the decline in Russia’s labour force is compensated for by Central Asian migration.’

On the economic front, while Russia has two big weaknesses—corruption and the brain drain of the best and brightest—Wilson says it is dangerously self-delusionary to argue that Russia has a weak economy.

Putin will also be encouraged by cracks in European support for Ukraine, as well as by the distinct lack of enthusiasm for Kyiv’s struggle among much of the developing world.

This will be feeding into the perception, endlessly peddled by Russian propaganda, that democratic nations don’t have the stomach for the Russian way of war and that Russia, as part of its exceptionalism, has an ability to suffer in a prolonged way that Western countries simply don’t have, Wilson says.

So right now, Putin may not be feeling dissatisfied with the way things are going, despite all the assertions that the invasion is a disaster for him.

According to Wilson, Russia’s Black Sea blockade and destruction of Ukrainian infrastructure means that what Putin has achieved is the probable end of Ukraine as a viable nation-state.

‘Yes, the losses have been far higher than expected, in terms of both manpower and material. Yes, the attempt to take Kyiv was a notable failure. But if you look at how Putin defines winning, it would be, if Ukraine can’t be reintegrated back into the Russian empire, then no one will have it.’

As Russian missiles pound Ukrainian cities, and as Ukrainians fight to defend their country, some avowed realists might say, ‘So much for soft power’. But such a response betrays a shallow analysis. Power is the ability to affect others to get the outcomes you want. A smart realist understands that you can do this in three ways: by coercion, by payment or by attraction—the proverbial ‘sticks, carrots and honey.’

In the short run, sticks are more effective than honey and hard power trumps soft power. If I want to steal your money using hard power, I can threaten to shoot you and take your wallet. It doesn’t matter what you think and I get your money right away. To take your money using soft power, I would need to persuade you to give me your money. That takes time and doesn’t always work. Everything depends on what you think. But if I can attract you, soft power may prove a far less costly way to get your money. In the long term, honey sometimes trumps sticks.

Likewise, in international politics, the effects of soft power tend to be slow and indirect. We can see the effects of bombs and bullets right away, whereas the attraction of values and culture may be visible only in the long run. But to ignore or neglect these effects would be a serious mistake. Smart political leaders have long understood that values can create power. If I can get you to want what I want, I will not have to force you to do what you do not want to do. If a country represents values that others find attractive, it can economise on the use of sticks and carrots.

The war in Ukraine is bearing out these lessons. The short-run battle has of course been dominated by hard military power. Russian troops swept into the country from Belarus in the north and from Crimea in the south. Ukraine’s ability to protect its capital, Kyiv, and to thwart the invasion from the north was determined by its military effectiveness and the invader’s mistakes.

Russia is now seeking to take Ukraine’s south and east, and it remains to be seen how events will play out in this phase of the war. In the near term, the outcome will be determined by military force—including the equipment being supplied by the United States, NATO countries and others—and by the exercise of hard, coercive economic power. While threats of trade and financial sanctions did not dissuade Russian President Vladimir Putin from launching his invasion, the sanctions that have been imposed have had a damaging impact on the Russian economy, and the threat of secondary sanctions has deterred countries like China from assisting Russia militarily.

But more to the point, soft power, too, has already played a role in the conflict. For years, US officials had pressed Germany to abandon the Nord Stream 2 pipeline project, warning that it would make Europe more dependent on Russian natural gas, and that its route under the Baltic Sea would weaken Ukraine. Germany refused. But then came the shock of the Russian invasion. Atrocities against civilians have made Russia so unattractive to German public opinion that the government suspended the pipeline.

Similarly, the US had long pressed Germany to honour a NATO commitment to increase its annual defence expenditures to 2% of GDP. Again, Germany had been dragging its heels until the invasion, which forced it to reverse its position almost overnight.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has proved especially adept at wielding soft power. When the US offered to spirit him out of the country, he famously replied that he needed ammunition, not a ride.

Zelensky’s prior experience as a television actor has served him well. With his informal attire and constant communication with Western media and parliaments, he has succeeded in representing Ukraine as an attractive and heroic country. The result was not just Western sympathy but a substantial increase in deliveries of the military equipment that Ukraine needed for the hard-power task at hand.

In addition, the disclosure of Russian atrocities against civilians in places like Bucha on the outskirts of Kyiv, has reduced Russia’s soft power and reinforced Western sympathies for Ukraine. The longer term effects on Russian soft power remain to be seen. UN member states have already voted to condemn Russia’s actions and to expel it from the UN Human Rights Council, though nearly one-third—including many African countries—abstained.

India, the world’s largest democracy, has refrained from criticising Russia. It does not want to jeopardise its supply of Russian-made military equipment, nor does it want to reinforce Russia’s ties with China, which it sees as its major geopolitical threat. As for China, while it abstained from the UN vote condemning the invasion, it voted against Russia’s removal from the Human Rights Council, and it has lent its formidable media resources to supporting Russia’s propaganda campaign.

How this will play out in the long term will depend in part on the outcome of the war. Sometimes, memories are short. For now, however, Russia and China seem to have suffered a loss of soft power. In the months prior to the invasion, the two countries solidified their axis of authoritarianism, and China proclaimed that the east wind was prevailing over the west wind. Today, that slogan has become much less attractive.