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What are the causes of Russia’s brutal war against Ukraine and why have they created Europe’s most serious conflict since World War II? The answer is in the mind of President Vladimir Putin, the only person in today’s Russia with the authority to go to war.

Richard Betts warns in his seminal work Surprise attack: lessons for defense planning, ‘Pure bolts from the blue do not happen. Sudden attacks occur after prolonged political conflict.’

I must stress that I do not agree with any of Putin’s views. However, it is important for us to record what he says—and he says a lot—and to understand how he thinks.

We need to discuss three major issues: Putin’s perception of why the USSR collapsed more than 30 years ago and what he claims was Russia’s humiliation by an America that proclaimed it won the Cold War; his views about the eastward extension of NATO and its alleged threat to Russia; and the creation of a nation-state called Ukraine 30 years ago and why Putin wrongly considers it part of Russia.

Putin has described the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991 as the most serious geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century. He witnessed the USSR go from being the peer competitor of the US to becoming a bankrupt power whose GDP collapsed by over 40% in 12 months. Russian citizens lost their life savings, jobs, apartments and perks with the communist party. There were huge shortages and queues for basic foodstuffs, widespread hunger and, it is said, even famine in some remote parts of the USSR.

Rodric Braithwaite, UK ambassador to Moscow from 1988 to 1992 and chairman of London’s Joint Intelligence Committee from 1992 to 1993, says America and its allies ‘failed to avoid triumphalism’ over the disintegration of the Soviet empire. The belief in Washington that America won the Cold War, and that it was now the world’s sole superpower, ‘led America into one diplomatic misjudgement after another in the next three decades’. Braithwaite considers that the Americans acted as if Russia’s foreign and domestic policy was theirs to shape. He quotes President Bill Clinton’s adviser, Strobe Talbott, as saying, ‘Russia is either coming our way, or it’s not, in which case it is going to founder, as the USSR did.’

The rotting Soviet economy was declining so rapidly that President Mikhail Gorbachev was begging Washington for a sort of Marshall Plan, involving loans of US$100–150 billion. President George H.W. Bush was facing his own acute budgetary problems and his Treasury secretary, Nicholas Brady, advised that it would be ‘an absolute disaster’ to give the Soviets ‘any money to stay as they are’. Brady went on to articulate America’s strategic priority: ‘What is involved is changing Soviet society so that it can’t afford a defence system. If the Soviets go to a market system, then they can’t afford a large defence establishment. A reform program would turn them into a third-rate power, which is what we want.’

Bush, advised by Brady, also opposed the idea of providing the Soviets with ‘maneuvering room’ for paying their debts. Brady was firmly against the idea of a massive Western financial package to stabilise Russia’s economy in its transition to capitalism. He said: ‘We have just had a momentous triumph for our values and for our vital interests. I think we are in a strong position not to be rushed into hasty decisions. We should be able to resist pressures for large-scale cash assistance.’ Instead, Congress approved US$400 million annually to help dismantle and control Soviet nuclear weapons, including those in Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

Braithwaite claims that all this seeped into the Russian public consciousness and aroused an overwhelming sense of humiliation and resentment which coloured the making of Russian policy for decades ‘and was persistently underestimated by Western policymakers and commentators’. In Braithwaite’s view, Western diplomacy towards Russia and Eastern Europe has been by turns arrogant and incompetent.

Many commentators don’t agree with Braithwaite’s interpretation of the reasons for the Soviet collapse. They consider it was more to do with the bumbling financial incompetence of authorities still captured by their state planning ideology. They also point to the disastrous impact on the Soviet state of the deadly political war between Yeltsin and Gorbachev.

So, how was NATO’s enlargement handled? Robert Hunter, the US ambassador to NATO from 1993 to 1998, observes that NATO at its 1997 summit, following the conclusion of the NATO–Russia Founding Act, found Russia to be deeply opposed to any idea of NATO membership for Ukraine. Hunter records that the prevailing view in the Bush administration was that, since the Soviet Union had lost the Cold War, the US and NATO ‘could do as they pleased’. He notes that increasingly evident revanchist Russian impulses, backed by an emerging capacity to act on them, were ignored.

Hunter observes that Putin’s presentation at the Munich Security Conference in January 2007 was notable for its bluntness. Putin said NATO expansion represented a serious provocation that reduced mutual trust. ‘And we have the right to ask: against whom is this expansion intended?’ He then quoted the speech of NATO Secretary-General Manfred Woerner in Brussels on 17 May 1990: ‘The fact that we are ready not to place a NATO army outside of German territory gives the Soviet Union a firm security guarantee.’

There are many different views about what promises were, or were not, given to Moscow about NATO’s expansion. Mary Sarotte in her recent book, Not one inch: America, Russia, and the making of post-Cold War stalemate, argues that on 9 February 1990, US Secretary of State James Baker, in conversation with Gorbachev, proposed: ‘Would you prefer to see a unified Germany outside of NATO, independent and with no US forces, or would you prefer a unified Germany to be tied to NATO, with assurances that NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its present position?’ The Soviet leader replied that any expansion of the ‘zone of NATO’ was not acceptable. And, according to Gorbachev, Baker answered, ‘We agree with that.’

Some claim that there’s no record of the Baker–Gorbachev exchange. But Sarotte footnotes her source as West German chancellery documents in a letter that Baker sent on 10 February 1990 to Chancellor Helmut Kohl, recording his meeting with Gorbachev the previous day. Sarotte also quotes from National Security Agency records that Robert Gates, deputy head of the National Security Council, posed the same question to KGB head Vladimir Kryuchkov in KGB headquarters on 9 February 1990. That record states that Gates thought the idea that ‘NATO troops would move no further east than they now were’ was ‘a sound proposal’. US authorities continue to point to the lack of any written agreement afterwards as a sign that the secretary of state and Gates ‘had only been test-driving one potential option of many’.

In his 2016 book, The new Russia, Gorbachev reflects that the issue of enlarging NATO was just one manifestation of America’s triumphalism after ‘winning’ the Cold War and its ‘superpower illusions’ (using the words of former US ambassador Jack Matlock), which reached their apogee—said Gorbachev—during the Bush administration. Gorbachev concluded, ‘I believe there is a desire to keep Russia half strangled as long as possible.’

Of course, former Warsaw Pact members had an entirely different view about NATO’s expansion after 40 years of subjugation by the USSR. They had experienced violent occupation by Moscow, not least in Hungary in 1956 and Czechoslovakia in 1968. Rather than organically expanding at America’s behest—as some commentators suggest—NATO was enlarged at the specific request of Eastern European countries for obvious security reasons.

Debates about Russian membership of NATO were resolved 30 years ago, basically in the negative. Russia was considered too big to join NATO because it would dominate Europe. That geopolitical judgement still holds: Russia is too huge and unpredictable for integration within the Western orbit. That certainly can’t be considered a legitimate reason to invade Ukraine.

Putin’s perception of Ukraine as part of Russia has been rightly utterly rejected by the vast number of Ukrainians of both Russian and Ukrainian descent now defending their homeland from Russia’s brutal invasion. Putin’s refusal to accept that Ukraine is a separate country is outrageous.

In 1991, Gorbachev’s aide, Georgy Shakhnazarov, advised him that Russia should officially declare that the Crimea, Donbas and southern parts of Ukraine ‘constitute historical parts of Russia, and Russia does not intend to give them up, in case Ukraine leaves the Union’. But apparently Gorbachev never followed this up with either Boris Yeltsin or the president-elect of Ukraine, Leonid Kravchuk, as the Soviet Union disintegrated.

Putin allegedly authored a paper in July 2021 titled, ‘On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians’, a 7,000-word diatribe arguing that Russians and Ukrainians are one people sharing  essentially ‘the same historical and spiritual space’’ He argues that modern Ukraine is ‘entirely the product of the Soviet-era’ and claims that Ukraine was dragged into a dangerous geopolitical game turning it into a barrier between Europe and Russia, ‘a springboard against Russia’.

Putin’s real fear is that the continuation of an independent, democratic Ukraine will contaminate Russia and threaten his position as president. The Maidan revolution in Kyiv in February 2014 that led to the overthrow of Viktor Yanukovich’s pro-Russian regime continues to haunt Putin. A month later, in March 2014, Putin ordered the invasion and occupation of Crimea.

Putin even claims, ‘It would not be an exaggeration to say that … the formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state, aggressive towards Russia, is comparable in its consequences to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us.’ He threatens to ‘never allow our historical territories and people close to us living there to be used against Russia. And to those who will undertake such an attempt, I would like to say that this way they will destroy their own country.’ Putin quotes Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the son of a Russian father and a Ukrainian mother, that historically Russians and Ukrainians ‘constituted a single people’ and that post-Soviet Russia should preserve its Slav core consisting of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus populated by ‘three fraternal peoples’.

Underlying Putin’s posturing is his aim to re-establish Russia as a great power (velikaya derzharva). His view is that without dominance over Ukraine, Russia cannot be a great power and that a Ukraine closely associated with NATO—even remaining outside the alliance—is a threat to Russia.

Putin now believes Russia can demand that its role as a great power be obeyed. But he has seriously overreached and his barbaric attack on Ukraine promises to permanently make Russia a pariah state. Only Putin’s removal can bring any hope of resolution to this bitter conflict.

So, what does the future look like? It’s predictable that Russia and Ukraine will remain enemies for life. And given that Putin may have further territorial ambitions in the Baltic countries, there’s a heightened risk of a Russian war with NATO that could escalate to the use of nuclear weapons. Putin must consider future contingencies both at home and overseas that threaten Russia’s very existence. The risk here is that an isolated and declining Russia with a terminally damaged reputation will be even more dangerous.

The fictional British prime minister Jim Hacker once opined that summits were public relations circuses offering less scope for negotiating solutions to international problems than state funerals.

That might be harsh. But a spate of leaders’ meetings in Southeast Asia in November could prove Hacker right if Russian President Vladimir Putin or one of his minions attends them.

Of these, the G20 leaders’ meeting in Bali is so far attracting the most attention.

As host, Indonesia has a profound interest in the summit being a success irrespective of the global ructions that Putin’s invasion of Ukraine has generated. It wants to use the occasion to promote President Joko ‘Jokowi’ Widodo’s agenda of economic development and champion the interests of emerging and developing economies in the post-pandemic global economy.

Accordingly, Jakarta intends to adhere to its pre-invasion agenda of global health architecture, a sustainable energy transition and digital transformation, themes dear to emerging economies like Indonesia.

Nor is Jakarta alone in hoping that the G20 will proceed in a parallel universe to that now dominated by images of destroyed cities and dead children. Russia certainly does.

China, too, is cheering Indonesia on. Foreign Minister Wang Yi had reportedly urged his Indonesian counterpart, Retno Marsudi, not to allow Ukraine to be discussed at the G20 leaders’ summit. China’s foreign ministry spokesperson reiterated that the G20 was not an appropriate place to discuss the crisis in Ukraine, echoing Indonesia’s argument that the forum was designed for promoting multilateral economic cooperation.

That the G20 is ostensibly an economic grouping, not a political and strategic one, is undeniable. But that ignores the fact that security issues have been on earlier G20 agendas and that the economic consequences of what’s happening are immense and globally disruptive. To argue that Ukraine can’t be on the G20’s agenda now is to ignore the searing reality that effectively it already is.

Jakarta’s position also ignores the fact that most other G20 nations don’t share it, and that were hypothetically the summit to proceed as normal, its chances of achieving anything on its agenda would be zero.  If summits are public relations circuses, this big top promises to be one presided over by a ringmaster hollering about telecommunications infrastructure in Kalimantan while more than half of the performers are busy fending off a crazed lion with whips and chairs. Indonesia’s reputation would be stained in the process.

This reality may now have dawned on Jokowi. Presumably he hasn’t ignored the interventions of US President Joe Biden, European leaders and others like Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison calling for Russia to be kicked out of the G20 and saying that Russia’s presence in Bali would be ‘highly problematic’ for them.

Jokowi may well be hoping that Putin solves this problem simply by staying away. Perhaps he’s hoping that China’s Xi Jinping and India’s Narendra Modi will help him out by persuading Putin to sit it out with promises that they will look after Russia’s interests and ensure Ukraine doesn’t raise its head.

But should the rest of us accept such a quid pro quo just to hold a meeting that ostensibly exists to deal with global economic problems of the kind Putin’s invasion has caused?

And would Putin agree, risking a message to his own citizens that their country had been ostracised for bad behaviour rather than applauded for slaughtering ‘Nazis’? It’s just as likely Putin won’t deny himself the psychotic satisfaction of thumbing his nose at his enemies. According to his ambassador in Jakarta, he intends to go—perhaps virtually or in Lavrovian form if his fear of absenting himself from Moscow or being in closer proximity to the coronavirus deterred him from the trip. In that event, Jokowi shouldn’t expect to be greeting most of the other G20 leaders.

And if indeed the European leaders and others boycotted, Australia’s leader should do so too. That might cause offence in Jakarta, though none would be intended. Canberra would need to manage this properly, advising Jakarta of its decision before telling the rest of the world. But given that the absence of most of the world’s largest economies would make the meeting pointless, despatching our prime minister or a senior minister to Bali in such circumstances would achieve nothing while being morally indefensible.

So, if Indonesia really wants to benefit from hosting the world’s premier economic forum, it should do more than just pray that Russia stays away. Since it would need a consensus of the membership to deny Moscow a place at the table, it should at least be urging China, India and perhaps others to agree to disinviting it. It should not, in effect, be siding with China’s line that Russia could not and should not be kicked out of the G20 or buying its absurd pitch that Russia’s presence would make for ‘true multilateralism’ and ‘strengthen solidarity and cooperation’.

The same applies equally to Thailand, this year’s APEC host. Like Jakarta’s plans for the G20, Bangkok’s goals for APEC go to post-Covid economic resiliency. Like the Indonesians, the Thais and the APEC secretariat seem determined to proceed as if the war in Ukraine had never happened.

But should Putin insist on attending APEC and be welcomed, those economies that seem set on taking a stand against Russia in Bali are hardly likely to behave differently in Bangkok. Others, like New Zealand, would likely join them. And if so, is a summit missing the leaders of most of APEC’s largest economies one that Thai Prime Minister Prayut Chan-o-cha would be content to host?

If she isn’t already, Australia’s Foreign Minister Marise Payne should be losing no more time in getting this message across to her Indonesian and Thai counterparts and urging them to change course. It shouldn’t be too taxing. She can cut and paste her talking points for each brief.

The third of these events, the East Asia Summit, is more complicated story. The EAS is different to the other two institutions. Most of its members are ASEAN states. It operates under ASEAN’s auspices. ASEAN runs it. Only ASEAN members can host it.

ASEAN couldn’t even bring itself to condemn Russia for the invasion. Two of its members, Vietnam and Laos, joined with China and India in abstaining on a UN General Assembly resolution condemning Russia’s action. Only Singapore has voiced explicit condemnation and joined in levelling sanctions against Russia. Persuading ASEAN’s current rotating chair—Cambodia, whose own autocratic leader has enjoyed ties to Moscow stretching back to the 1970s—to preclude Russia’s presence therefore seems the most quixotic quest of them all.

That shouldn’t deter Payne from lobbying her Cambodian equivalent with the same message as before, as well as other key ASEAN partners.

If ASEAN persists in inviting Russia to the East Asia Summit, however, Australia’s response needs a different calibration to its G20 and APEC settings.

The EAS has an enduring salience for Australia’s interests in its most strategically critical region that the other institutions lack. It may be less important in Australia’s strategic calculus now than was a decade ago. It is no substitute for harder forms of deterrence and the likes of the Quad, AUKUS and ANZUS. But it still offers the most important regional diplomatic adjunct to what is currently a defence-heavy strategy for navigating the dangerous uncertainties of the Indo-Pacific’s future. It is destined is to remain the only plurilateral avenue for diplomatic dialogue and mediation in East Asia that might mitigate the risks of conflict.

Boycotting the EAS in protest at Russia’s presence should therefore be off Canberra’s options list. Doing so would achieve nothing while flaring ASEAN members’ doubts about our commitment to regional diplomacy and reducing any influence we have in it. Ceding this turf to China would be most imprudent.

But however much the ASEAN states might wish otherwise, such an eventuality would not make for meetings filled with the spirit of amity and cooperation. And nor should it.

They should expect some of us to attend with chairs and whips.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and the West’s unprecedented response, represent a watershed in international relations, marking the formal end of the post–Cold War era and setting the stage for seismic geopolitical and geo-economic shifts. But one defining feature of international relations will remain: to paraphrase Thucydides, the strong will continue to do what they can, and the weak will continue to suffer what they must.

Leaders and observers around the world often speak of strengthening or defending the ‘rules-based international order’. But that order was always more aspirational than real. Countries that possess military or economic might reserve the right not only to make and enforce the rules, but also to break them.

It’s when the rule-makers disagree that the greatest risks arise. The Ukraine war—the first conflict of the post–Cold War period that pits great powers against each other—is a case in point. On one side, Russia has been carrying out a brutal conventional military assault on Ukraine, in an apparent effort to bring the country—which Russian President Vladimir Putin believes is rightly part of his country—back into the Kremlin fold. On the other side, NATO, led by the United States, has been waging a comprehensive hybrid war against Russia.

The West’s war has included the supply of huge quantities of weapons to Ukrainian forces: US President Joe Biden alone has authorised the transfer of US$1.35 billion worth of lethal weapons since the war began, with much more to come. The West has also implemented ever-escalating economic and financial sanctions, virtually expelling Russia from the Western-led financial order and sequestering the assets of many wealthy Russians. And it has sought to shape international opinion, with many countries now blocking access to Russian state media.

For all the talk of a rules-based order, the world’s rule-makers have reverted unhesitatingly to unilateralism. The risks are legion. The flood of weapons that the West is sending to Ukraine—a country with a long history of weak governance and widespread corruption—could eventually flow westward, fuelling organised crime, narcotics trafficking and terrorist violence across Europe. And the Iron Curtain’s revival may hasten the emergence of a militarily robust, neo-imperial Russia. Putin, who has called the Soviet Union’s collapse a ‘tragedy’ and the end of ‘historical Russia’, has indicated that Kazakhstan, like Ukraine, is not a country.

And it’s not just Russia that will become isolated. The Ukraine war could trigger the unravelling of decades of broader global economic engagement, long viewed as a key deterrent against great-power conflict.

Of course, the notion that countries would rather trade than invade has never been unassailable. Economic interdependence hasn’t stopped China, for example, from engaging in relentless expansionism, from the South and East China Seas to the Himalayas.

Even today, however, economic interdependence has forced rule-makers to exercise some restraint. Despite the raft of financial and economic sanctions it has imposed on Russia, Europe continues to support the Russian economy’s mainstay: oil and gas exports. This undermines the West’s own mission, especially as the confrontation drives up energy prices. But Europe’s longstanding dependence on Russian energy supplies has left it with no good alternatives—at least for now.

Such a trade-off may not arise in the future. The European Union has already vowed to eliminate its dependence on Russian energy by 2030. At the same time, countries that want to uphold trade ties with Russia are seeking solutions outside Western-controlled channels. For example, India is buying Russian oil with rupees. Similar moves elsewhere—for example, Saudi Arabia is considering renminbi-based oil sales to China—threaten to erode the US dollar’s global supremacy.

This is probably the beginning of a broader bifurcation of the global economy. At a time when economic power has shifted eastward but the West still controls the world’s financial architecture—including the main international payments system, the primary currencies for trade and financial flows, and the leading credit-ratings agencies—the establishment of parallel arrangements seems imminent.

China, which dwarfs Russia in terms of both economic power and military spending, will likely lead this process. In fact, China is set to emerge as the real winner of the NATO–Russia conflict. An overstretched America’s renewed preoccupation with European security will create strategic space for China to press its strategic objectives—its leaders have been as clear about absorbing Taiwan as Putin was about claiming Ukraine—and bolster its global influence, at the expense of the US.

Chinese global dominance would amount to the final nail in the coffin of the rules-based order. Since its establishment in 1949, the People’s Republic has displayed blatant contempt for international law, more than doubling its land mass by annexing Xinjiang and Tibet and currently detaining over a million Muslims. Yet China has paid no tangible price. The Kremlin, for its part, probably didn’t think twice about rejecting the International Court of Justice order to suspend its military operations in Ukraine.

International law may be powerful against the powerless, but it is powerless against the powerful. The League of Nations, created after World War I, failed because it couldn’t deter important powers from flouting international law. Its beleaguered successor, the United Nations, may be facing a similar reckoning. How can the UN Security Council fulfill its mandate of upholding international peace and stability if its five veto-wielding permanent members are arrayed into two opposing camps?

The world is headed for an era of greater upheaval. However it plays out, the pretence of a shared commitment to international law will be the first casualty.

China moved closer to Russia when its officials amplified Vladamir Putin’s disinformation, including his bizarre claim that the US and Ukraine were planning to target Russia with Slav-specific biological weapons carried by migratory birds. The US warned that those claims could be a cover for Moscow to use chemical or biological weapons.

Beijing also reaffirmed that it’s seeking more strategic and economic integration with Russia.

Russia and China share world views. Xi Jinping is personally invested in building the relationship, and Russia is seen in Beijing as the only other power capable of challenging US hegemony. The perception of Russia and China working in lockstep has generated much anxious attention in Western capitals. Despite the whiplashing events of recent weeks, it would be hard for China to give up on this prized ‘no limits’ relationship and return to a more isolated position.

But the relationship is being tested by the harsh sanctions leveled against Russia by the world’s biggest economies in an effort to halt Putin’s war in Ukraine. Central bank and SWIFT sanctions appear to have crippled Russia’s financial system and are unraveling its economy in chaotic ways. Russia is facing steep currency devaluation, divestment, debt default, supply-chain and credit-access problems, a looming unemployment crisis and a decline in state revenues, despite higher fossil fuel prices.

Russia urgently needs economic assistance from China and, according to the US, Putin has asked for it. Thus far, Beijing and other actors in China’s economy seem reluctant to step in, fearing secondary sanctions and irrevocable damage to major markets. And there are real limits to what China can do.

But an economically collapsed Russia is a big strategic negative for China. And given that Putin would be unlikely to forgive Xi for turning his back on Russia in its self-inflicted hour of need, there are strong incentives for Beijing to consider how it might help stabilise Russia’s economy.

This is a complex dilemma and uneven signals from China suggest that Xi hasn’t yet given a clear directive about how he wants to proceed, and that the broader system is still figuring out its options.

China was as unprepared as Russia for the first-ever coordinated central bank sanctions against a G20 country. Some Russian journalists say the country’s financial institutions were anticipating SWIFT sanctions and some level of currency depreciation.

But Moscow and Russia’s major companies weren’t prepared for being barred from dollar- and euro-denominated international trade, or for losing roughly half of Russia’s US$630 billion of foreign currency reserves held in Western banks combined with a 40% decline in the rouble. Russia’s credit rating now ranks with that of Angola.

Russia is also heavily dependent on imports for machine parts and digital technologies, which is why some analysts argue that choking tech supply chains to the oil and gas industry would be more effective than sanctioning the industry outright.

Russian agriculture depends on EU and US imports for about 40% of its seed stock.

There’s been a mass exodus of companies that have effective global monopolies on critical technology supply chains. Russian aviation has only a few weeks to live, according industry experts. Boeing, which provided parts and repairs to Russia’s military and civilian aviation sectors, and Cisco, Intel and Microsoft, which provide the software, hardware and services on which Russian computing networks depend, have gone. Internet isolation may soon become a reality. Data-routing entities Cogent and LINX have suspended Russia from their services, and Putin appears to be taking steps to isolate Russia’s internet from the rest of the world.

Russia’s fossil fuel industry—the backbone of the economy and of the political power of Putin and his circle—is also affected, even though the sector has so far been exempted from sanctions because of fears about driving up energy prices in developed economies even further, as well as the fact of the EU’s gas dependence on Russia.

But BP, Exxon, Shell and others are divesting from the sector and Russia is finding it hard to sell its oil due to overcompliance with sanctions by global oil markets. In addition, the US unilaterally sanctioned Russian oil and there’s now a live debate in Germany on blocking both oil and gas from Russia. And given that the EU has developed a plan to cut Russian fossil fuel imports by two-thirds in the next year, Russia is likely to permanently lose its most valuable market.

Russia’s financial institutions are trying to figure out ways of surviving, but central bank sanctions mean options are limited. There was no inventory build-up before the war. Measures taken by the Russian central bank to prop up the rouble—the imposition of capital controls, restricted currency trading and raising interest rates to 20%—may have stabilised its slide in the short term but could have a disastrous effect on the economy given Russia’s extremely high levels of consumer debt. The central bank has reportedly requested that banks keep pre-war rates for existing mortgages, but it may not have spare liquidity to compensate them for the losses this would create.

As yet, the Russian government hasn’t announced any large-scale stimulus measures to prevent mass layoffs. But it seems keen to ensure Russia’s long-term isolation from the global economy by passing legislation permitting seizure of foreign company assets, including leased aircraft, and software pirating. The government is also trying to stem a brain drain in critical technology skills by issuing flexible visas for tech workers, though this is unlikely to be effective.

JP Morgan estimates that the Russian economy will contract by 35% in the second quarter of 2022, and by 7% overall this year. That’s probably an extremely conservative estimate that doesn’t take into account the cascading effects of sanctions and supply-chain issues. Other economists are predicting a 15% GDP drop in 2022.

To assist significantly, China would have to help Russia pay for imports and boost its currency and increase support for its critical oil and gas sector. My next post will look at how China could help Russia’s failing economy.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine and the awful scenes of human suffering accompanying it are understandably prompting many to ask what more can be done to respond. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has been making loud calls for NATO to impose a no-fly zone over his country, a call thus far rebuffed. The rejection of that call pivots on the very legitimate concern that a war between the US and NATO on one side and Russia on the other would most certainly be worse than a war between Ukraine and Russia.

A generation since the end of the Cold War, the level of literacy about the risks of a shooting war between nuclear powers is such that articles can be published in support of a no-fly zone that don’t once mention nuclear weapons, and simplistic explainers are published outlining ‘Why the US won’t fight in Ukraine’.

Of course, the US and Russia are aware of the escalation risks. ASPI’s Rod Lyon has made the point on this site that nuclear issues have thus far ‘enjoyed a much higher profile than might have been expected’. Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to place his own deterrent on a ‘special regime of combat duty’ was the first explicit use of nuclear forces as a signalling device in this crisis, though it’s unclear exactly what that decision entails. The US flew B-52 bombers over Eastern Europe earlier this month. And a military hotline has been established between the Pentagon and Russia’s defence ministry to prevent ‘miscalculation, military incidents and escalation’ in Ukraine, though exactly how this hotline is operating is not clear.

We should be deeply concerned with the possibilities for inadvertent escalation in this crisis. That is, we should be concerned about actions taken, deliberately and carefully calibrated, that might nonetheless cross a threshold in the mind of Putin and Russian military leaders and lead to undesired escalation. We should also be worried about accidental escalation, the product of something that could genuinely be considered an accident, like a targeting or navigational error.

So, to the possibility of a no-fly zone. The potential thresholds appear clear at first but quickly become foggy. How would the Russian leadership respond to a NATO downing of a Russian aircraft? At the very least they would be likely to then target NATO aircraft operating over Ukraine.

But would it be possible to enforce a no-fly zone at an acceptable level of risk to NATO aircraft by only targeting Russian aircraft in Ukrainian airspace? Or would it be necessary to target support systems or Russian surface-to-air missiles based just over the Russian or Belarusian border? Likewise, can it really be expected that the Russian response would be so geographically limited? Or would Russia target early warning or reconnaissance aircraft flying just beyond the Ukrainian border? What about airbases within missile range? And where would escalation lead once those thresholds were crossed in turn?

The fog thickens once you consider the mechanics of a no-fly zone in more detail. Those in the West calling for this option must address these concerns. It seems unlikely, however, that the Biden administration’s clear stance against this possibility will change given the profound risks built into it.

Little discussed so far has been the messy escalation risks inherent in a potential Russian occupation of Ukraine, either whole or partial (say, partitioned along the Dnieper River). Official sources from NATO countries are, of course, refraining from openly discussing this eventuality while Ukraine continues to offer fierce resistance to the Russian assault. Brief anonymous statements suggest that officials in the US and elsewhere are considering what a government-in-exile and continued Ukrainian resistance would look like in such circumstances.

There will doubtless be much more said about what a Ukrainian insurgency in the case of Russian occupation might involve—and there are a range of possibilities.

Insurgencies often rely on safe havens and external support. We can expect that an ongoing Ukrainian resistance will seek external financial and material support, much as the Ukrainian government is currently doing. The insurgents resisting a Russian occupation can also be expected to seek to use—with or without the blessing of the governments in question—cross-border safe havens in NATO countries like Poland and Romania. In these places they might expect to be able to organise, rest and prepare free from the risk of Russian attack. It’s an open question how Russia might respond to such a situation. Would it accept this as a reality of an occupation or might it attempt to act against borderland safe havens in the belief that NATO wouldn’t respond? How would NATO respond?

There is a gamut of escalation pathways not discussed here that will presumably be preoccupying Western intelligence agencies. Potential routes from Western economic sanctions to retaliatory Russian cyberattacks or other measures are one, should those sanctions be truly crippling and cause serious problems for the Russian regime domestically.

Our lack of a good understanding of how decisions are being made in Moscow complicates any analysis. The bizarre aesthetic of Putin publicly dressing down his senior deputies and the haphazard progress of the first weeks of the Russian invasion, reportedly contrary to Russian expectations, are worrying indicators about the nature and quality of advice and decision-making surrounding the Russian leader.

It’s right that voices across the political spectrum continue to ask what more can be done to aid Ukraine. This discussion must also be imbued with an understanding of the potentially catastrophic escalatory risks.