Tag Archive for: Russia

Measuring Russia’s economic and military power

Russian President Vladimir Putin aspires to be leader of the great power of Eurasia rivalling China to its east and the European Union and the United States to its west. Yet the latest analysis from the International Monetary Fund’s World Economic Outlook database shows that Russia’s economy generated goods and services worth US$1,647 billion in 2021, fractionally more than the US$1,610 billion it reported for Australia.

After the precipitous fall in the value of the rouble this week, the value of Russia’s economic output would now be significantly less than Australia’s.

It is a comparison that speaks volumes about the relative productivity of businesses and workers in the two economies but says almost nothing about their relative size.

Geographically, Russia is the world’s biggest nation, covering 16 million square kilometres compared with second-ranked Canada’s 10 million. Its population of 145 million people is 15% larger than Japan’s and 70% bigger than Germany’s.

The Russian Federation inherited a large and inefficient economy from its Soviet forebears with a concentration in heavy industry, a strong oil and gas sector, and the world’s third largest holdings of arable land. It was also bequeathed a bloated state sector.

These essential contours have remained the same. Russia is the world’s fifth largest steel producer and the fourth largest producer of electricity. It is the biggest exporter of gas and the third biggest producer of oil. It is the third biggest exporter of wheat.

Following the fall of the Soviet Union, large swathes of state-owned industry were hived off to insiders who became billionaire oligarchs. Under Putin, there has been significant renationalisation, with the Russian government taking control of privatised companies in ‘strategic’ sectors such as energy, aviation, construction, transport and finance.

A 2014 IMF estimate put the Russian state’s share of the economy at 70%, although more contemporary estimates suggest somewhere between a third and half depending on how businesses with state investment are counted. But between the enterprises owned by the state and by the oligarchs, there is little competition or incentive for growth, and corruption and misallocation of capital are rife.

The result is great inefficiency. According to the OECD, Russian workers produce only 40% as much per hour as workers in the US. The comparative figure for Australia is 84%.

Poor productivity and markets that are skewed by unpredictable state interventions on behalf of oligarchs or itself make Russia unattractive to foreign investors, despite the lure of its energy sector. Russia has always received significantly less foreign investment than Australia.

This results in a low valuation for the rouble relative to currencies of other more productive countries, and it is that low valuation which depresses the US dollar value of Russia’s GDP. As travellers are aware, a US (or Australian) dollar buys a lot more in, say, Bali than in Sweden.

The IMF’s alternative measure of economic size assesses the purchasing power of the US dollar in different countries. This generates a radically different picture of the size of the Russian economy, showing its output as US$4.5 trillion, which is just slightly smaller than Germany’s US$4.7 trillion.

It is purchasing power that matters when it comes to military spending. According to data compiled by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Russia devotes 4.3% of GDP to its military, which helps it support armed forces of almost one million and the world’s fourth biggest arms industry. Only in the Middle East do much smaller nations devote a greater share of their economy to military spending, although the World Bank data shows that Ukraine isn’t far behind Russia, spending 4.1% of GDP.

Military spending, by contrast, accounts for 3.7% of the US economy, while China, with a vast economy when measured by purchasing power, devotes only 1.7% to its armed forces.

There have been various academic efforts to measure military power based on economic strength. Perhaps the best known is the composite index of national capability, created by a US academic J. David Singer in 1963 for the still operational ‘Correlates of War’ project.

It is an index derived from measures of military spending, military personnel, iron and steel production, energy consumption, total population and urban population. It is designed as a composite of demographic, economic and military strengths.

It ranks Russia as the fourth most powerful nation behind China, the US and India, with its strongest measures being its steel production, its energy consumption and its military personnel. The Ukraine, by contrast, ranks 26th and Australia, according to this index, ranks a lowly 64th.

The influential US analyst Michael Beckley argues that such measures of physical strength exaggerate the power of large but underdeveloped nations. He contends that the development of an economy is as important as its size. ‘A military with skilful military personnel and superior technology will use fewer resources to accomplish a mission than a military with low skill and outdated technology,’ he says.

Even then, history abounds with smaller and weaker militaries defeating much better resourced adversaries—the Vietnamese and the Taliban, to pick two. David beats Goliath in 20% to 30% of international disputes and wars, Beckley says, not because they are more powerful, but because they are more resolved, with grit, luck and wisdom on their side.

Putin’s empire of lies

Vladimir Putin’s regime has banned Russian media from referring to his invasion of Ukraine as a ‘war’. Instead, it is to be framed as ‘an operation to liberate Ukraine from neo-Nazis’.

The state-run RIA news agency has published lurid propaganda arguing that Russia ‘for the second time in history will take on the burden of responsibility for the liberation of Ukraine from Nazism’. Readers are told that ‘filling in the swastika only slightly with cosmetic correction and high-quality powder’ was ‘the main method of building Ukrainian statehood’. Now, Russia is carrying out a ‘denazification’ operation ‘in the interests of all Europe, even if Europe is not aware of it’.

It is worth dissecting this propaganda, because propaganda plays an important role in sustaining Putin’s dictatorship, especially in times of crisis. And without Putin’s dictatorship, there certainly would be no war in Ukraine. The more Russia’s military campaign falls short of what he had hoped, the more he will rely on propaganda.

Over the years, Putin has told the Russian people many contradictory things about Russia and Ukraine. During his first two terms as president (2000–2008), he had ambitions to modernise Russia and deepen its ties with the West. But after he had gotten a taste of power, he started thinking primarily about how to keep it. Modernisation gave way to police-state brutality, and now, thinking about his place in history, he has concluded that without Ukraine, Russia cannot be a world power. Yet, when he took office, Ukraine was still pro-Russian, and the Kremlin still had significant influence over it. It was his annexation of Crimea and seizure of 7% of Ukraine’s territory in 2014 that lost Ukrainian hearts and minds.

Between failing to modernise Russia and driving Ukraine away, Putin has committed multiple unforced errors that future generations of Russians won’t forgive. Recall that, in the early days, Putin himself considered bringing Russia into the European Union and even NATO. Denying Ukraine’s sovereignty wasn’t on his mind. When asked in May 2002 about Ukraine’s declaration of willingness to join NATO, he replied:

As for NATO enlargement, you know our attitude to this issue. It does not change, but this does not mean that Ukraine should remain on the sidelines of processes aimed at strengthening peace and security in Europe and on earth in general. Ukraine is a sovereign state and has the right to independently choose the path to secure its own security.

But when Ukrainians took to the streets in the 2004 Orange Revolution to protest corruption and electoral fraud, Putin got scared. What if Russians ever decided to do the same? By 2008, Putin had adopted a new posture. Speaking at a NATO-Russia Council meeting in Bucharest, he offered an early preview of the rationale that has now led him to wage aggressive war against Ukraine. Had Western governments taken him seriously, they would not have spent the past three months guessing at his intentions, and they probably would have supplied Ukraine with more weapons and money. Putin made his intentions plain:

The south of Ukraine, completely, there are only Russians. Who can tell us that we have no interests there? … In Ukraine in general, one-third of the population is ethnic Russians. Of the 45 million, according to the official census, 17 million are Russians. There are regions inhabited only by Russians, say, in Crimea—90% Russians. Ukraine in its present form received territory from Poland—after World War II—from Czechoslovakia, Romania. It received huge territories from Russia in the east and south of the country. It is a complicated state creation. And if you add to that the NATO problem, other problems, they can put statehood itself on the brink of existence altogether.

The two census claims were untrue: 17 million is merely the number of Ukrainians who declared Russian as their first language, and ethnic Russians comprised no more than 60% of Crimea’s population at the time. But the point is that Putin signalled 14 years ago that he would use historical revisionist claims about Russian minorities outside Russia’s borders as a pretext for interfering in other countries’ internal affairs. In doing so, he was following in the footsteps of Adolf Hitler, who, six months before invading Poland, used German minority populations across the border as a pretext to destroy democratic Czechoslovakia.

Moreover, like Nazi Germany, Putin is consumed by a stab-in-the-back myth. Echoing German nationalists in the 1920s and 1930s, he can’t accept the fact that the Soviet Union fell without losing to the West on the battlefield. The only other explanation is that it must have been betrayed by elites, who dragged the great nation down from within.

Apparently oblivious to these historical parallels, Putin sees Nazis on the march everywhere but at home. Yet it is he who routinely enlists the help of neo-Nazis like Dmitry Utkin, a mercenary with the Wagner Group, a private army financed by pro-Kremlin oligarchs, who bears Waffen-SS tattoos on his collarbone and chest.

As with Nazi Germany, the Kremlin’s provocations seem extraordinarily inept. Russia is ostentatiously and brutally violating international law in an effort to humiliate Ukraine and frighten a dissolute West. That is why the Kremlin’s propaganda has gone to such lengths to smear Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky as a drug addict and a neo-Nazi, even though he is a Jew whose grandfather fought the Nazis in World War II, and who lost many other relatives in the Holocaust.

Until recently, Russian propaganda has worked not only in Russia but also in the West. Beyond the US Republicans who have openly sided with Putin, many Germans have long failed to appreciate that the Soviet victims of Nazism were not all Russian. In fact, Nazism claimed more Ukrainian victims, and a Ukrainian soldier was the first to open the gates of Auschwitz.

Whatever happens in Ukraine, Moscow has already lost the war for hearts and minds. The period of craven forbearance toward Russia is ending. Around the world, the Ukrainian people and their leaders are now regarded as heroes. And as more body bags arrive in Russia or are burned in mobile crematoriums, even Putin’s closest supporters may come to doubt his leadership.

ASEAN’s weak response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine

Last Saturday, in a two-paragraph statement, ASEAN foreign ministers said they were ‘deeply concerned over the evolving situation and armed hostilities in Ukraine’. They called on ‘all relevant parties to exercise maximum restraint and make utmost efforts to pursue dialogues through all channels, including diplomatic means to contain the situation, to de-escalate tensions, and to seek peaceful resolution in accordance with international law, the principles of the United Nations Charter’. The statement continued, ‘For peace, security, and harmonious co-existence to prevail, it is the responsibility of all parties to uphold the principles of mutual respect for the sovereignty, territorial integrity and equal rights of all nations.’

Reading those lines, what would disappoint many is that there is no reference to Russia and no condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The generalised wording of the statement could make someone who is out of touch with the breaking news think that the ministers are talking about a civil armed conflict rather than a state-to-state war between Russia and Ukraine. Whatever the reasons or pretexts Russian President Vladimir Putin cited in his raging speech announcing the deployment of a ‘peacekeeping’ mission, with the sending of troops into Ukraine, Russia has obviously launched an invasion against an independent and sovereign state and a fellow member of the United Nations.

Russia’s use of force constitutes an act of aggression and violation of the UN charter and international law. So, why was the name Russia absent from the ASEAN ministers’ statement?

Here is the assumption reading between the lines. The ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine was too far away for ASEAN to be affected. That war was in Europe not in Asia or Southeast Asia, and therefore it wasn’t in the interests of ASEAN to speak. More pragmatically, though, Russia is a trading partner and a major or potential weapons supplier to most ASEAN members, while Ukraine is not. Russia is a strategic partner and member of several key mechanisms led by ASEAN, while Ukraine is not.

Is it because of these factors that Russia wasn’t named in the statement and condemnation? No one apart from ASEAN can answer that question, but if the group fails to condemn Russia, it fails to honour the commitments solemnly stated in its own charter.

While ASEAN itself has not criticised Russia, Singapore, one of the group’s founding members, has joined the US, the EU, and many other countries in the region including Japan and Australia in strongly condemning Putin’s actions, and is planning to impose ‘appropriate sanctions and restrictions’ to punish Russia for its assault on Ukraine.

ASEAN, in its charter, which was unanimously endorsed by all group members in 2007, vows to respect ‘the fundamental importance of amity and cooperation, and the principles of sovereignty, equality, territorial integrity, non-interference, consensus, and unity in diversity’, renounce ‘aggression and … the threat or use of force or other actions in any manner inconsistent with international law’, and uphold ‘the United Nations Charter and international law’.

Even though the ASEAN charter is meant for its members in Southeast Asia, by adopting these universal principles, ASEAN demonstrates that the group is not just a regional organisation but is more broadly part of the international community. Its pledge to honour the UN charter and international law reflects a commitment to live in peace and security and to respect the wellbeing and protect the lives of civilians.

Raising concerns and issuing a statement of condemnation of an act that constitutes a serious violation of international law and poses threats to international peace, security and stability in the region or other parts of the world has precedents in ASEAN’s recent records. For example, in 2017, in relation to actions including nuclear tests undertaken by North Korea, ASEAN leaders expressed their ‘grave concerns’ in the statement of the chair of the 30th ASEAN Summit.

Similarly, in 2018, regarding the situation in Syria, ASEAN foreign ministers adopted a statement declaring, ‘The situation in Syria is of serious concern to international peace and stability.’ They urged all parties ‘to exercise restraint and settle the dispute by peaceful means in accordance with international law, including the UN Charter’ and said that ‘all parties must take steps to avoid escalation and ensure the safety and security of civilians’. ASEAN had the same response to the situation in Iraq and Palestine.

The tensions linked with China’s aggressive actions in relation to the disputes in the South China Sea have been a constant concern in ASEAN leaders’ and foreign ministers’ statements.

But in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea, ASEAN stayed silent. This time, Russia had seemingly even more reason to be confident about ASEAN’s response after the two sides elevated their ties to a strategic partnership in 2018. In addition, Moscow seems to have appreciated that its close relations with every single ASEAN member state, along with the group’s working principle of consensus, would save Russia from condemnation if the group had intended to craft any such a statement on its attacks on Ukraine.

Within ASEAN—with the exception of Singapore and Indonesia, both of which condemned Russia’s actions—other nations have offered tamer responses. The Malaysian prime minister spoke bluntly at a press conference during his visit to Cambodia, saying that ‘ASEAN agrees that we do not get involved in the issues of foreign countries’. ASEAN is not alone in Asia in being friendly to Russia on this. China and India have both avoided condemning Russia. However, unlike China and India, ASEAN is a group of smaller countries and some of them are currently involved in territorial disputes with China in the South China Sea. As such, it would be a mistake if ASEAN refrained from issuing such a generalised statement.

Issuing such a muted condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could have some repercussions and shows the weakness of ASEAN again in not taking a united position against an aggressive act of a major power in the region, as it has also failed to do against China’s actions in the South China Sea. The ASEAN foreign ministers’ statement could be interpreted as meaningless when it didn’t express explicit sympathy for this tragedy and for the grievous and needless suffering of the civilians affected.

How digital media could help end the conflict in Ukraine

In the lead-up to Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine last week, much of the information the public received was from open-source intelligence. Commercial satellite imagery, mainstream media coverage and social media video footage all combined to provide a detailed picture of the Russian military build-up. Most major cities are covered by CCTV, which has helped police solve crimes but also enabled repression by authoritarian regimes.

In Russia, dashcam footage abounds. In Ukraine, we can already tune in to live CCTV footage from major cities and witness the Russian military crossing Ukrainian borders and making its way through Crimea.

But now, with Russia having invaded Ukraine, could real-time video also play a role in ending the conflict?

Despite advancements in ‘deep fake’ technology, video is a powerful weapon for the truth. One of the defining images of the 1989 Tiananmen Square protest is video (and stills) of a lone Chinese citizen holding up a column of tanks. During the 2011 Arab Spring, mobile phone video footage was sent out on social networks over the internet, bypassing state media. Al Jazeera, one of the most trusted news sources in the Arab world, amplified those messages and provided a window into events for many in the West.

So too in 2019 in Hong Kong, where months long protests were documented by video and disseminated through social media. Chinese authorities went to extraordinary lengths to clamp down on dissent, including stopping video content from Hong Kong from making its way into mainland China through the social media platform Weibo. Beijing also provided a counternarrative in an effort to nullify the persuasive effects video imagery can have.

But it’s not only in authoritarian regimes that video footage has changed the course of history. In February 1968, with the US in a bloody conflict in Vietnam, widely regarded as the first televised war, American news anchor Walter Cronkite’s on-the-ground reporting has been credited with exposing the US position as far worse than official government reporting had claimed. Controversy still rages as to whether Cronkite’s coverage undermined the US war effort or legitimately reported in the public interest. Either way, the images emerging from Vietnam turned public opinion and ultimately led to political pressure that caused the US to withdraw.

Large social unrest has also resulted from video imagery of police brutality. The 1992 Los Angeles riots following the acquittal of police accused of beating Rodney King were largely caused by the public having seen video footage of the event beamed into their living rooms. The death of George Floyd in 2020 at the hands of Minneapolis police, captured in excruciating detail on video by onlookers, sparked the global Black Lives Matter movement calling for social change.

Ukraine’s own ‘Euromaidan’ revolution in 2014, which overthrew the pro-Russian President Viktor Yanukovych and ushered in a more euro-friendly government, was greatly assisted by video broadcast on social media drawing Ukrainians into the street.

Russia surely knows this, and may soon use cyberattacks on Ukrainian communications infrastructure to limit the flow of information out of Ukraine, but it will also need to limit the spread of information at home. For now, video footage caught on CCTV and with widespread mobile phone usage helps document the invasion and counter the Kremlin’s disinformation narrative.

Extraordinary moments of bravery by ordinary citizens willing to confront an armed foe have already been documented. In the face of overwhelming military might, Ukraine can’t hope to win a conventional military conflict, but must instead try to prevail by maintaining resolve and winning sympathy and support worldwide.

While Western governments try to contain and ultimately defuse the Ukrainian crisis through increasing sanctions, Russian President Vladimir Putin will only back down if it becomes too politically damaging for him to persist. This requires domestic pressure, which the West’s sanctions may spark if they bite on ordinary Russians’ economic wellbeing. Some have speculated that the invasion of Ukraine may ultimately lead to 69-year-old Putin’s downfall.

The invasion and the consequences for both Russia and Ukraine will be documented on video and shared with the world. While ‘fake news’ will no doubt emerge on both sides, and we ought to treat all footage with caution until verified, video is a highly effective medium. Vision of the progress of the invasion will likely unify and embolden Western liberal democracies to strengthen measures against the Kremlin.

To build a movement for change from within, Russian opposition to Putin needs to employ elements of past successful protest movements. The old adage still stands that seeing is believing, and with millions of lenses capturing events globally, what one person films can now be instantly seen by thousands.

As events in the US, Hong Kong, the Arab world and elsewhere have shown, video messaging on social media can be a powerful motivator for change. We may already be starting to see seeds of opposition within Russia to Putin’s war. Should that protest movement build, we may see the beginnings of a peaceful revolution—and one that will be televised.

Kick kleptocrats in the wallet

The world aims to punish Russian President Vladimir Putin and his cronies with economic sanctions.

Follow the logic of sanctions to reach for a powerful weapon to threaten autocrats and kleptocrats.

Kick them where it really hurts: hit them in the wallet. Don’t just make it hard for them to do business and enjoy their loot. Seize back the ill-gotten profits they’ve looted.

Autocrats respect hard power and cold cash. In the kleptocrat world, that translates as power at home and cash secreted abroad.

Using government to steal from the people and the state—and ever fearful of the future—autocrats and their buddies loot, and then stash the loot beyond the reach of the state they’re robbing.

Putin runs a ‘rogue mafia state’, turning Russia into ‘a gas station with nukes,’ observes the former Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov.

The big gambit available to the West, Kasparov writes, is to confiscate the cash the rogues stash: ‘Kick Putin’s mafia state out of the international institutions it uses and abuses to spread corruption. Seize the hundreds of billions in assets he and his cronies hide in the West and kick out the oligarchs and their families.’

In journalist and historian Anne Applebaum’s words, the autocrats—‘whether in Russia, China, Venezuela, or Iran’—ignore rules and diplomatic protocol, because lying keeps opponents on their toes and being hated adds to their aura of power:

Putin’s goal is not a flourishing, peaceful, prosperous Russia, but a Russia where he remains in charge. [Foreign Minister Sergey] Lavrov’s goal is to maintain his position in the murky world of the Russian elite and, of course, to keep his money. What we mean by ‘interests’ and what they mean by ‘interests’ are not the same. When they listen to our diplomats, they don’t hear anything that really threatens their position, their power, their personal fortunes.

Such thinking animated the European Union’s high representative for foreign affairs and security policy, Josep Borrell, when he announced EU sanctions on Russia and then tweeted, ‘No more shopping in Milan, partying in Saint-Tropez, diamonds in Antwerp.’ He quickly deleted the vivid tweet, but it was reproduced by Russia’s foreign ministry, which responded: ‘First time we’re seeing a “euro bureaucrat” celebrating damage done by Brussels to businesses in EU Member-States.’

Going after the cash is complicated and grand corruption skips by a lot of laws.  The 189 countries that are party to the United Nations Convention Against Corruption each have laws criminalising corrupt conduct. Yet kleptocrats enjoy impunity because they control the ‘justice’ in the countries they rule.

The war launched by Putin’s dark mind calls for sanctions, containment and new ways to punish and push back. One answer is to create an international anti-corruption court (IACC).

An IACC would be a court of last resort, holding kleptocrats accountable (and grabbing their accounts). The court would recover, repatriate or repurpose stolen assets, punishing corrupt officials but also professional enablers (step forward, lawyers, bankers, accountants and real estate agents).

The IACC could be established by a small number of founding member states, so long as they include several major financial hubs where lots of cash gets stashed (step forward, the UK, Europe and the US).

The existing International Criminal Court doesn’t cover crimes of corruption and amending its statute would require a two-thirds vote by its 123 member states.

The IACC could learn some valuable lessons from the ICC’s shortcomings and be a nimbler beast with sharp teeth. Going after the cash, the anti-corruption court could pay much of its own way.

A campaign for the IACC launched last year when leading citizens from 45 countries (Nobel laureates, former heads of state and government, high court judges, former cabinet ministers, business leaders) signed a declaration of support.

The multilateral model for the fight against grand corruption is the successful international campaign to ban landmines. My nomination for the bumper sticker: ‘Kick the kleptocrats, recover the cash.’

At this early stage, Canada and the Netherlands are the countries stepping up to the diplomatic challenge of establishing the court by treaty.

In Canada’s federal elections last September, the Liberal and Conservative party platforms had commitments to the anti-corruption court. The mandate letter given Canada’s new foreign minister in December included these tasks:

– Working with international partners to help establish an International Anti-Corruption Court, to prevent corrupt officials and authoritarian governments from impeding development that should benefit their citizens; and

– Continuing to support and implement Canada’s Magnitsky Law, the Justice for Victims of Corrupt Foreign Officials Act, and promote the adoption of similar legislation and practices globally.

Australia, too, now has a Magnitsky law, named after the tax lawyer Sergei Magnitsky, who died in a Moscow prison in 2009. Magnitsky gave his name to a 2012 US law aimed at Russian human rights abuses, and then in 2016 to a US law with global reach, covering corruption as well as human rights.

Australia’s law, which took effect on 8 December 2021, provides sanctions for ‘abuses of human rights, serious corruption and significant cyber incidents’. The act is the government’s response to a parliamentary report, Criminality, corruption and impunity: should Australia join the global Magnitsky movement?

Australia’s Magnitsky law offers ‘an illustrative list of themes’ for sanctions: the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; threats to international peace and security; malicious cyber activity; serious violations or serious abuses of human rights; activities undermining good governance or the rule of law, including serious corruption; and serious violations of international humanitarian law.

That’s a lot of bandwidth for ministerial discretion, as noted by a range of critics—‘unfettered power’ is one barb.

Magnitsky and the IACC share similar instincts, but are different approaches. One is a national instrument; the other is multilateral. One is driven by Australian government decision and discretion; the other is a new international court seeking to create new global norms. Magnitsky makes it hard to move or spend loot, while the court would grab for the loot.

In seeking to buttress a rules-based international order against Putin and other autocrats, we need to reach beyond the old rules to create new institutions to police the rules.

An IACC couldn’t do much about ‘Putin’s palace’, the US$1.3 billion mansion by the Black Sea; Alexey Navalny denounced the palace as the ‘world’s largest bribe’ as he flew back to Russia to his certain imprisonment. The cold shadow cast by an anti-corruption court would fall on the property and loot beyond the nation being looted. The very idea will madden and frighten autocrats everywhere.

In Australia’s election campaign in April and May, all sides of politics should follow Canada’s example and commit to a court to kick the kleptocrats.

Ukraine invasion a crystallising moment for a more dangerous, divided world

Events on the ground in Ukraine as Russia attacks the UN member state and its people are rightly absorbing the world’s attention: 190,000 heavily armed troops invading another country and inflicting death and injury is a level of armed force on the scale of the nasty conflicts in Korea, Vietnam and during World War II.

It’s also absolutely right for there to be a focus on what powerful nations and groupings—like all EU member states, NATO, the US, Japan and Australia—are doing to sanction and condemn Russia and to support Ukraine and its people as the conflict unfolds.

It’s likely that no level of sanctions and harsh words will constrain Russian President Vladimir Putin now. This is already a growing source of criticism of the UN, the EU, NATO, US President Joe Biden and other world leaders who are joining the sanctions.

What’s happening in Ukraine is about 44 million people with lives and families, not just some piece on the geopolitical chessboard. The real-time feeds of Russian attacks in Kyiv and Kharkiv bring home the brutal reality of what Putin is doing to people who just days ago were living in a free and democratic society.

We must also examine who is not joining the international action against Russia’s aggression and what this means for now and over the next few years.

This ‘long game’ will become more important and more apparent whenever the intensity of the immediate crisis in Ukraine lessens. But we can identify one big dynamic about this from the now emerged and operating Russia–China partnership.

China is the single major power that not only is not working with a unified international community in  condemning and sanctioning Moscow, but is working against that unified international community. The Chinese foreign ministry has made opaque statements about needing to ‘respect the legitimate security interests of any country’, along with startlingly out-of-touch assertions like, ‘On the Ukraine issue, lately the US has been sending weapons to Ukraine, heightening tensions, creating panic and even hyping up the possibility of warfare.’

China is signalling support for Putin, wrapped in language of de-escalation and diplomatic paths. The invocation of ‘legitimate security interests’ echoes Putin’s false premises for attacking Ukraine—that Ukraine threatens Russia’s security, so Russia needs ‘security guarantees’ aimed at ‘reducing military risks’ it apparently faces.

More than this, Beijing is working against broad international sanctions on Russia. Its foreign ministry stated: ‘We consistently oppose all illegal unilateral sanctions’, carefully avoiding the uncomfortable fact that the sanctions are not unilateral, given the broad set of UN members joining them, including every EU nation, the US, the UK, Japan, Australia and Canada.

None of this should be surprising, because these are all symptoms of and indicators from a much bigger development, the Russia–China partnership.

Back in the pre-pandemic days of November 2019, defence policy expert Paul Dibb wrote a report titled, How the geopolitical partnership between China and Russia threatens the West.

His core assessment was crisp and disturbing:

China and Russia have commonly perceived threats with regard to the West and are now sharing an increasingly close strategic relationship. If the China–Russia military partnership continues its upward trend, that will inevitably affect the international security order, including by challenging the system of US-centred alliances in the Asia–Pacific and Europe.

At the time, this analysis was greeted with scepticism, with critics focusing on the differences between Russian and Chinese interests, capacities and civilisational approaches. The happy result of this line of thinking was to discount having to think about or act on the implications of this disturbing analysis—which now looks prescient and correct.

This year looks entirely different to the hopeful ideas of the past when limitations and differences in the Russia–China relationship outweighed their grounds for cooperation.

Instead, as we see in Kyiv and Kharkiv and across Ukraine, the defining element of the Russia–China partnership now is how it’s enabling Russia to reorder security in Europe—with global implications for the rest of us—including folk like Australians who live in the Indo-Pacific.

It’s now hard to sustain an argument that what happens in Europe is a distraction from what happens in the Indo-Pacific, or that the Indo-Pacific is a distraction from pressing concerns in Europe.

Putin and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping have made their authoritarian nations a common strategic challenge for European and Indo-Pacific partners. They even did us the courtesy of announcing it in writing after their meeting in Beijing on 4 February.

Xi and Putin’s joint statement describes their deepening relationship and active support for each other’s ‘core interests’, along with themes of exerting power and excluding others ‘in their common adjacent areas’. Putin is now acting on these ideas and Xi’s support as he works to create a sphere of influence around Russia, through either invited occupation—which he has achieved in Belarus—or the brute force and war we are witnessing in Ukraine.

The arc of development of the Russia–China strategic partnership has enabled the Russian war against Ukraine: Putin knew from his summit with Xi that Beijing would support him as the conflict and its later broader effects unfolded.

We should expect Beijing not just to oppose and complicate international efforts to inflict damaging consequences on Russia for the war, but also to provide Moscow with material financial assistance and access to China’s market for resources and goods as a way of diluting any international actions against Russia. The Chinese customs agency opening up China’s market for Russian wheat yesterday, as Russia’s attack began, is a simple but crystal clear example of engagement designed to undercut international action and enable Russia.

This complicity at the highest level between Beijing and Moscow will be obvious and palpable in the weeks and years ahead.

The underlying realisation from all the governments joining the sanctions discussions and measures must be that, beyond Ukraine, Europe and the Indo-Pacific are now a single strategic system joined by the actions of Putin and Xi. That’s the common strategic challenge we can no longer hide from or deny. This will be a difficult realisation for India and Germany because both nations, for different reasons, have accentuated the potential of engaging Russia and seen the differences between Beijing and Moscow as more important than they are turning out to be. Realising that hope is not a method, or a basis for policy, is always hard, although German Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s swift move to halt approval of the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline from Russia is a signal of this shift in mindset occurring.

The larger strategic contest is not between the ‘authoritarian world’ and the ‘democratic world’. It’s between two particular aggressive autocratic states—Russia and China—and the collective action, wealth and power of the democratic nations of Europe and the Indo-Pacific, joined by every other UN member state that believes in the principles of the UN charter.

This will remain true while Xi leads China and while Russia is led by Putin.

So, we don’t get to choose whether to focus on Europe or the Indo-Pacific. Together we must do both. In this way, the UK’s 2021 integrated review got things more right than I and others realised back then, when it said the UK would remain a Euro-Atlantic-centred security actor but undertake an Indo-Pacific shift at the same time. That’s a much better frame for our strategic world in 2022 than superficial debates about whether Europe or the Indo-Pacific should be the single priority.

In the months and years ahead, stronger military forces in Europe must be built to deter further Russian aggression, through a reinvigorated NATO and an awakened EU. And here in the Indo-Pacific, the efforts to shift the military balance away from China will accelerate through frameworks like AUKUS, the Quad and the other powerful US alliance relationships here. Economic diversification and technological decoupling from Russia and China must be accelerated to reduce the shocks and dislocations that the existing interdependencies create (energy supply to Europe from Russia is one example).

It’s a crystallising moment for the world, as we enter a more divided and more dangerous future. Let’s approach that future with an understanding of the actual challenge we face, and from whom.

The known unknowns of Putin’s bloody gamble

As feared, Russia’s so-called ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine was launched with widespread attacks, including near the capital Kyiv, using aircraft and missiles to disable airfields, combat aircraft and other military assets. Russian troops landed at Ukraine’s main port of Odessa in the southeast, and at Mariupol in the southwest, and parts of these cities have been under missile fire.

In the so-called rebel provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk, Russian troops crossed the border to support their local militia forces. Repeated cyberattacks have disrupted Ukrainian communications and critical infrastructure.

Russian tanks and heavy armour crossed the border from Belarus, a couple of hours of highway driving from Kyiv. Much further to the south, columns of armoured vehicles were filmed moving north from the Crimean Peninsula. They could help secure a land bridge to the eastern rebel provinces but are too far away to threaten the capital.

Russian special forces units are operating in Ukraine in significant numbers. Their task will be to degrade Ukrainian military assets to reduce opposition to the land assault. Special forces operatives may also be targeting Ukraine’s political leadership.

It’s clear that this operation is moving on a much bigger scale than simply consolidating Russian control of the eastern provinces. It is a large-scale attack, operating on multiple dispersed fronts and using all elements of Russian power: sea, air, land, rocket forces, special forces, and even mercenaries brought from Russian private ‘security’ activities in Africa.

The spread of attacks indicates this may be the largest military assault on an independent country in Europe since the fall of the Berlin Wall. As we know only too well from Iraq and Afghanistan, it’s easier for an aggressor to occupy a country than to stabilise it, and once the tanks are rolling there’s little option other than to press for military victory.

The next 48 hours or so will be decisive as to whether this attack will attempt to seize political control of the country, a move that will require a long-term Russian occupying presence, or simply peter out into a temporary exercise—in President Vladimir Putin’s words, to ‘demilitarise’ Ukraine. That strategic objective offers a convenient cover to withdraw if things start going badly for Moscow.

To use the words of the redoubtable former US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld, there are many ‘known unknowns’ about how this conflict might unfold in coming days.

Russian armour has been able to move towards Kyiv from Belarus along roads upgraded to improve economic links between that country and Ukraine. Belarus is where Putin has deployed some of his most capable forces, including the 76th Guards Air Assault Division, with a battle lineage going back to Stalingrad and modern combat roles in Chechnya, Georgia and the 2014 Crimean invasion.

Hitting Kyiv from the north was the obvious option for a lightning campaign to decapitate Ukraine’s political leadership, and yet so far we have a naval assault from the south and a broader air and missile assault.

We also don’t know about the likely extent of Ukrainian resistance. Russia’s Defence Ministry claims it has disabled all of Ukraine’s air defences and air bases. But will the Ukrainian army and reserve forces be able to get anti-armour weapons into action?

We should not assume that the Ukrainian military will fold as quickly as the Afghan security forces did. There is a terrible irony here. The Afghan military was built around the presence of US and allied forces providing intelligence support and critical maintenance of aircraft and vehicles. Afghan resistance collapsed not because key units didn’t want to fight; they just lost all their enabling support.

This is not the case in Ukraine, where Western military support has been deliberately limited since 2014 to avoid ‘provoking’ Russia. After eight years of fighting around the eastern rebel provinces, it’s likely that the Ukrainian military has the equipment and motivation to put up stiff resistance.

We also don’t know about the strength of opposition inside Russia to such a large-scale military operation, which, terribly, may soon be sending young soldiers home in body bags. This military operation is on a much larger scale than Russia’s recent air and special forces operations in Syria. It will take a much deeper bite from the Russian economy and affect many more families. It’s unclear how long Putin will be able to confect public support for a large-scale military occupation.

Here is one last ‘known unknown’: we don’t know what Chinese leader Xi Jinping really thinks about Putin’s actions. Rhetorically, the two dictatorships have each other’s backs. But Beijing’s language grew more cautious in recent days. If Russia’s invasion draws NATO and America’s friends and allies more closely together in a new cold war power divide, that won’t advance Xi’s goal for military domination.

In one sense, China wins from this conflict because Putin becomes more dependent on Xi. China will be Russia’s economic lifeline when (and if) sanctions bite and a long-term occupation of Ukraine will bleed Russia dry.

Just like North Korea, Beijing now has a second errant ‘little brother’, always plotting dire malevolence. But China wants to own the world order, not smash it like Putin. The conflicting world views of the two countries will keep them nervous about each other.

It’s too early for many lessons, but one is already clear. Western weakness in refusing to offer Kyiv any real military support handed Putin his opportunity. US President Joe Biden has had his second major foreign policy disaster after Afghanistan. He refused to lead, instead allowing a gaggle of Europeans to make separate and utterly fruitless pitches to Putin, asking him not to do what we could all see was about to happen.

NATO is nothing without the US. Biden could dismiss the fall of Kabul as a necessary evil so that America could concentrate on China, but there is no European exit strategy for Washington without handing central Europe to Putin.

For Biden, the lesson is that global security is not an elegant Ivy league politics seminar; it’s a knife fight in the dark, driven by animal instincts, blood and fear. Is Biden up for that fight with China? Are we?

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine another blow to the rules-based order

Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine is another blow to the rules-based international order. It is an illegal act against a sovereign state and an attempt to reorient the global balance of power away from the United States. It may well work. It will embolden other states to pursue their own revisionist objectives.

Born of the ashes of World War II in Europe and Asia, the rules-based international order, underwritten largely by American power, is today unravelling in the same regions. Russia seeks to reassert its power and influence in Europe. China under President Xi Jinping seeks the same in Asia, perhaps even beyond. Recent developments indicate that Moscow and Beijing now openly support each other’s agendas.

Xi will forensically examine the American-led response to Russia’s incursion. Does President Joe Biden’s administration have the mettle to resist attempts to rewrite the global rulebook? The answer remains to seen.

Nevertheless, the world has entered a new era of great-power rivalry driven by Russia and China.

Xi and Putin share two key ambitions. The first is to restore their respective nations’ historical claims to great-power status. The second is to cement their individual legacies.

The recent joint statement on international relations issued by China and Russia suggests, significantly, that they’re moving closer. They don’t have a formal alliance, but their objective is to move the global balance of power.

Putin has long been nostalgic for the days of Soviet power and the Russian empire that predated it. His foreign policy is geared accordingly.

The US has unwittingly assisted. Successive administrations, distracted with other global issues, have not deterred Putin’s ambition. His action against Georgia in 2008, followed by the partial, and ongoing, annexation of Ukraine shows no respect for American power or the sovereignty of neighbouring states. He explicitly uses his own historical narrative to legitimise his revisionist strategic objectives.

To that end, with two draft agreements issued by Russia in December, he wants to rewrite the rules for NATO and the US in Europe. But Putin is not alone in reinterpreting history to validate foreign policy.

Xi has two similarly rooted key strategic objectives. The first is to bring Taiwan into the People’s Republic of China. There’s no telling when that might happen.

The second is to reinforce Chinese claims over much of the South China Sea. For the past decade China has been steadily militarising the region.

As Beijing’s ability to project power in the region develops, it will become more difficult to check. China wants to replace the US as Asia’s leading power and is increasingly flexing its muscles further afield.

Hard power is en vogue.

The result is a new era of escalating great-power rivalry. There’s little evidence the US is willing, or even able, to slow it down. The unipolarity Washington enjoyed in the 1990s is not coming back anytime soon. And with strategic rivalries come ample opportunities for miscalculations, misinterpretations and accidents that may lead to war.

Great-power war is inextricably tied to the existential threat of nuclear weapons. They weigh upon every strategic gambit undertaken by the states possessing them. Putin’s strategic weapons drills days ago were no coincidence. It was a reminder of Russia’s strategic potency.

If the conflict in Ukraine spills further into Europe it will drag NATO in. Then the world would face the prospect of an unprecedented war involving at least four nuclear-weapon states: the US, Russia, the UK and France.

Similarly, any confrontation between China and the US has a very real danger of escalating to the point of nuclear exchange. This is illustrated by the 1962 Cuban missile crisis.

Any war directly pitting the US against Russia, or China, would be catastrophic. The US refuses to send forces into Ukraine; the price is too high. The first rule of international relations is survival of the state. Washington will not sacrifice New York for Kyiv.

History demonstrates, repeatedly, that controlling the course of war is impossible. The prospect of great-power war is nightmarish. But it could happen.

This brings us to a delicate and dangerous impasse and the emergence of a bifurcated international system—one half adhering to the rules-based international order and the other half seeking to overturn it.

It marks the return of zero-sum competition. It will become more difficult for states to find consensus on pressing global issues such as climate change and nuclear non-proliferation. Global institutions, notably the United Nations Security Council, will be less effective.

The outlook is murky and incredibly complicated. Much of the world looks to Washington to check aggressive moves by belligerent powers. However, the US will be unwilling to step into a military conflict with either Russia or China unless it is directly threatened. So, the rivalries will intensify and the international system of the past seven decades will continue to slip away.

America is focusing on the wrong enemy

Much of the democratic world would like the United States to remain the pre-eminent global power. But with the US apparently committed to strategic overreach, that outcome risks becoming unlikely.

The problem with America’s global leadership begins at home. Hyper-partisan politics and profound polarisation are eroding American democracy and impeding the pursuit of long-term objectives. In foreign policy, the partisan divide can be seen in perceptions of potential challengers to the US: according to a March 2021 poll, Republicans are most concerned about China, while Democrats worry about Russia above all.

This may explain why US President Joe Biden is treating a ‘rogue’ Russia as a peer competitor, when he should be focused on the challenge from America’s actual peer, China. In comparison to Russia, China’s population is about 10 times bigger, its economy is almost 10 times larger, and its military expenditure is around four times greater. Not only is China more powerful than Russia, it genuinely seeks to supplant the US as the pre-eminent global power. By contrast, with its military build-up on Ukraine’s borders, Russia is seeking to mitigate a perceived security threat in its neighbourhood.

Hastening the decline of US global leadership is hardly the preserve of Democrats. A bipartisan parade of US leaders has failed to recognise that the post-Cold War unipolar world order, characterised by unchallenged US economic and military predominance, is long gone. The US squandered its ‘unipolar moment’, especially by waging an expensive and amorphous global war on terror, including several military interventions, and through its treatment of Russia.

After its Cold War victory, the US essentially took an extended victory lap, pursuing strategic manoeuvres that flaunted its dominance. Notably, it sought to expand NATO to Russia’s backyard, but made little effort to bring Russia into the Western fold, as it had done with Germany and Japan after World War II. The souring of relations with the Kremlin contributed to Russia’s eventual remilitarisation.

So, while the US remains the world’s foremost military power, it has been stretched thin by the decisions and commitments it has made, in Europe and elsewhere, since 1991. This goes a long way towards explaining why the US has ruled out deploying its own troops to defend Ukraine today. What the US is offering Ukraine—weapons and ammunition—cannot protect the country from Russia, which has an overwhelming military advantage over its neighbour.

But US leaders made another fatal mistake since the Cold War: they aided China’s rise, helping to create the greatest rival their country has ever faced. Unfortunately, they have yet to learn from this. Instead, the US continues to dedicate insufficient attention and resources to an excessively wide array of global issues, from Russian revanchism and Chinese aggression to lesser threats in the Middle East and Africa, and on the Korean peninsula. And it continues inadvertently to bolster China’s global influence, not least through its overuse of sanctions.

For example, by barring friends and allies from importing Iranian oil, two successive US administrations enabled China not only to secure oil at a hefty discount, but also to become a top investor in—and security partner of—the Islamic republic. US sanctions have similarly pushed resource-rich Myanmar into China’s arms. As Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, whose country has faced a US arms embargo over its ties to China, asked last year, ‘If I don’t rely on China, who will I rely on?’

Russia has been asking itself the same question. Though Russia and China kept each other at arm’s length for decades, US-led sanctions introduced after Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea drove President Vladimir Putin to pursue a closer strategic partnership with China. The bilateral relationship is likely to deepen, regardless of what happens in Ukraine. But the raft of harsh new sanctions the US has promised to implement in the event of a Russian invasion will accelerate this shift significantly, with China as the big winner.

The heavy financial penalties the US has planned—including the ‘nuclear option’ of disconnecting Russian banks from the international SWIFT payments system—would turn China into Russia’s banker, enabling it to reap vast profits and expand the international use of its currency. If Biden fulfilled his pledge to block the Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline, which is set to deliver Russian supplies directly to Germany via the Baltic Sea, China would gain greater access to Russian energy.

In fact, by securing a commitment from Putin this month to a nearly tenfold increase in Russian natural gas exports, China is building a safety net that could—in the event of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan—withstand Western energy sanctions and even a blockade. China could also benefit militarily by demanding greater access to Russian military technology in exchange for its support.

For the US, a strengthened Russia–China axis is the worst possible outcome of the Ukraine crisis. The best outcome would be a compromise with Russia to ensure that it does not invade and possibly annex Ukraine. By enabling the US to avoid further entanglement in Europe, this would permit a more realistic balancing of key objectives—especially checking Chinese aggression in the Indo-Pacific—with available resources and capabilities.

The future of the US-led international order will be decided in Asia, and China is currently doing everything in its power to ensure that order’s demise. Already, China is powerful enough that it can host the Winter Olympics even as it carries out a genocide against Muslims in the Xinjiang region, with limited pushback. If the Biden administration does not recognise the true scale of the threat China poses, and adopt an appropriately targeted strategy soon, whatever window of opportunity for preserving US pre-eminence remains may well close.

Why Putin sees the US, NATO and Ukraine as a threat

Why has Russia’s President Vladimir Putin become so aggressive in his attitude to the US, NATO and Ukraine? In this article, I begin by examining the disintegration of the former Soviet Union and how it is still seen in the Kremlin as a great humiliation. Then I turn to the enlargement of NATO, and how Putin claims to see Ukraine and Russia as ‘one people’ and why he is risking war. I conclude by sketching out how Putin sees opportunities in a friendship with China that ‘has no limits’ and in which China opposes ‘further enlargement of NATO’ and supports Russia’s proposals to create long-term, legally binding security guarantees in Europe.

I need to stress at the outset that by trying to understand Moscow’s hostile stance and the way it is currently threatening to use military force against Ukraine, I do not endorse Moscow’s belligerent attitude or the dictatorial role that Putin is playing in what is now a potentially very dangerous situation for peace in Europe and, indeed, globally.

If we are to attempt to understand why Russia is behaving in this potentially very dangerous manner, we need to begin by recalling what happened to the Soviet superpower as it collapsed in 1991 and how that calamity continues to affect current strategic thinking in Moscow. Putin recalls the Soviet collapse as a time when gross injustice was done to the Russian people: ‘It was only when Crimea ended up as part of a different country that Russia realised that it had not been simply robbed, but plundered.’ The UK ambassador to Moscow from 1988 to 1992, Rodric Braithwaite, observes that the disintegration of the USSR at the end of 1991 was a moment of triumph for the West, but for the Russians it brought national humiliation, domestic chaos, great poverty, and even famine.

Former CIA director and US defence secretary Robert Gates recently stated that almost everything Putin does at home and abroad these days is rooted in the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, which for him marked the collapse of the four-century-old Russian Empire and Russia’s position as a great power. Gates remarks that Putin’s current actions ‘however deplorable, are understandable’. Since becoming president in 1999, Putin has been focused on returning Russia to its historical role as a major power and its historical policy of creating a buffer of subservient states on its periphery—the so-called near abroad.

Readers who wish to consult the definitive account of the USSR’s collapse are strongly advised to read the just published authoritative book called Collapse: the fall of the Soviet Union by Vladislav Zubok, a professor of international history at the London School of Economics. Braithwaite describes it as a deeply informed account of how the Soviet Union fell apart and how we have once again come to the brink of a major armed stand-off between Russia and the West.

Zubok concludes that the speed and ease with which the Soviet central structures collapsed baffled even the most experienced Western observers. He believes Mikhail Gorbachev’s leadership, character and beliefs constituted a major factor in the Soviet Union’s self-destruction. His fumbling policies of reform generated total chaos that legitimised runaway separatism in the Baltics and, ultimately, in the core Slavic territories of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.

In the summer of 1991, the expectation of a new Marshall Plan among the Soviet elites became almost universal. But many in Washington wanted to break up the Soviet Union for security reasons. Treasury secretary Nicholas Brady advised President George H.W. Bush that America’s strategic priority was to see the Soviets become ‘a third-rate power, which is what we want’. During the 1990s, Zubok claims that 70–80% of Russians lived in poverty with the old Soviet social safety net gone and with rampant crime and mafia-like rule in most towns and regions.

Regarding the prospect of the incorporation of a democratising Russia into a larger Europe and NATO, the view was that the post-Soviet geopolitical space was too huge and unpredictable for integration within the Western orbit. The enlargement of NATO took place quickly, because the newly independent Baltic countries and Poland wanted to be free of the Russian military menace. Boris Yeltsin wanted Russia to join NATO, but the new US administration under Bill Clinton chose to offer Russia only ‘a partnership’ with the alliance because the general view in Washington was that Russia was simply too big to fully belong to NATO.

Yeltsin warned that NATO’s enlargement could lead to a new division in Europe. The US secretary of state, James Baker, reassured Gorbachev that NATO would ‘not shift one inch eastward from its present position’ once it had safely taken in a reunited Germany. Those words were never recorded in any mutually agreed formula.

Neither was the issue of Crimea raised when the leaders of what became the new countries called the Russian Federation, Ukraine and Belarus, met in secret in the Viskuli hunting lodge near Minsk on 7 December 1991. It was there that they agreed to the dissolution of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. According to Zubok’s book, before Yeltsin’s departure from Moscow his adviser, Galina Starovoitova, suggested he offer the Ukrainian leadership an option of negotiated changes to the borders of Ukraine after a moratorium of three to five years. She was concerned about Crimea.

This option would have helped to placate Russian public opinion and leave open the possibility of settling the territorial issue according to international law. Yeltsin, however, didn’t raise this issue in the Viskuli negotiations. The subsequent attitude of his state secretary, Gennady Burbulis, was that all this could be resolved by skilful diplomacy. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Turning now to the NATO issue, Braithwaite’s view is that, under relentless US pressure, NATO’s borders have advanced until they are ‘within spitting distance of Russia and Ukraine’. That is how it’s seen in Moscow, but it is ridiculous in my opinion to suggest that current NATO members Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland present any realistic military threat to such a powerful country as today’s Russia.

Putin, of course, takes an entirely different point of view. He believes that the Americans conspired to break up his country and encourage the creation of a separate country called Ukraine. We are now in a situation where the animosity between Moscow and Washington over NATO’s future and the existence of an independent Ukraine has become central to the future of peace in Europe. As Gates observes, Putin’s embrace of the strategy of securing Russia’s near abroad is seen in his actions in Belarus, Moldova, Transnistria, Georgia, the 2020 Armenia–Azerbaijan conflict, Kazakhstan and now—most dramatically—Ukraine.

Putin regards Ukraine as a critical security risk for Moscow—a dagger pointed at the Slavic heart of Russia. Gates believes that Putin has overplayed his hand on Ukraine because he finds himself in a situation where Russian success is defined as either a change of government in Kyiv—with the successor regime bending the knee to Moscow—or Russian conquest of the country. Resolving this serious threat peacefully is going to be an immense challenge to the resolve and unity of the Western alliance. Already, Germany is looking like a key weak link because of its dependence on Russia for half of its natural gas supplies.

Putin is proclaiming that Ukraine’s membership of NATO is a ‘redline’ issue for Moscow and that he wants written guarantees from the US that Ukraine NATO membership will never be allowed. In July 2021, he allegedly wrote a 7,000-word article titled ‘On the historical unity of Russians and Ukrainians’. In it, he asserts that Russians and Ukrainians are one people—‘a single whole’. He argues that ‘modern Ukraine is entirely the product of the Soviet era. We know and remember well that it was shaped—for a significant part—on the lands of historical Russia.’ He goes on to claim that the US and EU countries systematically pushed Ukraine into ‘a dangerous geopolitical game aimed at turning Ukraine into a barrier between Europe and Russia, a springboard against Russia’.

Putin asserts that what he terms ‘the formation of an ethnically pure Ukrainian state, aggressive towards Russia’ is ‘comparable in its consequence to the use of weapons of mass destruction against us’. He ominously concludes: ‘And we will 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 this way they will destroy their own country.’ So, in effect, there is Putin’s declaration of war if the US and NATO do not for ever ban Ukraine from NATO membership.

But there is a further potentially dangerous international complication. As I have argued in ASPI publications over the past two years or more, Russia and China are increasingly looking like a de facto alliance. Last week, Putin visited China and met with President Xi Jinping. In a joint statement, the two leaders agreed that friendship between their countries ‘has no limits; there are no ‘forbidden’ areas of cooperation.

The two sides specifically agreed to ‘oppose further enlargement of NATO’, and the Chinese side proclaimed that it ‘supports the proposals put forward by the Russian Federation to create long-term legally binding security guarantees in Europe’. This is China’s most explicit support to date of Moscow’s confrontation with the West over NATO membership.

The joint statement of this meeting between the leaders of the world’s two major authoritarian powers includes ‘serious concern’ about AUKUS and ‘strongly condemns’ the ‘decision to initiate cooperation in the field of nuclear-powered submarines’. The statement marks an increasingly serious joint confrontation with the West. What we are witnessing now is Beijing’s encouragement of Moscow’s hostility against the US over NATO membership.

Xi will now be closely scrutinising how Washington reacts to Moscow’s military threats against Ukraine and the implications for Beijing’s military intimidation of Taiwan.