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After World War II, global diplomatic efforts sought to create a new international order that would prevent the world from descending into war, chaos and anarchy again. A major part of that project was to refine the international legal order by establishing tribunals to prosecute war crimes. Hearings held in Nuremberg and Tokyo established that aggression is the ‘supreme international crime’—one for which leaders from Nazi Germany and imperial Japan were sentenced to death.

The Nuremberg Tribunal’s judgment was very clear on this point: ‘To initiate a war of aggression is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.’ Since then, the international order has rested on the territorial integrity of states. To challenge this core principle with a violent act of aggression—the supreme international crime—is to put the entire world at risk of sinking into disorder, chaos and war.

In a resolution adopted on 2 March, the United Nations General Assembly condemned Russia for committing precisely this offence. Viewing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on 24 February as an act of aggression, the resolution demands that Russia ‘immediately, completely, and unconditionally withdraw all of its military forces from the territory of Ukraine within its internationally recognized borders’.

True, Russia is not the first power to commit the crime of aggression—or even the first permanent member of the UN Security Council to do so. The United States has intervened in other countries within its own hemisphere; the Soviet Union invaded Hungary, Czechoslovakia and Afghanistan during the Cold War; and China sent its forces into Vietnam in 1979. But Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine is different, because its express purpose is to subjugate, dismantle and eventually eliminate Ukraine as a sovereign nation-state. Russian President Vladimir Putin has said so openly and explicitly.

As such, Russia’s war is unusual in modern history. One obvious comparison is to Hitler, who aimed to eliminate Poland when he launched his war of aggression in 1939 (forging an agreement with Stalin to partition the country between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union). Another is Saddam Hussein’s attempt in 1990 to eliminate Kuwait and make it part of Iraq. But, other than these two cases, I can think of no other close examples in recent history.

In any case, the world did not accept Hitler’s effort to eliminate Poland or Saddam’s attempt to wipe out Kuwait, and nor should it recognise any other modern attempt to change borders by force. Aggression is still the supreme international crime. Having formally recognised the statelets that it set up in the Donbas region of Ukraine in 2014—the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics (DPR and LPR)—Russia clearly intends to absorb these occupied parts of Ukraine, thus continuing its dismemberment of an independent UN member state.

But the only other countries to recognise the Donbas statelets have been North Korea and Syria, and that will likely remain the case, because even countries that are otherwise close to Russia have little interest in following it down this road. Kazakhstan has already made clear that it will not recognise the DPR and LPR as independent states. And even Russia’s satellite regime in neighbouring Belarus is certain to baulk at recognising the Donbas statelets.

How China responds is of particular importance. Does Chinese President Xi Jinping’s ‘no limits’ friendship with Putin mean that China will abandon territorial integrity as one of its core principles? To take that step would powerfully undermine its demand that the rest of the world recognise Taiwan as part of China.

So far, China has avoided any talk of Russian aggression or Ukrainian territorial integrity. But, given that China has long regarded this issue as sacrosanct, it cannot sit on the fence for long. An old Roman legal maxim holds that ‘silence means consent’ (qui tacet consentire videtur). Until China speaks up, the international community has every right to assume its tacit consent to Russian aggression, and to demand more clarity about where it intends to stand on this critical question.

Finally, the African countries that abstained from the 2 March UN resolution (for their own unrelated reasons) should reconsider their position. Whatever their grievances with the West, they have little to gain from an erosion of the principle of territorial integrity or the international norm against aggression.

Today’s national borders aren’t the result of any scientific process or acts of divine intervention. In Europe and in many other parts of the world, borders were drawn in blood through centuries of war and conflict. Sweden and Denmark, for example, fought over their border for centuries before the conflict was grudgingly settled and consigned to the past. In Eastern Europe, wars over borders have generated millions of victims during the past century.

Given this bloody history, there are very good reasons for continuing to treat aggression as the supreme international crime, and territorial integrity as the foundation stone of the international order. The WWII generation was right to establish these principles in Nuremberg and Tokyo. We should be extremely careful not to break from what they started. Down that road lies only ruin.

World politics has reached an ominous phase of polarisation. The struggle between the US-led democracies and the Russo-Chinese-led autocracies primarily underpins this development. Yet there’s also another dangerous dimension to it: the emergence of close relations between the autocratic powers and such extremist theocratic forces as the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991 certainly inspired a new era of optimism in the West. In the view of many, most importantly the US leadership at the time, it ushered in the end of the Cold War as we knew it, marking the triumph of democracy over communism and free-enterprise capitalism over suffocating centralised socialism. It led a thinker like Frances Fukuyama to claim ‘the end of history’. Few saw the sideways shift of power from the West to the East, with the rise of a very challenging autocratic communist China and assertive Russia.

In a similar vein, not many could foresee, as Joe Nye described it, the diffusion of power, exemplified by transnational violent extremist groups and networks, such as al-Qaeda and Islamic State. It was also generally unthinkable that the US and its NATO and non-NATO allies would bow out of Afghanistan in defeat, enabling the Taliban, the protector of al-Qaeda that perpetrated the terrorist acts of 11 September 2001 in the United States, to return to power in the country. Or, for that matter, that Russia would invade Ukraine as an embodiment of the power ambitions of a modern-day autocrat, Vladimir Putin.

Meanwhile, the more disconcerting development is that the two pools of rival powers no longer care which countries they pull into their orbit as long as they are on the right side of their conflicting interests. The US administration under President Joe Biden has abandoned its initial emphasis on human rights and the promotion of democratic values in foreign policy. China and Russia are cosying up to whichever forces are actually or potentially opposed to the United States. For example, whereas Biden is now re-embracing the country that he had declared a pariah (Saudi Arabia) and abandoning any pretence of pressuring Israel to end its brutal occupation of the Palestinian territories, his Chinese and Russian counterparts are being very friendly to the Taliban.

Beijing and Moscow no longer see the Taliban as an extremist force but as a potential ally. Short of formally recognising the group’s regime in Afghanistan, both have established close diplomatic contacts, along with trade and economic ties.

Beijing has welcomed the Taliban leaders with open arms and the Chinese foreign minister has visited Kabul to promote bilateral relations. China now stands as the largest potential investor in Afghanistan, especially in the minerals sector, and has removed tariffs on imports of Afghan goods. Beijing is emerging as a very influential player, enjoying the Taliban’s declaration of China as their preferred economic partner.

China’s influence, along with its economic and strategic partnerships with Afghanistan’s two neighbours, Pakistan and Iran, and Pakistan’s critical patronage of the Taliban, provides Beijing with quite a formidable regional grouping. It is remarkable to see how China’s ‘godless’ secularist communism has expediently come to interact favourably with the Taliban’s extremist brand of Islamism, as it also has with Iran’s politically pluralist theocratic order.

The same goes for Russia, which has but all recognised the Taliban regime. It has allowed the Taliban to run the Afghanistan embassy in Moscow—the only state to do so after Pakistan. Putin’s envoy for Afghanistan, Zamir Kabulov, recently announced that, for all practical purposes, Russia is dealing with the Taliban regime as a recognised entity.

Russia has offered to sell gas at discount prices to Afghanistan, although it’s not clear through which pipelines. The Taliban have backed Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and it’s possible that some of the group’s battle-hardened fighters will be deployed to that front. Russia has almost abandoned its fear of the Taliban’s radical Islamism spreading into its Central Asian backyard, and the Taliban have apparently forgotten Russian atrocities during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980s and overlooked Putin’s renewed faith in Christianity in support of his autocratic rule.

The US and its allies have geared up for the long haul in support of Ukraine. They have designated Putin’s Russia as an enemy that seeks to change the European and, for that matter, the world order, and China as a threat in Indo-Pacific. The two eastern powers have sought to get into bed with the support of whomever they can enlist. That even includes theocratic forces, such as the al-Qaeda-linked Taliban and their affiliates in different parts of the world—Asia, the Middle East and Africa in particular.

The battlelines being drawn now are making the global situation more tenuous and more dangerous than it was during the Cold War.

In the broader discussion about Russia’s war on Ukraine, an important but overlooked element is the exodus of Russians from their homeland. Though it’s impossible to determine the scale of this phenomenon, we can expect the outflow to continue, especially if the United States pursues a policy to lure highly skilled specialists and sustain a Russian brain drain, as President Joe Biden has proposed.

The Russian diaspora could be a key partner in building a new Russia after Vladimir Putin no longer rules. But the emigrants can’t count on a warm welcome in Europe, where resentment against even ‘ordinary Russians’ is now widespread.

To be sure, the sentiment is somewhat understandable, given that Putin’s ‘special military operation’ in Ukraine apparently commands high support among the Russian public. Such findings from pollsters can’t be ignored. Though the Kremlin has unleashed the full might of its propaganda machine, it’s not as though we’re living in the 1940s. Russians who want the truth can get it.

Still, we should question whether polling data can capture the true state of Russian public opinion, even when it’s gathered by the independent, highly respected Levada Center. In a democracy, pollsters ask citizens to rank their preference for multiple candidates, and the results offer a straightforward picture of where the public stands (with a small margin of error). But what are we to make of polls that give people a ‘choice’ between a figure with 83% support and no one else?

To respond ‘no’ is to put oneself outside the bounds of normalcy. Even if you don’t support Putin, you might not want to take the position of being ‘different from everyone else’, much less be completely candid with pollsters asking politically sensitive questions. Given these complications, the best we can do is to assume that support for Putin is indeed widespread. Though he certainly isn’t backed by 70–80% of Russians, he may have the support of around half.

But even if it were true that only 10–20% of Russians oppose Putin, that’s still 14–28 million people. Why alienate them by issuing broad condemnations of Russian society? Making enemies of these potential allies is neither fair nor politically wise.

Regardless of whether Russia wins or loses the war, it will not cease to exist. More to the point, the problem is not this or that Russian leader (have they really been so different from each other historically?) or ‘ordinary Russians’. The problem with Russia stems from a political culture shaped by Byzantine Orthodoxy and Mongol domination, and an economy based on raw materials extraction.

These factors all work against democracy. If people’s incomes are derived from natural resources and distributed by the powers that be, what kind of regime should we expect? If changing this model is possible, it will take many years and would require the disintegration of the state, most likely along ethnic lines. It would also require a new mentality in Western Europe, which so often was naive about Russia.

Emigrants would be natural candidates to lead this process, provided they meet certain conditions. In the past, those who fled from Russia or the Soviet Union abhorred the regime but shared the belief that Russia can and should truly be great, which a priori means that it includes Ukraine; even dissidents like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Joseph Brodsky thought this way. If the most recent cohort of emigrants shares this view, there’s nothing to talk about. The West should do them no favours.

But let’s hope that today’s emigrants are different or can change their position. An interesting point of reference is the story of Polish emigration after 1945. For a long time, Poles clung desperately to their long-lost status as a regional power, harbouring illusions that Lithuania, Belarus and parts of western Ukraine belonged in Poland.

They pointed out that up until 1939, Wilno (now Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital) and Lwow (now the Ukrainian city of Lviv) were within Polish borders. And many Poles even dreamed of restoring the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth that existed before the partitions of 1772–95. Even today, if Poles are being honest, they will admit that while they consider the Russian bombardments of Kharkiv and Kyiv to be tragic, they see the threat to historical buildings in Lviv as being far worse.

After World War II, the largest share of Polish emigrants went to London, but they retained a sense of possessiveness over what had been lost. Many spoke of Lwów-i-Wilno, just as Russians still insist on Krymnash (‘Our Crimea’). Anyone who accepted that Poland’s eastern border lay on the Bug River was considered a traitor.

Only very slowly did a wise alternative to this way of thinking emerge. It started in Paris, where a small centre organised around the Literary Institute and Jerzy Giedroyc’s Kultura magazine began to formulate a doctrine known as the ULB, which stated: ‘There will be no independent Poland without an independent Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania.’

The point was not to advance some starry-eyed cosmopolitan vision. Rather, ULB was about hard political realism: if Poles continued to fight the nations between Germany and Russia, they would continue to lose. Only by cooperating could the smaller nations of Central and Eastern Europe strike out for independence. This insight now serves as the foundation of Polish foreign policy (even for the current nationalist government), and one can imagine a future in which it would be embraced by ‘ordinary Russians’.

The world knows an unjust war when it sees one. That is why Russian President Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine has attracted such widespread condemnation. But negotiating a peace settlement—the key to ending most wars—will require attention not only to justice, but also to stability and balance between competing national interests and ambitions. The question, then, is: What would a stable peace in Ukraine look like?

In theory, nothing short of true justice in Ukraine should suffice. That means ensuring Russia’s unconditional defeat, the restitution of Ukraine’s full territorial integrity and possibly even reparations from Russia to help fund Ukraine’s reconstruction.

For many observers, this outcome seems entirely likely. Some, such as Russian opposition politician Vladimir Milov, argue that Putin’s days in power are numbered. Others believe that Russia will suffer a decisive defeat on the battlefield. British historian Antony Beevor, for one, anticipates a military collapse and humiliating withdrawal. Author Yuval Noah Harari has assured us that Putin lost the war the day he started it.

But the era of glorious wars, overwhelming victories, and clear-cut defeats is over. Yes, Putin’s murderous army is an inefficient, clumsy machine that has not moved beyond the archaic tactics of World War II. Yet the combination of barbarism and sheer numbers—‘quantity has a quality of its own’, said Stalin—has enabled Putin to achieve significant territorial gains in eastern Ukraine and along the Black Sea coast.

Of course, the West is providing vast—and growing—military aid to Ukraine, which could tip the scales to some extent, especially given Russia’s international isolation. But this remains an asymmetric war, not least because it is happening on Ukrainian soil. As a result, Ukraine’s economy cannot function, and Russian soldiers can target civilians—something that, as multiple reports and videos show, they have not hesitated to do.

Mutually damaging deadlocks have often spurred progress towards peace settlements. But, in the current war, a military deadlock would hurt Ukraine far more than it would hurt Russia, even if Putin refrains from using chemical or tactical nuclear weapons. If he does cross that line, the costs to Ukraine would skyrocket.

This is a real risk. Though the West is attempting to calibrate its military aid to Ukraine to avoid provoking a Russian escalation, the pressure on Putin is intensifying. Indeed, judging by his Victory Day speech, he is well aware of both his military’s limits and the fragility of Russian public opinion.

Many feared Putin would use the commemoration of Russia’s victory over Nazi Germany to issue a formal declaration of war on Ukraine, which would have allowed him to send hundreds of thousands of young conscripts to the battlefield. But that day has come and gone, and the war remains a ‘special military operation’ in Russia. Putin, it seems, did not want to risk stirring popular opposition.

But this might not be a reason for celebration. Lest we forget, Russia possesses the world’s largest nuclear arsenal, and Putin has both the unconstrained authority to use it and an inability to accept defeat. Autocrats who lose wars lose power—and, sometimes, their heads. If Putin feels backed into a corner, he may well view deployment of tactical nuclear weapons as the minimum requirement to save face.

This points to the dangers of a weakened Russia. But even a resounding Russian defeat is an ominous scenario. Yes, under such circumstances—and only such circumstances—Putin might be toppled in some kind of coup led by elements of Russia’s security apparatus. But the chances that this would produce a liberal democratic Russia that abandons Putin’s grand strategic designs are slim. More likely, Russia would be a rogue nuclear superpower ruled by military coup-makers with revanchist impulses. Germany after World War I comes to mind.

As they seek to engineer Russia’s defeat in Ukraine, the United States and its NATO allies must not lose sight of what happens the day after. A vast, nuclear-armed and humiliated power cannot simply be isolated or ignored. Even as they help Ukraine resist Putin’s aggression, they must attempt to integrate Russia into Europe’s broader security architecture, reshaping that architecture in response to Russia’s concerns. Otherwise, Putin cannot make sufficient concessions without jeopardising his political, if not physical, survival.

Beyond ending its bid to join NATO and maintaining an Austria-like neutrality—concessions to which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has all but agreed—a settlement on the ethnic Russian regions of Donetsk and Luhansk, whose ‘independence’ Putin recognised days before the invasion, will be needed. A form of self-government, along the lines laid out in the 2015 Minsk II agreement, might be the answer.

Putin is highly unlikely to agree to reverse Crimea’s annexation, even in exchange for the clarification of the status of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet at Sevastopol. But he may be convinced to shelve his dream of a territorially contiguous Russian sphere of influence stretching from Moscow all the way to the Black Sea. He should also agree to respect the territorial integrity of both Moldova and Georgia.

The responsibility for convincing Putin to make these concessions, in exchange for appropriate strategic arrangements, falls primarily on the US. After all, in Putin’s view, Russia is currently fighting the US and NATO—not just Ukraine. US President Joe Biden recognises the dangers of a cornered Putin, so he should offer a face-saving exit strategy. The economic impact of sanctions, the progressive weakening of Russia’s military, the spectre of a guerrilla war of attrition against his demoralised army, and a lack of international support for Russia should motivate Putin to accept a reasonable offer.

That offer will not deliver the justice Ukrainians deserve. But nor will it be a triumph for Russia. Instead, it will be a mutually unsatisfactory, but ultimately tolerable, arrangement—disappointing to all, but better than the alternatives.

Before Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, it was fashionable to suggest that his Chinese counterpart, Xi Jinping, would approvingly scrutinise Russia’s military performance and its implications for a Chinese military attack on Taiwan. Now, Beijing must face up to the fact that Russia has performed poorly and the West has been surprisingly cohesive in enforcing crippling financial sanctions on Moscow.

There are at least five military lessons for Xi to learn from Russia’s campaign so far.

First, Russia’s military planning has displayed an abysmally poor attitude to tactical coordination, including applying military force in battalion-sized penny packets instead of building up overwhelming, coordinated force on the key strategic object of occupying Kyiv. There appears to have been a serious breakdown in joint operations and overall command and control. And authoritarian countries like Russia run militaries where personal initiative is denied.

The architect of Russia’s approach to hybrid warfare, the chief of the general staff, Valery Gerasimov, enunciated a new doctrine of Russian warfare in 2013. Gerasimov saw conventional war between armies as a thing of the past. Instead, he called for ‘long distance, contactless actions against the enemy’, arguing that ‘the information space opens wide asymmetrical possibilities for reducing the fighting potential of the enemy’. He talked about an enemy’s ‘perfectly thriving state’ sinking into ‘a web of chaos’ under such an attack.

So, why has Gerasimov’s military philosophy gone missing? Rather than conventional war between armies being outdated, what today’s Russian military planning in Ukraine has confirmed is its reliance on crude conventional warfare. Most of us expected that the opening Russian campaign would be a massive cyberattack on Ukraine’s military command and control, intelligence networks and air-defence systems, as well as its air traffic control and electricity generation. None of this seems to have happened.

Second, Moscow’s logistics coordination and resupply planning seems to have been based on the expectation that Kyiv would be occupied within 48 to 72 hours. Instead, tanks have run out of fuel and troops have ransacked supermarkets for food. After nine weeks of uncoordinated urban warfare, the Russian army pulled out of Kyiv to focus on what it now claims is its primary military aim—the occupation of the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.

Third, the intelligence advice about the likely attitudes of the invaded Ukrainian people was dangerously misinformed. The director of the Fifth Service, the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service responsible for Ukraine, has been relieved of his command and sent to Moscow’s infamous Lefortovo prison. Apparently, his advice to Putin was that the Russian invasion force would be greeted with open arms and flowers by the Ukrainians.

Fourth, Russia still depends on conscripts for about 30% of its fighting force, and many of them are teenagers who were told that they were just going on a military exercise. Their morale is at rock bottom. Senior generals are being sent to lead Russian troops, resulting in eight or nine of them being killed (and even Gerasimov himself has reportedly been wounded). The smart Ukrainian approach to Russian army prisoners of war is to confiscate their mobile phones, ring their mothers and invite them to come into Ukraine and pick up their sons. What a brilliant tactic for undermining the morale of Russian conscripts!

But it’s not only the conscripts who are performing poorly. Some of Russia’s elite troops—including some members of the renowned 76th Guards Air Assault Division—are refusing to continue fighting.

Last, there is ample evidence of the mediocre performance of many of Russia’s tanks, armoured personnel carriers, artillery and missile brigades. Much of this appears to be down to poor maintenance. There’s also a problem of equipment suffering from an absence of critical components, because they were never installed or were stolen for sale on the black market.

Xi will want to reassure himself that these sorts of fundamental military deficiencies do not exist in the People’s Liberation Army. But the fact is that a great many of them are indeed deeply embedded in China’s corrupt communist system.

In addition, there are broader strategic policy challenges that confront Beijing in the post-Ukraine-invasion world. First, it has just been demonstrated by Russia that invading another country is not an easy task when there’s strong local resistance. It’s difficult enough when crossing a land border, but invasion would be an entirely different task for China when crossing the 160 kilometres of the Taiwan Strait. Throughout history, amphibious assaults have been among the most challenging and potentially perilous of military endeavours.

There is the further fact that the inhabitants of an invaded state rarely welcome the foreign military occupiers. Putin claims that Russians and Ukrainians are ‘one people—a single whole’ unified by their common history, culture and spiritual space. That demonstrably has proven not to be the case and Ukrainians now see the Russians as a violent and cruel occupying force. In the case of Taiwan, more than 70% of the population of 24 million identify themselves as being Taiwanese and not Chinese. That percentage is likely to grow as the years go by and those who identify themselves as of Chinese origin diminishes.

Xi presumably now looks with dismay at Russia’s military experience of occupying Ukraine and the disastrous intelligence provided by Russian agencies. He should be taking urgent steps to ensure he is better advised than his ‘best friend’ Putin.

The second strategic challenge for Beijing is the way in which the European Union and the broader Western community of democratic states agreed so rapidly to serious punitive economic sanctions against Russia. These have not been just the usual trade and commodity sanctions, but—more importantly—a dramatic focus on comprehensive financial measures that include sanctioning trade in roubles and bank transactions with Russia, and sanctioning Moscow’s access to its large reserves of foreign currencies—amounting to more than US$700 billion. Any such future financial sanctions against China by the West would be more difficult to sustain because of the enormous difference in size between Russia’s economic interrelationships with the West and those of China. Even so, this is not an issue that Beijing can just dismiss as being a totally implausible possibility.

The third strategic challenge for Beijing is that, unlike Russia, China has no recent first-hand experience of military conflict. Moscow’s experience includes the occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 for nine years, the Chechen wars in the 1990s, the attack on Georgia in 2008 and the occupation of Crimea and the Donetsk and Luhansk regions of eastern Ukraine in 2014, as well as its involvement in Syria since 2015.

The last time the PLA fired any shots in anger was in 1979 when Beijing decided that it would ‘teach Vietnam a lesson’ over its occupation of Cambodia. In fact, the PLA struggled to assert itself against battle-hardened Vietnamese forces, which had only a few years before defeated America in the Vietnam War.

Apart from some borders skirmishes in Siberia with the USSR in 1968, the PLA’s other experience of war was in the Korean War, where it relied on mass attacks by its poorly trained peasant forces. This lack of combat experience will be a crucial vulnerability of the PLA in a high-intensity conflict involving Taiwan.

All of these factors combined should give Xi pause for serious reflection on the need for extreme caution in mounting an invasion of Taiwan.