What if Putin Loses His War in Ukraine? Victory over Russia would recast Europe’s politics as well as the U.S.-China rivalry. Walter Russell Mead
Nobody this side of paradise knows how Vladimir Putin’s war will end, but Zbigniew Brzezinski identified the stakes in 1994. “Without Ukraine,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs, “Russia ceases to be an empire.”
Mr. Putin couldn’t agree more, and for him and the Russian nationalists clinging to his coattails, Russia is an empire or it is nothing at all.
A Ukrainian victory—which we can describe as an end to the conflict that leaves Ukraine with all or most of its original territory, independent of Moscow and aligned with the West—would be a geopolitical earthquake. The Russia that Europe has known and feared since the 18th century, an immense and looming presence relentlessly bent on expanding westward, will be gone. The consequences would reshape the politics of Europe and the Middle East and define a new era in U.S.-China competition.
Many in the West hoped that the fall of the Soviet Union would have ended the threat of Russian imperialism, but Mr. Putin’s regime was bent on defying the odds. After all, czarist Russia collapsed in World War I and the Communists had to sign the punitive treaty of Brest-Litovsk with imperial Germany, giving up swathes of land and acknowledging the independence of former imperial territories, including Ukraine. Taking advantage of Western divisions and weakness, Lenin reassembled almost the entire empire of Nicholas II, and Stalin seized still more territory to make Moscow a global superpower.
Mr. Putin wants to follow in those footsteps, but he doesn’t covet only Ukrainian territory. He wants Ukraine’s DNA. Russia faces one of the greatest demographic challenges of any country in the world. After peaking in 1992, the population of the Russian Federation declined by roughly five million through 2021. Worse, from Mr. Putin’s viewpoint, despite substantial immigration by ethnic Russians from newly independent ex-Soviet republics in Central Asia, the ethnically Russian population is in free fall, diminishing by 5.4 million between 2010 and 2021. During those years the percentage of the federation’s population that was ethnically Russian fell to 72% from 78%.
Meanwhile, Russia’s Islamic minority populations continue to grow. In Russia’s current population, 10% of people belong to originally Muslim ethnic groups (many Russian citizens of all ethnicities aren’t religious believers). By 2034 these groups are projected to account for 30% of the federation’s population.
Mr. Putin needs Ukraine’s people to reinforce the hegemony of Orthodox Slavs in the Russian Federation. Without them, faced with rising populations in Central Asian countries like Uzbekistan (up 63% since the fall of the Soviet Union to an estimated 35 million in 2023), Russian nationalists foresee only doom and decline.
These considerations underline how committed hard-core Russian nationalists are to victory in Ukraine and how globally consequential a Russian defeat would be. A Ukrainian victory would leave a weakened and discredited Kremlin squeezed by a powerful China and a rising Central Asia in the east, a reinvigorated security alliance in the west, and restive ethnic minorities at home.
A Ukrainian victory would also present Moscow with a dangerous political challenge. It is by no means certain that Ukraine will emerge from the war as a genuinely democratic and modern state. Many former Soviet republics and ex-Yugoslav republics and even some former Warsaw Pact nations have had a hard time establishing stable democracy, and Ukraine is likely to have more governance struggles. Even so, if Ukraine is seen as the victor in Mr. Putin’s war, it will have demonstrated that his style of governance isn’t the only model that can work among Orthodox Slavs, and many Russians will want to learn from the winners.
A Russian defeat would basically strengthen America’s hand globally, but there would be complications. On the plus side, with Russian expansionism firmly checked, the task of maintaining the status quo in Europe would require less U.S. investment. American and Western prestige would be significantly enhanced by victory and would be gravely impaired if Russia wins. As I noted last week, a victorious Ukraine would join Poland, the Baltic states and the Scandinavian countries in a pro-defense bloc of European countries who understand the value of the American alliance.
But not all news would be good. Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey would only grow friskier if its fear of Russia fades. An enfeebled, embittered Kremlin could throw itself into China’s waiting embrace. Russian instability could pose huge security challenges. Nuclear and biological weapons could fall into even more-dangerous hands. Nuclear scientists could scatter to the winds, taking their skills with them. Criminal syndicates and cyber hackers could operate with impunity across an unstable Russia.
Even so, given the cruelties and atrocities that mark Russian imperial history, few will shed tears if Ukraine wins its war and proves Brzezinski right.
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