https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-if-putin-loses-his-war-ukraine-russia-nationalism-slavs-china-defense-e1864e09?mod=opinion_lead_pos10
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.