How the Ukraine War Will Likely End

As we consider how the war in Ukraine will end, we must first understand how it began. Russia invaded for geostrategic reasons – having Ukraine as a buffer state safeguards Moscow from invasion from the west – and for economic reasons, which have often gone overlooked. The transition from the Soviet Union to the Russian Federation wasn’t exactly lucrative. It may have increased total wealth, but Russia remains a poor country. Its gross domestic product ranks just behind South Korea’s, a respectable placement but hardly where a superpower should be. And in terms of per capita GDP, Russia ranks 85th, nestled between Bulgaria and Malaysia.

Economic statistics rarely tell the whole story, of course, but in Russia’s case they fairly accurately present a country that is poorer than it appears, masked superficially by a top layer of the superrich elite. Life in major cities like St. Petersburg and Moscow is luxurious for the wealthy and bearable for the rest. Life in the countryside is something else entirely.

Individual regimes can’t be solely blamed for Russian poverty. The size of the nation, and the difficulties in areas such as transport associated with its size, makes Russia difficult to govern. From the time of the czars, it has been the state rather than shared economic prosperity that has kept Russia together. Often this has been achieved through the security services, which are tasked with maintaining state power, not with building an economy. It’s little wonder that the country that boasted the Okhrana also produced a president who cut his teeth in the KGB. Rightly or wrongly, Russia’s size and inefficiency tend to demand a strong hand.

This has created an expectation that the state will be strong even if the people are poor. There was pride in the czars and in Stalin – the so-called “man of steel.” But for a ruler to govern Russia, they must demonstrate strength. The intellectuals in Russia speak of democracy and human rights. The people want protection against invaders from without and against impoverishing chaos from within.

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