The Long Game

For Putin, Ukraine is not merely a prize but a precedent.

The prospect of negotiations between Russia and Ukraine continues to remain a minefield. Despite repeated entreaties from US president Donald Trump, Moscow remains unmoved. Meanwhile, at the recent Antalya Diplomacy Forum in Turkey, Russian and Ukrainian foreign ministers accused each other of violating a U.S.-brokered 30-day ceasefire intended to pause strikes on energy infrastructure.

While both parties are still a long way off from holding parleys to end the three-year war, the conflict has nonetheless changed Russia’s standing across he globe, as per a report by the Washington-based Brookings Institution.

When Vladimir Putin crossed the Rubicon on February 24, 2022 by launching his full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the war was not simply a military gambit to topple Volodymyr Zelenskyy or to force Ukraine’s neutrality; it was, for Putin, the latest chapter in an existential struggle against a Western world that had, in his eyes, mocked, diminished and encircled Russia since the end of the Cold War.

Putin’s immediate aim was to decapitate the Ukrainian government and reassert Moscow’s control over a territory he believes was lost not to history but to Western manipulation. Yet behind the bombs and tanks was a far grander vision to undo what he considers an unjust post-Cold War order.

Even before the tanks rolled into Ukraine, Putin was building an alternative axis. He courted Iran and North Korea - regimes that, like his, bristle at Western hegemony. He deepened ties with the BRICS nations and offered his services, for a price, in the Middle East. From Libya to Syria, Moscow has played power-broker, bombing where it suited its interests and negotiating where it could accrue leverage.

China became Russia’s lodestar. Forged in sanctions, their economic and military ties tightened as both powers bristled at America’s primacy.

To many in the Global South, Putin recast himself not as the aggressor but as the anti-imperialist, the voice challenging a world order long dictated by Washington and enforced by NATO’s shadow.

In Putin’s mental geography, Ukraine is not just a neighbour but a keystone in the imperial arch. Reabsorbing it, even at the cost of war, would validate his belief in a unified Slavic state consisting of Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, perhaps even parts of Kazakhstan.

The Donald Trump factor, needless to say, is a variable whose importance cannot be overstated. The Kremlin had greeted Trump’s first election in 2016 with restrained glee. Though the net gains from Trump’s presidency were meagre at the time, the prospects for Moscow in Trump’s second innings seems far more enticing.

Recently, Trump’s envoy General Keith Kellogg proposed a controversial plan for resolving the Ukraine-Russia conflict by partitioning Ukraine similarly to post-World War II Berlin. His proposal suggests that the UK and France lead reassurance forces in western Ukraine to deter further Russian aggression, while formally acknowledging Russian control over the 20 percent of eastern Ukraine it currently occupies. A demilitarized zone roughly 18 miles wide would separate Ukrainian and Russian forces.

But the endgame goes further. By dismantling Ukraine, Putin hopes to force the West to renegotiate the Euro-Atlantic security architecture. NATO, in his view, must be pushed back to its 1997 borders, its eastward creep reversed.

All of this feeds into a broader mission to build a world where America is merely first among equals, where Russia, alongside China and other like-minded powers, helps design the rules and not just follow them.

Today, Putin is still fighting in the trenches - militarily in Ukraine, diplomatically in the halls of the Global South, and psychologically in the narratives he spins to his people and to the world.

Make no mistake: this is not a war over Ukraine alone. Whatever follows in the next few weeks, Putin is firm on his goal is restoration of the Russian sphere, of Russian prestige, and ultimately, of a multipolar world where the United States no longer gets to write the rules.

After all, this has been a war over the past, the future, and the very architecture of international power.