Invasion of Ukraine kicks off a rollback of Western advances since the fall of the USSR

(Originally published Feb. 24 in “What in the World“) Ukraine declared a state of emergency and appealed for international assistance, with President Volodymyr Zelensky addressing a video appeal directly to the Russian people, saying Russian President Vladimir Putin has 200,000 troops readied to invade. The Pentagon warned that the Russian military and pro-Russian forces in eastern Ukraine were mobilizing for an attack against Kyiv as Moscow said rebels in eastern Ukraine had appealed for aid against Ukrainian “aggression.”

That supposed SOS could serve as the equivalent of a Maine/Mukden/Gulf of Tonkin incident for Russia to claim a full invasion of Ukraine is retaliation against attacks on ethnic Russians in the eastern Donbass region. Russian invasion forces are already “peacekeeping” in the breakaway eastern areas of Donetsk and Luhansk, where European security forces say pro-Russian rebel ranks have been joined by Russian mercenaries with experience fighting in Libya and Syria.

Putin is the clear aggressor, Thomas Friedman argues in The New York Times, but his grievances aren’t entirely without merit. Following the fall of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the United States failed to cultivate Russia as a democratic partner and instead expanded NATO eastward into the former Soviet bloc against an imagined Russian menace. By failing to recognize that the Soviets, not the Russians, were the West’s enemies, Washington fed into Russia’s historic paranoia of western invasion and opened the way for a leader like Putin.

The war in Ukraine thus marks the start of a new effort by Russia and China to topple the U.S.-led world order, with both in much stronger positions than at the end of the Cold War. Putin is taking advantage of Western division and pandemic-induced weakness to roll back its eastward advances since the fall of the Soviet Union. China’s President Xi Jinping, meanwhile, is gradually turning his country inward and severing its cultural and financial links with the world in ways that go well beyond its pandemic-related isolation.

Concerned that Beijing may pursue its own rollback strategy, Taiwan’s President Tsai Ing-wen has ordered the island’s armed forces to step up its own preparedness for potential attack.