Four years of war in Ukraine has brought seismic evolution to the world – to the nature of warfare, the balance of global powers, and to European security.
For Ukraine, the war has been a curse – a curse to survive and adapt long enough to spare Europe’s borders from Russia’s forces and absolve its allies from springing into greater action.
Kyiv is paying the price of the upheaval with constant churn and relentless loss, Ukrainians told me. “Some of us are still positive, but just because there is no other option,” texted a military intelligence officer.
It is the Ukrainians in this fight who wish most urgently the war would really end tomorrow. It is a cruel paradox: Many in the West also wish the war would stop, because of its cost to their defense budgets and heating bills. Yet it is the West’s lack of spending – of material support for Kyiv – that has condemned Ukraine to fight on.
Europe’s is a false economy, spending less now, but risking spending far more if the conflict spreads in the future.
Were Ukraine’s front lines to collapse and Kyiv to fall, Moscow by most Western estimates would soon move to NATO’s borders. Yet that threat does not panic Europe into wholesale action. The first three years of big-dollar American support only went so far and is now over. But the war is not, and more anniversaries likely lie ahead. A full four years in, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s display of ruthlessness and determination seems to have left Europe more convinced that he might just one day stop seeking to occupy foreign lands, rather than less.
Oddly, exhaustion – that of Russian budgets and manpower – is both what the West hopes will end the war
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