There is no doubt that Moscow has shaken the international security system with its full-scale invasion of peaceful Ukraine and subsequent territorial annexations, genocidal policies, open nuclear threats, and abuse of its veto power in the UN Security Council.

After more than ten years of war in Ukraine, the results of Russia’s attack on its purported “brother nation” remain uneven for the Kremlin. On the one hand, its image as a supposed military superpower has suffered disastrously. The war in 2022 became an international embarrassment for the Russian leadership, army, and weapons industry. Moscow’s campaign in Ukraine led to the loss of Western partners, markets, and investors. These and other related setbacks will have far-reaching regional, geopolitical, economic, and possibly even domestic political consequences for Russia.

Moscow’s Achievements

On the other hand, a number of partly ignored and partly underestimated results of Russia’s Ukraine policy have weakened the international order and the West. The invasion launched in February 2022 led to a partial consolidation of the Western bloc: NATO and the EU have moved closer together; Western countries have supplied military and other support to Ukraine; Finland and Sweden have joined NATO; at the same time, the EU is about to start membership negotiations with Ukraine and Moldova and has granted candidate status to Georgia.

Despite certain positive side effects of the confrontation, the global political damage caused by the Russian war is already—and will continue to be—enormous. Although this was not the Kremlin’s primary goal, it should be assumed that these secondary effects on international stability are also in Moscow’s interest. Current and potential revisionist actors across the planet are benefiting from Russia’s subversion of the foundations of international law and order. The Russian attack on the world security system, in many ways, weakens the West and international organizations, thereby strengthening—at least in the Kremlin’s zero-sum calculations—Moscow itself, its anti-Western allies, and other revanchist forces around the world.

Alongside the devastation in Ukraine, Russia’s adventure is the most worrying blow to global stability and cooperation since the end of the Second World War. It is true that the post-war Yalta Order—with its spheres of influence and limitations on sovereignty—was never particularly just nor liberal. Since 1945, there have been several equally tragic wars in various regions of the world. The legality of various armed interventions by Western and non-Western states under international law is also open to questioning.

Nonetheless, in the sum of its specific characteristics, the Russian war against Ukraine, especially since 2022, has a novel quality. It is not only Moscow’s attempt to undo the European Security Order established by the Paris Charter of 1990. Putin’s war goes beyond the rules and conventions of the pre-1990 Cold War era. A combination of five violations of fundamental rules of international order sets the Russian assault on Ukraine apart from other post-World War II military invasions.

Moscow’s Five Cracks in the World Order

First, in 2014, Russia attacked a hitherto peaceful and militarily powerless country without provocation. The Russian leadership has many times since pronounced that Ukraine, the West, or both left them with no choice but to invade. Still, the change in Ukraine’s domestic and foreign policies after the victory of the Euromaidan Revolution of 2014 was far less dramatic than Moscow and its apologists abroad have portrayed. Ukraine’s policy towards the ethnic Russian minority remained tolerant immediately after the regime's change in Kyiv. It only became more restrictive in reaction to the war that started after the revolution, and especially as a result of the escalation in 2022. Ukrainian right-wing extremism has always been—and is still—weak by European standards. The European Union’s 2014 Association Agreement and free trade area with Ukraine was not a challenge to Russia’s then-operational free trade agreement with Ukraine.

Ukraine’s potential accession to NATO was in 2014 and remains a distant prospect today. According to the logic of this particularly popular justification for Putin’s behavior, Russia should have, for instance, withdrawn its troops from the Republic of Moldova long ago. Moldova is, according to Article 11 of its today still valid 1994 Constitution, officially non-aligned, which has precluded NATO accession. Nonetheless, Moscow has maintained, with active military and economic support, an unrecognized Transnistrian satellite state on Moldovan territory for thirty years.

Conversely, according to the logic of Kremlin spokespersons and apologists, Moscow should have reacted far more resolutely and negatively than it did to NATO’s significant eastern enlargements of 1999 and 2004. More recently, Russia should have attacked Finland in response to its application for NATO membership. After Helsinki’s intention to join was made public in early 2022, it was obvious that NATO would satisfy Finland’s request far sooner than Ukraine’s membership application of the same year. While the Russo-Finnish border is not quite as long as the Russo-Ukrainian border, it is substantial. When Finland joined NATO in 2023, this roughly doubled the total length of the NATO-Russia border.

In addition, Finland’s accession has now put Putin’s and numerous other leading Russian politicians’ native St. Petersburg in a precarious strategic position. The second Russian capital is now in close proximity to NATO from both the west (Estonia) and the north (Finland). This new geopolitical situation for St. Petersburg has made Finnish accession to NATO a more worrying strategic issue for Russia than a potential Ukrainian accession in the probably distant future.

Nonetheless, apart from some noise, there has been no material Russian reaction to Finland’s NATO application and accession. In fact, over the past two years, Russia has withdrawn troops from its Western and Northern Military Districts on or close to the Russian-Finnish border. Despite Finland’s—in contrast to Ukraine’s—actual rapprochement with and eventual accession to NATO, the Kremlin’s reaction, until now, has been mainly rhetorical rather than material.

Second, the Russian invasions of 2014 and 2022 were not only aimed at the temporary occupation of conquered territories or Ukraine’s inclusion in a zone of influence. They have led to the—from a Russian perspective—final and complete annexation, first of Ukrainian Crimea and later of four additional regions on the southeastern Ukrainian mainland. Such a blatant war to extend state territory at the expense of an internationally recognized neighboring country is not unique. Still, it has been a rare move, to say the least, since 1945.

Third, the Russian invasion in 2022 has been a war not only for expansion but also for annihilation of the Ukrainian state. It aims to abolish Ukraine as a sovereign entity and eradicate the Ukrainian people as an independent cultural community apart from Russia. Moscow’s genocidal intent is expressed not only in its many official statements but also in its terroristic behavior, from the deliberate bombing of civilian infrastructure to targeted destruction of Ukrainian cultural institutions, such as churches and libraries, arbitrary mistreatment and killing of hundreds of civilians and prisoners of war, mass deportation of tens of thousands of accompanied and unaccompanied children, Russification campaigns in the occupied territories, re-education camps for Ukrainians of minor and adult age, and so on. This genocidal approach is also not a unique phenomenon since 1945. However, it has never been practiced in this form beyond its territory by a permanent member of the UN Security Council.

Related to this is a fourth specific feature of the war—Russia’s deliberate use of the UN Security Council seat, which it inherited from the Soviet Union in 1991, to diplomatically abet a war of annihilation and secure territorial enlargement. Russia’s approach has, since 2014, turned the UN’s original function on its head. Created to protect international law and, in particular, its member states’ borders, integrity, and sovereignty, the UN Security Council has, in Russia’s hands, become an instrument of the violation of these most basic principles.

A curious side issue is that Ukraine, a former Soviet republic, was one of the founders of the UN in 1945, while the predecessor Soviet republic of today’s Russia, the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), was not. Nonetheless, the successor state of the RSFSR, the Russian Federation, which joined the United Nations only in late 1991, today officially includes five forcibly annexed regions of a UN-founding republic. Against this backdrop, it might come as no surprise that Russia bombed Kyiv in late April 2022 while UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres was in the city. Guterres had to hide in a Kyiv bomb shelter from missiles sent by a permanent member of the UN Security Council in his immediate vicinity.

The most far-reaching consequences of Moscow’s conduct and rhetoric for the world security system are related to a fifth feature—the nuclear aspect of Russia’s war of expansion and annihilation against Ukraine. The behavior of all actors in this confrontation is shaped by Russia’s possession and Ukraine’s non-possession of nuclear weapons and other weapons of mass destruction. Ukraine, the West, and other allies are calculating their actions and signals in light of Moscow’s blatant threats to use nuclear weapons and Kyiv’s inability to reciprocate.

The most scandalous aspect of this constellation is that the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), signed in 1968, explicitly allows Russia to possess nuclear weapons but absolutely forbids Ukraine to acquire or build them. Like the paradoxical effects of Russia’s permanent seat on the UN Security Council, Moscow has turned the meaning of the NPT on its head. Conceived as an instrument for peacekeeping, today’s consistent implementation of the NPT, in the context of Russia’s behavior towards the non-nuclear Ukraine, has had the effect of enabling a war of expansion.

As in the case of the Ukrainian Soviet Republic’s UN membership since 1945, there is a historical curiosity regarding the non-proliferation regime. After gaining independence in 1991, Ukraine briefly had the third-largest arsenal of nuclear weapons after Russia and the United States. At the time, Ukraine possessed more atomic warheads than the remaining three official nuclear weapon states—the United Kingdom, France, and China—put together.

In the mid-1990s, however, Kyiv agreed to destroy its unusable intercontinental missiles in exchange for the now-infamous Budapest Memorandum of 1994. Ukraine was also persuaded to liquidate or hand over to Russia all militarily usable atomic stockpiles, radioactive materials, nuclear technologies, and relevant delivery systems.

The Gravedigger of the Post-Cold War Order

Russia’s war against Ukraine since 2014 and its escalation in 2022 have shaken not only the liberal world order but also the European Security Order and the general international legal system. Russia’s attack is directed not just against Ukraine’s democracy but against the statehood, borders, sovereignty, identity, and integrity of a UN member state. The subversive effects of this behavior by a permanent member of the UN Security Council and official nuclear-weapon state under the NPT are amplified by the meek and ineffectual behavior of the remaining members of the Security Council, other nuclear weapon states, and other powerful Western countries—first and foremost Germany.

It is true that the massive sanctions imposed on Moscow by the West since 2022 have hampered Russian warfare and weakened the economy. However, they have not been able to constrain Russia, let alone end the war. Western arms deliveries to Ukraine are not insignificant but continue to be reluctant, circumscribed, and slow. They remain limited in scope and size. The deliveries still exclude various crucial types of weaponry.

Russia’s war also often indirectly and sometimes directly affects the security interests of Europe and other states. For example, Russian missiles operate in the vicinity of Ukrainian nuclear power plants, target the embassy district of Kyiv, or destroy Ukrainian grain silos. Even so, militarily powerful European states whose interests are visibly threatened or diminished by Russian warfare have not reacted materially. Instead, the European nations leave the protection of objects in Ukrainian territory critical to them for Ukraine’s armed forces.

Last but not least, international involvement in non-military aid for Ukraine remains muted. Today, there are intense debates in the West over transferring Moscow’s frozen funds to Kyiv, on how to punish Russia for its mass human rights violations in the occupied Ukrainian territories, and on the repatriation of thousands of unaccompanied deported Ukrainian children from Russia to their homeland. However, there have thus far been few relevant practical steps taken to implement these and similar intentions.

Conclusions

The continuing gap between the West’s public rhetoric and political practice gives the impression that the liberal international order is a mirage. To be sure, Russia is heading towards a dead end for its would-be empire and will emerge from the war as a net loser, even if victorious on the battlefield. At the same time, the Kremlin has managed to partly destroy the UN-based world system that emerged after 1945 and the European Security Order that emerged from the Helsinki Declaration of 1975.

To alleviate this situation, the words and deeds of Western and non-Western governments and international organizations must align. This concerns European actors above all but is also an issue beyond Europe. Western European and North American support for Ukraine is heavily driven by normative and emotional concerns, often based on feelings of community, solidarity, and empathy. While laudable, such motivations must be supplemented with more explicit and rational consideration of the national and transnational costs of Russia’s continuing devaluation of world order, international law, and global security.

Outside the Western realm, values, emotions, and norms have played a lesser role in evaluating Ukraine’s plight since February 24, 2022. Many politicians and commentators in the Global South see the Russo-Ukrainian war as either a quarrel between different groups of white people or as a conflict between Russia and the West. Most commentators perceive it as an event largely unrelated to the interests of non-European nations. A number of politicians, diplomats, and experts even regard it as a confrontation that should be exploited by Asian, African, and Latin American countries for their own benefit. Some go as far as to mistake Russia’s imperial war, illegal annexations, and genocidal behavior as acts of anti-imperialist resistance against an allegedly expansive West—a curious misinterpretation also popular in Western far left- and right-wing circles.

The spread of such misunderstandings across the non-Western world is paradoxical. Russia’s rhetorical devaluation and practical subversion of international law, order, and organization not only concerns the European continent. It may be more dangerous for militarily weak non-Western countries than for well-protected NATO member states or close non-NATO allies of the United States, such as Japan or South Korea.

It is sometimes forgotten that Ukraine is—in broadly comparative terms—a country intensely involved in regional and global treaties and organizations. To illustrate the international embeddedness of Ukraine as of May 2024, it has been the beneficiary of an extraordinary Budapest Memorandum attached to the NPT since 1994, a participant of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe since its creation in 1995, party to an especially detailed Association Agreement with the EU since 2014, as well as co-convenor of a special NATO-Ukraine Council founded in 2022. Many states around the world are less entrenched in international structures or have less powerful partners and allies. The sovereignty and integrity of these non-European countries rely—even more than Ukraine’s—on the functioning of the multilateral rules, organizations, and agreements that Russia is currently attacking.

Western and non-Western countries should, out of their own interests, support Ukraine as much as possible as it works to restore its territorial integrity and sovereignty. They should support Ukraine in its attempts to limit and reverse the genocidal aspects of Russia’s attack on Ukraine since 2014 to hold Russia accountable and consider ways to reform the UN and broader world system in order to prevent future misuse of international agreements and organizations to implement expansionist or genocidal policies. They should consider strengthening older or establishing new discussion forums (diplomatic, political, or academic), transnational networks (governmental, non-governmental, or mixed), and international organizations (regional, transregional, or global) designed to confront and contain revanchist, colonial, imperialistic and genocidal policies.

Western and non-Western governments, think tanks, media outlets, and NGOs should cooperate in the exchange and spread of accurate information and political clarification to the wider public about Russia’s war and its various international consequences. Making national and multinational action in support of Ukraine more resolute will demand better explanatory work from Western and non-Western press offices, research institutes, PR companies, educational institutions, and other public bodies. They must clarify for their audiences the full range of risks and implications for international stability that emanate from Russia’s subversive foreign behavior.

Dr. Andreas Umland is an analyst at the Stockholm Centre for East European Studies (SCEEUS) at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs (UI). The article is based on a February 2024 SCEEUS report. See sceeus.se/en/publications/.

Image: Dmytro Larin / Shutterstock.com.