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by Cem Tuna Aksu
Policy Analysis
Introduction: One War, Many Layers of Transformation
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 can no longer be read as a bilateral front-line conflict. The evidence that has accumulated since then — from ideological justification to economic shockwaves, from Europe’s rearmament to the reordering of global power balances — shows that this war has taken hold of one corner of the post-1945 European security architecture and shaken the whole structure. To read this rupture as having begun only in 2022, however, is to miss its roots. The war’s underlying worldview was built, brick by brick, over more than two decades in the corridors of the Kremlin.
This paper draws together findings from a range of sources — policy institutes, international organisations, think tanks, and statements by the principal actors themselves — into a single framework, in order to trace the causal chain through which the war developed and to locate where that chain stands today.
The central argument is as follows: the war first passed through a process of ideological and historical justification; that process crystallised into a series of concrete breaking points (Estonia, Georgia, Crimea); it then produced humanitarian and economic devastation; that devastation triggered a Western military-budgetary response; and this response has, in turn, hardened into a broader geopolitical realignment. None of these stages stands alone — each builds on the one before it, and together they continue to shape the diplomatic debate over how the war might end. A final, unresolved question runs beneath all of this: whether Russia’s recurring pattern of costly, short-lived gains constitutes a string of Pyrrhic victories — and what happens to the millions of ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers scattered across Eastern Europe once, or if, the guns fall silent.
1. From the Corridors of the Kremlin to Power: Putin’s Three Priorities
Vladimir Putin did not arrive at the presidency in 2000 as an outsider. Through his tenure as director of the FSB and then as prime minister in the closing years of the 1990s, he had already been groomed for power within the Kremlin’s own corridors. On taking office, his agenda — in his own later framing — centred on repairing what he saw as three sources of damage to Russia’s standing.
The first priority was to restore the image of the Russian economy, and by extension of the Russian people, in the eyes of the world. The 1990s had become synonymous with “wild capitalism,” oligarchic plunder and runaway inflation; Putin’s first term, buoyed by rising energy prices, sought to reverse that picture.
The second priority was to contain the centrifugal forces threatening to pull the Russian Federation apart, both within its own borders and along its post-Soviet periphery — above all Chechnya, but also Georgia and the Central Asian republics. An extension of this same impulse was the effort to keep Ukraine within Russia’s orbit; Kyiv’s drift toward the West was perceived not merely as a strategic loss but as an existential threat to the entire narrative of a unified “Russian world.”
The third priority was resistance to NATO’s eastward enlargement. That resistance found its clearest articulation in 2007, at the Munich Security Conference, in the wake of the alliance’s largest single wave of expansion in 2004 — seven countries, including the Baltic states. In that speech, Putin openly rejected the unipolar order, framed NATO enlargement as a betrayal of promises he claimed had been made to Russia, and argued that the international system needed to evolve into a genuinely multipolar one, with Russia standing as one of its poles.
2. Looking to the Past: Legitimacy Through Selective History
The discursive architecture of the Putin era rests on a selective reading of history. Putin has described the collapse of the Soviet Union as “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century,” while simultaneously arguing that Boris Yeltsin — widely remembered abroad as an erratic and weak leader — should instead be recalled as a statesman who knew when to take responsibility. This reframing conveniently reinforces the legitimacy of Putin’s own succession. Alongside it, favourable references to the more authoritarian figures of Soviet history — Yuri Andropov in particular, and at times even Stalin — have become increasingly visible in official discourse. One symbolic expression of this tendency is the continued practice, within the FSB (successor to the KGB that Andropov once headed), of formally marking the founding anniversary of the Cheka, the Soviet secret police.
The function of this historiography is transparent: to demonstrate that Russia cannot be written out of the international system, that it remains an immovable actor in the politics of power, and to use selective appeals to the past to legitimise the case for a multipolar order. In this narrative, Russia is positioned not merely as a regional power but as a pole in its own right.
3. The “Fifth Column” Anxiety and the Colour Revolutions
A recurring theme in the Putin government’s foreign-policy rhetoric has been the claim that the “colour revolutions” across the former Soviet space — Georgia’s Rose Revolution of 2003, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of 2004, Kyrgyzstan’s Tulip Revolution of 2005 — were engineered and supported by the West. In the Kremlin’s telling, these movements form part of a “fifth column” effort to penetrate Russia’s political, economic and military sphere of influence through a variety of channels: civil society organisations, media outlets, election observation missions. This framework has allowed Moscow to present its own interference in the domestic politics of neighbouring states as a defensive reflex, and — fused with the (Russian-alleged) claim that promises not to expand NATO had been broken — has hardened Western distrust into an institutionalised narrative.
4. “The Country That Saved Europe Twice”
A further pillar of the Kremlin’s construction of historical legitimacy is the claim that Russia — first in its Tsarist, then in its Soviet form — twice rescued Europe from tyranny: once from Napoleon, once from Nazi Germany. In this telling, it was the Red Army, not the Western allies, that truly defeated Hitler, and the immense human sacrifice Russia bore in doing so goes unappreciated by today’s Europeans. This is not merely a historical reminder; it is a claim to legitimacy — an assertion that Russia has earned the right to a voice in European security. It links directly to the resistance to NATO enlargement: in Moscow’s framing, a continent rescued at such cost has no business disregarding Russia’s own security concerns while advancing an alliance to its very doorstep.
5. Breaking Points: From Rhetoric to Action
This ideological groundwork translated into concrete military and cyber action through a sequence of escalating episodes beginning in 2007:
Estonia, 2007. The Estonian government’s decision to relocate the Soviet-era “Bronze Soldier” monument from central Tallinn to a military cemetery triggered violent unrest among the country’s ethnic Russian population — the so-called “Bronze Night” — followed by a sustained and coordinated wave of cyberattacks against Estonian government institutions, banks and media outlets, widely attributed to Russia. The episode is now recorded as the first large-scale cyber campaign against an entire state, and stands as one of the earliest signs of the cooling in Russia-West relations.
Georgia, 2008. That same summer, Russia used tensions in South Ossetia as a pretext for military intervention in Georgia, occupying both South Ossetia and Abkhazia. The intervention marked the first major instance of Russia enforcing, by force of arms, its doctrine of a privileged “near abroad” across the former Soviet space.
Crimea, 2014. In the immediate aftermath of the Maidan protests in Ukraine and the fall of the Yanukovych government, Russia occupied and annexed the Crimean peninsula — a clear violation of international law that the Kremlin sought to legitimise through the language of “reclaiming historically Russian territory.”
Full-Scale War, 2022. The culmination of this chain of breaking points came on 24 February 2022, in an assault initially labelled a “special military operation” that within days had become the largest armed conflict Europe had witnessed since the Second World War. Later that year, in September 2022, Russia unilaterally annexed four Ukrainian regions — Donetsk, Luhansk, Zaporizhzhia and Kherson — declaring them Russian territory even though substantial parts of each remained under Ukrainian control. The move was not recognised by the vast majority of the international community, but it was entirely consistent with the framework Putin himself had laid out the year before, in his 2021 essay “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians.”
That essay, read in hindsight, was never simply an academic exercise in historiography; it was a text laying the ideological groundwork for future military action. It denied the legitimacy of Ukraine as a distinct nation, framed its present-day borders as a “Soviet gift,” and carried an implicit threat wrapped in the claim that the West had turned Ukraine into an “anti-Russia.” Its significance extended beyond propaganda value: by signalling that the 1991 Belovezha Accords might no longer be considered binding, it quietly pre-drew the map of the territorial claims that would surface once war began.
6. The Scale of Devastation and a Sharply Divergent Economic Impact
The OECD’s comprehensive assessment of the war’s effect on the Eastern Partnership countries makes clear that the war’s regional impact has been anything but uniform — it has instead produced sharp divergence. Ukraine itself absorbed devastation on the scale of a full economic collapse: a GDP contraction in the range of 30–45 percent, a 60 percent fall in exports, and a poverty rate that leapt from roughly 5 to over 25 percent of the population; the cost of reconstruction alone was estimated at more than 1.6 times pre-war GDP. Moldova, absorbing a refugee inflow equivalent to 3.5 percent of its population and remittance dependence reaching 15.7 percent of GDP, emerged as the region’s most fragile link.
Yet the very same war delivered a budget surplus equivalent to 20 percent of GDP to energy-exporting Azerbaijan in 2022, while Armenia and Georgia found an unexpected short-term windfall in the inflow of Russian capital and skilled labour — particularly into their IT sectors. This picture resists any single “winners and losers” narrative; instead, the war’s economic impact has diverged sharply according to geography, energy dependence, and pre-existing economic resilience. That divergence has, in turn, shaped the geopolitical alignments discussed below: countries that gained have tended toward hedging strategies (Azerbaijan, and until recently Hungary), while those that lost have accelerated their integration with the West (Moldova, Ukraine).
7. The Western Military-Budgetary Response: Rearmament Spreading from the Eastern Flank Westward
The war’s most tangible and measurable consequence has been the systematic increase in defence spending among NATO’s eastern-flank states — and, increasingly, among core powers such as Germany. Poland aims to expand its armed forces to 500,000 personnel by 2039 — nearly double current capacity — while planning to devote 5 percent of GDP to defence in 2026. This is no arbitrary target: statements from Poland’s defence ministry make explicit reference to lessons drawn directly from Ukraine’s wartime experience — drone warfare, the neutralisation of Russia’s Black Sea Fleet by unmanned systems, and the centrality of intelligence on the modern battlefield.
More striking still is the trajectory of Germany, historically a country cautious about military spending. The allocation of €82.69 billion to the Bundeswehr in the 2026 budget, and the plan embedded in the 2027 draft to raise defence spending as a share of GDP gradually from 3.1 percent toward the NATO target of 5 percent by 2035, shows that Berlin’s rhetoric of Kriegstüchtigkeit — “readiness for war” — has moved from slogan to line item. But the transition is far from frictionless: both the historical sluggishness of Germany’s procurement system and the fact that European and American munitions production still lags behind Russia’s expose a real gap between declared intent and actual capacity. Nor is the fiscal cost trivial: Germany’s recourse to €196.5 billion in fresh borrowing, financed in part through cuts to social spending, has placed the “guns versus welfare state” dilemma squarely on the political agenda of Europe’s largest economy.
8. Geopolitical Realignment: Durable or Transient?
Here, RAND Corporation’s extensive historical comparison offers a crucial caveat: regional conflicts typically reinforce existing alliances, but genuine “strategic realignments” — the kind that turn former rivals into partners, or drive allies apart — are historically rare. Viewed through this lens, the war’s most durable outcome is likely to be the probably irreversible rupture between Europe and Russia; by contrast, the US-European alliance has
deepened, while the Russia-China relationship has strengthened, driven by both sides’ shared interest in eroding the US-led order.
The Clingendael Institute’s regional mapping situates this picture within a more granular geopolitical geography: the EU’s retreat from Russian gas (its share of EU gas imports falling from 45 to 19 percent), Ukraine’s disruption of Russian naval dominance in the Black Sea through unmanned systems, and Türkiye’s consolidation of a mediating role by exploiting this very division all point to a redrawing of regional power distribution. Hungary offers a striking counter-example — and, at the same time, a demonstration of just how fragile such hedging can prove. For sixteen years in power, the Orbán government pursued a lone path of “balancing” within the EU, repeatedly objecting to sanctions on Russia and sustaining its relationship with Putin; in the April 2026 parliamentary election, however, that stance carried a heavy electoral price, and Orbán suffered a decisive defeat to Péter Magyar’s Tisza Party, ending his sixteen-year hold on power. Signals that the incoming government will pursue a course closer to Brussels underscore a striking point: the war has reshaped not only foreign policy but the internal political balance of Russia’s neighbours as well.
9. Pyrrhic Victories? Reassessing Russia’s Strategic Record
When these successive breaking points are considered together, a broader pattern begins to emerge — one that deserves to be identified explicitly. Time and again, Russia’s tactical and territorial gains have come at a strategic cost that arguably outweighs their immediate benefits. In many respects, they bear the defining characteristics of Pyrrhic victories.
The 2007 cyberattacks against Estonia demonstrated Russia’s capabilities in the cyber domain, yet they also accelerated NATO’s — and the wider West’s — investment in cyber defence. Rather than intimidating Estonia into submission, the attacks helped transform Tallinn into one of the Alliance’s leading centres of cybersecurity.
The 2008 war in Georgia left South Ossetia and Abkhazia under Russian control, but it also consolidated Georgian public support for NATO and European Union membership, a strategic orientation that has since been embedded in the country’s constitution, however distant its practical realisation may remain.
Similarly, the annexation of Crimea in 2014 secured a peninsula of considerable strategic value, but it also triggered the first substantial wave of Western sanctions, ended Ukraine’s longstanding ambiguity over NATO membership, and initiated the extensive Western military assistance to Kyiv that Moscow has spent the following decade attempting to counter.
The clearest example, however, remains the full-scale invasion launched in 2022. According to Putin’s own stated rationale, the operation was intended to halt NATO’s eastward expansion and reinforce Russia’s influence across its “near abroad.” In practice, it has produced almost precisely the opposite outcome. Finland and Sweden abandoned decades of military non-alignment to join NATO, effectively doubling the Alliance’s direct land border with Russia. Germany embarked upon the largest rearmament programme in its post-war history, while the European Union accelerated its strategic decoupling from Russian energy by several years — if not an entire decade.
Measured solely in territorial terms, Russia today controls territory it did not hold before February 2022. Measured against the strategic objectives articulated by the Kremlin itself — a demilitarised and non-aligned Ukraine alongside a weakened and divided Western alliance — the war appears less as a strategic success than as a self-inflicted acceleration of the very developments it sought to prevent.
Whether the Kremlin ultimately recognises this broader pattern, or continues to interpret each episode as an isolated tactical success, will play a significant role in shaping Russia’s future behaviour along its periphery.
10. The Unresolved Question: Russian Minorities Across Eastern Europe
Any assessment of how — or even whether — this war can be resolved in a durable manner must confront a demographic reality that both predates the conflict and is likely to outlast it. Significant ethnic Russian and Russian-speaking communities remain dispersed across a broad arc of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet space, including the Baltic states, Moldova’s breakaway Transnistria region, eastern and southern Ukraine, Georgia’s occupied territories, and parts of Central Asia.
These communities are far from homogeneous, and their political loyalties vary considerably. Nevertheless, their presence has repeatedly provided the Kremlin with a justification — sometimes grounded in genuine grievances, at other times in constructed narratives — for political or military intervention. From the protection of Russian speakers invoked during the annexation of Crimea in 2014 to similar arguments employed in the Donbas, and more recently to warnings concerning Russian-marked drones allegedly being used to provoke NATO member states, this narrative has remained a recurring element of Russian strategic discourse.
For this reason, no ceasefire line, however carefully negotiated, can fully resolve the underlying problem. A settlement based on the current line of contact — the scenario explored in studies by RAND and others — would leave millions of Russian speakers inside Ukrainian territory while millions more would continue to reside across neighbouring states, remaining potential instruments of leverage for future governments in Moscow.
Conversely, even a comprehensive Ukrainian recovery of occupied territory would not eliminate these demographic realities. It would merely shift responsibility for their political integration, representation and security to a different state authority. The historical narratives cultivated by the Kremlin since the early 2000s — the concept of a divided Russkiy Mir, claims that ethnic Russians abroad face systematic persecution, and selective interpretations of Soviet-era borders — cannot simply be removed through a diplomatic settlement.
Regardless of how the current war ultimately ends, these questions are likely to remain enduring fault lines within the domestic politics of the Baltic states, Moldova, Georgia and Ukraine. Any lasting peace settlement will therefore need to address minority rights, language policy and cross-border cultural ties with the same seriousness as territorial arrangements and security guarantees.
11. The Diplomatic Dimension: Negotiating the End of the War
The debate surrounding the eventual settlement of the war cannot be separated from these broader structural realities. Henry Kissinger’s early proposal for a return to a status quo ante line — under which roughly 93 percent of Ukrainian territory would remain under Kyiv’s control while the remainder would become the subject of subsequent negotiations — generated considerable controversy when first advanced. In retrospect, however, it anticipated many of the negotiating parameters that later emerged around the evolving line of contact.
Kissinger’s description of Vladimir Putin as “calculating and resentful,” together with his argument that Russia’s future relationship with Europe represents “the key geostrategic question,” continues to provide a useful analytical framework. Whatever the military outcome of the war, the reconstruction of relations between Russia and Europe is likely to become one of the defining security challenges of the coming decade.
Conclusion: The Endpoint of a Twenty-Year Narrative, or the Beginning of a New Era?
Taken together, the evidence examined throughout this analysis points to a single overarching conclusion: the war in Ukraine was not a sudden crisis that erupted in 2022, but the culmination of a political and strategic narrative that had been taking shape since the early 2000s. The three priorities that defined Putin’s rise to power — restoring Russia’s economic standing, containing centrifugal forces across the post-Soviet space (Ukraine foremost among them), and resisting NATO’s eastward enlargement — gradually evolved into an explicit strategic doctrine. Articulated most clearly at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, that doctrine was subsequently tested through successive breaking points in Estonia (2007), Georgia (2008) and Crimea (2014), before culminating in the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Viewed in this broader historical context, four conclusions stand out.
First, rearmament has become a structural rather than cyclical feature of European security. The experiences of Poland and Germany demonstrate that increased defence spending is no longer a temporary response to crisis but an enduring component of long-term strategic planning.
Second, the war has produced profound regional economic asymmetries, and those asymmetries are increasingly shaping foreign policy choices across Eastern Europe and the wider post-Soviet space. In some cases, as Hungary illustrates, they have also carried significant domestic political consequences.
Third, RAND’s historical comparison serves as an important reminder that regional wars rarely produce revolutionary geopolitical transformations. More often, they accelerate trends that are already underway. If that historical pattern holds, the rupture between Europe and Russia is likely to endure, even if a comprehensive restructuring of the wider international order proves less probable.
Finally — and perhaps most importantly — Russia’s experience over the past two decades resembles not a sequence of strategic triumphs but a succession of Pyrrhic victories. Tactical and territorial gains have repeatedly generated strategic consequences that run directly against Moscow’s own long-term objectives. The unresolved legacy of this pattern is perhaps most evident in the millions of Russian-speaking communities dispersed across contested borders — a demographic and political fault line that no ceasefire agreement, by itself, can resolve.
Ultimately, the legacy of this war will not be measured solely by the movement of front lines. It will be measured across the broader arc stretching from Tallinn to Tbilisi, from Crimea to the Donbas, and through the reconfiguration of the political, economic and military landscape extending from Warsaw to Berlin and from Baku to Chișinău. The central question facing policymakers is therefore not simply how this war ends, but whether the settlement that follows can prove resilient enough to outlast the historical narratives, demographic realities and geopolitical fault lines that made the conflict possible in the first place.
Research Basis
This policy analysis is informed by reports, policy papers, datasets and publications produced by:
- Anadolu Agency
- Atlas Institute
- Clingendael Institute
- Der Spiegel
- NV
- OECD
- OSW Centre for Eastern Studies
- RAND Corporation
It also draws on historical literature examining Vladimir Putin’s political career, the evolution of Russian foreign policy, and official speeches and statements by Russian political leaders.