Expert outlines potential global consequences should Russia be allowed to win in Ukraine

That’s according to an oped by Oleksandr Danylyuk, an Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (UK), published on the organization's website, Ukrinform reports.

At the current stage of the war, which has already become protracted, Russia is persistenly working to undermine international support for Ukraine and degrade the embattled nation’s will to continue the struggle, the expert notes, adding that, despite such efforts, over 74% ofo Ukrainians remain in favor of figting until all occupied areas are liberated.

In the West, however, both public attitudes and the attitudes of ruling elites are “putting at risk the volume of military-technical assistance to Ukraine”.

Meanwhile, even a short-term loss of Ukraine’s ability to deter Russian aggression “will inevitably upend the current equilibrium”.

Ukrainians will undoubtedly continue the struggle even in such a scenario, but it will increasingly bear the character of an irregular insurgent war, under the conditions of which it will be practically impossible to keep large territories under Ukrainian control, and even more so to protect the civilian population. It is enough to look at Syria to imagine the nature of such a confrontation. The methodical use of airstrikes and the destruction of cities that resist Russian troops would not leave Ukraine with much of a chance even in the medium term,” the report reads.

Also, the expert argues that current uncertainty over continued support to Ukraine on the part of the U.S. to help the nation win the war with Russia “calls into question the US’s readiness to protect individual NATO countries from Russian aggression”.

“It is obvious that if Ukraine loses support from the West, Putin may well achieve his goal of destroying Ukrainians as a people and erasing the largest country from the map of Europe. Despite the obvious tragedy of this situation for Ukraine, the consequences of its defeat for the West and especially for the US as the leader of the free world would be no less catastrophic,” reads the oped.

The Russian leadership perceives and positions the war as a one-on-one confrontation with the U.S. and NATO, where Ukraine serves only as a proxy – the stance shared including by other authocratic states.

In this context, any outcome that Russia could pass as own victory would be perceived by these countries as a defeat of the West and the U.S. in particular, and encourage autocracies to pursue their own military expansion, as well as force the countries of the Global South to seek special relationships with these countries, displacing the U.S. as an international security broker, Danylyuk wrote.

“Not only would this lead to a weakening of the West’s ability to use the military infrastructure of these countries, but it would also limit access to their markets, as well as the ability to obtain strategic materials from them,” the oped reads.

“A Russian victory in Ukraine is highly likely to destroy NATO, at least in its current form,” the expert argues, recalling that since inception, it has embodied an agreement between, according to which the U.S. undertook to protect Europe from the Soviet threat. In exchange for this, among other things, European countries made their military infrastructure available to the U.S., undertook to develop their own defence capabilities, and recognised the undisputed military leadership of the U.S. in the event of a war with the USSR.

It is obvious that without U.S. troops, and especially without its nuclear umbrella, European countries will not be able to defend themselves in the event of a full-scale war with a nuclear power, Danylyuk admits. “Awareness of the high risk of losing U.S. protection may force the leaders of European states to start looking for bilateral security arrangements with Russia or China, either of which may offer to step in as a security broker, as has already happened in the Middle East. Undoubtedly, the withdrawal of the US from Europe – which was and remains the principal goal of first Soviet and now Russian active measures – would be immediately capitalised upon by filling the resultant vacuum with Russian and Chinese influence. For the US, the loss of Europe would be equivalent to losing the status of leader of the free world, and together with the loss of European markets, it would mean the inevitable end of the era of US political, military and economic dominance,” the article notes.

A Russian victory in Ukraine would destroy the modern system of global nuclear security, pushing the world into an inevitable period of nuclear war, as if proving that the only means of protection against aggression coming from nuclear powers is “the possession of nuclear weapons of one’s own”.

As a result, “breaking the taboo on the use of nuclear weapons would create a new reality, the tragic characteristics of which are hard to imagine”.

The expert underlines that any attempt to sign a peace treaty with Russia, according to which Ukraine could survive in some form despite the loss of territory and sovereignty, would only give Putin the strategic pause necessary to prepare the next phase of aggression.

Meanwhile, defeating Russia in Ukraine remains quite achievable as it is believed that an effective offensive requires a three-to-one advantage in capabilities, the expert notes. “This rule could also quite easily be applied to the financing of military operations. The only thing needed to win this war is to be ready to send three dollars to support Ukraine for every dollar allocated by Russia. In 2024, Russia will once again spend about $100 billion on the war. The West doesn’t even have to spend its own money to apply the 3 to 1 rule: by a strange coincidence, exactly $300 billion of Russian reserves are now blocked in accounts abroad,” the oped concludes.

As Ukrinform reported earlier, Senator Chuck Schumer, leader of the Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate, said on Wednesday that negotiators in Congress get “a little bit closer” each day to approving the supplemental national security package that provides, among other things, more than $60 billion in security assistance to Ukraine.

Also, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday advanced legislation that would allow the U.S. to seize immobilized Russian assets to be used for the Ukraine cause.