After two and a half years of war, the West is still providing limited support for Ukraine without realizing that this delay and lack of determination plays into the hands of Moscow and Beijing. In the capitals of democratic countries, the true nature of the Russian regime and its war goals, which have been clearly stated, are still not understood. The geopolitical paradigm shift resulting from globalization has not been acknowledged. Precious time has been wasted, making it increasingly difficult to thwart the project of world vassalization pursued by Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.
Since Moscow’s invasion of eastern Ukraine, Western support for Ukraine has consistently been marked by chronic delays in reacting to realities on the ground. While this support is undeniable, the delay in its implementation has had disastrous consequences in terms of loss of lives for Ukrainians, both on the front lines and among the civilian population, as Russian bombings — missiles, bombs, and drones — have widely struck civilian buildings: homes, schools, hospitals, places of worship, businesses, economic and energy infrastructure. This delay took on dramatic proportions with the blockage of U.S. aid for over six months by Donald Trump’s supporters in Congress, and with Germany’s refusal to supply Kyiv with Taurus missiles, which could have been used to destroy the Crimean Bridge, which would have been a significant blow to Russia. Ukrainians are still suffering the consequences. Moreover, this delay has been accompanied by a form of skepticism toward Ukraine itself, despite statements of support.
Indeed, after a phase of admiration for the courage, heroism, and ingenuity demonstrated by President Volodymyr Zelensky’s compatriots in resisting Russian aggression, criticisms highlighting Ukraine’s weaknesses and shortcomings have proliferated. Corruption, political discord, military incompetence, delays, and insufficient mobilization of the population after the initial momentum of winter and spring 2022 — we have heard it all. At diplomatically and militarily “sensitive” times, Ukraine’s “allies” — particularly the Americans and Germans, but not only — made sure that major media outlets spread these criticisms, which were not always unfounded. Organized leaks were plentiful. Of course, there is no question of turning a blind eye to the problems and flaws on the Ukrainian side. But one wonders about the persistence and frequency of these criticisms. Was there an effort to promote the idea that Ukraine should be “reasonable” and stop asking for too much and always more? Was there an attempt to signal to Kyiv that, in the end, the “Russian mass” would achieve the objectives Vladimir Putin had set for it, and that it would therefore be more “realistic” to be reasonable? Since the beginning of the war, and even before, the proponents of Realpolitik have been working on public opinion and attempting to influence governments.
Ukraine kept in a position of suffering
This way of blaming Ukraine and trying to bring it to “reason” obviously glosses over the consequences of the delay and the strictly measured — “calibrated,” as French General Michel Yakovleff, a former NATO official, fiercely put it — Western support. One of Ukraine’s first requests was for a “no-fly zone” over its sovereign territory. Had the West agreed, the outcome of Russia’s so-called “special military operation” in Ukraine would have been very different. Subsequently, for a long time, in Washington, Bonn, and even Paris, we were told that “at this stage, Ukraine did not need aircraft”… Broadly speaking, the time lost in equipping Ukrainians with the means to defeat Russian strategy — not just to hold the front lines — allowed Moscow to use this delay to prepare and adapt when it should have been caught off guard. Far from providing Ukraine with the means to take and keep the initiative on the ground, it was placed in a position of suffering. This is still evident today, as hesitations over authorizing the use of long-range weapons against military targets on Russian territory — especially against the bases from which planes take off to drop the powerful gliding bombs that wreak havoc on Ukrainian front lines and, now, on civilian targets such as in Kharkiv — are allowing the Russian General Staff to begin positioning itself out of reach of these weapons.
Officially, in Western diplomatic circles, the rationale is to avoid getting involved in an escalation that could lead to a third world war. The goal is to avoid appearing as “co-belligerents,” a term dear to the Kremlin, which pretends to be unaware of the fact that supporting an attacked country — without direct military intervention — does not imply becoming a party to the conflict. In reality, behind this term, foreign to international law, the Kremlin is promoting the idea that those who oppose its geopolitical ambitions, Russian expansionism at the expense of its neighbors, and disregard of international treaties are enemies of Russia, thus exposing themselves to reprisals. Indeed, it is the fear of reprisals — fueled by the recurring threat of nuclear weapons — that leads the West to cautiously calibrate the means provided to Kyiv to defend Ukraine’s sovereignty and the lives of its citizens. As a result, Ukraine is hampered in its defensive struggle. It must fight “with one hand tied behind its back.” The West ensures that Ukraine does not collapse, but does nothing to shorten its suffering, much less incapacitate those inflicting it. American and European support amounts, in practice, to a form of Chinese torture, which gives the executioner great latitude while preventing them from finishing the job. We act as if we wanted to prove former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev or the Deputy Speaker of the Duma right when they repeatedly stated that Western aid would only prolong the war without preventing Russia’s final victory.
The choice to calibrate Western support, even at a heavy price for Ukrainians, is based on a persistent idea in Washington: that this war is a means to permanently weaken Russia. For now, Putin’s country has revitalized its military industry, and the conflict allows it to update its expertise in multiple military domains and in information warfare. Paradoxically, Ukrainian ingenuity has turned the “special military operation” into a true laboratory from which Russians are reaping significant benefits. Certainly, Russia is depleting its military capabilities faster than it can replenish them, but it is receiving direct and indirect aid from North Korea, Iran, China, and even countries like Turkey, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, and a few others, which have become playgrounds for circumventing international sanctions against Moscow. This aid allows Russia to hold out in the long term. But it has other, more serious consequences, because the question is not just how long Russia can hold out, as seems to be pondered in Western capitals, but what this lost time produces or enables for Russia and its allies.
Head in the sand of the front line
We must broaden our focus to understand the gravity of the West’s error. Since the beginning of the war — since 2014 — political leaders, military officials, and many geopolitical analysts have been slow to grasp the true nature of the Russian regime, which is an alliance of security organs, the military-industrial complex, large post-Soviet companies and financial groups, and organized crime. In no way is Putin’s Russia a “normal” state, with which it is possible to maintain civilized relations. The reliability of Moscow’s words and commitments is entirely dependent on the pursuit of its objectives, and lying is not an exception but a recurring practice.
The objectives of this regime cannot be reduced to the conquest of all four regions invaded and illegally annexed in 2022, not to mention Crimea, stolen eight years earlier. Just as the delay in military support has been constant, the tendency to minimize Putin’s objectives has been ever-present. As if it were impossible to imagine that his ambitions are far greater, more irrational, or disruptive. It seems that the hubris driving him is mentally ungraspable. It is a reality that people do not want to confront out of fear of having to face it. A portion of Western leaders (and not insignificant ones) and commentators bury their heads in the sand on the front line. The first example of this inability to face up to the obvious was the near-unanimous belief at the beginning of 2022 that, despite Russian rhetoric and threats, Russian tanks would not cross the Ukrainian border. Yet the Kremlin explicitly promised Ukrainians that if they did not yield to the arguments of Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, they would have to face Shoigu’s (the Russian Defense Minister until last spring). The shock of the February 24, 2022, invasion shattered this erroneous belief, but failed to fully open the eyes of Western leaders.
One cannot support the idea that Russia’s war aims are limited to a new “Novorossiya” (the name of the territories conquered by Catherine the Great), essentially eastern and southern Ukraine, from Kharkiv to Odesa. Even if his henchmen endlessly repeat that these lands have been irrevocably Russian since time immemorial, Vladimir Putin consistently places his actions within a global context of confrontation with the “global West1.” He has repeatedly claimed that the “Nazis and degenerates” in Kyiv are mere puppets controlled by Washington and that Europeans will pay dearly not only for their commitment to Ukraine but also for their participation in exploiting the rest of the planet and their colonial or neocolonial policies. This says it all, but people prefer not to hear it and instead consider it mere rhetorical flourishes. This ignores the fact that one of the essential functions of political discourse in Russia (since at least Soviet times) is not to explain reality to seek compromise or adjustments but to bring about what is announced. The discourse aims to change the world to bend it to the will of power rather than understand it and adapt to it peacefully and democratically.
Global Offensive Underway
We must, therefore, take Putin seriously and look at what is happening across the geopolitical stage, which Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, Pyongyang, and Ankara have clearly begun to reshape in their favor, across nearly every continent, using a variety of means and forming the most extravagant alliances and convergences, with Putin presenting himself as the defender of civilization and Christian values against Islamist terrorist groups while receiving a delegation from Hamas in Moscow right after the massacres of October 7, 2023. What is being targeted is what Immanuel Kant projected in 1795 in his book Perpetual Peace, an ideal toward which, for better or worse — often worse — Europeans and Americans have striven, with the creation of the United Nations or the European Union. While Putin and his friends are obviously not “guilty of everything,” they are certainly taking advantage of anything that destabilizes the post-World War II legacy.
The general picture is grim. Can France forget that it has largely lost its footing in Africa and that Côte d’Ivoire and Senegal, once considered pillars of stability, are now under pressure? In Europe, as we have recently seen in Germany, the rise of extremism, both right and left, fueled by the exacerbation of immigration issues and the stoking of collective fears, poses serious threats to the future of democracy and the cohesion of the European Union. The victory of Javier Milei in Argentina2, Brazil’s Lula’s misguided views on the Ukraine conflict, Maduro’s hold on power in Venezuela, and the long-standing drift in Nicaragua, to name just a few examples, show that in Latin America, the fight against the rule of law and international regulations is in full swing — by means other than those imagined by Che Guevara and Fidel Castro. In Asia, alongside Beijing’s constant pressure on Taiwan and its strategy of permanent tension in the South China Sea, we also see the increasing power and provocation of North Korea, which is on the verge of possessing ballistic missiles for its nuclear weapons. In the Middle East, Tehran, on the cusp of becoming a nuclear-armed state, is proving to be the great destabilizer of the entire region, with its allies Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Palestine, and the Houthis in Yemen. In North America, Donald Trump and what has become of the Republican Party are certainly primarily products of the crisis within American society, but this crisis has been fueled by the interconnections between the American far right and Russian networks, which have spread messages to weaken the Democratic camp and simultaneously radicalize part of its left wing, particularly among university youth. It is also striking to see the ideological convergences between the most extreme proponents of wokeism and the “decolonial” rhetoric addressed to African youth by local “influencers” supported, if not fashioned, by Moscow. This is indeed a global offensive, and in this scheme, the war in Ukraine is not an end but one of the means.
The objective: the feudalization of the world
What Putin and Xi Jinping are implementing — the former largely doing the dirty work for the latter — is a strategic paradigm shift. They have, in a sense, drawn Machiavellian lessons from globalization by thinking of the confrontation between powers not locally but systemically. The United States still sees itself as a leading power and is largely focused on the challenge posed by China without realizing that this challenge can only be overcome through a broader geopolitical understanding. Europeans are still stuttering when it comes to a common foreign policy, while defense remains the responsibility of EU member states, leaving them equally behind on the effects of globalization, which they have only considered from an economic perspective — and not even a technological one, unlike Americans.
Western political leaders and many of our diplomatic analysts are, therefore, still out of sync with this shift, which did not just appear out of nowhere: the Soviet Union commonly carried out destabilization operations around the world, and Putin is reviving, reactivating, and amplifying what was being done when he joined the KGB in the 1970s. The novelty, under the growing influence of Beijing, where geopolitics is seen as a gigantic game of Go, is the systematization of alliances and partnerships and, above all, the coordination of opportunism. It is all the easier because non-democratic players, whose decisions are made in very small circles, are invited into the game. Such a situation is obviously one of the effects of globalization and the technological tools that have made it possible. Behind this paradigm shift, it is not difficult to see the outline of a project for the feudalization of the world, with Beijing as the overlord and Moscow as the first vassal.
This project could be thwarted by bringing down its Russian pillar. On the one hand, it would make China much more cautious, as its own power is threatened internally by economic and demographic crises. On the other hand, it would reshuffle the cards on all the fronts where Russian destabilization is at work. Yet there is a sense among Western governments of powerlessness against adversaries who play outside the scope of common international rules. But this is precisely where time is a crucial factor. Western lack of determination is giving those who wish to dominate us — because that is what this is all about — the time they need to build up their networks, forge ties, establish their influence, and impose forms of dependency and authority. The more time passes, the harder it will be to oppose this increasingly complex and powerful project.
Putin has mirrored with Georgia in 2008, Crimea and Donbas in 2014, and the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 what Hitler did starting in 1935 with Saarland, then Austria, and finally the Sudetenland in 1938. At each stage of the Kremlin’s advance, we had the opportunity to stop it, provided we had the courage — rather than relying on the direct victims of Moscow — and we did not. Continuing to calibrate military aid to Ukrainians, out of fear of a third world war, is a way of repeating the Munich Agreement in dribs and drabs. It is perhaps an attempt to avoid dishonor this time, but it is not a way to stop the war we fear. Quite the contrary. In fact, the third war has already begun, and we pretend not to see it. We pretend to ignore it all the more easily because it is much less direct and more subtle, but it is still the continuation of politics (the feudalization of the world) by other means. Clarity forces us to say that if we do not try in the coming months to inflict a genuine defeat on Russia, the entire world will have to wait, to free itself from this feudal regression, for this domination to collapse from internal decay. History shows that empires always fall this way, but it will likely take a long time, probably several generations. Do we want to impose on our children such servitude, of which Russia, Iran, and China are giving us a clear picture, in terms of how they treat their own people?
Jean-François Bouthors is a journalist and essayist, contributing to the magazine Esprit and serving as an editorialist for Ouest-France. He is the author of several books, including Comment Poutine change le monde published by Editions Nouvelles François Bourin in 2016.
Footnotes
- He has asserted his desire to counter what he calls the American order and the global West since 2007.
- The logic of his libertarianism, like Elon Musk’s, is the law of the strongest—”a free fox in a free henhouse.” This model, which can only lead to a form of chaos and/or tyranny, is the one Putin wants to establish at a geopolitical level, given that he has already installed a totalitarian form of power in Russia.
