The Russian Issues

The conflicts that define the former Soviet space did not begin in 2022, nor even in 1991. They reach back through a century of empire, famine, forced movement, and the slow grinding of great-power ambition. To read the war in Ukraine clearly, one must first understand the disputes behind it — the separatist regions, the land bridge to Crimea, the energy reserves, and the long Russian argument that Ukraine was never a nation at all. Our analysis of the disputes behind the war lays out the substantive causes that brought two neighbours to open conflict.

Yet disputes alone do not explain war. The story of how Russia and Ukraine failed to reach a deal is a story of shifting balances of power, miscalculation, and the personal incentives of a leader who had held power for more than two decades. When the invasion finally came, its first hours turned on a single airstrip. The assault on Hostomel Airport was meant to be the decapitation strike that ended Ukraine in a weekend — and its failure reshaped the entire war.

From that opening, the war evolved into something few predicted. The skies over Ukraine became a laboratory for a new kind of warfare, as drones and glide bombs displaced manned aircraft and cheap quadcopters began destroying million-dollar tanks. None of this can be separated from the deeper economic story. The rapid rise and sudden collapse of the Soviet economy left a legacy of centralised fragility that still shapes how Russia funds, supplies, and sustains its wars today.

That legacy is geographic as much as economic. The question of how Russia became so vast and culturally diverse explains the borders, the republics, and the very logic of expansion that drives the present conflict. And the pattern of great powers drawing lines through other people's countries is not unique to Russia. The division of Korea into North and South shows the same Cold War hand at work — a peninsula split at the thirty-eighth parallel, much as Europe was split, with consequences that outlast every generation that inherits them.