The Russian Issues

Ten days after the attacks of September 11, 2001, the world was already rearranging itself around a new kind of war. The United States had invoked NATO's Article 5 for the first time in the alliance's history. Central Asia's former Soviet republics were opening their airspace and their bases to American bombers. And in Moscow, Vladimir Putin was positioning himself as an indispensable partner in what Washington was already calling the Global War on Terror — a partnership that would buy Russia years of Western forbearance while the Kremlin quietly rebuilt the very instruments of power that would one day be turned on Ukraine.

The decade that followed reshaped the global order in ways its architects did not predict. The United States poured its blood and treasure into the deserts of Iraq and the mountains of Afghanistan, while Russia used the breathing room to consolidate its energy leverage over Europe and rearm its military. The economic story underneath is inseparable from the military one: the rapid rise and eventual collapse of the Soviet economy had left a legacy of centralised fragility that still shaped how Russia funded and sustained its wars. The vast geography that made that economy possible — the question of how Russia became so big — was the same geography that now mattered to American logisticians seeking supply routes into Afghanistan through the former Soviet space.

Few understood then that the real fault line of the century would run not through the Hindu Kush but through the flatlands of eastern Europe. The disputes that would erupt into open war in 2022 were already visible to anyone who looked: the separatist regions, the land bridge to Crimea, the energy reserves, the long Russian argument that Ukraine was never a nation at all. Our four-part analysis of the disputes behind the war traces those causes and the bargaining frictions that turned them into Europe's largest conflict since 1945.

When the invasion finally came, its first hours turned on a single airstrip outside Kyiv. The plan to seize Hostomel Airport was meant to end Ukraine in a weekend. Its failure reshaped the entire war and opened the door to a contest of attrition nobody predicted, where drones and missile defense displaced manned aircraft and cheap quadcopters began hunting million-dollar targets. And the pattern of great powers drawing lines through other people's countries was not unique to Russia: the division of Korea into North and South shows the same Cold War hand at work, with consequences that outlast every generation that inherits them.