Rubén Herrero de Castro, PhD., Professor of International Relations, Universidad Complutense de Madrid (Spain), rubenherrero@cps.ucm.es

Almost two years ago and following a delusional Foreign Policy, Russia launched a war of aggression against Ukraine. With this, the autocrat Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent, sought to recover the imperial policy of the tsars and the Soviet Union. to rebuild Russia’s battered global agenda and regain significant influence in the post-Soviet space of Eastern Europe. After breaching several treaties signed with Ukraine and destabilizing the east of this country for years, he ended up attacking it based on a list of false premises and pretexts.
Putin and Lavrov, his foreign minister, argued that he should attack Ukraine, to protect the supposed lust for freedom of two imaginary republics, Donetsk and Luhansk, as well as to avoid NATO pressure in Eastern Europe and to reduce U.S. pressure in the area. They concluded their distorted narrative with a dreamlike argument, Ukraine had to be denazified. The farce reached its peak, when Minister Lavrov asked about the fact that Ukrainian President Zelensky is jewish, he replied „Hitler was too”.
Thus, with no reliable intelligence reports on Ukraine’s ability to resist and the West’s response, and with troops prepared for a short invasion, Russia attacked Ukraine and made one of the worst foreign policy decisions in living memory. What could possibly go wrong, everything, and so it has been so far. An invasion designed to last a month is heading for two years and shows no signs of ending anytime soon.
Once a superpower, Russia is now an intermediate power that owes its waning relevance to its possession of nuclear weapons and energy hegemony. When he attacked Ukraine, he forgot two key lessons, first, war is a matter of logistics and second, Clausewitz’s concept of total war, which does not involve compromising everything but fighting in a way that will lead your opponent to know that he will lose. For this last lesson, combat morale is key in addition to weapons and soldiers. In this case, the one with the most predisposition and morale for the combat of the two contenders, Ukraine.
To this must be added the invaluable support of the United States and its allies, which means that Ukraine puts its soldiers on the line, while everything else is the responsibility of all the countries that support it. On the contrary, Russia must bear the full cost of its war of aggression and lacks the weapons and human logistics to continue to sustain its war campaign.
Everything Putin said he wanted to avoid is multiplying. Its aim to reduce NATO pressure, broken when two countries such as Sweden and Finland that operated outside NATO, decided to become members of the Atlantic Alliance. He wanted to keep the U.S. out of the area, on the contrary, he just fixed it extensively in Eastern Europe for decades. Not only that, the European Union and particularly Eastern European countries are developing energy plans to decouple from Russia in this area. Poland, for example, will no longer depend on Russian energy by 2024. If there was one thing Russia had before the war, it was energy hegemony. Now its sales are declining in Europe and with it the income it receives. The autocrat’s solution is to put himself in the hands of the communist dictatorship of People’s Republic of China and sign an energy supply treaty for that country, where power is held by those who buy and not those who sell.
In addition, Russian aggression has led to an increase in defense spending by all countries in Europe. Especially the Poles, historically well acquainted with Russian trickery, had proceeded since the beginning of the 21st century to design and implement a powerful army, which today would be able to defeat the Russians.
The war that was supposed to restore Russia to the status of a superpower inevitably led it to international marginalization. As an intermediate power, it should have used its economic, energy, military and cultural capacity to develop an intelligent power, presenting itself as a reliable provider of energy and security in the international environment. Russia did just the opposite, now it will lose a war it cannot win while is heading towards the twilight.

Rubén Herrero de Castro, Political Science and International Relations PhD., Professor of International Relations at the Faculty of Political Science and Sociology of the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain). He collaborates with various media, contributes with several chapters in scientific works, is an author in several scientific publications and to date has written three books: 

-Invented reality. Perceptions and decision-making process in Foreign Policy (prologue by Robert Jervis), Plaza and Valdés 2007

-John F. Kenney and Vietnam: The Fall of Camelot, Plaza and Valdés 2011

-Allies. Transatlantic Relations: Security and Images of the 21st Century, Plaza and Valdés 2015.