It is tragic when wars happen and people die, doubly so when these things happen due to miscalculations or misperceptions. However, it is most tragic when wars happen due to miscalculations that could have been easily foreseen. The Russo-Ukrainian conflict which started in February 2022 promises to be such a sorry episode, where a Russian force of approximately 200 thousand men invaded a country exceeding 600 thousand square kilometres in landmass and 43 million fiercely anti-Russian citizens. The operation’s success seems increasingly unlikely. A subsequent occupation’s success looks impossible. When factoring in the effects on the Russian economy and NATO revitalization, the entire series of events looks catastrophic to Moscow.

But how precisely did this geopolitical nightmare come about?

Prelude: Resetting the Board

At the start of 2022, Russia faced a rather unpromising situation.

Its sphere of influence was receding and unravelling. In only the past two years, its bulwarks in Belarus and Kazakhstan had experienced unprecedented protests that had demanded intervention to stabilise. Its economy continued to heave under sanctions. Its non-state allies in the European Right, with the exception of Serbia and Hungary, appeared to no longer stand a serious chance at electoral power. Its chance to reset ties with the US and attain sanctions relief during the sympathetic Trump administration had passed. From a fractured and military inept country, Ukraine appeared to be consolidating and developing genuine capabilities and national unity capable of crushing Russia’s proxy Donbas separatists if they were unsupported. Social media companies and US Intelligence were growing wise to its disinformation playbook.

Yet, a window of opportunity still seemed open. Russia still possessed world-class military and covert operations capabilities. For the time being, Ukraine appeared to still be weak. The EU seemed to still be dysfunctional. Germany, with its affection for Russian natural gas and a new coalition government, appeared indecisive. The United States was laser-focused on the Indo-Pacific. Hence, it seemed prime time to convert perishable military tools into long term geopolitical assets. The theatre would be in Ukraine, a strategically promising choice owing to its peripherality to Europe and the US, the deployability of its military there and the presence of loyal Donbas separatist assets.

But which long-term geopolitical assets precisely should it seek to acquire? And what ways and means should it deploy with respect to those aims? These would be the questions that would break the back of Russian strategy.

Negotiations from December to January: NATO and European Security Architecture

One of the things that Russia sought to accomplish in Ukraine was ensuring a stop to NATO enlargement into Ukraine, as well as other former Soviet states. To do this, Russia had a decent menu of options.

As NATO enlargement to any state requires unanimous consent, Russia only needed one member state to veto the accession of any particular state. This could be done on a state-by-state basis. Russia could acquire de facto or even written agreements with France to block Ukrainian accession, and with Germany to block Georgian accession, for instance. This could also be done on a time-by-time basis. For instance, Russia could pay off Hungary to block Ukrainian accession in the Summer and get Germany to block accession in its oil-hungry Winter. This was not entirely unrealistic – in the 2008 Bucharest Summit, France and Germany already blocked offering Ukraine and Georgia Membership Action Plans on the basis of ensuring that Russia felt secure. They had also denied US proposals for alternative membership application processes outside of the Membership Action Plans – meaning the Yankees could not pull any tricks or create any backdoors. 

Alternatively, Russia could get Ukraine itself to issue a written or de facto moratorium on joining NATO – after all, it was not as if NATO was going to kidnap or seduce Kyiv into joining it. Ukrainian intent of joining was a prerequisite for any membership accession, and it was free to drop out at any point throughout the process. Russia had a wide range of options to this end – it could threaten Ukraine with arms, make peace with it through cutting support to the Donbas statelets or entice it with economic investment. Theoretically, the solution had already been laid out in the 2015 Minsk II agreement – whereby in exchange for Russia cutting support to separatists, the Moscow-friendly separatist regions would be reintegrated into the Ukrainian state with a veto on foreign and trade policy as well as a good deal of self-governance. It was true that the process had stalled, but at least there was a starting point for negotiations to reset from.

Similar logic could apply to Russian agreements with the US or other member states to place a de facto or legal moratorium on the deployments and exercises of their specific militaries in other host countries. This would be immensely difficult, far more so than restricting NATO enlargement, but possible.

However, this was not the approach taken by Russia. Instead, the Russian Foreign Ministry expressed a very different set of demands in December 2021. These included:

1. A legal ban on NATO eastward enlargement, not just for Ukraine but in general
2. A legal ban on NATO troop or weapons deployments to NATO members Poland and the Baltics, as well as the Balkans or Ukraine
3. A legal requirement for Russian permission before NATO drills and exercises in Eastern Europe and the Caucasus, including NATO members

The radicalism of these demands is hard to overstate. It would be one thing to request de facto moratoriums on NATO enlargement. However, what Russia demanded was far greater. It demanded de jure, legal restraints on the entire NATO organization. Effectively, this would require a re-writing of core NATO policy and possibly the Founding Treaty. Crucially, this would require consensus between all thirty NATO states at a single point in time – Poland, Germany, France, Greece, Turkey and the United States, amongst others, all at once.

In short, this was an exceedingly unserious set of demands. This is not even getting into the time-unlimited nature of these concessions- even the concessions of the Opium Wars had time limitations. To make things worse, on 19 January Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov explicitly refused the possibility of settling for a temporary moratorium, decrying it as “a trick” and repeating his demands for “bulletproof, 100-percent guarantees of NATO’s non-expansion.”

The problem with these demands was not just that they were impossible. It was also that by their very structure, they pushed for a stronger NATO. Instead of succeeding through NATO apathy, the Russian coercion machine was now begging for NATO attention, from every single member state.  Instead of working on NATO disharmony, it now demanded NATO unanimity. Relatively sympathetic states such as France wishing to come to an agreement with Moscow were now activating NATO communication lines and sending out feelers. Even if these were merely maximalist conditions to be negotiated down from, the very framing of these negotiation terms already encouraged NATO alertness and consolidation.

Yet, this would not be the only list of demands. Putin would make a new speech on 21 February, after which agreements on NATO deployments, missiles and membership would no longer be mentioned as serious Russian objectives. Impossibility would transform into confusion.

Reshuffling Objectives on 21 February: Recognizing Donbas Separatist States

Up to this point, the conversation about the build-up seemed to be focused entirely on NATO. On 21 February, this would change. Russian President Vladimir Putin expressed a change in Russian policy on the status of the Donbas separatist states (Donetsk People’s Republic, Luhansk People’s Republic). The states would be recognized, backed up by new Russian deployments to secure them militarily.

This was confusing for two reasons. Firstly, it was a reversal in policy. Russia’s previous policy towards the Donbas republics had been to in the near term use them as a sharp semi-military edge against Kyiv, but in the long term push for their reintegration into Ukraine. As pursued in the Minsk II agreements, this would allow the pro-Russian Donbas to serve as a pro-Russian lobby or even veto in Kyiv, blocking the other EU-friendly regions of Ukraine from building more friendly ties with Brussels or Washington. At the very least, negotiations regarding reintegration could allow Russia to capitalize on the Donbas for some other valuable concessions. Without this future role, it is important to recognize how little the Donbas separatist states contribute to the Russian geopolitical strategic position. They were not the Afghan Taliban in hiding – raising troops, building control or patronage networks and successfully attriting down the Ukrainian state. Instead, they were economically unsustainable tinpot dictatorships, sustained only by the largesse of Moscow and facing increasingly worse odds with every new skirmish with Kyiv.

Secondly, this represented a strange movement in negotiation momentum. Without achieving any outcomes regarding NATO, Putin had suddenly opened up new objectives and then took action to accomplish those objectives. So was this the conciliatory token victory that Putin would grab before withdrawal? Were Russian escalations now going to primarily manifest through the Donbas republics, such as through heavy weapons transfers and volunteer troops? The massing Russian military still remained total in distribution, organization and range of function, so perhaps this was just a move to deploy slightly more advantageously. Yet, did Putin really need to recognize the Donbas republics in order to station troops within them?

Confusion is not a good thing in coercion. When the target is unaware of the demands placed upon it, it cannot fulfil them. As of 23 February, Putin still had not stated whether he wanted Ukraine to make some kind of treaty or commitment regarding NATO, nor had he stated that he wanted Ukraine to recognize the independence of the Donbas republics. With these new actions, even actively negotiating parties like France were not clear exactly what Putin seriously wanted with regards to NATO, or if new requests like international Donbas separatist recognition were what he wanted instead. Indeed, such states did not even know if Russia wanted anything it could provide. Hence, if this was supposed to be a coercive operation, it had failed catastrophically.

One clear strategic option remained – the concept that this operation was not a coercive act, but the prelude to direct action. This would be direct action to destroy Ukrainian power before it could blossom and bear fruit from ongoing largely successfully military reform, and less successful political and economic reform, as well as weaken NATO solidarity. In Israeli terms, it could be aiming to “cut the grass”. In this case, military action could be expected shortly, possibly be combined arms, but would stress fires and the economy of force. This would not require the successful compellence of either NATO or Ukraine. However, this would still require some form of clear strategic signalling for its own population and military to prepare them for the future fight. This signalling would not arrive.

Invasion Aims, 24 February: the status of Ukraine 

On 24 February, Putin announced the start of a special military operation, with two objectives. These were:

1. Denazification of the Ukrainian state
   1. An end to a claimed genocide of Russian speakers in Ukraine
2. Demilitarization of the Ukrainian state

In addition, Vladimir Putin also announced that he intended for there to be no Russian military occupation in Ukraine. 

These sets of demands were the vaguest, certainly much more than the list of demands issued to NATO in September. Taken to a minimal, more common-sense interpretation, denazification of the Ukrainian state could refer to the legal restriction, bureaucratic restructuring or physical destruction of right-wing political and paramilitary groups. These could include organizations like the Svoboda Party and the Azov Battalion, which are fringe components of Ukrainian society, and the measures could range from limitations on fundraising and electioneering to any presence at all. However, when considering “denazification”, one must also consider Russia’s past rhetoric and actions around Nazi accusations. In 2004, pro-Russian Ukrainian politician Viktor Yanukovych baselessly claimed that his pro-EU political rival, Viktor Yushchenko was a Nazi. Yuschenko was later poisoned with dioxin, reportedly by pro-Russian individuals who later sought refuge in Russia. In 2015 and 2019, Russia spuriously claimed that Poland was a Nazi collaborator before the Second World War. As a result, it is important to understand that Russia often chooses to craft accusations of Nazi sympathies and collaboration in an instrumental manner, to attack or justify attacks on moderate or even democratic figures, rather than any sort of consistent, good-faith claim. Hence, with variance ranging from the demobilization of one fringe paramilitary (Azov) to the reshaping of the entirety of Ukrainian politics as per Russian demands, it became very hard to identify what Russia actually wanted in denazification.

As for the objective of demilitarization, that too could mean a wide range of things. It could mean the one-time physical destruction of military units and infrastructure, directly accomplished by the Russian Armed Forces. It could refer to Ukrainian commitments to unilateral arms control commitments. This could extend to a Japanese-style constitutionalized military restriction, though this would be likely unsustainable given that Ukraine lacks that same strand of pacifism as Japanese civil society. It could also refer to an institutional deconstruction and then reconstruction of the Ukrainian military, allowing Russia to insert its own proxies at strategic points within the security bureaucracy. As such, the variance in what demilitarization could mean was also very high.

There was another element to these strategic objectives that made them confusing – their novelty and unexpectedness. Since at least 2008, there had been no clear signals that Russia had serious problems with the composition of the Ukrainian political scene and security establishment that rose to the level of national priority, let alone any mention of specific changes it desired. Certainly, Russian state media had indeed been denouncing Ukraine as infested by neo-nazis for years. However, Russian state media had lost useability in actual state-to-state signalling due to its frequent deployment in disinformation campaigns. The same channels had aired conspiracy theories about 5G towers, QAnon and secret microchipping plots. In any case, dislike of an extreme non-governing party in a foreign country was by no means a common justification for military action in any country. Similarly, the military strength of Ukraine had never been articulated as a real issue before. Hence, the lack of precedent compounded the problem of vagueness as there was no precedent that could be used to infer the details of Russian intents and also threw the seriousness of its newest demands in doubt.

What this ultimately meant was that up till the very end, there were still four plausible causes of a Russian attack. Russia could be seeking for NATO to issue restrictions on deployments and enlargement, or be pressuring Ukraine to renounce its NATO ambitions. It could be making demands on the status of Donbas, or it could be seeking to fundamentally reshape the Ukrainian State. It could be striving for two or three or all of those things at once, to differing degrees, or perhaps something else entirely, which would be revealed later. It could even plausibly have not actually settled on what it wanted, whether out of genuine indecisiveness or fear of settling on goals that others could measure its success against later.

One could infer that it certainly wanted things to happen, given the scale of its first-day application of air, missile and artillery fires, and the violence along the three major fronts – Belarus to the North, Donbas to the East and Crimea to the South. However, without clear Russian objectives, Russian soldiers still did not know why they were fighting and Russian adversaries knew not what concessions could end the bloodshed. This would not end well for the invasion.

From November to February: Reshaping the Coercive Toolbox

War aim incoherence notwithstanding, military action was happening as of 24 February. But why was it so total? If objectives were unclear or weak, one would have expected the military operation to naturally account for this through having distinct limits – perhaps geographic limitations such as keeping to Donbas territorial borders, domain limitations such as restraints in the use of airpower, or operational limitations such as sticking to the use of fires rather than actual land invasion. If as Clausewitz claimed, war was politics by other means, then limited political objectives should have resulted in limited war.

The first answer to this would be the institutional pathologies of Russian intelligence – intelligence was too afraid of the Presidency to give unpopular reports of Ukrainian strength, resulting in underestimated costs for total war. Putin thought he was shifting from a protracted low-intensity conflict to a short, sharp war when he was really moving towards a protracted high-intensity conflict. This has been well-examined in various think pieces. However, could those institutional pathologies have been present throughout the entire period from December 2021 to end-February 2022? I propose a second cause – that the ongoing military buildup created strategic escalation rigidities and narrowed options to that of total invasion or total withdrawal. 

During this period, Russian troop presence increased. They had numbered 100 thousand by 13 November 2021. This increased to a number ranging from 127 thousand (Ukrainian estimates) to 198 thousand (US estimates) by 18 January 2022. By 23 February, this number hovered around 190 thousand by some US analyst estimates. Some commentators suggested this was an act of escalation. However, from the perspective of coercive escalation, this may not exactly be right.

Coercion is focused on perceptions and feelings – specifically pain infliction and pain relief. The Russian build-up did not exactly inflict pain on Ukraine. The level of fighting and casualties from December 2021 till February 2022 did not rise significantly since the longrunning Donbas War 2014 – 2022. There were some novel forms of pain such as investor skittishness but these were indirect and hard to directly attribute to Russia – indeed Zelensky chastised the US for increasing it. 

What was happening instead was the strengthening of new high-end options for escalation, at the expense of low-end options. These low-end options included border skirmishing, similar to what the Chinese had pursued in Ladakh in 2021, or the application of fires, similar to what the Israels had pursued in Gaza in 2021. This dynamic can be seen in the below diagram.

There are several reasons why the build-up limited Russian options. Firstly, the build-up increased the concentration and association of troops, which made escalation much harder to signal and hence control. This made limited, fractional and gradated escalations uncredible. If there was an entire Army stationed on the border, how were the Ukrainians supposed to tell the difference between a discrete skirmish of a single regiment and a general invasion with that regiment as its reconnaissance or spearhead? Accordingly, when a handful of Russians sallied out to show strength, were the Ukrainians supposed to hold off against applying artillery or aircraft fires against their HQs? After all, if a war was truly going to happen, the Ukrainians would be in a much better position with their planes airborne and fighting, even if losing, than obliterated on the tarmac by Russian bombs. This fact might be easily forgotten in the present day with hindsight knowledge of the rot within Russian airpower, but Russia was fully expected to dismantle the Ukrainian military within a handful of days if they had the advantage of the first strike. There would be massive “use it or lose it” pressures on every single high-end Ukrainian weapons system. 

Even if the Ukrainians somehow could tell that the Russian operation was limited in scope, it was certainly impossible to say it would stay that way after the build-up. What if the Russians in that limited battle started to lose? What if they needed reinforcements or fresh supplies? To use soldiers to coerce is also to make them vulnerable. What if they needed rescue? With legion waiting just across the border, all of these conditions could cause the Russians to escalate. This would not be the case only for skirmishing. The same logic would apply to the application of fires – with so much artillery and airpower stationed nearby, as well as troops ready to advance, Russian fires could easily transform into a general invasion, encouraging Ukrainians to get their planes off the ground, troops out of the barracks and begin movements (possibly in Donbas) as well as massive full-scale retaliatory artillery and air fire.

Secondly, the build-up’s geographic scope also made it far harder to construct, conduct and observe limitations in escalation. Russian deployments extended over the entirety of the approximately 2 thousand kilometres of Russo-Ukrainian land border and 1 thousand kilometres of Belarusian-Ukrainian land border. This meant 3 thousand kilometres to police, verify and react to twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. As such, it became impossible to signal an intent to only skirmish in one area. A small advance in the north might be but a distraction from the south, and vice versa. This only increased the difficulty of forging escalation into a fractional process.

Thirdly, the build-up was decaying in combat effectiveness over time. There was certainly no more element of strategic surprise that Russia had enjoyed in 2014 in Ukraine and 2008 in Georgia. Furthermore, Russia deployed perishable blood supplies out of cold storage on 28 January. Weather conditions promised to turn against it, as the infamous Ukrainian mud season that had swallowed the vehicles of the Wehrmacht approached, and returning foliage also promised to blunt the effectiveness of Russian air superiority. Its heavily forward-deployed soldiers were also likely to lose morale and combat effectiveness as time dragged on, and the rationales to keep them stationed in blistering cold weakened. Reports surfaced on 19 February that these soldiers had begun to drink heavily and sell off their diesel fuel. Hence, not only were Russian escalation options narrowing – the timeframe for Russia to make a decision from that menu of options was rapidly decaying.

Ultimately, the end-state was that instead of a varied menu of military options available to Moscow, two options dominated – total escalation and withdrawal. It was not as if the latter option was impossible – indeed the lack of “middle options” made a Russian back-down seem more likely, not less. Regardless, the window for Russia to identify and attain outcomes it could find satisfaction with would continue to narrow and narrow.

Aftermath

Through its shifting strategic objectives, Russia failed to coerce its adversaries, prepare its public and motivate its soldiers. Through its increasing military build-up, Russia lost the space to devise limited conflict scenarios and solutions that could still work despite an unprepared public and unmotivated soldiery. Instead, it only possessed that incredibly risky option of total war without sufficient material or spiritual mobilization or the costly option of withdrawal.

Ultimately, this has pushed Russia into a position where it can no longer credibly coerce any other neighbouring state by force of conventional arms. With such substantial military investment already made into Ukraine, and with the need to maintain fresh reserves for troop rotations and more dire contingencies, Russia cannot credibly threaten to commit its troops elsewhere.

As of writing, 150 to 200 thousand men, including military, National Guard and FSB personnel, are deployed to the Ukrainian theatre. This number may increase. If the operation does not collapse, they will likely be there for months, to fight, conduct counter-insurgency operations and administer the occupation. They have suffered from low morale since the start of the campaign and may need to themselves be policed for dissent even after their period of combat is concluded and they are rotated out of the front. Their equipment has already suffered 10-15% losses according to US estimates. With sanctions on technology imports, it is unlikely that the Russian defence industry will be able to rebuild the lost gear and vehicles or maintain current stock. Aside from this conflict, Russian troops and intelligence will continue to face constabulary duties in Russia itself, Belarus, Syria, the Caucasus (Georgia and Nagorno-Karabakh) and Central Asia (such as the 2022 Kazhakstan CSTO intervention). It simply does not have the manpower, materiel or morale (combatant and civilian) to credibly issue new threats to other states anymore. There remain only two instruments of Russian military might that have gone largely unsapped from this debacle, which can still credibly project power and conduct coercion by sound strategic logic. These are its Arctic navy and its nuclear forces, which are not useable in most conventional coercion operations.

So what happens when a state loses its ability to conventionally coerce? Well, in short, it suddenly becomes very easy for its neighbours to oppose it. On all fronts, Russia quickly saw its traditional red lines crossed. From traditionally neutral Finland and Sweden, there emerged new, serious efforts in joining NATO. From Georgia and Moldova came applications to join the European Union. These were actions that Russia had deterred in the past – through responding to Georgian dreams of NATO accession in 2008 and Ukrainian ambitions of EU accession in 2014 with overwhelming force. However, this is a force that Russia is simply no longer able to muster.

Further West, deterrence breakdown occurred in other areas of proxy warfare and rearmament. Past EU or NATO attempts to arm Ukraine with heavy weapon systems would have prompted Russian threats to arm proxies in the Donbas, South Ossetia, Abkhazia, Syria or other places with advanced armour, artillery and air units. However, Russian deployment (and loss) of such arms systems in Ukraine meant this was no longer possible. The consequences came quickly. The EU sent 500 million Euros worth of weapons to Ukraine. The US sent upwards of 13 billion dollars worth of arms aid. Sweden, Japan and South Korea also sent military support. Collectively, this aid included thousands of Stinger and Javelin missiles, MANPAD systems, ammunition, equipment, drones, rations and fuel.

Furthermore, fears of a general escalation spiral as a result of an arms race also evaporated as Russia lost options for gradual escalation. This paved the way for massive German rearmament, including doubling the 2022 military budget from 50 billion euros to 100 billion euros and making a permanent commitment to raise it from 1.5 to above 2% of GDP. It also made a pledge to buy 35 F-35 fighter jets. Poland, for its part, raised its defence budget commitment from 2 to 3% GDP. It had initially only planned for an increase to 2.5%. Furthermore, it would expand its military from approximately 140 thousand soldiers to 300 thousand soldiers.

Russia’s geopolitical position has been substantially worsened. Once equal to the United States, its relative regional power increasingly looks closer to that of Iran, Turkey or Saudi Arabia. Hopefully, the Kremlin will be able to accept its new position in the global pecking order quickly, without yet more tantrums that needlessly spill the blood of treasure of its countrymen and its neighbours. Unfortunately, this seems unlikely.

Further Reading

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Abdurasulov, Abdujalil. ‘Kazakhstan Unrest: “If You Protest Again, We’ll Kill You”’. BBC News, 21 January 2022, sec. Asia. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-60058972.
Barigazzi, Jacopo. ‘EU to Officially Examine Ukraine, Moldova and Georgia’s Bids to Join the Bloc’. POLITICO, 7 March 2022. https://www.politico.eu/article/eu-examine-ukraine-moldova-georgia-membership-bid/.
Beard, Nadia. ‘Georgia Speeds up EU Application in Policy U-Turn’. The Guardian, 7 March 2022, sec. World news. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/mar/07/georgia-expedites-eu-application-in-policy-u-turn-russia-ukraine.
Brunnstrom, David, and Susan Cornwell. ‘NATO Promises Ukraine, Georgia Entry One Day’. Reuters, 3 April 2008, sec. World News. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-nato-idUSL0179714620080403.
Bushuev, Mikhail. ‘Belarus Protests One Year on: Lukashenko in Command and Striking Back | DW | 08.08.2021’. DW.COM, 8 August 2021. https://www.dw.com/en/belarus-protests-one-year-on-lukashenko-in-command-and-striking-back/a-58793285.
Chance, Matthew, Kylie Atwood, and Ami Kaufman. ‘Ukraine Warns Russia Has “almost Completed” Build-up of Forces near Border’. CNN, 19 January 2022. https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/18/europe/ukraine-intelligence-russia-military-build-up-intl/index.html.
EU vs DISINFORMATION. ‘Everyone Against Russia: Conspiracy Theories on the Rise In Russian Media’, 22 May 2018. https://euvsdisinfo.eu/everyone-against-russia-conspiracy-theories-on-the-rise-in-russian-media/.
EU vs DISINFORMATION. ‘False Helmets, Trolling Arm Badges: How Pro-Kremlin Outlets Exploited the Situation in Kazakhstan’, 13 January 2022. https://euvsdisinfo.eu/false-helmets-trolling-arm-badges-how-pro-kremlin-outlets-exploited-the-situation-in-kazakhstan/.
Gedeon, Joseph. ‘The Weapons and Military Aid the World Is Giving Ukraine’. POLITICO, 22 March 2022. https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/22/ukraine-weapons-military-aid-00019104.
Gehrke, Laurenz. ‘Georgia, Moldova Follow Ukraine in Applying to Join EU’. POLITICO, 3 March 2022. https://www.politico.eu/article/georgia-and-moldova-apply-for-eu-membership/.
Reuters. ‘Germany to Buy 35 Lockheed F-35 Fighter Jets from U.S. amid Ukraine Crisis’, 14 March 2022, sec. Europe. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/germany-decides-principle-buy-f-35-fighter-jet-government-source-2022-03-14/.
Hackett, James, Nick Childs, and Douglas Barrie. ‘If New Looks Could Kill: Russia’s Military Capability in 2022’. IISS, 15 February 2022. https://www.iiss.org/blogs/military-balance/2022/02/if-new-looks-could-kill-russias-military-capability-in-2022.
EU vs DISINFORMATION. ‘Inside RT’s World of Alternative News’, 13 April 2017. https://euvsdisinfo.eu/inside-rts-world-of-alternative-news/.
Kuznetsov, Sergei. ‘Lukashenko Dodges and Weaves over Joining Russia in Attacking Ukraine’. POLITICO, 15 March 2022. https://www.politico.eu/article/belarus-ukraine-war-russia-alexander-lukashenko-dodges-weaves/.
France 24. ‘Macron Heads to Moscow and Kyiv amid Diplomatic Flurry to Avert Russia-NATO Clash’, 6 February 2022. https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20220206-france-s-macron-heads-to-moscow-on-high-risk-diplomatic-mission.
Masters, Jonathan. ‘Why NATO Has Become a Flash Point With Russia in Ukraine’. Council on Foreign Relations, 20 January 2022. https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/why-nato-has-become-flash-point-russia-ukraine.
Mazorenko, Dmitriy, and Almas Kaisar. ‘On the Ground in Kazakhstan’s Protests: What Really Happened?’ openDemocracy, 27 January 2022. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/odr/what-really-happened-kazakhstan-protests-january/.
Reuters. ‘Poland to Ramp up Defence Spending, Army as Ukraine War Rages’, 3 March 2022, sec. Europe. https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/poland-ramp-up-defence-spending-army-ukraine-war-rages-2022-03-03/.
Press, The Associated. ‘Neutral Finns and Swedes Reconsider Idea of NATO Membership’. NPR, 3 March 2022, sec. Europe. https://www.npr.org/2022/03/03/1084112625/neutral-finland-sweden-warm-to-idea-of-nato-membership.
Putin, Vladimir. ‘Address by the President of the Russian Federation • President of Russia’. President of Russia, 21 February 2022. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/67828.
———. ‘Address by the President of the Russian Federation • President of Russia’. President of Russia, 24 February 2022. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/transcripts/67843.
———. ‘Article by Vladimir Putin ”On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians“’. President of Russia, 7 December 2021. http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181.
Romanyshyn, Iulian. ‘Russia Demands Security Guarantees but What Putin Really Wants Is Ukraine’. Atlantic Council (blog), 4 February 2022. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/blogs/ukrainealert/russia-demands-security-guarantees-but-what-putin-really-wants-is-ukraine/.
Roth, Andrew. ‘Russia Issues List of Demands It Says Must Be Met to Lower Tensions in Europe’. The Guardian, 17 December 2021, sec. World news. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/dec/17/russia-issues-list-demands-tensions-europe-ukraine-nato.
DW.COM. ‘Russia Recognizes Independence of Ukraine Separatist Regions | DW | 21.02.2022’, 21 February 2022. https://www.dw.com/en/russia-recognizes-independence-of-ukraine-separatist-regions/a-60861963.
BBC News. ‘Russia-Poland Row over Start of WW2 Escalates’, 31 December 2019, sec. Europe. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-50955273.
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