The war in Ukraine has been a demonstration of what a profoundly different and simpler position victims of interstate aggression are in versus those whose own governments commit atrocities against them, in terms of the ability to seek international attention and assistance and to pursue accountability in a timely fashion.
And at the same time, it’s yet more evidence of how badly the international system fails all victims of mass atrocities when it comes to preventing or halting the violence against them.
The most important lesson of Ukraine is that major conventional war between developed nations is possible even under the shadow of nuclear weapons and that it’s as brutal as it’s always been. For decades, many Western observers have viewed major conventional wars as anachronisms for reasons both fair and foul. There are myriad strategic and operational lessons from this war, but they pale in importance next to serving as empirical proof that the unthinkable is possible. We underestimated the yearning and value of freedom. The Ukrainian people have shown the world their strength, courage and resilience. Their defiance in the face of devastation, destruction, terror and attempted genocide is inspiring the entire world from the streets of Iran to China. Having underestimated the will of the Ukrainian people and Ukraine’s power on the battlefield, global leaders were caught unprepared to support Ukraine and its defense of democracy. The delay and gradual nature of implementing sanctions, providing sufficient financial support
And weapons necessary to defeat Russia on the battlefield have drawn out this war enabling too much death and destruction and the global effects of the war will be longer and more painful as a result. Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine has created the largest refugee crisis in Europe since World War II. While millions of Ukrainian refugees have since returned home, almost 2.9 million moved to Russia, according to October figures, and roughly 7.9 million were registered across Europe between February and December 27, 2022. Besides Russia, Poland, Germany,and the Czech Republic have welcomed the largest numbers of Ukrainian refugees, while Italy, Spain, France, Romania and the UK have also accepted. There is little reason to suggest many Ukrainian refugees will return home soon. A June survey by polling group Rating, for example, found that 24% of Ukrainian refugees wanted to return but were waiting for a certain time, 48% said they would return after the end of the war, and 8% said they would not go back to Ukraine. A German government-backed survey from December, meanwhile, found that around 37% of Ukrainian refugees wanted to settle in the country permanently or at least for the next few years. As part of the Temporary Protection Directive that was invoked by the European Union last March, Ukrainians can now live, work and study in EU countries for a period of three years. Many Ukrainian refugees have already found employment in host countries and may like the temporary guest workers invited to Europe in the 1960s choose to settle permanently in those countries eventually.
Millions of Ukrainians also left their country before the Russian invasion, with 1.4 million having lived and worked in Poland in 2020 and another 250,000 having lived in Italy before the war alone. The incentive for Ukrainian foreign workers and refugees to return home has been significantly reduced after the widespread destruction across the country since the war began last February. Much of the country’s population has been suffering from limited and sporadic access to electricity, heat and water, and Ukraine’s economy shrank by 30% in 2022. Ukraine is now Europe’s poorest country, and its entry into the EU will likely take years. Instability in the country’s Donbas region since 2014 coupled with almost a year of open conflict with Russia means that peace will likely continue to elude Ukraine. While some Ukrainian refugees have returned, unlivable’ conditions during winters and the crumbling basic infrastructure will drive more Ukrainians to seek refuge in Europe, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council. Additionally, it is estimated that 90% of Ukrainian refugees are women and children, as conscription prevented most men from leaving the country. The men who remained in Ukraine may try to reunite with their families abroad, while those men who managed to leave may face the risk of being recruited into military service or being punished for evading it if they do return to Ukraine. Other countries that have suffered from conflicts in recent decades demonstrate that the longer violence continues, the less likely refugees are to return home.
In the Kosovo war of 1999, when NATO bombed Yugoslavia to prevent the brutalization of ethnic Albanians who make up Kosovo’s majority, hundreds of thousands fled, or were forcibly moved, to neighboring Albania and Macedonia.
These refugees eventually returned to Kosovo since the war lasted only 78 days, explained an article in The Economist. During the war in nearby Bosnia, which took place from 1992 to 1995, however, many Bosnians left and far fewer returned. More recently, the Syrian civil war, which began in 2011, resulted in 6.8 million refugees fleeing mostly to neighboring states as well as to Europe until 2021. The conflict, soon to enter its 12th year, has reinforced the perception that both the desire of refugees to return, as well as the ability of host countries to deport them, is limited as long as violence is ongoing. Between 2016 and 2022, for instance, just 336,496 Syrians returned to the country from neighboring host countries according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. And a UNHCR poll from June 2022 showed that more than 92.8% of Syrian refugees in Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq do not plan to return to their country within the next year. As a new generation of Syrian children born outside the country emerges, the likelihood of Syrian families returning will continue to decline. The Turkish government stated last May that it intends to relocate up to a million refugees back to northern Syria in regions controlled by Turkish-backed forces, and is increasingly using force to move them back across the border, even at gunpoint. But the failed efforts by Turkey to return Syrian refugees suggest that European countries will struggle to do the same with Ukrainian refugees who refuse to turn home.
Additionally, Ukrainian refugees have received a relatively warm welcome across Europe. While poorer EU countries bordering Ukraine, such as Poland and the Czech Republic, may seek to curtail future refugee intake, Ukrainian refugees may instead head further west into the continent Furthermore, the large number of casualties of prime-aged men because of the conflict will also undermine Ukraine’s demographic position for decades. A UN report from last year predicts that Ukraine’s population will likely never recover from the ongoing conflict and will continue to experience a significant population decline this century. Russia has of course played an active part in depopulating Ukraine. War is no longer unimaginable. The most significant among these is the possibility of war between the US and China. It is a prospect that we must now acknowledge is no longer unthinkable. Such a conflict, with its vast scope for escalation across every domain, would likely be of a scale not seen since 1945. There would be no winners. It would be a catastrophe for both countries and for us all. But a US. China war is not inevitable. It is indeed the avoidable war. To prevent war by accident in the short-to-medium term, muddling through will be insufficient. To avoid sleepwalking into crisis, conflict and war, both countries must act to construct a joint strategic framework of managed competition so as to keep their respective strategic redlines within political control. For the medium to long term, it will require effective deterrence by the U.S. and its allies sufficient to cause Beijing to conclude that any war to retake Taiwan would represent an unacceptable level of risk.
Implicit in all this is a recognition that the world is more integrated than often thought. We have believed ours is a world of regions, integrated into a global economy but largely insulated from instabilities generated in each particular theater. Yet for all the distance between Asia and Ukraine, the effects of the invasion are being felt here too. There are higher food, fertilizer or fuel prices, the rerouting of trade or transportation, new restrictions on business activity and refugees who have reached these shores. The ripples of Russia’s invasion have traveled far, far beyond Europe. And Putin’s war has underscored the challenge that we face in the Indo-Pacific, where the PRC is also pushing for something very far from our vision of a free, and stable, and open international system. Many different lessons can be learned from the war, but this is perhaps the most important one: Our world is smaller than it seems; we are all, no matter where we live, closer to one another than it seems; and our confidence in a stable future is worth no more than a square foot of real estate in Mariupol, a once-prosperous city that has been leveled. This war has also shown how ineffective a dictatorship can be on the battlefield. The only institution that has proved to be effective and indispensable in Putin’s Russia is the state propaganda system that has turned the Russian people into a society ready to support an attack on their brotherly neighbors. The main obstacle to any dictatorship is freedom of speech, pluralism of opinions, diversity of different media and a bulwark against a monopoly on information. It was the destruction of all this in Russia that made possible the strengthening of Putin’s power, then the destruction of all types of opposition in Russia, and then the invasion of Ukraine.
Rayhan Ahmed Topader is a
researcher and a columnist.
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