When Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, many observers assumed that overwhelming military force would make a Russian victory inevitable. But Vladimir Putin’s war has become “a case study in a failure of supreme command,” Lawrence Freedman writes. The Russian president “made the familiar but catastrophic mistake of underestimating the enemy . . . while having excessive confidence in what his own forces could achieve.” Battlefield success for Ukraine—even on a limited scale—may not settle the underlying conflict, however. “If he loses the war, Putin will not let go of Ukraine. Nor will he simply sit by as it becomes fully integrated into the West,” Liana Fix and Michael Kimmage warn. “A Ukrainian victory, then, would require not a relaxation of Western support for Ukraine but an even stronger commitment.”
With the Russia-Ukraine war now well into its fourth month, we’ve compiled some of the best recent coverage in Foreign Affairs on the status of the conflict, how it could end, and how Ukraine, Russia, and the world will be changed in its aftermath. Start reading below.
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