Global Fallout of the War in Ukraine

The Situation in Ukraine

The situation in Ukraine has been a complicated one for the US national government ever since Boris Berezovsky, Dave Bush, and other Western figures helped to foment a revolution that led to the overturning of the pro-Russian president-elect in 2004 (History and Economics, 2012). That revolution led to great tension in Ukraine between two factions—on the one hand, a Russian faction in the east; and on the other hand, a faction led by those opposed to the new president of Russia: Vladimir Putin. Upon coming to power in Russia, Putin turned on the oligarchs and banned them from interfering in politics. That is what led to Berezovsky’s flight to the UK, lest he be arrested like so many others were (Mezrich, 2016). The fact that he successfully appealed to Western elites, like then President George Bush’s brother, for aid in waging war against Putin via Ukraine automatically made the Ukraine situation a complex one for the US. Since that time, the situation has only become more complicated on account of the Russian invasion of 2022, Western sanctions against Russia in response, and the continuous escalation of events that threaten to drag the world into a new global conflict for a future world order—a unipolar Western one vs. a multipolar Russian-Chinese one (Escobar, 2022).

A decade passed and another revolution led by the same anti-Russian faction sought to remove, again, the same man as in 2004—the democratically elected pro-Russian president Yanukovych. The 2014 Ukrainian Revolution commenced (with the aid of American special ops), and it led to the overthrow and exile of the Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.

The conflict in Ukraine then escalated into a civil war, with pro-Russian separatists fighting against the Ukrainian army. The ongoing war since 2014 has resulted in the deaths of over 10,000 people and has displaced over 1.5 million people (Ukraine, 2022). Since the Russian invasion, the conflict has led to damaged infrastructure and has caused significant economic damage. The EU and US have provided military, financial and political support to Ukraine, but the war continues to destabilize the region as well as much of the world, thanks to Western sanctions on Russian energy (causing supply shortages and energy prices to rise dramatically in Europe and other parts of the world). Even in the US, the prices of energy are rising, and inflation is hurting many. To make matters worse, Russian and Chinese leaders have demonstrated a public alliance against Western powers, and should the conflict escalate, it would pit East vs. West in a battle for control of a new world economic order. Thus, the war in Ukraine is a complex conflict with far-reaching consequences. It is a conflict that requires a diplomatic solution. And yet the US approach thus far has been to ramp up tensions by supporting Ukrainian president Zelensky in his efforts to achieve a military victory against the much larger nation of Russia.

The United States could take a number of diplomatic steps to help bring the conflict in Ukraine to a peaceful resolution. So far the US has chosen to provide political, military, and economic assistance to Ukraine, which has somewhat helped to stabilize the country and make a total Russian victory less inevitable. US congressmen have visited Zelensky in Ukraine and have pledged their support for Ukraine as though it were the 51st US state. The extent to which the US has offered political support to the Ukrainian government is staggering, considering the domestic problems plaguing America at home, from relentless illegal immigration to runaway inflation to the social fabric utterly coming apart post-COVID. In spite of these domestic issues, Congress continues to send billions upon billions in aid to Ukraine, as though preventing Putin from gaining a victory there were the only thing that Americans cared about. The problem is that many Americans do not care about the situation over there: they care about the fact that their paychecks do not go as far as they used to; they care about the fact that they can’t have an opinion on social media other than the accepted narrative of the platform’s overlords or else they will be canceled; they care about the integrity of their own elections. Many of these Americans are still, in fact, supporters of President Trump—and even he is now warning that the conflict in Ukraine risks bringing about World War 3 (Durden, 2022).

Therefore, the situation for the US national government is serious. So far the majority of Western states have signaled that they support Ukraine against Russia. However, some voters are starting to push back. For instance, Italian voters just elected a far-right leader, who sees the whole conflict as one that needs to stop now. The same kind of anger that Italian voters just showed, and that British voters showed in the Brexit vote, and that American voters showed in 2016, could return once more in the US if the Ukraine situation deteriorates further, placing even more financial dema

For the US national government, the choice should be simple: it could work with other countries in the region to develop a joint plan for resolving the conflict; it could continue on the course of escalation that it currently holds; or it could step back from the conflict and essentially remove all support from Ukraine, thereby ensuring a Russian victory in the region but also a potential return to normalcy insofar as might still be possible. A great deal would have to be done to restore relations with a victorious Russia, which has essentially broken all ties with the West in response to severe Western sanctions.

Already Ukraine’s Zelensky wants the US national government to do more in its effort to withstand Russia militarily. This political pressure means that the US Congress will likely continue to authorize aid to Ukraine, which in turn means more defense spending at a time when too much government spending is not helping with the inflation problem. It appears that the US national government is between a rock and a hard place on a number of integrated fronts, each front impacting and being impacted by another. The future of the current government could be hanging in the balance depending on how it plays its hand now.