In February 2022, few in Western Europe shared the US intelligence assessment that with large-scale military gymnasiums in Belarus, Vladimir Putin was not just conducting psychological warfare exercises, but was intensively preparing for an invasion of Ukraine. Even when the fighting broke out, most envisioned a matter of days or weeks at most, as in the NATO wars in the former Yugoslavia and Russia in Georgia.

A year later, the merciless conflict continues with no indication of when or under what conditions it will end. Any forecast is risky as business dynamics are constantly changing direction. In the first few weeks, we had a picture of a Russian blitzkrieg with lightning-fast territorial gains in southern Ukraine and Russian armored vehicles on the outskirts of Kyiv. April brought a rebuff to the invaders from the Ukrainian capital, May – the capture of Mariupol by the Russians, September – their expulsion from Kharkov and November – the recapture of Kherson by the Ukrainians.

The fronts of the conflict were largely frozen for three months, and this confrontation is reminiscent of trench warfare, similar to the trench fighting that saw the heyday of French and German youth in the First World War. As a war of attrition favors stronger and more numerous belligerents (at last count there were 140 million Russians and 39 million Ukrainians) and the Russian military regained the initiative on the eastern front, the Americans and their allies are trying to turn the conflict into a war of movements, strengthening Ukraine heavy weapons, including tanks. Many imagine that in the coming months, decisive clashes could take place in roughly the same lands where the largest tank battles in the history of World War II took place.

Nothing suggests that a clear victory for one side or the other is on the agenda. At the enormous price that both warring parties paid over the past year (more than 130,000 soldiers killed each, according to the Pentagon, economic ruin for Ukraine, geopolitical weakening for Russia), the bar for the minimum will that can be considered a victory has been lowered. rose strongly. The Ukrainians are not going to negotiate unless they drive the Russians out of all their lands, including Crimea. The Russians will not hesitate to use any means (even tactical nuclear weapons if they have their backs against the wall) to secure what not only Vladimir Putin, but the entire Russian elite considers an existential issue for their country: the dominance of the northern part of the Black Sea, Western Russia’s only outlet to warm seas and turning Ukraine into a buffer zone between its country and the West, without NATO missiles that could hit Moscow in a matter of minutes.

In this regard, the most likely scenario is a protracted destructive war, ending at some point not with a viable peace treaty, but with a ceasefire along a heavily militarized line of contact, as was the case with the Korean War. Neither peace – nor war, nor victory – nor defeat, but the transformation of a hot war into a frozen conflict, which, like dormant, but active volcanoes, can awaken at any moment.

The most likely scenario is a protracted destructive war and at some point a ceasefire along a heavily militarized line, as happened in Korea.

The fact is that the course of the war contradicted the calculations of Vladimir Putin, who tragically underestimated not only the patriotism and resistance of Ukrainians, but also the reaction of the West. At the same time last year, NATO, according to Macron, was “brain dead”, Germany was preparing to open the Russian Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline and, even when the Russian invasion began, limited itself to sending Ukrainians some … helmets. Today, NATO is preparing to take in Finland and Sweden, Germany is sending Leopard to Kyiv, and Olaf Solz is opening two terminals in Wilhelmshaven and Lubmin, ready to receive very expensive American LNG. However, the assessments of many Western representatives, such as French Finance Minister Brinot Le Maire, who prophesied an imminent “collapse” of the Russian economy, were just as inappropriate and irrelevant. A year later, the IMF finds that Russia has experienced a decline of only 2.2% of GDP (while the Ukrainian economy has contracted by 35%) and will even return to growth in 2023. Having learned the lessons of Western sanctions, in 2014 the Putin administration, a highly capable Russian central bank governor, managed to accumulate $631 billion in foreign exchange reserves, of which only 16% was in US currency. On a political level, predictions of the collapse of the Putin regime have proven to be groundless, as the vast majority of Russians so far support the government and the war.

However, it is almost certain that no matter how events develop on the battlefield, Russia will be weakened on the international geopolitical map. If we recall Machiavelli, then not only will she be less loved, but above all, she will be less feared. For the first time since the time of Peter the Great, he will have no place at the table of the great powers that determine the future of Europe. It can maintain good relations with most countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America—even close US allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabia—that have maintained a position of benevolent neutrality in the current crisis, but it has finally lost Europe, its best market where it sells 32% coal, 49% oil and 74% natural gas. Its alliance with China is useful, but more and more on the terms of its big neighbor, which is in a position of power and outflanks Russia even in its soft underbelly, Central Asia.

The EU is likely to be among the losers in the conflict. In the most serious conflict on its own soil since 1945, Europe becomes America’s watchdog as ideas of European sovereignty and autonomy go into the freezer, the Franco-German axis blows its sails and becomes the EU’s center of gravity. is shifting towards the “New Europe” so beloved by the neoconservative of former US Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld – the staunchly pro-American democracies of Eastern Europe and the Baltics. The biggest winners will be the US and China – similar to the Second World War, which started as a conflict between the Germans and the Anglo-French, and ultimately the winners will be the two “outside” powers, the US and the USSR.

The most lasting consequence of this war may be to accelerate the movement towards a “fragmented world” as described at this year’s Davos Forum. The sharp energy separation of Europe from Russia and the gradual separation of the American economy from the Chinese, the massive subsidies to American industry from the Biden administration, the trade war with China, its overblown hysteria, the general trend of increasing protectionism, all this means one thing: politics, often violent and merciless, takes over the economy again. For those who, like globalization guru Thomas Friedman, have dreamed of a free-trade “flat world” that will lift all boats, small and large, like a fertile tide with the guarantee of Pax Americana, it’s time to wake up. The war in Ukraine may turn out to be a bloody prelude to a new, tougher era of fragmentation of the world into competing blocs, which will justify the penultimate lines of Nikos Gatsos in Manos Hadjidaki’s outrageous “Kemal”: the world always moves forward with fire and sword.