These are the possible bad outcomes of Russia invading Ukraine

 

It would definitely be game-changing event in contemporary European politics and security. It would be biggest military conflict in Europe since WWII and I believe that it would start some kind of new-epoch in European history, in a lot of senses. No obviously there is big if, because nobody except Russian ruling class really knows if there will be invasion or not, but it there is one, there will be many very impactful consequences.

Now I think we should examine motivations of Russia for its expansive politics in the first place. Russia is a very specific country with paranoid and defensive mentality. It comes from the flat plains of north-eastern Europe, with almost no natural borders and enemies to all sides. Throughout its history, Russians were attacked from everywhere. Mongols, Tatars, Turks, Poles, Swedes, Germans, Lithuanians, even the French. Everybody tried to take a piece of mother Russia. It is fair to admit, that most of those failed. It gave Russians very specific approach to geopolitics. Basically Russia tries to conquer as much land as possible to move its borders away from its core lands for protective reasons. You can see it in current lack of understanding between the west and Russia when trying to resolve the current crisis. While the west is mostly seeing it from the perspective of an aggression towards a sovereign nation, Russia is seeing it as a part of a power struggle between Russia and USA. In the west, joining NATO is seen mostly as a deliberate act of a sovereign nation choosing its fate. Russia just sees it as a power move of USA controlled alliance against Russia.

Now Russian current western borders are almost undefendable. They are just thousands of miles of flatlands from the Baltic to the Black sea. Ideal for tanks to roll over (remember Barbarossa?). One can argue that nobody is really attacking Russia or planning to, but it is fair to admit, that Russians just sees it from pragmatic and long term point of view. The fact, that Europe is now full of pacifist environmentalists does not mean it will be that way in 50 years. There is argument to be made that Russian anxieties and fears were not taken into account after the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1990’s (expansion of NATO into eastern Europe) and Russia was disrespected (bombing of Serbia, traditional ally). But it is also necessary to say that it is nobody’s fault but Russians, that half of the people from Baltic to Adriatic and Black See hates and fear them. That is on them. That is not USA-made anti-Russian propaganda, that is just historical memory of a whole region.

Now as I mentioned before, Russian leadership sees its current western border as a catastrophe in the making and want to do what it has always done. Move them far away to find some kind of natural border that is defendable. From the Moscow point of view, the cold war borders of the eastern bloc were a dream. Russia controlled the Northern European plain (from where the most horrendous attacks in Napoleonic wars, WWI and WWII came) up to its narrowest and most defendable point in east Germany. Russian population centres in European Russia were safe. Now Russia is today just a shadow of SSSR, so this kind of expansion is unthinkable, but there is this map (it is from a book by Peter Zeihan, I know that he is controversial, but this map makes perfect sense):

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