Six months on the Russian invasion of Ukraine, we can break the conflict down into three separate stages. The first one, which begins on the first month, laid bare a failed attempt at inflicting a blitzkrieg on Kyiv to decapitate the regime and replace it with a puppet government in the Belarusian style. For the Kremlin, this would earn them a two-for-one: expose the fragility and vaunted non-existence of the Ukrainian state and, at home, show the Russian people who the Euro-American axis had no power to deter Russian ambitions. Putin thought that 150,000 men sitting on the Ukrainian border for at least three months — many of them shipped there from Russia's eastern front — would bring to heel the 250,000-strong Ukrainian army. Hubris comes at a price, and Putin met with thunderous failure. Kyiv resisted with all the means and heart at their disposal, Ukrainian institutions rallied, and the West defined a path for cooperation that still holds at this writing.  

The second stage goes from April to July. Russian strikes peppered Ukrainian territory until they concentrated on expanding gains on Donbas and the southern coastal region. The scale of destruction and the humanitarian crises ended up consolidating the conflict geographically and illustrated the kind of weaponry that was in play. Furthermore, they helped focus international efforts on humanitarian and food assistance, allowing military support to Ukraine to become more predictable. And support will dictate the timing and fashion of Ukrainian resistance and counterattack over the coming months.  

We are now on the third stage, beginning when early August saw Russian assets targeted by Ukrainian strikes on Crimea. This evinces more sophisticated military capabilities and more political confidence. This doesn't signify a Russian withdrawal, as Kyiv demands. Rather, it means that the forces are more balanced than one suspected. It is estimated that 80,000 Russian troops have been killed or wounded over six months, as much as during the 10-year Afghanistan war (1979-1989). How new stages of the conflict evolve on the ground will certainly define the political terms of any agreement between the parties — the agreement nobody would pin a date on, but everyone wants to happen.

Until then, a number of things needs to happen. Firstly, financial and military support to Ukraine mostly from Europe and the US must continue. Getting support to the field will shape Ukrainian resistance throughout the winter and their capability to regain ground lost since 2014, which includes Crimea. That's Kyiv’s end goal. Moscow’s initial designs now frustrated, Putin will manage the coming months with the strategic patience he thinks the West, dealing with inflation, energy costs and social unrest, now lacks. Per that vision, Russian troops will not need a new counter-offensive. All they have to do is maintain their current belligerence levels for an indefinite amount of time. The effects will ripple across European economies and motivate leaders to dismantle political cohesion hereto maintained, and eventually roll back a few sanctions on Russia. The new Italian cabinet formed after the September 25 election may, if the radical right achieves any kind of majority, add further notes of discordance in the European Council. Budapest will play along, and so will a few, impatient others, who could prefer short-term survival tactics to overcoming authoritarianism via democratic methods in the long term. To get around this, Paris and Berlin seem to be on the same page when it comes to reviewing the mechanisms for unanimous decisions on EU foreign policy and security, foregrounding qualified majority decisions, speeding up certain steps and forestalling blockades from Putin's Trojan horses. Time, however, runs short for these procedural innovations.  
 
Another dynamic that will pressure Europeans and Americans is how the rest of the world sees war in Ukraine and the westernized vision that describes it. The truth is most countries want the conflict ended yesterday, hoping that inflationary pressure and social tension will quickly dissipate. Africa is a resolute member of this batch, and so are Latin America and practically all of the Indo-Pacific, which benefits from the war economy (China and India, who get to buy Russian electricity at discount rates) or aligns with the US and EU in the G7 (as is the case with Japan).  At the top of these countries disconnected from what we in Europe have described as a watershed moment for democracy is the BRICS block, with whom Moscow has cultivated stronger ties and influence. This helps us realize Putin is far from isolated in the world. In many ways, he receives support in his aggressive contestation of democratic order. Not for nothing did Russia, China, India, Belarus, Mongolia, Tajikistan, Laos, Syria, and Algiers gather 50,000 troops and 60 war vessels in early September for joint military exercises in the Far East (Vostok 2022).  
 
Despite the war, the rest of the world seems to passionately argue Euro-American terms of condemnation for Moscow, how the West handles the conflict daily and the roadmap for containing its collateral effects, namely economic ones. The currently evolving international order is in effect more plural and divergent than the centrality of the war within the Euro-American bubble would have us believe.  And we should pay attention to those changes.  

The sequence of blows to West-centrism in the post-Cold War period has in fact entered a new stage. After 9/11, the debacle that was the war in Iraq, the Russian invasion of Georgia, the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the annexation of Crimea, the rise of BRICS, the impact of China's New Silk Road, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine, one finds continual dispute of the rules and institutions that Europeans and Americans have put in place over the past few decades with global consequences. This balancing behaviour will not find success on several fronts, but the fact that most countries will not isolate Putin or even distance themselves from his positions and methods reveals depths about the stage we’re living through. It’s an attempt to order globalization — wealth, rules, power — through deliberate disorder. A way to part the waters, measure out trenches, force countries’ hands.  
 
One, as I've tried to argue elsewhere, is the reconfiguring of logistic chains for energy, still heavily reliant on fossil fuels, and under strong pressure from skyrocketing prices as well as frailties on the side of importers and resistance to change by large producers. Energetic transition, as desired by the former, entails control over the production of semiconductors and raw materials critical to technological competition in the field of clean energy. Taiwan is a key piece on this board. And so is Xi's consolidation of power in China, alongside the ongoing structural changes to extraction in the US. Shifts in the power balance over the coming decades will be dictated by strategic positioning on the natural resource/energy transition spectrum, which will likewise shape the vigor of economies thriving within that global competition scenario, projecting regional or global power as a result.   

This graphic allows us to draw one conclusion: Russia will not throw its weight around in the ongoing technological competition has it has done throughout the years of classic energetic competition. This explains a part of Russia's existential dilemma: at once unable to project sophisticated military power on the ground and incapable of taking a timely qualitative leap that will push its economy forward. Monochromatic, kleptocratic and besieged by international sanctions, facing an election cycle in 2024 (as the US will), Russia will have to demonstrate that the war they began months prior has paid off: reinforced their neo-imperial status, cornered the West, and bolstered their economy. The least one can say now is Russia hasn't come close to any of the three. The next six months will demand Europe be strategically patient and Putin put up existential resistance. It would be good if decision-makers in European capitals did not lose sight of that.

Disclaimer: Bernardo Pires de Lima, research fellow with the Portuguese Institute of International Relations (Instituto Português de Relações Internacionais) at Nova University of Lisbon.
The views, thoughts and opinions expressed herein belong solely to the author and do not reflect the official positions or policies of, or obligate, any institution, organization or committee he may be affiliated with.