After a year of war in Ukraine: three messages on future geopolitical scenarios

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has had profound repercussions on the global economic and geopolitical system. A year later, three messages, emerging from the review of international articles, to reflect on the future consequences of the conflict in the geopolitical context.

No longer divided into two blocks, the world will be fragmented Since the beginning of the conflict, Western states have shown strong unity, approving unprecedented sanctions and confirming the sending of arms and aid to Ukraine. NATO, defined in ‘a state of brain death’ by French President Emmanuel Macron in an interview with the weekly ‘The Economist’ in 2019, has returned to play a primary role. However, as the New York Times writes, ‘while the central coalition of the West has remained incredibly solid, it has never convinced the rest of the world to isolate Russia’.

From China to India, from South Africa to Turkey, there are several countries that maintain an ambiguous position on the conflict. For many states, the war in Ukraine is only a European and US issue. China, Turkey and India have filled the vacuum left by the European Union in the Russian market, strengthening their trade relations. According to estimates published by the International Monetary Fund, Russia’s economy in 2024 will grow more than the United States, Great Britain, Germany, France and Italy. The ambiguity of the countries was also evident from the approval by the United Nations General Assembly, on 23 February 2023, of a resolution on the ‘need to achieve, as soon as possible, a complete, just and lasting peace in line with the United Nations Charter”: 141 countries in favour, seven against and 32 abstentions. Among these are China, which recently announced a peace plan, India and several African countries.

To overcome this fragmentation, the West ‘needs the humility to consider some countries, for example India, Brazil and Turkey, as partners in shaping the future global order, not as players who need to be brought to the right side of the history’ write Timothy Garton Ash, co-founder of the ‘Europe in a changing world’ project at the University of Oxford, and Mark Leonard, co-founder and director of the think tank European council on foreign relations, in ‘Politico’.