GREAT WARS do not begin where the first shots are fired. The front line is merely the point where accumulated pressure finally breaks through to the surface. By that moment the foundation has already been destroyed: the language of mutual security, trust in commitments, a shared understanding of what is permissible, the capacity to perceive the other side as part of a common system rather than a threat to be eliminated. When these bonds break, politics does not direct events; it is led by them.
The war in Ukraine is such a case. It comprises several layers: the tragedy of peoples who lived for centuries within a shared historical space; a conflict between Russia and the West—a dispute over territory, alliances, historical memory and the future of the world order.
But a deeper failure underlies these: the modern world has lost the mechanism that once allowed major powers to exist within a single security system without denying each other’s status. When that mechanism breaks down, moral formulas begin to substitute for architecture, and punishment is mistaken for strategy.
I am neither a politician nor an ideologist. Politicians operate through will; ideologists operate through faith. My world is complex material systems: the flow of natural resources, their transformation into fertilisers and electricity, the logistics that structure these flows and long time horizons. Such systems are indifferent to declarations. They function as long as critical connections hold and they fail when load-bearing structures are compromised. A flow is like a river: it cannot be declared cancelled. It can be redirected, but it does not disappear. I try to describe the world as a physicist: as it actually is, not as one might wish it to be.
My formative experience was the Chernobyl disaster of 1986, which took place not far from the city in which I was born. It is proof that a complex system containing enormous amounts of energy does not forgive miscalculation or arrogance. A sequence of small events can build into a catastrophe before anyone realises what is happening. That experience does not allow me to treat the nuclear factor as an abstraction; it is an ultimate constraint beyond which the task loses meaning. Where consequences are physically irreversible, such an approach is the only acceptable form of responsibility.
When sovereignty becomes the problem
The central paradox of the current moment is this: the demand for international security has never been higher, yet the institutional infrastructure built to supply it—norms, enforcement bodies, shared legitimacy frameworks—has never been weaker. In such an environment, the temptation is to treat the sovereignty of adversaries as the source of instability. This essay argues the opposite: destroying sovereignty does not resolve the security problem; it removes the only mechanism through which the problem can be addressed.
Ukraine is not just a battlefield between Russia and the West. It is a state, a society and a political will that has paid a terrible price. Ukrainian sovereignty is real. But Ukrainian security built on the permanent negation of Russia’s sovereign agency is equally unstable.
A neighbour with known interests and a predictable price for its commitments represents a different quality of security than a neighbour defined by revanchism or siege. Sustainable peace requires sovereignty on both sides, not because they must love each other, but because only subjects can conclude agreements that hold.
Russia today possesses sovereignty: it has made and continues to make its decisions independently. This is not an evaluative judgment but a descriptive one. Russia has defined its vital interests, possesses the material base to defend them and bears the consequences of its own decisions.
The current Western discourse on post-war Russia, for all its variation in political packaging, aims at one thing: the destruction of that sovereignty or its radical limitation. The logic is understandable. If Russian sovereignty is perceived as a threat, its elimination seems to solve the problem.
This logic is supported by examples from recent history. The incorporation of post-war Germany and Japan into the Western world led, for a significant period, to the elimination of revanchism among the defeated powers. The analogy is imperfect—Russia is not a defeated power whose government collapsed—but the underlying hope is the same: that a country stripped of strategic autonomy will eventually accept the rules of those who stripped it.
This approach makes a profound error. Sovereignty is a necessary condition of any stable global-security architecture. This is not to say that sovereignty guarantees stability; a sovereign country’s actions may affect the security of others. But without it, this architecture is impossible. A durable peace cannot be made with a supplicant, because a supplicant is not truly responsible for its decisions. Any deal made in such circumstances will not lead to permanent peace; only to a temporary pause between phases of conflict.
There are four scenarios for post-war Russia being discussed in the West. For all their variation in political packaging, each entails the loss or curtailment of sovereignty and thereby destroys the only mechanism through which responsible behaviour is possible at all.
The first imagines a humiliated Russia, lingering on the periphery of the West. This, in the longer term, would generate aggressive revanchism. Versailles was not the creation of order but the accumulation of deferred energy. Russia is not Weimar Germany, and the modern world does not literally reproduce the 1920s, but the structural logic retains its force: if the sovereignty of a major historical nation is broken, it rarely disappears. It returns in a more dangerous form.
In the second scenario, Russia ends up in China’s orbit. At first glance, the Chinese path looks like a simple substitute for the Western one: Russia integrates into Chinese supply chains and gains access to markets, technology and financing, while providing raw materials, geography and strategic depth in return. In the short term this resembles a rational compromise. In the long term it simply changes the address of the dependency.
Russia would appear to retain the trappings of a great power but in reality would become an outer contour of Chinese strategy: a market for Chinese goods, a source of resources, a transit corridor and a buffer absorbing pressure directed at Beijing. Russia risks occupying a position structurally similar to the one Ukraine occupies for the West: a contested zone where the bigger players make their moves. This is not an equivalence of countries; it is the logic of using border space in the interest of another centre.
But a dependent Russia would be of questionable value to China. The obvious asymmetry of such a bond would be toxic: it is easy to build an anti-Chinese coalition on it, China’s neighbours would grow uneasy, and within Russia it would eventually generate the need to exit the subordinate position. China’s behaviour already shows that it understands this. It readily exploits its advantage but does not seek to carry it to formal vassalage. And the recent, painful experience of technological dependence on the West means that Russia will not voluntarily accede to the same situation with China.
The third scenario is the fragmentation of Russia, which would rapidly become unmanageable. There would be a struggle over the nuclear arsenal, resources, borders and history. This scenario destroys the cohesion that makes nuclear deterrence functional. The price paid in the post-Soviet conflicts—including the tragedy in Ukraine—makes such an outcome, in my view, impossible.
The final possibility is for Russia to become a fortress: closed, mobilised, in permanent siege. Technology, science, capital and civic trust do not grow in a state of perpetual emergency. Such an order does not end the war; it transforms conflict from an event into a mode of organising the state.
The forms differ. The systemic result is the same.
Why attrition is not a strategy
Negotiations work when both sides believe the other is able and willing to defend its position to the limit. When one side concludes that the other is bluffing or simply incapable of carrying through, it stops seeking a solution at the table. This is not a justification for any particular use of force. It is a description of how diplomatic failure actually occurs: not through bad faith alone, but through the collapse of credibility on both sides. Understanding this mechanism is not the same as endorsing its consequences.
The war in Ukraine is, in Russian eyes, a war against the West as a whole, fought with Western money, weapons and technology. That perception shapes every decision Moscow makes.
The roots of the conflict lie partly in a structural imbalance that persisted in Europe after the cold war: Moscow’s security concerns were heard but never seriously addressed. After the political upheaval in Ukraine in 2014, Russia concluded that diplomacy had run its course, and then acted—first in Crimea, then, eight years later, across four eastern and southern Ukrainian regions.
Moscow’s original goals were not achieved quickly. As the war dragged on, Russia revised what it would consider an acceptable outcome. Its publicly stated terms have narrowed to three: recognition of the territories Russia now claims under its constitution; legal protections for Russian-speaking populations; and a formal commitment to Ukrainian neutrality.
The West, meanwhile, reframed its own purpose. The debate about Europe’s future security architecture—which never properly happened—was replaced by an operational objective: attrition. The precise meaning varies by capital: some speak of degrading Russian military capacity, others of deterring revisionism, others still of signalling to would-be aggressors elsewhere. In practice, the war has become an instrument of prolonged pressure on Moscow.
The “support Ukraine for as long as it takes” formula is convenient because it defers a hard question: what security order should ultimately exist in Europe, and what place does Russia hold within it? Geographically, the fighting stays on Ukrainian soil; formally, Ukrainians do the fighting. This suits the West: the heaviest human and economic costs fall on Ukraine and Russia, while the impact on Western economies, though real, is judged bearable. But the arrangement has a strategic flaw that rarely gets an airing.
Moscow’s conclusion from all this is straightforward: under current conditions, Russia’s original objective—a new European security order in which Russia is a participant rather than a managed object—is out of reach. Battles can be won or lost; a war of attrition, by itself, cannot. It perpetuates the problem rather than resolving it.
The present format cannot continue indefinitely. An economically and technologically superior coalition sustaining an adversary’s army while limiting its own direct involvement will eventually give way to something else: either a different and more direct form of confrontation, or a political settlement. The question is not whether that transition comes, but when and on what terms.
Nuclear weapons make this question existential. Deterrence works not because the weapons exist, but because rational decision-making centres exist, communication channels are open and both sides understand where the limits lie. When trust collapses and emotion displaces calculation, nuclear weapons cease to be an instrument of last-resort deterrence and become background radiation of constant risk. Any strategy that treats nuclear escalation as a manageable extension of conventional pressure rests on a false assumption: that a complex system can be pushed to the edge and stopped precisely where it is politically convenient. Real systems do not work that way.
The existence of sovereignty, and the mutual recognition that agreement is necessary, does not guarantee that agreement will be reached. What matters equally is the direction in which sovereignty is applied. Whether it sustains a common framework or destroys it is determined, above all, by a country’s internal politics. That is precisely why the question of Russia’s internal trajectory cannot be resolved from outside.
How Russia conducts its own political process and towards what ends it directs its sovereignty is a question that can be resolved only inside Russia itself, without deference to external preferences. Any attempt to manage this process from outside is not only doomed but counterproductive: it destroys the very condition—sovereignty—without which sustainable peace is impossible in principle. This must be accepted, not out of sympathy for Russia but from the understanding that no alternative to this recognition exists.
I have grounds to believe this reckoning will come, and these grounds can only be understood by explaining why it has not come sooner.
Those who built the new Russia—entrepreneurs, scientists, artists, sportsmen, professionals who created its economy, its meaning, its reputation in the world—largely saw themselves as internationalists. This was neither weakness nor naivety. It was the obvious choice in a world where global integration seemed irreversible. Science operated by international standards, technology came from the best sources, rights and obligations were governed by Western law in Western courts, children studied at the world’s best universities, capital was placed where it was protected. This choice meant, consciously or not, the transfer of a significant part of sovereignty to external systems. Not because that was the desire. Because it seemed that the rules were neutral and access was open to all.
For many years Russia’s authorities warned that this was a mistake. The advocates of global integration viewed this as a remnant of Soviet thinking. Time has proved them wrong, not because globalisation did not exist but because it was never neutral.
Sanctions showed this plainly. They were written by some, in the interests of some, and can be revised for others by political decision. My own experience of Western sanctions matters here not as a personal grievance, but as evidence that the infrastructure of globalisation is politically conditional. Assets can be frozen; rights once considered inviolable dissolve the moment a political decision is taken.
The systemic effect of sanctions proved broader than their original intent. Disconnection from global systems—financial, technological, legal, educational—confronted Russia’s creative class with a choice it had not anticipated: either full emigration with the severing of all ties, or a return to the question it had been avoiding for three decades: how to build its own world inside Russia, by its own rules, to its own standards.
This process is neither fast nor easy. But it is inevitable, since the global world in its former sense no longer exists. Those who know how to create find themselves choosing not between Russia and a global space, but between Russia and a fragmented world in which each bloc builds its own rules. Under these conditions, the logic of creation points inward: to build something that will be attractive—to those who left long ago with the dissolved Soviet Union, to those who left recently, and to the Russian-speaking world at large.
Severe constraints—military pressure, economic sanctions, information warfare—compel efficiency. And efficiency is only possible when all social strata work together. In each of them there are enough thinking people to recognise that the minimal shared interest—the preservation of sovereignty—coincides. Everything else can be sorted out among themselves.
Sovereignty is not only a question for the state. It is the most important question for all who live and work within a country: citizens, businesses, institutions.
For citizens, the greatness of a country is measured not by the volume of its slogans but by the extent to which it protects its people’s interests. People vote with their feet and their life strategies. If a country lacks sovereignty, it sooner or later loses those capable of being its resource rather than its burden.
Businesses with international operations need sovereignty no less. One can construct complicated ownership structures and draft contracts in the most sophisticated jurisdictions. But ultimately the best protection of contracts and investments is provided by a strong state standing behind them. Companies that are neither American nor Chinese face unpalatable options: supply the large players with resources and markets in exchange for protection, or accept the role of a local player under permanent threat from external decisions. The sovereign alternative—aligning strategy with a state that regards large business as part of its strategic capacity—is the only one that does not require surrendering the future. In the 21st century the sovereignty of a state has a direct economic dimension: the capacity to create added value within its own jurisdiction and direct it towards strengthening its own sovereignty rather than someone else’s.
Russia’s business community consists of people who are capable not merely of surviving within given rules, but of changing the environment itself: designing and building new markets, industries and management systems. Over recent decades their selection has proceeded not along ideological lines but through competition, crises and restructurings—a selection of those who know how to calculate consequences, hear other interests and find workable compromises. Their role in the discussion about the direction of Russian sovereignty is not political but creative; not a question of who governs, but of what is being built.
Large Russian businesses that invest in a sovereign Russia will, in time, become an integral part of it. The same will hold for other important institutions. As a consequence, Russia itself will become different. If we strive for a sovereignty that creates unity between citizens and institutions, I hope that in time we will correct all the internal imbalances for which we too bear responsibility—through the fact that we were once glad to absent ourselves.
The attraction of predictability
A sovereign Russia will not make every country comfortable. But it will be more advantageous in the long run than the alternatives. The choice for external players is not between a friendly Russia and a hostile one. It is between a Russia whose behaviour is predictable and one whose trajectory is unknown. In the world taking shape now, predictability is more important than sympathy.
The internal discussion about what Russia should be is inevitable. But that conversation belongs after the war and inside the country.
The choice before the world is not between love for Russia and hatred of it, between punishment and forgiveness, between moral clarity and political cynicism. It is between two kinds of future: one in which major powers again learn to respect each other’s sovereignty, and one in which each attempts to reduce the others to objects of management. The second path has already brought us here.
The most important thing is that we step back from the abyss. Only then can we ask how we reached it and how to arrange the world differently. That work belongs to the next generation. Our role is to ensure they have something to work with.
Andrey Melnichenko is a major Russian industrialist under Western sanctions.
