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A Ukrainian victory could lead to the fall of the Russia Federation as we know it, according to one European economist.
Timothy Ash, an associate fellow at the international affairs think tank Chatham House, believes it's inevitable that Russian President Vladimir Putin and his army will be defeated by Ukraine. As the war head into its eleventh month, Ash said the real issue looming over Moscow's invasion is what will happen to Putin's Russia, and whether history will repeat itself.
In an op-ed published by the Kyiv Post on Saturday, Ash, who has advised various governments on Ukraine-Russia policy, said that he believes Russia will break off into new states—resulting in the exact opposite of what Putin had hoped to achieve when he launched the invasion into Ukraine almost a year ago.
"I see a decent chance that we see the end of Putin and, while not my base case, I think it's possible we see a collapse of the Federation into many new states—as with the USSR in 1991," Ash wrote.
Given that Russia is currently divided into a total of 89 regions—including 21 republics, 6 federal territories, 2 federal cities (Moscow and St. Petersburg), 49 regions, 1 autonomous region and 10 autonomous areas—Ash predicts that there could be the creation of 20 new states if the Russia Federation collapses.
"Putin started this war to create a Greater Russia, but the likely net effect will be a Lesser Russia," Ash said.
In 1991, the dissolution of the Soviet Union (USSR) resulted in the end of the country's existence as a sovereign state and brought an end to President Mikhail Gorbachev's time as the USSR's de facto leader. It was the 1991 collapse that gave Ukraine its independence, and from which the fraught relations between Russia and Ukraine have unfolded.
Ash is not the only expert who has opined that the war in Ukraine may end in the collapse of Russia.
In a January 7 op-ed for Foreign Policy, Alexander Motyl, a professor of political science at Rutgers University-Newark and a specialist on Ukraine and Russia, said that if Putin were to leave office, it is likely that a "vicious power struggle" would follow, and in turn, "a disintegration of centralized control and breakup of the federation."
"We don't know who will win, but we can confidently predict that the power struggle will weaken the regime and distract Russia from what remains of its war effort," Motyl wrote. "If Russia survives this turmoil, it's likely to become a weak client state of China. If it does not, the map of Eurasia could look very different."
Bruno Tertrais, a geopolitical adviser at the French think tank Institut Montaigne, also said a second collapse of the Soviet Union is likely to come from the war in Ukraine.
"Not only has [Putin] failed to unify the Russian world (russki mir), but his closest neighbors, thanks to the war, now seem to want to emancipate themselves," Tertrais wrote in December.
Janusz Bugajski, a senior fellow at the Jamestown Foundation, has warned that Western policymakers are gravely unprepared for an "impending" collapse of Russia.
"Instead of planning contingencies for external spillovers and capitalizing on Russia's de-imperialization, however, Western officials appear to be stuck in a bygone era, believing they can return to the post-Cold War status quo," he wrote in a January 12 op-ed for Politico.
He said in order for the West to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past, it must not presume that "the current empire is permanent."
About the writer
Katherine Fung is a Newsweek senior reporter based in New York City. She has covered U.S. politics and culture extensively. ... Read more