2025-02-19
46 分钟This is the Guardian, the Guardian Archive.
Long read.
My name is Keith Gessen.
I am the author of Was It Inevitable?
A Short History of Russia's War on Ukraine, which was published in March 2022.
I wrote this in the very first week and a half of the war, right after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
I was mostly drawing on years of kind of reporting and thinking about the Russian political system and the Russian relationship with, with Ukraine and thinking about NATO expansion and Russian reactions to that, as well as reporting inside of Ukraine over the years, and especially in the years leading up to and right after 2014, which was kind of the, the start of the kind of long term fighting between Russia and Ukraine.
You know, we've now had almost three years of the war.
I don't think anyone expected that it was going to last as long as it has lasted.
The war has gone through several phases.
There was a period of real optimism kind of early on after the initial successes of the Ukrainian military and the Ukrainian resistance.
And then, since then, things have not gone as well.
And the last year, and in particular the last six months have been really challenging for Ukraine.
And Russia is really advancing in the east of the country and taking back a lot of the territory that Ukraine took back back in the fall of 2022.
So Ukraine has gone through a lot in the last three years.
In terms of kind of the broader analysis, I think we're still stuck with this problem of what is our relationship with Russia going to be going forward, our meaning in the west, what is Ukraine's relationship with Russia going to be?
Is there a way to end the war and come to some kind of way of living that will prevent another war?
And I think a lot of these questions are still the questions of NATO, questions of, you know, what are Russia's legitimate security concerns and what are their, you know, illegitimate concerns.
Are there ways for the west to address these concerns?
It's not clear.