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Is the World Marching Toward War?
From Ukraine to Niger, unrest seems to be spreading.
Over the past three years, COVID-19 has wrought an untold number of changes in the geopolitical landscape. Many things that were true in 2020 are no longer true today.
Hotspots that were flaring into terrible life in 2020 have since grown into major conflagrations.
In Ukraine, war with Russia had been raging — if largely under the world’s radar — since at least 2014.
In 2014, Russian President Vladimir Putin took advantage of political unrest in Ukraine to forcibly annex the Crimean Peninsula. Since Russian intelligence and military agencies were largely responsible for Ukraine’s political unrest, Putin was well-positioned to take advantage of the opportunity.
The wealthy and strategically important province was brought under the auspices of Russian authority through an extremely nefarious and underhanded method that world authorities condemned.
Unfortunately, they didn’t condemn it strongly enough. Over the next decade, Putin unleashed a barrage of information warfare operations on Ukraine.
The propaganda, hacking attacks, election tampering, and other malfeasance continued right up until the moment Russian troops — finally — dispensed with prevarication and marched on Keiv.