After a long-awaited game of green war and a series of warnings and sanctions, Russia launched a wide-ranging attack on Ukraine on February 24. the former Soviet republic was seeing a long-anticipated invasion from the east, north, and south with many cities and bases facing airstrikes or shelling. As per Ukraine’s Government, Russian tanks rolled across the border in a “full-scale war” that could rewrite the geopolitical order. Russian President Putin justified the ‘Special Military Operation' to demilitarise Ukraine. After the two devastating World Wars, Western powers claimed to have built rule-based world order which has been under strain on many occasions. But this crisis has posed the biggest challenge to the so-called principled system by exposing its unprincipled nature of the same.
The ‘liberal’ world order, based on the realist paradigm,where protecting national interests in the anarchic global system is the only rational way of ensuring balance of power. The International organisations, treaties,and loud goals of peace and sustainable development have remained on paper. The instrument of sanctions has rarely been effective. The world is still grappling with ironical differentiationcalled just and unjust wars. Ukraine is reminding the world of guarantees given by the USA, the UK, and Russian Federation when the former member of the USSR agreed to give up the nuclear arsenal in 1994. At the same time, President Putin threatened that any foreign country attempting to interfere will face “consequences you have never seen”. The UN bodies are still deliberating over the response and NATO has called the Russian action a “brutal act of war”. Even though the conflict has been unravelingsince 2014, why theglobal community could not prevent this situation should be the central point of concern.
The Ukrainian experiment is not isolated. Chinese aggression and expansionism will also get a boost if the West led by the USA fails to intervene decisively to end the crisis. The impression that Ukraine is paying the price of siding with the West and Russia leveraging the military operation, in turn pushing Ukraine further towards the US, the stated cause of war – both are exposing the principles of Western values-based world order.
The Ukraine crisis that is believed to upend the post-Cold War security order has already shaken up the global financial market. The plunged stocks and soared oil prices only underscored the flip side of the so-called interdependence. We need a better model to ensure equity and sustainability which is the root cause of conflicts, besides the growing trend of radicalism and expansionism. So the failure of the prevalent global system to address the threats has been obvious day by day. The inability to control and mitigate the challenges posed by the new age war based on misinformation and cyberwar based on manipulated algorithms is just an extension of the same failure.
Recently, while answering questions based on an obvious biased mindset, Foreign Minister of Bharat S Jaishankar rightly gave it back by saying, “if people were so principled in this part of the world, they would have been practising them in Asia, or Afghanistan before we have actually seen them do.”The convenient application of principles by the Western countries and selective outrage of their paid media has forced countries to put interests over principles. A naturally universal and democratic country like Bharat has opted the way of Aatmanirbharta to be in a position to reshape this hypocritical world order
Whether the Russia-Ukraine conflict will lead to another World War or will provide an opportunity to alter the unprincipled fundamentals of this world order is a million Rouble question.
