The return of great power politics

There is a particular kind of dread that settles over strategic planners when the certainties of the post-Cold War era finally evaporate. For the best part of three decades, European security rested on a series of assumptions: that the United States would remain the indispensable guarantor of continental stability; that Russia’s revanchist ambitions could be managed through sanctions and dialogue; that the arc of history bent, however imperfectly, toward liberal internationalism. Those assumptions now lie in tatters. A comprehensive strategic assessment of the security environment facing Ukraine over 2026 and 2027 paints a picture of unrelenting darkness, a world in which the major powers circle one another like prize fighters in a decaying arena while smaller nations scramble for cover.
The dominant trend, as the assessment makes clear, is the solidification of a multipolar world defined by strategic competition between Washington and Beijing. The United States has identified China as its principal adversary, a threat to American interests that transcends party political divisions. Successive administrations, regardless of which side of the aisle they occupy, have converged on the view that containing Beijing’s ambitions represents the defining challenge of the age. This has profound implications for Europe, because attention is a finite resource in foreign policy, and the gravitational pull of the Indo-Pacific will inevitably draw American focus away from the continent it spent seventy years protecting. Washington will pursue normalisation with Moscow, the assessment warns, quite possibly at the expense of Ukrainian interests. The deal-making has already begun in whispers: a grand bargain over spheres of influence, a freezing of the conflict along existing lines, a quiet acquiescence to Russian dominance over its near abroad in exchange for American freedom of action in Asia.
For Moscow, this represents opportunity rather than defeat. Vladimir Putin’s Russia has always understood itself as a civilisation-state with legitimate interests that extend across the former Soviet space, and the Kremlin’s strategic objectives remain remarkably consistent: weaken transatlantic unity, force Washington into negotiations over a new European security architecture, and restore Russian primacy from Minsk to Bishkek. The assessment warns that Russia’s goals in Ukraine remain unchanged – the dismantling of Ukrainian statehood, the absorption of its neighbour back into Moscow’s orbit – and that even if active hostilities cease, the underlying threat will not. A ceasefire would become a breathing space, a period of reconstitution and rearmament before the next phase of aggression. Moscow would maintain current defence spending levels for at least two years after any peace agreement, rebuilding its arsenal while the West, exhausted by war, turns its attention elsewhere.
The military picture is equally bleak. Russian forces will continue their grinding advance, seeking to reach the administrative borders of Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia and Luhansk regions before pushing into Dnipropetrovsk. The assessment identifies the coming months as a period of intensified pressure along the Sumy and Kharkiv axes, as Moscow seeks to expand its controlled territory and push Ukrainian forces back from the Russian borderlands. On the other side of the front line, Ukraine faces the same grim arithmetic that has defined this war since its inception: manpower shortages, ammunition constraints, the exhaustion of a society that has now endured four years of full-scale invasion. The World Food Programme’s January 2026 situation report notes a more than 250 per cent increase in security incidents affecting humanitarian operations, with attacks reaching ever closer to the front lines and civilian infrastructure continuing to crumble under systematic bombardment .
What makes this moment particularly dangerous is the convergence of multiple crises across overlapping geographies. The assessment identifies four principal zones of instability that will demand attention and resources over the coming years. The European region itself, where Russia’s hybrid warfare targets not only Ukraine but the Baltic and Nordic states through a campaign of sabotage, cyber attacks and territorial probes. The Middle East, where the Israel-Iran confrontation threatens to ignite a wider conflagration and Syria’s fragmentation creates permanent ungoverned spaces. The Indo-Pacific, where Chinese aggression toward Taiwan and North Korea’s nuclear rhetoric keep the powder dry. And the African continent, where the Sahel collapses further into violence and Sudan’s civil war shows no sign of resolution. These are not separate problems. They are connected crises that will pull the great powers in different directions while overstretching the capacity of international institutions to respond.
European states are not blind to the danger. NATO members are building collective defence capabilities and reinforcing the eastern flank with an urgency that would have seemed unimaginable a decade ago. Estonia’s foreign minister captured the mood in February when he warned that any Russian invasion of the Baltic states would be met with strikes deep into Russian territory: “We’ll bring the war to Russia and we’ll have very deep strikes very far into Russia,” Margus Tsahkna told the Telegraph, adding that previous NATO plans assumed the alliance would eventually win, but that was cold comfort when “no Estonians will be left” . Poland’s prime minister has warned that Russia could be ready for confrontation with the West by 2027, with his own country likely to be the first target . Defence spending across the region has soared, with Poland already exceeding 4.8 per cent of GDP and European leaders committing to ambitious rearmament programmes .
Yet the fundamental dilemma remains. Europe cannot defend itself without the United States, and the United States is increasingly unwilling to prioritise European defence over its own strategic competition with China. The European Union talks constantly of strategic autonomy, but as analysts have noted, there is little indication that Brussels is prepared to depart from Washington’s policy lines on the issues that matter most . The transatlantic relationship remains structurally asymmetric, with European security ultimately dependent on an American security guarantee that is no longer reliable. War games and simulations paint a terrifying picture: one exercise envisioned Russian forces invading Lithuania in October 2026 and accomplishing most of their objectives within days, seizing strategic territory before NATO could mount an effective response .
The nuclear dimension adds another layer of danger. The assessment notes that all nine nuclear powers – the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain, Pakistan, India, Israel and North Korea – are modernising and expanding their arsenals. Belarus is now hosting Russian nuclear-capable missile systems, with satellite imagery confirming extensive construction at the former Krychev-6 military airfield, bringing strategic weapons within striking distance of European capitals . The threshold for nuclear use, already dangerously low in Russian doctrine, is being tested by the erosion of conventional deterrence. If Russia believes it can achieve conventional victory against NATO, it may never need to consider nuclear escalation. If it cannot, the calculus becomes infinitely more dangerous.
What does this mean for Ukraine? The assessment is unsparing in its conclusions. Russia’s strategic goal of dismantling Ukrainian statehood remains unchanged, and even if peace agreements are reached, Moscow will continue to view the “Ukrainian question” as central to its military-political planning. China, North Korea and Iran will remain Russia’s principal allies, providing military and technical assistance that sustains the war effort. The threat of Russian nuclear weapons on Belarusian territory, the use of Belarusian infrastructure for aggression, the disruption of Ukraine’s economic activity through mining threats in the Black Sea – all of these will persist regardless of diplomatic progress. Ukraine faces the prospect of a frozen conflict that is never truly frozen, a ceasefire that merely pauses the artillery while Russia rebuilds for the next assault.
The human cost is already incalculable. More than 200,000 Russian personnel have been documented killed, with total casualties on both sides running into the hundreds of thousands . Ukrainian civilians continue to die in their homes, their vehicles, their workplaces, as drone and missile strikes reach ever deeper into the country . The humanitarian situation deteriorates with each passing month: 10.8 million people will require assistance in 2026, including 2 million in need of food and livelihoods support, as energy infrastructure collapses and winter temperatures compound the misery of war.
There is no easy way out of this. The strategic environment facing Ukraine and its allies is one of profound uncertainty, where the old certainties have dissolved and new ones have yet to form. The United States is pivoting away, Russia is regrouping, Europe is rearming but divided, and the rules-based order that was supposed to prevent exactly this kind of great power predation lies in ruins. Strategic planners deal in probabilities rather than certainties, and the probability now is that the next two years will bring more war, more suffering, and more erosion of the fragile architecture that has kept the peace since 1945. The only question is whether Ukraine can survive long enough for the pendulum to swing again.