
Four years have elapsed since Vladimir Putin transformed his protracted confrontation with Ukraine into a full-scale military offensive — a calculated gamble predicated on the assumption of a swift, decisive campaign and the rapid absorption of a sovereign nation that the Kremlin's architect fundamentally refused to recognize as legitimate. The strategic calculus behind the invasion was anchored in a broader geopolitical ambition: to accelerate the global transition away from American-led unipolarity toward a distributed, multipolar architecture of international power — yet the unfolding reality has diverged dramatically from that blueprint, reshaping the very world order Moscow sought to engineer, though decidedly not in the configuration it envisioned.
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