Four years of Ukraine war: A fractured West and India’s strategic opening

The Russia-Ukraine war has shown a mirror to the West, exposing fractures in the long-held belief in deterrence, transatlantic cohesion and the legitimacy of liberal internationalism, even as it has hastened a pathway towards a more multipolar order in which the Global South — and India in particular — seek a distinct voice.

The conflict has revealed structural gaps in Western deterrence, especially after Donald Trump’s second presidency last year, and credibility issues that date back at least to the response to Crimea in 2014. Limited economic sanctions and the absence of hard security guarantees signalled to Moscow, which was already wary of NATO expansion right at its civilisational borders — often buttressed by Putin’s assertion that Ukraine is part of a larger Russian identity. It convinced the Russians that escalation risks were manageable in the larger context of the security of Russia’s economic and strategic interests.

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It has also highlighted how alliance politics, consensus rules and domestic constraints create ceilings on Western action even when rhetoric on both sides is maximalist. Nuclear risk, energy dependence and electoral politics produced an incremental approach — sanctions and arms deliveries calibrated over months — that looked hesitant to both Moscow and many in the Global South.

Beyond Europe, the war has aggravated existing mistrust in regions such as the Middle East and North Africa, where Western partners view sanctions, humanitarian discourse and refugee policies as selective and interest-driven. Many states see a sharp contrast between the speed and scale of Western mobilisation for Ukraine and the more restrained responses to crises in the non-Western world, reinforcing accusations of double standards.

War in Trump 2.0’s Shadows

Donald Trump’s return to the US presidency has not altered the kinetic reality on the battlefield so much as the strategic and political context in which the war is waged. His scepticism towards NATO’s security guarantees and his questioning of long-term US commitments have forced Europeans to contemplate a future in which Washington is neither the automatic first responder nor the unquestioned leader in European security. He raised the stakes by demanding Greenland be part of the US, emboldened by the Venezuelan experiment, but took a hasty retreat in view of the strong response against his move by the European states.

In this environment, war is increasingly understood as a contest of industrial capacity, sanctions resilience and alliance management rather than a short, high-tech campaign decided by precision weapons alone. The US has simultaneously explored new forms of “security partnership” with Ukraine tied to access to critical raw materials, blurring the line between strategic solidarity and economic bargaining, concentrating on ending the war and initiating economic engagement with Russia to explore its mineral wealth and rare earth minerals.

Trump vs Europe

Trump’s willingness to challenge established Western positions at the UN — including voting alongside Russia on some resolutions in 2025 — has further loosened the old “West versus Rest” template. For Europe, this underscores the possibility that the United States might seek a separate accommodation with Moscow, or at least pursue its own transactional agenda, even as Europeans still perceive Russia as the primary long-term threat.

The telos of the European and US perception of the war remains the same: to give a strategic defeat to Russia, if not a battlefield defeat, but the means to achieve this differ. For Europeans, the threat to Europe is existential and immediate. For Russia’s eastern European neighbours, it is about the integrity of the European security order, deterrence along their own borders and the credibility of NATO’s Article 5. This has motivated increases in defence spending and talk of “coalitions of the willing” to offer Ukraine security guarantees, including options that are less dependent on US boots on the ground.

These differences play out in debates over escalation, war aims and negotiations. US policy has oscillated between maximalist rhetoric and caution over escalation, whereas some European governments emphasise the long-term containment of Russia even if Kyiv must eventually accept a painful compromise, though they know that Trump’s approach is transactional, with an expectation that there should be a swift end to the war to economically engage Russia. The Economist writes that Volodymyr Zelenskyy, through his intelligence agencies, has uncovered a $12 trillion transactional deal with Russia whenever the war ends.

The result is a shared front in public, but with underlying disagreements about end-states, timelines and burden-sharing that Russia and others seek to exploit.

UN, Global South and India

The war has further eroded the perceived legitimacy of the UN Security Council, whose permanent members are divided, with one (Russia) a direct party to the conflict. Veto politics have paralysed the Council on core questions of aggression, accountability and enforcement, forcing debates and resolutions into the General Assembly, where outcomes are symbolic but not binding.

For many Global South states, this paralysis confirms that the UN architecture reflects an outdated distribution of power and is selectively effective depending on who violates international norms. India’s representatives have explicitly questioned the UN’s capacity to address contemporary security challenges, highlighting the “inherent limitations” of resolutions that neither change realities on the ground nor address the broader economic fallout for developing countries.

The Global South’s response has been neither uniformly pro-Russia nor pro-West but characterised by strategic autonomy and economic pragmatism. Many states condemn violations of sovereignty in principle but resist secondary sanctions, push back against Western narratives and foreground the war’s impact on food, fuel and debt vulnerabilities.

India stands at the centre of this dynamic. It has repeatedly abstained on anti-Russia resolutions, stressed dialogue and diplomacy, and foregrounded the wider “collateral consequences” of the war for the Global South. At the same time, it has provided humanitarian assistance to Ukraine, hosted high-level dialogues, and used platforms like the G20 to craft language that both the West and non-Western states could accept, even when that meant avoiding direct mention of the invasion.

India’s Possible Involvement in Bringing Peace

India on its own cannot be expected to bring the current impasse in the negotiations between Ukraine and Russia, aided by the US, to an end. At best it can only be a facilitator, either individually as a nation or as a leader of the Global South. India understands that any sustainable peace will likely require three interlocking tracks: a cessation of hostilities, a redefined European security architecture, and a broader accommodation among major powers that addresses not only Ukrainian concerns but also Russian security concerns without legitimising aggression. Purely military logic suggests that neither side can achieve maximalist aims at acceptable cost, yet political narratives in Kyiv, Moscow and Western capitals still constrain compromise.

In this context, actors with credibility across blocs are at a premium. India, along with other major Global South players such as Brazil and South Africa, has maintained working relations with both Russia and the West while consistently calling for “urgent diplomatic measures to end the hostilities”. New Delhi’s balancing of historical defence ties with Moscow, its strategic partnership with Washington, and its strategic and economic competition with Beijing gives it a unique vantage point that can be leveraged in several ways.

As Prime Minister Narendra Modi has framed it, “this is not an era of war”, a line repeatedly referenced by Indian diplomats to signal that major-power competition must be moderated by a collective responsibility to prevent great-power conflicts from cascading into systemic crises and a wider global conflict. Whether the West, Russia and Ukraine can translate battlefield stalemate into political compromise remains uncertain, but the space for actors like India to shape the diplomatic terrain is wider than at any point since the conflict began.

(Amitabh Singh teaches at the School of International Studies, JNU, New Delhi. Views expressed are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect Firstpost’s views.)