Vladimir Putin’s war of conquest defies an international trend. Since 1975 no country has wholly gobbled up and held onto another
say that Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was to be expected. There had been signs after Russia illegally annexed Crimea in 2014 that its president had ambitions beyond the Black Sea peninsula. But data show that Mr Putin’s war of conquest defies anWarfare remains common across the world, as the invasion of Iraq, war in Afghanistan and many civil wars in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere attest.
The number of attempted conquests has sharply declined in the past 50 years and invaders’ ambitions have changed. What Mr Putin tried to do in Ukraine—to seize the territory of an entire country—was last attempted when Saddam Hussein tried to take over Kuwait in 1990. He failed. In 1975, Indonesia conquered East Timor, but East Timor returned to independence in 2002. Going back even further, the only comparable attempts were those to reunite Korea in 1950 and Vietnam in 1974.
Mr Putin could yet buck this trend. But the war in Ukraine is going poorly for him. Early on he had to abandon his plans to take Kyiv, Ukraine’s capital, and in September a Ukrainian counter-offensive regained Kharkiv province. Mr Putin does not look destined to be remembered as a conqueror. He may instead enter the history books as the man who sacrificed the lives of tens of thousands of Russians and Ukrainians to his own ambition.
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