{"id":27027,"date":"2026-02-25T01:27:54","date_gmt":"2026-02-25T00:27:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mwehle.eu\/wp\/?p=27027"},"modified":"2026-02-25T01:27:54","modified_gmt":"2026-02-25T00:27:54","slug":"reflections-on-the-never-ending-war-in-ukraine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/?p=27027","title":{"rendered":"Reflections on the never-ending war in Ukraine"},"content":{"rendered":"

Volodymyr Ishchenko in the New Statesman<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The four years of the Russia-Ukraine war have laid bare a profound crisis of knowledge regarding Ukraine, Russia, the post-Soviet region and the world at large. This epistemological failure is manifest in the way so many experts have been systematically wrong on virtually every major development \u2013 not merely military, but socio-political, economic and international. We witnessed the initial shock of invasion and erroneous forecasts of a swift Russian victory, followed by equally flawed expectations of inevitable Ukrainian triumph, internal Russian fragility and unwavering Western support. Analysts systematically overestimated Ukrainian unity and resilience while underestimating Russia\u2019s authoritarian consolidation, blinding themselves to the deep-seated crisis of liberal democracy and the political fragmentation of Western elites.<\/p>\n

\n

These were not merely individual misjudgements, collective conformism or the by-product of war propaganda. Rather, they revealed fundamental flaws in our grand narratives of post-Soviet transformation. Neither the teleology of \u201cdemocratisation\u201d anticipated since 1989, nor the \u201cdecolonisation\u201d buzzword embraced since 2022, nor the cyclical models of patronal politics could predict the grim reality looming in early 2026. The war revealed and escalated fundamental national, regional and global crises. It has also shattered our basic interpretive frameworks about what is happening and what to expect next. Ukraine had served as a broken mirror for a disintegrating world sliding into a frightening, unknown future.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Volodymyr Ishchenko in the New Statesman: The four years of the Russia-Ukraine war have laid bare a profound crisis of knowledge regarding Ukraine, Russia, the post-Soviet region and the world at large. This epistemological failure is manifest in the way … Weiterlesen →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-27027","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27027","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=27027"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27027\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=27027"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=27027"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=27027"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}