The international system in the shadow of the Russian war in Ukraine

The war in Ukraine may hold many lessons, but one rarely mentioned is how difficult it has been for even the best informed experts to forecast how it was likely to unfold. Thus, most analysts never thought Putin would launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in the first place; yet, he did. Many then assumed Moscow would win in a matter of weeks. But it did not. We were then informed that the Russian economy would fold under the pressure of Western sanctions. And so far it has not. The war, we were then told, would prove unpopular amongst Russians. But both the elite and the wider Russian public appear to have rallied around the flag. Finally, quite a few pundits assumed the West would fail to react to Russian aggression in anything like a united fashion. But so far, the opposite appears to have happened, with Finland and Sweden having become members of NATO and Ukraine inching ever closer to membership of the Alliance [1].