KYIV, Ukraine—And it goes on and on in eastern Ukraine. Every day and every night. There’s never any end to the artillery, the rockets, the snipers. Or the killing. The war in Ukraine hardly makes the headlines anymore, if it ever did. The war is not a particularly big one. Conventional combat operations are confined along a static, 250-mile-long front line in Ukraine’s embattled southeastern Donbas region. Although, Russia’s hybrid tactics—like cyberwarfare and weaponized propaganda—affect the entire country. Nor is the Ukraine war the most deadly in the world today. Yet, it is a war—the only ongoing one in Europe, in fact. And if one were to draw a line back to the origins of Russia’s current hybrid conflict against the West, it would lead straight to the war in Ukraine. “This is the front line of new generation warfare,” retired U.S. Army Gen. Jack Keane said of the war in Ukraine at a talk in Kyiv on Monday. Russia invaded and seized Ukraine’s Crimean Peninsula in March 2014, and then launched a proxy war in eastern Ukraine the following April. In turn, the United States and the European Union levied punitive economic sanctions on Moscow for its aggression in Ukraine. Since then, relations between Russia and the West have hit a post-Cold War nadir. Ukraine, for its part, has rebuilt its armed forces into the second-biggest standing army in Europe, with about 250,000 active-duty troops and tens of thousands more in reserves. In terms of manpower, only Russia’s military is bigger among European countries.
Still, Ukraine’s upped defense spending underscores how the country now sees Russia as a long-term military adversary—a falling out between the two post-Soviet countries and erstwhile allies that has sent shock-waves across the region. “The Western community must avoid viewing the Kremlin’s war in Ukraine as a singular military crisis. Rather it should view it as a symptom of wider regional geopolitical and economic issues,” Franklin Holcomb, a Russia and Ukraine analyst at the Institute for the Study of War, told The Daily Signal. Russia’s “little green men” invasion of Crimea in 2014 could be a bellwether for the kind of offensive military operation Russia would conduct against NATO’s Baltic member countries. Consequently, U.S. military forces in Europe are leaning forward to anticipate how Russia might integrate multiple war-fighting domains into a combined hybrid offensive. The current war in Ukraine is nothing less than a sword of Damocles suspended over Eastern Europe, threatening to spark a larger conflagration. Tonight, there are roughly 60,000 Ukrainian troops deployed in the frigid trenches and embattled front-line villages of eastern Ukraine. When the sun goes down on this night, the tracers will cut across the dark sky up and down the 250-mile-long front line. War-weary soldiers and civilians will hunker down in trenches and in cellars, staving off the cold and the fear as they have for four winters now. There’s a 1 in 3 chance a Ukrainian soldier will die tonight on that lonely, frigid battlefield at the hands of a Russian weapon. There’s a good chance a civilian will be killed or wounded tonight, too. The war goes on and on. When, and where, will it end?