What Went Wrong?
Journal: Russia in Global Affairs
Year: 2022

Russia's military operation in Ukraine, illegal in terms of the pre-1990s international law and probably a geopolitical miscalculation, has caused a shock incomparable even with that of the 2003 American attack on Iraq that was proudly baptised Operation Shock and Awe. Remarkably, neither the twenty-year-long war in Afghanistan waged by the U.S. and its allies, nor the destruction of Libya in 2011, nor the multiple military interventions in Africa, nor even NATO's bombardment of Serbia in 1999-t