What if Ukraine is a forever crisis?

It is increasingly difficult to see how the Ukraine conflict could come to an end without acomplete collapse of one side, writes Harold James

Residents carry water in front of an apartment building damaged in an overnight missile strike, in Sloviansk, Ukraine, on Tuesday. Vladimir Putin and his cronies have already shown that they are not above using desperate migrants and refugees as a weapon against the West. Photo: AP/Francisco Seco

Russia’s attack on Ukraine is coming to resemble many previous geopolitical crises. Throughout history, episodes that initially seemed like temporary disruptions have become prolonged affairs. What start out as short confrontations very often result in a seemingly endless morass.

The most famous case of such a crisis is World War I, which George F. Kennan accurately described as the “great seminal catastrophe” of the 20th century. The sheer scale of the mobilization in August 1914 fostered a widespread belief that the conflict could not last long – that it “would be over by Christmas".