Is the Ukraine crisis a one-off conflict, or a prelude to World War III?

Fears are growing that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s offensive, the largest conventional military invasion since World War II, could herald the start of another global conflict.

“We’ve already started [World War III].” “We’ve been for a while,” Fiona Hill, former director of the United States National Security Council, recently stated in an interview with Politico on Monday, outlining the current state of the world.

“Unfortunately, we are retracing old historical patterns that we promised would never happen again,” Hill added.

For the time being, the fighting is confined to Ukraine and has not spread to neighbouring NATO member countries. The United States and its allies, for their part, have condemned Putin’s actions while refusing to send their own troops to Ukraine, indicating a desire to avoid further escalation of the conflict.

Experts warn, however, that war is never predictable. Russia is a nuclear power, which magnifies any issue.

Inadvertent escalation

The war is currently being fought in Ukraine’s eastern, southern, and northern regions, in cities such as Kherson, which was recently claimed by Russian forcibly. However, the longer the Ukraine crisis lingers, the greater the risk of a “inadvertent escalation,” or something going wrong on the outskirts of the conflict, causing it to spread.

“The bigger the conflict, the more likely something like that will happen,” said Mary Elise Sarotte, a post-Cold War historian and author of the 2021 book Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate.

es. Meanwhile, a large convoy of Russian military vehicles appears to have broken down 19 miles outside Kiev.

Several times during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union came dangerously close to nuclear war. And many of these near misses were the result of individual mistakes and human error.

“A dangerous and tragic case would be if Russian forces inadvertently, and I emphasise inadvertently, launched a missile that landed in a bordering NATO country, such as Poland,” Glennys Young, a Russian studies expert and chair of the history department at the University of Washington, told Fortune.

“If NATO commanders perceived this as an attack, which we hope it does not,” she continued, “this would trigger the provisions of the NATO alliance’s Article Five.”

NATO’s Article Five emphasises “collective defence,” the concept that an attack on one NATO-allied country constitutes an attack on all member nations, eliciting a mass, global response. A raging civil war in Ukraine, which shares borders with four NATO countries (Romania, Hungary, Slovakia, and Poland), raises the possibility of invoking Article Five. This would necessitate deliberation among all NATO members and, potentially, Russia, and would not necessarily result in an immediate response.

“There’s this phrase called ‘the fog of war,'” Young explained. “It means that, while one often has the impression that military manoeuvres, campaigns, and attacks are carefully planned, one never knows exactly how they will play out.”

Putin’s personality

Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine sparked international outrage, and some speculated that his actions could be the catalyst for a larger global crisis.

“[Putin] has recently done so many things that are just brazen, reckless, unpredictable, and frankly self-harming,” Sarotte said. “Given that someone like that is now in charge of a nuclear arsenal, I do believe there is a serious risk of war.”

Some long-term Russian observers have been taken aback by Putin’s steadfast stance on Ukraine. He is said to be preoccupied with how the Cold War ended.

“His unstated goal is to avenge what he has called the greatest tragedy of the twentieth century: the collapse of the Soviet Union, the unravelling of the Soviet empire and the territories it once controlled,” Young explained.

Putin has not been deterred by the sanctions imposed on Russia by President Joe Biden and other Western leaders, and he has escalated his invasion.

“Unfortunately, that appears to be the pattern we’re seeing. “The more resistance there is in Ukraine, the more Putin appears to be willing to use increased military force,” Young said, referring to the recent civilian bombing in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second largest city, which killed 25 people and injured 112 more as of Wednesday.

Russia’s isolation

Throughout his Ukraine campaign, Putin has been relatively isolated. His main ally is Belarus’s president, Alexander Lukashenko, where tens of thousands of Russian troops have been stationed since before the Ukraine invasion began.

Some countries with close ties to Russia initially reacted in a neutral manner to the invasion, with China neither criticising nor endorsing Putin’s actions. However, six days after the invasion began, China acquiesced and declared the invasion of Ukraine a war, with officials expressing “extreme concern” about how Ukrainian civilians were being treated, indicating Beijing’s desire to avoid further escalation.

“I don’t think China and India will pick sides any more than they have,” Paul D’Anieri, a political science professor at the University of California, Riverside, and author of Ukraine and Russia: From Civilized Divorce to Uncivil War, told Fortune in 2019.

“I don’t think either of them wants to alienate Russia, but neither country has any reason to support what Russia is doing,” D’Anieri added.

Other countries openly supporting Ukraine, such as the Netherlands, Sweden, Finland, and Germany, have all sent missiles, rocket launchers, or machine guns to aid in the country’s resistance. If the conflict escalates, Western governments may be more inclined to respond directly, but D’Anieri believes that is still a long way off.

Senior ministers have dismissed talk of Russia using nuclear weapons to escalate the conflict, accusing Western politicians of deliberately fanning political flames. “Nuclear war is always revolving in the heads of Western politicians, not in the heads of Russians,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Thursday.

However, Lavrov also stated that Russia is prepared to retaliate against any signs of aggression, warning Western governments to take a step back. “If a real war against us begins, those who have such plans must think twice, and I believe such plans are being carried out,” he said.

The United States has stated that it will not send troops to Ukraine, preferring to rely on diplomacy and international consensus to condemn Putin. Even if Western nations remain neutral, Russian success in Ukraine would exacerbate global tensions.

“There are some places where NATO and Russia share a border now, but they’re relatively limited,” D’Anieri explained. However, he added that if Russia successfully takes Ukraine, “you’d be back to where you started.”

D’Anieri believes that if this occurs, tensions between Russia and the West will reach their highest level since the 1950s.

According to Sarotte, the situation is one of the most dangerous in recent memory, and it is still rapidly evolving. “If you asked me two weeks ago what the chances of a major nuclear conflict were, I would have said pretty low,” she said. “Now, I don’t know, and that’s not good.”