Conflicto en Ucrania, guerra global

Every international event raises questions about its scope, both temporal and spatial, and about the depth of its systemic impact. In the case of the Russia-Ukraine war, it did not begin in February 2022 with Russian aggression. It can well be said that one has to go back to the annexation of Crimea in March 2014 to place a more precise temporality. Thus, from a broader perspective, this conflict, with intermittences, is not on its way to two years, but to a decade. In relation to its spatiality, the new scale of the conflict as of February 2022 has global implications, not so much because of the scenario of the confrontation -at least for now restricted to the territory of the belligerents-, but because of the dimensions of the political and diplomatic deployment it has provoked: the overflow of its impact in areas that go beyond the war itself in a context of polycrisis and densely interconnected global risks, the intensity of its projection in the international institutional architecture and the relevant role played by non-governmental actors of diverse nature for some effects. The Ukrainian war can be characterized, then, as a rooted, multi-actor, multidimensional and hybrid global war (Malacalza, 2023). War conflicts between great powers have been the norm in the history of international relations and have played a definitive role in the evolution of the configuration of international relations.