Who rules East Europe commands the world: Is geopolitics the answer to the war in Ukraine?

Abstract

The aim of this article is to examine applicability of classical geopolitics to interpret the context of the war in Ukraine. The author argues that the classical geopolitical approach has shortages in explaining the current warfare in Ukraine, because territory, space, and geography are not sufficient to explain complex international relations in today's globalized world. The interventionistic policy of the US, the main force of Atlanticism, undoubtfully has the key role in shaping the situation in Ukraine, but a wider picture indicates presence and influence of corporate and financial non-state actors that benefit from strengthening military-industrial complex. The author concludes that critical geopolitics offers deeper inquiry into the geopolitical claims than the classical geopolitical thought because the former recognizes that nowadays states are not only geopolitical agents. There are indications that the war in Ukraine is waged by Western political, economic, military, and financial elites against Russia as a part of the strategy to maintain global power and prevent rising multipolarity.

Keywords

• cold war
• classical geopolitics
• critical geopolitics
• interventionistic policy
• mackinder
• nato
• russia
• ukraine
• united states of america
• unipolarity