An analytical study of Russia-Ukraine war in reference to the offensive realist approach in international relations

Abstract

During the cold war, there had been deepened geopolitical tensions between Russia and the West—tension between the Soviet Union and the United States and their respective allies, which resulted in the decline of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) and in creating a unipolar world. The decline of the USSR was believed to be the disintegration of Russia. Since then, Russia had come in a defensive mode but since the 2000s it was looking for an opportunity in a diplomatic way and it got that opportunity when the West proposed to integrate Russia's border country—Ukraine with it. So, the current conflict between Russia and Ukraine again seemed an arena of resurgent geopolitical rivalry between major powers of the world. Prolong conflict between Russia-Ukraine over geography, identity, and power revisionism has recently led Russia to adopt offensive posturing in a manner that satisfies the conceptual ground of offensive realism to negate the possibility of harbouring a neighbour who may possibly disrupt the balance of power and may entrench a ditch in the world to make a bipolar world again in which Russian supremacy is likely to prevail. The term propounded by John Mearsheimer—offensive realism highlights a character in which great powers recognize that the best way to ensure their security is to achieve hegemony, which abolishes the possibility of a threat by another great power. The current study attempts to scrutinize the events in the backdrop of the Russia-Ukraine war drawing inferences from Offensive Realism, for which a descriptive and analytical approach has been adopted.