Thomas Friedman: The second year of the Ukraine war will be scary

Writer Thomas Friedman says that the second year of the Ukrainian-Russian war, which will begin soon this month, will be frightening in terms of the huge preparations that the Russians are making, and the great insistence of the West to support Ukraine.

Friedman said in

in The New York Times that it is now clear that Russian President Vladimir Putin has decided to double the number of troops, as he has mobilized in recent months up to 500,000 new soldiers to launch a new campaign on the first anniversary of the war.

He added that the first year of this war witnessed an easy situation for America and its allies, as it was limited to sending weapons, aid and intelligence, in addition to imposing sanctions on Moscow, while the Ukrainians did the rest, destroying Putin's army and pushing his forces into eastern Ukraine.

Putin follows in the footsteps of Stalin

But Putin, according to Friedman, is on his way to fully militarizing Russian society, as the late Soviet leader Joseph Stalin did during World War II, and is also ready for a long war, and ready to make Russia less safe to achieve the ambitions of the traditional Russian great power that are related to honor and identity more than Security.

The writer also believes that Putin is betting that America and the West will tire of the possibility of a prolonged conflict, as the American isolationists, left and right, in think tanks and in Congress have indicated that they are.

However, Friedman says, the West will not back down from supporting Ukraine at any cost, because it knows that any negotiations that leave Russian forces in place on Ukrainian soil will be a temporary armistice before Putin's next attempt.

Ukraine's war is a war about the world order

The writer highlighted that the Ukrainian war is ultimately a war by the West to preserve the liberal world order, and to protect this order from the Russian attack that seeks to uproot it.

Friedman devoted the majority of his essay to praising and defending the existing liberal world order, describing it as one that served the interests of the West and "the majority of the world's population."

He said that adherence to this liberal order was the basic logic that prompted the United States and its NATO allies to help Kyiv against Putin's "invasion", which he considered the first attack by a country in Europe against another of its neighbors since the end of World War II, and directed, in essence, against the liberal system.

Therefore, Friedman believes that the Ukrainian war will intensify in its second year, because Putin on the one hand and the Western countries - with Ukraine - on the other hand, are not ready to make concessions, and both adhere to his position, which will lead to a frightening escalation of this war, he said.