Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine to secure its western frontier but has instead produced the opposite result, according to a comprehensive new assessment by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. No matter how the war ends, Russia will emerge "less secure, more resentful, and more threatening to Europe than before the war," "Hvylya" reports, citing the Carnegie analysis by Eugene Rumer, director of Carnegie's Russia and Eurasia Program.

Rumer, a former national intelligence officer for Russia and Eurasia at the U.S. National Intelligence Council, argues that three converging factors will shape Russia's post-war threat perceptions: geography, technology, and the collapse of the transatlantic security order. The war has stripped Moscow of strategic depth - a cornerstone of Russian security thinking for centuries - while convincing Finland and Sweden to join NATO and turning Ukraine into a permanently hostile neighbor.

Instead of proving that Russians and Ukrainians are "one people," as Putin regularly insists, the full-scale invasion "has unified Ukraine" and transformed it into a country that will be "permanently hostile to Russia, aggrieved, and intent on joining the European Union and NATO," the analysis states. For decades to come, a battle-tested, well-equipped Ukrainian army will sit on the doorstep of the Russian heartland.

Rumer draws a direct parallel to the Soviet Union of the mid-1980s - stagnating, overextended, and desperately in need of a breather. Post-war Russia, he argues, will face the same structural exhaustion but in a far more hostile environment, with its defense industries struggling to compete and no prospect of the cooperative engagement that the West once offered Moscow after the Cold War.

Yet Rumer warns against wishful thinking. Western and Russian security visions remain "fundamentally at odds," he argues - one built on post-Cold War cooperation, the other on great-power spheres of influence. That incompatibility is not a policy choice but a product of geography, history, and political culture that no amount of diplomacy has managed to bridge.

The Carnegie assessment concludes that the adversarial relationship between Russia and the rest of Europe is "a long-term, enduring feature of European geopolitics," and that the quarter century after the Cold War was not the new normal but rather "a break from the normal."

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