It is not too early to start thinking about monuments to those personages associated with Russia’s war on Ukraine. Roman legions were still wiping up the last of the Dacians when the Senate began planning the 98-foot-tall Trajan monument in Rome. Moscow’s monument to Alexander I was started in 1811, a year before the tsar defeated Napoleon. And the American factories that turned out hundreds of Civil War monuments for both the North and South began tooling up even before Appomattox.
No matter what is still to come on the battlefield, the first and most significant monument to Russia’s war against Ukraine must go to the heroic Ukrainian people and their elected leader, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. It was their relentless effort and sacrifice that stopped Russia and checked its advance for three years. Such a monument must acknowledge the tens of thousands of patriotic Ukrainian men and women who perished due to Russia’s invasion, and also the sheer tenacity of the society at large.
The Ukrainians’ military and social fortitude not only preserved the Ukrainian state but confirmed its “European vocation.” In doing so, the same forces that gave rise to the war caused Ukraine to build and train the second-largest army in NATO. Yet these are only a few of many positive developments that can be attributed directly to Russia’s war on Ukraine. Other consequences directly affect nearly two dozen other countries spanning Europe and Asia. These further fruits of Russia’s war on Ukraine are fundamental and bound to be lasting. Indeed, the three years of war will go down as Anni mirabiles.
Russia’s Amazing Accomplishments
These amazing accomplishments must not go unnoted or unmarked. Indeed, they are as worthy of being monumentalized as any events in the 21st century. Statues of those responsible for them should be raised on lofty plinths and erected everywhere.
So numerous are these achievements that one is at a loss to know where to begin handing out the laurels. But since Russia declared at the outset that its goal was to prevent NATO from expanding, we should note that the war prompted two major countries—Sweden and Finland—to join NATO, doubling the length of Russia’s border exposed directly to NATO. Finland’s accession brought the further benefit of turning the Baltic into something akin to a NATO sea.
The perceived threat from Russia also awoke Europe from its prolonged security slumber. True, no other NATO member topped the 4.7% of GDP Poland now devotes to defense, but a greatly expanded concern over defense is evident everywhere, even in Germany. Now, one might argue that that great shift is due largely to President Donald Trump’s unwillingness to continue bearing the cost of continental defense. But it was not his intention to embrace the European Union’s plan to open up a path to Ukraine’s entry.
Nor did he or any others in Europe devote serious attention or resources to preventing the Black Sea from becoming a Russian lake. Now that Moscow’s navy has been defeated by Ukraine, which lacks a navy, NATO member Turkey is reclaiming navigation rights that it lost to the Russian Empire. Whoever deserves credit for these epochal shifts should be memorialized.
Thanks to generous aid from the United States and Europe and to the Ukrainians’ amazing ability to master new techniques and develop new weapons, Ukraine has emerged as one of Europe’s major producers of advanced military equipment. Unless one reaches back to the centuries before the Mongol invasion, this is the first time Ukraine has ever wielded such clout. The tragedy is that it only happened in response to a threat to Ukrainians’ very existence as a people.
The dramatic changes brought about by Russia’s war against Ukraine are not confined to Europe or NATO countries. Further afield, we see Armenia beginning to shake off Moscow’s control for the first time in a century. At the same time, the five states of Central Asia that gained independence with the collapse of Soviet rule are finally asserting their individual and collective identities. Though vigorously opposed by Moscow, they are even moving to create a regional organization akin to the Association of Southeast Asian Nations in order to reap the benefits of cooperation, gain economic strength as a team, and discourage outside powers from playing them off against each other, as Russia did for a century and a half. Again, let us award credit where credit is due.
Russia Has Been Transformed
Meanwhile, Russia itself has been transformed by the war against Ukraine. Indeed, the changes that have taken place there are so deep and fundamental that it will take a generation to recover from them. The death or decapacitating injuries of a million men have created a demographic crisis that will endure for decades.
Meanwhile, Russia’s massive oil and gas sector, the crown jewels of Russia’s economy, is in a miserable state. This has happened because Europe finally began weaning itself from overdependence on Russian sources and because American sanctions are limiting Russia’s access elsewhere. Moscow has paid for the war and these peripheral developments by tapping into its sovereign wealth fund. At the war’s outset, this fund contained the equivalent of $211 billion, but by the start of 2025, it was down to $122 billion. Economist Anders Aslund offers evidence that it will be empty by the last quarter of this year.
Whatever the outcome of the war, the long-term impact of these and related transformations in Russia will be devastating. Even the war’s staunchest defenders in Moscow are now critical of Russia’s military, which will take years to recover. Meanwhile, major industries that provided civilian goods have been turned over for war production. Changing them back will take many years and billions of dollars. The task will be worsened by the shrunken labor force and what is approaching a demographic collapse. If Moscow tries to solve this Rubik’s Cube by importing labor from third-world countries it will give rise to a fundamental cultural crisis. Meanwhile, the war has shown the world the depth of Moscow’s dependence on China and even North Korea and Iran.
This list of diverse and profound changes within Russia and wrought by the war on Ukraine could be indefinitely extended. What about the million Russian technicians, educators, doctors, and artists who have fled abroad and established families beyond Russia’s borders? What about the collapse of Russia’s medical system, or Moscow’s loss of its sole naval base in the Mediterranean?
Vladimir Putin: The Man Who Started It All
Meanwhile, the changes that have already occurred in Ukraine, Europe, the Baltic region, the Caucasus, and Central Asia are among the most many-sided and fundamental the world has seen in recent times. What’s more, nearly all of them will remain in place regardless of how and when the war ends. This reality brings us back to the question of monuments. Who should get the credit for bringing all this about?
Inevitably, a line—or, more accurately—the lines are already forming. Most of those who champion one claimant or another limit their case to specific achievements that occurred, thanks to their candidates. Others flip the argument and focus on blame. Of course, the world’s thinning ranks of Marxists object to all such efforts to personalize credit and blame, arguing instead that everything that has happened traces to anonymous economic forces that have no face or name. This may be so, but down through the ages, thoughtful men and women have preferred to hand out posies or prison sentences to individuals, whom they have memorialized in statues, triumphal arches, or marble monuments to their victims.
Who, then, should be memorialized for launching the entire bewildering array of fundamental changes that we have observed since 2022? Any sober analysis of the evidence, both positive and negative, leads to one person: Russia’s long-serving president, Vladimir Putin. To be sure, Putin has had an army of enablers, but so did Trajan, Genghis Khan, Tamerlane, Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. But our era has been dominated by only one man, to whom all credit and blame must be ascribed.
It is for this reason that I propose to launch an international movement to place statues of Putin in all the capitals affected by his actions. Donors to this monument fund must leave it to the people of every country to decide what kind of statue they erect and what they inscribe on the bronze tablets affixed to each monument. Some will express ironic gratitude while others will point the accusing finger of blame. This is the task of each country and city affected by Russia’s war against Ukraine.
But to repeat what we argued at the outset, it is not too early to start thinking about monuments to the one individual most closely associated with launching and sustaining Russia’s war on Ukraine and its multitude of consequences in many countries. And that diminutive figure, who is five feet seven inches tall and weighs in at 177 pounds, is Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin. True, his Russian critics have long called him “Liliputin.” But this Liliput has changed the world and should be monumentalized for having done so.
About the Author:
S. Frederick Starr is the Chairman of the Central Asia-Caucasus Institute and a Distinguished Fellow for Eurasia at the American Foreign Policy Council. He is also the Co-founder of the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies
