In February 2022, Russia escalated its war on Ukraine with a full scale invasion. Within weeks, Russia increased by more than fourfold the territory it occupied in Ukraine. Then Ukrainian forces pushed it back, retaking half the ground Russia had taken.

The core consequence of the war has been largescale loss of life, suffering and physical destruction in Ukraine. But the war has also had further consequences and repercussions in the ecological, energy, financial, food, geopolitical and humanitarian domains. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) has offered assessments of some of the wider implications of the war, summarised and linked below.

Russia’s war-time economy

Many questions are asked about how long Russia can afford to keep the war going. Just as supporters of Russia’s war effort are hoping Western support for Ukraine will fragment, so critics of Russia’s actions are hoping it will collapse into war-caused bankruptcy and penury and have to call it off.

A SIPRI report in June this year analysed Russia’s military spending and its likely economic impact.The author, Professor Julian Cooper, concluded that, broadly speaking, the increase in Russia’s military expenditure by then was significant but not dramatic. The Russian government could be seen to be trying to restrain war-spending so as to minimize its impact on the domestic economy. The assessment was that the Russian economy could afford this level of spending regardless of the sanctions.

In December, a further paper by Professor Cooper was published. This looked at the federal budget for 2024–26, adopted in November. Russia’s military and war-related spending is set to rise sharply in 2024 and will take up about one-third of the federal budget, while other war-related spending (e.g., the costs of occupation) push the costs even higher. For 2025 and 2026, the budget foresees cuts in military spending; this implies that President Putin is looking forward to winning the war in 2024. However, in Russian government practice, the second and third years of the three-year budgets are often changed quite markedly when it comes to it.

The military budget alone will account, according to official Russian estimates, to 7 per cent of GDP. That’s a lot by international standards. That figure, however, is based on assumptions about rising revenues for oil and gas exports that might or might not be realised. If those revenues do not increase, then the share of the national economy devoted to military spending will rise to 10 per cent – with other war-related costs on top. That’s not just a lot – that is an exceptionally heavy burden to bear.

So the scenario in which the Russian war effort collapses under its own economic weight is, like the counterpart scenario of Western support for Ukraine fragmenting and dwindling, neither impossible nor a sure thing.

Nuclear security during armed conflict

There has been considerable concern about the security as well as the safety of nuclear installations in Ukraine, both because Russian forces entered the no-entry area of Chernobyl, and because there has been combat so close to the major nuclear power plant at Zaporizhzhia. Two SIPRI reports on nuclear security in Ukraine came out in March this year. Nuclear Security During Armed Conflict: Lessons From Ukraine, by Vitaly Fedchenko, reflected on the unprecedented attacks on nuclear installations in Ukraine by the Russian military in 2022. International armed conflict creates new circumstances in which to try to assure nuclear security. The paper presents three areas where the international framework for nuclear security can be strengthened so it is closer to being fit for purpose when there are extraordinary events such as armed conflict. The partner paper, jointly authored by a team of researchers, was Nuclear Security in Ukraine and the Black Sea Region: New Threats, New Risks, New Consequences, discussing the changes needed in the national nuclear security regimes of Ukraine and the other states in the Black Sea region.

SIPRI also produced a map of Russia’s military attacks on Ukraine’s nuclear facilities, using data from the International Atomic Energy Agency and the OECD. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.

The impact on local and global food security

One consequence of the war is that food security has declined far beyond the broders of Russia and Ukraine. In sub-Saharan Africa in particular, hunger has increased and people have suffered. SIPRI has published a series of blog posts over the past two years about the impact of the Ukraine war on local and global food security, under the collective title War in the breadbasket.  

The first three posts came less than two months after the escalation to full-scale war. In the first, Caroline Delgado highlighted the general link between hunger and conflict to warn that the war would likely affect global food markets and aggravate the problem that already existed of rising food insecurity and food prices. In the second blog post, Kristine Tschunkert and Amal Bourhrous focussed on food security and stability in Lebanon as a way to tackle the impact of the war on the Middle East and North Africa, which had been buying more than 50 per cent of Ukraine’s total wheat supply. The third in the series, by Marie Riquier, discussed the implications of the war for humanitarian actors attempting to assuage global hunger in the face of both food shortages and rising food prices.

In February this year, the SIPRI team reflected on how the risks played out. The authors wrote that, ‘Few, if any, parts of the world have been left unaffected due to the vital role Ukraine and Russia play in producing food traded on the global food markets and for use by the major humanitarian agencies, such as the World Food Programme.’ The authors emphasize the need to treat food security as an issue of global stability.

The most recent blog post in the series, published in November 2023, explored the impact of landmines and explosive remnants of war on Ukraine’s food production. Fortunately, it seems that Ukraine has ample resources to deal with this issue, although one of the primary challenges now lies in effectively harnessing and coordinating these resources. The authors urge the Ukrainian government to focus on coordination and improving the availability of competent, officially recognized mine action services, so as to reduce the risks to farmers from ineffective work by untrained and unofficial demining actions and actors.

Concerning ecological impacts

The devastating ecological impact of the war in Ukraine is the focus of a backgrounder by Jiayi Zhou and Ian Anthony, who notedthat Ukrainian authorities, civil society and international partners are responding vigorously to the ecological challenges, by drawing attention to the ecological impacts of the war and by recording and measuring them. On this basis, these actors are pursuing accountability and restitution, and laying the groundwork for a green reconstruction. As well as benefiting Ukraine itself, all this could set positive precedents for and strengthen international mechanisms to account for, remediate and perhaps even prevent environmental crimes and damage related to armed conflict.