Wars unleashed by people can also be the result of deep historical processes.. To prove this, just look at the war that continues in Ukraine.. This conflict was unleashed by Vladimir Putin, who seeks to restore Russia's former greatness by destroying independent Ukraine.. But it's also part of a larger story about what happens when empires fall apart..

Gal Brands, professor at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, writes about this in an article for Bloomberg..

The battle in Ukraine is the latest and most brutal of the wars for what is left of the USSR, an empire whose death throes continue even 30 years after its virtual disappearance.. And, unfortunately, this battle is not the last.. In the 20th century, many large Eurasian empires collapsed, which once dominated global affairs.. World War I destroyed the Russian, Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and German empires. World War II ended the empires ruled by Tokyo, Rome (again) and Berlin. Later, decolonization ended the empires of Britain, France and Portugal.. The Cold War killed the USSR, which first lost the countries it controlled in Eastern Europe, and then broke up into 15 independent countries.

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However, empires don't die quickly.. Their process, as the historian Sergey Plokhy wrote, is “a process, not an event”. When a vast education that was held together by the iron discipline of the mother country falls into disrepair, one should not expect a new and stable status quo to emerge overnight.. The persistence of tension in the Balkans and the Middle East reminds us that the legacy of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires still leaves its mark.. Relations between Britain and its former colonies continue to develop.

The Soviet Union was under brutal control. And that's why his breakup was especially messy.. The end of the Soviet state removed the barriers that suppressed ethnic tension and interethnic rivalry between the former parts of the empire.. New politically unstable countries were born. The confrontation between empire-dominated Russia and countries seeking to escape the clutches of Moscow intensified. The result was what researchers call "

In the 1990s, wars broke out in Nagorno-Karabakh, Transnistria, Chechnya, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Tajikistan, often involving neighboring states and international peacekeepers.. Some of these conflicts still smolder. Others, such as the war for control of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, have escalated into larger international conflicts.. The end of the USSR was a geopolitical earthquake whose aftershocks destabilize the international system every day.

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Ukraine suffered the most from these aftershocks. The current war is distinguished by the brutality of the fighting and the totality of Putin's efforts to erase another country from the map.. Its immediate causes can be found in the increasingly totalitarian nature of the Putin regime, which allowed it to be more aggressive and appoint external enemies.. The question of whether Kyiv will be favorable to Moscow or to the West also played a role.. But the war remains part of a wider post-Soviet upheaval.. Ukraine's declaration of independence in 1991 destroyed the Soviet state and accelerated the collapse of the empire. It is therefore not surprising, and unfortunately symbolic, that Ukraine has found itself at the center of Putin's efforts to restore Moscow's dominance that it has lost..

The war did not go according to Putin's plan. Ukraine has defended itself well and will resist attempts to include it by force in the Russian sphere of influence for a long time to come.. In this case, Putin's quest for an imperialist revival has accelerated the formation of Ukrainian nationalism.. However, the fact that Russia paid dearly for its adventure does not mean that the wars over the Soviet legacy will end..

Regardless of how the Russian-Ukrainian conflict ends, the front line between the two armies could become another contentious post-Soviet front, where tension will escalate into violence from time to time.. Whether Russia wins or loses, the outcome will change the balance of power in the post-Soviet space, and perhaps also revive faded conflicts in Moldova, Georgia and elsewhere..

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The potential for an outbreak of violence in Central Asia remains high, as evidenced by protests in Kazakhstan crushed by the Russian military earlier in the year. Change of government or military mutiny cannot be ruled out in Belarus. Dissatisfaction with Alexander Lukashenko's authoritarian regime remains high. And this can also put the country at the point of conflict between Russia and the West.. In early 1992, American newspapers warned that the problems caused by " Even when the current Russian-Ukrainian war ends, the long, brutal afterlife of the Soviet empire will continue..