Is the Russia-Ukraine war an ‘existential’ war, and, if so, for whom? I have heard this question debated endlessly by policymakers, experts and advocates, on both sides of the Atlantic. It was one of the questions probed at the recent World Order conference hosted by the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at SAIS/Johns Hopkins with the support of the Ax:son Johnson Institute for Statecraft and Diplomacy. Opinions were divided.

On the one hand, there seems little doubt that the war is existential for Ukraine. Russia clearly seeks more than just the overthrow of President Volodymyr Zelensky’s administration. It wants to conquer the country, probably extinguishing its independence altogether, or, if not, annexing large parts of it, while exerting control over what truncated Ukraine remains nominally sovereign.

The Ukrainians have long understood their predicament, which is why they have stubbornly and heroically resisted Russia’s aggression. At one point Kyiv was spending just under 40 per cent of its GDP on the war effort (though this number has fallen back somewhat in 2024). The Ukrainian government has relied on sweeping mobilisation measures to push back against its numerically superior adversary.

Vladimir Putin has also implied that the war is existential for Russia, though whether this is really so is highly debatable. The argument would hold only if a defeat in Ukraine would trigger Russia’s collapse, fragmentation, and an ensuing civil war. While such a dire scenario cannot be discounted entirely, it is not the likeliest outcome.

True, Putin personally may not survive a defeat in Ukraine (as Evgeny Prigozhin’s mutiny last year showed, poor performance in Ukraine could well trigger domestic instability), and in this sense the war could indeed be deemed existential for the regime, if not necessarily for the country.

Putin’s investment in the war effort and the country’s militarisation – Russia is currently spending some 40 per cent of its budget on the military and security services – does suggest that he takes the possibility of defeat fairly seriously. Still, the roughly eight per cent of GDP that this spending represents is broadly in line with Soviet military spending during the Cold War, and is not indicative of a truly existential conflict, such as the Second World War. It is also worth noting that, for all the Sturm und Drang rhetoric, Putin has pointedly refused to declare general mobilisation, and has so far relied on contract soldiers to wage his war, hardly a sign of an existential conflict.

Things become much more complicated once we turn to the West. Here, the oft-heard claims about this war being ‘existential’ just fail to add up to the reality of defence spending. Despite significant spending increases in recent years (admittedly from a very low bar), eight out of 32 NATO member states, including Italy and Spain, are still failing to meet the ostensible ‘floor’ of committing two per cent of their GDP to defence. Most others are just barely over the line.

For example, Germany is estimated to have spent 2.12 per cent of its GDP on defence in 2024, quite a bit more than what it spent in 2014 (just over one per cent), but a far cry from the nearly five per cent West Germany spent on defence in 1963 (importantly, for all the Cold War tension, there was no active war raging in Europe at that time). These numbers put Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Zeitenwende into perspective.

More cognisant of the Russian threat than their relaxed West European brethren, the East Europeans – especially the Poles and the Balts – have long pushed for higher military spending. Given their memorable experience of Soviet imperialism and the doubtful privilege of bordering an aggressive, toxic Russia, it is not all that surprising that the Poles and the Balts would view the war in Ukraine as existential.

The difference, however, between the slackers and the pushers is not as stark as one might conclude from the alarmist rhetoric. For example, Poland currently spends just over four per cent on defence, with Estonia and Latvia not far behind. The third Baltic state – Lithuania – is estimated to spend 2.85 per cent, far lower than the United States. If taken as evidence of the Lithuanian assessment of Russia’s existential danger, then one must conclude that Vilnius has already resigned itself to its unenviable fate.

If Europe has not quite put its money where its mouth is, the United States does not even have to pretend that the war in Ukraine is existential. Russia, a broken, declining power that has struggled to bring Ukraine to heel, is not, and cannot pose, an existential threat to the US, except in a hypothetical nuclear exchange, which, to be sure, all interested parties are eager to avoid.

Is it not possible to argue, however, that even if Russia is not an existential threat to either Europe or especially the US, it could well be perceived as an existential threat to the US-led world order? The argument would go like this: if Russia claws its way to victory in Ukraine, then one will have to conclude that the United States can no longer enforce rules of good international behaviour. Others will then follow the path trotted by Putin, and the current order as we know it will collapse.

This is a powerful argument, although it raises a further objection. If we conceive of the current world order as an order established in 1945, and one that includes the all-important norm of non-aggression, then one must conclude that this order has been repeatedly challenged, often with relative impunity. Both the United States and the Soviet Union fought bloody, protracted wars beyond their borders during the Cold War, and both have even lost wars without necessarily undermining their credibility as superpowers.

Also, other powers – India and Pakistan, China, and India, China and Vietnam, the Arab states and the Israelis, Iran and Iraq, Ethiopia and Somalia, to name but a few – managed to fight fairly consequential wars without fatally undermining the rules-based international order. Long-term occupation of neighbouring countries was also not unheard of (for instance, Israel’s occupation of its neighbours’ territory after the Six-Day War).

Even if we conceive of the international order as the post-Cold War order established in 1991 – effectively an order where only the United States, really, had the right to intervene at will – it is all too easy to find multiple exceptions, including Russia’s war against Georgia in 2008, or, indeed, Putin’s annexation of Crimea and occupation of Donbas in 2014. The current war in the Middle East is another pointer to the flexibility of unimpeachable norms. Is there something more significant about the war in Ukraine than about these other violations of the rules-based order? If so, the significance must be in the scale and not in the principle as such.

One of the reasons for calling the war in Ukraine ‘existential’ is that it helps governments rally public support for increased military spending. In all cases, this entails making some difficult decisions about spending on guns or butter. Whatever we make of the threat posed by Putin, such redistribution of funding in our troubled world may well serve the purpose of deterring aggression, not necessarily by Russia, and so ultimately avert a truly existential war.