John M. Owen in The Hedgehog Review:
The war has exposed Russia as a conventional also-ran bristling with 4,500 nuclear warheads, but not a great power. The war has also unleashed a number of complications: it has heightened the dependency of Russia’s economy on energy exports; jeopardized those exports to the lucrative European market; affected Russia internally by making it more autocratic and opening a new brain drain; generated remarkable solidarity in the West, including a probable further expansion of NATO in the Nordic region and deployments of military assets to eastern members; and led those democracies to impose severe economic sanctions on Russia, including a freeze on Russia’s sovereign wealth deposits in their banks and a disabling of Russian banks from using the SWIFT system. Dozens of Western companies, under societal pressure, have closed down or suspended operations in Russia. (By “the West,” I mean, following convention, not only North America and Europe but also other wealthy democracies including Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, all of which thus far have joined the sanctions against Russia.)
The war also has demonstrated that most of the rest of the world—that is, the great majority of the world’s population—is more ambivalent about the war than is the West. The war has put China on the spot.
More here.