The War in Ukraine Is Not Conventional: World War III Has Already Begun
- john raymond
- May 14
- 4 min read
It is a critical mistake—an error repeated across media, academia, and military analysis—to view the war in Ukraine as a conventional war, fought by conventional actors for conventional aims. That framing comforts the mind with familiar maps and rules, with doctrines and strategies drawn from 20th-century playbooks. But the truth is this: what is unfolding now is not conventional war. It is asymmetric global conflict, and the sooner we recognize that, the sooner we can understand what is really at stake—and why we are sliding toward a broader, less visible, more insidious version of World War III.
To understand this, you must first understand the enemy—not in national terms, but in personal ones. The men driving this war—Putin, Xi, Trump, Orban, and others—do not act like the monarchs of old, despite their posturing. They do not seek legacy. They do not seek a shining future for their nations. They seek personal safety, regime survival, and perpetual control. Their wars are not really fought for glory or expansion—they are fought for distraction, consolidation, and survival. And that makes them more dangerous than kings. These are not statesmen. These are apex parasites.
Putin did not invade Ukraine to reclaim Russian dignity or protect Russian speakers. He did it to maintain power. Russia, demographically, economically, and culturally, is collapsing. The periphery—home to minorities, dissenters, and the young—is restless. The Kremlin no longer has the institutional or economic tools to provide real opportunity to its citizens. So Putin gives them something else: imperial myth. He sends the marginalized to die and tells the Russian heartland that their suffering has meaning. He revives the fantasy of empire not to build, but to distract from rot.
And Donald Trump? Trump is not a patriot—he is a Russian asset, leveraged through flattery, greed, and legal compromise. His loyalty is not to America but to whoever secures his power and protects his image. That has been Putin. Over and over again, Trump has bent American institutions—diplomatic, judicial, military—to weaken Ukraine, weaken NATO, and serve Moscow’s interests. Not because he believes in Russian strategy, but because Russian disinformation keeps him politically alive. He sabotages democracy to feed his ego and shield his corruption. His war is personal—as all asymmetric actors' wars are.
This is why you cannot map this war with the old tools. William Spaniel’s lines and Anders Puck Nielsen’s breakdowns—however intelligent—fall short. They treat Putin like a rational actor with national interests. But Putin is rational only for himself. He does not calculate based on GDP, territory, or alliances. He calculates based on regime threat. He sends young men to die not to conquer land, but to buy more time at home. That is why his tactics are horrific. That is why brutality isn’t a flaw—it’s the point. When legacy is impossible, fear is what remains.
Xi, too, plays this game. For a time, under Biden, China kept a cautious distance from the Kremlin. But Trump’s renewed pressure—economic, rhetorical, and performative—pushed Xi back. Tariffs were not economic tools, they were geopolitical coercion, designed to force China’s hand. When Xi reappeared beside Putin, the gambit had worked. Russia secured its eastern flank. China signaled allegiance not to policy, but to Xi's survival. And Trump pulled back—not because tariffs failed, but because the asymmetric objective was achieved.
These are not traditional alliances. They are mutual blackmail pacts between autocrats. They do not rest on treaties. They rest on fear, leverage, and shared enemies. The West, meanwhile, still tries to fight on the level of policy—while the other side fights through disinformation, sabotage, betrayal, and chaos.
If you want to understand the war in Ukraine, you must let go of symmetry. Ukraine is the testing ground not for tank columns but for the endurance of truth itself. It is where autocracy probes democracy for weakness—not just on the battlefield, but in parliament, in media, in minds. Trump’s role in this is not to deliver artillery. It is to degrade consensus. To fracture the will to resist. To poison the language of freedom until it can no longer be spoken with conviction.
And this is why the war is global. Because asymmetric war doesn’t require fronts. It requires only that one side operates by deception and the other by decorum. It is in the algorithms of our feeds, the normalization of falsehoods, the elevation of traitors to heroes and the silencing of those who call out the betrayal. World War III isn’t declared—it is insinuated. And it is already here.
Only when we see the motivations clearly—power, fear, and selfishness—can we understand the pattern. Autocrats need wars to survive. Not wars they win, but wars they control. And as long as we pretend Trump is an American president, and not a Kremlin functionary, as long as we pretend this is about Ukraine alone and not the systematic unmaking of the postwar democratic order, we will lose.
We don’t need better lines on maps. We need better clarity. And we need breakdowns that understand the asymmetries that exist.
Remember in asymmetric war, the first casualty is not just the truth, but also our ability to recognize it.
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