| Russia’s greatest military victories came in wars of attrition. Russians soaked up appalling damage at the hands of Napoleon and Hitler, outlasted them, and then pushed both back. The current war might also turn into one of attrition. Vladimir Putin showed in Chechnya his preparedness to keep inflicting pain on his adversaries, and he might yet repeat the trick in Ukraine. For the world, the most profound impact of the Ukraine conflict could rest on energy. Indeed, it’s tempting to say that this is a war over energy, even if it has a different declared purpose — which would make it very similar, in critics’ eyes, to the U.S. misadventure in Iraq 19 years ago. In a provocative but persuasive column for the New York Times, Bret Stephens suggests that Russia’s war aim is not preventing NATO enlargement, or rebuilding the Soviet empire, but cementing its status as an energy superpower: Suppose for a moment that Putin never intended to conquer all of Ukraine: that, from the beginning, his real targets were the energy riches of Ukraine’s east, which contain Europe’s second-largest known reserves of natural gas (after Norway’s). Combine that with Russia’s previous territorial seizures in Crimea (which has huge offshore energy fields) and the eastern provinces of Luhansk and Donetsk (which contain part of an enormous shale-gas field), as well as Putin’s bid to control most or all of Ukraine’s coastline, and the shape of Putin’s ambitions become clear. He’s less interested in reuniting the Russian-speaking world than he is in securing Russia’s energy dominance.
Even if this is not the aim, the possibility of entrenching Russia’s energy power is now at the center of the broader conflict between Putin’s Russia and the West. Europe’s reliance on Russia for its energy needs has long been identified as a key weakness, and Moscow exploited it in advance. Stocks of Russian-controlled gas in Europe at the beginning of this year were only a fraction of the normal average, as Capital Economics illustrates:. This makes it that much harder for Europe to use the economic weapon that would do most damage — an energy embargo. Several countries rely on Russia for more than a third of their energy: While Russia’s neighbors in central and eastern Europe are unsurprisingly the most reliant, countries like Germany, Italy and the Netherlands are also unhealthily dependent. That in part is because they make greater use of natural gas, which is hard to replace, for electricity production: Combining these factors, the Institute of International Finance finds that Hungary is the most exposed to Russia, the Netherlands relies on Russia for oil products more than any other country on the continent, and Italy, the Czech Republic and Germany could all have a problem due to their dependency on natural gas. Moving to an outright embargo would challenge European unity: However, it would also inflict imm | 
