I think that your two questions hang very closely together. Whether this is meaningful for the future depends very much on how we apprehend it now, what we're trying to do now and what we're aiming for now.
You may be right that there's no way to win this war. I don't actually agree with that. I think it's quite possible that Ukraine can win. It may not be more than 50% likely, but I think it's quite possible. I think it's important to orient oneself around that possibility, because if all we're thinking of now, at this particular turning point in world history, is the continuation of the war or a Russian victory, then we're not thinking of what the stakes are. I agree with you: I believe that the stakes for the future are very high. What the stakes are depends very much on who wins. If Ukraine wins, then we can say, “Ah, ha, this was a moment when democracies were able to defend themselves.” If Ukraine loses, we won't be able to say that.
My evidence for that is, think about what the world would be like if Ukraine hadn't fought at all and Zelenskyy had fled. We would now all be very depressed indeed about the future of democracy. The fact that the Ukrainians have fought for five weeks already puts us in a completely different frame of mind. My suggestion is that the better they do, the better we're also going to feel about the future of democracy.
In terms of lessons learned for the future, I would refer back to the concepts that I said at the beginning. We are in a world where tyranny is possible. We're in a world where oligarchy is generally dangerous. We're in a world where imperial ideas are once again with us.
I would also mention climate. This war is separated from climate, but, as has already been mentioned, this war has a lot to do with natural resources. You can frame this war as a kind of prelude to what the 21st century is going to look like. If the hydrocarbon oligarchs are in charge, we are going to have this kind of war again and again.
If Putin is driving the way that the world is, we're going to have climate change wars the rest of the way. It's symbolic that ice shelves are falling off of Antarctica while we're not looking because of this war. Putin is a hydrocarbon oligarch. Defeating people like this, in a very broad way, is consistent with trying to make sure that we have an ecologically sustainable future. There's an idea of what a big stake all of this is.