Is the US in a proxy war with Russia?

The short answer: it depends on how the term is defined, says Karen DeYoung, who speaks to experts on Washington’s continued involvement in Ukraine, and what its long-term objectives might be

Joe Biden with Volodymyr Zelensky at St Michael’s Golden-Domed Monastery on a surprise visit to Kyiv on 20 February (AP)

Three days before the anniversary of his Ukraine invasion on 24 February, Vladimir Putin outlined what he had learnt during a year of war. With its ever-increasing supply of sophisticated weapons, Putin said, the West was now using Ukraine as a “testing range” for its plans to destroy Russia.

Its goal was “to spark a war in Europe, and to eliminate competitors by using a proxy force,” he said in a presidential address. “They plan to finish us once and for all.”

Putin has come a long way since the morning of the invasion, when he outlined a brief “special military operation” that would permanently rescue breakaway regions of Ukraine – Crimea and part of the eastern Donbas region – from the “humiliation and genocide perpetrated by the Kyiv regime” during the previous eight years of low-level conflict.