Meanwhile, the Ukrainian authorities see the continuing destruction of their country and conclude that political compromise might be better than such devastating loss of life. Ukraine, say, accepts Russian sovereignty over Crimea and parts of the Donbas. In turn, Putin accepts Ukrainian independence and its right to deepen ties with Europe. But it is not beyond the realms of plausibility that such a scenario could emerge from the wreckage of a bloody conflict.
In the course of the past year, Putin’s domestic propaganda strategy has morphed from a message of “fight the Nazis” in Ukraine to “fight the West” there, said Stefan Meister, a Russia and Eastern Europe expert at the Berlin-based German Council on Foreign Relations. “The narrative is the great struggle of the Cold War,” he said, a framing that has helped to attract new recruits. Russian forces are already trying to slow down tanks in Ukraine with mines, trenches, and pyramidical, concrete “dragon’s teeth,” a type of fortification not seen in combat since World War II.
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Over the past year, Russia has, at times, temporarily taken control of large swathes of Ukrainian territory. But this back and forth could mean the war “is here to stay”, at least in the immediate future, according to Mathieu Droin, a visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Russia would retain its land corridor to Crimea, even if with some concessions to Ukraine. It would receive a guarantee that the water canals flowing southward to that peninsula from the city of Kherson, which would revert to Ukrainian control, would never again be blocked. Russia would not annex the “republics” it created in the Donbas in 2014 and would withdraw from some of the additional land it’s seized there.
Maybe Russia cannot provide enough troops to cover such a vast country. Ukraine's defensive forces transform into an effective insurgency, well-motivated and supported by local populations. And then, perhaps after many years, with maybe new leadership in Moscow, Russian forces eventually leave Ukraine, bowed and bloodied, just as their predecessors left Afghanistan in 1989 after a decade fighting Islamist insurgents.
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“We are drawn to this scenario, in part, because we seem to lack other variants, and it feels like an ending,” he wrote at the time. More likely, Snyder argues, Putin is trying to instill fear in order to buy his military time and undermine international support for Ukraine. He uses Russia's internal security forces to suppress that opposition.
- He said there is little the West can do to stop Ukrainians from trying to take back all of their country’s territory currently held by Russia — including parts that Moscow has formally, though illegally, annexed.
- The fog of war can obscure our view of who is winning, who is losing, and how long all of this will last.
- And that has direct consequences for the future of the war in Ukraine.
- Little wonder, perhaps, that Putin assumed his troops would take the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, within weeks, at most.
- There were other commanders clearly unhappy with the higher conduct of the war.
Russia lacks the equipment and trained manpower to launch a strategic offensive until spring 2025, at the earliest. It would be wrong to say that the front lines in Ukraine are stalemated, but both sides are capable of fighting each other to a standstill as they each try to take strategic initiatives. Industrial-age warfare bends significant parts, or in some cases whole economies, towards the production of war materials as matters of priority. Russia's defence budget has tripled since 2021 and will consume 30% of government spending next year. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 saw the return of major war to the European continent. The course of the conflict in 2023 marked the fact that industrial-age warfare had returned too.
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There was, for example, a thread of continuity between the first and second world wars. To be sure, a lot happened in the intervening years that could have changed the direction of what followed. But, said Macmillan, “the first world war laid the groundwork that made the second possible”. The danger lay in a humiliating peace treaty imposed on defeated Germany. As https://euronewstop.co.uk/what-did-liz-truss-have-to-say-about-ukraine.html stand, Putin, despite crushing setbacks on the battlefield, appears to be prepared for a long fight and believes Russia will win.
- Never,” United States President Joe Biden said in Poland last week, a day after a previously unannounced visit to Kyiv.
- Ukraine will do all it can to keep pressure on the Russians there to make it untenable for the Russian navy in Sevastopol, the handful of air force bases there and their logistics base at Dzankoy.
- Both sides want to carry on fighting, and any negotiated peace looks a long way off.
- Senior officials from around 40 countries, including China, and India, held talks in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, at the weekend with the aim of agreeing on key principles that could underline a future settlement of the war.