Monday briefing What would a win look like for both sides in Ukraine Ukraine

When President Bill Clinton signed that law in 1996, several countries accused the U.S. of violating their sovereignty, passing their own laws to make the U.S. regulation effectively unenforceable. There seems to be some degree of sensitivity in Ukraine to Russia's claims it's waging a proxy war with the West over Ukraine. A lot of the Ukrainians I've talked to, while they appreciate the Western weapons supplies, say this is their war to fight. Apart from a few exceptions, almost all of the tens of thousands of people who have died in this war have been on Ukrainian territory. The invasion has been a disaster for President Vladimir Putin and in order to justify it at home he at least has to take control of Ukraine's Donbas region, after which he can falsely claim that the army saved Russian citizens persecuted by Ukraine. Given the size and scale of this invasion, coupled with the rhetoric, I really do think that his objective is some form of annexation, or full conquest of Ukraine.

Expediting its membership would be a heavy lift for the EU and such an aid package would be costly to the Europeans and Americans, so they’d have to decide how much they were willing to offer to end Europe’s biggest conflict since World War II. The combination of Ukraine fatigue and Russian military successes, however painfully and brutally gained, may be precisely what Vladimir Putin is betting on. The Western coalition of more than three dozen states is certainly formidable, but he’s savvy enough to know that Russia’s battlefield advantages could make it ever harder for the U.S. and its allies to maintain their unity. The possibility of negotiations with Putin has been raised in France, Italy, and Germany. Ukraine won’t be cut off economically or militarily by the West, but it could find Western support ever harder to count on as time passes, despite verbal assurances of solidarity. The Russians were by then focused on taking the Donbas region.

Monday briefing: What would a ‘win’ look like for both sides in Ukraine?

“One may imagine something like the outcome of the Korean War,” with “the warring sides remaining not reconciled and irreconcilable, always on alert, but more or less securely divided,” Lipman told me. Still, she said, whatever border is drawn between Russia and Ukraine is likely to be far longer and harder to secure than the one dividing the Korean peninsula. And Russia, as a much larger country, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, and a significant economic player, “is no North Korea” and “can’t and will not be isolated,” she noted.

Wars often do not end predictably, and a failure to achieve hoped-for victories often leads to a sudden change of government. Ukraine appears very dependent on Volodymyr Zelenskiy in terms of its public diplomacy, but he does not direct its military strategy in detail and the country’s desire to fight runs very deep. So https://pastelink.net/submit is not a negotiated peace, but rather a conflict that consolidates around lines of control. “You end up with something between a frozen conflict and an everlasting war, in which neither side has the energy or economy to win,” Nixey said. Depending on how long the war lasts, it remains far from certain whether lawmakers will keep funding Ukraine aid packages. Congress provided more than $100 billion in aid to Kyiv since Russia invaded last year, including $61.4 billion in military aid.

Ukraine: what will end the war? Here’s what research says

Then there are all those websites to check out, their color-coded maps and daily summaries catching that conflict’s rapid twists and turns. NATO does not want a full-scale war in Europe, and Russian President Vladimir Putin knows he would lose a conflict with a 30-member military alliance led by the Americans. The other sticking point is that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy is an elected representative of the Ukrainian people – any settlement has to be mandated by them too. “They would not support a negotiated solution that would cede control of Ukrainian territory on a permanent basis,” Greene adds.

But western leaders still fear Russia could be poised to make a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Some migrants might stay in neighbouring Poland and eastern European countries, but some might head further west and eventually end up in the UK. Many analysts fear war in Ukraine could potentially spill over into other European countries.

After a year of war in Ukraine, all signs point to more misery with no end in sight

While the West could warn Kyiv that it would stop supplies of weapons or financial support if Ukraine were to insist on defying the US or Europe, “this kind of threat is not credible”, Slantchev told Al Jazeera. That, he said, is “because the Ukrainians know” that it is in Western interests “to not let them collapse”. Equally, Ukraine’s dependence on their weapons gives Western powers a say in how Kyiv plots its strategy.

• In the days following Russia’s invasion, it was impossible to know.









• Beyond the obvious dangers of a nuclear plant being shelled, there is also anxiety that Russia is trying to connect the facility to the grid in Crimea.









• National Security Council from 2017 to 2019, also pointed to the Kremlin’s imperial aspirations as a key indicator to watch, but added that these could be thwarted by developments off the battlefield.









• The war has already become very costly for the oligarchs and these costs will only increase with time.

The Ukrainian Embassy in Washington told Defense News that Ukraine would not strike Russian territory with longer-range weapons pledged by the United States. After imposing sanctions and export controls, Lichfield expects the West’s latest economic pressure point — oil price caps — to yield results because the Russian economy is so tightly linked to the energy market. An inability to do so could foster economic discontent capable of turning public opinion against the war, Lichfield told Defense News. Past attempts to squeeze the will for war out of Moscow economically also didn’t yield the immediate results for which experts hoped. And the near-total control of information by the government is making dissent difficult. “Those who are against the war have left, and those who remain are adapting,” Meister said.

• The undersecretary of state for political affairs, Victoria Nuland, told the Senate in January the Biden administration still expects the $45 billion Ukraine aid package Congress passed in December to last through the end of this fiscal year.









• "Ukraine has to show it can make progress, but everybody knows that, given the size of the force that they have, that they are not going to throw every Russian out of Ukraine in 2023," retired British Gen. Richard Barrons, the former commander of the U.K.'s Joint Forces Command, told CNBC.









• Another senior official, who spoke on condition he was not named, went further, suggesting that President Putin would be forced to dismiss his Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of Staff General Valery Gerasimov, perhaps as a response to another military setback.









• According to a poll by the independent Razumkov Centre, a majority of Ukrainians said they believe Ukraine is "heading in the right direction" in light of the war.

Ukraine's air defenses have been surprisingly effective against Russia's air force. That said, there wasn't much of a political will for third countries to sanction Cuba at the time. It's possible today's situation with Russia might make such a policy more politically palatable if the U.S. attempted it again, though I can't find any serious proposal in the government to do just that. From the very beginning of the war, President Putin has drawn parallels between the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany in World War II and the current military campaign against supposed "neo-Nazis" in Ukraine. That hasn't let up, if only because it's a powerful emotional and recruitment tool.

• Refusal can mean a jail sentence, though there is the option of civilian service out of uniform too.









• So, if you’re betting on a democratic Russia anytime soon, you’d better hope that the transformation happens peacefully.









• Russia's invasion of Ukraine has focussed the West's military minds.









• No one can know for sure whether Europe and the United States are headed for a recession, but many economists and business leaders consider it likely.









• At some point, Ukraine will have to decide if there's a military solution to the conflict or if it has to look for another way out without conceding any kind of defeat, Barrons said.









• Moscow has proved resourceful when it comes to building autonomy into critical goods, Lichfield explained.

Yet I recently posed them to several top historians, political scientists, geopolitical forecasters, and former officials—because only in imagining potential futures can we understand the rough bounds of the possible, and our own agency in influencing the outcome we want. Ukraine is assembling a force of more than 100 western Leopard 1 and 2 tanks, plus others, and a similar number of armoured vehicles that it hopes to use whenever the spring muddy season eases, to smash through Russia’s defensive lines in a D-day offensive. Russia achieves a breakthrough in the east either very soon, before Ukraine gets its western weaponry in place in a few weeks, or after a Ukrainian counteroffensive fails.