Earlier today, a Russian official said air defences had thwarted a drone attack on the Slavneft-YANOS oil refinery in the city of Yaroslavl. Moscow has claimed its forces have taken control of the village of Tabaivka in Ukraine's northeastern Kharkiv region. About 10 civilians are believed to have been killed, including six in an air strike in Brovary near the capital Kyiv. A man was also killed in shelling outside the major eastern city of Kharkiv. Russian cyberattacks have targeted Ukraine relentlessly in recent years, including attacks on the capital city of Kyiv's power grid in 2015 and 2016. The US and the EU also cut several Russian banks off from SWIFT, the global messaging system that facilitates foreign transactions. President Macron of France has spoken to President Putin on the phone. About 10 civilians are believed to have been killed, including six in an air strike in Brovary near the capital Kyiv. Maybe Russian forces get bogged down, hampered by low morale, poor logistics and inept leadership. Perhaps more likely is that this develops into a protracted war. And so there will always be a push, just like the Chinese are doing, to try to prop Putin up. But if he looks like a loser who is significantly reducing Russian power on the world stage and damaging others’ interests in the process, then there may be more international pressure for the Russians to get their act together, resolve this war and move on. Another aspect of having this war resolved on Ukraine’s terms is that Russia is going to have to pay for or contribute to the reconstruction of Ukraine in some fashion. That is another major reason why Putin would see the U.S. and its allies stepping back as a major win, because then there’d be no leverage whatsoever or pressure put on Russia for rebuilding Ukraine. Russia could just step back, wash its hands of all of this and let everybody else fix what it broke. Because every time you send a weapon to the Ukrainians, it’s an American weapon. Russia's demands, and a diplomatic solution Those concerns have been echoed by Britain's most senior military officer. What we need to do here is look for the best possible diplomatic solution, one in which Ukraine becomes an asset rather than a liability, where we use the war in Ukraine to try to stabilize the international system. The situation in Ukraine has so much riding on it at this point, and the longer this war goes on, of course, the more complicated it is. But other countries are starting to make plans for a world without us at this particular point. And you can be sure that Vladimir Putin, and President Xi and many others will be pretty ecstatic if we give up on Ukraine. All sides would have to consider the potential of nuclear-armed adversaries in direct confrontation. These two responsibilities—robustly defending European peace and prudently avoiding military escalation with Russia—will not necessarily be compatible. The United States and its allies could find themselves deeply unprepared for the task of having to create a new European security order as a result of Russia’s military actions in Ukraine. The consequences of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for international security – NATO and beyond In addition to strangling Ukraine's commercial ports, Russia could launch other operations in the south to consolidate its occupation of Crimea, experts say. Russian forces could move to secure a canal that Kyiv shut down in 2014. The closing of the canal has created a chronic water supply problem on the Russian-held peninsula. Moscow could also try to forge a land bridge between Crimea and the rest of Ukraine, possibly linking up with territory held by pro-Russian separatists. Short of a full-blown invasion and occupation of all of eastern Ukraine, Russia could choose to take more limited actions that could increase its leverage over Kyiv and test Western resolve and trans-Atlantic unity, Breedlove and other experts say. That scenario, of a Russian military incursion into a Nato country, almost unthinkable until recently, is when Nato and Russia could indeed be at war with each other. Biden, in his State of the Union address, framed this conflict as a battle between democracy and tyranny. Russia’s human losses are enormous and, in spite of censorship, becoming known to the Russian public. The U.S. military says that the thousands of soldiers deployed to Poland this month are prepared to assist with a large-scale evacuation. The Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 saw the return of major war to the European continent. The worst scenario for Putin is that it becomes another Afghanistan problem for Russian forces, or like Chechnya before 1999, with Russian forces attacked all the time and lots of reprisals, and lots of nasty incidents. Big military formations - with forces of 30,000 troops and armour and all the rest of it - can only do what they've done on exercises and manoeuvres, so we know in advance how they're going to fight. In this scenario, the strategists noted that a Ukrainian insurgency could force a significant, sustained human and financial toll on Russia as it would be required to devote far more of its resources over a much longer period of time than it had anticipated. In the meantime, NATO countries would likely provide covert but very robust defensive assistance to the Ukrainian resistance. Still, Russia’s performance so far has been so poor that the scales may ultimately tip toward Ukraine. How NATO's expansion helped drive Putin to invade Ukraine Seventy-eight national security scholars came out against a no-fly zone, saying that scenario would edge the US too close to a direct conflict with Russia. For months, Russia built up troops along the Ukrainian border, reaching around 190,000 on the eve of the invasion. At the same time, Russia issued a series of maximalist demands to the United States and NATO allies, including an end to NATO’s eastward expansion and a ban on Ukraine entering NATO, among other “security guarantees.” All were nonstarters for the West. They would come in the wake of failed diplomacy and would start at “the top of the ladder,” according to the U.S. administration. He noted that it's a non-starter for the West to send troops to fight alongside Ukrainians or to implement a no-fly zone over Ukraine because that leads to direct confrontation between NATO and Russian troops and accordingly risks World War III. Moreover, the use of nuclear weapons against targets in Ukraine – however improbable - cannot be ruled out. Most of Ukraine's combat forces are deployed along a contact line in the eastern Donbass region, where they are facing off against separatists backed by Moscow. I’ve just come back from Europe and from a whole host of conferences where there’s just so much rage and grievance about the United States and Putin is fanning the flames. Has Putin decided to initiate a conflict? The jury is still out, he said. Meanwhile, other Western defence sources have expressed concern about an increase in signals intelligence and chatter being monitored which could signal Russia's preparedness to invade. The admiral described Russia's military build-up on its border with Ukraine as deeply worrying. The White House later clarified the US had no indication that Russia was preparing to imminently use nuclear weapons. https://euronewstop.co.uk/what-is-china-saying-about-ukraine.html President Joe Biden said Mr Putin's nuclear threat was the biggest since the Cuban missile crisis, and that Washington was trying to figure out Mr Putin's off ramp from the war. Russia wants assurances that Ukraine will never be allowed to join Nato; that Nato members will have no permanent forces or infrastructure based in Ukraine; and for a halt to military exercises near Russia's border. But by giving up now, we’re basically giving up on ourselves, and giving up on European security and our own international position. This will have knock-on effects, very negative knock-on effects, including on our own domestic affairs. It’s problematic for Putin if he loses, or if he’s seen to lose and is diminished. Russia will use more resources and be unchained in its choice of instruments. The massive refugee flows arriving in Europe will exacerbate the EU’s unresolved refugee policy and provide fertile ground for populists. The holy grail of these informational, political, and cyberbattles will be the 2024 presidential election in the United States. The election of Donald Trump or of a Trumpian candidate might destroy the transatlantic relationship at Europe’s hour of maximum peril, putting into question NATO’s position and its security guarantees for Europe. Cold War analogies will not be helpful in a world with a Russianized Ukraine. If Russia prevails on the battlefield, you can be sure that Iran and North Korea will get benefits from this. And it will also embolden so many other actors to take their own steps. That’s where Japan and India and others in the Indo-Pacific come in.
https://euronewstop.co.uk/what-is-china-saying-about-ukraine.html
