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Ukraine: How might the war end? Five scenarios

 The United States, as Ukraine’s most important military supporter, remains the center of gravity when it comes to an eventual outcome for the conflict. American leadership has so far been largely united in their support for Kyiv. 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 ultimate end to this is the Ukrainians take back as much pre-Feb. I was more struck by his description of the problem he was trying to solve. The first and most obvious way for Ukraine to win would be for its armed forces to take back all the territory Russia has unlawfully seized since its first invasion in 2014 — including Crimea. He judges that continuing the war may be a greater threat to his leadership than the humiliation of ending it. And even though the fall of the Soviet Union was notable for its lack of bloodshed, many in Ukraine refer to today's conflict as a true war of independence. America has rallied military donations from more than 40 other countries. It has delivered artillery, but not the longer-range rocket systems that Ukraine is asking for. Without a critical mass of support, resistance to the Russian military will fall apart and Ukraine will lose the war. The fierce determination of the Ukrainian people up to this point suggests that this will not occur any time soon. Europe A frank and constructive dialogue is expected to improve relations between states, the Ukrainian president's office said on its official channel on the Telegram messaging app alongside a photo of Mr Szijjarto, Mr Kuleba and Mr Yermak. Mr Szijarto will be in the western Ukrainian city of Uzhhorod with his Ukrainian counterpart Dmytro Kuleba and presidential chief of staff Andriy Yermak. European countries have largely outsourced much of their military capacity and thinking on strategy and security to the States through NATO. The Ukrainians have fought a clever media war, and they are remarkably consistent in the messages that they deliver to their own people and their Western allies, as well as their enemies in Moscow. I think the countdown has started, said Andriy Yermak, President Zelensky's closest adviser. The drama over the border in Russia has hardened the view in Kyiv that Mr Putin's time as Russia's president is coming to an end. After a year of war in Ukraine, all signs point to more misery with no end in sight As of this writing, the superforecasters had assigned a roughly 70 percent probability to the scenario of Russia and Ukraine not agreeing to end the conflict before October 1, 2024, the furthest-out date among the multiple-choice options presented. When the superforecasters were asked to name the year in which they expected Russia’s war against Ukraine to end, the median answer was 2025, with a minimum of 2024 and a maximum of 2037. Many experts I consulted, however, advised girding for a struggle that could last a lot longer, even if the war in its more acute form resolves sooner. There are no certain answers to my questions, just ones contingent on unknowable future circumstances. To put a twist on an old Yiddish expression, people predict, and war laughs. For a war that has defied expectations, those questions might seem impossible to answer. But polls show that does not equal pacifism, with the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians supporting a prolonged defensive war. To show key areas where advances are taking place we are also using updates from the UK Ministry of Defence and BBC research. Some Ukrainian officials acknowledged the fear that gives Western leaders sleepless nights, that a public collapse of President Putin's regime might lead to real danger as his would-be successors jockey for power in a state with the world's biggest arsenal of nuclear weapons. Mr Danilov said they included security forces, officials and representatives of Russia's oligarchs, who believe that Mr Putin's decision to launch a full invasion of Ukraine in February last year has been a personal disaster for them as well as a threat to Russia. The report, cites two people with close links to the Kremlin and says that senior US officials were made aware of the signals in December via an unnamed intermediary. The first - which would be the most optimistic from Kyiv’s perspective - is that Ukrainian forces successfully move towards Mariupol on the Black Sea coast, cutting off Russian forces from the southern part of the country. The move “would also put Crimea at risk and then potentially we could see a collapse of Russian forces and effectively Ukraine could win,” he said. There is a difference between keeping options open, perhaps seeing what response tentative, private probes might get, and going public with a concrete proposal. Western allies are starting to split over the conditions for a peace With Western hesitancy bolstering Russia, and in the absence of either a coup or a health-related issue leading to Putin's demise, the only foreseeable outcome will be a negotiated settlement that for now both sides continue to refuse. For democracies, long-term consensus in support for war has always been more complicated than for autocrats with no accountability. We asked three military analysts how they think events may unfold in the coming 12 months. They are problematic for Putin because if taken seriously they would demand far more of Russia than Ukraine (as Zelensky was quick to notice). The United States might have to push to reform outdated elements of the world’s security architecture, such as the UN Security Council, so that they no longer reflect a bygone era in which a small group of big powers got to determine the course of international affairs. According to Politico , encouraged by the Biden administration, this is the shift in posture currently underway, bolstering air defences, strengthening positions in eastern Ukraine, and making it harder for Russian forces to attack from Belarus. The main reason for the assessment that it suits Putin to hang in there is that over time western support for Ukraine will drift away. Past attempts to squeeze the will for war out of Moscow economically also didn’t yield the immediate results for which experts hoped. In https://euronewstop.co.uk/when-will-german-weapons-arrive-in-ukraine.html 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. There were other commanders clearly unhappy with the higher conduct of the war. This was probably the period of maximum unease on the Russian side. If Putin now feels more confident it is because he weathered that particular storm. But it leaves a lingering “what if” question about the effect on the Russian system had there been more Ukrainian success or for that matter if the next mutineer has a clearer idea of what he is trying to achieve. Faced with the collapse of his business model Prigozhin mutinied, challenging directly Putin’s whole rationale for the war by pointing out the lack of an extraordinary Ukrainian threat to the Donbas enclaves in February 2022, before marching to the Southern Command HQ at Rostov. Then, having encountered minimal opposition and a few cheers, he carried on towards Moscow. Many in the international community feared that the conflict could spread outside of Ukraine’s borders. Before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Kyiv was already an active NATO partner, sending a handful of troops to Afghanistan during the alliance’s mission in the country. Andrew Cottey, a professor in the Department of Government and Politics at University College Cork, gave Euronews three possible outcomes for the war. The problem with the EU lies with Hungary’s veto of any funds to Ukraine, but either this will soon be overcome or, even if not, there are workarounds that will lead eventually to the desired result. At the same time, if we’re honest, we have to acknowledge that Ukraine may not achieve total military success in the next year or two. Now the U.S. and European militaries are training Ukrainian forces in Europe.

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