Defense News spoke with national security analysts, lawmakers and retired officials, asking each how the conflict could end. But the uncertainty surrounding President Putin and his regime, almost a year and a half into a disastrous war and after the Wagner drama, might feed the anxiety of those Nato countries who would prefer the war to end around the negotiating table, not on the battlefield. Senior Ukrainians are still doing their best to manage expectations about the summer offensive. They believe some of their Western allies, as well as supporters in the media, have become over-excited about Ukraine's army and its Nato equipment. As for Ukraine's offensive, Mr Podolyak said the Wagner mutiny did not last long enough to influence the fighting along a front of 1,800 kilometres, the longest - he said - in any war since 1945. This is partly because of the uncertainties surrounding the level of US and European support, a matter to which I will return in my conclusion. If we see the average Ukrainian’s willingness to suffer and fight lagging, it should give us cause for concern. There are no certain answers to my questions, just ones contingent on unknowable future circumstances. WASHINGTON and ROME — Germany’s promise early this year to send tanks to Ukraine marked the country’s latest concession and provided a cap to the gradual escalation in the kind of equipment allies were supplying. When I asked the official who wanted to remain anonymous about recent tactical gains in the east, including a handful of small villages, he lifted his hand with his finger and thumb pinching the air perhaps half an inch apart. 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. In his office, Oleksiy Danilov, the secretary of Ukraine's National Security and Defence Council, told the BBC that Prigozhin is not the most senior. They might become the new political elite. 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. 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. Why Putin won’t back down In the United States, he noted, everything from industrial policy to diplomatic and military strategy to domestic politics similarly will need to be refashioned for this new conflict. The conflict is “already a long war when compared to other interstate conflicts, and wars of this kind tend to cluster as either being relatively short—lasting no more than weeks or a few months—or averaging several years in duration,” Kofman told me. The Center for Strategic and International Studies has found that since 1946, more than half of interstate wars like the one in Ukraine have ended in less than a year, and that when such wars persist for more than a year, they last more than a decade on average. But Ukraine's air defenses were surprisingly effective, shooting down many Russian fighter jets and helicopters in the first couple months of the war. But Mr Putin might take the risk if he felt it was the only way of saving his leadership. If he was, perhaps, facing defeat in Ukraine, he might be tempted to escalate further. We now know the Russian leader is willing to break long-standing international norms. When will it be over? What's it going to take to get Russia out of Ukraine? — Sam Meanwhile, Western powers have pledged coveted battle tanks to Ukraine, and there is much talk of a new Russian spring offensive. Never,” United States President Joe Biden said in Poland last week, a day after a previously unannounced visit to Kyiv. Still, assume for a moment that Putin does depart, voluntarily or otherwise. One possibility is that he would be replaced by someone from his inner circle who then would make big concessions to end the war, perhaps even a return to the pre-invasion status quo with tweaks. But why would he (and it will certainly be a male) do that if Russia controls large swathes of Ukrainian land? A new Russian leader might eventually cut a deal, providing sanctions are lifted, but assuming that Putin’s exit would be a magic bullet is unrealistic. Shortly before Russia invaded last February, less than a third of Ukrainians supported foreign boots on the ground in Ukraine. While some Western governments will secretly balk at the ongoing costs of supporting Ukraine (the U.S. has already pledged over $40 billion in security assistance to Kyiv) many understand the high stakes, Barrons said. https://euronewstop.co.uk/what-will-happen-if-russia-wins-ukraine.html was not present at the discussions, however, and U.S. national security spokesperson John Kirby stated ahead of the talks that the White House did not expect any tangible deliverables. For now, at least, Ukraine's allies are standing firmly beside it, saying they will support it whatever it takes while Russia too is nowhere near giving up, Barrons said. In response, companies on both sides of the Atlantic announced plans to restart production lines for artillery shells and other weapons considered somewhat arcane until recently. But the sizable swaths of terrain Ukraine wants to liberate will take time, and to even build the necessary forces will take six months, Donahoe estimated. Ukraine war: Countdown has begun to end of Putin, say Kyiv officials The Ukrainians do not have unlimited resources of course, especially artillery ammunition and long-range precision weapons. 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. What happens on the battlefield becomes ultimately only the symptom of that struggle. A would-be challenger to Russian President Vladimir Putin has said he would end the war in Ukraine on day one of his presidency. And that has direct consequences for the future of the war in Ukraine. But to analysts, like Morris, the prospect of Putin being removed is extremely unlikely — and the chances that whoever replaces him will be less hawkish are even more remote. Russia’s allies like China – which has been a lukewarm friend to Putin in his war against Ukraine – have also been unable, or unwilling, to force him to the negotiating table. Previous wars, like the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, too have hinged on such external assistance. At different times in this conflict Russia has resembled Iran’s position, and Ukraine has mirrored Iraq’s in that war — if only incompletely — said Jeremy Morris, professor of global studies at Aarhus University in Denmark. One problem is it leads to playing down the benefits the US has always got in its conventional operations from superior firepower. The bigger question was whether the crisis would destabilise the regime. Putin dithered, not dealing with the dispute while in its early stages, and then could only be rescued by doing a deal with people he’d just called traitors, albeit one on which he later reneged (as with so many of his deals). Putin could respond to any Ukrainian efforts to claw back lost lands with air and missile strikes. The best precedent for this is perhaps the Helms–Burton Act, which extended U.S. sanctions on Cuba toward any foreign company doing business with both Cuba and the U.S. at the same time. Its counteroffensive is making progress, but slowly and painfully. With just three UK-provided Storm Shadow cruise missiles, they have forced the commander of the Black Sea Fleet to withdraw a third of his fleet from Sevastopol. The US has provided €44bn ($46bn) of military support to Ukraine, and Europe (including the UK) €18.7bn, according to Germany’s Kiel Institute. That conflict, also between neighbours, was fundamentally fought over territory and resources. Western weapons helped Iraq achieve early battlefield successes against the much larger Iran, which had to resort to costlier tactics like human wave attacks, where artillery columns charged towards Iraqi formations, risking heavy casualties in the hope of overwhelming the enemy. “And there was a proxy war overlaid onto it,” Morris told Al Jazeera, referring to the US support for Iraq in furtherance of its own interests in the Middle East. They are splitting into two broad camps, explains Ivan Krastev, of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, a think-tank in Sofia. One is the “peace party”, which wants a halt to the fighting and the start of negotiations as soon as possible. The other is the “justice party”, which thinks Russia must be made to pay dearly for its aggression. 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.
https://euronewstop.co.uk/what-will-happen-if-russia-wins-ukraine.html
