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. Putin had already opted to achieve his aims on the battlefield and was confident he could. https://euronewstop.co.uk/what-did-ukraine-look-like-before-the-war.html could respond to any Ukrainian efforts to claw back lost lands with air and missile strikes. An April estimate of the cost of rebuilding Ukraine ranged from $500 billion to $1 trillion, far beyond Kyiv’s means. Still, the botched northern campaign and the serial failures of a military that had been infused with vast sums of money and supposedly subjected to widespread modernization and reform was stunning. In the United States, the intrepid Ukrainian resistance and its battlefield successes soon produced a distinctly upbeat narrative of that country as the righteous David defending the rules and norms of the international order against Putin’s Russian Goliath. Subsequently, however, Russian forces have made significant gains in the south and southeast, occupying part of the Black Sea coast, Kherson province (which lies north of Crimea), most of Donbas in the east, and Zaporozhizhia province in the southeast. Where exactly is the U.S. aid money coming from? Is this an open-ended budget line? — Trevor President Putin declares victory and withdraws some forces, leaving enough behind to maintain some control. In his self-assessment, Phillips O’Brien concludes that he was too optimistic in assuming that the US and its allies would transfer the long-range systems necessary to attack and disrupt the supply lines behind enemy lines. And Ukrainians were putting a priority on liberating territory and that required a land offensive in some shape or form. The Brookings Institution’s Fiona Hill, a senior director for European and Russian affairs on the U.S. 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. And even once Russian forces have achieved some presence in Ukraine's cities, perhaps they struggle to maintain control. The money is coming through and Kyiv is still holding steady, battered and bruised but determined to resist Russian aggression. Putin can’t keep his forces on the offensive all year long and now has to keep an eye out for new Ukrainian strikes on assets not only in Crimea (such as the recent hit on a large landing ship in the Black Sea port of Feodosia in occupied Crimea) but also in Russia proper. Having to rely on Donald Trump both winning the November US election (the next major landmark event) and then doing what he wants is not wholly comfortable. 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 suggestion is that this is to prepare for eventual negotiations, although the main need is simply for Ukraine to show that it can play a long game. Kremlin denies report that Putin reached out to the US about talks on ending the war in Ukraine In Jensen’s view, even the collapse of Russia’s conventional force or a traditional Ukrainian victory may not mean the war is over; either could lead to nuclear escalation by Russia. Either side may act boldly if it winds up on the ropes and needs an exit strategy. Ukraine, Jensen suggested, might try a spectacular special operation to assassinate a Kremlin official, or Russia could decide to use — or simply test — nuclear weapons. It is vital to remember that anything Ukrainians, especially the ones running the country, say about their Russian enemies comes in the heat of a fight that they see, correctly, as a struggle for national survival. It started, they said, with his disastrous decision to mount a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February last year. The Wagner mutiny, and Mr Prigozhin's denunciation of the Kremlin's justifications for the war have, they said, removed what remained of Mr Putin's chances of hanging on. One is that Russian forces are still strong and will prevail in a grinding war. And the future of the EU's economic aid is seemingly dependent on Hungary's incongruous stance. He said he aimed to make Russia a great, peaceful and free country. Says more than 8 million Ukrainians fled to Europe since the start of the invasion. 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. Their families are often deprived of even elementary information about their location and wellbeing. Artem, 31, was a member of Ukraine’s Azov regiment and was taken prisoner at the end of the siege of the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol last May. It was only in March this year that Russia officially confirmed to the Red Cross that Artem was being held prisoner there; Natalia has heard nothing since and had no news from him directly. In a small apartment in a high-rise block on Kyiv’s left bank, 50-year-old Natalia struggled to remain composed as she contemplated spending a second New Year’s Eve without her son Artem. VIDEO: People in Denmark Are a Lot Happier Than People in the United States. Here’s Why. I think the danger for Ukrainians is if they really do end up with a stalemate, where they've gained very, very little territory where a lot of the equipment supplied by the West has been written off with Ukrainians having suffered very significant casualties, Shea said. Ukraine's counteroffensive is likely to make some progress in the remainder of this year, Barrons said — but nowhere near enough to end the occupation. It's become clear that the counteroffensive won't produce quick results and that success — however that might be measured in terms of retaking Russian-occupied territory — is not guaranteed. While the bipartisan majority of lawmakers support arming Kyiv, 57 Republicans voted against a $40 billion emergency aid supplemental in May. House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., made several concessions to those Ukraine aid skeptics to secure the votes to win his protracted speakership battle. But Smith also said ATACMS producer Lockheed Martin no longer makes the missiles, and the U.S. military still needs them in its stockpiles. 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. 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. Before the war, Putin pushed for a neutral Ukraine that would foreswear all military alliances. That alliance’s decision, at its 2008 Bucharest summit, to open the door to that country (and Georgia) was irrevocable. A month after the Russian invasion began, Zelensky put neutrality on the table, but it was too late. President Zelensky is either assassinated or flees, to western Ukraine or even overseas, to set up a government in exile. “Futility” was my most used word in 2023 in connection with Russian policy. “If that continues, we will all eventually lose interest in saving the system. How long the fighting will last and the form it takes depends on the extent and type of the problem. 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. The invaders’ key advantage is the number of troops available – about 300,000, almost all of whom are already committed to Ukraine. Ukraine’s war reaches the one-year mark with no immediate end in sight. Both sides want to carry on fighting, and any negotiated peace looks a long way off. 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. In addition, nearly 13 million Ukrainians (including nearly two-thirds of all its children) are either displaced in their own country or refugees in various parts of Europe, mainly Poland. Millions of lives, in other words, have been turned inside out, while a return to anything resembling normalcy now seems beyond reach. A Christmas Eve story in the New York Times claimed that Putin might be trying to find a way out. The rest is funding the Ukrainian government (this helps pay the salaries of Ukrainian government workers) and humanitarian aid to help the millions of Ukrainians who have been driven from their homes. People often accuse Putin of wanting to resurrect the Soviet Union. Yet one could argue that Putin is more interested in gathering the lands of the Russian empire. In fact, in his speeches about Ukraine, he criticizes the Soviet leadership for creating Ukraine, the Soviet republic that later became an independent country, on a whim. 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. This includes overwhelming domestic support for joining NATO and the European Union, despite both blocs expressing hesitation to Ukraine's membership for decades preceding the war. 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. 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. Then, at its July, 2024 summit in Washington, NATO would invite Ukraine to join the Western alliance, guaranteeing the security of all territory controlled by the Ukrainian government at that point under Article 5 of the NATO treaty. Ukraine's counteroffensive is likely to make some progress in the remainder of this year, Barrons said — but nowhere near enough to end the occupation. Such economic headwinds, along with the diminution of the early euphoria created by Ukraine’s impressive battlefield successes, could produce “Ukraine fatigue” in the West. Meanwhile, Ukraine’s biggest supporters, including the Biden administration, could soon find themselves preoccupied with economic and political challenges at home and ever less eager to keep billions of dollars in economic aid and weaponry flowing. In explaining why, Reiter pointed to “the heavy diplomatic costs of [Russia] using nuclear weapons, the lack of military utility of using nuclear weapons,” and the risk that such use would “increase NATO military involvement” in the war. Timothy Snyder, a historian of Eastern Europe at Yale, told me he stands by an assessment he made in October in which he similarly argued that a Russian nuclear detonation was highly unlikely.
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