“I’m ready to resign tomorrow. I’m completely disappointed with our army (…) We don’t have an army. You know how we fight? With what’s left of the Second World War. But the Ukrainians have everything, our technology. With them people practically do not fight. Their equipment fights, and we, on the contrary, equipment does not fight, because we do not have it or it is broken. We have people sent to the front and there are almost none left, at least in my regiment. Some were killed, or they just wrote a letter of resignation and left here. Understand: a destroyed village with seven streets, I accepted for two and a half months. This village is now ours. There is only untruth on TV, but there is no truth.” (avretulul.ro)

Russian soldier talking on the phone with a friend at home

On Thursday, July 7 of this year, Vladimir Putin, in his speech to the leaders of the parliamentary groups in the Duma, summarized how the themes of Russian pride are manifested after the army managed to gain control over the Luhansk region (along with the withdrawal of the Ukrainian army from Lysytsyansk):

“Today we hear that they want to defeat us on the battlefield. What do you say, let them try. I have heard many times that the West wants to fight with us to the last Ukrainian. This is a tragedy for the Ukrainian people, but it seems that everything is moving in this direction ( . (…)

We are told that we started a war in Donbas, in Ukraine. No, it was started by the same collective West, organizing and supporting the anti-constitutional armed coup in Ukraine in 2014, then encouraging and justifying the genocide of the people of Donbas.

The collective West is the direct instigator, the culprit of what is happening today (…) if the same West wanted to provoke a conflict in order to move to a new stage of the fight against Russia, to a new stage of containment. of our country, we can say that he succeeded to some extent. A war was unleashed and sanctions were imposed. Under normal circumstances, this would probably be difficult to do.”[1]

In essence, Vladimir Putin repeated the same thesis that Moscow had no choice but to attack Ukraine to respond to Western provocations and liberate Russian-speaking regions allegedly subjected to systematic genocide by the armed forces and paramilitary forces of the Kyiv government.

The Russian military is relentlessly pursuing its goals, Putin insisted in his speech, even if they are not doing so with all the force they are capable of. Even under these conditions, Luhansk was liberated, and the mission continues in Donetsk to gain control of this region in its entirety.

The West, Vladimir Putin warned lawmakers, showed its audacity when it imposed economic sanctions to weaken Russia and began supplying arms to Ukraine, before declaring that the goal was to defeat Russia, even at the cost of tens of thousands of lives. Ukrainians, which would actually be the real tragedy of this confrontation.

However, Russia does not want to give in and will relentlessly pursue its goals, calibrating its military efforts (Putin finally uttered the word “war”[2]) regarding the degree of resistance he will face, the Russian president made himself clear. If Kyiv were ready to return to negotiations, pragmatically, to accept Russia’s main demands, the destruction and loss of life would stop. Of course, for this Kyiv would have to get out of the influence of the West.

Summarizing the topics of Putin’s speech, I prepared the transition to what may happen in Ukraine in the next period. Russia, of course, has not changed its territorial and political goals, as they could be deciphered from the first month of the war: the conquest of Eastern and Southern Ukraine and their transfer under the influence of Russia either as an independent state or as part of/part of the Federation and replacing the Kyiv regime with a puppet regime.

These goals are not negotiable from the Kremlin’s side, from Moscow’s point of view, only the way to achieve these goals is negotiable. An aspect that Kyiv knows very well, so it preferred to leave the table of diplomatic negotiations.

Ukraine has decided to play another card that it hopes to win, and for its strategy to be successful, it needs strong support from the West. Having a Soviet-style arsenal at its disposal, Kyiv successfully thwarted the blitzkrieg strategy, inflicted significant losses on the Russians and pushed them away from Kyiv, Kharkiv, and Odesa.

With heavy weapons and sophisticated technologies obtained from the West, Ukraine hopes for more, as it has persistently repeated for the past two months: since August of this year, with a force of about 1 million people, Kyiv wants to recapture territories from the United States. retreated so far, to the east and south. This is what the victory of Ukraine and Ukrainians looks like.

On the other hand, Russia began to transform the social order in the territories under its control according to the Russian model, offering citizenship, introducing the ruble into circulation, allowing access only to authorized Russian or foreign TV channels, switching to Russian-language television. educational system. This is what Moscow’s victory looks like.

The West wants the victory of Ukraine, but it is still not clear how it defines it, because there is no unified vision. The United States, Great Britain, or Poland have made no secret of their support for a total victory for Ukraine, but they are unlikely to provide Kyiv with the full amount of high-performance, high-tech equipment and weapons it needs, and for how long. .

Other countries, such as France and even Germany, consider the victory of Ukraine to be the fact that it will remain a democratic state, that it will continue to have access to the Black Sea, even if it has to finally give up Crimea, Luhansk and Donetsk after negotiations, and that the Ukrainian state (after the territorial redistribution established by treaties and with appropriate international guarantees) will become a legal part of the West, as a member of the European Union.

SCENARIOS OF VICTORY OF RUSSIA

AFP analysis conducted after the withdrawal of the Ukrainian army from Lysytsyansk, citing analysts who closely follow the conflict – Pierre Grasser, a research fellow at the Sirice laboratory at the Sorbonne University, Pierre Razou, director of the Mediterranean Foundation for Strategic Studies (FMSS). ) and Oleksandr Grinberg, an analyst at the Jerusalem Institute for Security and Strategy (ISSI) – consider the Kremlin’s options regarding the continuation of the conflict in Ukraine[3].

We cannot know for sure whether the analyzes of specialized Western experts and their predictions will be completely confirmed in the future, but what we have on the table now is about all that analysts and planners have at their disposal; given that Putin and the Kremlin have taken decisions in the past few months that analysts rate as unlikely, and given the logic of war, many of the current predictions may contradict the complex reality of the conflict in Ukraine and be overcome.

Returning to the opinions of experts, they believe that at the moment it is impossible to prevent the Russian army from taking full control of Donbas, which in one way or another has been partially owned by pro-Russian separatists since 2014, even if pockets of resistance will continue to remain. Ukrainians

Russia will try to take control of Sloviansk and Kramatorsk and their surroundings, where it hopes to find a pro-Russian population that is not hostile to the occupation. On the other hand, although in the south the Russians control Kherson, they have not been able to stabilize the situation on the Black Sea; the best example being that they were unable, despite their naval superiority, to maintain control of Snake Island.

Only control of the coast will provide Moscow with territorial continuity with Crimea, which it annexed in 2014, and access to Ukrainian ports on the Black Sea. Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second city and very close to the Russian border, remains a target for the Russian military. But a battle for control of this large city of approximately 1.5 million inhabitants would be extremely destructive, and a siege could last even more than a year.

Cornel Kodice believes that at the military level, Putin’s belief in victory is supported by the time, material and human gap between the military efforts, which are timely applied at the front by the Russian troops, and the elements of support that come from the West for the Ukrainian army.[4]

Disengagement allows for the creation and maintenance of local advantage, celebrating successes on the ground and then turning them into political trophies or perhaps bargaining chips to end the conflict.

Vladimir Putin is convinced that he and his regime can survive well beyond the critical period in which Western democracies will have to deal with the complex consequences of war. Democracies are fragile, and if Russia continues sanctions long enough, the West may lose competition with dictatorships for stability.

HOPES AND DILEMMA

Ukraine is dealing with an aggressive Russian Empire, not being able to predict when this ordeal it is going through will end, because the leadership in Moscow is determined not to give up its claims on this sovereign country, which is our neighbor.

The West, which is actually an entity that speaks with many voices, is the only support for Kyiv and Ukrainians who want to free themselves from the imperial clutches, but they also have their own problems that need to be solved in order to cope with the challenges of the future.

This West knows very well what it can do to help Ukraine, but at the same time it is signaling through the voice of some leaders and what limits it sees, at least for the moment, in the actions it is promoting to help Kyiv.

These limits are due to the reluctance of the population of the West (that is, the electorate) to face the prospect of a deficit or an increase in the cost of living, not to mention the fear of direct participation in a war with a country like Russia. And in a democratic country, after all, it is the electorate that determines the limits of the executive political mandate.

In the West, we can talk about the restoration of Ukraine, about the provision of military and humanitarian aid, about how Ukraine will find its place in the future next to the democratic states of the world and in the European Union. But when it comes to cold homes in winter, queues at gas stations, rising food prices, which can alienate voters and fuel extremist and nationalist parties, things change.

Is it possible to imagine that the West will steadfastly continue to support Ukraine until the (illusory) victory, displacing the Russian army from the currently occupied territories of Donbass and Crimea, that is, for who knows how many more years? It doesn’t look like it. Therefore, the large-scale counteroffensive that Kyiv is planning for August, and especially its results, are extremely important.

Kyiv has high hopes for this counteroffensive, which believes not only that it will be successful, but also that it will be able to topple Putin’s regime. On the other hand, the Kremlin, through Vladimir Putin, has declared that it is ready to respond with all means – and, no doubt, it still has enough – to the Ukrainian counteroffensive to prove that the imprint of the currently occupied territories desired by Kyiv is illusory.

The West also has its own fears. If Moscow does not limit its military response to a Ukrainian counteroffensive, for example by resorting to tactical nuclear weapons, what will the West’s next step be? To intervene militarily, raising the prospect of a future and difficult-to-control global conflict?

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