In 2024, the trumpets of the apocalypse and alarming sirens will constantly sound in the system of international relations.

Romania will hear these sirens more and more clearly, more and more strongly, because the front in the south of Ukraine will move to the west. High-level geopolitical storms in the Black Sea region will continue to wreak havoc in eastern Romania in 2024. The region’s geopolitical thermometer will remain on Red and in 2024

It is unrealistic to predict changes in the paradigm of the war/Ukrainian front in 2024.

Neither Russia nor Ukraine have the resources for a strategic breakthrough at the front, and there won’t be any in the near future. Although external political and military-technical support for Ukraine will decrease, from Washington to Berlin to Bratislava, it will remain large enough to prevent a significant degradation of Ukraine’s ability to resist Moscow’s revisionist tanks.

Russia could gradually and confidently seize the tactical initiative along the entire front line, but without strategic military victories which was prepared for a long time, since the beginning of last year, Kremlinblind singers at the court of the little king.

The current front line will become a line of resistance for Ukraine in 2024.

The signs that force us to accept this have definitely multiplied the territorial goals of the Russian Federation in this war are much broader than those already achieved; this is the westward expansion of the current territorial corridor created in the south of the Kherson and Zaporizhia regions (both in terms of its length and width), and the complete blocking of Ukraine’s access to the Black Sea coast, the full occupation of the Donetsk region, and the confirmed expansion of this territorial corridor in the east, in the Kharkiv region.

I am increasingly convinced that the current imperialist and revisionist project of Moscow has as its territorial goal the occupation of very large territories of Ukraine, in the south and east of it, based on plans that include control over large cities in the south (Odesa) and east (Kharkiv), pay off de facto these cities and regions of the same name, as well as military advance along the current southern corridor towards the city of Odesa and beyond it, to the future borders with Romania.

We have many reasons to believe this Republic of Moldova (as a whole, and not only districts, districts not under the control of Chisinau authorities PRIDNISTROVSKY) she also enters menumodern Russian imperialist project territorial occupation in the north-west of the Black Sea.

Fortunately Moscow does not have now resources needed to achieve these goals. But they will remain on the priority strategic agenda of Russian revisionism for many years to come. Moreover, it seems Now Russia is testing “flying recovery” of resourceswithout waiting for a break in work that would traditionally have given her an opportunity to restore those resources.

Related goalsat the regional and global levels (weakening of the cohesion of the West, degradation of the hegemonic role of the West/USA in international relations, inhibition of the project a rule-based worldreconfiguration/recalibration of the global role, restarting the hegemonic regional project to support this global role, restoration of spheres of influence, etc.), will also remain on the strategic agenda of the Russian Federation, periodically articulating expansionist movements or broad hybrid volutes.

It will have a significant impact on the fate of this war the ability to restore and consolidate Moscow’s resources. The current fatigue from the war in Ukraine, which is growing in Washington and in major European capitals, may contribute to Moscow’s preparation for the next active military phase of the war in Ukraine, from which Volodymyr Volodymyrovych expects the fall of Odesa and Kharkiv. Left to build, Putin could gradually expand his current territorial conquests in Ukraine, at the same time, several tank regiments moved through Buchag and along both banks of the Dniester..

Russia is better prepared for a war of attrition than Ukraine and its external partners. Expansion sine die the current war is beneficial to Moscow. Volodymyr Volodymyrovych appears to have crossed the high threshold of domestic risk posed by a possible palace coup in the Kremlin by leading and/or hijacking the Prigozhin rebellion. However, broad social tension in Russia exists, is expressed and is constantly growing the prince seems to have reconciled again in the palace. Kremlin generals periodically raise cardboard swords against him, simulating an uprising for bloodthirsty bloggers in the occult underground of the eternally postponed, eternally illusory opposition.

Only the strategic success of the Ukrainian army at the front, which is unlikely in the short and even medium term, could encourage the rebel spirits in the Kremlin, could give them the necessary ammunition to overthrow Putin by force. In the absence of these strategic successes, Volodymyr Volodymyrovych will go on a campaign to fanfare not only in the supposed elections of March 2024, but throughout the entire modern history of Europe.

The election militia in the Kremlin has already calculated Elect at the election masquerade in March 2024. His theoretical opponents, carefully selected by the system so as not to commit the election police to mass distortions of voting at polling stations, will achieve single-digit points, and Elect will get a false rating (76%-79%) to confirm the Kremlin’s propaganda machine’s multi-layered narratives about the population’s supposed support for the new imperialist project of the empty king. The prisons and cemeteries of Mother Russia once again became a place of exile for dissidents.

Those who believed that the solution to Ukraine’s possible victory in this war would lie with Moscow (in the form of regime change that would reset the tsar’s belligerent foreign policy goals) will remain disappointed in 2024. “Russian mole” “Will not explode either in 2024 or in the following years, in the absence of noticeable successes on the front of the Ukrainian army.

The need for an operational break is obvious to both sides. This hiatus can be disguised as a successful negotiation of a temporary ceasefire/armistice agreement.

It is possible that the current military phase of the war will end with an armistice/ceasefire agreement. I foresee it such a truce can be reached in the first half of 2025, when a very likely change of administration in Washington could have its first devastating effects. I see no signs of such a deal in 2024, in which the hope of maintaining international (US priority) support for Ukraine at a significant level is slowly fading.

The year 2024 will not bring significant changes to the current paradigm of the war in Ukraine. It will gradually shift the focus from mutual hopes to strategic progress at the front (fortifications at the front) create a favorable position for negotiations on a ceasefire agreement (fortifications on the front after the front). These talks could take place and be concluded in the first half of 2025 after much groping and collective awareness and at the peak of the freeze/freeze de facto of the front according to parameters similar to the existing ones.

Hope for negotiations for one is illusory Agreement–frame political to end the war (ending a the settlement agreement) and predictions about the victory of one of the parties through capitulation are just as unreliable de jure another This war will be a war without victories and winners.

Most likely, the war against Ukraine will last many years and unfold as a sequence of active and passive military phases. As we have said, the current active military phase is expected to end in the first months of 2025 with a temporary ceasefire agreement, which will cover the operational pause and the corresponding transition to the training of both sides for the new active military phases.

But this gap can be fatal for Ukraine, for several reasons: it will allow to consolidate the Russian occupation regime in the current occupied territories; will accustom the West to the option of moderate, facade support; it formalizes and trivializes the war of attrition as the perception of an inexorable reality, an acceptable routine; will create systemic fatigue of the West from the Ukrainian issue; will increase internal disagreements in Ukraine (2024, according to forecasts, will be a year of much greater internal turbulence in Ukraine than in the Russian Federation); will make it possible to emphasize the existing gap in the functioning of national military industries, which is currently playing in favor of the Russian Federation; will significantly reduce the resources of political, diplomatic, military and military-technical support of Ukraine by the West.

In the new active military phase of the war, Ukraine will have more modest external support. Then more and more external partners will ask for a peace without victoryand those who make decisions in Kyiv will have to make tragic, almost impossible decisions.

Capitulation of the Capitol (the change of the American administration after the presidential elections in November 2024 and the inevitable changes associated with it in the foreign policy of the United States, which are understood, among other things, as a proposal to tame relations with Moscow through gift exchange) will come close to agreeing on a possible ceasefire in Ukraine, but the white flag in Kyiv will never be raised.

Russia’s occupying presence in the northwestern Black Sea and Ukraine’s legitimate goal of liberating territories illegally occupied by the Russian military in this war will keep the extended Black Sea region permanently inflamed. The war anxiety will not subside for many more years.

In this context, our absolute priority is create security architectures/guarantees for Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova which could slow down, stop and destroy Russia’s military project for this part of Europe and the world. _Read the entire article and comment on Contributors.ro