Notes

What history shows: How will the war in Ukraine end? Russia-Ukraine war
European countries have largely outsourced much of their military capacity and thinking on strategy and security to the States through NATO. Hungary has signalled it is ready to compromise on EU funding for Ukraine - after Brussels reportedly prepared to sabotage its economy if it did not comply. Meanwhile, Moscow has claimed its forces have taken control of the village of Tabaivka in Ukraine's northeastern Kharkiv region.


It is also a clear example that for all the talk of an integrated strategy and a rules-based order, the United States at present only has a limited integrated strategy even for dealing with Europe. Anything that approaches a rules-based order is limited to some developed countries. Putting clearly defined options on the table for improving U.S./European relations with Russia might lead to more Russian willingness to accommodate Ukraine in at least some aspects of territory and economic relations. More generally, Putin will not last forever, and presenting such options moves the focus away from a relatively narrow focus on the war to a focus on its outcome.

Sky News Services
The worry is that even this is overly optimistic, although it is the strategy that western leader appears to be selling to their publics. “There is a real problem here in that we may be over-encouraged by Ukraine’s early successes in counterattacking last year,” said James Nixey, a Russia expert at the Chatham House thinktank. "There is always a risk of nuclear escalation but I do think both sides are being cautious," Partlett says.

In his TV address, Mr Zelensky said the conflict "will be bloody, there will be fighting, but it will only definitively end through diplomacy". Kyiv has reclaimed more than half of the land Russia had captured since the start of the war in February 2022 and grabbed headlines by liberating villages and towns in the south and east. "If the Russian spring offensive was successful … they could possibly take all of the area west and [to] the east of the Dnieper River, and then make a puppet state out of what's left of Ukraine," Professor Clarke added. This does not mean, however, that the United States and its European allies do not start now to work for the kind of settlement that might lead to real peace. A Russian mobilization of more conscripts, even if ill-trained and poorly equipped, could shore up Russian defenses.
“Those who are against the war have left, and those who remain are adapting,” Meister said. In https://anotepad.com/notes/krrhnked 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. 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. The challenge now is training and equipping an armored force big enough and sophisticated enough to envelop Russia’s fighting force.

What are the Ukrainian refugees who fled their country doing now? Are they able to get jobs in their host countries? — Laurel
The recent arms donations — Kyiv still wants fighter aircraft and long-range tactical missiles — are predicated on the assumption they’ll force Moscow to end its invasion and begin negotiations because military costs are too high. That objective has coexisted with an expectation that Putin’s government will probably never stop fighting, as losing the war could spell the end to his political power. So far, western countries have shown strong unity in wanting to help Ukraine force out Russia. But if Joe Biden is defeated in the US presidential election in 2024 by Donald Trump or another isolationist candidate, it could pose serious questions for Ukraine’s war effort.


He wanted to take (what were claimed to be) the former Russian parts back into Russia and turn the rest into a friendly buffer state. From this perspective Russia remains a long way from a sustainable victory. But Ukraine's air defenses were surprisingly effective, shooting down many Russian fighter jets and helicopters in the first couple months of the war. It was once reluctant but now provides Ukraine with Stinger and IRIS-T low-altitude anti-air missiles, HIMARS rocket artillery, and Patriot high-altitude air defenses. The United States and Germany have said they will supply infantry fighting vehicles. Since the counteroffensive was launched in June, only a handful of villages have been recaptured.


Around 80% of the male population complete some form of military service. Refusal can mean a jail sentence, though there is the option of civilian service out of uniform too. In Sweden and Norway, conscription is partial - not everyone gets drafted.

And the near-total control of information by the government is making dissent difficult. The partial mobilization was carried out in a chaotic fashion, and, as at the beginning of the war, caused tens of thousands of people to flee Russia. Mr Putin could declare Western arms supplies to Ukrainian forces are an act of aggression that warrant retaliation. It would show that the West is committed to creating a more stable and peaceful relationship with Russia, effectively seizing the high moral ground. However, the United States never properly implemented a program to build up Afghan and Iraqi forces that could really be effective on their own or create an effective government that could unify the Afghan or Iraqi people.
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. The war between Russia and Ukraine entered a new phase this summer when Kyiv launched its much-anticipated counteroffensive, and there were hopes Ukraine would regain the upper hand. The longer the war drags on, there is an increased chance it may slow to "more of a nasty simmer", like the one prior to the full-scale invasion in February, Ms Oliker says. The "special military operation" in Ukraine has already beaten most analysts expectations and, with more offensives planned for this year, there appears to be no end in sight. "His sole remaining function in their perception of the new era of peace will be to nominate a successor and leave the stage." Although he added that discussions around Crimea would likely have to be settled separately, possibly going to an international tribunal for discussion and a process of continuing negotiation.


According to this approach, wars will end when the problem that caused the war is resolved by fighting on the battlefield. How long the fighting will last and the form it takes depends on the extent and type of the problem. In a matter of days, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has escalated to one of the biggest military conflicts in Europe since the second world war. The fog of war can obscure our view of who is winning, who is losing, and how long all of this will last.


As for humanitarian or war crime trials, these seem unlikely to affect more than a few low to medium-level scapegoats—or even take place—as long as Putin is in power. Ukraine might at least be able to repatriate some of its citizens and children who have been taken into Russia and are being forced to become Russian citizens. Put bluntly, a workable Western grand strategy means that the political leaders in the United States and its NATO partners need to make good on their political statements and efforts. They must create and actually implement an effective overall plan for arming, training, and supplying Ukraine, as well as strengthening NATO. The war in Ukraine has exposed the fact that Russia’s conventional forces have serious limits, but it has done an equally good job of exposing NATO’s lack of war reserves, standardization and interoperability, modernization, and readiness. Germany alone remains a critical power vacuum, but most of the nations in NATO have major problems in war fighting and forward deployment capability and uncertain plans for modernization.

Equally, Ukraine’s dependence on their weapons gives Western powers a say in how Kyiv plots its strategy. Germany alone remains a critical power vacuum, but most of the nations in NATO have major problems in war fighting and forward deployment capability and uncertain plans for modernization. That’s because the longer conflicts last, the more they exhaust finite resources and, hence, the parties are more willing to gamble. However, laying the groundwork for a serious effort to negotiate real peace offers at least some chance of changing Russian and Ukrainian positions over time.
They believed the wars that they had studied could shed light on the current conflict. The war theorist Branislav Slantchev, one of Goemans’s former students and a professor at the University of California, San Diego, told me that in August he’d been asked to participate in a Zoom symposium on war termination convened by a U.S. intelligence agency. More recent theoretical literature had acknowledged the two-sidedness of war, Goemans writes, but here, too, important aspects had been missed. War theory imported from economics the concept of “bargaining,” and wars were thought to begin when the bargaining process—over a piece of territory, usually—broke down.

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