Notes

When and how will Ukraine's war with Russia end?
Hein Goemans It seems to me that Putin might have tried it early on the war, but he can’t do it anymore. I mean, I can tell you one very specific instance in which you might wanna do it. First of all, it’s not gonna be very effective on the battlefield. You’re not gonna get the mass forces in one place that you can isolate it.


Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Kyiv will fully investigate the circumstances around the shooting down of a Russian military transport plane allegedly carrying 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war on Wednesday. Moscow alleges that Ukraine shot down the Russian military transport plane, an Ilyushin-76, using Western missiles. It said the plane was on its way to a prisoner exchange, which Kyiv confirmed. Six crew members and three Russian military escorts were also killed in the crash. Russia’s defence ministry also said its Iskander missiles had destroyed weaponry supplied by the west in the Ukraine’s second largest city, Kharkiv, north-west of Luhansk. A Ukrainian interior ministry official said Russian forces were trying to approach Kharkiv, which experienced intense shelling earlier in the war, and turn it into a “frontline city”.

Ukraine's air force commander slams 'frantic Russian propaganda' over plane crash
Depending on how long the war lasts, it remains far from certain whether lawmakers will keep funding Ukraine aid packages. Congress provided more than $100 billion in aid to Kyiv since Russia invaded last year, including $61.4 billion in military aid. Retired Maj. Gen. Patrick Donahoe, a former commander of the U.S. Army’s maneuver warfare school at Fort Benning, Georgia, said Western upgrades offer Ukraine the chance to dominate the close fight with Russian adversaries and conclude the tactical fighting to its advantage. Also in the mix is a pledge from France to ship AMX-10 RC light, wheeled tanks. 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.

The thing that is striking is that there is a cap on Ukrainian aims. "There may be an effort to create it but the Ukrainians are not going to go gently into the good night. They are going to fight like hell." Maybe it takes longer for Russian forces to secure cities like Kyiv whose defenders fight from street to street.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said last week that the military had asked for up to 500,000 additional conscripts but said he needed to hear "more arguments" to support the sensitive and costly proposal. The Kremlin said it would agree to an international investigation into Wednesday's plane crash in the Belgorod region that killed 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war — if Ukraine admitted to committing a crime in shooting the plane down. Russian prisoners exchanges will continue, a senior Russian official said Thursday, despite Wednesday's plane crash that saw 65 Ukrainian prisoners of war killed, alongside nine Russians, prompting further tension and hostility between Moscow and Kyiv. Russia blamed Ukraine for the plane crash, saying it had used Western missiles to shoot the military transport Ilyushin-76 plane down over the border region of Belgorod, killing all on board, while the aircraft was en route to a prisoner exchange. And even once Russian forces have achieved some presence in Ukraine's cities, perhaps they struggle to maintain control.

Europe bans Russian oil products, the latest strike on the Kremlin war chest
There has to be some notion that he says this is gonna be too costly. Russian forces were bombarding Kharkiv, and they had taken territory in the east and south as far as Kherson, and surrounded the port city of Mariupol. Russia has shown that it is committed to a long conflict in Ukraine and that it has the capacity to send hundreds of thousands of men to war. Putin claimed in his end-of year news conference that 617,000 troops were currently active in Ukraine. Another year of war in Europe has undoubtedly drained Western military resources and the political appetite to maintain massive amounts of military aid for Ukraine. In the meantime, the ISW noted in an analysis, "Ukrainian forces establish and consolidate defensive positions to conserve manpower and resources for future offensive efforts."


Alexei Kulemzin said Ukraine was behind the strike on the eastern Ukrainian city, which is currently under Russian occupation. “The Ukrainians are also hoping that new deliveries of US and Western heavy weapons, particularly long-range artillery, will help them to turn the tide against the Russian army and regain some territory,” Shea said. Moreover, such a scenario would not be politically justifiable for Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy. That would make him the president who not only lost the war but also large parts of his country.


Instead, he was urging Britain to prepare for a mass mobilisation of tens of thousands of people, should war break out. That would require planning and a change of mindset in government. As https://diigo.com/0vz5ua stated several times in his speech on Wednesday, "Ukraine really matters". Russia's ambitions, he said, were not just about seizing territory but "about defeating our system and way of life politically, psychologically and symbolically". However, the continuous push for more weapons is countered by concerns in some Western circles of being drawn into a war with Russia. As some experts have suggested, Putin has the upper hand in being able to escalate the war.


The U.S. is not providing F-16s to Ukraine but has authorized allies to provide their own jets. It didn't, and the prospect of a breakthrough in 2024 is also unlikely, military experts and defense analysts told CNBC. At the start of 2023, hopes were high that a much-vaunted Ukrainian counteroffensive — expected to be launched in the spring — would change the dial in the war against Russia. Brendan Cole is a Newsweek Senior News Reporter based in London, UK. His focus is Russia and Ukraine, in particular the war started by Moscow. He also covers other areas of geopolitics including China.

"The document referred to in the Financial Times article is a background note written by the secretariat of the council under its own responsibility which describes the current status of the Hungarian economy," the statement by the senior EU official said. The Week is part of Future plc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. Kasintsev was sentenced on Thursday to one year and nine months for helping her to hide, despite testimony from Trepova that she had never met him before and he had nothing to do with the bomb. He accused Russia of "playing with the lives of Ukrainian prisoners, with the feelings of their relatives and with the emotions of our society." And many countries have fought on in what looked like desperate situations for a long time, because they could motivate the people and because they thought there was some chance of realistic victory, even a very small one.
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