Notes

Ukraine war: Three ways the conflict could go in 2024
More European nations are now talking about the need to step up aid in light of concerns that the US is weakening in its resolve. Industrial-age warfare bends significant parts, or in some cases whole economies, towards the production of war materials as matters of priority. Russia's defence budget has tripled since 2021 and will consume 30% of government spending next year. For democracies, long-term consensus in support for war has always been more complicated than for autocrats with no accountability. We asked three military analysts how they think events may unfold in the coming 12 months.

There have been much publicised problems with the next large tranches of EU and US support. “There isn’t really any source of alternative power to coalesce around while Putin is healthy and alive,” said Morris. Like Stalin’s invasion of Finland in the Winter War of 1939, the Russian army is bogged down and bloodied by a much smaller, outgunned enemy.
I was more struck by his description of the problem he was trying to solve. Suppose, he wondered, if the four regions (Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia) or perhaps the whole of eastern and southern Ukraine were fully occupied. So a more likely end point here is not a negotiated peace, but rather a conflict that consolidates around lines of control. “You end up with something between a frozen conflict and an everlasting war, in which neither side has the energy or economy to win,” Nixey said.

Ukraine: How might the war end? Five scenarios
Under Article 5 of the military alliance's charter, an attack on one member is an attack on all. But Mr Putin might take the risk if he felt it was the only way of saving his leadership. If he was, perhaps, facing defeat in Ukraine, he might be tempted to escalate further.


Over three million Ukrainians have fled the country since the Russian invasion of Ukraine early on Thursday, February 24, 2022, creating Europe's largest refugee crisis since the Second World War. "We are unaware of the shifts in Russia's position described," US National Security Council spokeswoman Adrienne Watson said, per Bloomberg. The sources reportedly said that Putin could be willing to end his demands over Ukraine's neutrality and, eventually, his opposition to the country joining NATO.

Making weapons
Children look out from a carriage window as a train prepares to depart from a station in Lviv, Ukraine, on March 3, 2022. Says more than 8 million Ukrainians fled to Europe since the start of the invasion. 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.

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. "With the stalled counter-offensive, there is widespread pessimism about Ukraine's chances to defeat Russia and regain the occupied territories," Peter Rutland, professor of Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies at Wesleyan University, in Middletown, Connecticut, told Newsweek. And that has direct consequences for the future of the war in Ukraine. In the fall, Azerbaijani forces defeated Armenian troops and recaptured the disputed region of Nagorno Karabakh, three decades after Baku had suffered a military defeat to Armenia.
A second way for Ukraine to win — at least theoretically — would be through a diplomatic agreement. Last week, Ukraine ordered its forces to withdraw from the key city of Severodonetsk, which had been the target of an intense Russian offensive for weeks. While its forces are pushing to also seize the nearby city of Lysychansk, Russia on Thursday announced the withdrawal of its troops from the strategically important Snake Island. Moscow called it a “gesture of goodwill” aimed at showing it backed efforts to restart food exports from Ukrainian ports, but Kyiv hailed it as a victory, saying it had forced the Russians to retreat. "Unless circumstances change, it is unlikely that the war will end in 2024," he told Newsweek. "Despite the slow gains in 2023, Ukrainian morale remains high. The majority of the country still believes that they will win the war, and they will not accept any other outcome than the total removal of Russian forces from Ukrainian lands."

While defense spending in the United States and Europe is trending upward, in large part because of Russia’s attack, industrial capacity to crank out weapons and ammunition has emerged as a bottleneck. 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 https://euronewstop.co.uk/what-happens-if-ukraine-falls.html is a pledge from France to ship AMX-10 RC light, wheeled tanks. “Even technologically advanced, wealthy states in the Middle East eventually reached a point where they’re lobbing missiles at civilian cities, openly using chemical weapons and fighting in waves — just people rushing across the field getting shot at,” Jensen said. And long, exhaustive fighting carries its own risks, according to Benjamin Jensen, a war gaming expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.


Ukraine will do all it can to keep pressure on the Russians there to make it untenable for the Russian navy in Sevastopol, the handful of air force bases there and their logistics base at Dzankoy. Russia lacks a decisive, breakthrough capability to overrun Ukraine and will do what it can to hold on to what it currently occupies, using the time to strengthen its defences while it hopes for the West to lose the will to continue supporting Ukraine. What happens on the battlefield becomes ultimately only the symptom of that struggle.


The public is bearing the costs of war in the form of inflation, economic decline and battlefield deaths. But even if this occurs, that doesn’t mean the war itself will end with Putin’s downfall. As of this writing, the superforecasters had assigned a roughly 70 percent probability to the scenario of Russia and Ukraine not agreeing to end the conflict before October 1, 2024, the furthest-out date among the multiple-choice options presented. When the superforecasters were asked to name the year in which they expected Russia’s war against Ukraine to end, the median answer was 2025, with a minimum of 2024 and a maximum of 2037.


A conflict where a major nuclear power and energy exporter violated the sovereignty of a country that is a keystone of global food security was never going to be contained to just two countries. Now, a collection of Western tank-type vehicles is slated to arrive on the front lines this spring, with training already underway in donor countries. The vehicles carry the hope of enabling battlefield wins for Ukrainian forces that will lead to some kind of war-ending scenario — if the weapons arrive in time.

“For the time being, political support for Ukraine remains strong in the US and Europe, and the EU can hardly abandon a country to which it has just granted EU candidate status,” Shea said. Adding a democratic Ukraine in NATO would mark the utter and permanent defeat of Putin’s crusade to absorb it into a Russian empire. There are more indiscriminate artillery and rocket strikes across Ukraine. A protracted and costly World War I helped usher in the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917.
Or, Shea added, both sides reach a stalemate “where they dig in behind heavily fortified lines that remain fixed for years with a low-intensity conflict across [a] no man’s land”. Mark Temnycky, a Ukrainian-American journalist and nonresident fellow at the Atlantic Council's Eurasia Center said that delays in 2023 allowed Russia to fortify positions in the south and east of Ukraine, regroup and re-strategize. "Unfortunately, there is a very real chance that the Russo-Ukraine war will last well into 2024 and possibly beyond," 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. Either side may act boldly if it winds up on the ropes and needs an exit strategy. I have a good, safe life and follow events there from the comfort of my New York apartment. On March 16, 2022, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said that “neutral status is now being seriously discussed” and that “the sides are close to agreeing” on the specific terms of the agreement.
The Russian ruling elite saw the Soviet Union’s collapse merely as a reconfiguration in which former Soviet countries would “continue to be together in some way”, Popova told Al Jazeera, whereas Ukraine saw it as an opportunity to be fully independent. Unlike in the case of Serbia, experts do not foresee a scenario in which the US-led Western alliance would actively attack Russia. The war and Western sanctions have damaged Russia’s society and economy, but Moscow has blunted the worst effects and is unlikely to be left so weak as to be unable to pursue the war. Russia’s economy contracted by only a little more than 2 percent last year – far less than expected. The war in Ukraine conjures up a strong sense of historical déjà vu. Though recorded in 21st-century fashion through up-close-and-personal shots from mobile phone cameras and high-definition drone footage, the images being captured – of artillery duels and trench warfare – have a distinctly last-century feel to them.

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