Notes

Ukraine-Russia war latest: Hungary signals 'major shift' in Ukraine funding stance; Russia claims it has taken control of Kharkiv village
Watch how the rest of the world regards the Kremlin’s imperial ambitions. Expect any negotiated settlement to be fragile and reliant on third-party intervention. And don’t anticipate a dramatic finish, such as a Russian nuclear detonation in Ukraine or the overthrow of Vladimir Putin in Russia. Notably, in a reversal of perceptions a year ago, some experts could envision a decisive Ukrainian victory against Russia, but none forecasts a decisive Russian win against Ukraine. As for Ukraine's offensive, Mr Podolyak said the Wagner mutiny did not last long enough to influence the fighting along a front of 1,800 kilometres, the longest - he said - in any war since 1945. Mr Danilov said they included security forces, officials and representatives of Russia's oligarchs, who believe that Mr Putin's decision to launch a full invasion of Ukraine in February last year has been a personal disaster for them as well as a threat to Russia.

The government says it wants to spend 2.5% of national income on defence - but has still not said when. The United Kingdom will stand with Ukraine today, tomorrow and for as long as it takes. But he said even that is not enough - so the Army should be designed to expand rapidly "to enable the first echelon, resource the second echelon, and train and equip the citizen army that must follow". And for millions of Ukrainian people the fears over how the crisis will impact their daily lives is ever present. 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.
The West could — as Ukraine has sought — supply even more sophisticated weapons, faster, in the hope of convincing Russia that it cannot win. Both sides are now digging in as Moscow’s “special military operation”, which was intended to last a matter of days, grinds into another year of attritional warfare. Russia is throwing waves of recruits and mercenaries into close-quarters battles around towns like Bakhmut and Vuhledar. With daily events keeping us both absorbed and distraught, it remains difficult to look beyond the horizon and imagine how the war in Ukraine might end. In the days following Russia’s invasion, it was impossible to know. Second, he controls the state media apparatus and has censored other media organisations, limiting the information available to the general public.

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In theory, they could threaten to curtail support if they grow weary of the war or if Ukraine, encouraged by its military advances, crosses a threshold that could spark an escalation unacceptable to the West. Previous wars, like the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, too have hinged on such external assistance. At different times in this conflict Russia has resembled Iran’s position, and Ukraine has mirrored Iraq’s in that war — if only incompletely — said Jeremy Morris, professor of global studies at Aarhus University in Denmark. Without a critical mass of support, resistance to the Russian military will fall apart and Ukraine will lose the war.


Russia’s economy contracted by only a little more than 2 percent last year – far less than expected. The US and its allies were quick to provide aid that has been vital to Ukraine’s ability to defend itself. 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.

Ukraine will press Russia around Crimea
Viewed from any angle, Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine is nothing short of an unmitigated disaster for Russia. Having failed in the pursuit of its war aims, Russia’s campaign in the last week has achieved little except an increase in its own casualties and equipment losses. “If Russia were to use nuclear weapons, the West might then become directly involved in the war in Ukraine in terms of putting forces in [the country]. Under Nato's Article 5 the entire western military alliance is obliged to come to the defence of any member state that comes under attack.

A month after the Russian invasion began, Zelensky put neutrality on the table, but it was too late. "We want peace around the world," 70-year-old Kyiv resident Nina Albul recently told my colleague Hanna Palamarenko, "but we also want the world to know that it's okay for enslaved people to fight back." Conversely, that roughly tracks with the results of an Ipsos poll from January, which found about 7 in 10 people in Western countries think they should "avoid getting involved militarily" in Ukraine, while also "supporting sovereign countries when they are attacked by other countries."
Twenty million Soviets — Russians, Ukrainians and others — died fighting Hitler's armies. This is an edited and abbreviated transcript of our conversation. The most important question in all of this, Greene says, is what the west’s response will be because their priority is keeping Russia isolated at least to some degree to stop them from waging further war. “The more you keep Russia isolated the harder it is for them to reinvest in their military,” he says.


“So sanctions actually do become a tool of military engagement.” But in the context of a settlement, the international community would need to prioritise peace, not maximum humiliation for Russia. https://richard-andresen.hubstack.net/russia-ukraine-war-attacks-on-russian-enlistment-offices-signal-dissatisfaction-with-war-says-uk-as-it-happened-ukraine , head of the Ukraine Forum and the Russia and Eurasia programme at Chatham House, told me that a real victory for Ukraine is one where the country is in a more secure position than it was before the war began. This is the second Russian-Ukrainian war in the last decade, she notes, and a meaningful victory should stop a third war from ever happening. Practically speaking, in the short term, Orysia says, “Ukraine will have to push Russia out of as much territory as possible, including the occupation in the south and in Donbas”. Scott Boston, a senior defense analyst at the Rand Corp., told CNBC on Friday that the Russians "have a whole lot of combat power left and a lot of capacity to scale up the violence, which seems to already be happening. This thing could really drag on for a long time." Less than two weeks into Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the country's people and armed forces continue to mount a staunch — and undeniably brave — resistance against Russian forces.


Maybe Russian forces get bogged down, hampered by low morale, poor logistics and inept leadership. Maybe it takes longer for Russian forces to secure cities like Kyiv whose defenders fight from street to street. The fighting has echoes of Russia's long and brutal struggle in the 1990s to seize and largely destroy Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. Russian forces may try to push again along the entire front, at least to secure all of the Donbas region.


“The narrative is the great struggle of the Cold War,” he said, a framing that has helped to attract new recruits. Perhaps Italian analyst Lucio Caracciolo was the most pessimistic of all. “This war will last indefinitely, with long pauses for cease-fires,” he said. WASHINGTON and ROME — Germany’s promise early this year to send tanks to Ukraine marked the country’s latest concession and provided a cap to the gradual escalation in the kind of equipment allies were supplying. "They understand the wider strategic point, which is that this is a confrontation between the West and Russia and at stake is not just the future territorial integrity of Ukraine but the security construct for Europe and the West with Russia," he noted. "I think the danger for Ukrainians is if they really do end up with a stalemate, where they've gained very, very little territory where a lot of the equipment supplied by the West has been written off with Ukrainians having suffered very significant casualties," Shea said.


In his October assessment, Snyder floated one scenario in which Ukrainian military victories prompt a power struggle in Moscow that leads Russia to withdraw from Ukraine, as Putin and his rivals judge that the armed forces loyal to them are most useful on the homefront. But what Snyder envisions is Putin prioritizing his political survival in Russia over his personal and ideological designs on Ukraine, not necessarily Putin’s removal from power. Over the past year, there has been an ebbing and flowing fear of the war in Ukraine ending apocalyptically, with Russia resorting to the use of nuclear weapons, stirred most recently by Putin suspending cooperation in the nuclear-arms-control treaty with the United States known as New START. But many experts I turned to were not seriously concerned about such an outcome. Persuading countries in regions such as Africa and the Middle East to deny Russia its imperial schemes will require a major shift in how the United States and its allies describe the stakes of the war and even in how they articulate their broader worldview, Hill argued. Rather than framing the war as a struggle between democracies and autocracies or East versus West, U.S. and European leaders should make the case that the Kremlin, in its thirst for empire, has “violated the UN Charter [and] international laws” that keep other countries safe as well.

Russian forces may try to push again along the entire front, at least to secure all of the Donbas region. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian authorities see the continuing destruction of their country and conclude that political compromise might be better than such devastating loss of life. But for all of Ukraine's heart and courage in facing down multiple, sustained attacks from Russia's military in the north, east and south of the country, many analysts and strategists believe it is only a matter of time before Ukraine is overwhelmed by Moscow's military might. Scott Boston, a senior defense analyst at the Rand Corp., told CNBC on Friday that the Russians "have a whole lot of combat power left and a lot of capacity to scale up the violence, which seems to already be happening. This thing could really drag on for a long time."
Here's my website: https://richard-andresen.hubstack.net/russia-ukraine-war-attacks-on-russian-enlistment-offices-signal-dissatisfaction-with-war-says-uk-as-it-happened-ukraine