Notes

Ukraine war: Three ways the conflict could go in 2024
And at some moments they came very close to winning, right? So it’s a somewhat naive perspective because I think that Russia has plenty of hardware and mobilisation potential to keep fighting for a long time. The question is, do the Russians think that they still have a chance to score the necessary victory? So, I mean, if they push back the Russians all the way to the 1991 borders, the Ukrainians are gonna say, “We’re willing to settle,” and it would be genuine. I don’t see why the Russians would ever accept it, to repeat myself. https://houmann-monroe-2.federatedjournals.com/ukraine-invasion-russians-feel-the-pain-of-international-sanctions mean, Putin may be removed, but then there will be a more hawkish leader who’ll replace him.

Russia has also made advances north east of Kupiansk, north of Bakhmut, and south west of Avdiivka, according to the latest ISW assessment. Ukraine expert Terrell Jermaine Starr recently told me, "every step that Ukrainians took towards Europe came as a direct result of Russian aggression." 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. For his part, Trump has said that he'd be able to resolve the Ukraine war "in one day" if he was reelected, saying he'd convince the leaders of Ukraine and Russia to make a deal. 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.
"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." 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. This includes overwhelming domestic support for joining NATO and the European Union, despite both blocs expressing hesitation to Ukraine's membership for decades preceding the war.

For many outside the west, Russia is not important enough to hate
After Mr Macron and the German Chancellor Olaf Scholz held an 80-minute phone call with Mr Putin on Saturday, aimed at exploring ways to enable Ukraine to export grain through the Black Sea, Latvia's deputy prime minister lashed out on social media. But despite the dire state of Russia’s forces and the years-long quagmire its economy faces, Putin has shown no indication he intends to scale back his goals or seek a way out of the war, insisting Russia’s victory is “inevitable” and its “goals will be met in full”. When he ordered the invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Putin’s original plan envisioned Russian forces capturing Kyiv within as little as three days. Russian troops took control of Kherson, a city of 280,000 people. Former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker told CNBC he believes American and EU aid packages for Ukraine will be approved come January, saying he believed this funding would tide Ukraine over for another year, militarily.


The United States, as Ukraine’s most important military supporter, remains the center of gravity when it comes to an eventual outcome for the conflict. American leadership has so far been largely united in their support for Kyiv. “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. As the war enters its second year, the spigot of military aid is still gushing. But industrial capacities are spotty, and nations have started to scrutinize how much equipment they can spare while maintaining their own self-defense requirements and that of NATO.

Ukraine war could last for years, warns Nato chief
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.


So there is no incentive or there’s no even belief or need or just there would be no sanity in the idea of decisively defeating Russia inside Russia. You have to defeat decisively the Russians in Ukraine to push them back. They want to take over entire Ukraine and perhaps even, being realistic about this, subsequently in Moldova and other parts of the former Russian empire, whether we’d be the Czarist or the Communist one. Hein Goemans So I study war because it’s terrible, and because it’s truly terrible. I was raised, you know, in the Netherlands and with family members who had fought and who had died in the second world war in the camps and, you know, and elsewhere.

Kherson's underground resistance: How ordinary people fought Russia from the shadows
Now the U.S. and European militaries are training Ukrainian forces in Europe. Most U.S. training takes place at U.S. military bases in Germany. And even though the fall of the Soviet Union was notable for its lack of bloodshed, many in Ukraine refer to today's conflict as a true "war of independence." All these measures were approved when both the House and the Senate were controlled by Democrats. Some Republicans are saying the U.S. should stop funding Ukraine.

I mean, I suppose we hear from them and it’s difficult to dispute it, that they have no incentive to settle because they feel they’re fighting for their freedom and for their statehood. Prime Minister Viktor Orban has been highly critical of the EU's financial and military aid for Ukraine and has maintained close ties with Russia. When President Bill Clinton signed that law in 1996, several countries accused the U.S. of violating their sovereignty, passing their own laws to make the U.S. regulation effectively unenforceable. The longer the Russian invasion continues, the greater the refugee crisis that Europe is likely to face, and the riskier the situation becomes for NATO, which has gone to great lengths to avoid being drawn into direct conflict with Russian troops.
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. Emily Harding, a former National Security Council staffer, warned Tuesday that the U.S. and Europe should prepare for 8-10 years of economically disruptive conflict in Ukraine, Roll Call reports. If the U.S. sticks with Ukraine and supports its shadow war, "Russian casualties will be through the roof," former CIA Afghanistan operations chief Michael Vickers told the same CSIS audience. "This could be an insurgency that is bigger than our Afghan one in the 1980s in terms of things we could provide them that would really hurt Russia." Still, "given the durability of the Ukrainian resistance and its long history of pushing Russia back, the U.S. and Western powers do not believe that this will be a short war," CBS News reports.

However, Mr Orban's political director said this morning that Hungary was open to using the EU budget to allow further aid for Ukraine. Mr Zelenskyy has called for public officials to disclose their incomes to increase transparency and eliminate corruption as Ukraine tries to meet the stringent requirements for its bid to join the European Union. When the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991, the new Russian Federation inherited all of the USSR's treaties, diplomatic relationships, even embassies. "There is not going to be a Vichy Ukraine," former U.S. European countries have largely outsourced much of their military capacity and thinking on strategy and security to the States through NATO.
Homepage: https://houmann-monroe-2.federatedjournals.com/ukraine-invasion-russians-feel-the-pain-of-international-sanctions