Notes

When will the war in Ukraine end? And 9 more questions about Russia's invasion : NPR
Most U.S. training takes place at U.S. military bases in Germany. When the Soviet Union crumbled in 1991, the new Russian Federation inherited all of the USSR's treaties, diplomatic relationships, even embassies. Meanwhile, Ukraine had to pretty much start from scratch, establishing its own treaties and erecting embassies for the first time without approval from Moscow. Russian Communist supporters hold flags including one of the Soviet Union, as they take part in a rally next to the Karl Marx monument, marking the "Defender of the Fatherland Day," the former "Day of the Soviet Army", in downtown Moscow on Feb. 23. All these measures were approved when both the House and the Senate were controlled by Democrats.


"We are determined to reach our goals. And would prefer to complete it by diplomatic means. If not, the military operation will be continued till we reach our goals," he added. But Peskov told Bloomberg News, "President Putin has stated numerous times that Russia was, is and will continue to be open for negotiations on Ukraine." He said he aimed to make Russia a "great, peaceful and free country". Mr Nadezhdin, who name is similar to "nadezhda", the Russian word for hope, said he had the support of "dozens of millions of people". That could end up looking something like the Korean peninsula, with a demilitarised zone between Ukrainian and Russian-controlled territory, or a grinding perpetual conflict that flares up and down, eventually resulting in an uneasy truce. Some observers have suggested that continued defeats on the battlefield might result in Putin’s downfall.

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He is once again a powerful politician – Vladimir Putin’s chosen ruler of the occupied territory that lies across the river from Kherson. From there, shells, bombs and mortars rain down ceaselessly on the city he used to run. As we learnt more it also became apparent that the demands of close coordination of complex operations in tough conditions were beyond fresh units that had not quite enough training.

"He practically destroyed the key institutions of the modern state of Russia. My job will be to restore these institutions," said Mr Nadezhdin. With Western hesitancy bolstering Russia, and in the absence of either a coup or a health-related issue leading to Putin's demise, the only foreseeable outcome will be a negotiated settlement that for now both sides continue to refuse. Ukrainians who settled in neighboring Poland have learned Polish, which has some similarities to Ukrainian. “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.
From this perspective Russia remains a long way from a sustainable victory. In practice the problem was that the Ukrainians had been encouraged to embrace a western manoeuvre concept but without the capacity to make it work, which left them too dependent on the Russian army being in a weakened and demoralised state. The Ukrainians reverted to the sort of smaller-scale operations that they understood better. This meant however that progress was slow, giving the Russians time to reinforce areas coming under threat. Without improved coordination between units it was difficult to scale up the effects and take advantage of any breakthroughs. There were in fact already obvious tensions in the Russian high command.

Ukraine war: Three ways the conflict could go in 2024
Military experts warn that this means the war is likely to be prolonged, putting immense pressure on Ukraine to fight for several more years to come, potentially, and on its international partners to commit billions of dollars more in military, humanitarian and financial resources. “The ultimate end to this is the Ukrainians take back as much pre-Feb. 24 territory as they can get, force Putin to the bargaining table, and then ultimately Ukraine would have to compromise somewhat on issues like Crimea and portions of the east and arrange for solid security guarantees going forward,” Smith told Defense News in a phone interview. As the war enters its second year, the spigot of military aid is still gushing.

Chancellor Olaf Scholz also recently authorized supplying infantry fighting vehicles to help push Russian forces out of occupied Ukraine. The Russian air force - which has played a low-key role so far - launches devastating airstrikes. Putin can’t keep his forces on the offensive all year long and now has to keep an eye out for new Ukrainian strikes on assets not only in Crimea (such as the recent hit on a large landing ship in the Black Sea port of Feodosia in occupied Crimea) but also in Russia proper. “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.
Yet the campaign to conquer key cities—Kyiv, Chernihiv, Sumy, and Kharkiv—failed disastrously. The morale of the Ukrainians remained high and their military tactics adept. By the end of March, Russia had lost tanks and aircraft worth an estimated $5 billion, not to speak of up to a quarter of the troops it had sent into battle. Its military supply system proved shockingly inept, whether for repairing equipment or delivering food, water, and medical supplies to the front. I have a good, safe life and follow events there from the comfort of my New York apartment. The lives of millions of people who live in or fled the war zone have been shattered.

BBC News Services
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. But many experts I turned to were not seriously concerned about such an outcome. “One may imagine something like the outcome of the Korean War,” with “the warring sides remaining not reconciled and irreconcilable, always on alert, but more or less securely divided,” Lipman told me. Still, she said, whatever border is drawn between Russia and Ukraine is likely to be far longer and harder to secure than the one dividing the Korean peninsula. And Russia, as a much larger country, a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, and a significant economic player, “is no North Korea” and “can’t and will not be isolated,” she noted. One year ago, Russia launched a war that many never expected it to wage and assumed it would quickly win against a cowed Ukraine and its allies.

In the long term, says Emmanuel Macron, the French president, Europe will need to find a way of living with Russia. Still, it’s an open question whether the U.S. will be able to indefinitely continue its current level of support, said Mark Cancian, a CSIS senior adviser who has studied the volumes of artillery used in the war. The result is a protracted struggle that gradually lessens in intensity as the Russians run short on ammunition and resupply to Ukraine eases. The conflict is “already a long war when compared to other interstate conflicts, and wars of this kind tend to cluster as either being relatively short—lasting no more than weeks or a few months—or averaging several years in duration,” Kofman told me. Defense experts say it's unlikely the counteroffensive will see any breakthroughs this year. In the United States, he noted, everything from industrial policy to diplomatic and military strategy to domestic politics similarly will need to be refashioned for this new conflict.
Russia, he said, had an important role to play in Europe’s balance of power; it should not be pushed into a “permanent alliance” with China. Ukraine’s most important backer has yet to set out a clear objective, beyond strengthening Ukraine to give it a stronger bargaining hand. America has spent nearly $14bn on the war so far, and Congress has just allocated a further $40bn.

It was only in March this year that Russia officially confirmed to the Red Cross that Artem was being held prisoner there; Natalia has heard nothing since and had no news from him directly. Moscow has proved resourceful when it comes to building autonomy into critical goods, Lichfield explained. And while we have no right to tell Ukrainians to stop fighting before their country is whole, we also have no right to expect them to keep fighting at any cost. Combine that with another attack on the now repaired 12-mile (19km) Kerch Bridge to the Russian mainland and Crimea would be increasingly isolated and vulnerable. There seems to be some degree of sensitivity in Ukraine to Russia's claims it's waging a proxy war with the West over Ukraine. In practice the problem was that the Ukrainians had been encouraged to embrace a western manoeuvre concept but without the capacity to make it work, which left them too dependent on the Russian army being in a weakened and demoralised state.
Some Ukrainian experts fear a pincer movement to encircle Donbas and the east from Sumy in the north and Velyka Novosilka in the south, allowing Russia to occupy most of the four Ukrainian provinces it has unilaterally claimed to have annexed. At this point, Russia could call for a ceasefire to retain what it has, and run a defensive campaign to consolidate its battered military. To a lesser extent, Putin is dependent on the support of the general population. 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.


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