Notes

Boris Nadezhdin: Putin's would-be opponent vows to end Ukraine war
The senior UN political and peacebuilding official also warned that the lasting toll of the devastating war is beyond measure. Maybe Russian forces get bogged down, hampered by low morale, poor logistics and inept leadership. Maybe https://etextpad.com/ 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.


The challenge now is training and equipping an armored force big enough and sophisticated enough to envelop Russia’s fighting force. “I would love to think the kinetic phase could end in 2023, but I suspect we could be looking at another three years with this scale of fighting,” Roberts said. Ukraine is a democratic country aggressively pursuing European integration.

Russia attacks Ukraine: More coverage
Ukraine has continued ground operations on the eastern bank of the Dnipro River with heavy battles reported to be ongoing in the area around the village of Krynky, about 30km (19 miles) from the city of Kherson. More probable is a continuation of current tactics - a slow grinding of Ukrainian forces on narrow directions and a slow advance, like in Bakhmut and Avdiivka areas, with possible same tactics in Svatove-Kreminna area. "The price we pay is in money. While the price the Ukrainians pay is in blood. If authoritarian regimes see that force is rewarded we will all pay a much higher price. And the world will become a more dangerous world for all of us."

This is not a prediction but it would not wholly be a surprise if he decided that this was as good a moment as any to suggest the possibility of a ceasefire arrangement. The fierce determination of the Ukrainian people up to this point suggests that this will not occur any time soon. In his TV address, Mr Zelensky said the conflict "will be bloody, there will be fighting, but it will only definitively end through diplomacy". The rest, together with the forces freed for action after Kherson withdrawal, gives the Russians an opportunity to launch an offensive. 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 even if this occurs, that doesn’t mean the war itself will end with Putin’s downfall. "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. Russia was not present at the discussions, however, and U.S. national security spokesperson John Kirby stated ahead of the talks that the White House did not expect any "tangible deliverables." Meanwhile, any prospect of peace talks between Russia and Ukraine look slim despite efforts to bring both sides to the negotiating table.

Ukraine: How might the war end? Five scenarios
The EU's decision to open membership talks with Ukraine and Moldova is more than just symbolic. It implicitly means continued backing for Kyiv, as a future in the EU for Ukraine would be impossible with a full-blown victory for Russia. President Volodomyr Zelensky has admitted his country's spring offensive has not been the success he hoped.


It is clear to the most dispassionate observer of the war that Ukraine is having to fight very hard, and take casualties in troops and equipment, including the armour supplied by Nato. Another senior official, who spoke on condition he was not named, went further, suggesting that President Putin would be forced to dismiss his Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu and Chief of Staff General Valery Gerasimov, perhaps as a response to another military setback. By early summer Ukraine will be able to use US-made F16 fighter jets for the first time, which it hopes will improve its ability to counter Russian aircraft and strengthen its own air defences. 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. The military course of this war in 2024 will be determined in Moscow, Kyiv, Washington, Brussels, Beijing, Tehran and Pyongyang more than in Avdiivka, Tokmak, Kramatorsk or any of the devastated battlefields along the frontlines.

Ukraine conflict: Your guide to understanding the story
In his TV address, Mr Zelensky said the conflict "will be bloody, there will be fighting, but it will only definitively end through diplomacy". Writing on the messaging app Telegram, he said Ukrainian troops had repelled 11 attacks on the frontline - with eight tanks among the Russian vehicles destroyed. Meanwhile, heavy fighting is taking place in and around Severodonetsk, as Russian forces step up efforts to seize the whole of the Luhansk region. That scenario, of a Russian military incursion into a Nato country, almost unthinkable until recently, is when Nato and Russia could indeed be at war with each other. "No one thinks the UK-led Battle Group [in Estonia] by itself would deter the second most powerful nuclear country in the world," he says.

Second, he controls the state media apparatus and has censored other media organisations, limiting the information available to the general public. “We are drawn to this scenario, in part, because we seem to lack other variants, and it feels like an ending,” he wrote at the time. This means that the willingness of the general population to suffer in the face of high costs is of the utmost importance. Otherwise he would be stuck with many more months of war without tangible progress and a growing sense of futility.
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