Notes

When will the Russia-Ukraine war end? Experts offer their predictions
"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. One key question that could determine the war’s end game is how long Ukraine’s backers can keep up their arms donations to Kyiv.

Its military-industrial complex has also ramped up the production of hardware from drones to aircraft. As Gen Sir Patrick Sanders stated several times in his speech on Wednesday, "Ukraine really matters". It is the duty of the military to analyse that threat, and they still might be proved wrong. While not admitting responsibility for shooting down the plane, the agency said the "Ukrainian side was not informed about the need to ensure the safety of the airspace in the area of the city of Belgorod in a certain period of time, as was repeatedly done in the past."
A senior Russian lawmaker said Ukrainian military intelligence had been given a 15-minute warning before a Russian military transport plane carrying Ukrainian prisoners of war entered an area where it was shot down on Wednesday. Ukraine’s forces remain on the defensive in the eastern Donbas region, where fighting continues in Sievierodonestsk. Serhiy Haidai, the governor of the Luhansk region, said Russia was massing forces in an attempt to take full control of the city after weeks of fighting.

All that happened this week in Russia-Ukraine war
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. Amid the fog of war, it can be hard to see the way forward. The news from the battlefield, the diplomatic noises off, the emotion of the grieving and displaced; all of this can be overwhelming. So let us step back for a moment and consider how the conflict in Ukraine might play out.


Ukraine, after all, is situated at the doorstep of the European Union and NATO, both of which have a vested interest in ensuring that the country’s sovereignty is maintained and that Russia’s aggression is curtailed. 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. Russian officials often criticise Nato military support for Ukraine and in an interview last week with the BBC the country's Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, cited the prospect of Ukraine joining the Western alliance as a reason for the invasion in the first place.

When will it be over? What's it going to take to get Russia out of Ukraine? — Sam
Sanctions, meanwhile, have hurt Russia’s economy and have cut it off from supply chains crucial to sustaining Putin’s war machine. It came as the new head of the British army said British troops must prepare “to fight in Europe once again”. “There is now a burning imperative to forge an army capable of fighting alongside our allies and defeating Russia in battle,” Gen Sir Patrick Sanders said, writing to his charges about the challenges they face. Ukrainian officials have spoken bluntly in recent days about the need to boost the supply of heavy weapons to the country if Russian forces there are to be defeated. The prime minister, who visited Ukraine's capital on Friday, said supplies of weapons, equipment, ammunition, and training to Kyiv needed to outpace Moscow's efforts to rearm itself. But Ukraine's air defenses were surprisingly effective, shooting down many Russian fighter jets and helicopters in the first couple months of the war.


The Russian air force - which has played a low-key role so far - launches devastating airstrikes. Massive cyber-attacks sweep across Ukraine, targeting key national infrastructure. The government is replaced with a pro-Moscow puppet regime. President Zelensky is either assassinated or flees, to western Ukraine or even overseas, to set up a government in exile. President Putin declares victory and withdraws some forces, leaving enough behind to maintain some control.

Putin's commitment
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. Defense News spoke with national security analysts, lawmakers and retired officials, asking each how the conflict could end. Instead, its forces are facing a 600-mile front line and extensive Russian defensive fortifications — in some places up to 19 miles deep — that were built in winter while Ukraine was waiting for more heavy weaponry from its allies before launching its counteroffensive in June. Recently, Ukraine's winter offensive seems to have come to a halt. More than ever, the outcome depends on political decisions made miles away from the centre of the conflict - in Washington and in Brussels.

The unnamed source said that the flight recorders were located at the rear of the aircraft. The former minister, currently a serving Conservative MP, pointed out that the prime minister grew up without that existential threat. Nearly a year later, Russia’s army is no closer to winning the war — and has even lost part of the territory that Putin attempted to annex last September. But if the west decides they’re not gonna support Ukraine fully anymore, then Ukraine is in a really tough spot and they’ll have to dramatically lower aims.
Hein Goemans Let me start with a very basic kind of introduction to the topic. There is a war because both sides ask more than the other’s willing to give. So for a war to end, the minimum war aims of at least one side must change.

Before we get to the show, I’d like to tell you about a survey we’re conducting to find out more from our listeners about what you think of the show and what you’d like to hear more of. From the very beginning of the war, President Putin has drawn parallels between the Soviet Union's victory over Nazi Germany in World War II and the current military campaign against supposed "neo-Nazis" in Ukraine. The other, perhaps greater, risk is that Russian aggression could spread even farther afield, to the Baltics, which would not only draw NATO into a potential conflict, but also fundamentally threaten the post–Cold War order. Compared with this time last year, Vladimir Putin is stronger, politically more than militarily.
Hein Goemans Well, some people would say yes, because it makes clear that this is a war caused by a commitment problem that no peace deal will stick. But more generally it’s because the underlying dynamic is different from the short war. Everybody in Britain knows that it started in 1914 and ended in 1918. But one of the interesting things is that in November 1914, there was a Crown Council in Germany with the chancellor, with the Kaiser, William the Last, as I like to refer to him, and the chief of staff where they all agreed they can’t win. What happened there is that they had the Schlieffen Plan.

"The second Il-76 plane was flying next, which was carrying about 80 more prisoners of war; they managed to turn it around," Kartapolov said. https://matzen-larsen.thoughtlanes.net/the-uk-governments-response-to-the-russian-invasion-of-ukraine said 16 people had been killed in 19 Russian rocket attacks on the Kharkiv region, which borders Belgorod, in the last week. Zelenskyy said he'd instructed the foreign ministry to inform Ukraine's allies of the matter. "Our state will insist on an international investigation," he said. Peskov said the Russian military was investigating the crash, saying it was "still unclear what happened; investigators began studying the remains of the plane only yesterday." Prisoner exchanges are a thorny subject between Russia and Ukraine, although both sides have a vested interest in carrying out sporadic swaps of prisoners of war.

The course of the conflict in 2023 marked the fact that industrial-age warfare had returned too. It also said it was not told about the number of vehicles, routes and forms of delivery of the prisoners. It's become clear that the counteroffensive won't produce quick results and that success — however that might be measured in terms of retaking Russian-occupied territory — is not guaranteed. But the head of the British Army Gen Sir Patrick Sanders is not alone in issuing a national call to prepare for a major conflict on European soil. More than ever, the outcome depends on political decisions made miles away from the centre of the conflict - in Washington and in Brussels.
Russians go to the polls from March 15, less than a month after the full-scale invasion marks its second anniversary. Both sides seem resigned to a long conflict, with the high numbers of casualties, equipment losses and economic damage since it started on February 24, 2022 set to escalate. By committing this terrorist attack, the Ukrainian leadership has showed its true colors — it neglected the lives of its citizens. According to the previously reached agreement, this event was to take place in the afternoon at the Kolotilovka checkpoint on the Russian-Ukrainian border.

"Our state will insist on an international investigation," he said. "This may indicate deliberate actions by Russia aimed at creating a threat to the life and safety of prisoners," it alleged. Many prisoners remain in custody months after their initial capture. I think there is a chance that Ukrainians will push forward during the spring if they have integrated the tanks, but they may have to wait until they get the planes.
There can be secessionist movements in the administrative units in Russia, or it can be a long kind of peaceful stalemate or ceasefire along the 1991 border where there’s occasionally shots fired, but no dramatic incursions and no dramatic battles. Hundreds of thousands of people are gonna die and for really no good reason. I mean, there is a deal available, but Russia can’t take it. Domestic politics and they still have plans and ideas and you know, they think they can teach Ukrainians some new information or hope that the west will fall apart. Hein Goemans Well, Russia’s best hope is breaking up the western support for Ukraine, and that can happen in a variety of ways, right?

Here's my website: https://matzen-larsen.thoughtlanes.net/the-uk-governments-response-to-the-russian-invasion-of-ukraine