Notes

Win, lose, stalemate or a shock: how might the Ukraine war end? Ukraine
Even with these new packages some of the shortages – particularly in artillery shells – will continue. This is already starting to be felt in front-line operations so that commanders are having to ration allocations, making awkward priorities about operational needs. 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.

He was reported to have sent messages through “multiple channels” since September that he was prepared to do a deal, including freezing the fighting along the current front lines. There have been a number of proposals in circulation, from China’s last February and those later from the BRICS countries. They are problematic for Putin because if taken seriously they would demand far more of Russia than Ukraine (as Zelensky was quick to notice).


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. https://anotepad.com/notes/n6k7bmfj suggests that the two sides will have difficulty ever resolving the information problem. When this happens, countries often end up fighting wars of attrition that last until one side gives up. According to this approach, wars will end when the problem that caused the war is resolved by fighting on the battlefield. How long the fighting will last and the form it takes depends on the extent and type of the problem.

POLICY NEWS
According to a
NATO report from earlier this year, Europe’s largest economies all fell short of a common goal of spending 2 percent of economic output on defense. One is that Russian forces are still strong and will prevail in a grinding war. If routed, Russia could lash out at nato, or resort to chemical or even nuclear weapons to avoid defeat. In the long term, says Emmanuel Macron, the French president, Europe will need to find a way of living with Russia. Estonia’s prime minister, Kaja Kallas, retorts, “It is much more dangerous giving in to Putin than provoking him.” American and European officials have quietly been helping Ukraine develop negotiating positions. Short of a promise to defend Ukraine directly, ideas include the ability to “snap back” any sanctions on Russia that are lifted; and rearming Ukraine quickly if it is attacked again.

Third, since there are not free and fair elections, there is no way other than mass mobilisation and revolution for the Russian people to overthrow Putin. So far, western countries have shown strong unity in wanting to help Ukraine force out Russia. Ukrainian forces, once equipped and trained for combined arms warfare and tank tactics, will be “designed to punch a hole through a defensive network,” Donahoe predicted. 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.
However, that still falls short of the ATACMS, which would allow Ukraine to strike Russian targets about 190 miles away. But Smith also said ATACMS producer Lockheed Martin no longer makes the missiles, and the U.S. military still needs them in its stockpiles. “Everything I have come to learn about the will and determination of the Ukrainians leads me to conclude retaking Crimea is within reach, and they need the artillery that will enable hitting targets — the sites of missiles destroying infrastructure in Ukraine,” he said.

Would Putin do that?
And Kyiv will likely also try to spring more military surprises on the Russian invaders to knock them off balance in some areas. 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. For democracies, long-term consensus in support for war has always been more complicated than for autocrats with no accountability.


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. The Center for Strategic and International Studies has found that since 1946, more than half of interstate wars like the one in Ukraine have ended in less than a year, and that when such wars persist for more than a year, they last more than a decade on average. Prepare for the possibility of a long, shape-shifting conflict, perhaps lasting years, even a decade or more. 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.

Ukraine: what will end the war? Here’s what research says
The bigger question was whether the crisis would destabilise the regime. Putin dithered, not dealing with the dispute while in its early stages, and then could only be rescued by doing a deal with people he’d just called traitors, albeit one on which he later reneged (as with so many of his deals). Yet six months on Putin does not give the appearance of having suffered long-term harm. Perhaps this remains a situation in which absence of evidence is not the same as evidence of absence. The lack of political noise in Moscow does not mean that there is no unease or dissent among the elite. While the West could warn Kyiv that it would stop supplies of weapons or financial support if Ukraine were to insist on defying the US or Europe, “this kind of threat is not credible”, Slantchev told Al Jazeera.


The conflict in Ukraine is about to enter its second calendar year. We asked several military analysts how they think events on the ground will unfold in 2023. “Throughout the year, these convoys have provided critical assistance to almost 400,000 people in hard-hit frontline communities across oblasts from Kharkiv, to Donetsk, Zaporizhzhia, Dnipro, Kherson, and Sumy,” he said. “While we can attempt to count the numbers of those killed, injured and displaced, the full lasting toll of this devastating war on the civilian population is beyond measure,” he said. Briefing ambassadors at the Security Council, Miroslav Jenča, Assistant Secretary-General for Europe, said that like the previous year, the year 2023 has been devastating for the people of Ukraine. "His political life is not finished. He won't stay in exile in Belarus."

At least 10,000 civilians, including over 560 children, have been killed and more than 18,500 injured since Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February last year, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission there said on Tuesday. It’s not that we’re discouraging them from launching any new offensive,” the spokesperson added. He said there is little the West can do to stop Ukrainians from trying to take back all of their country’s territory currently held by Russia — including parts that Moscow has formally, though illegally, annexed. Ukrainian offensives might, nevertheless, pause down in the south-west, following the recovery of Kherson. 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. The Russian ruling elite saw the Soviet Union’s collapse merely as a reconfiguration in which former Soviet countries would “continue to be together in some way”, Popova told Al Jazeera, whereas Ukraine saw it as an opportunity to be fully independent.
In response to questions about the report — and specifically if Putin would be willing to give up his demands over Ukraine's neutrality and NATO, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said it was "a wrong report." Bloomberg reported earlier this week that Putin had "put out feelers to the US via indirect channels," suggesting that he was prepared to engage in talks over ending the conflict. A Kremlin spokesperson has denied a report that Russian President Vladimir Putin reached out to the US about talks on ending the war in Ukraine, Reuters reported.


Congress provided more than $100 billion in aid to Kyiv since Russia invaded last year, including $61.4 billion in military aid. And they said winning will depend on a Congress with the resolve to ensure continued support to Ukraine. But even then, the very concept of victory may be inaccurate, they warned.

“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. It's too early to plan a victory parade in Kyiv but all the momentum is with Ukraine now and there is no doubt in my mind that they will win this war, probably in 2023. Industrial-age warfare bends significant parts, or in some cases whole economies, towards the production of war materials as matters of priority. The Ukrainian Embassy in Washington told Defense News that Ukraine would not strike Russian territory with longer-range weapons pledged by the United States.
That scenario could embolden critics of the war; increase public discontent with continued funding for Ukraine; and pose a problem in terms of arms production and supplies for the West. Ukraine's counteroffensive is likely to make some progress in the remainder of this year, Barrons said — but nowhere near enough to end the occupation. 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. The war between Russia and Ukraine entered a new phase this summer when Kyiv launched its much-anticipated counteroffensive, and there were hopes Ukraine would regain the upper hand. They are splitting into two broad camps, explains Ivan Krastev, of the Centre for Liberal Strategies, a think-tank in Sofia. One is the “peace party”, which wants a halt to the fighting and the start of negotiations as soon as possible.

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