Russia’s allies like China – which has been a lukewarm friend to Putin in his war against Ukraine – have also been unable, or unwilling, to force him to the negotiating table. Previous wars, like the eight-year-long Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s, too have hinged on such external assistance. At different times in this conflict Russia has resembled Iran’s position, and Ukraine has mirrored Iraq’s in that war — if only incompletely — said Jeremy Morris, professor of global studies at Aarhus University in Denmark. 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. Russia is throwing waves of recruits and mercenaries into close-quarters battles around towns like Bakhmut and Vuhledar. Hungary has signalled it is ready to compromise on EU funding for Ukraine - after Brussels reportedly prepared to sabotage its economy if it did not comply.
- 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.
- Persuading countries in regions such as Africa and the Middle East to deny Russia its imperial schemes will require a major shift in how the United States and its allies describe the stakes of the war and even in how they articulate their broader worldview, Hill argued.
- There is a difference between keeping options open, perhaps seeing what response tentative, private probes might get, and going public with a concrete proposal.
- Suppose, he wondered, if the four regions (Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia) or perhaps the whole of eastern and southern Ukraine were fully occupied.
- “It was undeniably brave of Biden, an 80-year-old, to visit Kyiv, but I’m not convinced that he sees Ukraine as an election-winning issue either,” Nixey said.
- 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.
He will have been able to see whether or not the EU and the US have sorted out their funding packages. That conflict, also between neighbours, was fundamentally fought over territory and resources. Western weapons helped Iraq achieve early battlefield successes against the much larger Iran, which had to resort to costlier tactics like human wave attacks, where artillery columns charged towards Iraqi formations, risking heavy casualties in the hope of overwhelming the enemy. “And there was a proxy war overlaid onto it,” Morris told Al Jazeera, referring to the US support for Iraq in furtherance of its own interests in the Middle East. The war in Ukraine assumed international dimensions the moment Russian armoured columns rolled across the border in February 2022.
What are the Ukrainian refugees who fled their country doing now? Are they able to get jobs in their host countries? — Laurel
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. 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." The sources reportedly said that Putin could be willing to end his demands over Ukraine's neutrality and, eventually, his opposition to the country joining NATO. 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.
Timothy Snyder, a historian of Eastern Europe at Yale, told me he stands by an assessment he made in October in which he similarly argued that a Russian nuclear detonation was highly unlikely. “ https://euronewstop.co.uk/how-many-russian-soldiers-have-died.html 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. More likely, Snyder argues, Putin is trying to instill fear in order to buy his military time and undermine international support for Ukraine. The Brookings Institution’s Fiona Hill, a senior director for European and Russian affairs on the U.S. National Security Council from 2017 to 2019, also pointed to the Kremlin’s imperial aspirations as a key indicator to watch, but added that these could be thwarted by developments off the battlefield.
The ripple effects of Russia's war in Ukraine continue to change the world
“The war has been so absolutely brutal that they’re fearful of what will happen in territories handed over to Russia,” he said. Unlike in the case of Serbia, experts do not foresee a scenario in which the US-led Western alliance would actively attack Russia. Despite Ukraine’s gains against Russia, experts believe a frozen conflict or painful truce is most likely. Those standing against Mr Putin in the upcoming election, including anti-war candidate Boris Nadezhdin, have until Wednesday to gather the required number of supporters' signatures to back their campaigns.
Artem is one of at least 4,500 Ukrainian servicemen and women believed to be in captivity in Russia as prisoners of war. Their families are often deprived of even elementary information about their location and wellbeing. Artem, 31, was a member of Ukraine’s Azov regiment and was taken prisoner at the end of the siege of the Azovstal steel plant in Mariupol last May. 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. The leaders of Ukraine and Russia struck a defiant tone at end-of-year press conferences and vowed to reach their military goals as the war heads toward its third year, Pjotr Sauer reported.
Which weapons will Washington send?
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. That, he said, is “because the Ukrainians know” that it is in Western interests “to not let them collapse”. Equally, Ukraine’s dependence on their weapons gives Western powers a say in how Kyiv plots its strategy. In theory, they could threaten to curtail support if they grow weary of the war or if Ukraine, encouraged by its military advances, crosses a threshold that could spark an escalation unacceptable to the West. Balazs Orban, chief political aide to the prime minister, said Hungary sent a proposal to the EU over the weekend showing it was open to using the budget for the aid package if other "caveats" were added. Moscow has claimed its forces have taken control of the village of Tabaivka in Ukraine's northeastern Kharkiv region.
- “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.
- In a June article by Sergei Karaganov, an established ultra-nationalist analyst, which I discussed in October, most interest was in his urging Putin to take more nuclear risks (advice rejected by Putin).
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- “If leaders explain the stakes and the costs, this is a manageable burden,” he told me.
- But the idea that Ukraine can be pressured into some kind of peace is “incorrect” and “denies Ukraine their agency”, said Branislav Slantchev, a professor of politics at the University of California, San Diego, and a specialist in war negotiations and how conflicts end.
After imposing sanctions and export controls, Lichfield expects the West’s latest economic pressure point — oil price caps — to yield results because the Russian economy is so tightly linked to the energy market. Moscow has proved resourceful when it comes to building autonomy into critical goods, Lichfield explained. For example, the tactic of repurposing dishwasher electronics for weapons, mocked in the West as a sign of desperation, probably means “somebody thought about that from the beginning,” he said. Perhaps Italian analyst Lucio Caracciolo was the most pessimistic of all. “This war will last indefinitely, with long pauses for cease-fires,” he said. At the same time, election season in the United States — Ukraine’s most important backer — stands to spur arguments that a war in Europe of unknown duration is a costly nuisance for America.
- But even if this occurs, that doesn’t mean the war itself will end with Putin’s downfall.
- The Wagner mutiny, and Mr Prigozhin's denunciation of the Kremlin's justifications for the war have, they said, removed what remained of Mr Putin's chances of hanging on.
- Ukraine’s much-anticipated spring counteroffensive makes incremental or even no progress in the spring and summer, partly because the west has failed to supply it with enough weaponry.
- Numbers are hard to come by, but Russia had an estimated 1,500 fighter jets before the war began and still has the vast majority of them, probably 1,400 or more.
- If the US abandons the military alliance, it will fall to European countries to ensure a Ukrainian victory, Mr OBrien says.
That, in turn, could pressure Putin to strike a peace deal or even bring about new Russian leadership, Herbst told me. 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. For a war that has defied expectations, those questions might seem impossible to answer. Yet I recently posed them to several top historians, political scientists, geopolitical forecasters, and former officials—because only in imagining potential futures can we understand the rough bounds of the possible, and our own agency in influencing the outcome we want. The news from the battlefield, the diplomatic noises off, the emotion of the grieving and displaced; all of this can be overwhelming.
- There are no certain answers to my questions, just ones contingent on unknowable future circumstances.
- He said he aimed to make Russia a "great, peaceful and free country".
- It would make success dependent on events we cannot predict or control, including on the outcome of elections in Western countries, including the United States.
- The US and its allies were quick to provide aid that has been vital to Ukraine’s ability to defend itself.
- And the future of the EU's economic aid is seemingly dependent on Hungary's incongruous stance.
However, that still falls short of the ATACMS, which would allow Ukraine to strike Russian targets about 190 miles away. Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, also called for sending long-range missiles to Ukraine alongside advanced Gray Eagle and Reaper drones. Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, expects the war to end at the negotiating table, but said serious diplomacy hasn’t begun because Putin is still clinging to “maximalist” goals.
The main reason for the assessment that it suits Putin to hang in there is that over time western support for Ukraine will drift away. Indeed, Putin was quite explicit about this in his press conference of 14 December. Ukraine has been unable to put itself in a position to force a decision on Russia. But even if the offensive had made more progress it would have been a tall order to put the Russians sufficiently in a corner that their choice was only between battlefield humiliation and a negotiated withdrawal. We also need to keep in mind that there have been some successes, including pushing back the Black Sea Fleet through the effective use of naval drones. 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.