Kremlin Denies Report Putin Reached Out to the US About Ending Ukraine War

The election is so obviously rigged that it is hard for outsider observers to take it seriously as a landmark date. He would no doubt like some tangible victory before then – say the capture of all the Donbas that would allow him to argue that core objectives have been met. If there has not been any progress then at least he should take stock.

• Opposition leader Alexey Navalny, once seen as a major threat to the president's authority, has been in jail since 2021.
• After Russia first invaded in 2014, the U.S. military stepped up training for the Ukrainian military in western Ukraine.
• “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.
• This is why, as I noted in last year’s assessment, my preference is “to talk about trends, possibilities, and developments coming into view.” Wars pass through stages, as fortunes shift, and the challenges of supply and reinforcement change.
• Some Ukrainian officials acknowledged the fear that gives Western leaders sleepless nights, that a public collapse of President Putin's regime might lead to real danger as his would-be successors jockey for power in a state with the world's biggest arsenal of nuclear weapons.

But it leaves a lingering “what if” question about the effect on the Russian system had there been more Ukrainian success or for that matter if the next mutineer has a clearer idea of what he is trying to achieve. Although for a while Prigozhin carried on with his affairs in Russia as if nothing untoward had happened, and even at one point met with his old chum Putin again, it was hard to believe that he would survive such a challenge and so it proved. “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. 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. The result is a protracted struggle that gradually lessens in intensity as the Russians run short on ammunition and resupply to Ukraine eases. However, it is hard to imagine Russia striking very far west, given the painfully slow advance around Bakhmut and the catastrophic attempt to capture Vuhledar.

The First Time the Nazis Tried to Take Power

After shifting its focus to Ukraine’s east, Russia has captured nearly all of the Luhansk province and is likely to continue its efforts until it takes the rest of the Donetsk province – together, these two areas make up the Donbas region. On Wednesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin said there was “no use in setting an end date” to what Russia calls “special military operation in Ukraine”, adding that its objective to “liberate” Donbas had not changed. The suffering and destruction in Ukraine and the economic turmoil the war has produced in the West should be compelling enough reasons to end it. Ditto the devastation it continues to create in some of the world’s poorest countries like Kenya, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Yemen. Along with devastating droughts and local conflicts, it has led to staggering increases in the price of basic foods (with both Ukrainian and Russian grains, to one degree or another, blocked from the market). More than 27 million people are already facing acute food shortages or outright starvation in those four nations alone, thanks at least in part to the conflict in Ukraine.

• When a sufficient number of Putin’s coalition privately turn against the war, this will pressure Putin to end the war or risk his position of power.
• “This war will last indefinitely, with long pauses for cease-fires,” he said.
• While its forces are pushing to also seize the nearby city of Lysychansk, Russia on Thursday announced the withdrawal of its troops from the strategically important Snake Island.
• 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.
• Despite Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, Putin's closest EU ally, vetoing a $55 billion support package from Brussels for Kyiv in mid-December, backing from other European allies has been strong.

In the course of the past year, Putin’s domestic propaganda strategy has morphed from a message of “fight the Nazis” in Ukraine to “fight the West” there, said Stefan Meister, a Russia and Eastern Europe expert at the Berlin-based German Council on Foreign Relations. “The narrative is the great struggle of the Cold War,” he said, a framing that has helped to attract new recruits. Russian forces are already trying to slow down tanks in Ukraine with mines, trenches, and pyramidical, concrete “dragon’s teeth,” a type of fortification not seen in combat since World War II. 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. The challenge now is training and equipping an armored force big enough and sophisticated enough to envelop Russia’s fighting force.

Escaping the military

And the near-total control of information by the government is making dissent difficult. “Those who are against the war have left, and those who remain are adapting,” Meister said. But the sizable swaths of terrain Ukraine wants to liberate will take time, and to even build the necessary forces will take six months, Donahoe estimated. But https://euronewstop.co.uk/what-happens-if-russia-loses-to-ukraine.html , they’re expected to launch attacks across open plains, which would be harder to defeat, said Daniel Rice, a former U.S.

• Millions of lives, in other words, have been turned inside out, while a return to anything resembling normalcy now seems beyond reach.
• Western military experts were convinced that his army would make quick work of its Ukrainian counterpart, even if the latter’s military had, since 2015, been trained and armed by the United States, Britain, and Canada.
• It would be wrong to say that the front lines in Ukraine are stalemated, but both sides are capable of fighting each other to a standstill as they each try to take strategic initiatives.
• Faced with the collapse of his business model Prigozhin mutinied, challenging directly Putin’s whole rationale for the war by pointing out the lack of an extraordinary Ukrainian threat to the Donbas enclaves in February 2022, before marching to the Southern Command HQ at Rostov.
• Mr Nadezhdin, who name is similar to "nadezhda", the Russian word for hope, said he had the support of "dozens of millions of people".

Ukraine, Jensen suggested, might try a spectacular special operation to assassinate a Kremlin official, or Russia could decide to use — or simply test — nuclear weapons. While some Western governments will secretly balk at the ongoing costs of supporting Ukraine (the U.S. has already pledged over $40 billion in security assistance to Kyiv) many understand the high stakes, Barrons said. 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." For now, at least, Ukraine's allies are standing firmly beside it, saying they will support it "whatever it takes" while Russia too is "nowhere near giving up," Barrons said.

Europe

As a result, Russia essentially stopped flying fighter jets over Ukraine. 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. A year ago, most everyone expected Russia to dominate the skies with its much larger and more modern air force. Now the U.S. and European militaries are training Ukrainian forces in Europe.

And even though the fall of the Soviet Union was notable for its lack of bloodshed, many in Ukraine refer to today's conflict as a true "war of independence." 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. In his mind, the communist leadership tore Ukraine from its true home in the Russian empire. Putin illegally annexed four territories from Ukraine in September and now presents Ukraine's efforts — backed by the West — to take back its own territory as a fascist attack on the Russian homeland. As such, many Ukrainians are against the war, with "no war" becoming a common slogan. But polls show that does not equal pacifism, with the overwhelming majority of Ukrainians supporting a prolonged defensive war.

• 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.
• He would no doubt like some tangible victory before then – say the capture of all the Donbas that would allow him to argue that core objectives have been met.
• It was largely apparent that Russia’s army was and is far superior to Ukraine’s in terms of stockpiles of weapons and number of personnel.
• I was more struck by his description of the problem he was trying to solve.
• The undersecretary of state for political affairs, Victoria Nuland, told the Senate in January the Biden administration still expects the $45 billion Ukraine aid package Congress passed in December to last through the end of this fiscal year.

The invasion has been a disaster for President Vladimir Putin and in order to justify it at home he at least has to take control of Ukraine's Donbas region, after which he can falsely claim that the army saved Russian citizens persecuted by Ukraine. 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. Depending on how long the war lasts, it remains far from certain whether lawmakers will keep funding Ukraine aid packages. Congress provided more than $100 billion in aid to Kyiv since Russia invaded last year, including $61.4 billion in military aid. “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.

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. “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. The forecasting firm Good Judgment’s superforecasters, a global network of about 180 experts in various fields with a strong track record, tend to “see a long slog coming” in Ukraine, CEO Warren Hatch told me. Some of the superforecasters, however, point to key differences between this war and past conflicts that they believe could produce a faster resolution—including the degree to which the West is arming Ukraine and punishing Russia economically.

This Swedish Air Force handout image from March 2, 2022, shows Russian fighter jets violating Swedish airspace east of the Swedish Baltic Sea island of Gotland. Ukraine's air defenses have been surprisingly effective against Russia's air force. As the war enters its second year, the spigot of military aid is still gushing. 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. That’s changed, with Germany now pledging to deliver Leopard 2 battle tanks and approving other countries’ requests to follow suit.