-Ukraine will resist. Putin cannot win. But the war can continue.
Edward Luttwak does not have an iota of doubt.
And counter question.
-What weapons has Spain sent after the first symbolic shipment? What would persuade Madrid to send artillery to the Ukraine?
For the US military analyst, it is essential that Ukraine receive the weapons it needs to wage a war that he does not rule out, in brief communication via email with La Vanguardia, that it last for thirty years. “It is impossible to defeat Russia and it is impossible to force Ukraine to surrender,” he says.
It is true that Russia lost its first battle when, at the beginning of the invasion that is four months old today, it tried to take kyiv and replace the legitimate one of President Zelensky with a puppet government, who stood up and did not leave the country, as Putin expected. or Biden offered. It was a full-blown, “terrible” defeat for Moscow, in the words of Simon Schlegel, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, a non-governmental organization committed to conflict resolution. The Kremlin reordered its forces and confined the war to southern and eastern Ukraine to make it more sustainable.
And here begins another war, one of attrition, artillery and trenches, which can last for years and in which Ukraine has no plans to surrender. “They still feel like they can win,” Schlegel explains in a video chat. They have, he adds, the support of the West, and as long as they have the help of the United States and the NATO countries “their resistance will grow. I think time is ticking in favor of Ukraine, because she has more support and it will continue to come to her.”
And they are not short of troops. He has a one-month waiting list to be admitted as a recruit. But training them takes time, so it will take time to create the brigades that will allow a counteroffensive to be launched to recover the lost territory. Putin, however, has given up mobilizing reservists and conscripts, and the Defense Ministry is trying to attract men with military experience by offering them $5,000 a month, six to eight times what a lieutenant earns, it has been reported. The Economist.
In addition, and according to Schlegel estimates, “the impact of sanctions against Russia will continue to be more severe over time, especially when resources begin to dwindle and it has more problems resupplying. They will have trouble building tanks and missiles without the high-tech materials provided by the West. This will be a real problem for them at some point.”
But it may also be for Ukraine if fissures begin to open in support from the West, galvanized from the start by the suffering of the Ukrainian people. It is not clear how long it will last: bipartisan support is weakening in the United States and concern is growing in Europe about the implications in economic terms -inflation, energy and food crises- and in security terms -the risk of NATO entering into a confrontation open with Russia – that this war entails.
Schlegel, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, does not know how long Western support for Ukraine will remain unified, but he is clear that time is in favor of the Kyiv government, which will try to win as much as it can. He believes that for the next few months there will be a ceasefire on a front line that will remain stable.
And perhaps then, as Henry Kissinger suggested, the Kyiv government will begin to consider ceding territory to Russia in exchange for peace. Something that, today, upsets the Ukrainians, as does the proposal for a referendum on their future in the Donbass launched by Luttwak. “Either there is a plebiscite or war for thirty years,” he maintains. For Schlegel, “any Kyiv government that handed over territories belonging to Ukraine would commit political suicide.”
Zelensky has said that he will not accept anything other than the 1991 statute, when Ukraine gained independence from the Soviet Union. But he has also said that he would accept the status prior to the February 24 invasion. We’ll see what happens.
The Ukrainians will not give up, but they will have to make difficult decisions. They are the ones who fight, die or lose their homes. And its leaders, when the time comes for real negotiations, will have to make painful decisions, perhaps based on a peace by territories. But it is not known whether the pre-invasion status will satisfy Putin, who will not accept anything that Russia might regard as defeat.
But there is still time, perhaps years, for that.
