Between the catastrophic scenarios and a saving diplomatic intervention of China, bet on the first. Beijing sends messages that we want to read as contradictory despite the fact that it is not based on support for Russia. President Xi Jinping will not come to the rescue of the West, least of all USA. Our attrition will reinforce your world dominance. This game of wait and see has an expiration time: until it affects your economy.
We have two catastrophic scenarios and one worrying one that could end very badly. From Moscow The idea has been floated that there will be a withdrawal of troops if Ukraine accept Russian sovereignty crimea and of donbasrefuses to enter the NATO and demilitarized. It sounds like an attempt to confuse and divide public opinion despite the fact that later it ends up being a possible solution. what you want Vladimir Putin today is the unconditional surrender of Ukraine.
The Russian leader lives in a bubble surrounded by a clique that tells him they want to hear it. Fiona Hill, one of the greatest experts on Putin, says that her favorite room in the Kremlin is decorated with statues of Catherine the Great, Peter the Great, Nicholas I and Alexander the Great, the one who faced Napoleon. The pandemic has been spent studying maps of Russia’s most glorious times. His desire is to be the fifth of the great tsars.
Miscalculation
He must have believed that the Ukrainians would greet his troops jubilantly, that victory would be easy. Reality forces him to readjust plans. His military culture, as he demonstrated in Grozny and Aleppo, is to cause maximum destruction. Kyiv can be added to the list.
If you achieve your goals, which, according to Macron, consist of the conquest of the entire country and the change of government, an occupation will begin that will require the permanent presence of a significant force. The current military and civil resistance augurs a costly occupation for him. Putin has done more for the Ukrainian identity in two weeks than the revolution of euromaidan in eight years. The rupture is complete, and includes the Russian speakers.
The boss of Kremlin he will not accept an exit that he considers humiliating. Your position is at stake. Would it be humiliating to remain alone with Donbas and Crimea and leave the president in Kiev? Zelensky, whom he has called a Nazi and a drug addict? Any security pact should include China, which does not want a US-dependent NATO in its zone of influence (Taiwan, the islands of the South China Sea). The pact has to be global.
Atomic escalation?
For Hill it is essential that Putin does not perceive that the objective is to force his downfall. His great fear is to end up like Gaddafi. If you feel cornered, we would enter the worst catastrophic scenariowhich may include the launch of a nuclear bomb tactics on Ukraine. Are we ready to start an atomic escalation? It would be a checkmate to NATO. That we think this is possible is already a psychological victory for Putin.
Another dangerous scenario would be to stop sending sophisticated weapons to the Ukrainian Army so as not to prolong the war and minimize the number of civilian casualties, as proposed paul churches. Doing nothing or little in the past is what has ended up emboldening Putin. It happened in 2008, when Russia seized Georgia the regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia after flirting with NATO, and in 2014, after annexing Crimea and provoking war in Donbas. Nor was anything said in the two wars of Chechnyaconsidered an internal matter.
tsarist expansionism
Will Putin stop in Ukraine or does he have more strategic goals? Will it be enough to sell a historic hit or will you want to include moldova and Georgia?
Putin knows that touching the Baltics would cause a Third World war, despite the fact that in his imperial delusions they are part of his area of interest. You will know from history books that Poland, Lithuania and Sweden were once empires that rivaled the Russian. The boldest move would be to attack Finland. It does not belong to NATO, it does not demand an answer.
Article 5 of the Atlantic Alliance obliges everyone to act if a member country is attacked. The wording allows for a less literal interpretation. Ukraine is left out, but Finland could be a cause of war, as would an attack on arms supplies to Ukraine in Poland, as the Secretary General of the Alliance has warned, Jens Stoltenberg.
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The EU believes that in the short term there is only the option of helping the Ukrainian Army with sophisticated weapons that allow it to resist or slow down the advance. He hopes that if Russia gets bogged down and suffers casualties it will be easier for Putin to accept a negotiated solution that he considers honorable.
Russia has its economy on the edge of the precipice due to the sanctionsbut Putin still has a terminal option at hand: cut off the supply of gas to a dependent Europe. He knows that the extreme european rights, which it has financed and pampered for years, are going to benefit from the irritation caused by increases in the prices of electricity, gasoline, sunflower oil and cereals. They are your fifth column in an all-out war.