As European economy flounders with specter of food shortages, lack of energy to drive industry, plus the specter of insufficient heat in the next winter, Russia will dictate to the West what will transpire. There will be no treaties since NATO broke the two existing treaties related to Ukraine neutrality. Europe realizes that there can be no Europe without Russia. Russia with its vast resources of energy, raw materials, and food was almost immune to Western sanctions. The Russian Ruble recently reached a four year high in value. India and China are buying the energy previously earmarked for Russia. Even the U.S. is on the brink of real economic chaos due to a president who not only goaded Putin into war, but foolishly worked to prolong the war which has wrought chaos on the Western world. At this juncture, Russia has won the war, but it will only end the conflict at such time when its objectives are satisfied. I predict most of Ukraine East of the Dnieper River including the cities of Kharkov and even Dnipro and Zaporozhye will be annexed by Russia. Also a corridor along the Black Sea stretching from Mariupol through Kerson, and even Odessa will become part of Russia.
Andrei Martyanov, a former Russian Navy officer, now an American has written several books about the decline of the Western military prowess and the stunning rise and might of the Russian Army. He predicted accurately what would transpire in Ukraine years ago in his blog. A recent entry in Martyanov’s blog predicts how the war will end.
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“Neutral Ukraine” stopped being a “solution” about two months ago and it is not about Ukraine anymore. In fact, it never was from the get go in 2014. It is, indeed, an existential struggle for Russia, and Putin is one of the dovish ones in Russian leadership. Moreover, what Mearsheimer fails to understand, that Russia didn’t even roll out big guns and they are being kept in reserve in case Russia decides, which appears to be the case, to “expand” on her military-political objectives for SMO and is now in the mode of breaking up NATO. In this case, it really doesn’t matter what the US wants or cares about–it is all connected to the escalation dominance Russia possesses and I warned about it as early as 2015-16. It is not about Putin, it is about Russian people, as a nation and we are long past the point of any negotiations about Ukraine. As I write for 8 years in this blog–the subject of negotiations is what will be the conditions of surrender of the combined West
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