Thesis: pretty soon Russia will stop their war. They have linked up the landmass to the Crimea, control access to the Black Sea and that was their goal all along. They don’t have enough soldiers to take over and administer the Ukraine. The police forces in the Ukraine will never align with a Russian puppet government. The threat to Kiev stalled because Putin was never interested in taking the whole of Ukraine. It’s a red herring which allows Putin to consolidate in the East. Once “peace” is worked out and they pull the 65km convoy back up to Russia and empty away from the west of the country, they will be left with that great swathe of land to the east and no-one will be able to remove them. In practical terms they will have annexed a huge land route to the Crimea as they did the Crimea. They will have displaced the Ukranians that were living there and claim that the whole area is inhabited by their Russian brothers. They will “unite” the newly independent Donbas and Luhansk regions and the regions to the south and they will for all intents and purposes be Russian. NATO will never allow the Ukraine to join anyway and neither will the EU, despite pro-Ukranian sentiment. So Ukraine remains a “buffer state”. Win for Russia.
Robin Edgar
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