The minimalist scenario involves maintaining the current front line on the ground, where the situation seems frozen.
When Russia launched its offensive on February 24, it claimed it wanted to cleanse “Nazis” and “demilitarize” Ukraine, but has downgraded its goals after failing to seize the kyiv region.
The Russian army is now concentrated in the east of the neighboring country, where it is trying to “liberate” the entire Donbas region, an area controlled in part by Moscow through pro-Russian separatists since 2014.
In this context, the hypothesis of an “opposition war that would become chronic without a significant escalation” appears as one of the possible scenarios, according to Marie Dumoulin, of the European Center for Foreign Relations (ECFR).
“Ukrainians could consider [este escenario] as a victory by discard”, which would allow them to save kyiv and an access to the sea, indicates the former French colonel Michel Goya.
If the Russian army “proposes a ceasefire, kyiv could see it as a form of victory” and the Russians could for their part “claim a relative victory, but a victory nonetheless,” he explains.
Although this seems unlikely for now, Moscow could assert before its population
the self-proclaimed independence of the two Donbas territories, as well as the seizure of several key cities in the Sea of Azov.
“We have not yet reached that point,” Goya relativizes. “The Russians are continuing their offensive and the Ukrainians, who managed to drive them out of kyiv, may think that they can drive them out of Donbas as well. In that case, I find it difficult to imagine an agreement.”
Beyond the Russians, this does not mean that the Ukrainians accept it, since it means “losing part of their territory,” says Michel Duclos, former French ambassador and adviser to the Montaigne Institute.
“After so many atrocities and kidnappings of Ukrainian civilians, kyiv has no choice but to fight to reconquer all of its territory,” says Margarita Assenova, of the Jamestown Foundation in Washington.
This scenario would respond to one of kyiv’s repeated requests: the withdrawal of Russian forces from the territories taken since February 24.
The Ukrainians “want to restore their sovereignty, expel the Russian troops” and be able to prevent this from happening again, Derek Chollet, advisor to the US State Department, told Le Monde newspaper.
For Duchos, “this would be a form of victory”, but “a military progression is needed and diplomacy finds
a means to save face”
of Russian President Vladimir Putin.
And the Russian withdrawal would be meaningless if Moscow does not give guarantees that it will refrain from intervening in Ukraine’s foreign policy, according to the Jamestown Foundation.
With respect to the Donbass territories controlled by pro-Russians since 2014, kyiv “cannot” abandon them and Moscow “cannot get up from the table” without them, estimates the American historian Edward Luttwak.
But Moscow could “present as a victory” consultations organized in these Donetsk and Luhansk territories to determine whether to remain Ukrainian or join Russia, it adds.
In the maximalist scenario, which many observers see as unrealistic, kyiv and its Western allies would seek to return the Crimean peninsula, annexed by Russia in 2014, to Ukraine.
Although it is not excluded that kyiv “may retake sovereignty” of Lugansk and Donetsk, “there will be no short-term negotiated solution on Crimea,” John Herbs, former US ambassador to Ukraine, recently estimated.
The return of this peninsula “seems impossible”, since “it would question the Putin regime, for whom it has been a formidable factor of legitimacy in his own country”, explains Duclos.
Goya also considers it “difficult”, except for a “sudden collapse” of the Russians, but “the balance of forces is too balanced to suddenly imagine a spectacular victory”.
AFP
Source: Ambito
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