Russia invades Ukraine again?

[macdoc]

and it all goes back to the US panicking when they thought Russia was ahead in the arms race.
At the time when Russia had only 4 working weapons.
Maybe someone should have listened to OPPY.

[Tero]

Could Putin take Kyiv?

Here is where the fears of Zelensky and Trump may align. Ukrainians have long said that if they make a deal to end the war now, Putin will simply rest his army, restock and come back for the rest of Ukraine later.

Trump has repeatedly criticized President Biden’s Afghanistan withdrawal. Trump likely doesn’t want a similar legacy: a Russian takeover of Kyiv that lets Democrats say that he lost Ukraine. Republican defenders of Ukraine, a dying breed, argue that Trump never likes to look weak and won’t settle for a deal that gives Putin a free hand. But it’s hard to envision that Putin would make a promise to stay away that Kyiv could count on. (Past promises by Russia to respect Ukrainian sovereignty were worthless.) So protecting Kyiv will be the most difficult, and most important, part of the Trump negotiations.

NYT

[Tero]

Putin does not sign peace deals. Maybe a cease fire.
Biden Has a Pair of Gifts for Trump

Dec. 12, 2024, 5:04 a.m. ET

By David French

NYT Opinion Columnist
But Russia is hardly ascendant. To better understand its plight, I spoke once again to Frederick and Kimberly Kagan. Fred is the director of the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project, and Kimberly is the president of the Institute for the Study of War, which produces daily assessments of the wars in Ukraine and in the Middle East.

Russian losses are immense, Fred Kagan told me. Russia is spending down its cash reserves. It’s losing 35,000 to 45,000 men per month to death or serious injury. It’s also losing around 100 tanks per month.

While the men are theoretically replaceable (Russia’s population is far larger than Ukraine’s), “Putin is very unhappy about another mobilization,” Fred said. He’s reluctant to order another round of conscription. The Russian elite and the residents of Russia’s most prosperous cities have been largely protected from the war so far, but they can’t stay out of the conflict indefinitely if Russian losses continue to mount.

And, crucially, the fighting in Ukraine helped weaken Syria. This was perhaps the most surprising aspect of my conversations about the present situation. Every expert I talked to said that Ukraine helped facilitate the fall of the Assad regime by, in Kimberly Kagan’s words, taking the Wagner Group “off the chess board.”

The Wagner Group was the mercenary army that Putin deployed in the Middle East and North Africa to bolster local allies and advance Russian interests. But when Putin invaded Ukraine, Wagner focused its efforts on taking a city called Bakhmut.
Wagner eventually took the city, but it suffered extraordinary casualties. Wagner then revolted against Putin. It seized the city of Rostov-on-Don, and its founder, Yevgeny Prigozhin, dispatched an armored column toward Moscow.

The rebellion failed, Prigozhin was killed two months later in a plane crash, the Wagner Group was dismantled and its functions were dispersed across the Russian state.

Hezbollah’s demise at the hands of Israel, combined with Wagner’s demise at the hands of Ukraine, meant that al-Assad was vulnerable. His own army lacked the will and the capacity to repel the rebel offensive. Our allies’ military successes had a cumulative, symbiotic effect.

Our national interest requires the United States to continue to lean into our alliances, but Trump has a lean-out approach to foreign policy, and has said he will nominate people for his national security team who seem to be far more invested in fighting political enemies at home rather than opposing enemies abroad.

I was struck by my colleague Carlos Lozada’s recent analysis of Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick to be secretary of defense: “He is more concerned about domestic enemies than foreign ones, and he is willing to break rules to defeat them — even the rules his potential job requires him to uphold.”

Tulsi Gabbard, Trump’s selection for director of national intelligence, defended al-Assad, and she has long expressed what The Associated Press politely called “sympathetic views” toward Putin’s Russia.

Trump has isolationist instincts. His son Donald Jr. and closest allies mock Ukraine. At the same time, however, Trump is far more self-interested than he is ideological, and an American retreat in Syria, or the sight of Russian troops marching in Kyiv, or an Iranian nuclear bomb would all be deeply humiliating to him. They would signal American weakness, which would signal Trump’s weakness.

In other words, Trump’s vanity may save us from Trump’s isolationism, but vanity is a poor proxy for a coherent national security strategy.

Trump is a fortunate man: He’s inheriting the conditions for profound foreign policy success. But he’s also inheriting the possibility of failure, and the troubling reality is that his instincts are wrong, his national security picks are flawed, and he may well snatch a series of terrible defeats from the jaws of extraordinary military and diplomatic success.

[Tero]

Split up Ukraine as soon as Trump is sworn in.
https://unn.ua/en/news/russia-has-creat ... es-sources