The report is absolutely scathing. Some choice quotes:
But when the next crisis came, both the US and the governments of Europe fell back on old models of alliance leadership. Europe, as EU high representative for foreign affairs Josep Borrell loudly lamented prior to Russia’s invasion, is not really at the table when it comes to dealing with the Russia-Ukraine crisis. It has instead embarked on a process of vassalisation.
But “alone” had a very specific meaning for Scholz. He was unwilling to send Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine unless the US also sent its own main battle tank, the M1 Abrams. It was not enough that other partners would send tanks or that the US might send other weapons. Like a scared child in a room full of strangers, Germany felt alone if Uncle Sam was not holding its hand.
Europeans’ lack of agency in the Russia-Ukraine crisis stems from this growing power imbalance in the Western alliance. Under the Biden administration, the US has become ever more willing to exercise this growing influence.
Russia can’t even fucking match Ukraine which is being drip-fed surplus.
Hasn’t Russia been holding on to the claimed regions for almost an year now?
You mean hasn’t Russia slowly been attritioning itself in Bakhmut for no strategic gain whatsoever.
Not to mention that in the beginning Russia was claiming “Kyiv in three days”. It claimed Kherson. It claimed Kharkiv. Prigoshin wasn’t wrong when he called the whole thing a disaster in various colourful ways.
From what I gathered their demands for a peace deal for a very long time are basically for recognition of the new areas, without added land claims. This would imply that their war goal was just those. Am I incorrect there? Could you provide a source, if so?
Russia’s stated goal was to “demilitarise and denazify”, which never made any sense, but definitely involved capturing Kyiv (why else beeline for it?) and toppling the government. The actual goal seems to have been installation of a puppet regime a la Belarus.
But all that became moot as they lost the war in the first couple of days, only trouble was that didn’t mean that Ukraine won, or the Kremlin realised it had already lost. The rest of the war is, big picture, a slow Russian retreat while scorching the earth.
The reason the whole thing is still going on is the party’s utter disagreement when it comes to acceptable terms, and Russia’s authoritarian civic giving -50% war exhaustion, but that’s countered by Ukraine’s -100% temporal modifier “defence against genocide” (sorry couldn’t resist going Paradox after all).
Russia’s current stance “just give us what we have” would allow Putin to sell the thing as a win domestically, but we already see propaganda spins such as “sure we demilitarised them, now they’re not using Ukrainian but NATO hardware” which is olympic-level mental gymnastics so my assumption is that pretty much everyone but Putin (who is being fed bad info as giving him bad news gets you demoted to defenestrated) realises where this is heading.
I give it a year, tops, until the last Russian boot is out of Ukraine. Including Crimea.
