Dina Mahmoud (London)
After a full year passed in which the sound of the guns in Ukraine did not subside except for a few days during a unilateral truce that was declared during Christmas according to the Orthodox calendar in early January, the raging crisis in this country seems open to various possibilities, especially with the faltering of diplomatic efforts to find a settlement. her politics.
According to experts and analysts who have followed the course of events on the Ukrainian scene since its arrival to the moment of the armed clash on the 24th of last February, no future scenario can be ruled out, whether Moscow achieves great success on the ground, or that this is achieved with Kiev, or until the conflict finally arrives. to a stage of stalemate, thus opening the door to the continuation of the fighting for an unforeseen period.
The realization of the first possibility, related to the possibility that Russia will be able to resolve the confrontations militarily, depends on its forces achieving a series of field victories by the end of the current winter, regaining most parts of the city of Kherson, and advancing towards the coastal city of Odessa, taking advantage of the state of human and material exhaustion that the government suffers from. Kiev now.
In this regard, Moscow may benefit from the readiness of the forces that it mobilized heavily last fall, the redeployment operations it successfully carried out in recent months, and the removal of its vital sites from the reach of Ukrainian missiles, in addition to the cohesion of Russian logistical supply chains on the front lines. At the same time, the Russians can benefit from the problems that Kiev may face during the coming period, in terms of receiving more supplies of Western weapons and ammunition, in light of data indicating an escalating rate of ammunition consumption by Ukrainian forces, which senior Western officials have spoken of extensively. recently made public.
According to this scenario, the Ukrainian authorities may also suffer from the consequences of the corruption scandals that afflict some official figures in the current period, and they may also face internal divisions, due to the pressures exerted by hard-line nationalist currents.
On the other hand, the second scenario depends on the possibility of Kiev defeating the expected Russian attack at the beginning of next spring, and receiving larger quantities of weapons and equipment from its allies in the West, which makes it able to control more regions, move towards the Crimea peninsula, and perhaps extend its control over parts of it. like that.
However, the most likely possibility is that the military confrontations will continue for several years, with the inability of the two parties to the conflict to have either of them the upper hand on the battlefield, and the fighting reaching a dead end, without preventing this from continuing skirmishes and clashes on a limited scale. , at secondary sites in terms of importance.
On the field level, foreign aid in arms and equipment to Kiev may reach the maximum level, which it cannot exceed, either because of the declining productive capacity of the defense industry sector in the West, or due to the nature of the weapons that are being supplied, in parallel with the possibility of Moscow exhausting as much as possible. It devotes a large amount of its human and material resources to dealing with the current crisis. And this will be accompanied, as the experts told the “The Conversation” website, with the continued failure of the efforts of regional and international mediators to bring the two sides of the fighting to the negotiating table, especially with the reluctance of each of them to move seriously on this path, or to convince its public opinion of the feasibility of this, Especially since Zelensky’s government fears that its acceptance of any peace talks will lead to losing the support of nationalist currents at home and some of the major Western powers abroad.
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