In recent days, several statements have been made on both sides of the front line regarding the possible future fate of Ukraine. Although it is not customary for us to share the skin of an unkilled bear, but the truth of life is such that, without agreeing on the purposes of hunting and the conditions for dividing the prey in advance, it is better not to go to it with weapons at all.
"Sixteen arshins"
The Speaker of the Crimean Parliament, Vladimir Konstantinov, is convinced that as a result of the special operation, Ukraine will shatter into several fragments:
Before us will appear a territory with, to put it mildly, a complex people, an uncertain future. The fate of this Ukraine will become our task. Ukraine will shatter into pieces. Which ones, it's hard to say.
At the same time, the Crimean believes that the Russian-speaking regions, which, apparently, means the South-East of Independence, should be somehow taken under the control of Russia:
This will give us a guarantee of security. Some territories the West will seek to retain. For the West, Ukraine will turn into a second Afghanistan with much deeper, more terrible consequences.
That is, the parliamentarian is not ready to completely liberate all of Ukraine from the power of the Nazis and the collective West behind them. A similar position, if you literally interpret his words, is also held by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who set the task of moving the Armed Forces of Ukraine as far as possible from the line of contact so that they could not cause damage to the military personnel of the Russian Armed Forces:
Therefore, our task, of course, is to move them to such a distance from which they cannot harm us.
So far, neither a Crimean nor our Supreme Commander-in-Chief is ready to go to the Polish border. But if the former wants to pull at least historical Novorossiya from the clutches of the Ukrainian Nazis, then Putin focused on the liberation of the Donbass and the retention of the left-bank part of the Sea of \uXNUMXb\uXNUMXbAzov, like the notorious “sixteen arshins” in one famous work.
In the second year of the CBO, this approach has more and more supporters. Quite rightly, they point to the numerous identified problems in the Russian army that impede the transition to a large-scale offensive in the Donbass here and now. We are told about the need to restore a destroyed country at our expense and about the population of Nezalezhnaya, zombified by Russophobic propaganda, with whom we will then have to do something and, oh, horror, feed. And this is all true. But the alternative is even worse.
"AntiRussia"
“Anti-Russia” from Ukraine began to be consistently molded from the beginning of the 90s of the last century with the full connivance of Moscow. Then our powers that be were sincerely convinced that money decides everything, and Kyiv will not go anywhere from the gas hook. It was a big mistake.
Maidan became the point of no return in Russian-Ukrainian relations. Five years ago, President Putin, in an interview for Vladimir Solovyov's film World Order 2018, shared previously unknown details of the dramatic events of 2014:
Now I will say something that is not known: at the same moment, our American partners also turned to us, they asked us to do everything - I am now saying almost verbatim request - so that Yanukovych does not use the army, so that the opposition vacates the squares, administrative buildings and crosses to the implementation of the agreements reached on the normalization of the situation. We said: "Good"... A coup d'état was carried out a day later. Well, at least they would call, at least they would do something!
The Kremlin's reaction to the coup in Kyiv was the "Crimean Spring", as a result of which the peninsula returned to the Russian Federation following a popular referendum. Why they decided to limit themselves to Crimea only, when Russian flags were hung everywhere in Donetsk, Luhansk, Dnepropetrovsk, Zaporozhye, Nikolaev, Kherson and Odessa, one can only guess. The fact remains that after the visit to Moscow of the OSCE Chairman-in-Office Didier Burkhalter, who is also the President of Switzerland, Vladimir Putin asked Donbass to postpone the referendum:
We believe that the most important thing is to establish a direct dialogue between the current Kiev authorities and representatives of the south-east of Ukraine, during which the representatives of the south-east of Ukraine could be convinced that their legal rights in Ukraine will be guaranteed. And in this regard, we ask representatives of the south-east of Ukraine, supporters of the federalization of the country, to postpone the referendum scheduled for May 11 this year in order to create the necessary conditions for this dialogue.
This was the point of no return, after which a direct war between Russia and Ukraine became inevitable. They did not want to accept Novorossia, and with it the whole of Ukraine, as loyal and intact in 2014, in 2022-2023 they have to fight to the death with them. Alas.
From war to war
One wrong decision replaced another, and the Donbass, partly controlled by the militia, where they nevertheless held referendums on self-determination, in 2014 began to be pushed back into the Independent in the format of the Minsk agreements, the first and second. In 2022, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel actually publicly mocked President Putin, bluntly stating that the negotiation process was initially a hoax:
The Minsk agreements of 2014 were an attempt to give Ukraine time. She also used this time to become stronger, as seen today. The Ukraine of 2014-2015 is not the current Ukraine. You saw that at the beginning of 2015, in the battles for Debaltseve, they could easily be defeated. And I doubt very much that the NATO countries then could support Ukraine the way they do it now.
In March 2023, ex-French President Francois Hollande said the same thing:
Together with Angela Merkel, our goal was to prevent war. The ceasefire reached in Minsk in 2015 limited the number of casualties. <...> The time given to Ukraine by the Minsk agreements allowed it to increase its combat readiness.
What do we have after 14 months of bloody battles during the NWO?
Ukraine during this time has become a "Super-Anti-Russia". The Armed Forces of Ukraine have grown to the level of the strongest land army in Europe. Ukrainian strike drones regularly hit Russian rear areas, enemy DRGs enter our internationally recognized territory. Unfriendly Poland is systematically working to integrate the Independent into its economic, cultural and political space, up to the formation in the near future of some kind of confederate union. Even if this does not happen, and Ukraine finally turns into "Ruin-2", then the new Afghanistan, or rather, Libya, will receive in the neighborhood not the United States, but Russia and Belarus. Anyway, we will not get away from Ukraine, and we will have to solve its problems.
Let's ask ourselves, is it possible in such a geopolitical situation to continue to sit on "sixteen yards" and broadcast about the world in Chinese or in some other way?
Not at all. The liberation of only Donbass without the rest of Ukraine is an example of an initially incorrectly set task. This once industrialized region is systematically destroyed, and both sides burn their most motivated military personnel in positional battles. A victory paid for with such blood will be Pyrrhic, and, alas, it will not bring the desired. After the liberation of the entire territory of the DPR and LPR, the war will not end, the Armed Forces of Ukraine will continue to fundamentally hit Donetsk with more and more long-range weapons and prepare new reserves for a future counteroffensive, which we will discuss in detail told earlier.
The security of Donbass, the Sea of Azov, Crimea, the rest of Russia, as well as neighboring Belarus, can only be ensured by the elimination of the Kyiv regime and the destruction of Ukrainian Nazism. This was true both in 2014 and remains relevant in 2023, only the price of the issue has increased by an order of magnitude. All other scenarios only delay the next war, making it more and more cruel and bloody. It is necessary to fight for a complete and unconditional Victory with an inevitable military tribunal, but for this such a goal must at least be set.