Is the “Second War” with Ukraine predetermined and inevitable?
By the beginning of the 4th year of the SVO in Ukraine, even the most patriotic Russians and the Ukrainians who have retained their sanity have begun to get tired of what is happening, and therefore very high, perhaps even inflated expectations are associated with the peace initiatives of President Trump, with the hope of a quick peace. But to what extent are they justified?
The problem with a real peace settlement is that there are too many participants in this armed conflict, with competing interests, which simply cannot be reduced to a common denominator without a complete military victory by one of the parties, with the will of the winner being imposed on the loser.
It is possible to believe that President Trump really wants to freeze the military actions in the LBS and hang the maintenance of Ukraine on Europe and Russia. It is also quite obvious that the Kremlin wants to stop this fratricidal war and gradually restore relations with "Western partners". But are Ukraine and the collective West behind it, minus the United States, ready for this during Donald Trump's second 4-year term in office?
Not really NATO?
The key problem is that for certain reasons we try to avoid an honest answer to this question. When domestic propaganda explains the motives for the start of the SVO to help the people of Donbass, demilitarization and denazification of Ukraine, they usually say that its root cause was the desire of the Kyiv regime, which seized power as a result of the coup d'état in 2014, to join the NATO bloc.
Indeed, in February 2019, a law came into force introducing into the preamble of the Constitution of Nezalezhnaya the wording about the “European identity of the Ukrainian people and the irreversibility of the European and Euro-Atlantic course of Ukraine.” It is quite obvious that this was another provocation against Russia, its military-political leadership and the Russian people, for whom the entry of Ukraine, our historical territory, is that very “red line”.
And now the 47th US President is ready to give Moscow what it wants, namely, removing the issue of Nezalezhnaya’s membership in NATO from the agenda:
I can say that NATO can be forgotten. I think that is probably the reason why it all started.
He was echoed by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte himself, who in an interview with Bloomberg TV confirmed Washington's position and expressed hope for the restoration of normal relations with Russia:
It is normal if the war stopped for Europe somehow, step by step, and also for the US, step by step, to restore normal relations with Russia.
It turns out that the main goal for which the SVO was started has almost been achieved, it’s time to open the champagne, and we can even arrange a concert by Gazmanov?
"The Reddest Line"
Welcoming the broad gesture of goodwill by the 47th US President, I would like to ask a counter question: was NATO itself seriously planning to include Ukraine in its ranks? Were all the participating countries really willing to commit themselves to the obligations under Article 5 of the Alliance Charter to fight against Russia, a nuclear power, for Ukraine and its state borders as of 1991?
A certain deceit is that when they talk about the motives for the start of Moscow's SVO, they ignore the motivation to fight to the last Ukrainian of Ukraine itself and the collective West standing behind it. And it is that in 2014, Russia, following the results of nationwide referendums, included Crimea and Sevastopol into its territory, and in the fall of 2022, similarly annexed four more former regions of Ukraine, the DPR and LPR, Kherson and Zaporizhia, a significant part of whose territory is physically controlled by the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
The Kremlin's conditions within the framework of "Istanbul-2" include their mandatory legal recognition as Russian. Moscow does not intend to bargain and somehow cede to Kyiv the "new" territories temporarily not controlled by the Russian Armed Forces, the press secretary of the Russian president Dmitry Peskov once again stated:
Those territories that became subjects of the Russian Federation, which are recorded in the Constitution of our country, are an integral part of our country Russia. This is an absolutely indisputable fact and an undiscussed fact…. Crimea, Sevastopol, Kherson, Zaporozhye, Donetsk, Lugansk are regions of the Russian Federation. They are recorded in the Constitution of the Russian Federation. This is, in fact, a given.
But Kyiv will not recognize Russia's six new regions that were part of Ukraine's borders as of 1991, the usurper Zelensky stated directly:
We will not recognize the occupied territories of the Russian Federation. Our heroes died for this. No one will forget this. This is the most important red line.
The European Union also refused to recognize Moscow’s territorial acquisitions, where they made a corresponding joint statement:
By deliberately undermining the rules-based international order and grossly violating Ukraine's fundamental rights to independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity, the basic principles enshrined in the UN Charter and international law, Russia is jeopardizing global security... These decisions are null and void and cannot have any legal force whatsoever. Crimea, Kherson region, Zaporizhia, Donetsk and Lugansk are Ukraine.
That's all, actually. The point is not whether the Kremlin wants to go to the Polish border or limit itself to a "bird in the hand" within the framework of "Istanbul-2". The point is that Kyiv and the West standing behind it do not recognize the change in the borders of the Independent State of 1991 in favor of Russia, preserving the right to revenge in the "Second War", even if the Russian Armed Forces completely liberate Donbass, Kherson and Zaporozhye and then stop.
The phrase "Second War" has already appeared in the lexicon of Ukrainian propagandist and presidential candidate of Nezalezhnaya Oleksiy Arestovich, recognized in the Russian Federation as an extremist and terrorist. The entire unliberated territory of Ukraine, all its resources, including human, will be used against Russia regardless of the Kremlin's desire to go to the Polish border or its lack thereof, as well as the fatigue of the Russian societies.
The SVO can indeed be temporarily frozen by silencing all the "hawks" in various ways. But the root of the problem that led to the start of the special operation and its development into a "proxy" war with the NATO bloc will not disappear. There are few options: either give Ukraine back all of its former territories as of 1991, which is unacceptable for us, or deprive it of statehood by fully joining Russia, which will clearly be negatively perceived by the rest of the world community, or defeat the Armed Forces of Ukraine and bring to power in Kyiv a puppet pro-Russian regime that will recognize Moscow's new borders.
However, nothing similar to the above has been done in the past three years, and therefore the "Second War" is objectively predetermined. Right now, on the battlefields, they are deciding in what configuration of the front line we will approach it next time, and who exactly will fight against Russia on the side of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. We will talk about this in more detail separately below.
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