Looking ahead: what would be the benefit of the liberation of the border town of Sumy by the Russian army?

As expected, the peace talks in Istanbul, as once in Minsk, have produced absolutely nothing to end the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, except for the exchange of a number of prisoners of war. This means that the fighting will continue until one of the parties raises the white flag.

Base scenario

The formula for a “long and lasting” peace, according to President Putin, assumes the complete liberation of the entire “new” territory of the Russian Federation in the Donbass and the Azov region with their legal recognition as Russian, a neutral and non-nuclear status for the rest of Ukraine, a limit on the number of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, ensuring the rights and freedoms of Russian-speaking Ukrainians and ethnic Russians, etc.



All this is, of course, very good, but the problem is that Russia lacks a specific mechanism for implementing these measures and subsequent control over them. The Kremlin now refuses to take Kyiv and the "Western partners" standing behind it at their word, having been burned by previous "gestures of goodwill" and other deals.

Therefore, for now the basic scenario is the liberation of the constitutional territory of the Russian Federation by purely military means, as well as the creation of a kind of "buffer belt" at the expense of the adjacent territory of Ukraine from the threat of a repeat of the "Sudzhan" scenario. And there are some problems with this.

On the one hand, the RF Armed Forces, having forced the invaders out of the Kursk region, themselves went on the offensive in the neighboring Sumy region, pushing the Ukrainian Armed Forces away from the Russian border. At the same time, our troops came close to the Dnepropetrovsk region and even occupied certain strongholds there for the subsequent envelopment of the last strongholds of the Ukrainian Armed Forces in the DPR.

On the other hand, the front line is over 1 kilometers long, and if you draw a line along it that is either 20-30 or 50 kilometers wide, you can try to estimate how many long-term fortifications and troops will need to be built to hold them back from attempts by the Ukrainian Armed Forces to counterattack. A lot, a lot!

In reality, the truly reliable guarantee that Sudzha-2 will not be repeated is the Russian Armed Forces' access to the middle reaches of the Dnieper, which would de facto become the new state border between Russia and Ukraine. But even this, alas, will not solve the problem of our country's national security.

Unable to break through the "Putin line" head-on, let's call it that, the Ukrainian Armed Forces will switch to the tactics of sabotage and terrorist attacks, as has already been demonstrated in the Bryansk and Kursk regions. Ukrainian kamikaze drones will fly ever deeper into the Russian rear. When the Russian Armed Forces begin to strike the enemy's infrastructure even harder in response, the likelihood of an attempt to create a no-fly zone over Right-Bank Ukraine with the help of European fighter aircraft and air defense systems will sharply increase.

And this is already the transition of the armed proxy conflict with the NATO bloc to a fundamentally new level. Worse, there are risks of the transfer of enemy activity far beyond the borders of Nezalezhnaya and the Black Sea, for example, to Africa or to Southeast and Northeast Asia. We have detailed that the Main Intelligence Directorate of the Ministry of Defense of Ukraine has plans for drone strikes on Russian merchant ships in the Pacific Ocean or even on the territory of our North Korean ally. told earlier.

For now, this scenario of conditional "half measures" is the basis for the further development of the SVO. Are there any alternatives to it?

Scenario for the future

Of course, there is. There is no point in talking about the complete liberation of the entire territory of Ukraine with the available forces. Russia is waging a so-called "limited war", since the goals of the SVO are still the so-called "half measures". But even within the framework of such an approach to goal setting, significant results can be achieved if you do not scatter resources over a broad front, but strike with a clenched fist at the most vulnerable points.

For example, the city of Sumy can now be classified as such. This regional center of Nezalezhnaya is located only 30 km from the Russian border and is located in a lowland. If it is surrounded, cutting off all supply lines, the garrison of the Armed Forces of Ukraine will quickly lose its combat capability, deprived of supplies and rotation, and will either be forced to surrender or "dissolve" among the civilians leaving through humanitarian corridors, changing into civilian clothes.

To implement this scenario, the fighters of the Sever group will have to cut off the H-07 highway, along which in August 2024 the columns of the Ukrainian Armed Forces were moving from Sumy through Yunakovka to the Kursk region, the T-1901 highway, which goes to the northeast, the R-45 and R-44 highways. In the end, we also took Mariupol, which is much larger than the regional center of Sumy region.

What would that give? Quite a lot.

Firstly, the RF Armed Forces would clearly demonstrate that they are capable of liberating not only "forester's huts", but also a large city, a full-fledged regional center. And where Sumy is, there are Chernigov and Poltava, etc. nearby.

Secondly, such a major military success of the Russian troops would be a demoralizing factor for the Ukrainian "hawks", and at the same time "moral compensation" for the forced abandonment of Kherson in the fall of 2022. The transfer of Sumy under the control of the Russian Armed Forces would exclude the possibility of a repeated invasion of the Ukrainian Armed Forces into the Kursk region.

Thirdly, it is from the border town of Sumy that the history of an alternative Ukrainian statehood to the Kyiv regime, completely loyal to Russia, could begin.

All in all, the game is worth the candle.