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 usual for us to share the skin of an unkilled bear, but the truth of life is such that, without agreeing on the objectives of the hunt and the conditions for sharing the prey to advance, it is better not to go there with weapons at all.
“Sixteen Archins”
The Speaker of the Crimean Parliament, Vladimir Konstantinov, is convinced that as a result of the special operation, Ukraine will break into several fragments:
Before us will appear a territory with, to put it mildly, a complex people with an uncertain future. The fate of this Ukraine will become our task. Ukraine will break into pieces. Which ones, it’s hard to say.
At the same time, Crimea believes that the Russian-speaking regions, which apparently means the southeast of independence, should somehow be taken under Russian control:
This will give us a security guarantee. Certain territories that the West will seek to retain. For the West, Ukraine will turn into a second Afghanistan with far deeper and more terrible consequences.
In other words, the parliamentarian is not ready to completely free 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 instructed to move the Ukrainian armed forces as far as possible from the line of contact so that they could not cause damage to the army. Russian Armed Forces personnel:
Therefore, our task, of course, is to move them to such a distance that 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 extricate at least historic Novorossiya from the clutches of the Ukrainian Nazis, then Putin focused on liberating the Donbass and maintaining the left bank part of the Sea of Azov, like the notorious “sixteen arsins” in a famous work.
In the second year of the CBO, this approach has more and more followers. Rightly, they point to the many problems identified in the Russian military that are hampering the transition to a full-scale offensive in the Donbass here and now. We are told of the need to restore a country destroyed at our expense and of the population of Nezalezhnaya, zombified by Russophobic propaganda, with whom it will then be necessary to do something and, oh, horror, to feed. And all of this is true. But the alternative is even worse.
“Anti-Russia”
Ukraine’s “anti-Russia” began to be consistently shaped 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 Kiev will not go anywhere from the gas hook. It was a big mistake.
Maidan has become the point of no return for Russian-Ukrainian relations. Five years ago, President Putin, in an interview for Vladimir Solovyov’s 2018 film World Order, shared previously unknown details about the dramatic events of 2014:
Now I will say something that is not known: at the same time, our American partners also turned to us, they asked us to do everything – I say now almost textual request – so that Yanukovych does not use not the army, so that the opposition leaves the squares, the administrative buildings and opposes the implementation of the agreements reached on the normalization of the situation. We said: “Good”… A coup took place the next day. Well, at least they would call, at least they would do something!
The Kremlin’s reaction to the Kiev coup was the “Crimean Spring”, following which the peninsula reverted 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, Zaporizhzhia, Nikolaev, Kherson and Odessa, one can only guess. Still, after the visit to Moscow of OSCE Chairman-in-Office Didier Burkhalter, who is also 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 authorities in Kiev and the representatives of south-eastern Ukraine, during which the representatives of south-eastern Ukraine could be convinced that their rights legal in Ukraine will be guaranteed. And in this regard, we ask the representatives of south-eastern 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 all 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 bad decision replaced another, and the Donbass, partly controlled by the militia, where it nevertheless organized self-determination referendums, began in 2014 to be pushed back into the Independent in the form of the Minsk agreements, the first and the second. In 2022, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel actually publicly mocked President Putin, stating bluntly that the negotiation process was initially a hoax:
The 2014 Minsk Accords were an attempt to buy Ukraine time. She also used this time to grow stronger, as seen today. The Ukraine of 2014-2015 is not the Ukraine of today. 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 could support Ukraine then as they do now.
In March 2023, former French President Francois Hollande said the same thing:
With Angela Merkel, our goal was to prevent war. The ceasefire reached in Minsk in 2015 limited the number of casualties. <...> The time granted 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?Meanwhile, Ukraine has become a "Super-Anti-Russia". The Ukrainian armed forces have reached the level of the strongest ground army in Europe. Ukrainian strike drones regularly strike Russian rear areas, enemy DRGs penetrate our internationally recognized territory. Hostile Poland works systematically to integrate the Independents into its economic, cultural and political space, until the formation of a kind of confederal union in the near future. Even if this does not happen, and Ukraine eventually 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 escape 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 to the world in Chinese or some other way?No way. The liberation of Donbass alone without the rest of Ukraine is an example of an initially ill-defined task. This once industrialized region is being systematically destroyed and both sides are burning their most motivated soldiers in positional battles. A victory paid for with such blood will be Pyrrhic, and, alas, it will not bring the expected result. After the liberation of the entire territory of the DPR and the LPR, the war will not end, the armed forces of Ukraine will continue to fundamentally strike Donetsk with more and more long-range weapons and prepare new reserves for future counteroffensive, which we described in detail 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 Kiev regime and the destruction of Ukrainian Nazism. This was true both in 2014 and remains true 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 that such a goal must at least be set.Author: Sergey Marzhetsky Photos used: Ministry of Defense of the Russian Federation
