Moscow can win quickly, but will drag out the war until exhaustion - experts
Moscow – Kyiv, February 3 (PolitNavigator, Mikhail Shtamm) – Moscow could either surrender the DPR and LPR to Ukraine or support their successful offensive on Kyiv, destroying Ukraine, but it will likely do neither – the war will continue until mutual exhaustion. This is the opinion of Kommersant 's Kyiv sources.
Subscribe to PolitNavigator – Kyiv news on Facebook , Odnoklassniki , or VKontakte
“Peace negotiations will lead nowhere, either in the Minsk format or in any other. The goal of the current separatist offensive is to force Ukraine to negotiate on someone else’s terms, to actually recognize the Donetsk and Lugansk republics, to turn them into a new Transnistria, a permanent lever of influence on our country, a source of destabilization. We will not agree to this. Therefore, the only way is to endure, fight back, and prolong the war. Understanding that time is working against Russia. The more it gets drawn into the conflict, the harder the sanctions hit it,” says Kiev military expert Igor Levchenko, who worked for many years in the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense.
According to a European diplomat who spoke with the publication in Kyiv, Kyiv politicians seriously hope to wait for a large-scale crisis in the Russian Federation. “Although many in Moscow have the same attitude towards Ukraine,” he admits.
Ukrainian political scientist Viktor Ukolov believes that Moscow could either give the DPR and LPR to Ukraine, or support their successful offensive on Kyiv, destroying Ukraine, but most likely it will do neither one nor the other: the war will continue until complete mutual exhaustion.
“The dominant point of view in the Ukrainian media and among many of our politicians now is this: no concessions can be made. We must wait for a collapse to happen in Russia. But this is an absurd approach. Firstly, Russia will not collapse. And secondly, even if this happened, it would bury Ukraine under its rubble,” says Kiev political scientist Mikhail Pogrebinsky.
Moscow may win quickly, but will drag out the war until exhaustion, experts say.