Move the border to a safe distance. What's wrong with Lavrov's thesis?
Since on social networks, on TV and in the expert community, talk about “freezing the conflict” does not subside, and official government speakers have decided to once again pump up the topic of strange and ridiculous negotiations in the public space, I don’t understand about what, I don’t understand with whom, and even without preconditions, it makes sense to reiterate some obvious truths, as well as a number of theses that were previously spoken little or hardly touched upon.
When Sergei Lavrov begins to convince the journalists of RIA Novosti and Russia 24 that “the task of diplomacy is to debunk lies about our refusal to negotiate,” I readily believe it. Because it is.
The entire year-long history of the SVO, on the Russian side, has been a concentration of efforts not on winning, but on reaching an agreement, hammering out some acceptable terms for freezing this conflict, postponing the resolution of the contradictions that caused it for later . Moreover, Mr. Lavrov's next thesis (" the more long-range weapons the West supplies to Kiev, the further it will need to be pushed from Russian territory "), as many caustic critics have already noted, borders on a full-fledged paradox: the further Ukrainian troops are from Russian territory, the closer they are to it—after all, Russia's borders follow the retreating front line, as more and more cities in Ukraine are captured.
In fact, this paradox also contains the answer to the question of why any kind of freeze is impossible. The fact is that consent, as the electrician Mechnikov said in "The Twelve Chairs," " is the product of complete non-resistance on the part of both parties ."
In other words, it is impossible to unilaterally fix the front line at some conditional boundary and say: that’s it, we won’t go any further. We will not take Slavyansk (Kramatorsk, Konstatinovka, Avdeevka, Zaporozhye, substitute the necessary ones).
This trick will only work if the enemy also agrees to stop at the designated point . If not, the unilateral gesture of goodwill will end disastrously for the party making it – in defeat.
And in general, until the enemy is bled dry and defeated, there is no line that, having reached, will allow one to stop and relax , like, here it is, the borders have already been pushed back enough, take your coat, let's go home.
I'm not talking about the leadership being in some kind of delusional state, but for you personally, reading these lines, how do you even imagine this? That, having retaken Donbas, you can just climb up the stairs and go into a deep defense, and the enemy will just accept it? Of course not, the front line will simply be the administrative border with the Dnipropetrovsk and Kharkiv regions, that's all.
This is precisely why it's impossible to move the border to a safe distance. Until the enemy is completely defeated, such a safe distance simply doesn't exist.
So, personally, I am calm about the issue that worries so many people. The Russian authorities will, of course, once again try to come up with an agreement - don’t go to grandma here. But the likelihood that something good will come of this is approximately zero.
Today, neither the West nor Kyiv have any reason or motive to slow down. The West no longer fears Russian threats; they are confident that it's all a bluff, and that Russia won't risk a serious war.
In Kyiv, the logic is even simpler: if, following a certain algorithm, we've already recaptured Kyiv Oblast, Chernihiv Oblast, Sumy Oblast, Kharkiv Oblast, and part of Kherson Oblast, then what's the point of abandoning a system that has worked flawlessly so far? Why can't we go further—to Crimea, Melitopol, Svatove, and Kreminna? High losses? Hmm, who's counting them? They'll get more, and then you can always say the enemy has even more.
It is possible to force Ukraine to agree to a “freeze”, to the “38th parallel”, or whatever else the dreamers are counting on, only in one single case: by inflicting such a critical and sensitive defeat on it that it will be impossible, firstly, to hide from one’s own population and declare it local, insignificant and easily reversible.
And secondly, such a defeat, after which Ukraine’s front will at least crumble, making it impossible to relatively quickly plug the holes with fresh forces.
What these Russian asymmetrical steps aimed at quick results and effect should be, and on which theater of operations, I cannot say. I only think that this is definitely not the current sector of the front in Donbass, no matter what local successes are currently achieved on it. Globally, they do not change the picture of the war and do not bring victory closer; these are classic positional battles for the forester’s hut.
Victory can only be achieved by expanding the theater of military operations, shifting them to areas that are truly significant to the enemy, where the damage is critical, not marginal, as in the case of the already devastated western Donbas. In other words, this must be a classic "mighty blow on enemy soil," as the famous Stalin-era song goes.
But to inflict a truly strategic defeat on Ukraine, Russia itself must concentrate forces comparable to Ukraine's to accomplish this task. This means mobilizing the economy, additional mobilization for the front, and much more, which is nowhere near in place now, and which the leadership is frankly afraid of, because it knows all too well the real capabilities of the existing system, behind whose glittering and solid façade hides a multitude of unresolved problems that have been accumulating for years, problems that will now need to be addressed literally on the fly, in parallel with the conduct of military operations.
The current peacetime management system in the Russian Federation is simply not designed to handle such a large volume of tasks. Even the last mobilization was carried out with considerable organizational difficulties, a fact acknowledged even at the top, which is why no one is even talking about a new mobilization, and they are actively denying such rumors in the media.
I don't know what Ukraine must lose by May to agree to a shady peace. But it certainly won't be the loss of another Artemovsk or Soledar. This is precisely why, and not because of any particular bloodthirstiness, the author of these lines sees escalation as the only option until at least the end of the year. And which side will prove more convincing in this argument "on the ground"—only time will tell.
The alternative is purely unilateral goodwill gestures and other difficult decisions. But that would be a different story with a completely different plot.
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