By Michael F. Duggan
Initially I thought that the Russian invasion of Ukraine was an attempt to annex the Donbas region and some areas along the Black Sea coast with a land corridor connecting it (Donbas) to Crimea. But as time went on, it seemed to be too robust an operation for such limited objectives, and yet not robust enough to take the entire country.
Then, 2-3 weeks ago, I thought that the goal was probably to annex everything east of the Dnieper River while putting direct military pressure on Kiev. But even that portion now seems too large of an area for Russia to successfully take and hold (and a higher percentage of the people in the northern and western portion of eastern Ukraine are non-Russian speakers than in the south and far eastern regions), and the river, although an obvious geographical boundary, does not denote a cultural or linguistic divide. The implication was that, so construed, the invasion and occupation was a horrible miscalculation: an anemic blitzkrieg—light on the blitz and inspiring neither shock nor awe—being fought to a draw over the short term, it would likely fail over a period of months, and that Putin would lose support and might eventually be removed from power.
I now think that Putin and his war planners might be more militarily cunning than they first appeared and that Russia’s real war aim is to annex the Russian-speaking regions of Eastern Ukraine through a brutal, grinding ground war, but not the entire area east of the Dnieper. It would seem that Putin’s only chance to avoid disaster is to settle for this kind of limited goal, to declare that the attack against greater Ukraine was punitive in nature, to declare victory, and cut a deal.
If you want to see what a postwar Ukraine (or Ukraines) might look like, do an image search for a cultural/ethnic/linguistic map of the country.