The war in Ukraine in the “east” of 2024, will enter its second year. Events on a global scale are so dense and above all so important, that today there are people who believe that this particular war is not being waged.
There are people who, because the media does not “play” with constant links and videos, believe that the battles are not tougher than ever and above all that there is no longer a risk of losing a country “insurance” valve for the West in the critical region of Eastern Europe .
Volodymyr Zelensky has openly admitted that the war in Gaza has harmed his own struggle. This, in addition to being a fact, also shows the way in which the war on the territory of Ukraine is developing today. Russia has managed to gain something that it did not have at any point in the first year of the invasion, the advantage. After the fall of Kherson and the changes it brought to the army and the military hierarchy, Moscow once again decided to change its strategy.
From the attack and the many fronts, it was decided to fortify the occupied areas in the east and the south and to make their preservation an end in itself. The fiercest fighting with tens of thousands dead in Bakhmut effectively exhausted Ukrainian rather than Russian capacity for trained soldiers, with the Kremlin and Wagner sending massive “expendables” from Russian prisons to the scene.
With winter arriving again, freezing not only the atmosphere and the black fertile Ukrainian soil, but also the tactics in the fields, Russia has today for the first time since 24the February 2022 the upper hand. Ukraine cannot break through the fortifications to the east and south, and with ranged strikes alone it is extremely difficult to defeat even the now demonstrably multi-layered Russian army.
The morale also of the Russian soldiers seems to be gradually healing, since now the massive defeats of the first year (failure to capture Kiev, expulsion from the suburbs of the Capital, failure to capture Kharkiv, strikes in the Black Sea and Crimea, etc.) today at least there is no retreat from any area.
The more than 300,000 dead and wounded Russians on the battlefields have not created any “unbearable” pressure on Vladimir Putin who, in the midst of it all, managed to get rid of the only person who openly disagreed with him and had no qualms about articulate aloud and not only publicly: Prigozhin.
The cost of the war, understandably, is also an advantage for Moscow which, despite unprecedented sanctions, has a way even with purchases from Tehran, to still hurt Kiev.
On the contrary, the blows to Ukraine have begun to weigh more. Losses in well-trained military personnel cannot be replaced, as for Kiev and for a country resisting the occupier, prisons are never a source of recruitment.
The thousands of mortars and artillery shells required daily simply to “annoy” and not to put the Russian troops to flight, are not arriving with the frequency of the recent past, and the economy of the country is impossible under present conditions to be able to much more to maintain even the existing infrastructures.
With all the above data, one would expect that the primary goal of Zelensky’s world tour would be primarily a request for financial and military assistance. The Ukrainian President, however, is asking for something else, even if money and weapons are welcome.
Today, more than ever, Zelensky calls for open support for the Ukrainian struggle. Kyiv, the country’s President has diagnosed, needs today more than ever to boost morale and ensure that what the country and its people have given, will not go to waste.
Zelensky also wants to emphasize behind closed doors, mainly in the US, that he will not sit down for any reason, least of all himself, at the negotiating table with Putin and his own Russia.
The Ukrainian President, who in two years has made political leaps, knows that the long pre-election period of the USA is not his ally, but he has no intention of giving up the effort.
For him, as time proves, or rather the duration of his effort and the stability of his positions, the battles that are not lost are only those that are not fought and he has no intention of stopping fighting for an intact Ukraine.
Maybe along the way he will be forced to sacrifice parts of his narrative or his dream but today that is not in the frame.
Source: cnn.gr
