Russia and Ukraine

[Anomalocaris]

if we look at what russia’s short term and long term objectives in Ukraine is, and how much of price russia must pay to attain those objectives compare to how much she has already paid, it becomes clear Russia really no longer has any interest in ending this war relatively quickly.   

A quick war may have been russia’s original goal, to defeat ukraine quickly, establish a pliant client state in an intact ukraine, and bound ukraine to russia economically abs administratively,

But that ship has sailed,   Instead I believe the Russia objective now is to keep the war going at a medium intensity for at least several years.   her goal is no longer to take and hold territory for strategic reasons, but to take, as well as to yield, territory as necessary purely tactically to keep the war going and lay waste to the most developed parts of ukraine.   The real objective is to turn the most productive part of ukrainian population, who inhabit the land that will be fought over, into refugees who will then leave ukraine.   most of them will never return.    This will cripple ukraine by depriving it of the most fundamental resource required for meaningful future nationalism.

so I expect Russia will now pull back from all the exposed tips of the initial offensives in order to shorten and straighten the front line.   This will allow the russian army greatly reduce the number of men required to hold the front, thus freeing up large number of units that can then form a new mobile reserve.

Russia will probably take care to not withdraw so far as to make it inconvenient to renew previous offensives.   the new mobile reserve will then conduct new offensives into ukraine for a different purpose.   The goal is not to take major Ukrainian cities but to fight over them and thus make them unfit for civilian occupation.    It will probably start doing this over this summer,  but will probably do this several more times over the next few years.  This makes these population into refugees.     if the war were to last years, much of the resulting refugee would leave ukraine to be settled in Europe or elsewhere,  where most of them will stay snd never come back yo ukraine.

And that would be the real objective.

Russia followed this policy between 1994-2002 in Chechnya.   And it worked.  the parallel between chechnya and ukraine is striking.   both began with a failed Russian coup de main to take the capital of an intransigent former client state, resulted in apparent success for the defenders and high russian casualties.  Russia responded by broadening her attacks on chechnya from conventional military territory grabbing attacks to a full spectrum of operations designed to dislocate civilian population, forcing refugees to migrate.   Russia also capitalized on the general proliferation of arms amongst the population resulting from the armed insurgency to set up local warlords the fragment the cohesion of organized resistance, until chechnya completely hollowed out.    Now chechnya is a member of the russian federation and run by one of the warlords russia cultivated.  

Now it only make sense for it to do this on much larger scale on ukraine.