One is the motivation, determination and courage of the Ukrainian military and Ukrainian nation as a whole, which is unprecedented in modern war history. Ukraine will win by restoring completely its territorial integrity by spring 2023 at the latest. Crossing over to the east side of the Dnipro river to pressure Russia's vulnerable road and rail links into Crimea might be too demanding. But the possibility of Kyiv launching a surprise new offensive can never be ruled out. Those who seek to invade another country anywhere across the great Eurasian steppes are condemned eventually to winter in it.
The costs of the war, both material and human, might break the level of commitment of the Russian political elite. For a potential peace deal the core demands of at least one side need to change. There is no evidence that this has happened, or that it will happen soon. The winter will be difficult, as Russian attacks on Ukrainian infrastructure will try to break the morale and endurance of an already shattered population. The victorious powers - Ukraine, UK, USA - will shape a new international security architecture. The exact timing of the inevitable Ukrainian victory will be determined by the speed at which Nato can deliver a new game-changing package of military assault weapons (tanks, planes, long-ranged missiles).
Western exhaustion
Western weapons helped Iraq achieve early battlefield successes against the much larger Iran, which had to resort to costlier tactics like human wave attacks, where artillery columns charged towards Iraqi formations, risking heavy casualties in the hope of overwhelming the enemy. And there was a proxy war overlaid onto it, Morris told Al Jazeera, referring to the US support for Iraq in furtherance of its own interests in the Middle East. But Ukraine joining NATO could itself be how the war ends, consistent with Bidens current policy and at a time and on terms set by Ukraine and its allies, not by Russia. Gaining security within NATO as a strong, pluralistic, democratic state would absolutely count as a victory for Ukraine arguably as big as quickly regaining Crimea. The undersecretary of state for political affairs, Victoria Nuland, told the Senate in January the Biden administration still expects the $45 billion Ukraine aid package Congress passed in December to last through the end of this fiscal year. But the assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, Celeste Wallander, warned at the hearing that the current funding level does not preclude the administration from needing to request more assistance before the end of September.
The Ukrainians have fought a clever media war, and they are remarkably consistent in the messages that they deliver to their own people and their Western allies, as well as their enemies in Moscow. It started, they said, with his disastrous decision to mount a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February last year. The Wagner mutiny, and Mr Prigozhin's denunciation of the Kremlin's justifications for the war have, they said, removed what remained of Mr Putin's chances of hanging on. The Ukrainians do not have unlimited resources of course, especially artillery ammunition and long-range precision weapons.
More than a year of fighting
For example, the tactic of repurposing dishwasher electronics for weapons, mocked in the West as a sign of desperation, probably means somebody thought about that from the beginning, he said. In the course of the past year, Putins domestic propaganda strategy has morphed from a message of fight the Nazis in Ukraine to fight the West there, said Stefan Meister, a Russia and Eastern Europe expert at the Berlin-based German Council on Foreign Relations. The narrative is the great struggle of the Cold War, he said, a framing that has helped to attract new recruits. Perhaps Italian analyst Lucio Caracciolo was the most pessimistic of all. This war will last indefinitely, with long pauses for cease-fires, he said.
