Expert: Russia, Ukraine ready to expand and further internationalize war
Caliber.Az interview with Professor Yakushik

INTERVIEWS  11 May 2022 - 10:06

Caliber.Az presents an interview with doctor of political sciences, Professor Valentin Yakushik (Kyiv, Ukraine).

- Valentin Mikhailovich, how would you characterize the current military and political situation in Ukraine at this stage of the war?

- The Russian leadership planned and started the war in Ukraine as a lightning-fast “regime change” operation, but within a few days of fighting it became clear that in Ukraine almost the entire nation stood up to the armed invasion and is waging a Patriotic War. There is a full-scale war on land, in the air and at sea. Russian Federation troops are continuing the invasion, in which, unlike the first phase of the war (before the round of negotiations in Istanbul), the fighting is now mainly conducted in the east and south of Ukraine and has weakened in the north. The Russian army is systematically destroying Ukraine’s infrastructures, the foundations of economic life, and the social structures of the country. There are incalculable human casualties. The loss of civilian property through destruction and looting on the occupied and uncontrolled territories is enormous. There are now millions of internally displaced people in the country; since the beginning of the war, about 5 million people have gone abroad. Virtually all regions of Ukraine are systematically bombarded with rockets. And more recently, some border territories of the Russian Federation have themselves become the target of airstrikes.

- Military analysts predict a protracted war. What do you think about this?

- Making predictions on this issue is an unrewarding task. After all, the completely unthinkable became a reality on 24 February, 2022. It is not yet clear when and how the return to common sense will occur. The prospects are multivariate.

The acute phase of hostilities between Russia and Ukraine could end at any time – in a few weeks or a few months. For now, there will definitely be several weeks of extremely heavy fighting on all current fronts.

Possible scenarios for the coming weeks: 1) a counterattack by the Ukrainian armed forces; 2) further advance of Russian forces deeper into Ukraine and occupation of some new territories; 3) transition of the fighting to the stage of positional “trench warfare” (modelled on the western front of Germany in the World War I).

But the “hybrid” war between Russia and the West, in which the territory of Ukraine is only one of the battlefields, will develop further, capturing new areas and acquiring new forms. Further internationalization of the current war in Ukraine is quite possible. There are no prospects for ending the Russian-Ukrainian war so far, which at the superficial political level is manifested in the fact that both sides put forward mutually unacceptable conditions. First of all, Ukraine is not ready to make territorial concessions. From the very beginning, the Russian leadership demanded recognition of the annexation of Crimea and legitimization of the separatist entities in Donbass. Moreover, now Russian politicians and the mass media are not hiding the fact that their leadership has the task of tearing away a number of regions from Ukraine and that their troops and administration are not going to withdraw from the seized territories.

- How do you assess the volume of Western military aid to Ukraine?

- Western countries supply Ukraine with virtually every type of weaponry. As US State Department spokesman Ned Price recently said, the US “have inexhaustible opportunities for the delivery of weapons and defence assistance” to Ukraine. And this is no exaggeration. Western instructors are training many Ukrainian military specialists. NATO also provides Ukraine with key intelligence information and relevant, highly professional advice. Therefore, there is a possibility that the combat power of the armed forces of the opposing sides involved in military operations on Ukrainian territory will get actually equal.

- What concessions are Ukraine ready to make in negotiations with Russia?

- Practically none at the moment. It follows from the Ukraine leaders’ current speeches that Russia is required to capitulate almost completely and, to begin with, return to the line of territorial control that existed before 24 February, 2022.

- In the expert community, there is talk of dividing Ukraine between Russia and the West in the future. Do you share such opinions?

- There are always grounds for such theorizing: there are many creators and popularizers of certain concepts of global politics, as well as corresponding contrived or relatively reasonable versions of discourses on geopolitical topics. The most likely temporal division could be, as happened in 2014-2015, along the lines of actual control as a result of some form of “freezing” of active hostilities, including their transition to a prolonged stage of positional “trench warfare”. Since it is hard to expect complete defeat of one or the other side, we can assume that the restoration of territorial integrity and a unified pluralistic political system of Ukraine will be possible on the basis of reliable international guarantees for the creation and effective functioning of nationwide democratic decentralized and regionalized economic and political system in Ukraine.

- Can the war in Ukraine expand the geography of hostilities in the region?

- It can. And we may see it in the near future. Both sides of the confrontation are ready to expand the battlefield and further internationalize hostilities.

- Lastly, please name the main reasons why the Russian war plan in Ukraine did not work?

- The war cannot be stopped, first, because the necessary sufficient conditions have not yet matured to change the political regime in Russia and to begin the search for a real way out of the geopolitical and civilizational adventure into which this regime has plunged its country.

Second, because the forces of the opposing sides – the Russian Federation and the global West – at the point of their direct collision on the territory of Ukraine are currently approximately equal and there is still an illusion that by involving more and more resources the war can still be won. Neither side has been exhausted yet.

If we conditionally look at the scheme of unfolding processes during the World War I, which seems to be quite applicable to the prediction of the development of the Russian-Ukrainian war, then there is still a relatively long time before the transition to the stage of the 1917-1918 events model. For example, well-known Ukrainian media activist Oleksiy Arestovych argues that the war may last until 2035.

The Russian leadership’s initial plan to carry out a blitzkrieg in Ukraine did not work for a number of reasons:

1) overestimating its own organizational capabilities and resources and ignoring the real balance of power in the world;

2) choosing the wrong sparring partner for a geopolitical adventure, underestimating the Ukrainian people’s readiness to defend themselves;

3) loss of orientation in time: the conditions of 2022 in and around Ukraine are far from the situation of 2014-2015;

4) successful (from the organizational point of view) tactics and strategy of the West, primarily the US and Britain, to lure Russia into a devastating and deadly geopolitical, economic and civilizational trap;

5) lack of attractive ideological, socio-economic and political models capable of providing an alternative to the existing models of the West and the East, as well as soullessness, antihumanism and cynicism of the invading forces and the structures supporting them.

These are my impressions and subjective assessments of the facts of processes that seemed inconceivable and abnormal just a few months ago.

Caliber.Az