WHAT DOES VICTORY IN UKRAINE LOOK LIKE?

19 February 2023

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban cautioned Europe on Saturday that it could sleepwalk into a direct armed confrontation with Russia by sending increasingly deadly weapons to Ukraine.

https://sputniknews.com/20230218/hungarys-orban-says-europe-may-end-up-sending-troops-to-ukraine-1107582191.html

"If you supply weapons, provide satellite data, train soldiers of one of the warring parties and have its entire government on your payroll, while imposing sanctions on the other party, whatever you call it but you are at war," Orban said.

At what point does the SMO end and Russia says that now the two parties are in a direct conflict ie at war with each other?

The debate at the moment is about what victory looks like.  Is it Zelensky's defn : Ukraine has reoccupied all land within its internationally defined legal border, war damages to cover rebuilding, Putin at The Hague?

Or is it something less emotional, more realisable : country divided like Korea with DMZ, the EU admits Ukraine and rebuilds its part of the country plus Ukraine gets security guarantees though not NATO membership per se, forget The Hague.

Could Russia be balkanised? 

Could Russia become like France : has an imperial, militaristic and colonial past ; but is also an "open society"(*)? 

Could Asia be flipped 180° on the vertical along the Mackinder line?

There are wars where one side soundly beats the other...then you get an insurgency...and a counter-insurgency (Iraq).

There are wars that trundle forever, dites "wars of attrition", where each grinds down the other and the host country is wrecked, till one side runs out of willpower or of ammo (Afghanistan). 

The worry here is of a third type of war, a war  of obliteration where the host country is the battlefield and one side obliterates some or all of that fated country (Ukraine?).

Maybe America is stocking up for a post-nuclear Ukraine. Who know? Noone knows, not at the present, not yet. Just keep shovelling in the billions, pile on the sanctions and wait till the supply lines break or there's an "accident" too many (Nord Stream).

(*) K. R. Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies

Karl Popper defined the open society as one "in which an individual is confronted with personal decisions" as opposed to a "magical or tribal or collectivist society."

He considered that only democracy provides an institutional mechanism for reform and leadership change without the need for bloodshed, revolution or coup d'etat.