At first it may not seem like a long time, but one month after the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it is possible to draw some conclusions about what happened and glimpse the immediate evolution of the conflict provoked by the military adventurism of Vladimir Putin.
In light of the current situation on the ground – summed up in the idea that Ukraine still resists, but Russia is still making slow progress – it is clear that Putin has not yet achieved any of his goals. His first option – a blitzkrieg that did not even deal with achieving control of the airspace and “softening & rdquor; objectives to facilitate the advance of ground units – has not resulted in either the downing of Volodymyr Zelensky or the control of all of Donbas. And the worst thing for his plans is that the second – an inhuman tactic, with indiscriminate attacks against the civilian population to break their resistance capacity – has not had a better result, beyond provoking a serious humanitarian crisis, with more than 10 million Ukrainians becoming displaced or refugees.
For his part, a leader initially questioned as Zelensky has become a benchmark center of the Ukrainian resistance, in a net winner of the battle of the story against the Russian narrative –which maintained that its intention was to liberate the 44 million Ukrainians from a Nazi and genocidal government– and in an actor heard in all Western capitals. In any case, it is clear that, with such inferior forces, victory is out of reach.
From there, it is predictable that Putin exhaust all military options that you have left To do this, given the disastrous performance of his troops and already hopelessly immersed in a war of attrition, he still has the possibility of redeploying, abandoning some fronts to concentrate on the capital and in the Donbas; add more forces from other military districts, risking unguarding their borders with other countries; achieve the incorporation of Belarusian troops and “volunteers & rdquor; Syrians to carry out the assault on kyiv and other localities; or, much more worrying still, escalate the conflict with weapons of mass destruction.
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For its part, Zelensky has fewer options to the extent that all of its armed forces are already mobilized and are forced to maintain a simultaneous deployment on many fronts, without the possibility of generating a superiority of forces in the presence that allows you to turn the situation around. His bet basically consists of resisting and continuing to demand that those who are supporting him increase economic sanctions against Russia and provide him with more powerful weapons.
Meanwhile, in the diplomatic field there has been no nothing that can be qualified as true negotiation, not even to guarantee the functioning of the humanitarian corridors. Putin has simply limited himself to laying out the conditions for the Ukrainian capitulation –demilitarization and recognition of Crimea and Donbas as Russian territories–, considering that his military superiority still allows you to dream of victory. Even so, a calculation of minimums indicates that, aware that the damage of the sanctions is being very hard and that nothing guarantees the long-awaited victory, the negotiation will begin when Mariúpol finally –key to guarantee the control of the aforementioned corridor– be in your hands.