The war (expectedly, I should note) “fell” into the pattern that everyone had hoped to avoid, but which was apparently impossible to avoid: a mutual desire to inflict the maximum possible damage on the enemy’s civilian objects and civilian population, unrestricted by anything but technical capabilities. Simply within this pattern, Ukraine does what it can and Russia does what it wants.
This is an extremely dangerous reversal of the situation in general and for Ukraine in particular, because Russia both wants and can do much more than Ukraine can afford. The shelling of the border territories of Belgorod, Bryansk, Kursk and partly Rostov and Voronezh regions is an irritating factor, but does not cause significant damage to Russia’s military and civilian infrastructure. Ukraine currently has no means of defeat at a greater depth. But Russia does.
Since there are no moral, legal, or physical constraints on the Kremlin, Russia’s war has degenerated into a gigantic remote punitive operation in the spirit of the well-known anti-guerrilla methods of World War II. Russia will respond to every Ukrainian drone with kinjal fire until its “kinjals” run out. And they certainly won’t run out in the next few months. And these are the very months during which Ukraine will be left to its own devices, as Biden is also preoccupied primarily with himself.
It seems that we are entering the most difficult period of the war – senseless and merciless, the passage through which will be accompanied by huge civilian casualties, to which the West will look on with useless and inactive indifference.
At the same time, it does not seem that the political leadership of Ukraine has any realistic plan of action that would allow the country to pass through this terrible stage of the war. The standard plan, which boiled down to “foreign countries will help us” and “the people will overcome everything,” is stalling. The West is slowing down, and the limit of patience of the population is exhausted.
Under these conditions, the law on amendments to the system of conscription for military service, adopted by the Verkhovna Rada, which is compromising, but nevertheless harshly hitting the “conceptual relations” already formed during the years of war, may become a trigger for significant changes in the domestic and foreign policy of Ukraine.
