Moscow says it will keep pushing its offensive in Ukraine, though NATO doubts Russia has the resources to make a significant breakthrough.
NATO’s top military officer has said Russia’s armed forces are incapable of any major advance.
“The Russians don’t have the numbers necessary to do a strategic breakthrough,” NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander Europe Christopher Cavoli told reporters on Thursday.
“More to the point, they don’t have the skill and the capability to do it; to operate at the scale necessary to exploit any breakthrough to strategic advantage,” the general said.
They could still hold onto the land and Ukrainian population they’ve taken so far. Anything less than Ukraine regaining Crimea and the rest of its territory will not only be a loss for them, but would tell the Russian government that the West would rather appease them than let allow a conflict to escalate further. Appeasement didn’t work on Hitler, and it won’t work on Putin either.
Considering after two years of a Military Operation that was supposed to last weeks, they are now putting someone in to put them into a “wartime economy footing” I expect them to eventually either lose or have all of Ukraine. There really doesn’t seem to be middle ground for Putin.
Even if they would get all of Ukraine, I would expect quite a bit of underground resistance that would make holding on to Ukraine expensive.
