Ukraine Can Win Unless Moscow Uses Nuclear Weapons or Sparks a Revolution in Kyiv, Pastukhov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, May 21 – As Putin’s war of aggression against Ukraine grinds on into its fifth year, ever more people are asking whether Ukraine can win. According to Vladimir Putin, it can do so as long as Russia doesn’t use nuclear weapons in a wholesale manner and as long as no revolution takes place within Ukraine itself.

            The London-based Russian analyst argues that “it is already clear what such a [Ukrainian] victory might look like” and even how it could be achieved (t.me/v_pastukhov/1910 reposted at echofm.online/opinions/kak-pobeda-ukrainy-mozhet-vyglyadet-s-uchetom-vseh-realij).

            “Provided that Ukraine does not overextend itself to the breaking point,” Pastukhov says, “it will with European support slowly and steadily drive up the cost of the war for Russia until that cost become politically untenable.” That would open the way for a Ukrainian victory and a Russian defeat.

            If the war does end with a Ukrainian victory, it is still “unlikely that Russia would lose Crimea … but it might well be forced to ‘regurgitate’ some of the territories it has occupied.” Instead, and “most likely,” he says, “the outcome would involve a ceasefire along the actual line of demarcation.”

            For Putin and the Russian elite, that would be “tantamount to defeat” because Putin loyalists “would not be able to accept the ruins of a half-conquered Donbass as adequate compensation for the rupture of normal relations with the West, four years of crippling sanctions, and the loss of several hundred thousand killed and maimed Russians.”

            Pastukhov says that he believes that “this reality is understood above all within the Kremlin itself and that Moscow’s future efforts in Ukraine will be “concentrated in two specific directions: the simulation of nuclear weapons use and attempts to eliminate Zelensky,” the latter being in the Kremlin’s mind “tantamount to a revolution in Ukraine.”

            Russia’s “actual use of weapons still appears to be a highly risky undertaking” and “the temptation to ‘do something’ about Zelensky and to try to install a different figure in his place for ‘negotiations’ will grow stronger with each passing day,” Pastukhov says, especially with the image of the US moves in Venezuela in the minds of the Kremlin.

            “If Zelensky should manage to survive such an ordeal in both a political and strictly physical sense,” the Russian analyst says, “then the time to ‘count one’s chickens’ will arrive in a different coop entirely, one where quite inconveniently for it, elections happen to be on the schedule in the near future.”