I think we are drawn to this scenario, in part, because we seem to lack other variants, and it feels like an ending. This is because many of our imaginations are trapped by a single and rather unlikely variant of how the war ends: with a nuclear detonation. Right now, though, we have a certain difficulty seeing how Ukraine gets to victory, even as the Ukrainians advance. The have done so with admirable calm and sang-froid, even as their enemy perpetrates horrible crimes and openly campaigns for their destruction as a nation. They have carried out a series of defensive and now offensive operations that one would like to call "textbook," but the truth is that those textbooks have not yet been written and when they are written, the Ukrainian campaign will provide the examples. The Ukrainians, let's face it, have turned out to be stunningly good warriors. The war ends when Ukrainian military victories alter Russian political realities, a process which I believe has begun. This is not true, of course and their regimes are deceptively brittle. Tyrants such as Putin exert a certain fascination, because they give the impression that they can do what they like. That Ukraine is winning on the battlefield matters because Ukraine is exerting pressure on Russian politics. And now, no one can imagine how it will end. At first, no one could imagine that the Russo-Ukrainian war could begin.
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June 2023
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