The deal purposely involves provisions that Ukraine would find unacceptable. Russia isn't particularly interested in negotiating while it's winning, though funnily enough I'm a bit disappointed in Putin that he wouldn't go for much more maximalist demands. I guess he still wants to give it a veneer of "reasonableness".
The War in the Ukraine
- Thread starter SampanViking
- Start date
plawolf
Lieutenant General
While on the face of it, it might look like a bad deal for Russia, but in reality it’s actually a potentially interesting play.
Of course the US and rest of NATO will want to re-arm Ukraine. But can they?
Minsk 2 only worked out to Ukraine’s advantage because the US and EU supplied them from their existing Cold War left over weapons stocks. Those weapons and munitions stocks are now utterly depleted and western arms manufacturing output is pitifully slow. And that’s before Chinese RE chokehold kicked in.
With Minsk 3.0 in effect, Russia can buy Chinese arms in whatever quantities they want, China will be happy to also throw in ToT and production lines into the deal.
In 3 years time, Ukraine might add a few hundred tanks and fighters to its inventory, while Russia can have a full new army and air force that can take on NATO directly rather than just Ukraine.
If Putin does swallow this peace deal, it means he is taking the big picture approach to trade short term concessions to buying time to re-equip for WWIII so that Russia can be the Russia of WWII again rather than Italy.
Considering the fact that Russia can draw on non-mobilized reserves who are in different parts of Russia and rotate out their troops, it really isn’t. As for the missiles, since Russia is able to hit Kyiv easily and beyond, Ukraine losing the missile capability is basically crippling itself. All in all, everyone is going to lose something, except for the US who just wants the cash.
Given the fiasco with the CR929, I very much doubt that would happen. Id imagine that they would take the opportunity to expand military industrial plants for their domestic weaponry instead and expand their drone production capabilities. They have a saying in Russia from Tsar Alexander III: “Russia has only two allies: the army and the navy”. I strongly doubt that they would want to rely on a foreign nation for weaponry.