There is only little news of new developments out of east-Ukraine. The insurgents kicked the Ukrainian troops out of the airport in Lughansk and the Ukrainian troops at the Donetsk airport are said to be confined in a basement and will have to negotiate their surrender.
According to Spiegel NATO generals assess (in German) that Ukraine has lost the war. It is out of material in decent shape and out of enough soldiers with the moral to successfully fight for the oligarchs. But that does not mean the fighting is over. Obama may still decide to double down and that destroying Ukraine -like Afghanistan, Libya and Syria- by prolonging the conflict is in U.S. "interests".
The "western" financed Kyiv Post is lamenting that the Ukrainian president Porochenko did not keep the promises he made before he got elected. That snub may well be a sign that his time is already over. The current Ukrainian campaign of claiming that Russia has "invaded" Ukraine is making his position weaker. Apparently all those T-90 tanks only fly in by night and their cloaking devices prevent any picture of them appearing anywhere.
Putin said somewhere that if Russia would really invade Ukraine it would take 14 days to get Kiev. "Western" media claimed that was a "threat". It was rather a somewhat pessimistic statement of fact. Kiev would probably fall in four days though preparing the victory parade may indeed take a bit longer.
The United Nation has found that 1 million Ukrainians have fled from their homes, more than 800,000 of them to Russia. The Ukrainian "Anti-Terrorist-Operation" is apparently a campaign of ethnic cleansing. But as that campaign for now comes to an end the population movement may well reverse.
There will hopefully now be some negotiated solution which will likely end in a federalized Ukraine with great autonomy for the federal states. Ukraine as a nation, if that has ever existed at all, is over. Ukraine as a confederation of states is still a possibility.
The sad reality is that such a development was foreseeable and indeed in detail foreseen. The whole war was completely unnecessary.
NATO will get some temporary propaganda push out of the conflict but I do not expect any longterm change in its downward trajectory. Defense budgets will not increase and the newly announced rapid reaction force for east Europe is at least the third version of such an multinational emergency force concept. These never can work as their activation still depends on the the lengthy political process NATO needs to go to war. Such forces also depend on rotating "pledged" units by member states and, as experience has shown, many such units get "pledged" even when they are not available or incapable to fight.
After this conflict the loss of credibility of NATO will likely be greater than its leaders today anticipate. Showing off satellite pictures even a naive can recognize as irrelevant and propagandizing an "invasion" when obviously none happened will leave marks. Top that with the catastrophic results in Libya and the strategic loss in Afghanistan and there is little left of NATO that future taxpayers might want to support.
