by English Outsider
lifted from a comment
Russia will just overwhelm Ukraine and then install a puppet government to ensure it remains as a neutral buffer between Russia and Europe/NATO. This could go on for some more years, or maybe Russia will speed things up, surprise everyone, and make it happen sooner.
Posted by: aelfwed | May 28 2026 0:24 utc | 52
Yes, the end state of remnant Ukraine will be along those lines, though precisely how it’ll be done is unclear and is still maybe unclear to the Russians themselves. Friendly state (unlikely), neutral state, puppet state or occupied territory. The last decidedly the worst case for the Russians and they’ll avoid it if they can. Also, of course, the worst case for remnant Ukraine.
The position has changed, however, since the early Istanbul negotiations. Paramount now is the Russian need to prevent remnant Ukraine being used by the West for attacks into Russia. These have increased greatly in scale and intensity over the last few years and there is no indication that these attacks will cease unless remnant Ukraine is neutralised in one of the ways set out above.
This is not some rarefied “geostrategic theory” for the analysts to mull over. It is an urgent practical necessity for the Putin administration. How long would any American administration last if the American President had to say to his voters “We’re getting sabotage and assassination missions run in against us from Mexico. Drones and missiles are still coming over. There’s not a lot we can do to close these attacks down entirely so we’re going to have to put up with them for the indefinite future.” Impossibly to imagine an American President saying that and similarly impossible for any Russian President. So the Russians do have to aim for an end state to this conflict that precludes, permanently and entirely, any such threat on their Western border emanating from remnant Ukraine.
This imperative takes precedence over any other Russian goals. Maybe they’ll get their “new European Security Architecture”, maybe they won’t. Maybe they’ll come to some accommodation with the US, maybe they won’t. But if they don’t solve the problem posed to them by the Western use of remnant Ukraine as a convenient base for mounting attacks into Russia, their entire Special Military Operation will have gone for nothing. They’ll be ending up precisely where they started from in February 2022. They will have been defeated.
Since the Russians can’t be forced to accept what would be to them an entirely unsatisfactory outcome, they won’t. They can’t be forced by economic or diplomatic means, certainly not by military means, to accept defeat. So the end state for remnant Ukraine will inevitably be as set out. Friendly state, neutral state, puppet state or Russian-occupied. Any one of those results will preclude the hostile use of remnant Ukraine by the West and one of those results will be what we see at the end of this war.
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The above is not speculation or theory. It’s what’s going to happen. But is it permissible, in a comment section, to engage in hopeful speculation?
Because there’s always something new coming up. What seemed a very remote possibility indeed a couple of years ago is now perhaps a little less remote: that the people of remnant Ukraine themselves will finally understand that they’ve been used by the West, used as a mere counter in the Western/Russian conflict, and mercilessly used to an extent now resulting in their destruction. Here on “b’s” site Jeremy Rhymings-Lang, and often others, are charting the change in public opinion in Ukraine in detail and it does look as if that change might be gathering force.
We don’t know how much of the old Ukraine is going to end up as remnant Ukraine. Nothing like as much as would have been the case had the Istanbul negotiations succeeded. But that outside chance, that the Ukrainians themselves will say, “a curse on both your houses,” and themselves prevent the use made of them by the West as a convenient Western attack dog, might just possibly be there.
It should never be forgotten that in 2019 the Ukrainians themselves voted by a landslide majority for just that course. In the intervening years the savagery of war, the increasing grip of the extremists on power, the unremitting efforts by the Wester powers to “keep Ukraine in the fight”, and the heroic obstinacy of the Ukrainians themselves, has seemed to rule that 2019 decision out. The chance is still there.
End of hopeful speculation. But given that the end state of remnant Ukraine is inevitable, it’d be good if that’s how that end state was arrived at.
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b here:
My hunch is that whatever will be left of Ukraine, twenty years from now, will end up similar to Georgia. A country that has opted for a kind of neutrality while it is doing good business with its large Russian neighbor. It does so, against the wishes of Brussels, Washington and their paid for ‘nationalists’, because it makes sense.