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Their hope is in the famine
Putin banks on starvation, indifference and a cold winter
Russian forces are crunching forward through Donbas, using a mixture of artillery, electronic warfare and air strikes to chip off one destroyed village after the next (see map and update).
It’s the opposite of the rapid advance that ended fighting in February 2015, forcing Ukraine to sign the Minsk II agreement. But it looks designed to achieve the same end: a ceasefire followed by territorial concessions from Kyiv.
If Putin gets his way the conflict will be frozen once again, OSCE monitors will return to a ragged front line. The captured populations will be stripped of their human rights while Putin prepares his next moves against the democracies of Europe.
What that sequence of moves might look like is becoming clearer. On 17 June, to a previously agreed schedule, Lithuania began blocking imports of steel and iron ore into Kalninigrad, the Russian Federation’s enclave amid the Baltic states. In response, Russia has threatened “practical measures”.
The Russian dissident Mikhail Khodorkovsky predicts this will involve an “air blockade” of Lithuania, with Russian planes deliberately overflying the airspace of a NATO member to test the West’s response. Let’s hope he’s wrong.
