How Does This End? | What If Russia Loses? | Red Sky in the Morning, and more

The Russian Sanctions Regime and the Risk of Catastrophic Success  (Eric Sand and Suzanne Freeman, War on the Rocks)
What if the sanctions work — that is, they make life in Russia intolerable or undermine Russia’s ability to continue the war? That could force Russia to the negotiating table. But it could also have the opposite effect. Western policymakers are right to be concerned about an escalation with Russia leading to a general European war, but they seem focused almost exclusively on avoiding escalatory military options and managing the close proximity of NATO and Russian forces. Sanctions too can lead to war, or at least to riskier Russian strategies that court war. A desperate Vladimir Putin could escalate the war in a gamble for resurrection.

Red Sky in the Morning  (Katherine Bayford, The Critic)
The West woke to find itself hooked on Russian gas with degraded militaries.

Putin’s Russian History Is a Fantasy  (Orlando Figes, The Spectator)
As the first cracks appear in the Kremlin leadership, it is becoming clear that this is Putin’s war against Ukraine. NATO’s expansion is a secondary factor, the pretext Putin used to get doubters like foreign minister Sergei Lavrov on his side. Putin’s aim is to destroy Ukraine as a sovereign nation and restore it as a vassal of ‘historic Russia’ – his twisted vision of the ‘family of peoples’ living in the lands of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus from the time of Kievan Rus in the first millennium. Putin’s war is a war over history. But his history is fantasy.
Like many Russians of his generation, schooled in Soviet views of history, Putin never really recognized the independence of Ukraine. In 2008, he told George Bush, the U.S. president, that Ukraine was ‘not a real country’ but a historic part of greater Russia, a borderland protecting Moscow’s heartlands from the West.
That was a view he might have read in any Russian history book, starting with Karamzin’s History of the Russian State (1818-1829), the founding work of Russia’s imperial historiography. His reading of it tells him that Russia has been strong when its people were united behind a strong state; weak and vulnerable to foreign invasion when the people were divided or lost sight of the ‘Russian principles’ that united and distinguished them.

Brace for Putin’s Next Move  (Arieh Kovler, New Statesman)
After the battle for Ukraine, Russia’s foreign policy will be devoted to smashing by any means necessary the coalition that imposed crippling sanctions.

Urban Warfare Fueled by the West Will Likely Destroy Ukraine’s Cities  (Zuri Linestky, Responsible Statecraft)
Sending arms is not a panacea — statistics and history show more people will die, more buildings will be leveled, once the fight is joined.