Frag Out! Magazine
Issue link: https://fragout.uberflip.com/i/1467328
was going on continuously, in eastern Ukraine. Russia has managed to take just a part of Donbas. The Crimean Peninsula had no land connection with Russia, while Ukraine decided to head towards the Western societies, also reinforcing its army. For Putin, and the Russian government, the strategic goal adopted was to reconstruct the former Soviet empire. One should remember that the Russian elites perceive the world through the lens of the influence of the superpowers. It was not a surprise that the preliminary demands involved a withdrawal of NATO from the eastern flank, and a limitation of the military activities. As if it was meaningless that societies in Poland or Lithuania want the western armed forces to maintain a continuous presence, or that Ukraina had an ambition of joining the western structures in the future. Getting a birds eye view of the situation, one could consider a couple of hypothetical scenarios here. Never is any political or defense forecast applicable to a single event or phenomenon. Five scenarios were being considered here. 1. Muscle-flexing. Deployment of the forces to the Ukrainian border region could have been viewed as another element of military support for the negotiation - some talks happened in the autumn and winter of 2021 and early 2022. In a scenario as such, once pressure effectively yields results - for instance, Ukraine would declare that it would never become a NATO member state, or NATO would withdraw its forces from the Eastern Flank - the units deployed in the region would return to their hometowns, or they would stay, to inflict more pressure. 2. Creating a power shift through hybrid warfare. In this scenario, open engagement of military forces and armed conflict would only support the disinformation, political, and intelligence effort aimed at overthrowing the government in Kyiv and replacing it with officials that would turn pro-Russian, when it comes to foreign policy, either via a legal election or with the use of illegal measures. It was clear, however, that Russia already had its intelligence assets and saboteurs highly involved. ANALYSIS