Volunteer and public figure Hennadiy Druzenko expressed confidence that the active phase of the war in Ukraine could end by the winter of 2024. However, according to him, this period will only be the beginning of new challenges that the country will face. He outlines three possible scenarios that could radically affect the future of Ukraine.
I have written more than once that I expect the war to die down this winter. Because the sides simply will not have the will to fight on such a scale. Despite the patriotic upsurge and relentless propaganda on both sides, there are fewer and fewer people willing to kill and die for their homeland. The mobilization resource is becoming increasingly poor. And there is simply no political will to declare general mobilization in Russia or to lower its age to at least 20 years in Ukraine. Because almost everyone who wanted or was at least not against fighting is already at the front, and the multimillion-dollar armies of fans on both sides prefer to destroy the enemy in absentia, that is, in absentia. In addition, the very ethos of war as existential (they say, only one will survive) has long been and irreparably undermined.
Ukrainians are becoming more and more convinced that the war is no longer for Ukrainian statehood as such, but for its borders. And most importantly, who and how will be the beneficiary of Ukraine in these (new) borders. And this stimulates the most intelligent and resourceful to think and invest resources now not in defending the country, but in getting into the team of (future) beneficiaries. Well, the second front, on which the Ukrainian authorities are waging an uncompromising war with Ukrainian citizens and Ukrainian business, has already become much closer and more tangible for most Ukrainians than the front on which we are fighting the horde…
Russians are also far from feeling an existential threat from the Ukrainian offensive, and therefore from the motivation to save Russia at any cost. Despite the frantic propaganda, the Kursk offensive only confirmed the guesses of many citizens of the Russian Federation: this is not their war. The “Khokhly” are Nazis only in Putin’s sick imagination, it’s not scary to be under them and the main thing is that the front line does not linger for a long time in your “small homeland”. Therefore, it will not work to mobilize the “huge country” as in 1611-1612, 1917-1920 or 1941-1945. It remains to fight with mercenaries and contract workers, but with such an intensity of their utilization in Ukraine, very soon there will simply be no place to take them. And the size of the “lifting” will not affect the critical shortage of manpower.
Therefore, I consider both the “Kursk Offensive” and the Pokrovsky Offensive as the last trump cards of the parties before the war begins to stall in the winter and gradually fade away. It’s just that the stakes are unequal. The Russians have declared that they seek to annex the Ukrainian Donbas forever and have even written this into their own constitution, but what we should do with thousands of square kilometers of the PRC if we continue to declare our loyalty to the UN Charter and internationally recognized borders is unclear. If I were Putin, I would generally offer purely symbolic resistance to Ukrainians on the “eternal” territory of the Russian Federation: the more Ukrainian forces and resources are drawn into Russia, the easier it will be for the Russians to conquer the Donbas. As Napoleon said, bayonets are good for any purpose, but it’s just inconvenient to sit on them. The more “originally Russian” (subsidized) territories come under the control of Ukraine, the heavier the burden will fall on our state to maintain them. Let me remind you that the entire Kursk region is a little less than 0.18% of Russian territory..
So, according to my forecast, the trench warfare will start to slow down significantly in the winter. Perhaps, for a while, the parties will compensate for this with a certain analogue of the “urban warfare” of the Iran-Iraq war. That is, instead of capturing square kilometers, they will focus on destroying each other’s critical infrastructure. Because this requires much fewer people. But even in this war to destroy enemy infrastructure, I am afraid that the West and China will make sure that it declines as quickly as possible, without causing shocks on global markets and man-made disasters that would be felt far beyond the borders of Ukraine and Russia.
And when the front lines stabilize and become temporary, unrecognized by anyone, but more or less durable borders of post-war Ukraine, the very internal logic of the war for independence will put us before a fundamental choice. Because the people will feel rather than realize that the cause of this destructive war and the terrible victims that it brought to Ukrainian soil is not only the “Kremlin grandfather” obsessed with phantom imperial pains (although first and foremost he is), but also the weakness and inefficiency of the Ukrainian state, which seemed not only to Putin to be an easy prey for the Russian bear. So, through incredible strain of forces and at great cost, statehood was preserved. Its actual borders were determined not in Moscow or Yalta, but on the battlefield — where a dynamic balance of power was established between us and the enemy. As, by the way, has almost always happened in real, not fictional, history. After that, the question for Ukrainians will be: what to fill our independence with to make it durable? And so that it guarantees not only the protection of a separate identity, but also security, development, prosperity, and self-realization for its citizens.
And here we will have two and a half ways.
First. Like Americans, French, Italians, Indians, having defended their independence, sit down and agree on new rules of the game in post-war Ukraine. Convene your Constitutional Convention. Abandon the uncharacteristic European functions of the president as the cornerstone and guarantor of Ukrainian statehood. Create a more balanced system of checks and balances. Make difficult compromises. Balance different branches and levels of power. Leave enough autonomous space for the individual and protect it with effective courts. Finally, force our natural ego to work for the common good.
The second way, more likely than the first. To find and believe in another messiah. Especially since the war created and continues to create a whole pantheon of new heroes. “Father fantasy,” as my teacher David Williams called it, is deeply rooted in human nature. Most people do not like to take responsibility and, willy-nilly, are looking for a “father” to whom they are ready to delegate the burden of choice, responsibility, and freedom. So we may have a moderate “messiah” like Valery Zaluzhny or less moderate and more passionate Ukrainian “caudillos” on Bankova. In that case, there is a chance for radical reforms that Ukraine desperately needs. After all, Ataturk, Chiang Kai-shek, and Park Chung-hee were great modernizers who led their countries from the Third World to the First. Unfortunately, there are many more negative examples of Latin American and African dictators in uniform who led their countries astray from civilization. I'm not sure that we will be as lucky with the new "leader" as the Asian tigers, and not vice versa.
And the last option is to not change anything radically after the victory. Let the country go by its own accord. Divide the remaining wealth between those close to power. Slap international aid. Conduct endless negotiations with the EU. Blame all the fake news on the insidious Muscovites. Feed the people with identity instead of development and prosperity. Be proud of the heroes of the liberation struggle, especially the fallen (it's safer that way), and brand all critics of the regime as "agents of the Kremlin." And rot from the inside for decades. There are countless examples.
Unfortunately, the probability of the above options increases from the first to the third in geometric progression. Because we seem to have learned to fight, but we still haven't learned to negotiate a common future. But the choice is still ours..
