What Will Be The Geographic End State Of The War In Ukraine
March 19, 2022
The Ukrainian National Security Advisor has sent a letter to the White House and the CIA to request money in support of an insurgency in Russian held areas:
The document, dated March 6, asked the U.S. "to allocate additional funds for the organization of the resistance movement and voluntary formations of territorial communities throughout Ukraine."
The White House and the Ukrainian embassy vehemently deny that the letter is real. I however do not believe that it is faked. It just was not meant to become public. The CIA has been training 'resistance' militia in the Ukraine since 2015. To request new money for more of it is only natural.
The U.S. will finance a resistance in Ukraine through the CIA just as it did in Syria and just like it did from 1949 until the early 1950s when the U.S. financed anti-Soviet insurgency in Ukraine ended in misery.
But resistance against whom?
The premise seems to be that Russia wants to occupy the Ukraine.
It can be seen in an English language interview the Turkish state TV channel TRT had with Vitaly Klitschko, the mayor of Kiev. Klitschko accuses Russia of wanting to recreate the USSR. He rejects any negotiations for peace and wants the Ukraine to keep fighting.
After the interview the historian Gilbert Doctorow pointed out that it was Russia which first left the USSR to end the financing of outlaying provinces at the center's cost and that no one wants to recreate that situation.
As Putin ones said:
Whoever does not miss the Soviet Union has no heart. Whoever wants it back has no brain.
Russia has limited aims in Ukraine and will end the war and leave most of the Ukraine when those aims are achieved either by negotiations or by other means. It is the Ukraine that will have to bear the cost for it.
But Zelenski, Klitschko and the U.S. overlords do not want to see it that way. The U.S. wants to keep Russia in the Ukraine to fight it to the last Ukrainian and to damage it that way.
The Washington Post writes that there seems to be no Ukrainian urge to negotiate anything:
The prospects of a near-term deal look bleak, diplomats say, but mixed signals from Zelensky about how close he is to striking an agreement have only heightened anxiety about the trajectory of the negotiations.
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“I’m ready for dialogue; we’re not ready for capitulation,” Zelensky told ABC News earlier this week, while vowing to continue fighting Russia for as long as necessary.Zelensky reiterated that message in even stronger terms on Tuesday when the prime ministers of Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovenia traveled to Kyiv to meet him in a risky wartime visit. “He showed very little interest in a negotiated settlement and said Ukraine needed to keep fighting until Putin altered his demands,” said a diplomat familiar with the discussions, who like others spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive meetings.
The U.S. seems to be happy with that stand and the secretary of state even wants to widen the war:
“There’s no indication on our end that the Ukrainians are suing for peace. They want to fight,” said a senior U.S. official.
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Zelensky will have to sell any peace deal to his own people — a tricky task if he is forced to concede too much. He has been a wildly popular wartime president, but he was an unpopular peacetime one. And Ukraine’s westward ambitions have only been strengthened by Russia’s assault.
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Any potential deal will also require buy-in from the West, which will need to lift sanctions on Moscow in exchange for its withdrawal of Russian forces.But Secretary of State Antony Blinken said Wednesday that a simple withdrawal of troops may not meet a U.S. standard for sanctions relief. The United States “will want to make sure that anything that’s done is, in effect, irreversible, that this can’t happen again, that Russia won’t pick up and do exactly what it’s doing in a year or two years or three years.”
The only way to get to that end state is the total dismantling of Russia. That may indeed be what Blinken has in mind. What plans does he have to make it happen?
When the war to disarm the Ukraine started to my utter surprise I asked what Russia would desire as the geographic end state of the war:
It is difficult to discern what the planed end state of this operation is. Where is this going to stop?
Looking at this map I believe that the most advantageous end state for Russia would be the creation of a new independent country, call it Novorossiya, on the land east of the Dnieper and south along the coast that holds a majority ethnic Russian population and that, in 1922, had been attached to the Ukraine by Lenin. That state would be politically, culturally and militarily aligned with Russia.
This would eliminate Ukrainian access to the Black Sea and create a land bridge towards the Moldavian breakaway Transnistria which is under Russian protection.
The rest of the Ukraine would be a land confined, mostly agricultural state, disarmed and too poor to be build up to a new threat to Russia anytime soon. Politically it would be dominated by fascists from Galicia which would then become a major problem for the European Union.
On March 19 I revisited the question and added Kryvyi Rih (Kriwoi Rog in Russian), the yellow part of the map, to the list:
Novorossiya roughly includes the red and yellow areas in the above map. It also includes the valuable Soviet developed iron ore mines and factories of Kryvyi Rih west of the Dnieper river.
I especially want to point out that I spoke of a "mostly agricultural state, disarmed and too poor to be build up to a new threat to Russia anytime soon."
I could say that because nearly all of Ukraine's resources and industries are in the south and east. If Russia takes those or creates the new state of Novorossiya the 'rest of Ukraine' will be mostly de-industrialized. Also of note is that the south and east include most of the famous black soil areas, which consists of a half meter deep humus layer that allows for good agricultural results without using much fertilizers.
Much of the steel and heavy machine industries in the south and east have been neglected over the last 30 years under Ukrainian rule or were destroyed during the wars that are raging since 2014. It will require very large investments to revive them but the potential profits will be great.
Nearly half a year after I wrote about it, the Washington Post, with the help of some Canadians, is catching up on the issue:
In the Ukraine war, a battle for the nation’s mineral and energy wealth
After nearly six months of fighting, Moscow’s sloppy war has yielded at least one big reward: expanded control over some of the most mineral-rich lands in Europe. Ukraine harbors some of the world’s largest reserves of titanium and iron ore, fields of untapped lithium, as well as massive deposits of coal. Collectively, they are worth tens of trillions of dollars.The lion’s share of those coal deposits, which for decades have powered Ukraine’s critical steel industry, are concentrated in the east, where Moscow has made the most inroads. That’s put them in Russian hands, along with significant amounts of other valuable energy and mineral deposits used for everything from aircraft parts to smartphones, according to an analysis for The Washington Post by the Canadian geopolitical risk firm SecDev.
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“The worst scenario is that Ukraine loses land, no longer has a strong commodity economy and becomes more like one of the Baltic states, a nation unable to sustain its industrial economy,” said Stanislav Zinchenko chief executive of GMK, a Kyiv-based economic think tank. “This is what Russia wants. To weaken us.”
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Yet SecDev’s analysis indicates that at least $12.4 trillion worth of Ukraine’s energy deposits, metals and minerals are now under Russian control. That figure accounts for nearly half the dollar value of the 2,209 deposits reviewed by the company. In addition to 63 percent of the country’s coal deposits, Moscow has seized 11 percent of its oil deposits, 20 percent of its natural gas deposits, 42 percent of its metals and 33 percent of its deposits of rare earth and other critical minerals including lithium.
I believe that the natural gas share Russia already holds is higher as there are several sub-sea gas fields around Crimea and off the eastern coast.
If the Russian forces also take Kryvyi Rih and Dnipro they will have about 75-80% of Ukraine's pre-war GDP under their control.
Russia's war effort is currently financed by the 'west' which pays for it through record energy prices created by its own sanctions on Russia.
As the Russian Interfax agency reported yesterday (machine translation):
The positive balance of the current account of the balance of payments of the Russian Federation in January-July 2022 amounted to $166.6 billion, which is 3.3 times more than in the same period in 2021 ($50.1 billion). Such information is contained in the assessment of the balance of payments of the Russian Federation, published on the website of the Bank of Russia.
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According to the base scenario of the Central Bank’s forecast for 2022, updated in July, with an average annual oil price of $80 per barrel, the current account surplus is expected to be $243 billion, the positive balance of foreign trade in goods and services - $277 billion, and the negative balance of primary and secondary income - $33 billion.
If the 'west' really wants to deprive Russia of money it must immediately lift the sanctions and restart importing oil, gas and coal from Russia at then much lower prices.
Russia will not lack money to finance the rebuilding of Novorossiya's great industries. Once that is done those areas are evidently able to support themselves and to guarantee a high standard of living. They will also have enough money to militarily defend themselves against anything the poor rest of Ukraine will be able to finance.
At the end of March, after negotiations between Russia and Ukraine in Turkey, there was nearly an agreement on a ceasefire and on the end of the war. Joe Biden then tasked Boris Johnson with telling Zelensky to continue the war. The 'west' would otherwise stop paying him. Zelensky did as he was told and stopped all negotiations with Russia.
An agreement with Russia at that time would have kept the Ukraine mostly as one state with only minor losses in the Donbas. But the decision to continue the hopeless war also ended all chances for Ukraine to keep its riches.
It will be poor and helpless while its 'western' neighbors will feast on it.
