The Trump administration lifted its suspension of military aid and intelligence sharing for Ukraine, and Kyiv signaled that it was open to a 30-day ceasefire in the war with Russia, pending Moscow’s agreement, American and Ukrainian officials said Tuesday following talks in Saudi Arabia.
Ukraine is building up their military capacity. They will continue to work on better drones. They will continue to train their soldiers. Their EU allies (and others around the world) are likely to continue upping their military spending and research. The longer the cease fire the better it is for Ukraine, so long as the above two do not change.
Then again, there’s always the risk of the ceasefire becoming permanent. That would de facto mean Ukraine losing this war. The front would become a de facto international border, with the Russia gaining a huge land grab. That would enable Putin to advertise himself as the victor in this war, which would enable the Russia to make another offensive in some 5 years from now.
If the sanctions against the Russia are not relieved, then its economy will probably crash quite soon anyway, at which point the Russia will probably leave the Ukrainian territory – if you need to let go of your pride in order to start fixing your economy, then even if first they choose to retain their pride, eventually they’ll let go of it and go with sensible action instead.
It looks like Putin is not going to want a ceasefire now, because he fears the next attack might not turn out feasible for some reason. But for Ukraine a permanent ceasefire would be a catastrophe because it would with a high likelihood end with Ukraine not existing by 2035.
Russia’s economy is in trouble, but they can likely sustain war for a few more years at least.
That’s very unlikely. Their inflation is around 20 percent, their economy is not producing almost anything else than war materials.
There have already been two cases of the Ruble starting to fall and the Russia stopping that fall by buying Rubles with tens of billions of euros each time. They had 600 billion in cash in 2022, of which half was frozen. Of the 300 billion they’ve got available a few tens of billions are left. That will run out at latest by summer of this year.
After that, they have no money for stabilizing their currency anymore. Eventually the Ruble will end up in hyperinflation, at which point it gets very difficult convincing people to join the Russian army. They now do it for money, and once money stops having a useful value, it becomes impossible finding soldiers. And without soldiers, they cannot wage a war.
They can sustain a war for an absolute maximum of 1½ years, most likely it’s more like 10-ish months, and they might be about to crash into a wall already before summer, if the “insider information” Trump claims to have about the Russia’s situation is something told to him by Putin.
But, why do you think they could sustain the war that long?
Sustaining war doesn’t really depend on the economy. They can ignore a lot of things and just keep going. The only reason they have to worry about 10-ish months is they are running low of soviet stocks of things like artillery, tanks and such. However North Korea doesn’t really need/want money to deliver more and so that it is unknown how that continues.
The economy matters, but only in that as people’s lives get worse they will start to become more interested in revolution.
Sustaining a war does depend on soldiers and equipment.
Without a reasonably healthy economy, there won’t be any soldiers. The Russian soldiers are in it almost completely strictly for money. If there is no economy, there is no money. And with no money, there are no Russian soldiers. Similarly money is just one of the things that a functioning economy produces. The economy also produces goods. Tanks are produced by the country’s economy. If there is no economy, there are no factories running.
Also, North Korea is a lot smaller country than the Russia is. They do not have an infinite supply of tanks, nor a spectacularly good ability to produce many of them fast. They do have a lot of artillery shells, but that’s pretty much it. If you look at how few soldiers NK has sent to the war, you get a hunch of NK’s strength as an ally. A bit over 10 000 soldiers in a war, where the Russia’s losses are over 1000 per day, are peanuts. With that amount of soldiers, the war was prolonged by 10 days, not more than that. North Korea’s influence is vastly overplayed.