To prevent getting lost, the elevator goes directly to the
safety island Reporter Liu Ya Dong A
Despite Russia's constant threats, warning the United States, Germany and other countries not to provide main battle tanks to Ukraine , the United States, Germany, Poland and other countries have still made decisions to assist.
Among them, the United States decided to assist 31 M1 main battle tanks , and Germany decided to assist 14 Leopard 2 main battle tanks. The governments of Finland, Netherlands, and Spain also made statements one after another, announcing that they would provide Leopard 2 tanks to Ukraine.
These are the most advanced heavy weapons in active service in the United States and Europe today, showing that the United States and Europe's involvement in the war continues to escalate.
Since the war began, Russia has been retreating steadily on the Ukrainian battlefield. It has shifted from an all-out offensive at the beginning to a focused attack on eastern Ukraine. After losing ground, it was forced to shift to strategic defense. It hopes to defend the four states of Donbas with the natural dangers of the river. Recently, it finally managed to counterattack and recapture a small town. The United States and Europe have made the decision to provide Ukraine with advanced main battle tanks.
Therefore, this is definitely a headache for Russian Putin .
For people who hope that the war will subside as soon as possible, it is certainly disturbing news and may even lead to dangerous escalation of the war.
We know that compared with China and the United States, one of Russia's major shortcomings is that it lacks strategic determination, acts impulsively, and easily goes to extremes, otherwise it would not fall into the fire pit of the Ukraine war.
In the past few years, the US-led NATO has continued to expand eastward, trying to include Ukraine and push military boots to the Russian border. The Ukrainian government has also continued to take actions that have escalated tensions in Russia-Ukraine relations.
Stimulated by these external factors, Putin, who had long wanted to annex Kiev, also wanted to take advantage of Biden, a weak president, to repeat the past scene of annexing Crimea.. Internally, he also wanted to create legitimacy for continuing to govern after the constitutional amendment. Therefore, under the banner of "demilitarization and denazification", he launched this so-called "special military operation." But what was unexpected was that due to various misjudgments and the military technological gap with the West, not only did it fail to achieve the purpose of the war, but it suffered heavy losses on the front line and fell into unprecedented passivity.
Russia’s shortcomings of insufficient strategic determination also manifested themselves from time to time after the war fell into a stalemate.
For example, after the defeat of the frontline battle, members of the Russian Supreme Command to the State Duma continued to release the threat of nuclear war. As a result, not only did they fail to deter their opponents, but they pushed themselves into a more passive position, allowing the United States and Europe and other countries to occupy the international public opinion and moral high ground of anti-nuclear war.
Therefore, as the United States, Germany, Poland and other countries have made the decision to provide Ukraine with the most advanced main battle tanks in spite of the "red line" drawn by Russia in the war, it is really difficult to say what the Russians will do next based on their strategic determination.
In terms of conventional weapons and military technology, the gap between Russia and the West is too big. In order to alleviate the passive situation, Russia can only continue to increase its troops. Recently, it has made the decision to expand its army to 1.5 million, hoping to get rid of the passive situation through numerical superiority.
Putin’s current war goal is no longer “demilitarization and denazification.” His goal is to consolidate the military occupation of Crimea and the Donbas region and permanently turn these areas into Russian territory.
This is the few remaining results of this war, and it is also the basis for the Putin government to promote the legitimacy of the war internally. In any case, Putin cannot give up these gains, because giving up means not only military defeat, but also the political end of the Putin government and those who support this war.
But now as the United States and Europe upgrade their aid to Ukraine and put more and more advanced main battle weapons into the battlefield, whether Russia's goal of getting rid of passivity and holding Donbass by increasing its troops can be achieved may become unknown again - at least it will become more difficult.
This will once again pose a great test to Russia’s strategic determination.
As the war further escalates, it is worth paying attention to what tricks Russia, which has been stuck in the war for a long time and may even become more passive in the future, and whether it will take some unconventional countermeasures due to strategic impulse.
In any case, the war cannot end within the first anniversary. All parties involved should be prepared for the war to become complicated, protracted, or even suddenly intensified under certain circumstances.
This article is reprinted with permission from the WeChat public account: Hang Ziya, author Hang Ziya
