Military expert predicts prolonged Ukraine conflict
November 16th, 2022A Hungarian-Israeli military analyst suggests that the pattern of past wars waged by Russia doesn’t augur well for peace in Ukraine.
On Neokohn, Robert C. Castel, an Israeli Security Analyst and a regular contributor to the site analyses the history of interstate wars to assess the chances of a negotiated settlement in Ukraine. He believes that neither of the two sides can defeat the other, therefore it would be in their mutual interest to reach a compromise as soon as possible. However, his research shows that such a compromise is unlikely. Historically, Russia’s wars usually ended with compromises, but since the 1920s, the Soviet Union waged no interstate wars without completely defeating its adversaries. (Castel defines the war in Afghanistan as an ‘imperial’ one, rather than an ‘interstate’ war.) He deduces from those statistics that Russia prefers frozen conflicts to making concessions. That doesn’t augur well for the war in Ukraine, he concludes.