“Wherever Moscow decides.”
CLEARLY the end-game now, and I suspect the partition will be mostly well west of the Dnieper, pretty much down the middle of what was Ukraine.
On Russia’s side (the east side) will be Odessa (Putin’s now made that clear) and Kharkiv, and they will link-up with Transnistria (and, of course, the 5 regions that are already part of Russia), with a big DMZ in the middle.
On the West side, which Russia doesn’t even want, it will be Poland, Hungary, Romania fighting it out with NATO for their piece of the country.
With Adviika about to liberated, we’ll soon be seeing something like the Race to Berlin at the end of WW2, and the Russians will be moving west much faster (regardless of what that Trudeau junkie claims), so as to achieve their objective before they have to directly fight western troops.
Anyway, that’s my take on the end-game, but who knows...everyone has been wrong on just about everything, although people like MacGregor, Berletic, and Ritter have been right, so far, regarding more recent events, including the Ukrainian collapse.
Wanna make a small wager? The Russians have shown absolutely no capacity to break out. They do not have the manpower nor the logistics to break out - and this has been proven repeatedly in the past after other victories - Mariupol, Bakhmut, etc that the same commenters wrongly thought would lead to a quick Russian victory. Instead they have extremely weak supply lines, their own shortages of munitions, they lack trucks and tankers and spare tires and their command and control woes are as bad now as they were in the first phase of the war. There’s a big difference between amassing a huge amount of firepower to win a battle of attrition in a siege at enormous cost (just miles outside their so-called capital of Donetsk), but successfully engaging in maneuver warfare is an entirely different problem one they have shown zero capacity in.
Russia could just cut to the chase and renounce Stalin’s seizure of Eastern Poland in 1945.
The people of Lemberg obviously want what the EU has on offer. Surprisingly (to me anyway) the people of Poland recently elected an “open and affirming” government.
Give Galicia back! The rest would collapse overnight.