“The Russians will need a much bigger force to pacify all of Ukraine than the US used in Iraq.”
As I have noted many times since this began, I don’t believe Russia has any interest in taking over all of Ukraine. It’s a wildly corrupt economic basketcase, even by Russian standards, and almost all of the valuable assets are in the Southeast anyway.
Anybody paying attention when this began should have known that Luhansk and Donetsk would rebel, but I thought they’d be on the Dnepr long before now, down to Meltipol, opening the road network to Crimea.
That is the same analysis that I have heard - the Russians only want the heavy industrial areas in the southeast, linking them to the Black Sea and Crimea, where they have lots of ethnic Russians - Luhansk and Donetsk.
The poorer agricultural areas in the West with a higher percentage of Ukrainian speakers, are more of a charity case whose bills they would rather foist onto the West.
Russia and Ukraine are peas in a pod, economy- and corruption-wise. The difference is Russia has a continent's worth of resources in oil, gas, gold, and so on. Take away Russia's mineral resources, and it becomes a super-sized, nuclear-armed Ukraine.