Liana Fix, program director of the international relations department of the Kerber Foundation, and history professor Michael Kimmage write about Putinʼs likely next steps in Ukraine in an essay on Foreign Affairs. Fix and Kerber believe that the successful counteroffensive of the Armed Forces of Ukraine provided a decisive argument in favor of the fact that Ukraine should continue to fight, and not seek peace at any cost. Accordingly, the prospects for Russia changed, because success in Ukraine gave Putin the opportunity to continue the war without general mobilization and maintain a high level of support for the regime, isolating the population from the war. Currently, one of the two will have to be chosen, the authors believe. By continuing the war without general mobilization, Putin risks a complete defeat - mobilization will cause resistance among the population and reduce support for the regime. Another option for Russia, Fix and Kerber write, is to abandon the idea of complete victory and continue the war, seeking to keep the territories occupied until February 24. It would be typical for Putin to find an alternative "middle" path, the authors believe. It can increase covert mobilization, continue targeting critical infrastructure and civilian objects of Ukraine, use thermobaric weapons, etc. In either scenario, the West must continue to support Ukraine so that it continues its counteroffensive and eventually becomes too strong for Russia to try to attack again in the future.
Virginia Institute of Technology professor Gerard Tol and George Mason University professor Karina Korostelina write in The Conversation about the price that Ukrainians from the frontline territories are ready or not ready to pay for peace. A group of researchers, which included Tol and Korostelina, collaborated with the Kyiv International Institute of Sociology to conduct a survey of 1,800 Ukrainians from the cities close to the front ― Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia and Poltava about their vision of the future and their acceptable price for peace. The researchers asked the respondents an open-ended question about the main goals of Ukraine, and after processing the answers, it turned out that more than half consider the development of Ukraine as a prosperous and peaceful state a priority. About a third of the respondents named a large army capable of protecting the countryʼs territory. To the question about concessions acceptable to them for the sake of ending the war, the interviewees mostly answered "absolutely unacceptable". This concerns both the loss of the opportunity to determine oneʼs own future and the continuation of the occupation of the territories of Ukraine. The scenario in which Ukraine renounces NATO membership in exchange for peace was the least categorical for the respondents: this option became absolutely unacceptable for 46% of respondents. The researchers also studied who can influence Ukrainiansʼ support for the negotiation process. It turned out that a call from Zelenskyi to support the talks would work effectively, while public encouragement from Western leaders could backfire.
The New York Times published an interactive longread with photo and video elements about Mykolaiv firefighters who save their city every day after rocket attacks. For six days, the newspaperʼs reporter and photographer followed the team of firefighters led by Stas Ustych. Ustych says that because the shelling mostly takes place after two oʼclock in the morning, the heart begins to beat faster when it gets dark. He considers his work "for real men", but at the same time he is not afraid to show emotions: sometimes he cries several times a day, experiencing what he has seen in the last six months. The publication also writes about civilians whose homes were hit by Russian missiles - and there are many of them: 500 apartment buildings and about 700 private houses were damaged or completely destroyed, 130 people died, and hundreds were injured. Some locals believe that the Russian Federation is trying to intimidate the city in this way, and it is only achieving the opposite effect. Stas talks about the most terrible day of the war for him - the day when the Russians attacked the barracks of the 36th Marine Brigade, where hundreds of soldiers were sleeping, and he dreams that the shelling would stop for at least two days and he could finally sleep.