Western weapons are necessary for Ukraineʼs victory, but the West can and should provide something more important than modern tanks or 155mm shells, Brian Clark and Dan Pett of the US Defense Concepts and Technology Center write in a column for The Hill. The tactics of using weapons are often more important than their quantity and even quality: thanks to well-thought-out steps and access to information, the Ukrainians have so far managed to win back the territories occupied by them from the Russians. Even in spite of the numerous superiority of the occupiers and the greater number of weapons. Until now, the West has not provided Kiev with its advanced weapons — and most of what has been provided has analogues in the Russian army. However, thanks to software developments and access to intelligence data, the Ukrainians could sometimes lay a path to the nearest target as if it were a route on Google Maps. Having fewer weapons, the Ukrainians managed them much more effectively and aimed at warehouses and Russian command posts. This is becoming the practice of modern wars: yes, sometimes battles still take place in the trenches and under artillery fire, but the winner is not the bigger or the stronger, but the smarter. This is what Russia itself once did with its "little green men" in Crimea: Ukraineʼs allies could not do anything, allowing the annexation of the peninsula almost without fighting. This is what China is doing now, piling up artificial islands in the South China Sea and claiming them as its own. Today, Ukraine demonstrates numerous know-how on the battlefield. In order for this to continue, there are not enough tanks now: it is necessary to give Kyiv long-range missiles, F-16 aircraft, and access to the best technologies, the authors assure. In order to further observe how Ukrainians master them and learn from them.
A large-scale survey of experts on whether the Russian-Ukrainian war will end with Kyivʼs territorial concessions was conducted by Foreign Affairs. The editors of the magazine interviewed more than half a hundred experts — from historian Timothy Snyder to political scientist John Mearsheimer. The first is most confident that there will be no territorial concessions on the part of Ukraine, because the Ukrainian society will not agree to it. In fact, it is not necessary for Moscow, which aims to destroy Ukrainian statehood. In reality, Russia is sinking deeper and deeper into a crisis from which there is no easy way out. In order to quickly end the suffering, in particular of imperial Russia, the West should supply Kyiv with weapons as actively as possible, so that Ukraine, having repelled the Russian invasion, does not give reason to even think about the possibility of occupying some Ukrainian territories. According to Snyder, the only way to stop the war is to return Ukraine to all its lands. An influential political scientist of the opposite opinion: "Now it is difficult to imagine that Ukraine will win back Crimea from the Kremlin," writes Mearsheimer. ― It is much easier to imagine that Moscow is entrenched in the occupied territories and occupies new ones. It doesnʼt necessarily have to happen, but it leads to a scenario where we will have to look for a territorial compromise or prepare for a Korean scenario — without an armistice and with a virtually frozen conflict." Among other interesting opinions expressed in the survey, political scientist Mark Basingerʼs position is that, given the current pace of advancement of Ukrainian forces, Kyiv will not be able to retake Crimea alone, as this may cost the Armed Forces dearly. And governing a peninsula with a mostly Russian population for Kyiv has never been easy. Instead, a compromise can be traded for something beneficial for Ukraine — for example, Moscow agrees to Ukraineʼs accession to NATO. Dan Healy, a professor of modern Russian history from Oxford, on the other hand, is sure that whatever the likely peace agreement is in the medium term, it will not suit either side, so the most likely scenario is a further war with possible pauses.
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