Russians carefully, but more often say that problems of Donbas are not primary any more compared to their own insurmountable problems in Russia. Less Russian volunteers want to die for someone else’s bread, they get paid less for that and talking about moral aspect, “veterans of the war that doesn’t exist” are less respected by their own people. This is how it looks from the outer side.
From the inside, in short, it can be said like this: cold, hungry, under shelling and no perspective at all.
Cold. Military activities and looting leads to destruction (often without any perspective to restore) of city infrastructure. More or less perspective production was stolen and taken to Russia long time ago. Leftovers were looted and sold as scrap metal by local “authorities”. This territory was not just robbed and destroyed, it’s basically wiped out, and that means that there is no perspective for it to become a part of Russia or to be recognized as independent, but it also proves that its existence as it is now has no perspective.
Hungry. The information about crops is not secret, but it is more important than number of tanks that arrived. This would be a good idea to have a “rat” in Ministry of Agriculture of DPR and get information about the storage of different kind of food starting from potatoes to quinoa. Trade embargo makes bigger impact than weapon. To feed such amount of people, “militia” and soldiers is more difficult task as it could look like at first sight. Food and its distribution among population is the major problem on the territory which is full of military vehicles, ammo, bullets and so on. All economic ties and laws are broken, money were wiped out, companies are closed, paying capacity of population is extremely low and such territory can’t be fed by humanitarian convoys, specially, when there are coming serious problems with food in Russia.
Shelling and military activities continue. If there are no battles, the army decays, the enemy is not afraid, the level of mortality among terrorists increases, caused by drugs and alcohol, crime situation gets worse. If there are local fights in the same place (shelling in order to scare local population), human resources and money get wiped out, infrastructure gets broken and there is no money and no wish to restore it. If they try to attack and move the front line, there will be reaction in the world and new sanctions for Russia. Russian support (relatively little already) will decrease even more and there is no guarantee that the attack will be successful. There can be irreparable losses of manpower and the parity of forces will be destroyed. Those are the perspectives for military authorities of those territories.
All that can lead to big dissatisfaction inside the territory, uncontrolled riots inside population and militia, enemy troops will be divided into gangs fighting for recourses, the criminal situation will get worse and Kremlin would lose control over the situation. There is also a threat that heavily armed hungry gangs will start to look at Russian territories as the source of resources (robbing on the territory of Russian and retreating to DPR and LPR), and they can see Russian territories as a way to get rich, Russian is big and there are places to hide and operate. This is a huge security problem for Kremlin, specially, when the border with those territories is under poor control.
Autumn in Ukraine:
Among general perspectives are economics, Minsk, military activities, elections.
Economics. The processes can be described like that (without getting into details), it won’t be prosperous, but we will not die from hunger. All processes of economics, development and further perspective will be controlled from the outside, in case our leaders will think about getting out of control, there will be countermeasures like management from outside and increasing pressure and control. Financial support will be dosed, but regular and spending will be under control.
Minks. The West demands implementation of Minsk agreements from all participants of this process. Sometimes it may look like they demand that only from us and close eyes to inactivity or sabotage of Minks agreements by Russian side. This is not so. Lately, Washington chose the strategy to start new sanctions without “last Chinese warning”, i.e. they just give it to you as a fact, news sanctions because you broke agreements. It means that Washington doesn’t try persuade and negotiate with Russia, they just take direct actions after Russia does something wrong. They didn’t realize that in Russia completely yet and they try to resist, but without success so far. From our side they demand some unpopular moves in negotiations with terrorist, but we think that’s part of big game and scenario with a purpose to isolate Russia. So we will have to face some disappointments on that way, but without Western support and without accepting the rules of this game we can’t win this war.
Elections. They will be dirty and noisy. We just need to go through it. There will be a lot of space for provocations, also from Russia’s side, and they will use that chance (here comes so-called “National Rescue Committee” in Russia and its representatives who say they will get into Donbas via Kiev). In South-East regions where Russia thinks it can influence the situation, there can be more serious confrontation, riots, the rise of so-called protest “maidans”, pseudo-republics and even armed clashes and so on. There is high risk of terrorist attacks on those territories. But after analyzing the recent speeches of terrorists we came to the conclusion that they had to admit that they lost control over several regions, such as Odessa, Kherson, Mykolaiv. Maybe there are hoping for revanche during elections and if they don’t get that they will try make the situation more tense. But now they decreased or stopped their activity on those territories. But this information can also mean that narrowing its territorial preferences, Russia can increase its activity in order to get the results that they want in other regions like Zaporizhia, Dnepropetrovsk, Kharkiv, increasing protests among local populations. This should be taken into consideration.
Military activities. Several scenarios are possible here that will be offered after negotiations in Minks a little later. The most possible scenario for the nearest future. It’s going to be like ping-pong. Somewhere they attack us, somewhere we attack them. The situation will be tense, but without changes, the number of shelling and direct attacks will depend on negotiations process, intermediate results and on “independence and initiative” of some terrorist commanders. Unfortunately or fortunately the conflict will not be frozen.
Briefly about Financial markets:
A lot of small traders are trying to make money on the trends of oil prices. As a result a lot of traders got broke. Now there is the market grows a little, so traders buy and it’s going down again. This is a prior operation before the major operation can be possible.
The major operation is to support oil prices at the level of $55-$60 for a long term and prepare embargo.
When embargo was imposed against Iran the oil prices went up, so some countries made good money on oil and started believe they are powerful.
On the pick of this believe Russia invaded Ukraine and Venezuela kicked out investors from their oil market. The situation in Venezuela reminds typical Russian revolt, senseless and merciless.
Conclusion. From one side Russia is putting pressure on Ukraine from all directions in order to create certain amount of internal problems that Ukraine will have no time to think about Donbas and accept Kremlin conditions. From the other side the West supports Ukraine keeping it afloat and puts pressure on Russia.