Russia plans to enter the third-order military operation: What kind of "Eastern Ukraine" does Putin want?

On June 3, Russia's special military operation against Ukraine entered its 100th day. Looking back at the trajectory of the war, Kherson in the south fell on March 2, the first major Ukrainian city under Russian control after the war began. On March 29, the Russian Ministry of Defense announced that the main tasks of the first phase of the special operation have been completed, and the subsequent operations will be transferred to the Donbas region. Since then, the Russian army has completely withdrawn from around Kyiv and from Chernihiv and Sumy in northern Ukraine. During the first phase of operations, the Russian ground forces once penetrated 15 kilometers from the center of Kyiv.

On April 18, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky announced that the Russian offensive against the Donbas region had officially begun; on April 21, Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu reported to Vladimir Putin , the Russian army has controlled all areas of Mariupol except the Azov Steel Plant; on May 16, the Ukrainian Army announced the end of the Azov Steel Plant combat operation, and the Ukrainian personnel guarding the steel plant surrendered one after another; On May 20, Shoigu announced that he had taken full control of the Azov Steel Plant, and the operation to control the Luhansk region was nearing completion.

According to Xinhua News Agency, on June 1, a committee under the Russian Ministry of Defense announced the objectives of the third phase of special military operations, including the control of Mykolaiv, Odessa and Kharkiv; 6 On the 2nd, the Ukrainian side released data showing that now Russia and Ukraine continue to fight fiercely in Severo Donetsk and its surrounding areas. The total length of the front is more than 1,000 kilometers. The Russian army has controlled about 80% of Sievierodonetsk. At the same time, it controls nearly 20% of Ukraine's territory, and the Ukrainian army is slowly retreating to the industrial area in the west of the city and Lysychansk across the river. Russian presidential spokesman Dmitry Peskov said on June 3 that the special military operation will continue until all goals are achieved.

Russia is continuing to erode Ukraine

Based on the above developments, two major trends in the battlefield can be seen. First, it is difficult for Russia to occupy the entire territory of Ukraine in the short term; second, it is impossible for Ukraine to return its territory to its pre-2014 state, and even the probability of recovering most of the occupied cities after 2022 is extremely low.

When the war broke out on February 24, there were some predictions that Russia could reproduce the steel torrent of the Soviet era, quickly behead the Kyiv regime, bring pro-Russian leaders to power, and even cancel the national legitimacy of Ukraine and directly merge it into the Russian territory. . The above-mentioned purpose speculates that it is difficult to conclude whether it is really Russia’s initial plan, but from the overall situation of the war, Russia’s expectation for a “quick victory” should be beyond doubt, otherwise it will not directly insert a small number of troops into Kyiv and encircle it. Instead of attacking; its initial public opinion propaganda strategy also deliberately packaged the halo of "justice", emphasizing that his move was to save his compatriots from "neo-Nazis" and defend Russia's national security, rather than deliberately embezzling Ukrainian territory. It also generally adheres to the principle of "not harming the innocent" with regard to Ukrainian civilian facilities.

However, such a "quick victory" presupposition is similar to Europe and the United States, which were eager to withdraw their embassies at the beginning of the war and believed that Ukraine was about to "quick defeat". To a certain extent, they overestimated Russia's large-scale combat capability and underestimated Ukraine. will to resist. Russia originally expected to repeat the Crimea scene, but after the negotiations continued to fail and turned to the Donbass, it became a bloody scene similar to the Soviet-Finnish war, and it no longer hesitated to destroy Ukrainian civilian facilities.

However, following the "Ukrainian quick defeat theory", Europe and the United States made another major misjudgment in the pre- and mid-war period, that is, they believed that the Vladimir Putin regime would collapse quickly due to economic sanctions and the prolonged war. Multiple doses of "short-term medicine", such as claiming to impose an oil and gas embargo on Russia, supplying any arms that Ukraine wants without bottom line, and hyping the public opinion of "global support for Ukraine", etc.

In all fairness, the above-mentioned measures have no real benefits other than to quickly push the West to the moral high ground, inspire Ukraine’s will to fight, incite public dissatisfaction in Russia, and increase the probability of color revolutions, and may even lead to additional economic costs. The military action is not without progress. The premature high-profile declarations of the West have gradually become the shackles of political correctness that bind themselves. It is obviously impossible to continue high-intensity overweight today. After all, the West is deeply in the dilemma of high prices and high inflation, not to mention fighting to the death with Russia; but "persuading" Ukraine to surrender is undoubtedly telling the world that he is just treating Ukraine as bloodletting. Russian consumables, the moral energy accumulated in the early stage may be disintegrated.

Faced with a dilemma, the West can only continue its current embarrassing stance, pretending to be willing to put a knife to Ukraine's side. Although Russia could not repeat the torrent of steel, it slowly devoured Ukrainian territory and continued to eliminate the Ukrainian army's living forces under the "fighting" operation.

Up to now, the outcome of the war has gradually taken shape. Russia has paid a high price, causing countless youths to be splattered with blood and lost in foreign places, but Ukraine is unable to regain its lost ground, just as it was unable to regain Crimea in 2014. Although the Ukrainian army can launch local counteroffensives in Kherson, Severo-Donetsk and other places, it has lost the core ability to recover large areas of territory. The counterattack by Russia can only cause a weak and temporary change in the front lines of the two sides; and since Russia has paid a high price in this war, to convince the domestic "blood is not in vain", it needs to produce obvious results or political gains, so let it give up In the occupied territories after 2022, unless Ukraine is willing to make political concessions greater than neutralization or even Finnishization, such extravagant hopes are tantamount to seeking fish for nothing.

By the same token, unless Putin’s regime collapses overnight, or Zelensky’s regime is replaced by pro-Russian factions, a fragmented and dismembered Ukraine may be the inevitable outcome of this war.

Thinking at the Limits of East and West Ukraine

On this basis, the pattern of East Ukraine and West Ukraine divided along the north-south Dnieper River (Dnieper) is not the most probable prototype of the end of the war. The reason why the Dnieper River is the traditional dividing line between East and West Ukraine is that it runs through the country from north to south, and was once the limit of the military power of traditional great powers. When Poland and Russia signed a treaty in 1654, it was this boundary to divide Ukraine for two.

But this time things are a little different. As a result, Russia may not be able to completely occupy the east side of the Dnieper River. After all, it includes not only the Donbass and Kharkov, but also Chernihiv and Sumy. The latter two can be described as the extreme north. Before Kharkov, it is easy to cut off supplies when marching here; secondly, the third-stage action targets announced by Russia, in addition to Kharkov, also include Nikolayev and Odessa on the west side of the Dnieper River. , which shows that the actual control result it imagines is to make Ukraine a completely landlocked country, losing the Black Sea coast, and the northern border is temporarily not in its primary consideration. Of course, the Russian army may not be able to successfully advance. As a result, the final southern line of actual control may stop at Kherson at the mouth of the Dnieper River, and the northern part will depend on whether Kharkiv is captured and whether it is captured. What will happen after the battle.

But no matter what the actual outcome is, in what form "Eastern Ukraine" will become Russia's sphere of influence, and there is a high probability that it and the "Western Ukraine" controlled by Kyiv will not be in the same economy and tax calculation system. If the situation develops like this, Ukraine's endogenous "development differences" may be split into "two countries' data" after the war, which will help "Eastern Ukraine" to develop economic integration with Russia. , but for "Western Ukraine", it was catastrophic.

First of all, according to the data released by the National Statistical Office of Ukraine before the Crimea crisis in 2014, in Ukraine’s gross regional product (GRP) in 2013, the city of Kiev (312.55 billion Ukrainian hryvnia) ranked first, Done Tsk Oblast (Donetsk, 164.92 billion) was next, followed by Dnipropetrovsk (152.9 billion), Kharkiv (85.31 billion), Odessa (69.76 billion), Kiev (68.931 billion), Lviv (63.32 billion), Poltava (58.46 billion), Luhansk (55.1 billion), Zaporizhzhia (543.5) billion), which constitutes the top ten ranking.

According to the latest data released by the National Bureau of Statistics of Ukraine (2019), after deducting Donetsk and Luhansk, which had insufficient data since 2014, the rankings have not changed much, except that Odessa fell slightly to After Lviv, the rest of the region still maintains the leading position in Ukraine's development.

If combined with the monthly salary data, according to the data of the Ministry of Finance of Ukraine in 2022, the city of Kiev ranks first (21,347 Ukrainian hryvnia), followed by Donetsk (15,480), Kiev (15,152), Porozhya (14,510), Dnipropetrovsk (14,479), Nikolayev (14,382); or looking back at the GPR per capita in 2016 (the latest data released by the National Statistical Office of Ukraine), After the city of Kiev (191,736 UAH), the Poltava (81,145), Dnipropetrovsk (75,396), Kiev (74,216), Zaporozhye ( 59,729), Kharkiv Oblast (57,150), Odessa Oblast (50,159), Nikolayev Oblast (50,091). From a similar arrangement and combination, it can be seen that the economic development of Ukraine is the most dazzling on the southeast side, except for Kyiv.

The reason for this phenomenon is that Ukraine's heavy industry is concentrated in the southeast. First of all, the Dnipropetrovsk and Donbas regions are all important coal mining areas in Ukraine. The estimated coal reserves in the Donbass are as high as 60 billion tons. Before the outbreak of the armed independence conflict in 2014, coal was produced here. Ukraine, Europe's third-largest coal producer, contributed 30 percent of the export figures.

In addition, Ukraine is also the seventh largest iron ore producer in the world, and the metallurgical industry and related manufacturing belts are also formed on the southeast side. Zaporozhye is home to the major Ukrainian automaker ZAZ, Nikolayev is a major shipbuilding town, Metinvest (Mariupol, part of Donetsk), ArcelorMittal Kryvyi Rih (Dnipropetrov) Large iron and steel enterprises such as Azov Steel Plant (Mariupol), Ilic Steel Plant (Mariupol), etc. are also distributed in the southeast.

Although Kyiv's data is dazzling, it also enjoys the political dividends of the capital to a certain extent. For example, Kyivstar, Ukraine's largest telephone operator, registered its company headquarters in Kyiv. In addition, take the Antonov Design Bureau, an aircraft manufacturer headquartered in Kyiv as an example, which relies to a large extent on the industrial production resources and supply chain in the east, and has a national aviation production enterprise in Kharkov. With the fall of Kharkov, the Antonov Design Bureau may be forced to split its business, so that the current level of income can no longer be maintained.

In contrast to the development of the current front, the Russian army has occupied almost the entire territory of Luhansk, the southwestern half of Donetsk, the eastern half of Kharkov, the southern half of Zaporozhye, almost the entire territory of Kherson, and Nikolai. Yev part of the eastern land. If the Russian army successfully seizes Kharkov, combined with the substantial control of Zaporozhye, it will be able to double-team the eastern coast of Dnipropetrovsk from the north to the south; if it successfully captures Nikolayev, it can Open the road to Odessa. This time, the East-West Ukraine model is not considered a traditional geographical buffer zone bounded by rivers. Russia has obviously incorporated its economic strategic thinking, intending to seize Ukraine’s high-value heavy industrial belts and sea ports, and reshape its Southwest economy and geopolitical structure.

In addition, as a major grain-producing country in the world, Ukraine also contributes to the east, not as intuitively imagined by the outside world, and its agricultural belt is all concentrated in the west. According to the data of the National Bureau of Statistics of Ukraine from 2016 to 2020, taking sunflower seeds as an example, Kharkiv contributed 10% of the output of the whole Ukraine, and Dnipropetrovsk also contributed 9%; the same distribution of wheat, Kharkiv, Dnipropetrovsk, Zaporozhye, Kherson, Donetsk, and Luhansk accounted for 36% of the total output; millet was mainly produced in the east, as mentioned above. The six places account for 50% of the total. Therefore, Russia's current encroachment on southeastern Ukraine will also damage Kyiv's future agricultural income.

Ultimately, the division of Eastern and Western Ukraine may become a metaphor for the end of the war. The occupied areas in the east will be integrated into the Russian economic circle, whether voluntarily or not, and will gradually restore production levels with related energy and construction blood transfusions. If it becomes Russia's sphere of influence, it will not be able to join the EU or NATO, but its people will have a high probability of being forced by life to flock to the EU or other places to find various job opportunities, whether legal or illegal.

Russia may have paid a very high price for this special military operation, but it did destroy the possibility of Ukraine joining NATO, and warned the West that it is not wise to interfere in Russia's "natural sphere of influence", while gradually plundering Ukraine's high-value areas; As for the latter, the West obviously does not intend to stop it, and there are even public opinions calling for Ukraine to "exchange territory for peace". Of course, whether Russia can really complete the third stage of military operations and occupy Odessa is still unknown, but when the division between East and West Ukraine is taking shape, and the West has acquiesced to a certain extent, Moscow's "victory" must be extremely difficult for Ukraine to bear in the future. heavy.

Original published URL:

2022.6.8

Russia plans to enter the third-order military operation: What kind of "Eastern Ukraine" does Putin want? | Hong Kong 01 https://www.hk01.com/sns/article/778932