Can the Russians take the capital of Kiev, and, if so, what happens there, both to the city itself and to the government?Īnother key is the final package of sanctions from Western nations that get passed and their effect on Russia. I just don’t see the ‘day after’ strategy, from the Russian point of view.”Įxperts said in the days and weeks to come, they’d be looking for things like how much of a fight the Ukrainian army puts up and whether they can drag the battle out and increase the Russian body count. “It’s gruesome and bloody and requires a huge amount of human force. “The Russians learned in Chechnya the same lesson that we learned in Mosul, which is it’s extremely difficult to hold cities,” Vacroux said. The large cities may prove a particular problem, Vacroux said. “But what are they going to do after that? We can say that there’s no way the Ukrainian army can stop them, but we can also say that there’s no way an army of even 200,000 Russian troops is going to be able to hold a country of 43 million people.” “Ukrainians are doing the best that they can, but you can’t stop the larger, better-equipped, probably better-trained Russian army moving in on three sides from basically getting to its objective,” said Alexandra Vacroux, executive director of Harvard’s Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies.
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Does he want to carve out territory, like the Russian-speaking eastern regions, which border Russia? He has said that he has no plans to occupy Ukraine, but will he at least try to install a Russia-friendly government? Beyond that, it’s still unclear what Putin’s ultimate objectives are. Russia’s larger and far superior military would likely overwhelm Ukraine’s in head-to-head combat, but it seems likely the Ukrainians will continue to offer armed resistance.
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So, they’re not going to visit schoolchildren and have training on the weekends, they’re going there to be a valid reinforcement to the defenses that are already there.”įor the short term, however, the experts agreed, Russia is going to have its hands full with Ukraine. But more than that, the important thing would be to have those troops be combat-ready, have ammunition in a storage site nearby, have them be integrated into war plans and the defenses of those NATO countries. “It sends a message to Putin if we increase troop presence in the Baltics and Poland and so on. “Putin is not about messaging as much as he is about doing something, and we should focus more on deeds than words,” Ryan said. Much will depend, however, on how much resistance he meets in Ukraine and how unified NATO remains through the crisis. But it seems likely that he will avoid taking on NATO directly as that could lead to a nuclear standoff, and so will avoid member states. Ryan and other Russia experts at Harvard say that it’s difficult to predict exactly what Putin’s next move will be. He said concrete steps to deter Russian President Vladimir Putin should be taken. Kevin Ryan, a senior fellow at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, said even though it is unlikely that Russia would invade Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, their NATO membership, Lithuania’s borders with Russia-friendly Belarus, and Estonia and Latvia’s with Russia raise the stakes of a broader conflict. and its NATO allies should be tripling combat-ready troops in the Baltics and NATO-allied eastern Europe to deter any thought of a Ukraine-style incursion there. With Russian troops in full-scale assault against Ukraine, a key step for the U.S.
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