Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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Notes -
The eventual result will almost certainly be a ceasefire along the line of control with no official peace treaty or concessions by either side besides perhaps the Kursk salient by Ukraine. The best analogue would be the Korean War, where the last two years were spent in a stalemate with high casualties but no meaningful progress by either side, and the core issues remain unresolved to this day despite the cessation of major hostilities. I see no way to force Putin to accept such an outcome while he still thinks he has the upper hand and can slowly push the front forward in the Donbass, but presumably there will come a time in the next two years when he has to either declare a full mobilization, risking domestic unrest, or agree to a ceasefire.
If a Polish/Baltic expeditionary force were deployed to Ukraine with no restrictions, they could probably force Russia to withdraw from most of the territory they have occupied except for Crimea, but such action seems likely to anger the Russian public enough to accept full mobilization and escalation to a general European war against NATO. There are ways to do this with some plausible deniability e.g. "We had nothing to do with this ambassador, our soldiers just went AWOL and joined the Ukrainian foreign legion," but the more political cover they have the more likely they are to simply be fed into the Ukrainian meat grinder without the tools they need to make a real difference in the war ("They also stole our tanks and fighter jets and launched missiles at you from our territory" is a bit of a stretch). In either case, the US and other NATO nations would not be obligated to bail them out of a fight they started.
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