“The challenge is this: Putin continues to press this aggression, and that is why we are concerned this could go on for some time,” a State Dept. spokesperson says.
that have roiled Moscow's economy, could President Vladimir Putin look for an early offramp to end the war?"Maybe there's more happening there than meets the eye, but the Kremlin has gone all in on this invasion — a major war of a kind Russia has not fought since 1945," said Michael Kimmage, who joined the State Department in 2014 to focus on Ukraine-Russia issues and is now chair of the history department at the Catholic University of America.
"It is now an air war," said Oleksandr Danylyuk, the former secretary of Ukraine's National Security and Defense Council who is now helping organize the territorial defense on the front lines in Kyiv. Rather than requiring Ukraine's full demilitarization and pushing NATO to remove all deployments east of where the alliance stood in 1997, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry PeskovUkraine would have to end all military action, write into its constitution that it would not join NATO or the European Union, officially recognize annexed Crimea as Russian territory and accept the independence of two breakaway eastern regions.
"All of this has been there for a long time, but this is the first time we see them on paper," Boulegue said."The question is where do we go from here? How can they turn what they're doing now into a military victory that would ensure them and guarantee them the ability to carry forth with their political strategic ambitions?"