Russian Annexation of Occupied Ukraine Is Putin’s Unacceptable “Off-Ramp”

The Kremlin likely plans to annex much of the Ukrainian territory currently occupied by Russian forces—portions of Kherson and Zaporizhia oblasts in the south and the areas of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in the east that Russian forces and their proxies control. [...] Such Russian actions would likely follow the establishment of military control of occupied Ukraine and take account of the fact that Russia almost certainly lacks the military capability to seize the parts of Ukraine, including Odesa, that would be necessary for such a land bridge. [...] Outright annexation of Ukrainian territory would foreclose the resurrection of the legal frameworks outlined by the Minsk II accords, which depended on treating Russia’s proxy statelets as parts of Ukraine and requiring Kyiv to grant them both autonomy and the rights to participate in the Ukrainian political system. [...] A Russian military collapse would more likely be roughly analogous to the state of the French army from April to June of 1917 during the First World War, when over half the divisions in the French army refused to go on the offensive due to shattered morale and poor leadership.11 Russian forces in such a state would be extraordinarily vulnerable to concentrated Ukrainian counteroffensives, and the. [...] A Russian military collapse would likely involve an endemic level of desertions and “fragging“ of officers, the practice of personnel killing their own officers, both of which have been observed throughout the war.12 Such a collapse would render further offensives impossible in the current phase of the war in Ukraine and could lead to a disorderly withdrawal of Russian forces from the front lines,.