After the Budapest Memorandum was so easily forgotten by a leader who has added all the recent entries here to the already long legacy of Russian war crimes :
Which means Russian sanctions never end. A few hundred miles of the Ukraine isn't worth it. Russia is sliding into global irrelevance; it's only the remnants of their archaic and decaying nuclear arsenal that gives them any credibility at all.
It seems as though the sanctions were levied aggressively as a long term play. I’m curious how their effect is over time as it seems to disrupt their trade quite a bit. I’ve read contextual reports but would like for someone to tie it all together and put a 5 year hypothesized forecast on it.
Seems like it would invite perpetual freedom fighting/guerrilla ops indefinitely, and Putin is not getting younger. How did 20 years in Afghanistan work out for the US, for example.
High level, Russia’s days as a superpower are over. People will continue to flee (~200k highly skilled Russians have fled the country, several million more Ukrainians as well), and the world will accelerate the transition off of oil to not be beholden to Russian petroleum.
Guerilla depends on the local population not accepting the situation.
For instance, as far as I know all is fine and quiet in Crimea, and as I wrote in my previous comment even if Ukraine does not officially accept the situation, in practice the border has moved since 2014 and no-one fights.
So we'll need to wait and see how the situation stabilises and which territories Russia can grab and decides to hold on to.
It's no unusual for armed conflicts to end that way, with an armistice.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_war_crimes
..it is very hard to imagine any way that a durable peace treaty could be concluded with the current Russian administration.