The weather is going to be a biggest factor if Putin standing down than anything else. I have no doubt after watching his actions that he was ready to go, but Jan and Feb ended up being too warm. He couldn’t get the frozen ground to move his armor.
And as much as Ukrainian president wants to declare there is nothing going on you don’t start training old men, women, and teens to act as a civil guard if you aren’t preparing for a likely and imminent invasion.
I won’t rule out a further push into Donbas. He’s basically using the same strategy here as he has in Georgia. Declare a border and then will start moving the fence a couple dozen meters every month. Literal salami tactics.
They could probably take Odessa from the sea as well, but a move on Kiev with these weather conditions would cost a lot in men and material.
Because it’s about stopping someone hell bent on rebuilding an empire here today because it will cost a lot more lives and treasure to do so tomorrow. And Putin has said consistently for the last 20+ years that he felt allowing the Soviet States to declare independence was a mistake. This includes not only Ukraine, but the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Putins long term plan is to reabsorb those states as well. It’s why they so quickly went to join the EU and NATO. They knew from history that the Russia of the 90’s was temporary and that a new Russian strongman would come around and conquer them yet again.
We also bear the burden of the fact we were the ones who talked the Ukrainians out of their nuclear weapons and strategic arsenal in exchange for security guarantee we failed to honor back in 2014.
I know it’s popular to side with Putin on here, but this who the man really is. He wants to go down in history as a modern Peter the Great who rebuilt a new Russian Empire.
What we did find that never really made it into the news. The best way I have to explain it is imagine that the State of California outlaws hot brewed cups of coffee. One day the state raids the HQ of some tech firm that has 1M square feet of office space. What they find are green coffee beans, roasters, coffee pots, filters, grinders, powdered creamer (heathens), cups, mugs, sugar, sweet'n low, equal, and some coffee cups in the sink that have a little bit of old stale coffee at the bottom. We found everything you need to make a hot brewed cup of coffee, old coffee that had been brewed a long time ago, but not actual coffee brewing or hot cups of coffee ready to go.
That would require the rugged individuals of the countryside to actually come together and organize as a group. One of the flaws in that theory...