War is politics by other means…Putin’s goals are political

From Brian Whitmore at RFERL:

….War is politics by other means and the Kremlin’s goals in Donbas are ultimately political.

Vladimir Putin may have once dreamed of seizing all of what his propagandists call Novorossia — the strip of land from Kharkiv to Odesa — and establishing a land bridge to Crimea.

But that’s off the table now and he is clearly not interested in annexing the war-ravaged and economically devastated enclaves his separatists currently hold.

“The Kremlin, for its part, is losing interest in the armed conflict it helped create: It wants to move on from military interference in Ukraine to quieter political destabilization,” political commentator Leonid Bershidsky wrote in Bloomberg View.

….If you want to see Ukraine’s future under this scenario, just look at Bosnia.

Read more at How Do You Solve A Problem Like The Donbas?.