JRL NEWSWATCH: “Putin’s Pyrrhic Victory: Russia’s Setbacks in Eastern Ukraine Show Why It Can’t Win the Wider War” – Foreign Affairs

“As the terrible destruction of Mariupol, Volnovakha, Severodonetsk, Rubizhne, and other eastern cities shows, Putin is determined to subjugate the Donbas even if that means slaughtering ostensibly pro-Russian eastern Ukrainians and torching what remains of Russia’s soft power …. stak[ing] his credibility on the Donbas … seem[ingly] determined to rule its smoking ruins rather than admit the insane folly of his war of choice and retreat. But the response from eastern Ukraine has been remarkable. Its military has mounted a far more robust defense than Russia could have imagined … [I]ts residents have bravely protested their occupiers. The imperial narrative Moscow used to sell the war to the Russian public simply will not take root in Ukrainian soil. … Russian propagandists from a pro-Kremlin media outlet … recently visited an occupied district of Mariupol and were shocked by the enraged responses of local Russian-speaking women …. [C]oming weeks will determine if Ukraine’s defiance and the West’s determination to gird it with arms are enough to stop Putin’s ruthless move on the Donbas. … [I]t has already baldly exposed Russia’s revanchist fantasy …. Whatever happens on the battlefield, Moscow has lost forever its cultural sway and beachhead in the bilingual, multinational, and yet now unambiguously Ukrainian east.”

Click here for: “Putin’s Pyrrhic Victory: Russia’s Setbacks in Eastern Ukraine Show Why It Can’t Win the Wider War” – Foreign Affairs/ Brian Milakovsky