- Patchy controlling – Everybody says that it’s wildly expected from the Russian President Vladimir Putin to keep on loathing Ukraine’s current pro-Western government and its wishes to join the EU and NATO, by installing a pro-Russian regime in Kyiv. How and when things could happen is very uncertain, but the Eurasia Group has a base-case scenario for the next three months, where Russia would gain control of eastern Ukraine, all the way up to the Dnipro River, and capture the capital of Kyiv after a protracted siege. This way, they would establish a Russian-backed puppet government in Ukraine. This predicted analysis would come with a refugee flow of 5 million to 10 million people from Ukraine into Western Europe.
- Purge and partition – There are some analysts that are currently agreeing to one thing: any kind of patchy control over Ukraine by Russian forces will eventually lead to some kind of partitioning of the country. This applies even more as the Russian army has been firmly entrenched in eastern Ukraine, especially in the Donbas region where it recognized the independence of two pro-Russian republics before the invasion even started. According to Taras Kuzio, who’s a researcher at the Henry Jackson Society, Putin has an apparent objective of eradicating all vestiges of Ukrainian identity, but also condemning the country to a grim future with his military dictatorship locked firmly inside the new “Russian Empire”. Plus, we should admit that there are TOO many questions over who could be the next puppet leader in Ukraine, but an immediate answer would be that he would resemble Belarus President Alexander Lukashenko.
