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HOW UKRAINE'S CRITICAL 'FORTRESS BELT' COULD BE LOST UNDER PUTIN'S DEMANDS
>Kremlin officials want Ukraine to cede Crimea and all of Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts that comprise the Donbas region, as well as freeze other parts of the front line in a ceasefire, Bloomberg, citing unnamed sources, said, according to the ISW.
>The fortress belt is made up of four large cities and other towns that run north to south over 30 miles along Donetsk's H-20 Kostyantynivka-Slovyansk highway and has proved to be an obstacle to Russian territorial ambitions since 2014. Trump has said peace talks in Alaska on August 15 would likely discussing "some swapping of territories."
>handing over the whole region for a ceasefire with no final peace settlement would allow Moscow's forces to renew their attacks on much more favorable terms without any further struggle for the territory where they are trying to envelop from the southwest, the ISW said. Russian forces failed to envelop all of Ukraine's fortress belt in 2022, and such an operation would likely take years and involve high personnel and equipment losses, the think tank said.
>Ceding Ukrainian-held parts of the Donetsk region would allow Moscow to avoid this complication and let its forces go to the border of the region, which is significantly less defensible than the current line.
>This would force Ukraine to built fortifications to be built along the Kharkiv and Dnipropetrovsk border areas, the terrain of which is poorly suited to act as a defensive line, the ISW said.
>The think tank said Russian forces will almost certainly violate any future ceasefire or peace agreement and renew military aggression unless a peace agreement includes robust monitoring mechanisms and security guarantees for Ukraine,
AAAHAHAHAAHA REMEMBER THE SMUGNESS WHEN RUSSIA COMPLAINED ABOUT UKRAINE VIOLATING MINSK 2? SUCK IT.
https://archive.md/bXMiy