Thread by @Suriyakmaps

Nearby eight years since the Minsk agreements were reached the situation in eastern #Ukraine deteriorates again, the recent recognition of LPR & DPR by #Russia put an end of the previous agreement & set a new period of scalation in this conflict where military confrontation

ceased to be a remote possibility but an inevitable one. #Russia, as a superpower that is, uses the conflict in #Ukraine as a grey zone strategy, trying to grow its influence in the country, which was lost previously in 2014 in order to confront NATO/EU expansion towards east

Another strategy related with this one is the use of popular referendums in this regions in order as a way to legalize & legitimate the covert expansion as we saw in Crimea. Strategy in which Russia is not pioneer.

We can see the same strategy during 2008 was against #Georgia, where #Russia recognizes the independence of Abjasia & southern Osetia as an answer to NATO attempt to expand in the Caucasus, which result in the defeat of the small state & the de facto lost of these provinces.

Conflict in Georgia has its origins in the disaster territorial designs the URSS made during its existence. 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh war shows this features too, & similar happened in Ukraine, where national unity between Russian & non-Russian speakers is everyday more fragmented.

Sadly we are seeing how this old problem is being solved through military solution rather than political one. Ukraine realizes it's impossible to recover the lost territory through political ways & with Russian recent order to deploy in the pro-Russian republics military way

began to be unrealistic. Most probably is Russian deployment is LPR & DPR have only defensive purposes & will wait until Ukraine made an error of calculation to change to an offensive posture in which objective won't be a total invasion of Ukraine but an expansion of rebel area

to the official limits of #Donestk & #Luhansk oblasts. A conflict that might last some months depending of the capacities of Ukrainian forces to defend their positions as an external direct help from NATO/UE is discarded.