Thread by @JimmyThomist

What could a peace deal in the Ukraine war look like? Would it lead to stability or a transition to insurgency?

In my FLOCARK map below I determined there are 3 major East/West defensive lines within Ukraine, anchored on the:

1: Carpathians
2: Dniper River
3: Donets River

I will assume that Russia invaded Ukraine because:

1. It thought Ukraine was on the path to joining NATO and they wanted a more defensible border
2. They wanted to directly or indirectly control the ethnically Russian parts of Ukraine.

There are many other explanations (mostly

economic or ideological) but I don't have a background to address those the way I can look at the terrain of the region from the operational level.

Looking at the 3 defensive lines, we can ignore the Carpathians (line 1). It would require a total collapse of the Ukrainian state.

In which case you don't need a contentiously negotiated peace deal. A similar comment applies to the Russians withdrawing to the pre-war border.

The best defensive feature by far is the Dniper river (line 2). Russia could hold the Dniper river with a sustainable sized force.

Line 3 on the Donets not nearly as good of a defensive feature, but it's a lot closer to the current "front line" and has much less risk of triggering a long insurgency.

To understand this dynamic let's take the oblast (province or state level) map of Ukraine and simplify it.

To take the optimal defensive line on the Dniper river Russia needs to seize the Chernihiv, Sumy, Dnipro and Kharkiv oblasts. Even in Feb-Mar 2022 they seized less than half of this area, so it would require a major breakthrough by the Russian army.

The small portion of the Kyiv oblast east of the Dniper river is also a major problem. The part of Kyiv on the east bank is about 875 sq km, which is more than 20x the size of Bakhmut. More on this later.

For the Donets line the Russians 'only' need to seize parts of Kharkov. At the cost of maintaining a larger force they could tie the Donets river line into the Dniper line through Kherson and Zhaporizhia. This would maintain the land bridge to Crimea.

But for either scenario what are the risks of an insurgency developing in the Russian controlled area? This was, after all, the original US plan for dealing with the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

I scored each oblast on the % of primarily Russian speakers and election results.

I assume this is a good metric for the insurgency vs collaboration risk, though there's been a lot of movement of people since the invasion that undermines the validity of these numbers.

The map below has red for Russian aligned, yellow for Ukraine aligned and white for mixed.

The Russians therefore have three contradictory goals in which oblasts to attempt to seize:
1. A defensible border;
2. Controlling the more Russian speaking areas; and
3. Minimizing the risk of a protracted insurgency.

#1 requires not taking Odesa or Mykolaiv, which violates #2.

#1 also requires taking Chernihiv, parts of Kyiv, Sumy and Poltava. The first two are a high risk for a long insurgency, the second two are a moderate risk.

Combining the defensive value of an oblast with the risk of a long insurgency give the following map:

So Russia is most of the way to a good balance of defensibly and avoiding an insurgency. But there's isn't an optimal solution for Russia in Ukraine.

If they maximize controlling areas with significant ethnic Russians they will have a border that isn't easy to defend.

Maximizing a defensible border will expose them to a long insurgency in the North and involve abandoning the ethnic Russians in the south-west.