What Will Happen After the Fall of Mariupol?

Military and political pundits have already started hypothesizing about what will happen next, following the fall of the city of Mariupol at the hands of Russian forces. Several plausible scenarios have been articulated. According to the most widely cited one, Russian forces will complete a rapid takeover of eastern Ukraine and capture the Donbas region to secure all separatist regions in the Republics of Donetsk and Luhansk. From there, they will move onto Odesa, which will be attacked through a naval landing from the Black Sea. According to several experts, Russian forces hope to achieve this goal by May 9 – which is Victory Day, a Russian holiday that commemorates the Soviet victory over Nazi Germany in 1945 – so that [Russian President Vladimir] Putin will be able to join the military parade in Moscow’s Red Square and announce Russia’s victory in Ukraine. In doing so, Ukraine will become a de facto landlocked country without access to any of its port cities, and Putin will announce a cessation of hostilities and begin negotiations with Ukraine. Putin will demand that Ukraine become a neutral state, refrain from joining NATO, and formally recognize Russia’s sovereignty over Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk. If Ukraine refuses to accept these conditions, Putin will announce the continuation of the hostilities in Ukraine. It is expected that Ukraine will agree to the first condition pertaining to its neutrality and the second condition pertaining to NATO. However, the third condition regarding the annexation of Crimea is a thorny subject that would be difficult to swallow. So is the recognition of the two separatist republics. Therefore, it is possible that Ukraine would propose a degree of autonomy for these regions without formally handing them over to Russia. If all these options fail, there’s another scenario in which Russian forces begin advancing towards the city of Lviv, located on the Polish border, to block off access to Ukraine by land. This would block the arrival of any military aid from the United States or NATO into Ukraine and give Russia the upper hand in Ukraine’s western region. –Samir Farag (translated by Asaf Zilberfarb)