The behind the scenes aspect to this entire war is just amazing in so many sad ways for me but with 2023 around the corner, we are going to have to be prepared for some very interesting things to unfold.
Like it or not, Europe is in a significant energy crisis and they have been flip flopping on how best to deal with it. The entire world has had it's inflation and energy costs skyrocket as a result of this war! We went from NO MORE RUSSIAN OIL to a price cap of $60 a barrel for it and playing games with insurance carriers and tanker's mixing oil to avoid sanctions. We got some EU countries wanting to not piss off Putin and their electorate and other's who want to go for his jugular economically and end this bull **** fast.
There is enough commentary from US officials on being careful as Russia still has significant military power at it's disposal and I am not talking about nukes either.
Putin may be willing to feed conscripts into the war machine but perhaps another play would be to force US and Europe's hand in other ways outside of energy. Enough people are getting fatigue in this war that something will have to give next year. Does Putin get a lot more aggressive and than proceed with dropping mega bombs on major towns and centers? What if central Kyiv almost doesn't exist anymore ? What if in a week instead of having some rocket attacks we have 50k killed? This isn't WW1, this is playing out in real time in people's homes on their computer screens.
What if 10 million more Ukrainian's are ready to flee to EU countries, does the EU allow that? How does that play politically in Europe? Is the west ready for the side effects of non stop human death, destruction and crumbling of the entire country? Let's not forget, it's going to be the west that pay's for and assists with the rebuilding of Ukraine but those costs are only going up.
The next year will be interesting
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