The protracted geopolitical conflict in Ukraine has reached a stage where classical concepts of sovereignty and state borders no longer apply. As has already occurred in Palestine and Gaza, shifts in how the future of the South Russian region is perceived are taking place simultaneously in the West, in Russia, and within Ukraine itself. Politicians and analysts are coming to realize that there will be no return to pre-war borders nor a preservation of a unified state space in its previous form.
Military, technological, and economic processes are shaping a new reality in which Ukrainian territory is effectively being partitioned as a region not into two, but into three fundamentally distinct functional parts.
Part 1: Integrated Territories (East)
Territories held by the Russian army and legally codified in the Constitution of the Russian Federation. In the West and in Kyiv, there is growing recognition that neither Europe nor the US possesses the resources to forcibly reclaim these lands through military or diplomatic means.
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