Meanwhile, Kyiv has officially announced that the negotiation process with Moscow has been put on pause. This means that there will be no meetings of delegations in the near future, and there will be no consultations. President Zelensky said that if the Russian Federation captures Mariupol, Kyiv will refuse any further negotiations. So far, everything is going exactly to this. Kyiv has had much more trump cards in its hands in the last month than at the very beginning of the conflict. In recent weeks, Western countries have been actively pumping Ukraine with all kinds of weapons, so the APU has something to defend its positions with. It turns out a situation in which the Russian army was going to "liberate Ukraine from the Nazis" hoping that it would be met with "bread and salt", and the whole operation would take a maximum of three days, but in reality, the confrontation has lasted for almost 2 months and so far no special results are visible. In addition, the Kremlin expected to face a maximum of 100 thousand Ukrainian soldiers who do not possess modern weapons and equipment. In practice, it turned out that Ukrainians have the equipment, as well as modern weapons, since the European Union, the United States, and other countries of the world simply united around Ukraine. As they say, "everything didn't go according to plan." And the negotiations were initially doomed to failure since the issue of Crimea and Donbas was not resolved at all. We talked about this a month ago, when these negotiations still had a slim chance of success. Neither Moscow will give up Crimea and Donbas, nor Kyiv. Accordingly, this military conflict will continue until the complete defeat of one of the participants or until the change of power in the Kremlin or the Rada.
Meanwhile, the International Monetary Fund has published an economic forecast for GDP. According to its expectations, Ukraine's economy will collapse by 35% in 2022. Russia's economy - by 8.5%. The global economy will slow down from 6.1% in 2021 to 3.6% in 2022 and 2023. However, we would like to note that this is an "up-to-date forecast for this time." If several more European countries are involved in the military conflict in Ukraine tomorrow (which cannot be ruled out at all), this could hit the European economy even harder and ricochet on global GDP. From our point of view, a military conflict can persist for years. It can provoke famine in Africa, food crisis in Europe, and energy and fuel crises around the world. It can provoke the Third World War. It may end in "DPRK 2.0" for Russia, and in utter ruin for Ukraine. All this cannot be predicted now. Consequently, any economic forecasts now are a finger in the sky. Nevertheless, the very fact that the forecasts are getting worse suggests that nothing good can be expected. The world is on the verge of another crisis. And it's good if only the crisis.