THAT WOULD BE NICE: Russian military expert on Ukraine: ‘War could end this year.’ “I don’t see how this can continue in the present pattern for a long time. It’s like football, you never know what’s going to happen actually on the battlefield. There’s a well-known saying that ‘Russia is never a strong as your fear’, as we see during this year, but ‘Russia is also never as weak as you hope’. So you can’t just write off Russia. The intensity of the fighting is too high for it to be maintained for long.”