A consensus is building among NATO officials and military analysts of the situation in Eastern Ukraine that Russia will renew its invasion of the region in the next two months.
However, there is also general agreement that the attack would take only after the 9 May Victory Day celebrations in Moscow, which President Vladimir Putin regards as reaffirming Russia's continued position as a "great power."
The predictions of a new Russian offensive by analysts have coincided with similar statements by officials such as NATO Supreme Commander, USAF General Philip Breedlove. Gen Breedlove testified to this effect before the US Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) on 30 April, stating that the sometimes on-sometimes off ceasefire agreed in February after the second round of Minsk negotiations had been utilised by the Russian forces to "reset and reposition".
NATO's assessment, he added, is that the Russian military's goal is to secure the gains made on territory already taken in the Ukraine Donbass region, as well as to deploy for the launch of a late spring attack. "Many of their [the Russians'] actions are consistent with preparations for another offensive," he said, adding that Russian forces' activities were not just exercises but "preparing, training, and equipping to have the capacity again to take an offensive."
Gen Breedlove's conclusions were based on two major indicators. One is that Russia's armed forces do not typically engage in empty sabre-rattling without following through with real military action. "In the past they have not wasted their effort," he said.
The other is that Russia's military has moved to exert enhanced positive control on the battlefield over the formations of "separatist" combatants and to more closely integrate their actions with those of Moscow's regulars "because there was disunity in some of the earlier attacks. We do see a very distinct Russian set of command-and-control in the eastern part of Ukraine," he stated. "Command-and-control, air defence, support to artillery, all of these things have increased - making a more coherent, organised force out of the separatists."
Dr Phillip Karber of the Potomac Foundation in Washington, DC, a defence and foreign policy thinktank that has led calls for the US to provide Ukraine with military assistance, has traversed the front of the Ukraine-Russia conflict a number of times.
He and former NATO Supreme Commander General Wesley Clark (retd) have given numerous briefings on the lessons learned from the Russian operation and have analysed the scenarios likely to unfold.
The Russian use of "political agents, Spetsnaz, 'little green men', volunteers, and mercenaries provide a variety of low visibility insertion, sabotage, training, and advisory options" and mean it has been able to prosecute its action in Ukraine "…in such a way that allows some European nations to pretend that they cannot recognise the direct control of Moscow in this conflict," Karber said.
"We are probably looking at three potential scenarios at this point," said Karber. "One is that this situation stays as it is now: a frozen conflict with Ukraine partially dismembered and its economy in such disarray that it will never be eligible for EU membership - a central goal of Putin."
"The second scenario," he continued, "is that the Russian forces move out and occupy all of the Donbass [Lugansk and Donetsk] regions. They run up the separatist flag and say 'we play the Abkhazia/South Ossetia [Georgia] game again' and just declare these regions protectorates of Russia."
"The third option that could play out is Putin orders an all-out offensive and the Russian army swings south to take Dnepropetrovsk, Zapaprozhye, and Mariupol, which gives him the land bridge to the Crimea that he wants."
In all of these scenarios Crimea remains in Russian hands and Moscow will not even engage in the pretence that it is a separatist region. It has already been assimilated as Russian territory, say all of the analysts looking at the situation in this region of Ukraine.
This year's Victory Day celebrations - marking 70 years since the end of the Second World War - are the most elaborate and expensive in the history of post-Soviet Russia. The impact of the event has greater implications than many realise.
"It's the only opportunity for the nation to assert itself. There are no other foundations for national pride left," said the sociologist Lev Gudkov, director of the independent polling unit at Russia's Levada Center. "This is the triumph of the Soviet Union over Hitler's Germany and at the same time a triumph over the West. It's a declaration of might, the transformation into a superpower," he said in an interview with the New York Times .
Russia's continued aggression in Ukraine, say other analysts, is seen by Putin as a continuation of the country's "historic mission" of the Second World War - "saving Europe from fascism, extremism, and restoring poryadok i zakony (law and order) to all of the regions he believes still should belong to Moscow."
That the Russian president now views Russia's actions through this prism is part of what prompted Gen Breedlove to state in the same 30 April congressional testimony that "what we do believe is that we should consider changing the decision calculus of Putin. That's what we look at."
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