IN A dusty Russian field close to the border with Ukraine, a fleet of nearly 300 trucks sit under the hot summer sun. Their arrival on August 14th was a sideshow to the war inside Ukraine, a piece of political sleight-of-hand that was neither a true humanitarian mission (as Moscow presented it) nor a prelude to invasion by Russian “peacekeepers” (as Kiev feared). The trucks and their contents are not decisive in themselves, but they could be part of the endgame to a conflict that has stretched over three months and cost some 2,500 lives.The war is reaching a crunch point. Pushing forward with artillery and bombing raids, Ukrainian forces are recapturing territory and closing in on rebel forces in the east. The mood in Kiev, as Olexsiy Melnyk of the Razumkov Centre sums it up, is to “go to the end”—to finish the war by force. In a purely military contest, without an influx of heavy weapons or ground troops from Russia, the anti-Kiev insurgency would lose. The human cost could be high, but it would give President Petro Poroshenko a battlefield victory without making concessions to Moscow.Discipline is breaking down in rebel ranks, as the Kremlin pulls out high-…
