Will grain exports out of Odessa proceed—with Russian acquiescence?

And, yet, will the Ukrainians allow the Russians to encircle them in the Lysychansk salient, or will they make a mad dash through the fields to escape?

I’ve marked Lysychansk in the Luhansk Oblast of Ukraine here:

Let’s zoom in.  Here a screen shot from 2 July from https://liveuamap.com/:

The Russians appear to have captured a railroad terminus east of Lysychansk and, more importantly, to have cut the last major highway out of Lsyschansk.

The Ukrainians have been holding out in the Sievierdonetsk/Lysychansk salient for weeks, but over the last week-and-a-half the Ukrainians have given up the western half of Sievierdonetsk and have retreated across the river into Lysychansk.  Meanwhile, the Russians have made progress narrowing the gap further west of Lysychansk.  The gap is about 5 miles/8 kilometers wide.  For many weeks it had been as much as 12 miles/20 kilometers wide.

Are the Ukrainians contemplating the prospect of the Russians encircling their troops in Lysychansk, or would they make a mad dash through the fields to get their troops out?

Zooming out:

Compare this last screenshot to one I posted a few weeks ago on 8 June:

One can see that there has been some give-and-take, but there has been a lot of “take” by the Russians around Lysychansk.  The salient has been shrinking, and the Russians have made notable progress shrinking it over the last week. 

Now, is this a big deal as far as the entire campaign goes?  I don’t know, but here is the Ukraine-wide view:

It is still hard to know how the war ends.  The West—that is, the United States—seems intent on channeling enough resources to Ukraine to keep the war going, but wars end only when one or all parties become exhausted.  Exhaustion makes them amenable to cutting deals.  Even before the war started, some observers had suggested what a deal could look like: cede Crimea and the two renegade oblasti of Donetsk and Luhansk to Russia and commit Ukraine to not joining NATO.  Other observers have complained that such a deal would amount to replaying the West’s deal with Hitler over the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia in 1938: The West agreed to one party absorbing some borderlands (the Sudetenland) only to see the belligerent party (Germany) subsequently go on to absorb the entire country (all of Czechoslovakia).  Hitler went on to observe that, after “the Czech affair,” the West would do nothing to stop him.

Meanwhile, one can now wonder at this stage whether the Russians would even accept a deal limited to territorial concessions comprised of the Crimea and two oblasti.  Has an opportunity to cut such a deal passed?  Might the Russians now demand the land bridge that they have established with Crimea?  Might they also demand the city of Kherson, thereby blocking free access from Ukraine to the Black Sea along the Dnipro River?  And what of the other swath of territory that they’ve since overrun in the east of Ukraine?

Ultimately, what will Ukraine look like going forward, and what credible commitment (if any) could the Russians make to leaving it alone? 

Here is a bit of data that might be consistent with a post-war Ukraine holding on to Odessa:

I did see some noises in the press yesterday about the Russians leaving Snake Island.  (Here is an example.)  Snake Island is situated in the Black Sea south of Odessa. I’ve marked it here:

Conceivably, it is a site from which the Russians could police a blockade of Odessa, but now that it is back in Ukrainian hands, some volume of grain exports might proceed.  That is the theory. The Russians have even acknowledged as much in that they might acquiesce to opening a “humanitarian corridor” out of Odessa.

Some observers have suggested the Snake Island matter amounts to a “humiliation” for the Russians—the Ukrainians drove them off the island—and the “humanitarian” spin is just that: a way of the Russians spinning a “humiliation” into an affirmative gesture of good will.