U.S. President Joe Biden is in Kiev today to rescue his lunatic project of destroying Russia by proxy war. But there is no good way to do that.
A review of 'western' media shows that the inevitable outcome of the war is now recognized. The only still open alternatives are to risk a large nuclear war or to retreat from 'western' dreams of its permanent hegemony.
Few 'western' officials will admit that the war is lost, that Russia has won in Ukraine. But it has. It had won the war when it successfully trapped the Ukrainian army into a war of attrition.
A the Russian commentator Sacha Rogers writes (in Russian, machine translation):
This war has already been won (moreover, what is most offensive for various "unrecognized geniuses", without their participation and contrary to their foolish ideas of how it should be won). It was won at the moment when, instead of a highly maneuverable war, our General Staff imposed a positional “standing” with an attrition war on the Armed Forces of Ukraine.
Strictly by the textbook: Attrition warfare is a military strategy consisting of belligerent attempts to win a war by wearing down the enemy to the point of collapse through continuous losses in personnel and material.
Ukraine has already lost two armies and it is begging for a third one. But the 'West' is unable to deliver it:
Less than a quarter of the modern battle tanks the West has promised to Ukraine are likely to arrive in time to counter an anticipated Russian spring offensive.
Kyiv is expecting its supporters to send up to 320 western tanks in total but estimates suggest barely 50 will reach the front lines by the start of April, prompting concerns they will not be enough to have a substantial impact on the fighting.
The recognition that the Ukraine has lost the war is creating a panic in those quarters that are committed to 'western' uni-polarity.
The Economist warns of the loss of the 'West’s authority':
Ukraine’s future still hangs in the balance—and is likely to remain uncertain for years to come. Mr Putin may accept a ceasefire at some point out of expedience, but his overhaul of Russian society is geared entirely towards aggression abroad and repression at home. Any conceivable end to the shooting will therefore require strong Western security guarantees and large and lasting transfers of arms and financial aid—almost as if a second, much bigger Israel had appeared on Europe’s eastern borders. Some European leaders argue that requires full NATO membership. If reconstruction of Ukraine were to fail, and its economy to falter, then Ukrainian democracy would start to fail, too.
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Only a third of the world’s population lives in countries that have both condemned Russia for its invasion and also imposed sanctions on it, according to the Economist Intelligence Unit, our sister organisation. Most of them are close allies of America. The rest tend to see the war as a contest between autocrats and hypocrites.
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Even countries that think that Mr Putin’s invasion was reprehensible might still conclude that Western power is on the wane if it fails to succour Ukraine. But given arms, money and political support Ukraine may yet prevail. Through courage and by the power of their example, the Ukrainian people have earned that chance. There could be no better investment in Western security.
An editorial in the Washington Post is blowing the same horn:
To allow an outcome that rewards the Kremlin in any way would be a moral travesty. It would also deal a potentially lethal blow to the principle on which Western stability and civilized international conduct rests: that sovereign states cannot be invaded, subjugated and subjected to mass slaughter with impunity.
(Ever heard of Yugoslavia? Or Iraq?)
To thwart Russia and safeguard Ukraine’s sovereignty, the United States and its European allies have little choice but to intensify their military, economic and diplomatic support for Kyiv. That means equipping Ukrainian forces with more decisive weapons and in greater numbers, imposing more aggressive sanctions on Moscow and galvanizing a more muscular international coalition to isolate and ostracize Russia.
That agenda is urgent; the status quo of relatively static battle lines is untenable.
In the New York Times one David French warns that America Can’t Go ‘Wobbly’ on Ukraine:
Yet the outcome of the war is simply too important — to America as well as Ukraine — to allow our support to falter. On the war’s anniversary it’s time for a concerted effort to persuade Americans of a single idea: We should support Ukraine as much as it takes, as long as it takes, until the Russian military suffers a decisive, unmistakable defeat.
On the one side of the current discussion you have those, see above, who think of the outcome of the war in absolute terms. The U.S. must win in the proxy war it has caused, no matter what. But there are alternatives. The will require to acknowledge that the short period of U.S. global hegemony has ended. The time for multi-polarity has come.
Count Secretary of State Anthony Blinken as one who is unwilling to admit that As soon as China 'threatened' to negotiate peace in Ukraine did he accuse it -without evidence- of aiding Russia in the war:
In his interview with NBC’s “Meet the Press,” which was taped on Saturday night for broadcast on Sunday, Mr. Blinken said the United States would soon be offering new information to demonstrate Beijing was “strongly considering providing lethal assistance to Russia.”
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Mr. Wang has been using the conference in Munich as a platform to tell European leaders and diplomats that China is ready to bolster ties with them and to try to play a role in ending the war in Ukraine. In his public remarks on Saturday, he said that China would soon offer a peace proposal to stop the fighting. But Mr. Blinken warned in a separate event against the allure of cease-fires that Russia might exploit to regroup for new offensives.
China has not yet supported Russia in the war. But if Russia would seem to lose the war China would have to intervene. It would otherwise become the very next country that the U.S. would try to obliterate.
The U.S. fell into an escalation trap when it has allowed the Ukraine leadership to lead the country towards disaster:
By virtue of its decision, Ukraine, along with its closest partners in Poland and the Baltic nations, became the classic “trojan ally” — smaller countries whose desire for regional clout against the extant middle power (Russia) is predicated on their ability to persuade an external great power and its global military network (here, the US and, by extension, Nato) to step in militarily on their behalf. As we noted in our study, “this comes at great risk to the regional balancer and at great cost to the external great power”. For ultimately, the arrangement depends on “the threat of the use of force and military intervention” by that external great power, without which the regional balancer would fail.
That is exactly where we are. Ukraine's pathological hater Vladimir Zelenski is leading the U.S. into an ever deeper commitment to win by ultimately destroying Russia.
But any direct confrontation with Russia would lead to nuclear war. The U.S. can not risk that. It is therefore pushing Ukraine to speed up its commitment to suicide:
As the fighting continues to rage, both sides of the Atlantic fear that Russia is finding its footing, Ukraine may be overmatched in certain parts of the east and south and the West’s pipeline of weapons will slow to a trickle. Biden leaves Monday for Poland to meet with President Andrzej Duda and other key NATO leaders. U.S. officials believe that Ukraine’s defense is about to hit a critical phase with Russia launching its much-telegraphed offensive. The Biden administration has urgently pressed President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s administration to consolidate its gains — and perhaps launch its own counterstrike.
The White House has also told Zelenskyy’s team, per multiple officials, to prepare for the offensive now, as weapons and aid from Washington and Europe flow freely, for fear that backing from Ukraine’s European neighbors could be finite.
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But the reality Biden will confront in Poland is that Zelenskyy has made clear that he will not negotiate until all of Ukraine’s territory is restored — all but ensuring that the war will stretch into the distant horizon.“We’re in this for the long-haul and it’s going to grind on for quite some time,” said Rachel Rizzo, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Europe Center. If Western support starts to fade away, “there’s no denying that it will have an effect on both the outcome and the length of the war.”
You don't say …
The 'West' is going wobbly because it can not provide enough for long enough to give the Ukraine even a small chance to win the war:
“We will continue to try to impress upon them that we can’t do anything and everything forever,” said one senior administration official, referring to Ukraine’s leaders. The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomatic matters, added that it was the administration’s “very strong view” that it will be hard to keep getting the same level of security and economic assistance from Congress.
“'As long as it takes’ pertains to the amount of conflict,” the official added. “It doesn’t pertain to the amount of assistance.”
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The critical nature of the next few months has already been conveyed to Kyiv in blunt terms by top Biden officials — including deputy national security adviser Jon Finer, deputy secretary of state Wendy Sherman and undersecretary of defense Colin Kahl, all of whom visited Ukraine last month.CIA Director William J. Burns traveled to the country one week ahead of those officials, where he briefed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on his expectations for what Russia is planning militarily in the coming months and emphasized the urgency of the moment.
Faster please, is what the U.S. is telling Ukraine. Hurry up because we will soon have to end our support.
But the Ukrainian army does not have the material and manpower ready to launch some kind of counter offense that would have a chance to be win the war. It doesn't even have enough to regain some significant territory.
The third army it would need would have to be much stronger than the two armies it has already lost. And its not coming.
So what is the 'West' going to do? Deliver more wonder weapons?
President Biden is set to travel to Poland this week to discuss Western efforts to help Ukraine resist Russia’s invasion, as pressure builds on his administration to provide Kyiv with F-16 fighter jets. Poland’s prime minister, Mateusz Morawiecki, said in a weekend interview with CBS’s “Face the Nation” he believes that eventually “there will be fighter jets from the West” — as was the case with other advanced weapons whose provision was “unimaginable” when the war began.
I have news for Mr. Morawiecki. The first F-16 flew in 1974. To think that 50 year old airplanes will have a chance against Russia's first class air defenses and fifth generation fighter planes is lunacy.
Fighter planes are flown by using trained reflexes, not by conscious decisions. Pilots get trained for that. Once those reflexes are adopted to a specific plane, and its philosophy, it takes years to retrain them for a different one. Ukrainian pilots in F-16s anytime soon is wishful thinking.
But maybe Poland, in its futile bid to be Ukraine's savior, can convince its own pilots to suicide themselves in an environment that is saturated with Su-57s fighter jets and S-400 air defenses. Or it can send its own army to the front. The U.S. would surely welcome another country's commitment to suicide for the greater good of its dollar hegemony.
But I don't think that it will come to that.
The U.S. needs an exit strategy from the war. To recognize that the only alternative is total war and nuclear annihilation, as the Economist, WaPo and NYT opinions imply, is the first step to developing one.