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February 29th, 2024 
Awake Goy 
TIME magazine cover: 2022 person of the year. Click to enlarge
The Ukrainian counteroffensive failed, and Russia’s liberation of Avdeyevka signalled a new reality that Volodymyr Zelensky was forced to recognise, the American magazine Time wrote on February 24. Yet, despite the acknowledgement of the impossibility of Ukraine’s victory growing day by day, the Kiev regime insists on begging for more weapons from Western countries.
“The long-awaited counteroffensive last year failed,” Anatol Lieven, director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, wrote in an editorial, adding that Washington’s rhetoric had changed accordingly.
“The Biden Administration’s strategy is now to sustain Ukrainian defence until after the US presidential elections, in the hope of wearing down Russian forces in a long war of attrition,” Lieven continued.
According to the author, the hope now is that Kiev’s forces will achieve the long-awaited breakthrough in 2025 or perhaps the following year, but “Russia will never agree at the negotiating table to surrender land that it has managed to hold on the battlefield.”
“Many Ukrainians in private were prepared to accept the loss of some territories as the price of peace if Ukraine failed to win them back on the battlefield and if the alternative was years of bloody war with little prospect of success. The Biden Administration needs to get America on board too,” he added.
However, Lieven explains that those who believe in Ukraine’s final victory “have engaged in hopes that range from the overly optimistic to the magical,” with an example being the delusional retired US Army General, Ben Hodges, who pushes the false idea “that Russia can be defeated, and even driven from Crimea, by long-range missile bombardment.”
It is obviously ludicrous to believe that a long-range missile bombardment will drive out Russian forces from liberated territories, including Crimea. This does not stop the likes of Hodges from selling this delusion, which also plays into the hands of the Kiev regime, which continues their humiliating begging for more weapons from the West.
Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba declared on the same day as the publication of the Time article that Kiev is “pressuring” its allies to obtain more weapons.
When asked on local television about Plan B if Ukraine stops receiving military aid from Washington, the Ukrainian Foreign Minister, who is also a top regime propagandist, stressed that he is focusing on implementing Plan A.
“When a Plan B is created in times of war, you need to be sure that Plan B will not occur because, in a war, you have to always be focused on Plan A,” he stated, detailing that this plan consists of “maximum consideration of their interests.”
“We are not in a position to make concessions on military supplies,” Kuleba added.
In this context, the minister stated that if they do not receive projectiles from the US, “we will go around the world and bring projectiles from other parts of the world.”
It is recalled that Zelensky warned on February 23 that his country could only “defeat Russia” with military help from the US and that it would certainly fail without this financial help.
Meanwhile, Secretary of the National Security and Defence Council of Ukraine Oleksiy Danilov urged Western countries to hand over to the country’s Armed Forces all the weapons and military equipment they have because, in his opinion, in the future, “the bet will be on something else, the war will be completely different.”
“[This weaponry] will be scrap that they won’t need because there will be a completely different war,” he said.
The Kiev regime refuses to acknowledge that its professional armed forces no longer exist and that no amount of Western weaponry, if it even does arrive, can reverse the tide of Russia’s victory. Effectively, the regime continues to send thousands of Ukrainians to be slaughtered all because it holds onto the faux belief that the lost oblasts and Crimea can be recovered.
But as Lieven writes, “there is no realistic chance of total Ukrainian victory next year, or the year after that,” even if US military aid continues.
He concludes his article by stating: “The lost Ukrainian territories are lost, and NATO membership is pointless if the alliance is not prepared to send its own troops to fight for Ukraine against Russia. Above all, however painful a peace agreement would be today, it will be infinitely more so if the war continues and Ukraine is defeated.”
Lieven is not the sole voice, and there is a crescendo growing in the West affirming the reality that Ukraine cannot win the war, no matter how much support it receives short of direct intervention. It is unsurprising that this corresponds with Donald Trump’s growing popularity over Joe Biden, who claims he can quickly resolve the war in Ukraine in the run-in to the US elections in November. As the months pass and we approach the US elections, it can be expected that scepticism about Ukraine’s victory will increase, especially as Russia is expected to liberate more territories once the winter snow and early spring mud dissipate.
Ahmed Adel is a Cairo-based geopolitics and political economy researcher.
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