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The Looming Ukraine Debacle
There is indeed a serious risk that, rather than the West teaching Russia a lesson and putting Putin in his place, the opposite may occur.
April 7, 2024 | by Matthew Blackburn
With Ukraine's military situation deteriorating, NATO foreign ministers have gathered in Brussels to develop a long-term plan to deliver the necessary supplies to Kyiv. As NATO secretary-general Jens Stoltenberg put it, "Ukrainians are not running out of courage, they are running out of ammunition." Distracted by other matters, America increasingly looks to Europe to coordinate the defense of Ukraine. But, other than scrambling for shells and money or unveiling a modest EU defense industry strategy, European leaders do not appear to have the ideas or the means to intervene in a decisive or timely fashion.
French president Emmanuel Macron's suggestion that NATO troops may enter Ukraine was supported by Poland and Czechia but caused some consternation in France itself. More importantly, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States still rule out boots on the ground. Instead of a new approach, the old pattern continues: NATO mulls over how to help Ukraine without provoking open war with Russia and fails, in the end, to deliver the kind of decisive assistance needed to turn the course of the war.
Another established pattern is the repetition of moralistic binary language. The West "cannot let Russia win." The "rules-based order" could unravel. Then there is the new domino theory: if Ukraine falls, Russian hordes will flood further west. The personalization of the conflict onto one evil man, Vladimir Putin, continues with the death of Alexei Navalny. It is a Manichean struggle of good and evil, democracy and authoritarianism, civilization and darkness. There can be "no peace until the tyrant falls." The Western alliance must not waver in its commitment to Ukraine.
What is lacking throughout the discourse is realism. What is the real balance of power between the warring nations, and what can be concluded from two years of Russia-NATO hard power competition? Unsurprisingly, Western leaders are reluctant to admit that the dire situation facing Ukraine is related to their own fundamental miscalculations about Russia. Russia's multiple blunders in this war are well-known but what of those made by the Western alliance?
About two years ago, it became clear that Russia's Plan A in Ukraine failed. Putin's initial approach was a sudden movement of troops into Ukraine that, in the best case, could topple Ukraine's government or, at least, coerce Kyiv into signing a new and less favorable version of the Minsk II agreement. Russia's Plan A was resisted by the Zelenskyy government, whose military forces held firm on the outskirts of Kyiv in March 2022. After the collapse of the Istanbul peace negotiations between Kyiv and Moscow in April, Russia shifted to Plan B: waging a grinding war of attrition to exhaust Kyiv's will and capacity to resist while testing the Western alliance's collective ability to sustain Ukraine.
Russia's Plan B had mixed results in 2022. While Russia won important, if costly, victories in Mariupol and Severodonetsk, Ukraine exploited Russia's lack of manpower to win back territory in the Kharkiv and Kherson regions. However, following a partial military and economic mobilization, Russia turned the corner, defeating Ukraine's offensive in 2023 and taking the upper hand in 2024.
Please go to The National Interest to continue reading.
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In some financial circles with any remaining integrity this is called theft:
When NATO soldiers find themselves fighting Wagner PMCs and Chechens in Ukraine they will find out immediately what real war is all about:
A meme with a sting:
Translation: "Zakharova refuted information that her boss called Western
journalists imbeciles. Nobody called these dumbfucks imbeciles, clarified Zakharova."
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