Top US official admits failure in Ukraine
While Antony Blinken insists that “Russia is militarily, economically and diplomatically weaker," a top State Dept. official acknowledges that "Russia has almost completely reconstituted militarily."
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When Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin declared, two years ago this month, that the US goal in Ukraine was to see Russia “weakened,” President Biden and other top officials “cringed,” the New York Times later reported. Biden was so agitated that he not only called Austin “to remonstrate him for the comment,” but also “directed his staff to leak the fact that he had done so.”
Biden, seeking tens of billions of dollars and global support for a proxy war with Russia under the guise of defending democracy, was clearly upset that his defense chief had “acknowledged” what “was indeed the long-term strategy,” as White House officials told the Times. But by July 2022, when Congress had approved more than $54 billion for Biden’s war along with considerable sums from NATO allies, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan was free to confirm it. Speaking to a crowd of foreign policy elites at the Aspen Security Conference, Sullivan explained that the United States’ “strategic objective” was not to protect Ukraine and bring the war to a speedy end, but to ensure “a strategic failure for Putin,” and that “Russia pay a longer-term price in terms of the elements of its national power.”
For Ukrainians, the US strategy of using their country to “weaken” Russia’s “national power” and, in furtherance of that objective, sabotaging all diplomatic opportunities to end the Russian invasion, has cost hundreds of thousands of lives and about 20% of their territory. Yet even through the lens of a “strategic objective” that views Ukraine as a tool for bleeding Russia, the “strategic failure” in the Ukraine proxy war currently belongs to Washington.
Speaking to a DC think tank, Deputy Secretary of State Kurt Campbell acknowledged that far from suffering the “longer-term price” that Biden sought to inflict, Russia has been resilient. “We have assessed over the course of the last couple of months that Russia has almost completely reconstituted militarily,” Campbell said. Moreover, Moscow’s “newfound capabilities pose a longer-term challenge to stability in Europe and threatens NATO allies.”
For Campbell’s superior, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, the admission was ill-timed. Just one day earlier, Blinken insisted that he is “convinced” that his administration has achieved “a defeat, a strategic debacle for Russia in Ukraine,” in which “Russia is militarily, economically and diplomatically weaker.” Just as Austin once blurted out the White House’s real goal in Ukraine, Campbell had now acknowledged its real result.
The US strategic failure extends beyond the battlefield. From the start of Russia’s invasion, the White House has routinely boasted about having “the ruble... reduced to rubble” (Joe Biden, March 2022), causing “long-term damage done to the Russian economy and to generations of Russians,” (William Burns, September 2022), and leaving Russia “more isolated on the world stage than ever.” (Antony Blinken, June 2023.) Yet this year, Russia’s economic growth is expected to be more than double both the IMF’s previous forecast and the rate for Europe overall. Perhaps the biggest indicator is Russia’s oil exports, which are now more profitable for Moscow than before the invasion.
“In the here and now, the sanctions have disappointed,” Edward Fishman, a former State Department official who oversaw US sanctions against Russia, now admits. “Unfortunately, Russia has now built a kind of alternative supply chain.”
As for Russia’s Blinken-declared global isolation, it is Washington that in fact finds itself virtually alone in its defense of Israel’s mass murder campaign in Gaza. Meanwhile, Marine Corps Gen. Michael Langley, the head of the US military’s Africa Command, recently warned that African countries “are at the tipping point of actually being captured by the Russian Federation,” which is spreading “access and influence across the whole Maghreb.” Blaming the traditional bogeyman of Russian “disinformation” – a euphemism for challenging US propaganda – Langley additionally complained that “the Russian Federation’s narrative drowned out the US government’s in the past years.”
Meanwhile, Ukraine is in a state of peril. Unless Congress approves Biden’s $61 billion war funding request, Ukrainian troops will be forced to “go back, retreat, step by step, in small steps,” President Volodymyr Zelensky recently warned. Zelensky even raised the fear that Russia “could go to the big cities.” To address manpower shortages, Zelensky has reluctantly enacted a long-delayed measure that lowers the conscription age from 27 to 25. He also established an electronic database that tracks all males above the age of 17. Yet Ukraine still continues to face such a shortage that a previous request for up to 500,000 new soldiers has been “significantly reduced,” according to Ukraine’s top military commander, Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky.
Speaking to Politico, high-ranking Ukrainian military officers who served under Syrsky’s predecessor, the recently ousted General Valery Zaluzhny, report that “the military picture is grim.” If Russia launches an expected counteroffensive this year, “there’s a great risk of the front lines collapsing.” Adds one of the Ukrainian sources: “There’s nothing that can help Ukraine now because there are no serious technologies able to compensate Ukraine for the large mass of troops Russia is likely to hurl at us.”
Ivo Daalder, a US ambassador to NATO, appears to agree. “The last two months have not been good for Ukraine, and there’s nothing in the offing that it’s going to get any better,” Daalder recently warned.
Yet even as top-ranking Ukrainian military officials warn that “nothing can help Ukraine,” their Western sponsors nonetheless insist that Ukraine has no choice but to keep fighting.
“If NATO allies deliver what we should, then we are absolutely confident that the Ukrainians will be able to make new gains,” NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg declared last week. Stoltenberg’s faith in Ukrainian “gains” has not been shaken by Ukraine’s own high-level doubts, nor the failure of his prior predictions. One year ago this month, as Ukraine prepared to launch what would become a disastrous counteroffensive, Stoltenberg assured the public: “I’m confident that when Ukraine decides to launch new operations to liberate more land, Ukraine will be successful.”
Given the failure of last year’s effort, a Western ambassador now acknowledges to the Washington Post that “Ukraine does not have the power to make another offensive.” Yet rather than attempt diplomacy with Russia now, Ukraine and NATO should instead look to 2025 as “another year of war, not peace talks,” the ambassador advised. This means yet another massive injection of NATO weaponry, using this year “to provide Ukraine with everything that’s necessary to enter into offensive mode and make substantial gains in 2025.” A second Western diplomat in Kyiv adds that Ukraine will need to draft more soldiers: “Nobody wants to really bear the responsibility at this point,” the diplomat told the Post. “But it will have to be done. I mean, you cannot go on like this.”
While correct, the Western diplomat’s complaints are misdirected. Rather than chiding Kyiv for failing to send more young people off to die, perhaps Western proxy warriors could take responsibility for using Ukrainians as part of a “strategic objective” that has decimated their country in a failed quest to weaken Russia.