Posted on 04/06/2024 2:17:04 PM PDT by Vlad0
Far from this being a frozen conflict, a nightmare scenario is edging into view because the West is failing to send arms.
Manual Excerpts
Contrary to the predominant view that this is a perpetual “frozen conflict”, with neither side able to win a decisive advantage, the front line is bitterly contested and there is a real risk of Ukrainian forces being pushed back. Nato leaders must hope their gathering in Washington in July for a summit celebrating the 75th anniversary of the alliance is not consumed by such a crisis.
Only a year ago, it was all very different. The hope then was of a Ukrainian spring offensive that would reclaim territory. That didn’t work and, as the American magazine Foreign Affairs put it this week, “Ukraine is bleeding. Without new US military assistance, Ukrainian ground forces may not be able to hold the line against a relentless Russian military.”
The governments who support Ukraine most strongly are clearly worried and considering even the worst scenarios. The US Treasury secretary, Janet Yellen, has issued several warnings that Ukraine is running out of money, while urging Congress to pass the aid bill that is stuck amid legislative infighting. The US risked being responsible for Ukraine’s defeat, she said.
A Russian advance would obviously be disastrous for the Ukrainians. It would also confront the West with all manner of tough challenges. Would the allies send troops to defend Kyiv?
President Macron has clearly sensed the danger and is trying to steer the West towards a more muscular approach by raising the possibility of ground troops. Other countries, such as Germany, strongly object. When will the message be finally understood that peace for European populations is guaranteed only by strength? When Ukraine falls and Putin moves on to menacing the Baltics, Poland, Finland, Sweden or Norway?
No greater a proprietor of conventional wisdom the the Times U.K. is now talking openly about the fall of Kiev.
It's on the table, and this is only one of several MSM sources that have now, finally, abandoned the "happy talk" narratives that have polluted the information available about the conflict.
Some progress in admitting the obvious has been made, but most Ukraine fan-bois have a long way to go still.
For those hitting the Times U.K. paywall the full article is also available in archive:
I don’t see it happening it will be propped up
The war will go on as long as there is money to be laundered.
Our own border has collapsed. Fix it.
Are egg prices still high in Russia as reported by the western media and zeepers?
If so Ukraine is winning
Do you mean “Keeve?”
It’s all over but the crying.
There was never a chance that Russia would lose this war with a country right on its border. Ukraine was destroyed for nothing (other than advancing US interests by driving a wedge between Europe and Russia).
The Dnipro River protects Ukraine in the South. But Kyiv is vulnerable if the Russians break through defensive fortifications in the east.
The EU, their Davos masters and the US deep state are prepared to literally fight to the last Ukrainian. Average Ukrainians have no say, or agency in this situation.
There’s still a lot of Ukrainians left for them to muster. Its far too early to talk about “collapse.”
Sorry. DILLIGAS still.
That’s what scares me. All of those former Soviet Block countries would love for the US to slap Russia for them. Putting them in NATO is just insane. I don’t see the logic in continuing to antagonize Russia when China is the real economic threat. I mean even we have limited military resources, does potato head Biden want to fight both of then at once? They thought they could take down Russia with this war and failed but don’t want to admit it.
Russia claims it only wants Crimea, Donetsk, and Luhansk.
Not sure anyone believes that but it would be a logical basis for a peace deal.
Gee Whiz, the Fall of Eastern Europe's Epstein Island Laundromat.
So Sad.
Russia attempts to take over the city of Kiev will mean a bloody guerilla war in the streets. It would be another Stalingrad but they would be the Germans.
That’s what Russian officials were saying over two years ago. It’s logical they don’t want to waste resources controlling the non-Russian, western oblasts.
The author is saying the Ukraine will lose without foreign supplies, just as Russia would have been defeated by Germany without US and British supplies and Allied attacks on Germany, including air raids that razed big chunks of German cities. For instance, the US sent 14,000 airplanes and 13,000 tanks to Russia, including ~5,000 of the Airacobra, a fighter first made in 1941.
“I want to tell you what, from the Russian point of view, the president and the United States have done for victory in this war,” Stalin said. “The most important things in this war are the machines.... The United States is a country of machines. Without the machines we received through Lend-Lease, we would have lost the war.”
Nikita Khrushchev offered the same opinion.
“If the United States had not helped us, we would not have won the war,” he wrote in his memoirs. “One-on-one against Hitler’s Germany, we would not have withstood its onslaught and would have lost the war. No one talks about this officially, and Stalin never, I think, left any written traces of his opinion, but I can say that he expressed this view several times in conversations with me.”
, the United States provided the Soviet Union with more than 400,000 jeeps and trucks, 14,000 aircraft, 8,000 tractors and construction vehicles, and 13,000 battle tanks.
However, the real significance of Lend-Lease for the Soviet war effort was that it covered the “sensitive points” of Soviet production — gasoline, explosives, aluminum, nonferrous metals, radio communications, and so on, says historian Boris Sokolov.
“In a hypothetical battle one-on-one between the U.S.S.R and Germany, without the help of Lend-Lease and without the diversion of significant forces of the Luftwaffe and the German Navy and the diversion of more than one-quarter of its land forces in the fight against Britain and the United States, Stalin could hardly have beaten Hitler,” Sokolov wrote in an essay for RFE/RL’s Russian Service.]
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