By David Sole
Printed to coincide with the 75th NATO Summit in Washington, D.C. the New York Times ran a piece of pure propaganda designed to calm growing fears in the West that Ukraine may soon lose the war with Russia..
The Times headline on July 9 was “U.S. Officials Say Russia Is Unlikely to Take Much More Ukrainian Territory.” The piece was full of opinions that have repeatedly been proven baseless. The authors claim that the Russian Federation is having difficulty due to “its poorly trained forces struggl[ing] to break through Ukrainian defenses that are now reinforced with Western munitions.”
However almost all sources, pro-Ukrainian and pro-Russian, admit that it is the Ukrainian military that is very short of recruits and is throwing new recruits without sufficient training or weapons against the advancing Russian lines.
There is no denying the steady Russian gains won on the battlefield in the last 15 months. First Ukraine lost Bakhmut in fighting that cost them heavy losses in May 2023. The next month saw the much touted Ukrainian “Spring counteroffensive.” Ukraine, armed with huge supplies of heavy Western weapons, sent wave after wave of its forces against heavily fortified Russian defenses. This counteroffensive went on into the Summer and then ended in the Fall. The Ukrainian losses were staggering in both casualties and weaponry.
Later the battle for the heavily defended Ukrainian fortress city of Avdeyevka ended with Ukraine’s retreat on February 17, 2024. Since that time Russian forces have been advancing across hundreds of miles of front lines, taking one town after another. Ukraine has been unable to build up serious defense lines under the relentless pressure of Russian artillery, air power and ground forces.
Most recently Russia opened a new front in Kharkov province. Ukraine has had to shift frontline forces from other battlefronts to try to hold back the Russian advances in that northern theater.
The Times article reluctantly admits that Ukraine is really losing with little chance of regaining territory. It says “the prospects of Kyiv retaking more land from the invading army are also waning.” And “there are real concerns about Ukraine’s ability to keep its infrastructure, including its electrical grid, functioning.” “Prodded by American advisers, Ukraine is focused on building up its defenses and striking deep behind Russian lines.” But there is no sign that the grinding down of Ukrainian forces by Russia’s systematic and successful war of attrition is reaching any sort of limit.
The authorization granted by the Biden administration to use U.S. supplied long range missiles may make headlines, but those strikes are militarily meaningless in the ground war where Russia has overwhelming air superiority as well as military personnel.
Ukraine, unable to hide the truth, has taken to attacking freedom of press inside its borders. “Journalists and groups monitoring press freedoms are raising alarms over what they say are increasing restrictions and pressures on the media in Ukraine …that go well beyond the country’s wartime needs.”
The U.S. and NATO have made repeated proclamations about defending Ukraine to the last Ukrainian in this proxy war. But short of putting Western troops in large numbers along with US/NATO air power into the conflict, it appears that Ukraine cannot indefinitely continue to sustain the losses it is suffering in combat. Even tens of billions of dollars’ worth of heavy armor promised by NATO are not likely to make any difference at this point.
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