{"id":26165,"date":"2023-11-03T05:00:35","date_gmt":"2023-11-03T09:00:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/?p=26165"},"modified":"2023-11-02T20:25:27","modified_gmt":"2023-11-03T00:25:27","slug":"the-truth-leaks-out-of-kiev","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/orionscoldfire.com\/index.php\/2023\/11\/03\/the-truth-leaks-out-of-kiev\/","title":{"rendered":"The Truth Leaks Out of Kiev"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Up until this summer the audience in the West heard from their leaders and the media that<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Ukraine was inflicting enormous casualties on Russia while suffering very light losses to their own troops.<\/li>\n<li>Russia\u2019s population was dead set against the war and only prisoners were fighting on the Russian side.<\/li>\n<li>The Russian troops and officers were incompetent and had rock bottom morale.<\/li>\n<li>That with the provision of advanced western weapons and training Ukraine would sweep away the Russians and recapture all of the Eastern provinces including Crimea.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>During the summer and into the fall word started getting out that the Ukrainian counter-offensive, bolstered by Western tanks and other armored vehicles was suffering tens of thousands of casualties and wasn\u2019t able to punch through the defensive lines that the Russians had prepared in Zaporizhzhia to protect Crimea from assault.\u00a0 Now with the onset of winter many in America and Europe are starting to question whether the tens of billions of dollars in weapons and aid have accomplished anything more than facilitating a slaughter of Ukrainians and Russians without accomplishing anything worthwhile.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, word is now leaking out of Ukraine that the leaders surrounding President Zelensky no longer share his almost religious belief that Ukraine can win the war they are engaged in.\u00a0 And the news first broke in the periodical that had declared Zelensky \u201cMan of the Year\u201d in 2022, Time.<\/p>\n<p>In <a href=\"https:\/\/time.com\/6329188\/ukraine-volodymyr-zelensky-interview\/\">an interview with Ukrainian leaders<\/a> many parts of the real story come out.<\/p>\n<p><strong>\u201cBut his (Zelensky\u2019s) convictions haven\u2019t changed. Despite the recent setbacks on the battlefield, he does not intend to give up fighting or to sue for any kind of peace. On the contrary, his belief in Ukraine\u2019s ultimate victory over Russia has hardened into a form that worries some of his advisers. It is immovable, verging on the messianic. \u201cHe deludes himself,\u201d one of his closest aides tells me in frustration. \u201cWe\u2019re out of options. We\u2019re not winning. But try telling him that.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>When I raised these claims with a senior military officer, he said that some commanders have little choice in second-guessing orders from the top. At one point in early October, he said, the political leadership in Kyiv demanded an operation to \u201cretake\u201d the city of Horlivka, a strategic outpost in eastern Ukraine that the Russians have held and fiercely defended for nearly a decade. The answer came back in the form of a question: With what? \u201cThey don\u2019t have the men or the weapons,\u201d says the officer. \u201cWhere are the weapons? Where is the artillery? Where are the new recruits?\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>\u2026<\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>In some branches of the military, the shortage of personnel has become even more dire than the deficit in arms and ammunition. One of Zelensky\u2019s close aides tells me that even if the U.S. and its allies come through with all the weapons they have pledged, \u201cwe don\u2019t have the men to use them.\u201d <\/strong><\/p>\n<p><strong>Since the start of the invasion, Ukraine has refused to release official counts of dead and wounded. But according to U.S. and European estimates, the toll has long surpassed 100,000 on each side of the war. It has eroded the ranks of Ukraine\u2019s armed forces so badly that draft offices have been forced to call up ever older personnel, raising the average age of a soldier in Ukraine to around 43 years. \u201cThey\u2019re grown men now, and they aren\u2019t that healthy to begin with,\u201d says the close aide to Zelensky. \u201cThis is Ukraine. Not Scandinavia.\u201d\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>And this is a Biden Administration cheerleader saying this.\u00a0 If you read <a href=\"https:\/\/responsiblestatecraft.org\/zelensky-war-time-magazine\/\">other sources<\/a> they\u2019re even more dire.<\/p>\n<p><strong>\u201cAlone among his team, Zelensky seems not to understand how circumstances have changed. Shuster and TIME try their best to portray him as the last stalwart of the Ukrainian cause, but the fact that his own inner circle is the source of the torrent of revelations and complaints suggests that his immovability owes not to Churchillian resolve but rather to an impervious bunker mentality.\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>What seems to be the case is the neo-cons have decided that bleeding Russia by genociding the Ukraine is a sensible policy.\u00a0 Even people who despise Vladimir Putin and desire the United States to dominate in Eastern European politics should have enough basic humanity to recoil from what\u2019s going on in Eastern Ukraine.\u00a0 It\u2019s just an update of 1914.\u00a0 Meatgrinders in Bakhmut and Avdiivka are just senseless wars of attrition that kill and maim tens of thousands of men while yielding up only bombed out moonscapes to the victor.<\/p>\n<p>Russia is bleeding but Ukraine is bleeding out.\u00a0 Hopefully House Speaker Mike Johnson will have the good sense to put an end to this nightmarish quagmire of death.\u00a0 If we stop sending them billions of dollars in \u201caid\u201d the only ones who will lose will be the oligarchs that won\u2019t be able to steal their chunk of the loot.\u00a0 The rest of the Ukrainians can go back home and pick up what\u2019s left of their lives and their future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Up until this summer the audience in the West heard from their leaders and the media that Ukraine was inflicting enormous casualties on Russia while<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[636,623,3107,3568,3942],"class_list":["post-26165","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-current-events","tag-military","tag-neo-cons","tag-russia","tag-ukraine","tag-ukraine-war"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v20.4 - 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