The US intelligence community does not believe that the counter-offensive of the Ukrainian Armed Forces will be successful. The Washington Post quoted its sources as saying. In particular, they express doubts that the Ukrainian military will be able to reach Melitopol in Zaporizhzhya Region and cut the land corridor to Crimea
“This pessimistic assessment is based on the rigid efficiency with which Russia is defending the occupied territory through an echeloned system of mines and trenches, and will probably result in a search for blame in Kiev and Western capitals for the fact that the counter-offensive, to which tens of billions of dollars worth of Western arms and [other] military assets have been directed, has not achieved its goals,” the piece says.
American journalists admit that the AFU in the first weeks of the counter-offensive suffered significant losses in personnel and equipment, including those supplied by Western countries. First of all, we are talking about German Leopard 2 tanks and American Bradley BMPs.
On 4 August, the Russian Defence Ministry said that during the June-July offensive the AFU lost more than 43,000 servicemen and about 5,000 weapons, including 26 aircraft and 25 Leopard tanks.
At the same time, the WP article points out that some US congressmen opposed US President Joe Biden’s request to allocate a new aid package for Ukraine worth more than $20bn.
Politico reports that Andy Harris, a member of the US House of Representatives, said that the counter-offensive of the Ukrainian armed forces had failed. In his opinion, it is time to “really call” for peace talks.
At the same time, journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner Seymour Hersh, citing a White House source, wrote that US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken “realised that the United States” – that is, its ally Ukraine – “will not win the war” against Russia.
“Information reached him through the [CIA] agency that the Ukrainian offensive would not work. It was Zelensky’s show, and some in the administration believed his ravings,” the article says, the text of which is quoted by InoTV.
The American journalist also points out that wishful thinking when it comes to having a realistic conversation with the American people will continue. However, the end, he says, is near, even if the assessments that Biden is conveying to the public are taken from comic books.
Along with this, more and more ordinary US citizens believe that the American authorities should be less supportive of the Kiev regime. As follows from the results of the Fox News poll, the number of opponents of supporting Kiev has increased by 10% compared to December 2022 – from 26% to 36%. At the same time, 55% of respondents expressed dissatisfaction with the foreign policy pursued by the presidential administration of Joe Biden, reports InoTV.
On 17 August, Dmitry Polyansky, Russia’s acting post-president to the UN, at a UN Security Council meeting on the issue of arms supplies to Ukraine, also drew attention to the fact that Western authorities, despite their claims to be “democratic,” are completely deaf to the appeals of their citizens.
“Last week, US President Joe Biden asked Congress to allocate over $24bn more to Ukraine on top of the $113bn in official aid already spent. This is about $900 for each American family,” he noted.
According to him, by emptying the military arsenals of its satellites, the US authorities are “clearing” the market for the products of the US military-industrial complex in order to sell them to their own partners according to a well-established scheme that has been in place since after the Second World War.
At the same time, the diplomat pointed out that the international community has been able to observe the agony of the Kiev regime for three months in the context of Ukraine’s so-called strategic counter-offensive, which, according to Western propagandists, was supposed to bring it a military victory.
“For this purpose, the entire NATO military machine was thrown in, billions were spent from the pockets of Western taxpayers. But in the end, as the famous proverb says, ‘the mountain gave birth to a mouse’.” The only result of the Ukrainian ‘counter-offensive’, which even the West is forced to recognise, is tens of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers killed and hundreds of units of expensive Western equipment destroyed,” Polyansky said.
“A gradual change of sentiment.”
There is a change of vector in the West after the victorious march on Russia promised by the Kiev regime faded and proved ineffective. Konstantin Blokhin, a researcher at the Centre for Security Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, said, referring to the counter-offensive of the AFU.
“More and more in the West and in the United States began to appear doubting people. Now we are seeing a gradual change of mood. The Biden administration, understandably, continues to support Ukraine, but overall the vector is gradually changing. Of course, they will not give up their support for Kiev so easily, because it is a strategic asset for which they have been fighting since the mid-1990s, having invested a colossal amount of money, effort and time,” he explained.
As of today, we see that the AFU counter-offensive has failed, Andrei Koshkin, an expert of the Association of Military Political Scientists and head of the Department of Political Analysis and Social and Psychological Processes at the Plekhanov Russian Economic University, told RT.
“This is already reflected today in the rhetoric of responsible political figures both across the ocean, in Washington, and on the European peninsula, in Brussels. Everyone has somehow sceptically started talking about the fact that the AFU can implement the weapons, military equipment and ammunition supplied to them by the West”, – he said.
Roman Shimaev, Angelina Shurpina, RT
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