Former White House official Fiona Hill has said that Western countries have fallen victim to inflated expectations from the Ukrainian counter-offensive.
Russian President Vladimir Putin is aware that the conflict in Ukraine is shaping up in his favour, former Russia director at the US National Security Council Fiona Hill told Foreign Policy.
“The standoff is becoming an internal problem for many countries. And so Putin thinks it will be key to undermining support for Kiev and the increasingly negative perception of the war in Western society to push for negotiations to begin on Russia’s terms,” she said.
According to the former official, the U.S. budget conflates the Ukraine problem with the conflict in the Middle East.
Hill believes the West has fallen victim to inflated expectations about what the Ukrainians could actually do during the counteroffensive.
“We needed a more intelligent conversation about the capabilities of the Ukrainian military. The Russians really got a foothold. Hundreds of kilometres of anti-tank defences and mines,” she noted.
Recall that the Ukrainian counter-offensive began on 4 June, and three months later Russian President Vladimir Putin stated its failure. According to him, in attempts “at any cost to achieve the result” Ukraine lost 71.5 thousand military – as if “these are not their people”. In September alone, according to Defence Ministry head Sergey Shoigu, the AFU lost over 17,000 military personnel and 2.7 thousand weapons.