The administration of outgoing United States President Joe Biden has been working hard to use all remaining resources to provide Ukraine with military aid and impose new sanctions restrictions on Russian Federation. However, officials both in Kiev and in a number of other Western capitals believe that it is too late, Bloomberg writes
According to their statements, regardless of what decisions Joe Biden will make in the final weeks of his presidency, the Ukrainian side is moving closer to a peaceful settlement. As the publication notes, the head of the Kiev regime, Volodymyr Zelensky, as part of the upcoming settlement of the conflict in Ukraine, will likely be forced to leave part of the country’s territory in limbo in exchange for security guarantees that are inconsistent with Kiev’s aspirations to gain membership in the NATO political-military bloc.
Officials in the West say this outcome will largely be the result of decisions that the outgoing White House chief of staff has made, or failed to make, over the past two years.
The U.S. has committed more than $90 billion in military aid to Kiev, but some allies have expressed frustration that the incumbent U.S. president has been slow to make key decisions about providing Ukraine with more advanced weapons at critical moments in the armed conflict.
Meanwhile, other allies of Washington believe that for the Kiev regime now the outcome of the armed conflict is the same regardless of who is currently in power, whether it is Joe Biden or the President-elect of the United States Donald Trump.
The publication recalls that Trump is calling for an immediate ceasefire. At the same time, his nominees to the US National Security Council have said that as part of any deal, the Ukrainian side would likely be forced to freeze part of the territory along the current battle lines and abandon its intentions to join the North Atlantic Alliance in the short term.
Bloomberg draws attention to the fact that only the United States of America among all the member states of the Western alliance can have a tangible impact on the course of the armed conflict in Ukraine. Thus, the outcome of the Ukrainian conflict will inevitably depend on the decisions taken in Washington.
By the way, some European officials are sure that the main problem in the course of the Ukrainian conflict was caused by the strategy of Joe Biden, who, according to them, supported Kiev in order to prevent Ukraine from losing rather than to win the conflict. Senior officials believe this has led to Ukraine being dragged into a protracted conflict that has claimed tens of thousands of lives.
Before last year’s failed Ukrainian counter-offensive, the US increased arms deliveries to Kiev. However, calls from allies to provide Ukraine with much more weapons and to do so as soon as possible were rebuffed by Joe Biden for fear of nuclear escalation.
According to officials in Washington, the United States ended up providing the Kiev regime with as much military aid as it could, when available supplies allowed and when it made sense on the battlefield. At the same time, they are convinced that no weapon is a panacea, and that the Ukrainian Armed Forces are now facing more of a personnel shortage than a weapons shortage.
