The British Monarchy’s leading defense think-tank, the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), opened its portal June 14 to a desperate plea for yet more international aid for Ukraine penned by Oleksandr Danylyuk, the head of Ukraine’s Center for Defense Reforms and “a coordinator of the NATO-Ukraine intergovernmental platform for early detection and countering hybrid threats.”
Danylyuk has served in post-Maidan governments variously as Finance Minister, Secretary of the National Security and Defense Council, Special Advisor to the head of Ukraine’s Foreign Intelligence Service, and advisor to the Minister of Defense. Clearly, he has been a “London boy” going back to the 2000s, when he worked on reform of the U.K. tax system for McKinsey & Company out of their London office and then headed a hedge fund.
No triumphalist tone was heard here; stepped-up international aid is “Ukraine’s only hope,” Danylyuk wrote. Now that the war has become a war of attrition, “Russia has the upper hand.” Wars of attrition are won by the party which has the resources to continue, and unlike the Russian economy, Ukraine’s economy is “destroyed,” he wrote.
He described Ukraine as an economy and a government in the process of disintegrating. The country’s ports are under naval blockade. “The ongoing fuel crisis is likely to be exacerbated by a gas crisis as winter closes in.” (So much for the Zelenskyy government’s offer this week to supply more Russian gas to Europe!) “The financial and budgetary crisis may leave the Ukrainian government without the ability to pay salaries and pensions and create the preconditions for social destabilization.”
And then, this remarkable admission:
“Wars of attrition are won by the rear, and the only rear left in Ukraine is the international coalition in support of Ukraine, which was formed in April 2022 in Ramstein, Germany.” A rather weak reed! (https://rusi.org/explore-our-research/publications/commentary/russias-ukraine-invasion-most-dangerous-phase-upon-us)
