Seymour Hersh, in an article posted on Substack yesterday, reports that “significant elements in the American intelligence community” believe that the Ukrainian army is so demoralized by its failure to make real progress against Russia’s layered defenses that large elements of it have given up. “The reality is that Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s battered army no longer has any chance of a victory,” Hersh writes. “The war continues, I have been told by an official with access to current intelligence, because Zelenskyy insists that it must. There is no discussion in his headquarters or in the Biden White House of a ceasefire and no interest in talks that could lead to an end to the slaughter. ‘It’s all lies,’ the official said, speaking of the Ukrainian claims of incremental progress in the offensive that has suffered staggering losses, while gaining ground in a few scattered areas that the Ukrainian military measures in meters per week.”
The official, still not otherwise able to break with the U.S./NATO narrative about Putin’s “stupid decision” to start the war, nonetheless says that the Biden administration’s decision to wage a proxy war in response was also stupid. “And so now we have to paint him [Putin] black, with the help of the media, in order to justify our mistake,” he said. Take note that the unnamed official here cited a joint black propaganda campaign vs. Putin run by the CIA and British intelligence.
The official remarks that the early “successes” of the Ukrainian army in the offensive were actually traps set up by the Russians, by which they were able to destroy the Ukrainian forces. “After weeks of high casualties and little progress, along with horrific losses to tanks and armored vehicles, he said, major elements of the Ukrainian army, without declaring so, virtually canceled the offensive,” Hersh writes.
