Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, in his remarks to the 74th meeting of the International Peace Coalition yesterday, declared in no uncertain terms that Russia is winning NATO’s proxy war in Ukraine. That reality is seeping through the deepest pores of Global NATO, though like Hitler in the bunker, it refuses to draw the obvious conclusions.
“American military and intelligence officials have concluded that the war in Ukraine is no longer a stalemate as Russia makes steady gains, and the sense of pessimism in Kyiv and Washington is deepening,” the New York Times reported yesterday. “Ukraine is losing territory in the east, and its forces inside Russia have been partially pushed back,” it reports further. “The Ukrainian military is struggling to recruit soldiers and equip new units. The number of its soldiers killed in action, about 57,000, is half of Russia’s losses but still significant for the much smaller country.” Yet, it still goes through twists and turns to portray Russia as losing the war despite the recent gains Russian forces have made on the Donbass front.
Looming over the whole thing is the U.S. election: the great fear, as is now being expressed regularly in Western press reports, is that Donald Trump may win on Nov. 5 and put the kibosh on U.S. support for the Kyiv regime and bring the war to an end, as he has promised to do (whether he can do what he’s promised to do is another question.—ed.). “The election, and its uncertain outcome, is weighing heavily on Ukrainians,” the Times reports. “After a meeting with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv last week, American officials said the Ukrainian leader looked worn and stressed, anxious about his troops’ battlefield setbacks as well as the U.S. elections.”
The pessimism extends to the imperialists in Washington. “‘Everyone is feeling bad across the board,’ said Frederick W. Kagan, a scholar with the American Enterprise Institute who has advised the U.S. military (Kagan was one of the neo-con architects of the U.S. war in Iraq and is the brother of fellow neocon Robert Kagan—ed.). ‘It has been a very long, hard year and the Russians are still grinding forward.’” Nonetheless, Kagan is trying to hold on to any sliver of hope he can find. “But Russia, Dr. Kagan said, is trying to suggest its victory is as inevitable as it was in World War II. ‘The Russians would like you to believe this is 1944 on the eastern front,’ he said. ‘It isn’t.’”
