The following update on the Ukraine War comes from a piece at AntiWar.com:
As Ukraine’s counteroffensive begins to unravel, it is not clear that the hundreds of thousands of deaths already suffered have purchased any of its goals.
Ukraine is not in NATO, and it has not received any firm assurance that it will ever be. All that has happened is that the fifteen year old promise that Ukraine will some day become a member of NATO has been updated to a promise that Ukraine will “join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met.” Recognizing the ruse, Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has bitterly complained that “It’s unprecedented and absurd when time frame is not set neither for the invitation nor for Ukraine’s membership. While at the same time vague wording about ‘conditions’ is added even for inviting Ukraine.”
Ukraine is not whole. It has not pushed Russia off its land or reacquired any significant amount of contested territory. Donbass and Crimea remain firmly in Russia’s control. No Ukrainian advance severed Crimea from the mainland. Indeed, as the New York Times pointed out at the end of September, during this counteroffensive Ukraine actually lost more territory than it gained.
As a result, Ukraine is not in any better position to negotiate, as US president Biden promised it would be a year and a half ago. Instead, it is in a far worse bargaining position now than it was during the first weeks of the war, when it initialed a tentative ceasefire agreement with Russia promising to forgo NATO membership in exchange for a Russian withdrawal to its prewar position. At that point, Ukraine could have ended the conflict with relatively few casualties, and its miliary and infrastructure still intact, but the US blocked peace efforts and urged Ukrainian leaders to fight on in pursuit of US goals, according to several sources who were present at the talks, or in a position to know.
And yet, the US has no more achieved any of its goals than has Ukraine. It has not seen Russia’s militarily weakened, a goal Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin identified. Indeed, several Western analysts have suggested that Russia is now stronger militarily than it was in April 2022.
Nor has Russia been “devastated by sanctions” as Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen promised; its economy has, instead, grown. General Valery Zaluzhny, the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, even stated recently that “the capabilities of [Russia’s] military industry are increasing, despite the introduction by the world’s leading countries of unprecedented sanctions against the aggressor state.” There has been no uprising in Russia against the war; not even a perceptible dent in Putin’s domestic popularity. And, to add insult to injury, Russia is far from isolated diplomatically, as shown by the lackluster international response to calls to boycott Russia, and the growing interest in multipolar international organizations favored by Russia like BRICS.
All that has been achieved by prolonging this war is the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives, the loss of tens of thousands of limbs, the devastation of infrastructure and of the environment, and the shattering of global peace and stability.
(See more at link above.)
The situation is Ukraine is dire and has been since the US got involved. Who can say that the lives lost were worth it?
After Afghanistan, former Rep. and current Dean of the School of Government at Regent University, Michele Bachmann shared with me that the Biden Administration is the administration of death. Biden’s actions in Ukraine prove it.