Two completely contrasting mainstream media reports from recent days highlight that the American national security establishment is still trying to come to grips with what’s happening.
First, state-funded Voice of America (VOA) on Feb. 16 cited a senior US defense official to claim that Russia is suffering “staggering losses despite Ukraine’s supply shortages” – as the headline reads.
But to read the fine print of the article is to learn the only recent “successes” of the Ukrainian military is seen in the latest spate of limited naval actions in the Black Sea. Ukraine is said to be protecting its coastline utilizing sea drones, which reportedly sunk a Russian landing ship.
But these Black Sea operations, as well as cross-border shelling of places like Belgorod or sending the occasional drone against Crimea, are doing nothing strategically on the ground.
Next, two days after the misleading, falsely “optimistic” VOA report, The New York Times gave its readers more of a dire dose of reality, by admitting that with Saturday’s Russian capture of Avdiivka, the tide of the war has drastically shifted and at this point it can’t be denied.
Above & Below: A couple of MSM headlines, two days apart…
Wrote the NY Times, “the front line has shifted substantially, setting the stage for the war’s next grueling chapter as Ukrainian forces retrench and Russian troops reform for future assaults.”
More crucially, the report admits there’s no fallback line for the exhausted and retreating Ukrainian army in the area of Avdiivka:
In the retreat from Avdiivka, these problems are exacerbated by the flat and unforgiving terrain outside the city. Without dominant hills, larger rivers or extensive fortifications of the kind it built around Avdiivka over the better part of a decade, Ukraine will probably have to cede more ground to hold back Russian units.
“They don’t have a well-established secondary line to pull back to,” said Michael Kofman, a Russia expert at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, said in a telephone interview. “Much depends on whether Russian forces can keep pushing or if they run out of momentum.”
As Western politicians and pundits continue to desperately struggle putting a positive spin on the proxy war in Ukraine in hopes of attracting more urgent defense funding and weapons for Kiev, their arguments will increasingly shift in acknowledgement of the new battlefield reality. In short, they will have no choice.
Masks fall, a new (uglier) narrative emerges
Already, examples of this new creative spin abound only in the last several days. A case in point…
The cynical turn in narrative has now become but the US isn’t sacrificing its own soldiers while reaping the ‘benefits’…
Without the U.S. doing any of the fighting in Ukraine, its economy is benefiting from the war. Defense output has surged in last 2 years. Biden Admin estimates 64% of $61 billion Ukraine aid in supplemental flows back to US defense base. By Tom Fairless https://t.co/icirFt13v2pic.twitter.com/2BBKsf0jcC— Greg Ip (@greg_ip) February 18, 2024
While it has never been a secret that the anti-Russia hawks in Washington are willing to fight Putin “down to the last Ukrainian” …the pundit class has never been this out in the open in bluntly saying it.
But now the proverbial mask has completely fallen, as we approach the grim two-year anniversary of the war’s start.
For the final, and most brazen example, below is none other than the editor in chief of The Economist gleefully explaining why things are going swimmingly well because it’s really just the Ukrainians doing all the dying, while the US and Europe can reap the benefits. Ghoulish… who talks like this?
Economist editor @zannymb tells @jonstewart that arming Ukraine “is the cheapest possible way for the US to enhance its security. The fighting is being done by the Ukrainians, they’re the people who are being killed. The US and Europe are supplying them weapons.”
