Ukraine may lose war in summer if military aid from America and EU comes to end, US official says
Ukraine faces defeat as early as next summer if American and Nato military aid dries up, a senior US official has warned.
Vladimir Putin’s chances of victory have been buoyed by war fatigue and blocks on funding in both America and the EU.
“There is no guarantee of success with us, but they are certain to fail without us,” a senior US military source told CNN.
Viktor Orbán, Hungary’s prime minister, last week blocked a £43 billion EU aid package for Ukraine.
Austria had also threatened to block the bill until Kyiv toned down criticism of an Austrian bank still working in Russia.
Western planners working on ‘worst-case scenario’
In the US, the Senate has held up a £48 billion military support bill for Ukraine and polls have shown that most Americans think that the US government is overspending in Ukraine.
Western military planners are now working on a “worst-case scenario” of Ukraine without aid being defeated by Russia within a few months, according to CNN which a source described as a “disaster” for European security.
“I don’t think people fully realise what Ukraine’s fall would actually mean. We would see horrible things: ethnic cleansing and the total destruction of Ukraine,” CNN quoted an unnamed European diplomat as saying.
With support slipping, Volodymyr Zelensky has been touring Western capitals and Joe Biden has warned that disinterest in Ukraine risks giving Putin an early “Christmas present”.
But weapons and kit are already in short supply in Ukraine and analysts have estimated that Kyiv will soon run out of air defence missiles, anti-aircraft missiles and shoulder-mounted missiles if Western aid drops.
The EU has also admitted that it is only able to supply Ukraine with around a third of the artillery shells that it had initially promised.
Reports from the front line of ammunition rationing have also increased.
Around Avdiivka, the focus of Russian attacks in Ukraine’s eastern Donbas region, Soviet-designed Ukrainian transport helicopters converted to carry air-to-ground missiles are only deployed if Russian forces attack with vehicles.
A counter-offensive that soon stalled
Infantry attacks go unharassed because of a lack of supplies.
Ukraine launched its counter-offensive in May but it soon stalled after running into stronger-than-expected Russian trench systems and densely sown minefields.
Ukrainian forces that have taken ground from Russia and secured footholds in the villages of Robotyne, in Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya region, and Krynky, on the left bank of the Dnipro River 20 miles upstream from the city of Kherson, have found themselves surrounded and pounded by artillery.
The New York Times interviewed Ukrainian marines, some trained by the British military, who have been trying to secure Krynky, a collection of fishermen’s houses, for the past couple of months.
They described it as a “suicide mission” fought in a hellscape of waterlogged shell craters filled with dead bodies and not the decisive foothold the Ukrainian military spokesmen have been talking up.
“The left bank was like purgatory. You are not dead yet, but you don’t feel alive,” an injured soldier said from hospital.
Putin brands Ukraine ‘a US satellite state’
Putin has increasingly boasted about Russia’s prospects of outmanoeuvring and out-thinking the West and at an annual phone-in on Thursday with the Russian public he said that he retained his original war objective of forcing Ukraine’s surrender.
On Sunday, he also kicked off his campaign for March’s presidential election by mocking Ukraine for becoming a US satellite state “in exchange for sausage”.
Stephen Hall, assistant professor of Russian politics at Bath University, said that Putin was on the front foot and the West had no choice but to keep supporting Ukraine.
“If his war aims are unchanged, this means one thing,” he said. “The Russian armed forces will have to get to Kyiv.”
