The blame game over the debacle in Ukraine has started

The Russia-Ukraine conflict appears to have reached its pinnacle over the past few days, not in the battlefield but in the halls of power. At the White House on February 28, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was confronted verbally by Vice President JD Vance and President Donald Trump. It appeared to be staged and scripted.

Trump seemed to be trying to break up with Ukraine using a pretext. On March 4, the decision to freeze military aid actually took effect, and on March 5 the intelligence sharing was suspended, which will have an immediate impact on Ukrainian military operations.

While European leaders rushed to a summit and declared their unwavering support for Zelenskyy, he appeared to stand his ground. They vowed to keep providing Ukraine with military and financial aid.

It might be tempting to attribute Trump’s tendencies to the recent events. However, what we are seeing is a political production intended to appeal to the Western public, who has been fed the idea that Russia is weak and capable of being defeated or weakened to the point of irrelevance.

The West, which was once ruled by former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, has actually exhausted the available resources and willingness to engage in what he claimed was a “proxy war” against Russia. Damage control and a blame game are hidden behind the rhetoric and theatrics, preparing the public for the unavoidable.

Russian hawks who want to keep insisting that Russia can still be defeated, such as Kaja Kallas, the EU’s foreign policy chief, and military industrial lobbyists. However, nothing has changed on the ground since they’ve been selling this story and a number of magical solutions, such as the supply of F16 fighter planes or long-range missile strikes into Russian territory. Ukraine’s men, population, and infrastructure are all being lost.

Under the current circumstances, it is improbable that Ukraine could reach a better deal than the one it rejected in Istanbul in the spring of 2022 or as it might have done before thanks to the Minsk agreements. The separatist-controlled regions of the Donbass region, which Russia has now formally annexed, would remain under the control of Ukraine under the latter framework, which was agreed upon in 2015-2016.

The outcomes of the conflict have been based on Kyiv’s experience. Oleksiy Arestovych, a former adviser to Zelenskyy’s administration and Ukraine’s main talking point at the start of the war, once said in March 2022, “getting less than we had before the war means our defeat.”

In other words, if the outcome was worse than what Ukraine would have experienced under Minsk, the conflict is not worthwhile to fight. With all the terrible losses it has suffered over the past three years, Ukraine is even further away from achieving this objective. The blame game has already begun because of this.

Trump’s version of it involves blatant indolence and a waste of Western aid, according to Trump. He also blabs some of the nations in Europe for not helping Ukraine, which is false.

He is not the only one who is playing this game, though. Politicians in Europe may be expressing lofty opinions about Ukraine’s unwavering support, but the message is that the US must always support them. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer acknowledged that “strong US support” will be essential in order to help Ukraine obtain a much better deal than Minsk when he mentioned a “coalition of the willing” to assist it with “boots on the ground and planes in the air.”

At their upcoming summit, the EU is unlikely to agree on the 20 billion euro ($21. 6 billion) aid package for Ukraine despite proverbs. In the absence of US support, Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, has proposed a bold plan to “re-arm Europe” and assist Ukraine, but Hungary and Slovakia, which are allies of Trump, have declared they will veto any additional aid to Kyiv.

European leaders can point fingers at Trump and attribute his role in the Ukraine-related disaster because getting the US back on board is a prerequisite for that.

Zelenskyy, for his part, is attempting to persuade the Ukrainian people that he has done his absolute best by endured reprimands and outright humiliation in an effort to win the support of the West and advance Ukrainian interests.

Given the circumstances on the battlefield and the uncertainty of NATO membership, he presented a maximalist “victory plan” to the Biden administration last fall, knowing that it was going to be rejected.

Given that Ukraine is a victim of brutal Russian aggression, what he is doing is continuing to promote maximalism from the position of moral superiority.

Zelenskyy keeps clamoring for “security guarantees” from the West, knowing for a fact that pressure was put on the West to refuse to do so in Istanbul in exchange for them.

The Ukrainian public should be the subject of all of this public shaming and maximalism. When he doesn’t receive what he demands, Zelenskyy will be able to claim that Ukraine has been betrayed and that there is nothing left to do but negotiate with Russia.

The ruling elite and the president of Ukraine have been very objective in their discussions of the prospects for the country in private. At a secret parliamentary hearing in late January, Kyrylo Budanov, the head of Ukrainian military intelligence, told lawmakers that Ukraine should start talks on peace by the summer or face “dangerous” consequences for the Ukrainian state. The HUR lacked a warm response to the media reports that an MP was present at the meeting.

In the US, Europe, and Ukraine, all this arguing on the verge of the unavoidable is a sign of a political culture that prioritizes neatly packaged messaging over substance. Since 2014, the Western strategy for the conflict with Russia has been predominated by this political culture.

In terms of information, The West has successfully defeated Moscow (and perhaps some truth) on a variety of media platforms aimed at various audiences. But Vladimir Putin, a brutal and criminal who prefers substance over form and whose decisions are based on reality rather than wishful thinking, is undoubtedly going to win the fight on the ground.

Source: Aljazeera