Western countries deliberately pushed the topic of Kiev's offensive in the media to justify the supply of weapons and ensure unity among NATO member states, Russian Foreign Intelligence Service Director Sergei Naryshkin said on Monday.
"It was important for the Westerners to promote the topic of the upcoming Ukrainian counteroffensive in the global information space. The obviously overestimated importance attached to it is an element of mental attack before the battle. In addition, the constant exaggeration of this topic allowed the Euro-Atlantic totalitarian liberal elite to justify the supply of weapons to Kiev and ensure the unity of NATO countries, many of which are already pretty tired of Ukraine and its president," Naryshkin said.
Naryshkin added that many Western military analysts expressed doubts about the success of the Ukrainian offensive and assessed the tasks announced by Kiev as "unachievable."
Ukraine has touted its coming offensive since late 2022. It was first scheduled for the spring, then rescheduled to the summer. The Ukrainian government said the postponement was due to a shortage of weapons, all while pushing its Western donors to supply progressively heavier arms, including tanks, drones and fighter jets.
Ukrainian troops launched a large-scale offensive in five sectors of the South Donetsk direction on June 4 but failed to achieve their goals, the Russian Defense Ministry said. Since then, the Ukrainian military has been trying to break through the defense lines of the Russian armed forces in the Donetsk and Zaporozhye regions, but their attempts have been unsuccessful and Ukraine has suffered heavy losses in armored equipment and manpower.
Kiev 'Politically Pushed' by NATO to Launch Counteroffensive Despite Being Unprepared
Украинские военнослужащие ведут огонь из гаубицы M777. Архивное фото - Sputnik International, 1920, 19.06.2023 Subscribe International India Africa The long-anticipated Ukrainian counteroffensive, touted both by the regime in Kiev and its Western backers for months, finally began this month, although it seems that it has so far failed to produce the results its masterminds desired.
While Ukrainian forces demonstrated a remarkable aptitude for losing manpower and military hardware by charging across minefields into fortified positions held by Russian forces, they haven’t managed to get close to, let alone breach, the first line of Russian defense.
Retired USAF Lt.Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, a former analyst for the US Department of Defense, told Sputnik that Western media “has reported very little concrete information about the counteroffensive,” with much of the information on the subject coming straight from Ukrainian media and thus being “difficult to verify.”
According to Kwiatkowski, Kiev was “politically pushed” into launching this counteroffensive by “its NATO sponsors,” despite the fact that, as it turned out, Ukrainian forces simply weren’t prepared for it.
“The results are an increasingly desperate battlefield for Ukraine, and increasingly desperate measures being taken by Ukraine and its political leadership,” she said.
“When I say desperate, I'm suggesting that the Ukrainian leadership has decided to write off regaining the eastern lands including Crimea and now are ready to do what they can to simply increase costs for Russia in the future - by destroying civilian and energy infrastructure, and the ability of that part of Ukraine to become productive as easily as they might.”
Rather than an actual counteroffensive meant to allow Kiev to seize control over Donbass and Crimea, Kwiatkowski argued, we are witnessing what she described as "dog in the manger" military scenario.
It also remains unclear whether NATO leaders and the Kiev regime are even in agreement about what the “end goal” of this “strangely-designed counteroffensive” actually is, the ex-DoD analyst mused.
“When US policymakers are asked about this 'goal' they say simply, 'no peace, no freeze, keep fighting until the last Ukrainian,'" she added.
As Kwiatkowski explained, the Kiev regime and its NATO backers are unlikely to achieve any “serious progress” if they “continue solely with what they have been doing.”
Theoretically, Ukrainian forces might achieve success if their “ground and limited sea capability” could be “refreshed, well-led, focused on a specific mission, AND a specific counter-offensive coordinated with a temporary destruction of air command and control, or a major destruction of Russian airfields or aircraft,” she said.
However, “the very imaginative consideration of how many ducks would need to be in a row for this to succeed is mind-blowing, and certainly unsustainable by current Ukrainian capabilities,” Kwiatkowski remarked.
“In a sense, this has been the story of the Ukraine war -- and fantasies that have fed Ukrainian political strategy since 2014. These fantasies are based in trust in American politicians and diplomats - who know very little about actual war-fighting, actual democracy, and economy,” she continued.
“The same people who promised cakewalks and flowers in Iraq and new energy pipelines across Afghanistan, also promised Zelensky things that cannot be delivered.”
Kwiatkowski did warn, however, that this does not mean that the “neocons in the West, who have insisted upon this war, are not dangerous to Ukraine, Russia, and the rest of the planet.”
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