Strategic Culture – Dec 15, 2023

The United States’ proxy war in Ukraine against Russia has cost the lives of up to 400,000 Ukrainian soldiers. In the last six months alone, it is estimated that over 120,000 Ukrainian troops have been killed in a failed counteroffensive.

Even Western media are coyly admitting the grim reality of failure after much-vaunted predictions last year of imminent victory against Russia.

Yet nearly two years after the conflict erupted, the leader of the puppet regime in Kiev persists in begging for billions more in funds from his Western sponsors to continue the bloodbath – the biggest armed confrontation in Europe since the Second World War.

The hostilities can be traced back to the 2014 coup in Kiev orchestrated by the CIA and precipitated by the European Union and Washington trying to cleave traditional Ukrainian relations with Russia. Those hostilities culminated in February 2022 in what can be seen as a U.S.-led proxy war against Russia. A war that has failed for the Western powers and needs to be peacefully negotiated to spare further death and destruction.

This week, however, saw Ukrainian President Vladimir Zelensky going to Washington “cap in hand” to plead for $60 billion in additional funds. His begging mission failed. The U.S. Congress refused to pass the supplemental bill requested on his behalf by President Joe Biden for Ukraine.

After that humiliation, Zelensky then turned his solicitation to the European Union. The EU, by turn, failed to agree on a requested fund for $54 billion for Ukraine.

As a sort of consolation prize, the EU leaders at their two-day summit in Brussels declared that Ukraine could start negotiations for eventually gaining access to the 27-member bloc. That decision was bombastically hailed as “historic” but it seemed more theatre than substance given that the negotiations will take several years to conduct and there is no guarantee at the end of the tedious process that Ukraine will actually gain EU membership. Will Ukraine even exist as a state in a few years, as our columnist Stephen Karganovic ponders in an article this week?

The EU membership talks were granted no doubt as a way to distract from the fact that the EU funds were not forthcoming and especially following the miserable response from U.S. lawmakers.

The whole sorry saga indicates that the U.S.-led proxy war in Ukraine has become a deplorable black hole for Western public money. Given the military debacle and the futile bloodshed, it is becoming politically untenable for Washington and Brussels to keep shovelling billions of taxpayer money into this abyss.

Up for the asking this week was a total of nearly $100 billion between the U.S. and Europe for Ukraine. How many badly needed public services in Western states could do with – and are denied – that kind of financial sustenance?

The spectacle of Zelensky touring the world scrounging for more money is as shameful as it is sordid.

Official figures show that the Western governments have already donated a combined total of $200 billion to Ukraine since the conflict escalated in February 2022.

To put that largesse into perspective, it is estimated that the U.S. Marshall Plan for the reconstruction of the whole of Europe following World War Two was equivalent to $173 billion in today’s money.

Think about that. The Western funding to Ukraine already exceeds this historic salvage package by some $30 billion. And yet Western governments are trying to muster another $100 billion on top of that.

There are several conclusions to be made. First of all, the U.S.-led proxy war against Russia is indisputably a calamitous failure. Despite the unprecedented financing of weapons and other support to the Kiev regime, the war is a dead-end for the Western powers. The 30-member NATO military alliance is staring at a defeat unparalleled in its 75-year history.

Secondly, it is patent that the Kiev regime is only being propped up by the transfer of colossal flows of aid from the West. Without those transfusions of weapons and capital, the regime is finished. It has already lost grievous numbers of troops on the battlefield. Conscription drives are scraping the barrel. Without the lifeline of aid, the regime is finished. The Kiel Institute for World Economy reported last week that Western capital pledges to the Kiev regime have fallen off a cliff since the summer.

Russian President Vladimir Putin said this week in his annual marathon televised Q&A with the public and journalists that Russia will push on with its objectives of eradicating the NATO-backed Nazi forces in Ukraine. There seems little doubt that the objective will be achieved given the parlous state of the Kiev regime.

Another conclusion to draw is the scale of corruption that Ukraine is mired in. For all the funds pumped into this regime so much of it has been siphoned off from the stated purposes.

The obscenity of this war racket is the inordinate corruption, deaths and destruction of economies across Europe while Western weapons corporations have raked in mega-profits.

Zelensky’s global begging tour is a desperate attempt to keep the war racket going for another while. He and his wife Olena have enriched themselves with overseas properties and shopping trips to Paris and New York. Zelensky and his cronies have been paid off with blood money for their role in peddling the biggest war scam in modern history. A scam that is funded by hard-pressed and hoodwinked Western taxpayers who have been gaslighted by their politicians and media about “defending democracy and freedom”.

To keep this grotesque charade going, Western politicians in the pay of arms companies and NATO think tanks are resorting to desperate scaremongering and blackmail.

President Biden has repeatedly warned that if extra funds were not released to Ukraine to “defend against Russian aggression” the rest of Europe will be overrun by Moscow.

In Washington this week, U.S. lawmakers who refused to pass the supplemental funding bill for Ukraine were, in effect, accused of being traitors by helping Russia.

Zelensky appealed to European leaders by saying that Putin would exploit any negativity towards Ukraine, and he pleaded with the EU to not “betray” Ukrainians.

On the eve of the EU leaders’ summit in Brussels, the European Commission declared that it was finally releasing €10 billion in withheld funds to Hungary. That was a bribe to Hungarian premier Viktor Orban to concede to the proposed €50 billion in extra aid for the Kiev regime. In the end, Orban did not concede to the multi-billion-euro handout, however, he gave way to his objection to talks for Ukraine’s membership of the EU. Such is the shoddy business of propping up the Kiev regime that arm-twisting and bribery are the order of business in Brussels.

The horrendous waste of lives and financial resources in Ukraine by the Western elite – instead of pursuing diplomacy and peace – is the hallmark that these regimes are terminally corrupt and doomed to failure.

The conflict in Ukraine has recklessly stoked tensions between nuclear powers and has condemned generations of Americans and Europeans to debt. The war in Ukraine is a historic dead-end for the U.S. and its European vassals. Zelensky’s begging bowl is a death rattle.

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