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‘Hopium and Defense’ All Ukraine Has to Sustain Itself as NATO Weapons Dry Up

04.12.2023 Sputnik International

With its supply of Western weapons dwindling and little sign of change from the NATO powers, Ukraine will be incapable of launching another counteroffensive like last summer, an analyst told Sputnik. However, barring a mutiny or political crisis, a collapse of the Ukrainian war effort isn’t necessarily imminent.

White House Office of Management and Budget Director Shalanda Young told federal lawmakers on Monday that the US was “out of money to support Ukraine in this fight.”

According to Pentagon statistics, the US has sent Ukraine some $44 billion in military aid since February 2022, as well as $76 billion in other types of support, including budget financing and humanitarian aid. US President Joe Biden has asked for billions more to be approved, but the Republican majority in the House, now led by Ukraine skeptic House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), has remained cool to the idea without improvements in oversight.

The news also comes as the Pentagon failed its audit for the sixth year in a row.

Moscow-based international relations security analyst Mark Sleboda told Radio Sputnik’s The Final Countdown on Monday that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was correct in a way: Ukraine is indeed entering a new phase of the conflict – a defensive phase, as it waits and hopes that time will bring favorable changes to the situation.

“But it is definitely having an effect on the battlefield in Ukraine. There was already a trend because of the US and collectively NATO’s inability to ramp up their own industrial production to provide their Kiev Regime proxy with enough of the war basics like artillery shells, air defense missiles, and many other things that it needed. And now, that is coupled with the fact that Kiev is competing with Israel for many of the same things, which have been on the demand list … for Israel for what it needs for its conflict. And Zelensky is finding himself second-fiddle, vying not only for attention and supplies and funding” from the US and European Union, which he said had hit a “speed bump” in attempting to support both Kiev and Jerusalem at once…………………..

Over the weekend, NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said the alliance “should also be prepared for bad news” from Ukraine, noting that wars “develop in phases” and that the West should continue to support Kiev “in both good and bad times.”

“For Zelensky, this is really a case of ‘the emperor has no clothes,’” Sleboda said, noting that other figures had turned against him, too, including anti-Russian journalist Simon Shuster, who quoted Ukrainian officials calling Zelensky “delusional” and claiming he won’t hear talk of Ukraine losing the conflict, and Kiev Major Vitaly Klitschko had called Zelensky “authoritarian.”

“I guess the Western propaganda is failing, and when the mainstream media is already out in front of him, even Jens Stoltenberg has to turn it around and admit certain things, although it must be said that these admissions are not coming in front of the media, they’re coming behind it, he simply no longer has any propaganda spin for maneuver.”

Sleboda said he agreed with Zelensky that Ukraine had entered a new phase of the conflict.

“Their offensive days are over, there is no large new offensive package from the West anywhere within sight, there’s not even enough maintenance aid to continue basic supplies of anything at this point. So the next year is solidly about desperate defense, building defensive lines, and a much-talked-about new total mobilization, meaning mass, forced conscription, that could possibly include 17- to 70-year-olds now and possibly women being conscripted for combat roles. And, evidently, it is going to be privatized, the last months of conscription having failed miserably, they are now evidently going to turn to private companies, which literally means Westerners coming in and help press-gang Ukrainians off the streets and putting them in the trenches.”

However, he cautioned that modern battlefield technology makes defense much less costly than offense, so “it does not necessarily mean a collapse of the Kiev Regime military,” adding that the bigger danger to the government was a mutiny or a political crisis.  https://sputnikglobe.com/20231204/hopium-and-defense-all-ukraine-has-to-sustain-itself-as-nato-weapons-dry-up-1115381340.html

December 10, 2023 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Ukraine, weapons and war