'Facade of NATO Unity' Has Crumbled Over Ukraine - Ex-US Assistant Secretary of Defense
© KENZO TRIBOUILLARD
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The United States and its allies have poured about $200 billion in weapons and cash into the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine over the past 22 months, with little to show for it apart from accelerating the rise of a multipolar world order.
The image of unity among the NATO bloc and any pretense to the superiority of Western weapons systems have been smashed in the battlegrounds of Ukraine, former senior State Department official Chas Freeman said.
“I know that the façade of NATO unity that existed earlier has cracked. We now have NATO members openly dissenting from the vision of continuing this war. And of course the international, global majority is not on the side of the West in this battle, but has chosen to sit this fight out, and sees this battle as yet another example of Western warmongering and threat-making,” the veteran ex-DoD and State Department official said.
“What has been accomplished? Maybe the discrediting of NATO’s military prowess, because the Russians have learned to counter the best weapons NATO has. It certainly has not succeeded in the stated objective, which was to weaken and isolate Russia. Russia is not weaker, its economy has grown, it is now larger than Germany, which has been contracting due to the crisis produced by the loss of access to Russian energy exports. It has not been isolated. It has been reoriented toward the east, toward the south, toward the Middle East, toward Africa,” Freeman said.
“The stated objectives have not been achieved, Ukraine has been devastated,” he stressed, pointing out that the crisis has only served to accelerate the country’s demographic collapse, from about 51 million people in 1992 to about 32 million before 2022, and as little as 20 million today.
“People emigrated early on because there was no work in Ukraine. And then when the war began they emigrated to avoid the draft or for reasons of safety, and there’s no indication they plan to come back,” Freeman said, characterizing the conflict as a “disaster” for everyone involved.
The proxy war against Russia has been lost by Kiev and its allies, Freeman believes, but the West has continued to pump resources into the conflict because of the “theory of sunk costs,” the idea that “since we have spent a lot of money doing something we can’t afford to stop doing it.”
“But if the thing you are doing is stupid and counterproductive, if you do more of it, you just build up more problems. You don’t solve anything,” he said.
The same is true of the Ukrainian government’s plans to mobilize even more troops, the observer believes.
“There are probably 400,000 casualties on the Ukrainian side, probably less on the Russian side…Ukraine has been successfully partitioned, unlike the Minsk Accords which would have recognized the Donbass region as part of Ukraine in a federalized system – they have been lost to Ukraine. Ukraine is not getting them back. Mr. Zelensky says he requires drafting another 500,000 soldiers. There aren’t 500,000 people to draft in Ukraine. The age at which they are drafting people now is from 17 to 70…There’s no training for these people. And so they are simply being pushed to the front, and they’re being killed. The prospects are now that the Russians who have begun to take the offensive will continue not only to kill lots of Ukrainians on the border between the two armies, but will actually advance. And rather ominously, Mr. Putin’s terms and objectives seem to be hardening, not softening,” Freeman warned.
“He’s speaking about Odessa as a Russian city, which suggests that he plans to deprive Ukraine of its Black Sea coast. A landlocked, truncated Ukraine, neutralized or not, is a threat that Russia has contained,” the observer said. “Historically, of course, Mr. Putin is correct. Odessa was established as a city by Russians and it was largely Russian-speaking. And one of the massacres that set off the civil war in Ukraine occurred in Odessa, where Russian-speakers were murdered by Ukrainian nationalist fanatics. So I can understand that statement both as a threat to take Odessa, and as a recognition of historic realities. I’m not sure which it is.”
Ultimately, Freeman believes there’s “growing recognition” in the US that Ukraine “has basically lost this war.”
“All the brave talk which was intended to bolster Ukrainian morale, and to bolster American support for this misadventure in Eastern Europe is now confronting reality. And the reality is that Ukraine is out of manpower. The average age of the soldiers in the Ukrainian army now is 43. There are people 70 years old being drafted. They don’t have the physical strength and stamina to perform well on the battlefield. The Russians tell us that they are capturing Ukrainian female soldiers who are pregnant. When you are reduced to keeping pregnant women in the armed forces, you are really near the end. So I think the reality is beginning to sink in that this war has not been won by NATO or the United States. It’s not yet been decisively won by Russia but it has been lost by Ukraine,” the veteran US DoD official and diplomat summarized.
