Ukraine “can’t win” against Russia, despite the vast military aid being pumped to fight the West’s proxy war against Moscow there, an American senator has told US media.
"Yes, we’re not getting the point in Washington, D.C. …At the end of the day, it’s a junior high team playing a college team. They can’t win,” said Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL), speaking on The Ingraham Angle on Monday.
According to the Republican senator, what Washington is doing is “trying to get everybody’s eye off the real problem,” which is “the Biden administration and the Democrats. They’re a total disaster.”
Earlier in the program, the host mentioned a poll conducted by SSRS news agency from July 1-31 among 1,279 adults. It revealed that over half of Americans (55 percent) are against Congress authorizing more funds for Ukraine. Fifty-one percent say that Washington has done enough to help Kiev, while 48 percent disagree. The latter number is 14 percentage points down from the 62% of those who felt the US should have been doing more, according to a poll conducted in the early days of Russia's special military operation. When asked in the recent survey specifically about types of assistance the US could offer Kiev, only 17 percent say they would support sending American troops to the battlefield, and 43 percent prefer providing weapons. Furthermore, the poll found that 71 percent of Republicans would want Congress to stop sending more assistance for the authorities in Kiev.
Growing Rift Over Kiev Funding
On Sunday, dozens of anti-war protesters rallied outside the United Nations headquarters in New York to demand a halt to military supplies for Ukraine. The gathering was held by Humanity for Peace, an international peace coalition, to mark the anniversary of the world's first use of an atomic bomb by the United States against the Japanese city of Hiroshima in 1945.
However, US President Joe Biden appears to be adamant, insisting just days after the announcement of controversial cluster munitions shipments to Ukraine that, "We will not waver.” Biden was speaking in Lithuania following a recent NATO summit, where the West touted a long-term program to prop up Ukraine.
Meanwhile, an ever-growing number of Republicans in Congress have been railing at the billions of taxpayer dollars being funneled into the Ukraine conflict. House Speaker, Republican Kevin McCarthy, went on record as saying that Kiev should not receive a “blank check.” Ex-POTUS Donald Trump, a hopeful in the 2024 race to the White House, threatened to halt war funding, saying last month that the US should “refuse to authorize a single additional shipment of our depleted weapons stockpiles.” His rival for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, has also been open about his skepticism of the funding.
Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has repeatedly slammed the US role in the proxy war against Russia. “Congress should not authorize another penny for Ukraine... Ukraine is not the 51st state of the United States of America,” said Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from Georgia. Rep. Matt Gaetz, a Florida Republican who co-sponsored an amendment to block Democrat Biden from sending cluster munitions to Ukraine, earlier railed against the US acting like it was "the world’s piggy bank.”
Stuttering Counteroffensive
Despite the much-heralded, but consistently faltering counteroffensive, the West continues providing the Ukrainian Armed Forces with weaponry that they use against Russian troops and civilian infrastructure. Ukraine's counteroffensive kicked off on June 4 after months of delays over a lack of military supplies from Western donors.
The Russian Defense Ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said in a statement earlier that since the beginning of its counteroffensive, Ukraine has lost more than 43,000 soldiers and over 4,900 units of various weaponry, including 26 planes, nine helicopters, 1,831 tanks and other armored fighting vehicles, including 25 German-made Leopard tanks, seven French-made AMX wheeled tanks, and 21 US-made Bradley infantry fighting vehicles.
Meanwhile, Western media reports citing unnamed Ukrainian and Western officials have acknowledged that Kiev's forces had lost approximately one-fifth of their Western military equipment over the last two months, while using up much of the stockpiles of munitions given them.