Having lauded the Kiev regime's resolve and the Ukrainian military's resourcefulness for quite some time, the US mainstream press has suddenly changed its tune, being forced to admit that the well-advertised Ukrainian counteroffensive has failed. Some established American newspapers went even so far as to report that the US military tactics had proven almost useless on the Ukrainian battlefield.
"After two months of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, the US press is finally waking up to the fact that the offensive is going extremely poorly," Daniel Lazare, an independent journalist, author, and writer, told Sputnik. "Ukraine has made minimal gains due to very dense Russian defenses, including mines and drone swarms, which are completely changing the battlefield equation. This is devastating news for the Biden administration, which after the disastrous retreat from Afghanistan in August 2021, is now two years later facing an equally dangerous situation in Ukraine."
As of August 4, Ukraine had 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 (IFV), as well as 747 field artillery guns and mortars, since the beginning of Kiev's counteroffensive, per Russia's Ministry of Defense. Thus, Ukraine's attrition rate is so high it could hardly be ignored by Western politicians and corporate press.
"These articles are not a ploy. That's not how the US mass media works. They're honest," Lazare said. "CNN is telling it as it sees it, in its own limited way. And after months of pro-Pentagon propaganda, where CNN essentially toed the Defense Department line all the way, essentially now it realizes it can't do that much longer because the facts are running strongly against it. So CNN, The New York Times, Politico, etc., are forced to recognize the reality of what's happening in Ukraine. And it's extremely negative from a US perspective. I think it is a sobering-up process. They are alerting their readers to how dangerous and negative the situation in Ukraine is becoming in terms of American strategic interests. And therefore, they are preparing them for worse to come. But it's honest in the sense that no one is bribing CNN and it has no ulterior motive in mind. It simply is telling the truth in its own half-witted, politically distorted fashion."
Still, those who have followed the Ukraine conflict from the very beginning have already noticed that the US media's prognoses don't work. So, for them the Ukraine counteroffensive failure was hardly surprising, per US independent journalist and geopolitical analyst Max Parry.
"There is no way anyone could follow this conflict closely without noticing Western corporate media’s continuous pattern of failure in its predictions about the outcome of the war in favor of Kiev and then backtracking each time only to come up with excuses as to why its prognostications have been wrong," Parry told Sputnik. "As a result, it has only revealed the incompetence of Washington’s military strategists and NATO, whose forces have trained Ukraine, and the media’s own role as a propaganda arm of the US."
"Recent polls even published by CNN show the tide of public opinion is turning against sending more aid to Ukraine, but the White House continues to request more ammunition for Kiev. Eventually the jig is going to be up for the Biden administration as we approach an election year and the American people realize they’ve been deceived by the media and Washington," the journalist continued.
Stalled Counteroffensive Will Backfire on Biden and Dems
The US press has warned that the "stalled Ukrainian offensive" could represent a huge political problem for President Volodymyr Zelensky in the US. However, it's not Zelensky's whose political future is at stake: Joe Biden and his team are likely to face repercussions ahead of the 2024 election, too, according to Lazare.
"Everything is riding on this war," Lazare said. "Joe Biden's political fortunes, the Democrats, the very future of US democracy, and the fact that the offensive seems to be failing means that Joe Biden's prospects are looking extremely grim. We don't know how this all will work out, but clearly the counteroffensive is hopelessly bogged down. There is little chance of any kind of breakthrough before the fall. And I think that the US has gotten itself into a real military mess yet again."
"I mean, essentially back in 2014, the US tore Ukraine apart by encouraging a neo-Nazi-led coup d'état in Kiev, which encouraged parallel revolts in Odessa and the eastern part of the country. Those revolts were bloodily repressed, but nonetheless, Ukraine lost control of major parts of its territory, and since then has been struggling to regain them, with the US encouraging, really, in fact, enforcing an ever more militant response. The result has been war, which the US is now losing. So the US has now blundered into yet another military disaster from which there is no way out and the implications will be profound."
Some US observers suggest that Biden does not have a coherent strategy in Ukraine and, what's worse, doesn't have a Plan B for a face-saving exit. Earlier this week, on his Twitter page (X), Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a Democratic presidential candidate, accused Biden and then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson of disrupting the peace agreement between Russia and Ukraine in March 2022.
"Is it worth the cost already being paid — tens of thousands of dead youngsters and families?" Kennedy wrote on Twitter on August 7. "Billions of American dollars drained from our food banks, our hospitals, our schools and instead detonated in foreign skies to rip young flesh from bone? Higher gas bills, higher grocery prices, higher utility bills, higher housing costs, and too little money in your bank account to pay for them? Tell me, President Biden, how is it worth all this to fight a war that could have ended a month after it began?"