The rebuke came less than a week after Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky failed to convince lawmakers in Washington to approve a $61 billion aid package that US President Joe Biden has been pressuring Congress to approve.
Kenneth Hammond, a writer and professor of Global History and East Asian History at New Mexico University told Sputnik’s Political Misfits that the failure to secure aid means that “Zelensky is in trouble,” and that “Ukraine is not playing out in the way that [...] Western European and American political leaders had been talking about when this all got going a couple years ago.”
Rather than win, the United States and NATO are simply trying to prolong the conflict in Ukraine as long as possible in a bid to weaken Russia on the world stage, Hammond argued.
“This exposes perhaps the deeper game that especially the Americans have been playing, which is really to try to bleed Russia and try to weaken Russia as part of their overall campaign to eliminate anyone who doesn't really toe the line with American policy,” Hammond explained. “What they do is they just drag it on and on and on and on, allowing Ukraine to be the sacrificial lamb for American policy interests.”
Hammond notes that the military hardware the US and NATO sent was never going to be enough to defeat Russia. “[The US is] not providing the kind of assistance that they're begging for, they're asking for. Which is not to say that further assistance to the Zelensky regime [would] resolve anything, because I think it's unlikely that somehow Ukraine is going to rise up and defeat Russian military capabilities,” Hammond told co-hosts Michelle Witte and Ben Zinevich.
“I'd say in many ways it's a very mixed message, but really, it's a pretty straightforward message: we just want to drag this out as long as it's possible. As long as Ukraine can continue to suffer, we're going to use that to the advantage of American and Western European interests.”
Joining the EU is likely to take years for Ukraine, if it happens at all. Earlier this month, the White House told lawmakers in Congress that without another aid package, the US would have to stop providing Ukraine with weapons by the end of the year.
Congress did announce that they would delay their holiday recess in an attempt to pass the Ukraine aid bill and other issues that Washington deems critical.