Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov reacted to French President Emmanuel Macron’s bellicose rhetoric towards Russia Tuesday after the controversial leader raised the prospect of sending NATO troops to assist Ukraine.
“In this case, we have to talk not about the probability, but rather the inevitability” of a conflict between Russia and Ukraine, Peskov warned, adding any such move would be “absolutely against the interests of those nations” and their people.
But Western countries have given in to pressure to up the ante in the past, eventually providing tanks and ever more sophisticated weaponry to Kiev even after previously dismissing the prospect. Still, Russia has maintained the upper hand in the Donbass, leading Sputnik’s host of The Critical Hour program Wilmer Leon to bewilderingly ask “is this a de-population campaign?”
“It is clear that the trend of the war is definitely in Russia's favor,” agreed security analyst Mark Sleboda, who said the conflict has evolved into “a war of attrition.”
“The regime is suffering extreme manpower problems,” the international relations expert added, noting that NATO countries have also struggled to provide Ukraine with sufficient weaponry to sustain combat. He ridiculed President Volodymyr Zelensky’s claim the Kiev regime had only lost 31,000 combatants in two years of fighting, claiming “that's about what they have lost per month, at least in the last eight or so months.”
“That being said, the Kiev regime's military has not broken yet,” said Sleboda. “They are buckling along the frontline.”
Russia’s resilience has embarrassed Western countries, who envisioned Ukraine’s proxy war as a low-risk opportunity to weaken the Eurasian power. The United States repeatedly worked to scuttle peace talks to end the conflict, intervening in at least two separate rounds of negotiations involving British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett.
The strategy has backfired spectacularly, with Western sanctions economically damaging European allies and threatening the global reserve status of the US dollar. Now, a Russian victory threatens to indisputably usher in a multipolar era and signal that Western powers no longer have the ability to dictate policy to the rest of the world.
“This is not the first time we have heard threats and rumors of NATO countries having contingency plans… if their [Ukrainian] regime fails,” said Sleboda, noting the significance of the Donbass conflict to the West. “They will feel the need to intervene directly because they fully believe that their US global leadership, that the rules based order, which is to say, US-led Western global hegemony [is threatened].”
Sleboda added that European countries are “falling apart” amidst the economic ramifications of the conflict, while the continent’s armed forces are also in a highly compromised state. Meanwhile, he claimed Russia enjoys “the most powerful and advanced air defense system and electronic warfare capability in the world.”
As Ukraine remains on the backfoot in the Donbass, French President Emmanuel Macron organized a meeting of European leaders on Monday, during which Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico reported there was no discussion of peace with Russia.
Sleboda predicted that Western leaders’ hubris would eventually lead to a war between NATO and Moscow.
“Take a look at events since 2014,” said the analyst. “They [Western leaders] are crazy. They are messianic, supremacist, exceptionalist and [demonstrate] no amount of being disabused, whether in Georgia or Syria or now in Ukraine or in Israel or anywhere else in the world, the failure of the US in Afghanistan, the collapse of Iraq, the destruction in Libya, it never, ever sinks in. So, yes, I believe they are crazy.”