President Joe Biden’s support for Ukraine in its proxy war against the Russian Federation has been marked by careful efforts to manage the narrative accompanying US involvement.
Biden has consistently attempted to paint the United States as a cautious and responsible party to the dispute, warning of the potential of a dangerous escalation of the conflict with the nuclear-armed power. To this end the president has often resisted calls to provide Ukraine with certain high-power armaments, only to relent months later as Kiev’s forces appear to be at the end of their rope.
The White House signaled one such escalation Thursday when Western media reported Washington was “open” to providing Ukraine long-range cruise missiles with a range of over 230 miles. The Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile (JASSM) is reportedly the US Air Force’s most powerful and longest-range weapon, but questions remain over whether Ukraine possesses the aircraft and trained pilots necessary to put it to use.
“I don't think I'm overstating the reality when I say that Russia has been fairly measured in its response to the proxy aggression that Ukraine has been engaged in,” said host Wilmer Leon on Sputnik’s The Critical Hour program Friday, responding to the development. “If they are now considering sending missiles further into Russia, that's not going to bode well for Ukraine. It's not going to bode well for NATO. This is not a very good idea.”
“I think at this point we should… not think of this as a war between Ukraine and Russia, but rather think of this as a war between the United States and Russia, with Ukrainians doing the fighting for the United States,” said author and independent journalist Caleb Maupin. “Ukraine is simply acting as a proxy. The flow of American weaponry and the direction from American intelligence and American military personnel, the oversight of everything Ukraine does, is very, very apparent.”
“Attempts to distance itself from what Ukraine has done may serve diplomatic purposes for the United States, but at the end of the day Russia knows what's going on, and so does much of the world,” the analyst noted. “Even though there are not directly American troops involved, this is American weaponry, this is done with American oversight, this is an American operation against Russia, and has been since 2014, when the Ukrainian government was toppled.”
Host Garland Nixon claimed Russia is on a path to win the conflict, having successfully liberated territory in Donetsk, Luhansk, Kherson and Zaporizhzhia. Ukraine’s nationalist government has targeted ethnic Russians in the country since 2014’s Euromaidan coup, attempting to suppress Russian heritage and the use of the Russian language.
The Russian military moved to protect citizens in the formerly-Ukrainian territory at the request of local authorities, intervening after several years of the Kiev regime’s targeting of the region’s inhabitants. The Odessa trade union massacre represented one of the most shocking incidents of the Ukraine regime’s war against its own people; dozens perished when neo-Nazi paramilitaries set fire to a union hall after attacking a group of anti-Maidan protesters.
“Unfortunately, I don't think there was ever any intent for Ukraine to ‘win,’” said Maupin, acknowledging that the US has merely used Kiev as a battering ram against Moscow.
“The Donbass, those folks made clear [their intentions] in 2014 when they voted for independence, and then they have been operating as independent and autonomous for quite some time. And the idea that the Kiev government is going to retake every territory that it claims as its own, it's not going to happen. And it was never going to happen.”
“I think it's pretty clear this whole operation has just been about costing Russia in terms of lives, in terms of resources, and in terms of morale,” he continued. “It's a cynical waste of human life and a waste of resources. And if you look at the details and you see that the US has never really had any intention for Ukraine to win and very much provoked this whole thing from the beginning with that understanding, you're going to have to look on and be very disgusted if you have any basic sense of human decency or morality.