The Ukraine war’s big lie

Ukraine’s drone campaign won’t turn the war around — but it will cause it to dangerously escalate

If you’re getting “Ukrainian 2023 counteroffensive” vibes, it’s because once again they are repackaging the same old narrative that we’ve heard countless times before: Ukraine is winning, Russia is on the verge of collapse, now is the time to double down on support for Zelensky!

The latest alleged game-changer is Ukraine’s drone-strike campaign inside Russia. But this is a lie, no less than previous propaganda drives. Yes, Kyiv’s drone campaign is certainly having an impact. But this is unlikely to change the course of the war. The Russian economy is faltering, yet it remains in a better position than much of the EU. But even more crucially, the Russian army continues to advance on the battlefield. It is steadily closing in on its goal of conquering the entire Donbass. Just the other day, Moscow announced the capture of Kostiantynivka — a town in Donetsk and the largest settlement it’s taken since Mariupol. All this flatly contradicts the prevailing “Ukraine has turned the tide” narrative.

If further proof were needed that things are going badly for Ukraine, one need only look at the increasingly widespread “busification” policy — the kidnapping of conscription-age men off the streets to be sent to the front, which is fuelling growing domestic opposition to the war — or at the EU’s proposal to exclude military-age Ukrainian men, in practice all men aged 23 to 60, from the bloc’s temporary protection scheme.

In this light, the drone campaign looks less like a game-changer than a sign of desperation: given Ukraine’s inability to turn the tide on the battlefield, Kyiv and NATO have decided to “bring the war to Russia” by engaging in a semi-terrorist campaign.

Yet there is no evidence that Ukraine’s drone campaign will turn the war around — much less force Putin to capitulate. Indeed, over the past few days, Russian forces launched some of the largest drone and missile strikes on Kyiv so far, killing dozens of people. The Ukrainian attacks are, if anything, emboldening the more hawkish voices in the Kremlin, who accuse Putin of mismanaging the conflict and are demanding a far more forceful response — even beyond Ukraine.

After all, these attacks are planned with Western intelligence, executed with Western-enabled weapons and now backed by an explicit G7 commitment to “accelerate” the delivery of long-range capabilities. What little remained of the “proxy war” fiction has now been dispensed with: in everything but formal declaration, this is a direct NATO-Russia war. And yet, most Europeans appear entirely oblivious to the fact that an undeclared war is being waged against a nuclear power in their name — and that with every new escalation their leaders are gambling that Moscow will simply go on absorbing the blows forever.

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Thomas Fazi

Website: thomasfazi.net

Twitter: @battleforeurope

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