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| Government Corruption |
| The US is insuring itself against Kyiv’s betrayal |
| 2023-11-22 |
| Direct Translation via Google Translate. Edited. by Irina Alksnis [RIA] Yesterday, US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin unexpectedly arrived in Kyiv. This visit takes on additional dimensions if we remember that CIA Director William Burns visited there just as suddenly last week. And this at a time when the hottest and most painful topic for Washington is clearly the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. It would seem that the States simply have no time for Ukraine at the present time. However, both the head of the Pentagon and the head of the US intelligence service had to switch from the Middle East rush to Kiev, and this means only one thing: events there are developing somehow completely badly, since the Americans had to send such high-ranking figures there. What exactly is going wrong is not difficult to guess: the West is ripe for recognizing the fact that the Ukrainian card against Russia is broken - at least in the current situation - and a change in strategy is necessary. But how exactly to change it is now a fierce debate on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. It is a mistake to believe that Europe and the United States have begun to look at the situation soberly and are ready to admit defeat in the war against our country. The voices voicing such a point of view are in an absolute minority and are essentially marginal. The West's confidence in its superiority is unshakable - at least in words. In recent weeks, the pages of the world's leading media have been flooded with publications proposing their own ways out of the current impasse. Despite the large number and apparent diversity, in fact, all the proposals voiced are very similar to each other. They assume some kind of freezing of the conflict, the active restoration of Ukraine (usually with the country joining the EU and NATO ) - and then someone transparently hints, and someone says directly that in a few years, Kiev, which has gained strength, will make a new attempt to defeat Russia in a hot conflict. The utopian nature of these projects is not even a question of whether Moscow will agree . Another thing is more important: they all assume that the West should take Kiev for its maintenance for many years to come, and we are talking about amounts not much less than the hundreds of billions of dollars that have been allocated for it since February 24, 2022. And if formally the majority of Western countries maintain their position “We stand together with Ukraine to the end,” then in reality their consolidation is bursting at the seams, especially with the prospect of paying for Kyiv for many years. Internal American squabbles, due to which financial support for Ukraine is not included in the US interim budget, are increasing confusion and vacillation. In general, Lloyd Austin will have difficult work this week at the next meeting of donor countries in Kyiv. And the new aid package of one hundred million dollars he announced following yesterday’s visit does not help matters: against the backdrop of the tens of billions required, the announced amount indicates that the United States is openly scraping its bottom. In this not very optimistic construction, one more important problematic factor cannot be underestimated - Kyiv itself. Ukrainian elites are well aware that their short “golden age” is fading and the chances of its return are approaching zero. They know that the war against Russia is lost, that the world is tired of Ukraine and will soon completely lose interest in it, that the cash flow that has fallen on them in the last year and a half is drying up, which means the time has come for new adventures and machinations. There is no doubt that under the numerous rumors about the sharply escalating behind-the-scenes struggle in Kyiv, there is a grain of truth hidden. Ukrainian elites have never been weak-willed puppets in the hands of a geopolitical patron, no matter who he is: they always play their own (stupid, short-sighted, but their own) game, often acting across the “higher authority” and harming it. The West has repeatedly seen this the hard way: Zelensky’s recent statement about canceling the elections can be considered a typical illustration. In the current situation, the Kiev establishment in all its diversity, without a doubt, has already launched stormy intrigues and behind-the-scenes games, and one can only guess what results they can lead to - even the most phantasmagoric. And for Washington there is a problem. It was in the old, unipolar times that petty intrigues among one of the vassals were unimportant for the United States: emerging problems were resolved quickly and effectively, and for the American public it did not matter at all what was happening there on the other side of the world. Now everything is different. Right now, the current president's rating is plummeting because of Israel's military operation , which the White House is forced to support, and it is impossible to force Benjamin Netanyahu to moderate the ruthlessness of the IDF, because the Israeli prime minister has his own political survival at stake and he ignores Washington's wishes. In a situation where Americans' attention is shifting to the Middle East, the chances that events in Kiev will turn out completely differently from what they want are increasing sharply, and this will be another nail in the coffin of the Democrats' election campaign. Therefore, the United States is forced, in the midst of a crisis in another region, to send Pentagon and CIA leaders to Kyiv instead of the usual middle-level emissaries - in the hope of keeping the Ukrainian authorities in check and the situation in Ukraine under control. This is exactly how the hegemony of the only superpower dies: it does not fly into tartar with a wild roar, but simply gradually crumbles in the hands and slips through the fingers like sand. |
| Posted by:badanov |