The protracted war in Ukraine has brought to the fore powerlessness and military shortcomings of European states which have to some extent been compensated by American participation, according to a political analyst.
Faraan: Gilbert Doctorow, an independent international affairs analyst, made the comments on Press TV’s Tuesday edition of Spotlight after Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky appealed to a meeting of the Group of Seven (G7) for modern tanks, artillery, and long-range weapons.
The organization, which includes the UK, Germany, Italy, Canada, the United States, France, and Japan, pledged to “meet Ukraine’s urgent requirements” after Zelensky on Monday tabled a fresh request for modern tanks, artillery, and long-range weapons to counter Russia. In his remarks on Monday, British Defense Minister Ben Wallace expressed his readiness to supply Ukraine with longer-range missiles. US President Joe Biden also assured Zelensky on Sunday that Washington’s priority was to bolster his country’s air defenses.
One billion Euros from some 70 countries in immediate aid to help Ukraine get through a harsh winter.
Russians have a production capacity that according to Doctorow is much greater than the United States and its allies. “Russia is ahead and all of these pledges are virtually meaningless in terms of Ukrainian military prospects,” he said on the Press TV program. “The financial assistance from the United States and from Europe has been decisive in allowing the Ukrainian government to stand, to pay the salaries of its administrators, of its government and its pensioners and the rest of it but as regards military prospects that’s a wholly different situation and you cannot give what you do not have.”
Ukrainian officials were quoted by Reuters on Monday as saying that Russian artillery struck nearly 20 settlements near the eastern city of Bakhmut, and there was “massive shelling” of the southern city of Kherson, which was captured by Ukrainian troops last month. Separately, European Union countries agreed to top up a fund that has been used to pay for military support for Ukraine with another 2 billion euros ($2.1 billion) after it was largely depleted. Emphasizing that the ground conditions in Ukraine were expected to become more difficult from mid-December, Doctorow said what Russia is doing is a different war.
‘It is the war of attrition it is the destruction of the infrastructure in Ukraine which will have the effect of depopulating further the major cities because they become uninhabitable,” he remarked. Doctorow pointed out that Western countries are not able to continue the war in Ukraine without the support of the United States. “The Europeans all lined up like so many ducks following the United States into what is for them economic suicide because they were frightened by the exposure of their own military weakness before Russian strength,”
Russia launched the war on Ukraine in late February, following Kiev’s failure to implement the terms of the 2014 Minsk agreements and Moscow’s recognition of the breakaway regions of Donetsk and Luhansk. Since the outbreak of the war, the US and its European allies have imposed unprecedented waves of economic sanctions against Moscow while supplying large consignments of heavy weaponry to Kiev. Moscow has been critical of the weapons supplies to Kiev, warning that it will only prolong the war.
