Journalist Elsa Vidal claims governments deliberately withheld crucial weapons from Ukraine, fearing Russia’s collapse post-defeat. She implicates RAND Corp and criticizes the costly middle-ground approach, urging a shift towards aiming for victory, echoed by experts and officials in Eastern Europe.
Journalist Elsa Vidal claims governments deliberately withheld crucial weapons from Ukraine, fearing Russia’s collapse post-defeat. She implicates RAND Corp and criticizes the costly middle-ground approach, urging a shift towards aiming for victory, echoed by experts and officials in Eastern Europe.
byu/PjeterPannos inUkraineWarVideoReport
by PjeterPannos
21 comments
Although I don’t fully follow her argumentation, this is a relevant point.
There is no “middle ground” during a war, this approach can only be taken once the war is “won” and RF has vacated Ukrainian territory.
The free world / NATO has to go “all-in” by providing all required conventional weapon systems, training, funding and political support for Ukraine to vacate RF from Ukrainian territory and dissuade any future attempts of invasion by Russia.
NATO needs to establish a decisive “red line” that any use of WMDs by RF inside Ukrainian territory will be treated as reason to activate article 5, base for this could be the declarations by the US and UK concerning the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant Crisis in 2022 (wikpedia [link](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Atlantic_Treaty#Threatened_invocations)).
This is very obvious to anyone who understands why Western leaders kept Russia from collapsing in 1991.
Im glad all these people are starting to say the quiet part out loud, because Ukraine cannot say it. Even though they have known it since a few months after the war started. Zelenskyy continues to be gracious for everything he is sent.
Underneath, it must be frustrating as hell to know these politicians are smiling and basking in their benevolent reputation, while giving half a piece of bread. Just enough to keep Ukrainians alive, but not enough to stave off the hunger pains, weakness, and sickness that comes from being malnourished.
The instant any Ukrainian says this out loud, funding dries up completely. You can see people’s frustration in the commenta section on UA news sites. The citizens see it happening, they dont stay quiet.
Its taken waaay too long for this message to be spoken though. Better late than never, as there is still a chance to turn this around for a victory this year.
Foreign news outlets and commentators need to speak up more, and be the voice that Ukraine isn’t allowed to use, if they want to continue fighting.
Let‘s not act like Russia is only still existing by the West‘s mercy.
It shows a wrong and condescending attitude, this assumption that one could easily turn tides in Ukraine. One can not.
One could have perhaps in the beginning of the war (and partially did), but now Russia has adapted and things got worse.
Let‘s act to not make it worse still.
Knowing how much they have been working world wide to make every conflict as sour and contested as possible, the constant propaganda that is there to seed discontent, hatred, antivax, anti science propaganda, so many invaded countries and these fuckheads are pulling the same shit like with Saddam. That ended so well didn’t it?
this is BS, she is most likely writing a book over this proofless idea and wants to promote it and for sure herself…What sense would it make to already spend billions of euro’s/dollars just to aim for a loss (negotiations and loss of a big chunck of Ukraine being a loss as well). Typicall French Parisian bourgeois who has a unquenchable thurst to feel ‘important’…
I would not rule it out that there are corporate interests that would like the war to go on for as long as possible so they can keep getting large contracts.
I mean if the Russian frontline collapse and they get driven out of Ukraine, and peace is signed, will all these big defense increases that’s been planned in many western countries still happen?
I completely agree that Ukraine did not receive what it needed sooner.
What I have to disagree is the notion that if Ukraine kicked out Russia from it’s territory, the war would end. It would only mean different frontline.
TRANSLATION :
We decided to help Ukaine and the kind of help that we gave to Ukraine couldn’t have produced a different situation such as the one that we are embroiled in today.
And it’s precisely because we aimed to give a kind of military help to Ukraine that wouldn’t assure a decisive victory for Ukraine because we were scared of a potential collapse of Russia that today we are not facing a ukrainian defeat but we are instead facing an absence of victory, a victory that at the same time we expected.
The western elites that, today, are criticizing Ukraine for this absence of victory are revealing the length of their cynicism because at the same time they deliberately choose to delay the shipping of weapons to Ukraine.
Earlier in the war, in the United States, the think-thank RAND Corporation pushed for this kind of strategy, no victory for Ukraine but no defeat either.
But such strategy creates a situation in which the support of Europe to Ukraine can only decrease.
The second point is that Ukraine’s Western partners have never said at any moment of the counteroffensive : We are going to support you no matter the result of the counteroffensive and no matter the time that it takes to win.
This is why we have seen President Zelensky pursuing military goals that are costly in human lives and in military ressources while Zaluzhnyi wanted to adopt a more defensive strategy.
But this was made possible just after Ursula Von Der Leyen and Olaf Scholz formalized that they were going to support Ukraine <<until the end>>.
Before that we only supported Ukraine when the Ukrainians gave us victories on the battlefield.
Now we are improving our political position and this position needs to be clearer and clearer.
Our declarations also need to be followed by actions otherwise we won’t be able to criticise Ukraine for not winning a war in which WE ARE THE DECISIVE FACTOR driving Ukraine’s victory.
And we now need to ask ourselves if we want a Ukrainian victory, not Ukrainian resistance but a decisive Ukrainian victory.
It is puzzling, even irrational, to assume that russia would act irrationally and want to “go out in a nuclear blaze of glory” if indeed russia “collapsed”. No such event(s) happened after the collapse of the USSR. It is just as irrational to assume any new ‘emerging’ nations, such as Chechnya or Dagestan for instance, would suddenly be ruled be ‘madmen’ who would then launch nuclear strikes against France, the UK or US or any other country. Even if they had these weapons. The notion that russia would revert to a ‘suicidal nuclear blaze of glory’ in the event of its “collapse” is completely baseless. Regardless of soloviev’s rants on RT broadcasts. But certainly in the Kremlin’s interest to have others believe the ‘nuclear blaze of glory’ is even a remote possibility.
She told exactly the opposite few months ago in front of Piotr Tolstoi (about the dotation of leopard mbts).
Those people are clowns. While they speak on tv, people are dying.
Anstatt noch einige Jahre Tausende von Menschen zu töten, sollte man dafür sorgen, das Putin aufgibt, mit allen Mitteln !
Also warum noch warten ?
If Russia doesn’t collapse, NATO and EU will collapse. China will invade Taiwan and it will be the beginning of the end of America.How did such spineless politicians come to power so unitedly?
Who would have thought that letting politicians fight wars would not work so well? If only we had historical examples.
I’ll say it for the thousandth time…100% in or 100% out. There is no middle ground. A bulk of this war could have been over by now if the support was REAL.
C dans l’air is a *consistently* excellent platform.
Just allowing western weapons to be used on Russian soil would make a huge difference by itself. Allowing ukraine to take out targets before they get in the air would have likely saved billions of dollars already.
Why would they fear the collapse of ruZzia? It’s just a lie and an excuse to stall this war to profit as much as possible from it by the blood of Ukrainians & orcs, on both sides.
Or is there a theory it will be the equal to the aftermath of WW1/WW2 Germany, to that I can say a certain **no**, why? Because they don’t have the same capability, and their adversaries would most definitely destroy them, and they know that.
Russia collapsing is a bad thing and must be dealt with (later), but Russia waging an open war on Europe and the collective West, and pumping everything in its war economy is better how exactly?
Imagine the Allies taking this approach in WW2.
In Europe, to avoid ‘escalation’, the bombing Germany and it’s allies not allowed, troops in the western europe theatre after D-Day, expected to stop at the Rhine, and in the East, USSR forces similarly expected to stop at the 1939 border with Poland.
In the Pacific, a similar situation, the Battle of Okinawa would not have happened, or for that matter, Iwo Jima.
It would have been considered ludicrous then, so why is Ukraine being expected to ‘be nice’ and fight back with one hand tied behind its back?
She is absolutely correct : the West needs to clearly define its objectives and not blame Ukraine for not winning the counteroffensive.
It is the West that decides how strong the support of Ukraine is and it was a huge mistake to limit the delivery of weapons from the beginning of the invasion. The fall of Ukraine will mean NATO ( and American boots ) in Europe, just like during WWI and WWII and that would be hugely costly in terms of lost lives and perhaps could even spell the end of the world as we know it because of the Nuke threat.
My thoughts when this started in Feb 22 and that Russian convoy was heading down the road towards Kyiv was this needs to be Russia’s Basra Highway of Death moment. No holding back, no mercy, no quarter given. A bloody nose delivered so devastatingly that Putin’s Orcs would have been running back to Belarus and Russia so fast their feet would hardly have touched the ground, those that survived, that is. And the Putin regime would have likely not survived the backlash.
Instead the West dithered, hundreds of thousands are dead. Putin is stronger than ever, and the West’s commitment is weakening thanks to Russian hybrid warfare.
Republicans blocking more aid to Ukraine are supporting a Kremlin’s agenda that will do them no favours down the line. They really should spend a few minutes studying Russian State media for a better insight into what the future hold for the US if Russia should win. China is watching. Iran is watching. North Korea is watching. Putin must be defeated not only because he threatens Ukraine, but also because he threatens the world order on which US prosperity and security, and that of its allies, is based.