President Zelensky holds his annual press conference in Kyiv on Tuesday amid mounting concern over the future of western military aid and Ukraine’s ability to hold back a renewed Russian offensive.
It comes after a Ukrainian general said troops along the entire front line were facing ammunition shortages and had been forced to downsize some operations because of a decrease in foreign assistance.
“The volumes we have are not sufficient, given our needs,” General Tarnavskyi said on Monday.
As they stood shivering on the streets of Kupyansk, just eight kilometres from the Russian front line, Dave and Justin Smith worried that the war they’d come to Ukraine to fight is slowly being lost.
Not because the two Canadians have any doubts about the bravery or the commitment of the Ukrainians they fight alongside, but because they feel the West is becoming distracted and losing interest in the grinding conflict here.
Ukraine has warned it is already being forced to downsize some military operations because of a drop-off in foreign aid.
Top general Oleksandr Tarnavskyi said troops faced ammunition shortages along the “entire front line”, creating a “big problem” for Kyiv.
It comes as billions of dollars of US and EU aid have been held up amid political wrangles.
Ukraine said it hoped to boost its own ammunition industry with western help.
Russia’s red button is in the hands of God
During a service this autumn, Patriarch Kirill of Moscow wished a happy birthday to one of his congregants in the Church of Christ the Saviour. It was no ordinary salutation. Radii Il’kaev, who had just turned 85, was a nuclear physicist who had worked for much of his life in the secretive town of Sarov, the birthplace of the Soviet atomic bomb. Long before it became a centre of nuclear defence, the town had been home to a monastery where one of Russia’s most popular saints — Serafim — had lived and prayed.
Vladimir Putin says more than 600,000 Russian soldiers are in Ukraine, almost twice the number he started the war with. His “freeloading” adversary will soon run out of Western support. And in a sign of his growing confidence at his traditional end-of-year press conference, he insists that Ukraine’s forces have “failed everywhere” in their counter-offensive. But as the snow starts to fill trenches at the end of a second year of fighting he initially expected to be over in days, is he right?
Ukraine faces dwindling reserves of ammunition, personnel and Western support. The counteroffensive it launched six months ago has failed. Moscow, once awash in recriminations over a disastrous invasion, is celebrating its capacity to sustain a drawn-out war.
The war in Ukraine has reached a critical moment, as months of brutal fighting have left Moscow more confident and Kyiv unsure of its prospects.
Tens of thousands of Ukrainians who fled the war in their homeland for safety in Canada under a temporary visa program are pressing Ottawa to allow them to settle here permanently.
When Russia invaded Ukraine in February, 2022, the Canadian government swiftly enacted the Canada-Ukraine authorization for emergency travel (CUAET), allowing an unlimited number of Ukrainians fleeing the war to work, study and stay in Canada for up to three years.
I have zero problem with this however it will almost certainly be used as a precedent by the sleazebag Trudeau government to import Hamas supporters by the tens of thousands and that has to be stopped. The usual suspects are already whining that Hamas supporters are victims of a racist Canada that does not treat them like the normal Ukraine refugees.
The Ukrainian president is facing calls for regime change
Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Western public has been sold the story of a Ukrainian front united in its unwavering commitment to a total military victory over Russia. Over the past few weeks, however, this narrative has started to crumble.
The Biden administration’s persistent failure to provide Ukraine with the military supplies it requires poses a serious danger of gifting victory to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
From Abrams tanks to F-16 fighters, US President Joe Biden has constantly dithered over providing Ukraine with the equipment upgrades its forces desperately need if they are to succeed in defending themselves against Russian aggression.
Without vital US military support there is a real danger Ukraine could end up losing this war – not immediately but in the longer term.
President Volodymyr Zelensky is in Washington to spell that out, hoping that he can persuade Congress to pass a $60bn aid package that has stalled amid a row over US border security.
On Sunday, Ukraine’s first lady, Olena Zelenska, warned Ukraine is in mortal danger without continuing American support.
Ukraine has released images which appear to show the dead body of a former MP whom it allegedly assassinated in Moscow, in a warning to other Russian collaborators.
Illia Kyva, a pro-Kremlin opposition politician who fled to Russia after it invaded Ukraine in February 2022, was shot dead on 6 December by a Ukrainian assassin.
With the Ukraine conflict languishing in stalemate, the possibility that Russian president Vladimir Putin might yet emerge victorious from his ill-judged invasion cannot be ignored, with all the implications such an outcome would have for Europe’s security.
Ukraine’s failure to make a decisive breakthrough in its counter-offensive during the summer has all but silenced the optimistic predictions made by Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and his senior commanders that victory was within Kyiv’s grasp. Instead, the Ukrainian narrative is in danger of descending into recriminations over the refusal of its Western allies to provide Kyiv with the weaponry required to break the impasse on the battlefield. As the Ukrainian leader remarked in a recent interview, “We didn’t get all the weapons we wanted, I can’t be satisfied.”
The Kremlin’s spy chief Sergei Naryshkin warned the U.S. that Ukraine will turn into its “second Vietnam,” amid disagreement in Congress over funding for Kyiv.
“Ukraine will turn into a ‘black hole’ absorbing more and more resources and people,” Russian foreign intelligence chief Naryshkin said Thursday in a written statement published by his agency’s house journal, the Intelligence Operative.
“Ultimately, the U.S. risks creating a ‘second Vietnam’ for itself, and every new American administration will have to deal with it,” he added.
A German research body that tracks donations to Ukraine says the value of pledges fell almost 90 per cent between Autumn 2022 and 2023, with levels dwindling since this Summer, around the time of Kyiv’s ‘Spring Offensive’.
Politics is not so much about getting things done, as it is about whom to blame when those things go wrong.
The Biden administration chose to tether a limited Israel military resupply package to a huge one for Ukraine. The goal here was to put Republicans on the wrong side of the Israel debate and then, in the wake of the bad news from Ukraine’s offensive, to blame them for the loss of the war.
