Russia is accomplishing it’s objectives in eastern Ukraine, but it will have to cope with large U.S. arms shipments to Ukraine in the western part of the country. The U.S. can’t adapt to Russia’s game because it doesn’t know what it is. From Scott Ritter at unz.com:
NATO has raised the stakes by flooding Ukraine with heavy weaponry and trying to prolong the conflict, says Scott Ritter, a military analyst and former US Marine intelligence officer.
Sputnik: In a recent interviews with Sputnik you said that if Russia is “able to achieve some sort of demonstrable battlefield victory of such a large scale that the inevitable defeat of Ukraine is played before the European community, that would put a damper on the provision of weaponry [by the West] in a futile exercise.” Could the surrender of Ukrainian military, National Guard and neo-Nazis in Azovstal be considered this sort of victory?
Scott Ritter: It’s an impressive victory. It’s an important victory. It’s a strategic victory, but it’s not the victory over Western weaponry that I was speaking of. It was a static victory, achieved after driving defenders underground. That was the latter half of the battle. It wasn’t a battle against Ukrainian forces that had been trained and equipped, especially, with this new wave of military assistance. Now that battle is taking place. I think with what we’re seeing in Donbass we see the potential formation of several cauldrons that have the potential of surrounding many thousands of Ukrainian troops. That’s the victory I think that could turn the tide in terms of shaping or influencing opinion in Europe and elsewhere.
STRAIGHT LINE LOGIC 