Russia might fight a forever war because it would grind Ukraine into dust. The U.S. would fight a forever war because its contractors would get even richer. From Branko Marcetic at responsiblestatecraft.com:
Now that Kyiv’s counteroffensive is foundering, goal posts in the timing for talks and a ceasefire are quietly being moved.
A forever war seems to be brewing in Ukraine.
Last week, I argued that given the failure of Kyiv’s summer offensive to reclaim significant territory from Russia and given the maximalist rhetoric that the U.S. government and NATO allies had been using since last year to sell the public on open-ended military support, the war in Ukraine was in danger of being prolonged again, well past the date that the Biden administration had appeared to set last year.
This increasingly looks to be the case. On Saturday, the Financial Timesreported that “U.S. officials are privately girding for what increasingly looks like a war of attrition that will last well into next year,” echoing an earlier Wall Street Journal report that “military strategists and policymakers across the West are already starting to think about next year’s spring offensive” and about “how to prepare for a protracted conflict.”
It may well become “a protracted struggle that lasts several more years,” the Journal warned on Sunday, noting that Ukraine’s goal of retaking all the territory it lost now “appears a distant prospect.”
Writing in POLITICO, former Democratic congressman and Obama administration State Department official Tom Malinowski — now a senior fellow at the McCain Institute — argues that “for the war in Ukraine to end on terms consistent with American interests and ideals, Ukraine must be seen to have won, and Russia’s invasion must go down in history as a decisive failure.”
In particular, Malinowski points to President Joe Biden’s declaration in February this year that “Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia — never.”
On Aug. 10, an unnamed senior official told CNN that “we don’t know how much longer this war is going to go on,” but that the White House “won’t be bashful about going back to Congress beyond the first quarter of next year if we feel like we need to do that.”
