A statement of the obvious, perhaps, but one that is still not generally accepted in the U.S. and Europe. From Ted Snider at antiwar.com:
Ukraine has lost the war. That is not fake news from social media. It is not propaganda from Russian media. It is what follows deductively from statements made by the commander-in-chief of the Ukrainian armed forces, General Valery Zaluzhny, in a November 1 interview with The Economist.
In that interview, Zaluzhny assesses that “we have reached . . . stalemate.” As for Ukraine’s chances of emerging from that stalemate victorious, his prognosis is that “There will most likely be no deep and beautiful breakthrough.”
An admission of a stalemate is not an admission of defeat. But a stalemate entails a long war of attrition. And in a long war, according to The Economist, Zaluzhny “acknowledges [that] Russia has the advantage.” “There is no question in General Zaluzhny’s mind,” The Economist reports, “that a long war favors Russia.” Zaluzhny says that “The biggest risk of an attritional trench war is that it can drag on for years and wear down the Ukrainian state . . .. sooner or later we are going to find that we simply don’t have enough people to fight.” A close aide to Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky told Time magazine, in an interview published the same day, that even if the United States gave Ukraine all the weapons it needed, they “don’t have the men to use them.”
From those statements it follows that Ukraine has lost the war. The war has reached a stalemate. A stalemate entails a long war of attrition. A long war of attrition favors Russia because Ukraine will run out of men.
