Patrick Lawrence: What? Ukraine Is Not Winning the War?

Readers of the mainstream press are due some reeducation about the Ukraine-Russia war. From Patrick Lawrence at scheerpost.com:

The Narrative Turns. Now What?

Putin at a forum in Kazakhstan. Павел Бедняков, РИА «Новости», CC BY 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

“Putin’s Russia is closing in on a devastating victory. Europe’s foundations are trembling.” 

This was the headline atop a Dec.9 commentary in The Telegraph, the farthest right of the major London dailies. The subhead elaborated the theme in yet graver terms: “Kyiv’s counteroffensive has ended in failure. This could be NATO’s Suez moment.” The piece that followed included all sorts of goodies in this line.

It is not official, not yet, that Ukraine’s grand counteroffensive, the great Russophobic hope of the Zelensky and Biden regimes earlier this year, has proven a bust and that defeat is in the offing. The closest we have to such an admission came from Volodymyr Zelensky earlier this month, when the Ukrainian president declared that the counteroffensive “did not achieve the desired results.” I loved that moment, to be honest. It reminded me of Emperor Hirohito’s famous declaration on August 15, 1945, when he announced the surrender on Japanese radio. “The war,” he told his desperate subjects, “has not necessarily progressed to our advantage.” 

O.K., let’s leave Zelensky to Zelensky, Joe Biden to Joe Biden, and Antony Blinken to Antony Blinken. We can count news of failure unofficially official when mainstream media start dropping such news on their readers and viewers. The Telegraph, so far as I know, was the first big daily on either side of the Atlantic to make such blunt admissions. Others have already followed, if in gentler, more oblique language—in Zelensky-speak, this is to say. 

Continue reading

Leave a Reply