Friday 14 July 2023

Biden says Putin has lost his war

Presumably based on the most up-to-date intelligence and analysis, President Biden has declared that Vladimir Putin has lost the war in Ukraine and that victory belongs to the western-backed Kyiv government. That sort of declaration always makes me nervous. Remember when President George W Bush declared "Mission Accomplished" after the Saddam Hussein army in Iraq had been defeated in 2003. A new terrible insurgency war subsequently emerged and lasted for another eight years. I don't suppose for one moment Putin believes he has lost the war in Ukraine, even though some of his generals are telling him most days that it really isn't going very well. I think Biden, like George Bush, is being premature. There's a lot of fighting left in the Russian armed forces, and a grim determination by their commander-in-chief to keep on and on until he has achieved his goal. He won't make it, that I agree with, but that doesn't mean he won't just carry on regardless. One reason is that as soon as a settlement is reached and the fighting stops, Zelensky is going to be banging on Nato's door every day until he gets a date for joining the alliance. Then Putin will truly have lost. So when Putin reads Biden's statement at a press conference in Finland that Russia has lost the war, I fear his reaction will be something like: "I'll show you who is losing the war, and it ain't me." So Biden may technically be right in the sense that Putin has totally failed to do what he thought he could do very quickly but I doubt he is in a frame of mind to give up on his ambitions. And if he is forced into a settlement he is probably going to be allowed to retain some of Ukraine's territory currently occupied by Russian troops because that's what compromise settlements are all about. And Zelesnky has said no way. So the war will go on.

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