Unveiling Ukraine’s Dire Dilemma: The Narrative Shift from Hope to Hopelessness

by Jeff Childers

Consider yesterday’s noteworthy headline published in one of the corporate media’s crown jewels, the Washington Post:

 
Or worse. Consider the narrative implications of this long-form, straight news piece that essentially conceded there is no strategy for Ukraine to win the war. Nobody really knows how to rescue Ukraine from its current quagmire:

Ukrainian and Western officials view Zelensky as largely stuck. As Russia steps up airstrikes and once again advances on the battlefield in Ukraine more than two years into its bloody invasion, there is no end to the fighting in sight. The status quo is awful. With the fight now a grinding stalemate, Ukrainians are dying on the battlefield daily.

How long can Ukraine withstand being at war? An anonymous Ukrainian lawmaker said the country will not survive the status quo for another 10 years. Others, however, think the fight could go on even longer.

“No one will concede territory, but people understand that getting it back might take a long time,” Professor Mylovanov said. “What form can that take? Views differ here. A long war with eventually a victory? A sudden collapse in the Russian power structure? A successful counteroffensive? But that requires a very different type of support than what Ukraine has now.”

According to the Post, a diplomatic solution is not an option. This is evident madness to all sane people. So it appears the narrative crafters are setting up a new, pugnacious, blameable Zelensky character as a resolute impediment to any kind of diplomatic solution:

Negotiating with Russian President Vladimir Putin to end the war — something Zelensky has rejected as long as Russian troops remain on Ukrainian land — is politically toxic.  Zelensky has said Ukraine will accept nothing less than the return of all its territory, including land that Russia has controlled since 2014.

Zelensky will also have to live up to his own promise — which he restates regularly — of returning Ukraine to its 1991 borders, including Crimea.

“How will Zelensky get out of this situation? I have no idea,” said a Ukrainian lawmaker, who spoke anonymously like other sources for this article.

About ten minutes ago, bad Ukraine news was either embargoed or minimized. If it did make print, bad Ukraine news was always intended to pressure Congress to cough up more war bucks to save Ukraine before it’s too late. But this story was different, mostly because it was missing the part where they assure us that, if Ukraine just gets a couple hundred more billion, then it will drive the Russians back to Moscow.

The narrative seems to be shifting.

A couple days before that, on Wednesday Politico ran a similarly remarkable story headlined, “Ukraine is at great risk of its front lines collapsing.”

 
Once again, a story like this would have been intended to apply painful political pressure on Congress to whip out the taxpayers’ collective checkbook again. But behold the following paragraph from the story, which admitted that even the much-discussed billions can’t help Ukraine:

The sad truth is that even if the package is approved by the U.S. Congress, a massive resupply may not be enough to prevent a major battlefield upset. Essentially, everything now depends on where Russia will decide to target its strength in an offensive that’s expected to launch this summer.

And who said this? Not Biden or Blinken or Jake Sullivan. The sad truth that more money can no longer help Ukraine is, according to Politico, coming from high-ranking Ukrainian officers who are literally saying nothing can help us now:

According to high-ranking Ukrainian military officers … the military picture is grim. The officers said there’s a great risk of the front lines collapsing wherever Russian generals decide to focus their offensive.

“There’s nothing that can help Ukraine now because there are no serious technologies able to compensate Ukraine for the large mass of troops Russia is likely to hurl at us. We don’t have those technologies, and the West doesn’t have them as well in sufficient numbers,” one of the top-ranking military sources said.

The article began and ended with a goofy reference to Elon Musk, who has nothing whatsoever to do with the war except occasionally he tweets about it like the rest of us. According to Politico, Musk enraged squadrons of easily-offended Ukraine armchair warriors last week by tweeting, “if the war lasts long enough, Odesa will fall too.”

For a variety of good reasons, if Odessa falls, Ukraine is a dead duck. Although the article started by mocking Musk’s tweet, take a look at the article’s final words of concession:

… So, Musk may not be too wide of the mark after all.

Haha, they couldn’t bring themselves to just say “Musk could be right.”

Again, U.S. and NATO war planners continue publicly insisting Ukraine is right on the brink of a definitive victory; if only stingy, nitpicky Congressmen could get off their butts and quit whining about the United States’ border problem for five minutes, then warplanners can turn this whole thing around, they promise. “Not one inch,” Biden always says.

But now, high level Ukrainian military officers are saying that no amount of money can win the war. To whom should we listen? Ukrainians who are actually doing the day to day fighting? Or NATO war planners, sitting safely in their leather chairs far from the front lines in Washington and Brussels?

But wait. There’s more.

This week we got an odiferous whiff of shambolic Biden Administration desperation, if not an outright sign the Administration is at risk of completely collapsing. Let’s begin with the Yemenese Houthis, who are currently a thorn in Joe Biden’s side, because their scrappy desert fighting forces have effectively bottled up cargo ships in the Red Sea:

 
Following a few months of relentless U.S. military air and sea attacks against Houthi targets, absolutely nothing has changed.  Yesterday the Biden Administration appeared to throw in the towel and, whereas there’s no way in Hades we’ll ever negotiate with that rascal Putin since the Ukrainians would rather die first, but when it comes to desert terrorists, Biden called for diplomacy:

 
Most corporate media sources reported this week that the Biden Administration — communicating through the papers — offered the Houthis a bribe, I mean an olive branch: removing them from the designated terrorist list. Bloomberg:

 
The Bloomberg article set the table pretty well:

The comments suggest Washington is once more leaning on diplomacy after a nearly three-month-long campaign of airstrikes against Houthi facilities in Yemen. Those have failed to stop the group’s missile and drone attacks against merchant vessels and warships, though the US says it has managed to degrade the Houthis’ military capabilities.

“My hope is that we can find diplomatic off-ramps,” Tim Lenderking, President Joe Biden’s special envoy for Yemen, told reporters in an online press briefing on Wednesday. “To find ways to deescalate and allow us to pull back, eventually, the designation and of course to end the military strikes on Houthis’ military capability.”

So, in Ukraine, we must fight to the last Ukrainian. No diplomacy. Never! But in Yemen, after a short three-month try — only airstrikes, no troops — America is prepared to cave, offering to bribe the terrorists by removing their terrorist label even though they are terrorists.

In other words, it’s a “quid pro quo,” which you’ll recall was an impeachable offense when Trump did it, but is now supposed to be masterful leadership or something:

Asked by Bloomberg News after the briefing if the US was offering the Houthis a quid pro quo to end their attacks on ships in return for revoking the designation, Lenderking said: “We would certainly study that but not assume it’s an automatic thing.”

It is a humiliating defeat for the increasingly-desperate Biden, not least because he began his term in office by revoking Trump’s original declaration that the Houthis were terrorists. It was one of the very first things Biden did in February of 2021:

 
In other words, Biden is a moron. The Houthis were so grateful to Biden they repaid his unsolicited generosity by terrorizing the Red Sea and attacking U.S. warships with cheap underwater drones. In January, a frustrated Team Biden jammed the Houthis back on the terror list, presumably as punishment for jamming up the Red Sea:

 
But the Houthis apparently found this re-labeling especially humorous, and responded by increasing their water-drone attacks:

 
Lest we lose the thread, Biden’s much ballyhooed “Operation Prosperity Guardian” has failed. A bunch of wild Arabs in motorboats have defeated the U.S. Navy and Air Force, or at least held them to a standstill.

 
So now, three months after re-designating the Houthis as a terror group — which Trump had already done four years ago until Biden flipped it — now Biden is offering to re-un-designate the Houthis, or however you say it.

Joe Biden fails at everything he does, except failing. He’s wildly successful at failing.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for diplomacy. But all this flip-flopping, shilly-shallying, political back-and-forth-ism, one day you’re a terrorist and the next day you’re not, not only looks disorganized, reactive, and desperate, but it fails to withstand even meagre analysis that someone like Joe, well maybe not Joe, but even someone like Tony Blinken should be able to perform.

Explain this: Biden is sending a message to all terrorists that, hey, if you’re successful enough as a terrorist then we will reward you and pretend you’re not a terrorist.

How does that possibly makes sense? What is Biden’s foreign policy? Is it encouraging terrorism? I wish that sometime, one of the White House reporters would ask Karine whatshername to explain his “foreign policy.” Is it on the website somewhere?

Biden lost Afghanistan. Biden lost against the Houthis. Biden lost the sanctions war against Russia. Biden’s losing Ukraine. The best we can say is Joe Biden is not a winner. “Winning is overrated,” he’d be likely to quip, if he could quip anymore.

But Biden and his Administration got even more disorganized, reactive, and desperate this week.

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