(…) Instead of cringing in shame and living her life out at an honest job, perhaps scrubbing toilets at an old folks home, Nuland recently sat down with Politico to answer some burning questions—those that caught our attention centered around Ukraine.
What we found particularly interesting was that, amid all the political gobbledygook and fast-talking, Nuland refused to say that Ukraine can win the war with Russia.
Pretty telling stuff, eh?
The first relevant question from Politico went like this:
Can Ukraine win this war against Russia? And how do you define winning?
Here was Victoria’s cleverly crafted refusal to declare “victory” for Ukraine.
Let’s start with the fact that Putin has already failed in his objective. He wanted to flatten Ukraine. He wanted to ensure that they had no sovereignty, independence, agency, no democratic future — because a democratic Ukraine, a European Ukraine, is a threat to his model for Russia, among other things, and because it’s the first building block for his larger territorial ambitions.
Can Ukraine succeed? Absolutely. Can Ukraine come out of this more sovereign, more economically independent, stronger, more European than it is now? Absolutely. And I think it will. But we’ve got to stay with it. We’ve got to make sure our allies stay with it.
And we have to accelerate a lot of the initiatives that were in the supplemental, like helping Ukraine build that highly deterrent military force of the future, like deploying these longer-range weapons to strategic effect, like ensuring that the critical infrastructure and the energy sector are protected, like building up our own defense industrial base and that of our allies and Ukraine’s again, so that we and Ukraine are building faster than Russia and China.
When asked if Ukraine could reclaim territory, Nuland whipped out her smoke and mirrors and got back to work. The Politico piece continues:
It can definitely get to a place where it’s strong enough, I believe, and where Putin is stymied enough to go to the negotiating table from a position of strength. It’ll be up to the Ukrainian people what their territorial ambitions should be. But there are certain things that are existential.
Any deal that they cut in their interest and in the larger global interest has to be a deal that Putin is compelled to stick to. We can’t be doing this every six months, every three years. It has to actually lead to a deal that includes Russian withdrawal.
Putin is a master at what we call rope-a-dope negotiating, where he never actually cuts the deal. It has to be a deal that ensures that whatever is decided on Crimea, it can’t be remilitarized such that it’s a dagger at the heart of the center of Ukraine.
So much for the reconquest of Crimea and forcing a broken Putin beg Zelensky not to march on Moscow, eh?
When she was asked if it was a mistake not to push the Ukrainians harder to go for some sort of negotiated end to the war in 2022, especially the fall of 2022, Nuland once again tiptoed on a tightrope like a pro. The Politico piece continues:
They were not in a strong enough position then. They’re not in a strong enough position now. The only deal Putin would have cut then, the only deal that he would cut today, at least before he sees what happens in our election, is a deal in which he says, “What’s mine is mine and what’s yours is negotiable.” And that’s not sustainable.
Victoria knows Ukraine is toast, but she can’t say that out loud. (Read more: Revolver, 5/13/2024) (Archive)