From a report by Roland Oliphant (the Telegraph / Yahoo!News):
"Any Western politician suffering from Ukraine fatigue could learn a lot from Lieutenant Yulia Mykytenko.
“I know that I am tired. I’m really tired. I know that my people are also tired. A lot of them I took from assault units, so they are, like, extremely tired,” the 29-year-old philology graduate says.
“And we are also sort of ready for negotiations, but we are just asking that the West insists on our interests.”...
Sir Keir Starmer met US president Joe Biden, German chancellor Olaf Scholz and French president Emmanuel Macron to discuss the West’s response to the war in a meeting in Germany on Friday.
Their summit comes after Volodymyr Zelensky, the president of Ukraine, lobbied them to support a five-point “victory plan”...But it depends on massive commitments from the West. And the West does not seem impressed.
President Biden has already vetoed a request for long-range strike capabilities that is central to Mr Zelensky’s defence concept. There has been no serious progress on Nato membership, despite support from Britain and Poland.
Presidential candidate Kamala Harris has made no sign that she will deviate from Joe Biden’s policy of providing enough kit to keep Ukraine in the fight, but not enough to antagonise Russia into “escalating” the conflict.
Republican rival Donald Trump has made no secret of his wish to end the war quickly, and most suspect that means quickly cutting a deal with Russian president Vladimir Putin that suspends US aid to the Ukrainians.
Mr Zelensky met all three of them on a recent trip to the United States, and none have embraced his plan wholeheartedly.
So where does that leave the war – and the men and women fighting it?...
Asked if her expectations have changed, Lt Mykytenko remarks that early chances to win and end the war were squandered.
“I knew that the war wouldn’t end in a few weeks, and we wouldn’t be in Crimea in a few months, as our government used to say. I completely understood that. But I was hoping for much more help from the Western world,” she said.
“I was hoping to get F16s at the end of 2022. I was hoping to get Patriots and Abrams at the end of 2022, when we really needed them, when we had a really motivated army, when we had a lot of warriors who were ready to fight.”
If only, she muses, the West had sent enough help on time...
“Now we are being given a small amount of those weapons, and we are expected to use them the same as in 2022 but unfortunately, we won’t, because a lot of warriors are dead, missing and injured.”
“Our motivation, let’s be honest, is much lower than it was even one year ago. So yeah, we had a great chance to end it up to 2023, if we had got everything that we asked for, and now it’s almost impossible. We won’t recover the strengths which we had in 2022 for at least 10 years.”
In short, the victory which once seemed so close has slipped below the horizon.
And Ukraine has already been at war for a decade..."
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Let me remind any readers I have that the USA deliberately stabbed Ukraine in the back and sent its victory below the horizon because it does not want Russia to lose. And the once great American people seem to be OK with this.
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