America is bleeding Ukraine to death

 From the Atlantic:

"The Abandonment of Ukraine

The American strategy in Ukraine is slowly bleeding the nation, and its people, to death.

By Karl Marlantes and Elliot Ackerman 

On a recent trip to Ukraine, we walked through the rubble of a children’s hospital in Kyiv targeted by the Russians, toured an apartment building in Kharkiv where floor after floor had been destroyed by Russian missiles, and visited the front lines to meet with soldiers who spoke of the brutality of Russian human-wave tactics. But the most unsettling thing we saw was the American strategy in Ukraine, one that gives the Ukrainian people just enough military aid not to lose their war but not enough to win it. This strategy is slowly bleeding Ukraine, and its people, to death.

...We have a combined 60-year breadth of combat experience between us, including Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan. The horrors of war are not unfamiliar to us. Yet both of us felt deeply disturbed as we finished our trip.

In Kharkiv, we met with a group of Ukrainian combat veterans. Before the war, Victoria Honcharuk, a 24-year-old medic, lived in the United States, where she’d been accepted to a graduate program at Harvard while working in New York City in investment banking. When war broke out in February 2022, she left that life behind and returned home to defend her country. Her unit of medics, composed entirely of volunteers, draws no pay. Approximately half of the friends she began service with have been killed or wounded... When a member of our group observed that Ukraine’s future would involve young people, like her, leading and rebuilding her country, she paused and politely reminded us that they could rebuild it only if they survived...

Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has spent a great deal of time pleading with his allies for weapons and permission to use them to their full capabilities. But his administration is now pleading simply for the delivery of weapons that have already been pledged. Currently, these delays are the result of U.S. Department of Defense protocols that affect the drawdown rates of U.S. stockpiles... Ironically, we keep our weapons in reserve for a crisis exactly like the one playing out in Ukraine. We must make those weapons available to those who would use them in our shared defense.

The war in Ukraine is at risk of being lost—not because the Russians are winning but because Ukraine’s allies have not allowed them to win. If we encourage the Ukrainians to fight while failing to give them the tools they need for victory, history will surely conclude that the Russians weren’t the only ones who committed crimes against Ukraine."

***

Let me just remind readers that back in 1994, the USA and the UK pressured Ukraine into disarming, promising to defend it in return - the Budapest Memorandum.