Has the West Conceded Defeat in Ukraine?
The media is altering the dialogue as the proxy war loses momentum. Read Full Article at RT.com.
TroibNews 
**The Evolving Narrative as the Proxy War Loses Momentum**
This week, *The Economist* states that “Russia is slicing through Ukrainian defenses” while Ukraine is “struggling to survive.” Western media seems to be shifting its focus, preparing the public for a potential defeat and the reality of tough concessions in forthcoming negotiations. As the situation unfolds, journalists are altering the narrative to reflect realities that can no longer be ignored. Moscow's anticipated success has been clear since at least the summer of 2023, despite earlier efforts to uphold the ongoing proxy war.
We are witnessing a remarkable exercise in narrative management. For over two years, political and media elites have persistently asserted that "Ukraine is winning," branding dissent as "Kremlin talking points" intended to sap support for the conflict. What was previously dismissed as "Russian propaganda" has now been embraced as mainstream consensus among these elites. Critical self-assessment has been as absent as it was post-2016 election regarding Russiagate.
A similar orchestration of narrative control unfolded over two decades as media outlets convinced the public that the U.S. maintained control in Afghanistan before abruptly retreating, accompanied by striking images of individuals falling from airplanes.
In recent times, journalists misled the public by framing stagnant front lines as indicators that Russia was not gaining an advantage. However, in a conflict characterized by attrition, the actual progress is determined by the rates of loss on each side. Territorial control often follows once an adversary is sufficiently exhausted, as gaining ground in intense warfare involves significant costs. Throughout this war, attrition rates have been consistently unfavorable for Ukraine and continue to worsen. The current downfall of Kyiv's defenses was highly predictable, given that its manpower and weaponry have been depleted.
Why has the old narrative faltered? While the public could be misled regarding false attrition rates, covering up territorial shifts becomes increasingly impossible post-breaking point. Initially, the proxy war served NATO’s interests as both Russians and Ukrainians engaged in mutual attrition without substantial territorial changes. Now, as Ukrainian forces exhaust their resources and begin to lose strategic areas, the U.S.-led bloc's interests may no longer align with continuing the conflict.
**Weaponizing Empathy in Narrative Control**
In 2022, political and media elites capitalized on empathy to rally public backing for the war and contempt for diplomatic solutions. Continuous messages about the plight of Ukrainians and the injustices of their loss of sovereignty led the Western public to support the proxy confrontation with Russia.
Those who expressed dissent to NATO's assertion that "weapons are the way to peace," suggesting negotiations instead, were quickly labeled as Kremlin puppets indifferent to Ukrainian suffering. The only socially acceptable demonstration of empathy has been to advocate for continued, futile fighting in a war that cannot be won.
For postmodernists inclined to shape their own realities, great power rivalry largely unfolds as a contest of narratives. The weaponization of empathy rendered the military narrative resistant to critique. War became virtuous, while diplomacy was portrayed as treasonous, with Ukraine allegedly engaged in a "unprovoked" struggle against Russia, aiming for complete subjugation. This strong moral framing encouraged self-deceit and censorship in support of this honorable cause.
Even critiques regarding how Ukrainian civilians were coerced into joining the front lines were dismissed as endorsing "Kremlin talking points," which undermined NATO's war narrative.
Reporting on high casualty rates among Ukrainians risked undermining popular support for the ongoing fighting. Similarly, revelations regarding the failure of sanctions could diminish public approval for those measures. Reports highlighting the U.S.'s role in damaging the Nord Stream pipeline threatened to create fractures within NATO, while discussions of U.S. and U.K. interference with the Minsk agreements and Istanbul negotiations challenged the narrative of the West's altruistic support for Ukraine. The public was presented with a binary choice: either align with the pro-Ukraine/NATO stance or the pro-Russia viewpoint. Those who challenged this binarism with inconvenient facts were easily labeled as supporters of Moscow. Observations that Russia was gaining the upper hand were often simplistically interpreted as siding with its interests.
Numerous facts and statements indicate that NATO's efforts have essentially involved fighting until the last Ukrainian in order to weaken a strategic rival. However, adherence to the established narrative has prohibited any discussion of such evidence.
**Proxy War Objectives: Weaken the Adversary**
The insistence on loyalty to the prevailing narrative conceals the reality that U.S. foreign policy emphasizes restoring global dominance rather than genuinely committing to liberal democratic ideals. The United States views Ukraine as a crucial tool for eroding Russia's status as a strategic competitor.
In 2019, the RAND Corporation, a think tank with U.S. government ties, released a report outlining how the U.S. could draw Russia deeper into Ukraine to weaken it. The report suggested that increased military support for Kyiv might compel Russia to intensify its direct involvement in the conflict.
“Providing more US military equipment and advice could lead Russia to increase its direct involvement in the conflict and the price it pays for it… While NATO’s requirement for unanimity makes it unlikely that Ukraine could gain membership in the foreseeable future, Washington pushing this possibility could boost Ukrainian resolve while leading Russia to redouble its efforts to forestall such a development.”
The same RAND report warned that this strategy of bleeding Russia needed careful calibration, as escalation could result in Russia seizing strategic territories—counterproductive to U.S. interests. After Russia initiated military actions in February 2022, the approach shifted to prolonging the conflict so long as significant territorial changes were avoided.
In March 2022, Leon Panetta acknowledged, “We are engaged in a conflict here, it’s a proxy war with Russia, whether we say so or not… The way you get leverage is by, frankly, going in and killing Russians.” Even President Zelensky recognized that some Western nations preferred a prolonged war to exhaust Russia, even at the cost of Ukrainian lives.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin laid out the proxy war's objective to diminish Russia's capabilities:
“We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine… So it [Russia] has already lost a lot of military capability. And a lot of its troops, quite frankly. And we want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability.”
There have also been indications that regime change in Russia could be a broader war aim. U.S. and U.K. government sources suggested in March 2022 that the goal was to prolong the conflict to “bleed Putin,” as “the only end game now is the end of Putin's regime.” U.S. President Joe Biden remarked it was necessary that “this man cannot remain in power.” The White House later moderated these incendiary comments.
A spokesperson for then-U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson explicitly mentioned regime change, stating, “the measures we’re introducing, that large parts of the world are introducing, are to bring down the Putin regime.” U.K. Armed Forces Minister James Heappey articulated in the *Daily Telegraph* the objective of ensuring “his failure must be complete; Ukrainian sovereignty must be restored, and the Russian people empowered to see how little he cares for them.”
**'Fighting to the Last Ukrainian'**
Chas Freeman, a former U.S. assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, criticized Washington’s approach of letting Ukrainians bear the brunt of the fight.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham hinted at a favorable arrangement for the U.S.: “I like the structural path we’re on here. As long as we help Ukraine with the weapons they need and the economic support, they will fight to the last person.” Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell urged caution against conflating idealism with the hard realities of U.S. interests in the proxy war:
“President Zelensky is an inspiring leader. But the most basic reasons for continuing to help Ukraine degrade and defeat the Russian invaders are cold, hard, practical American interests. Helping equip our friends in Eastern Europe to win this war is also a direct investment in reducing Vladimir Putin’s future capabilities to menace America, threaten our allies, and contest our core interests… Finally, we all know that Ukraine’s fight to retake its territory is neither the beginning nor end of the West’s broader strategic competition with Putin’s Russia.”
Senator Mitt Romney claimed that arming Ukraine is “diminishing and devastating the Russian military for a very small amount of money… a weakened Russia is a good thing,” noting that there have been “no lives lost in Ukraine” for the U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal asserted that “we’re getting our money’s worth on our Ukraine investment” because “for less than 3 percent of our nation’s military budget, we’ve enabled Ukraine to degrade Russia’s military strength by half… All without a single American servicewoman or man injured or lost.” Congressman Dan Crenshaw echoed this sentiment, stating that “investing in the destruction of our adversary’s military, without losing a single American troop, strikes me as a good idea.”
Retired General Keith Kellogg argued in March 2023 that “if you can defeat a strategic adversary not using any U.S. troops, you are at the acme of professionalism.” He elaborated that employing Ukrainians to combat Russia “takes a strategic adversary off the table,” allowing the U.S. to focus on its “primary adversary which is China.” Former NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg remarked that defeating Russia and utilizing Ukraine as a barrier against it could facilitate U.S. strategic focus on China, suggesting that “if Ukraine wins, then you will have the second biggest army in Europe, the Ukrainian army, battle-hardened, on our side, and we’ll have a weakened Russian army, and we have also now Europe really stepping up for defense spending.”
**The Quest for a New Narrative**
As NATO-supported Ukraine faces the harsh reality that it cannot realistically defeat Russia on the battlefield, a new narrative must be crafted. One possibility is to assert that Russia has failed in its aims to annex all of Ukraine for recreating the Soviet Union as well as conquering Europe. This narrative would enable NATO to claim victory despite the setbacks faced by Ukraine.
After Ukraine's challenging summer counteroffensive in 2023, David Ignatius of the *Washington Post* suggested that the true measure of success was the weakening of Russia:
“Meanwhile, for the United States and its NATO allies, these 18 months of war have been a strategic windfall, at relatively low cost. The West’s most reckless antagonist has been rocked. NATO has grown much stronger with the additions of Sweden and Finland. Germany has weaned itself from dependence on Russian energy and, in many ways, rediscovered its sense of values. NATO squabbles make headlines, but overall, this has been a triumphal summer for the alliance.”
Sean Bell, a former Royal Air Force air vice marshal, noted in September 2023 that the conflict has considerably degraded Russia's military capacity to the extent that it “no longer poses a credible threat to Europe.” Consequently, he concluded, “the Western objective of this conflict has been achieved,” recognizing that “the harsh reality is that Ukraine’s objectives are no longer aligned with their backers.”
As Ukraine becomes increasingly exhausted, the proxy war may reach its conclusion unless NATO opts for direct confrontation with Russia. With NATO poised to reassess its losses, a new narrative will soon emerge, allowing calls for negotiations under the guise of empathy for Ukraine.
This piece was originally published on Glenn Diesen’s Substack and edited by the RTN team.
Ramin Sohrabi for TROIB News
This week, *The Economist* states that “Russia is slicing through Ukrainian defenses” while Ukraine is “struggling to survive.” Western media seems to be shifting its focus, preparing the public for a potential defeat and the reality of tough concessions in forthcoming negotiations. As the situation unfolds, journalists are altering the narrative to reflect realities that can no longer be ignored. Moscow's anticipated success has been clear since at least the summer of 2023, despite earlier efforts to uphold the ongoing proxy war.
We are witnessing a remarkable exercise in narrative management. For over two years, political and media elites have persistently asserted that "Ukraine is winning," branding dissent as "Kremlin talking points" intended to sap support for the conflict. What was previously dismissed as "Russian propaganda" has now been embraced as mainstream consensus among these elites. Critical self-assessment has been as absent as it was post-2016 election regarding Russiagate.
A similar orchestration of narrative control unfolded over two decades as media outlets convinced the public that the U.S. maintained control in Afghanistan before abruptly retreating, accompanied by striking images of individuals falling from airplanes.
In recent times, journalists misled the public by framing stagnant front lines as indicators that Russia was not gaining an advantage. However, in a conflict characterized by attrition, the actual progress is determined by the rates of loss on each side. Territorial control often follows once an adversary is sufficiently exhausted, as gaining ground in intense warfare involves significant costs. Throughout this war, attrition rates have been consistently unfavorable for Ukraine and continue to worsen. The current downfall of Kyiv's defenses was highly predictable, given that its manpower and weaponry have been depleted.
Why has the old narrative faltered? While the public could be misled regarding false attrition rates, covering up territorial shifts becomes increasingly impossible post-breaking point. Initially, the proxy war served NATO’s interests as both Russians and Ukrainians engaged in mutual attrition without substantial territorial changes. Now, as Ukrainian forces exhaust their resources and begin to lose strategic areas, the U.S.-led bloc's interests may no longer align with continuing the conflict.
**Weaponizing Empathy in Narrative Control**
In 2022, political and media elites capitalized on empathy to rally public backing for the war and contempt for diplomatic solutions. Continuous messages about the plight of Ukrainians and the injustices of their loss of sovereignty led the Western public to support the proxy confrontation with Russia.
Those who expressed dissent to NATO's assertion that "weapons are the way to peace," suggesting negotiations instead, were quickly labeled as Kremlin puppets indifferent to Ukrainian suffering. The only socially acceptable demonstration of empathy has been to advocate for continued, futile fighting in a war that cannot be won.
For postmodernists inclined to shape their own realities, great power rivalry largely unfolds as a contest of narratives. The weaponization of empathy rendered the military narrative resistant to critique. War became virtuous, while diplomacy was portrayed as treasonous, with Ukraine allegedly engaged in a "unprovoked" struggle against Russia, aiming for complete subjugation. This strong moral framing encouraged self-deceit and censorship in support of this honorable cause.
Even critiques regarding how Ukrainian civilians were coerced into joining the front lines were dismissed as endorsing "Kremlin talking points," which undermined NATO's war narrative.
Reporting on high casualty rates among Ukrainians risked undermining popular support for the ongoing fighting. Similarly, revelations regarding the failure of sanctions could diminish public approval for those measures. Reports highlighting the U.S.'s role in damaging the Nord Stream pipeline threatened to create fractures within NATO, while discussions of U.S. and U.K. interference with the Minsk agreements and Istanbul negotiations challenged the narrative of the West's altruistic support for Ukraine. The public was presented with a binary choice: either align with the pro-Ukraine/NATO stance or the pro-Russia viewpoint. Those who challenged this binarism with inconvenient facts were easily labeled as supporters of Moscow. Observations that Russia was gaining the upper hand were often simplistically interpreted as siding with its interests.
Numerous facts and statements indicate that NATO's efforts have essentially involved fighting until the last Ukrainian in order to weaken a strategic rival. However, adherence to the established narrative has prohibited any discussion of such evidence.
**Proxy War Objectives: Weaken the Adversary**
The insistence on loyalty to the prevailing narrative conceals the reality that U.S. foreign policy emphasizes restoring global dominance rather than genuinely committing to liberal democratic ideals. The United States views Ukraine as a crucial tool for eroding Russia's status as a strategic competitor.
In 2019, the RAND Corporation, a think tank with U.S. government ties, released a report outlining how the U.S. could draw Russia deeper into Ukraine to weaken it. The report suggested that increased military support for Kyiv might compel Russia to intensify its direct involvement in the conflict.
“Providing more US military equipment and advice could lead Russia to increase its direct involvement in the conflict and the price it pays for it… While NATO’s requirement for unanimity makes it unlikely that Ukraine could gain membership in the foreseeable future, Washington pushing this possibility could boost Ukrainian resolve while leading Russia to redouble its efforts to forestall such a development.”
The same RAND report warned that this strategy of bleeding Russia needed careful calibration, as escalation could result in Russia seizing strategic territories—counterproductive to U.S. interests. After Russia initiated military actions in February 2022, the approach shifted to prolonging the conflict so long as significant territorial changes were avoided.
In March 2022, Leon Panetta acknowledged, “We are engaged in a conflict here, it’s a proxy war with Russia, whether we say so or not… The way you get leverage is by, frankly, going in and killing Russians.” Even President Zelensky recognized that some Western nations preferred a prolonged war to exhaust Russia, even at the cost of Ukrainian lives.
U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin laid out the proxy war's objective to diminish Russia's capabilities:
“We want to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine… So it [Russia] has already lost a lot of military capability. And a lot of its troops, quite frankly. And we want to see them not have the capability to very quickly reproduce that capability.”
There have also been indications that regime change in Russia could be a broader war aim. U.S. and U.K. government sources suggested in March 2022 that the goal was to prolong the conflict to “bleed Putin,” as “the only end game now is the end of Putin's regime.” U.S. President Joe Biden remarked it was necessary that “this man cannot remain in power.” The White House later moderated these incendiary comments.
A spokesperson for then-U.K. Prime Minister Boris Johnson explicitly mentioned regime change, stating, “the measures we’re introducing, that large parts of the world are introducing, are to bring down the Putin regime.” U.K. Armed Forces Minister James Heappey articulated in the *Daily Telegraph* the objective of ensuring “his failure must be complete; Ukrainian sovereignty must be restored, and the Russian people empowered to see how little he cares for them.”
**'Fighting to the Last Ukrainian'**
Chas Freeman, a former U.S. assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, criticized Washington’s approach of letting Ukrainians bear the brunt of the fight.
Republican Senator Lindsey Graham hinted at a favorable arrangement for the U.S.: “I like the structural path we’re on here. As long as we help Ukraine with the weapons they need and the economic support, they will fight to the last person.” Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell urged caution against conflating idealism with the hard realities of U.S. interests in the proxy war:
“President Zelensky is an inspiring leader. But the most basic reasons for continuing to help Ukraine degrade and defeat the Russian invaders are cold, hard, practical American interests. Helping equip our friends in Eastern Europe to win this war is also a direct investment in reducing Vladimir Putin’s future capabilities to menace America, threaten our allies, and contest our core interests… Finally, we all know that Ukraine’s fight to retake its territory is neither the beginning nor end of the West’s broader strategic competition with Putin’s Russia.”
Senator Mitt Romney claimed that arming Ukraine is “diminishing and devastating the Russian military for a very small amount of money… a weakened Russia is a good thing,” noting that there have been “no lives lost in Ukraine” for the U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal asserted that “we’re getting our money’s worth on our Ukraine investment” because “for less than 3 percent of our nation’s military budget, we’ve enabled Ukraine to degrade Russia’s military strength by half… All without a single American servicewoman or man injured or lost.” Congressman Dan Crenshaw echoed this sentiment, stating that “investing in the destruction of our adversary’s military, without losing a single American troop, strikes me as a good idea.”
Retired General Keith Kellogg argued in March 2023 that “if you can defeat a strategic adversary not using any U.S. troops, you are at the acme of professionalism.” He elaborated that employing Ukrainians to combat Russia “takes a strategic adversary off the table,” allowing the U.S. to focus on its “primary adversary which is China.” Former NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg remarked that defeating Russia and utilizing Ukraine as a barrier against it could facilitate U.S. strategic focus on China, suggesting that “if Ukraine wins, then you will have the second biggest army in Europe, the Ukrainian army, battle-hardened, on our side, and we’ll have a weakened Russian army, and we have also now Europe really stepping up for defense spending.”
**The Quest for a New Narrative**
As NATO-supported Ukraine faces the harsh reality that it cannot realistically defeat Russia on the battlefield, a new narrative must be crafted. One possibility is to assert that Russia has failed in its aims to annex all of Ukraine for recreating the Soviet Union as well as conquering Europe. This narrative would enable NATO to claim victory despite the setbacks faced by Ukraine.
After Ukraine's challenging summer counteroffensive in 2023, David Ignatius of the *Washington Post* suggested that the true measure of success was the weakening of Russia:
“Meanwhile, for the United States and its NATO allies, these 18 months of war have been a strategic windfall, at relatively low cost. The West’s most reckless antagonist has been rocked. NATO has grown much stronger with the additions of Sweden and Finland. Germany has weaned itself from dependence on Russian energy and, in many ways, rediscovered its sense of values. NATO squabbles make headlines, but overall, this has been a triumphal summer for the alliance.”
Sean Bell, a former Royal Air Force air vice marshal, noted in September 2023 that the conflict has considerably degraded Russia's military capacity to the extent that it “no longer poses a credible threat to Europe.” Consequently, he concluded, “the Western objective of this conflict has been achieved,” recognizing that “the harsh reality is that Ukraine’s objectives are no longer aligned with their backers.”
As Ukraine becomes increasingly exhausted, the proxy war may reach its conclusion unless NATO opts for direct confrontation with Russia. With NATO poised to reassess its losses, a new narrative will soon emerge, allowing calls for negotiations under the guise of empathy for Ukraine.
This piece was originally published on Glenn Diesen’s Substack and edited by the RTN team.
Ramin Sohrabi for TROIB News
