Andrew Korybko
One of their leading foreign affairs commentators
argued that an infliction point has already supposedly been reached whereby
Russia’s strategic defeat is predestined, but upon scrutinizing the claims that
they presented in support of that conclusion, it’s clear that this isn’t the
case at all
CNN recently published an
article by Brett McGurk, who was the Biden Administration’s National Security
Council Coordinator on the Middle East-North Africa, declaring that “Russia
is losing in Ukraine. Xi has noticed — Trump should too”. The gist is that
shifting on-the-ground dynamics, speculative casualty counts, and Ukrainian
deep strikes inside Russia have already predestined Russia’s “strategic
defeat”. Xi is thus supposedly biding his time on Taiwan and Trump should put
more pressure on Putin.
In the order that McGurk made
his case, the on-the-ground dynamics first shifted after Russia’s pullback from
Kiev shortly after the special operation began
as part of the British-
and Polish-sabotaged Istanbul peace process, so there’s nothing new in
principle about the battlelines moving back and forth. As for his second point,
neither side’s estimates of their own and the other’s casualty counts should be
taken at face value as is the case in any conflict, nor should their respective
partners’ tallies be either.
And finally, Ukraine’s deep strikes inside Russia are a predictable outcome of this protracted conflict after Ukraine received unprecedented levels of military-technical, logistics, and intelligence support from NATO, thus making the gradual evolution of its respective capabilities unsurprising. Taken together, his claim that “Russia is losing in Ukraine” is premised on giving the arguments that he made the benefit of the doubt, which will only be done by those whose preexisting assumptions were confirmed by his piece.




















