NYT On Ukraine – Real Reporting, Propaganda For Balance, Ominous Warning

Guest Post by Moon of Alabama

Th New York Times is putting itself in a twist with its current reporting on the war in Ukraine.

Last month Ukraine was winning the war – at least in ‘western’ media. But this week the NYT‘s man on the ground reports the opposite:

Outnumbered and Worn Out, Ukrainians in East Brace for Russian Assault

Exhausted Ukrainian troops complain they are already outnumbered and outgunned, even before Russia has committed the bulk of its roughly 200,000 newly mobilized soldiers. And doctors at hospitals speak of mounting losses as they struggle to care for fighters with gruesome injuries.
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The first stages of the Russian offensive have already begun. Ukrainian troops say that Bakhmut, an eastern Ukrainian city that Russian forces have been trying to seize since the summer, is likely to fall soon. Elsewhere, Russian forces are advancing in small groups and probing the front lines looking for Ukrainian weaknesses.The efforts are already straining Ukraine’s military, which is worn out by nearly 12 months of heavy fighting.

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Losses among Ukrainian forces have been severe. Troops in a volunteer contingent called the Carpathian Sich, positioned near Nevske, said that some 30 fighters from their group had died in recent weeks, and soldiers said, only partly in jest, that just about everyone has a concussion.

“It’s winter and the positions are open; there’s nowhere to hide,” said a soldier from the unit with the call sign Rusin.

At one frontline hospital in the Donbas, the morgue was packed with the bodies of Ukrainian soldiers in white plastic bags. In another hospital, stretchers with wounded troops covered in gold foil thermal blankets crowded the corridors, and a steady stream of ambulances arrived from the front nearly all day long.

“We cannot let that defeatist piece stand alone,” said the editor and turned to the dimwits of the British Military Intelligence to get some ‘balance’:

Moscow’s forces are advancing only a few hundred meters a week, U.K. intelligence says.

As Russia makes slow, bloody gains in a renewed push to capture more of eastern Ukraine, it is pouring ever more conscripts and military supplies into the battle, Ukrainian officials say, although it remains far from clear that Moscow could mobilize enough forces to sustain a prolonged offensive.
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But Britain’s defense intelligence agency said on Tuesday that Russia had been trying to launch “major offensive operations” since early last month, with the aim of capturing the rest of the Donetsk region, which includes Bakhmut. But it had “only managed to gain several hundred meters of territory per week,” because of a lack of munitions and maneuver units, the agency said in its latest daily assessment of the war.“It remains unlikely that Russia can build up the forces needed to substantially affect the outcome of the war within the coming weeks,” the agency concluded.

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One wonder what ‘outcome of the war’ those folks are dreaming of.

The reports from the ground leave no doubt on who is winning. Even the op-ed pages of the NYT now acknowledge it:

The problem is that Ukraine is losing the war. Not, as far as we can tell, because its soldiers are fighting poorly or its people have lost heart, but because the war has settled into a World War I-style battle of attrition, complete with carefully dug trenches and relatively stable fronts.Such wars tend to be won — as indeed World War I was — by the side with the demographic and industrial resources to hold out longest. Russia has more than three times Ukraine’s population, an intact economy and superior military technology. At the same time, Russia has its own problems; until recently, a shortage of soldiers and the vulnerability of its arms depots to missile strikes have slowed its westward progress. Both sides have incentives to come to the negotiating table.

The last sentence is wrong. Russia has no incentive to negotiate now. It no longer has a shortage of soldiers and its ammunition points have been dispersed and camouflaged to protect them from Ukrainian HIMARS attacks. Russia keeps grinding the Ukrainian army into the ground and is ready to attack further.

But the piece then makes a correct point. The U.S. would not allow any negotiations:

The Biden administration has other plans. It is betting that by providing tanks it can improve Ukraine’s chances of winning the war. In a sense, the idea is to fast-forward history, from World War I’s battles of position to World War II’s battles of movement. It is a plausible strategy: Eighty years ago, the tanks of Hitler and Stalin revolutionized warfare not far from the territory being fought over today.But the Biden strategy has a bad name: escalation.
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With whom is Russia at war — Ukraine or the United States? Russia started the war between Russia and Ukraine. Who started the war between Russia and the United States?
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Many Americans cannot resist describing Mr. Putin as a “barbarian” and his invasion of Ukraine as a “war of aggression.” For their part Russians say this is a war in which Russia is fighting for its survival and against the United States in an unfair global order in which the United States enjoys unearned privileges.

We should not forget that, whatever values each side may bring to it, this war is not at heart a clash of values. It is a classic interstate war over territory and power, occurring at a border between empires. In this confrontation Mr. Putin and his Russia have fewer good options for backing down than American policymakers seem to realize, and more incentives to follow the United States all the way up the ladder of escalation.

That is indeed the case. Russia does not want to escalate. But when the U.S. does escalate, then Russia will do it too.

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