Biden: Putin Already Lost in Ukraine, No Chance of Winning
Biden’s administration has been presenting Russia’s invasion as a disastrous miscalculation by the Kremlin
President Joe Biden repeated his administration’s oft-repeated claim that somehow Russia has already lost the war in Ukraine — despite Moscow controlling 20 percent of the country and Biden himself admitting that the U.S. is running low on ammunition.
Biden was visiting Finnish President Sauli Niinisto in Helsinki that Russian President Vladimir Putin has "already lost the war" and that there is no chance of him ever winning.
Biden’s comments are not new, and his administration has been presenting Russia’s invasion into Ukraine as a disastrous miscalculation by the Kremlin since February 2022.
Most famously, Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who sent a shockwave through Washington when he said in October that Ukraine may want to consider peace negotiations because Kyiv accomplished everything that it could have hoped for against such a larger adversary, and that now may be its last, best chance to negotiate.
“We’ve seen the Ukrainian military fight the Russian military to a standstill. Now, what the future holds is not known with any degree of certainty, but we think there are some possibilities here for some diplomatic solutions,” he said in an interview with CNBC.
He changed his tune a short while later, and told reporters that Russia “lost strategically, they’ve lost operationally and, I repeat, they’ve lost tactically. What they’ve tried to do, they’ve failed at. The strategic reframing of their objectives, of their illegal invasion, have all failed, every single one of them.”
Biden is not the only world leader to say Russia has lost.
German Chancellor Olaf Scholz declared in November that Putin can “no longer win on the battlefield, that much seems clear.”
“That’s why my appeal to Putin remains: stop the senseless killing, withdraw your troops completely from Ukraine and agree to peace talks with Ukraine,” Scholz said.
The Kremlin has long said Russia will achieve all of its goals in its war.
Biden, during his visit to Finland, revisited the NATO issue for Ukraine and said no country could join the alliance while engaged in a war, but said the door will be open for Ukraine at a later time.
The U.S. president told reporters that he smoothed things out with Zelensky, who has been critical of the alliance for dancing around the membership question. He said Zelensky “ended up being very happy.”
Finland is the alliance’s newest member.
Finland shares an expansive, 830-mile border with Russia and was invaded by its neighbor during WWII, which resulted in a brutal confrontation that ultimately resulted in Helsinki and Moscow signing a peace treaty in 1948, which included Finland’s assurances that it will not join NATO. The mood shifted in the country after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Finland has a formidable military although it only has a population of 5.5 million. The country has about the same number of reservists as Germany with a population of 83 million.
“Finland is one of the very few European countries that never stopped preparing for a potential war,” Minna Alander, a research fellow at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, told VOA News.
Charly Salonius-Pasternak, senior researcher at the Finnish Institute of International Affairs, told the Associated Press that Biden’s trip to the country was the first time a sitting U.S. president came to Finland to honor the country itself and not for a summit with Russian leaders.
.“It’s a kind of deterrence messaging that only the United States can do,” he said.
Jewish Corruption in Ukraine . . . by Andrew Joyce, Ph.D.
❝. . . the present conflict is a huge distraction from the fact that, for decades, the biggest threat to Ukraine hasn’t been Russia, but financiers and speculators operating with impunity within Ukraine’s borders to exploit ethnic Ukrainians and plunder their resources.❞
https://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/2023/02/17/jewish-corruption-in-ukraine/
With formerly neutral Finland having recently joined NATO, it seems that the West is preparing to make the Russians fight a two-front war. Why would Finland be so reckless as to risk winding up like Ukraine?