Ukrainian Official Wants Clarity from West: What Does 'For As Long As it Takes' Mean?
At some point, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will have to either negotiate or watch his entire country fall to the Russians
The U.S. will support Ukraine “for as long as it takes,” has been the kneejerk response from any official from the Biden administration when asked how long Washington will continue to fund Kyiv’s losing war effort.
Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, noted in July that Western promoters of the war love to make vague comments about how long their support for Ukraine will last.
“They never answer the question—‘it takes’… to do what? It is one thing to end the military campaign like they ended it in Afghanistan or in Iraq,” Lavrov said.
Now, after the failed counteroffensive and weakening Western support, Ukrainian officials are beginning to seek some clarification.
Aleksey Danilov, secretary of the Ukrainian National Security and Defense Council, said in an interview Friday that Washington continues to say “for as long as it takes” but have never stated clearly that a Ukrainian victory is required.
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“No one can clearly answer us what our victory means,” he said, according to RT, the Russian news outlet.
“They tell us: ‘We will support you until’… and then I have never heard them say the word ‘victory.’ They say, ‘Until you choose to make decisions yourself.’”
President Joe Biden famously said in February—during the one-year mark of the war—that the U.S. is fully committed to the war and the support will not stop.
Biden met with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kyiv at the time and then visited Warsaw, where he told the crowd that “brutality will never grind down the will of a free Ukraine. Ukraine will never be a victory for Russia. Never.”
The U.S. and NATO allies have been pumping Ukraine’s military with a historic amount of weapons. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, a former Raytheon board member, told reporters early in the war that it is his hope “to see Russia weakened to the degree that it can’t do the kinds of things that it has done in invading Ukraine.”
But the RT report noted that John Kirby, the White House National Security Council spokesman, said earlier this week that the Pentagon could only prop up Kyiv’s war effort for “a few weeks” without a new funding bill.
An alleged top source told Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh that the White House already knows that Ukraine has lost its war against Russia despite reports indicating that its forces have made recent small gains in their counteroffensive.