Here is most of Bernard's report at Moon of Alabama .
The Times signals that it is all over bar the shouting and that the Nazi War Criminal , Zelensky is broken and will soon be gone .
The Time piece is a signal. It announces the end of Zelenski's regime. I am sure that the National Security Council, as well as the State Department, is feverishly looking for an alternative - and for a face saving way to install it.
Nobody Believes in Our Victory Like I Do.’ Inside Volodymyr Zelensky’s Struggle to Keep Ukraine in the Fight - Time - Oct. 30, 2023
“He deludes himself,” one of his closest aides tells me in frustration. “We’re out of options. We’re not winning. But try telling him that.”
Napoleon, Hitler and several other folks who had sought war with Russia, had to learn to never underestimate the depth of its resources. Now NATO, the U.S. and its European proxies, are learning that lesson.
Zelenski still hasn't. He won't concede:
The Times signals that it is all over bar the shouting and that the Nazi War Criminal , Zelensky is broken and will soon be gone .
The Time piece is a signal. It announces the end of Zelenski's regime. I am sure that the National Security Council, as well as the State Department, is feverishly looking for an alternative - and for a face saving way to install it.
Nobody Believes in Our Victory Like I Do.’ Inside Volodymyr Zelensky’s Struggle to Keep Ukraine in the Fight - Time - Oct. 30, 2023
Quoting a soldier on the front of the counter-offensive, the Economist agrees:That offensive has proceeded at an excruciating pace and with enormous losses, making it ever more difficult for Zelensky to convince partners that victory is around the corner. With the outbreak of war in Israel, even keeping the world’s attention on Ukraine has become a major challenge.
Still, Zelenski is urging them on:"Left Handed", an infantryman fighting at the front between Robotyne and Verbove, says Ukrainian losses have increased to alarming levels, in part due to the work of drones. The plains of Zaporizhia have turned their back on life, he says. “It’s hellish. Corpses, the smell of corpses, death, blood and fear. Not a whiff of life, just the stench of death.” Those in units such as his own had more chance of dying than surviving. “Seventy-thirty. Some don’t even see their first battle.”
“He deludes himself,” one of his closest aides tells me in frustration. “We’re out of options. We’re not winning. But try telling him that.”
Zelenski's people put the blame everywhere but on the those who have caused the mess.The war is lost. They know it. But they are unwilling to give up.
Napoleon, Hitler and several other folks who had sought war with Russia, had to learn to never underestimate the depth of its resources. Now NATO, the U.S. and its European proxies, are learning that lesson.
Zelenski still hasn't. He won't concede:
The Ukraine's old problems, foremost corruption, persist:The cold will also make military advances more difficult, locking down the front lines at least until the spring. But Zelensky has refused to accept that. “Freezing the war, to me, means losing it,” he says. Before the winter sets in, his aides warned me to expect major changes in their military strategy and a major shake-up in the President’s team. At least one minister would need to be fired, along with a senior general in charge of the counteroffensive, they said, to ensure accountability for Ukraine’s slow progress at the front. “We’re not moving forward,” says one of Zelensky’s close aides. Some front-line commanders, he continues, have begun refusing orders to advance, even when they came directly from the office of the President.“They just want to sit in the trenches and hold the line,” he says. “But we can’t win a war that way.”
When I raised these claims with a senior military officer, he said that some commanders have little choice in second-guessing orders from the top. At one point in early October, he said, the political leadership in Kyiv demanded an operation to “retake” the city of Horlivka, a strategic outpost in eastern Ukraine that the Russians have held and fiercely defended for nearly a decade. The answer came back in the form of a question: With what? “They don’t have the men or the weapons,” says the officer. “Where are the weapons? Where is the artillery? Where are the new recruits?”
In some branches of the military, the shortage of personnel has become even more dire than the deficit in arms and ammunition. One of Zelensky’s close aides tells me that even if the U.S. and its allies come through with all the weapons they have pledged, “we don’t have the men to use them.”
Since the start of the invasion, Ukraine has refused to release official counts of dead and wounded. But according to U.S. and European estimates, the toll has long surpassed 100,000 on each side of the war. It has eroded the ranks of Ukraine’s armed forces so badly that draft offices have been forced to call up ever older personnel, raising the average age of a soldier in Ukraine to around 43 years. “They’re grown men now, and they aren’t that healthy to begin with,” says the close aide to Zelensky. “This is Ukraine. Not Scandinavia.”
Knowing that the ship is sinking, this its probably what I would do too. Bring anything available onto my personal life raft and prepare for cutting its lines to the mother ship.Amid all the pressure to root out corruption, I assumed, perhaps naively, that officials in Ukraine would think twice before taking a bribe or pocketing state funds. But when I made this point to a top presidential adviser in early October, he asked me to turn off my audio recorder so he could speak more freely. “Simon, you’re mistaken,” he says. “People are stealing like there’s no tomorrow.”