There's clearly been a Ukraine war narrative shift among media and pundits in the West, as we've been covering, but for the first time this week President Zelensky himself has admitted that "fatigue" is setting in more broadly amid the war effort. This is leading Western advisers and military strategists to float 'solutions' toward winding down the conflict:
According to Teona Lavrelashvili, an analyst at the European Politics Centre, they could signal that several allies are ready for a "pragmatic solution" to the end of the war,.
But Kyiv will be "worried but not panicking" by the growing sense that some traditional allies have "fallen out of step", said Sean Hanley, an associate professor in Comparative Central and East European Politics at University College London.
To recount, just over the last several days Ukraine aid was dropped from the stop-gap budget bill in US Congress, Poland declared it would cease arming Kiev amid the row over grain imports, a Moscow-friendly politician has been elected to lead Slovakia, and most recently Britain's military has said it's run out of vital arms to give Kiev.
All of this has led Zelensky to admit "There is fatigue" - but he pivoted quickly to citing a "slowly" progressing counteroffensive.
He told an Italian broadcaster in a fresh interview, "There is fatigue but we will do everything to win against our enemy, and our counter-offensive goes ahead, even if slowly we do everything to repel the enemy." And on the billions in future US aid held up and potentially canceled:
He said Ukraine felt support from the United States in "these very difficult times" and was convinced this would be the case in the future despite the delay in the approval of US financial aid due to the political bickering in Washington, DC.
But there's no evidence of any "progressing" Ukraine offensive. For example the The Economist documented that "Ukraine has liberated less than 0.25% of the territory that Russia occupied in June." The establishment publication noted, "The 1,000km front line has barely shifted."
And on whether the supply of Western advanced arms has made a difference, The New York Times recently observed that in first two weeks of the counteroffensive "as much as 20% of the weaponry Ukraine sent to the battlefield was damaged or destroyed, according to US and European officials."
Sign of the times: neocon pivot to "it's all about China"...
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