Kyiv’s carefully cultivated image of military invincibility is running up against harsh battlefield realities.

Talk of NATO as past its sell-by date began thirty years ago, with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of NATO’s fifty-year adversary, the Warsaw Pact. Strong U.S. advocates of the western alliance agreed with the summary view of the late republican Senator Richard Lugar: NATO—”Out of area or out of business”. And NATO did, indeed, move decisively “out of area”: Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq and Syria are a far cry from the north Atlantic, and few if any of these posed an immediate threat to NATO’s historic territory.

In this month’s update, New Cold War’s regular contributor and analyst Dmitriy Kovalevich describes what has been happening on the ground in Ukraine throughout May. In his comprehensive account, based on reports including those from the Ukrainian media, Kovalevich clearly demonstrates how the western establishment’s narrative differs strikingly from the reality and why Zelensky is now saying that, despite bellicose statements from countries like Great Britain and Canada, the conflict can only end through diplomacy.

Positions in the Donbass have moved from perilous to precarious and retreat now looks massively risky for Ukraine

While everyone’s focused on the latest mass shooting in the US, The Washington Post published what may be the first major acknowledgement from the mainstream western media that Ukraine’s war against Russia has not been nearly the cakewalk they’ve been leading the public to believe.

To update my May 10th article “Tentative Conclusions on Bucha: A Small My Lai”, a French aide worker and former French marine, Adrien Boucquet, who was in Bucha in March for some three weeks, has given an interview to french media.

Henry Kissinger and Noam Chomsky, longtime political enemies, have found rare common ground over the Russia-Ukraine war.

Outside the U.S. and Europe, countries tend to see Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a regional conflict, not a global crisis.

The Western narrative that Russia is facing defeat at the hands of the Ukrainian military is falling apart. The contrived narrative that Ukraine was “winning” made Kiev delusional which in turn created conditions for Washington and London to extend the war and incrementally enter into it laterally and turn it into a war of attrition against Russia.

There have been several calls for Ukraine to give up territory to Russia in the last week and get a quick peace, starting with French President Emmanuel Macron, then an op-ed in the NYT “The War in Ukraine Is Getting Complicated, and America Isn’t Ready”, published on May 19, and now Henry Kissinger speaking at Davos yesterday.