Coalition countries are giving Kyiv money that helps prolong a losing war while saddling the suffering country with enormous debt

Foreign-policy advisers close to the president-elect put forth different versions of a plan to effectively freeze the front line

The media is changing the narrative as the proxy war is running out of steam

The White House admits that its $61 billion proxy war infusion failed, while handing Zelensky a new humiliation.

For over two and a half years, a semi-proxy war has been raging in Ukraine. In a proxy war, two powers avoid direct conflict by fighting through weaker intermediary partners. The Russia-Ukraine war is a semi-proxy war because one power, Russia, is directly involved, while the other power, the U.S. and its Western partners, fights through the Ukrainian intermediary. Ukraine was in a position to attain its goals in the first weeks of the war when it initialed the draft treaty in Istanbul. Since then, when the U.S. discouraged those talks and promised Ukraine all the military support it needs for as long as it needs it, Ukraine has been fighting as a Western proxy in pursuit of U.S. goals, including maintaining U.S. hegemony and asserting NATO’s right to expand wherever it pleases.

Below are a number of New York Times headlines which represent the propaganda narrative about Ukraine as it has changed over time.

Pessimism pervades Kyiv and Washington about Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine as President Volodymr Zelensky tries to steer his country through the war’s third winter.

I will try not to repeat the well-known demonstrations – wilfully ignored in certain official circles – that the tragic conflict between Ukraine and Russia was completely avoidable had the Western Alliance not fostered and organized a coalition of revisionist militant forces within Ukraine and in Eastern Europe committed to an openly anti-Russian agenda. So many scholarly and talented experts and public figures have argued that thesis, from John Mearsheimer to Sahra Wagenknecht and from Emmanuel Todd to Robert F Kennedy Jr., but by looking at European history, we can notice precedents that show a geopolitical pattern into which the current protracted war finds its place.

I started listening to George Beebe a few years ago when he was warning about tensions in Ukraine, the real risk of escalation to nuclear war and the dangers of groupthink. Back in 2021 he assessed that Russia was likely to invade Ukraine given the combination of the US’s determination to bring the country into NATO and the fact that it was a “now-or-never moment” for Moscow to stop this happening. Years earlier, US Ambassador to Moscow, and now CIA director, William Burns had urgently cabled Washington to warn that the Russians regarded Ukraine as ‘the reddest of red lines’:

Russia seized most Ukrainian land last week of the year so far. Poll shows more Ukrainians now favor peace talks with Russia.