The US strategy is both cynical and simple: Grind up Russia's military in a war of attrition in Ukraine. Whether Ukraine wins or loses, the US is on track to achieve the strategic objective of neutering the Russian army as an offensive force against Europe.
As for the infrastructure attacks, one must remember the history of Ukraine and R…
The US strategy is both cynical and simple: Grind up Russia's military in a war of attrition in Ukraine. Whether Ukraine wins or loses, the US is on track to achieve the strategic objective of neutering the Russian army as an offensive force against Europe.
As for the infrastructure attacks, one must remember the history of Ukraine and Russia--it's not a friendly history at all. Ukraine tried to exit the Russian Empire in 1918, only for the Bolsheviks to reconquer them during the Russian Civil War in 1922. Stalin inflicted the Holodomor on the Ukrainian people in the 1930s--a brutal and barbaric famine which the West largely tried to overlook even as it was happening (The New York Times won a Pulitzer for denying the famine was occurring). The 1980s saw the devastation of Chernobyl inflicted on Ukraine by Russian corruption.
On top of that, Putin's own ethnonationlist essay from July of 2021 made his views on Ukraine quite clear: Ukraine only has a right to exist as a satellite of Muscovite Russia, and the Ukrainian people only have a right to exist as a subject population under the domination of Muscovite Russians.
If the Ukrainians are viewing the infrastructure attacks through that historical lens, then the attacks make Ukrainian surrender or even acquiescence to Russian occupation of the Donbass an impossibility. Regardless of the other geopolitical forces in play, for the Ukrainians, the calculus is simple: if they stop fighting, they cease to exist. Terror tactics such as what Putin has attempted do not work against such a mindset, because he's already eliminated the potential middle ground that would make surrender possible.
The US strategy is both cynical and simple: Grind up Russia's military in a war of attrition in Ukraine. Whether Ukraine wins or loses, the US is on track to achieve the strategic objective of neutering the Russian army as an offensive force against Europe.
As for the infrastructure attacks, one must remember the history of Ukraine and Russia--it's not a friendly history at all. Ukraine tried to exit the Russian Empire in 1918, only for the Bolsheviks to reconquer them during the Russian Civil War in 1922. Stalin inflicted the Holodomor on the Ukrainian people in the 1930s--a brutal and barbaric famine which the West largely tried to overlook even as it was happening (The New York Times won a Pulitzer for denying the famine was occurring). The 1980s saw the devastation of Chernobyl inflicted on Ukraine by Russian corruption.
On top of that, Putin's own ethnonationlist essay from July of 2021 made his views on Ukraine quite clear: Ukraine only has a right to exist as a satellite of Muscovite Russia, and the Ukrainian people only have a right to exist as a subject population under the domination of Muscovite Russians.
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/66181
If the Ukrainians are viewing the infrastructure attacks through that historical lens, then the attacks make Ukrainian surrender or even acquiescence to Russian occupation of the Donbass an impossibility. Regardless of the other geopolitical forces in play, for the Ukrainians, the calculus is simple: if they stop fighting, they cease to exist. Terror tactics such as what Putin has attempted do not work against such a mindset, because he's already eliminated the potential middle ground that would make surrender possible.