In a blistering salvo, Russia on Sunday accused the United States of careening deeper into the Ukraine quagmire, doubling down on a catastrophic path echoing the humiliating military fiascoes of Vietnam and Afghanistan.
The explosive broadside from Maria Zakharova, the Russian Foreign Ministry’s verbose spokesperson, came just a day after the U.S. House cleared a massive $95 billion assistance bundle for Ukraine. It also underwrote military aid to Israel and Taiwan, two other global flashpoints.
With her trademark bombast, Zakharova excoriated what she dubbed Washington’s “hybrid war” against Moscow. She claimed the White House wants to fight Russia “to the last Ukrainian” – even if it means enabling attacks inside Russia itself that imperil civilians.
“Washington’s ever-deeper immersion in its proxy war on Russia will culminate in a shameful, raucous debacle for America akin to its travails in Vietnam and Afghanistan,” Zakharova thundered ominously. She vowed an “resolute and uncompromising retaliation” from the Kremlin.
The seething rhetoric underscores the velevatingtensions as Russia’s President Vladimir Putin shows no signs of relenting in his bloody invasion of Ukraine. Despite modest territorial gains, Moscow has thus far fallen well short of the promised outright conquest.
In a striking parallel cited by Zakharova, over 58,000 U.S. troops perished in the two-decade Vietnam morass before the humiliating 1975 withdrawal after North Vietnam’s forces overthrew the American-backed regime in Saigon.
More recently in Afghanistan, the mutli-trillion-dollar, generation-spanning U.S. intervention likewise imploded in chaos and ignominy in 2021. As American and NATO troops beat an unceremonious retreat, the Taliban swiftly reclaimed power in Kabul just two decades after U.S. forces had toppled their draconian rule.
While Russia’s own Soviet invasion of Afghanistan from 1979-1989 proved equally disastrous, with over 14,000 Russian deaths, Moscow is now taunting the perceived folly of America’s bellicose policies anew.
Crucially, the new U.S. aid authorization opens the door for Washington to seize Russian assets worth potentially billions of dollars. Zakharova derided this as brazen “theft” lining American defense contractors’ pockets more than actually helping Ukraine’s military.
In a defiant stance certain to further inflame tensions, she predicted the White House has abandoned fantasies of a clear-cut Ukrainian military victory. Instead, Zakharova claimed, Washington is now maneuvering simply to keep Kyiv’s beleaguered forces in the field through the November 2024 U.S. presidential election in a desperation ploy.
Despite Russia’s scorching rhetoric, the U.S. has continued funneling crucial intelligence, training and heavy weaponry to Ukraine’s battling legions. These supplies have helped stymie Putin’s hopes for a lightning offensive to rapidly subjugate Ukraine and forced a grueling positional war of artillery duels and drone strikes.
Yet even as Russia consolidates control over around 18% of Ukrainian territory, Ukraine’s own vaunted counteroffensive of 2023 sputtered with minimal gains. Both sides now appear locked in a bloody stalemate indefinitely along a heavily fortified 1,000-kilometer front.
With diplomatic solutions remaining elusive, Ukraine faces the agonizing quandary of pursuing cherished goals of regaining all occupied lands at a staggering cost in blood and treasure – or eventually resigning itself to hard-nosed compromises accepting permanently ceding some areas to Russia.
As the superpowers remain intractably at loggerheads, fears are mounting of a potential catastrophic miscalculation that could trigger direct U.S.-Russia hostilities and a wider conflagration enveloping NATO allies. For now, the ruinous human toll only mounts relentlessly amid the stalemate with no clear path to a peaceful resolution in sight.
