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https://twitter.com/shashj/status/1744828316685652129

The Washington Post has an excerpt from Yarislov Trofimov’s forthcoming book on Russia’s genocidal re-invasion of Ukraine: (emphasis mine)

Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, was flying home on a Turkish Airlines plane from New York when Russia invaded. He had just been welcomed into the White House by President Biden. It felt like he had been diagnosed with Stage 4 cancer, he thought. The warm handshakes, the empathetic smiles were meant to be final farewells — for him, and for his country.

In Washington, and in most European capitals, no one expected Ukraine to survive in February 2022. The CIA director, William J. Burns, had secretly flown to Kyiv at Biden’s request, warning Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky that Russia was planning to assassinate him.

“They spoke about the physical liquidation of our leadership, about the creation of filtration and concentration camps,” said Zelensky’s national security adviser, Oleksiy Danilov. “But what could we do? We kept asking: give us weapons. But they didn’t really give weapons to us.”

As the United States shut down its embassy in Kyiv ahead of the invasion, it did ship some weapons to great fanfare, such as Javelin antitank missiles. But the quantity was puny: only about 90 Javelins, according to Danilov. Then-British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, while also briefed about the hopelessness of the Ukrainian cause, had overruled internal objections and authorized a heftier load of about 2,000 NLAW missiles. Still, those were weapons best suited for a guerrilla campaign, not a conventional war.

At the time, Ukraine’s military leadership, under Gen. Valery Zaluzhny, had successfully kept Kyiv’s war planning secret — and not just from the Russians. Neither Washington nor many senior officials in the Zelensky administration knew Zaluzhny’s blueprint. “We were pessimistic about Ukraine holding out in part because the Ukrainians didn’t share any of their preparations or planning with us,” a senior Pentagon official told me later. “And the preparations and plans that they did share with us were military deception.”

Poland, perhaps because of its history, was the only nation that didn’t despair in these early hours. Rerouting his connecting flight, Kuleba attended Poland’s national security council meeting on Feb. 24, the day of the invasion. The Polish government, like other NATO members, had been told by the alliance’s intelligence that a swift collapse of the Ukrainian state was near certain. Still, Warsaw refused to give up. Immediately, Poland sent several truckloads of ammunition and heavy weapons. “The Poles believed in us more intuitively than fact-based, because all the facts spoke against us at the time,” Kuleba recalled.

The mood was very different in other European capitals. “Nobody was giving the Ukrainians any chances,” Johnson said. “If this is going to happen, the best thing is that maybe it should happen quickly,” a senior aide to German chancellor Olaf Scholz told him at the time.

There is much more at the link if you can stomach it.

We should be ashamed. We did nothing of significance to deter Putin, nor to assure our allies and partners. Then we provided a parting gift of 90 javelins, turned tail, and ran. That shame has now been compounded by the wreckers that are the House majority GOP caucus:

https://twitter.com/shashj/status/1744849182966284793

The Ukrainians are not going to stop no matter how often we continually let them down.

Here is President Zelenskyy’s address from earlier today. Video below, English transcript after the jump.

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War for Ukraine Day 685: ShamePost + Comments (28)