Western allies receive increasingly GLOOMY updates on Ukraine's counteroffensive

Western allies receive increasingly ‘sobering’ updates on Ukraine’s counteroffensive: ‘This is the most difficult time of the war’https://t.co/zf7QV74VWI

— Solomon (@SnafuBlogspot) August 8, 2023

Important pieces of the article...

“They’re still going to see, for the next couple of weeks, if there is a chance of making some progress. But for them to really make progress that would change the balance of this conflict, I think, it’s extremely, highly unlikely,” a senior western diplomat told CNN.

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 Multiple officials said the approach of fall, when weather and fighting conditions are expected to worsen, gives Ukrainian forces a limited window to push forward.

Western officials also say the slow progress has exposed the difficulty of transforming Ukrainian forces into combined mechanized fighting units, sometimes with as few as eight weeks of training on western-supplied tanks and other new weapons systems. The lack of progress on the ground is one reason Ukrainian forces have been striking more often inside Russian territory “to try and show Russian vulnerability,” said a senior US military official.

Note.  All those strikes are just for show.  Its meaningless as far as the battlefield is concerned.  It gives the zealots hope but professionals know better.

 Some officials fear the widening gap between expectations and results will spark a “blame game” among Ukrainian officials and their western supporters, which may create divisions within the alliance which has remained largely intact nearly two years into the war.

“The problem, of course, here is the prospect of the blame game that the Ukrainians would then blame it on us,” said a senior western diplomat.

This is the rub.

This is the thing that keeps Western govts up at night.

They pushed all in on the most corrupt country this side of Somalia, gave them all kinds of money and weapons and somehow, someway expected success.

It was a fool's errand from the start and they knew it.