By Over the last few weeks, Ukraine has faced a massive onslaught as Russia began a wave of assaults on the Eastern Front. Reuters recently reported that “resurgent Russian forces, which significantly outnumber and outgun the Ukrainian defenders, have been mounting multiple attacks across the eastern Donbas region in recent months and along the country’s northeastern border last week.
The drive has marked an inflection point in the conflict spawned by Russia’s full-scale invasion more than two years ago.
Russia has gained more territory in 2024 than it lost control of during Ukraine’s much-hyped counteroffensive in the summer of 2023, according to Pasi Paroinen, an analyst with Black Bird Group, a Finnish-based volunteer group that analyses satellite imagery and social media content from the war.
Moscow’s forces have claimed 654 sq km since the beginning of this year, outstripping the 414 sq km lost to Ukraine between June 1 and Oct. 1 last year, Paroinen said. Russia has gained 222 sq km of territory since only May 2, he added.”
As his nation slowly loses the war, Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky, fresh off receiving another round of American aid worth billions of dollars, has begun begging NATO to do something it’s promised not to do.
He wants NATO soldiers to come to Ukraine and work as “trainers.”
The New York Times reports that NATO allies are inching closer to sending troops into Ukraine to train Ukrainian forces, a move that would be another blurring of a previous red line and could draw the United States and Europe more directly into the war.
Ukraine’s manpower shortage has reached a critical point, and its position on the battlefield in recent weeks has seriously worsened as Russia has accelerated its advances to take advantage of delays in shipments of American weapons. As a result, Ukrainian officials have asked their American and NATO counterparts to help train 150,000 new recruits closer to the front line for faster deployment.
So far the United States has said no, but Gen. Charles Q. Brown Jr., the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said on Thursday that a NATO deployment of trainers appeared inevitable. “We’ll get there eventually, over time,” he said.
For now, he said, an effort inside Ukraine would put “a bunch of NATO trainers at risk” and would most likely mean deciding whether to use precious air defenses to protect the trainers instead of critical Ukrainian infrastructure near the battlefield. General Brown briefed reporters on his plane en route to a NATO meeting in Brussels.
As a member of NATO, the United States would be bound by the alliance’s treaty to assist in defending against any attack launched by Russia against the organization’s troops on the ground.
Biden has been adamant that no American soldiers will be sent to Ukraine, but with this president, such a decision would be made less by what he or the American public wants and more by what his staff decides is good and proper.
Remember, this is the same president who effectively announced an arms boycott against Israel a day after declaring our alliance with that nation to be “ironclad.”
French leader Emmanuel Macron recently said that he has “not ruled out” sending his nation’s troops into battle in Ukraine.
In an interview with The Economist, Macron declared “that Europe is “mortal” and could ‘die’ partly due to the threat posed by Russian aggression after its February 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
‘I’m not ruling anything out, because we are facing someone who is not ruling anything out,’ said Macron when asked if he stood by comments earlier this year not excluding the sending of Western troops that sent shockwaves around Europe.
Macron said ‘if Russia decided to go further, we will in any case all have to ask ourselves this question” of sending troops, describing his refusal to rule out such a move as a “strategic wake-up call for my counterparts.’
He described Russia as a power of regional destabilization” and “a threat to Europeans’ security.’
“I have a clear strategic objective: Russia cannot win in Ukraine,” Macron said, according to France 24.
Earlier in May, Russia warned France that if they send soldiers to the front, they will be “legitimate targets.”
“If the French appear in the conflict zone, they will inevitably become targets for the Russian armed forces. It seems to me that Paris already has proof of this,” wrote Reuters.
Russia’s foreign minister has claimed that they are seeing rising numbers of French nationals dying in Ukraine. The country’s military leaders have also promised to deploy tactical nuclear weapons if threats from France, Britain, or the United States increase.
Biden has long shown a specific interest in Ukraine for some reason.
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