How Goes Ukraine's Propaganda War?

From Reuters on Thursday:

Ukraine told critics of the pace of its three-month-old counteroffensive to "shut up" on Thursday, the sharpest signal yet of Kyiv's frustration at leaks from Western officials who say its forces are advancing too slowly.

Since launching a much vaunted counteroffensive using many billions of dollars of Western military equipment, Ukraine has recaptured more than a dozen villages but has yet to penetrate Russia's main defences.

Stories in the New York Times, Washington Post and other news organisations last week quoted U.S. and other Western officials as suggesting the offensive was falling short of expectations. Some faulted Ukraine's strategy, including accusing it of concentrating its forces in the wrong places.

As I've pointed out here many times, Kyiv simply has to wrap up its counteroffensive this year. In fact, Ukraine's early success in 2022 for a time prompted the talking-head retired US generals to predict a capture of Crimea by the end of that year, but certainly in 2023.

Retired U.S. Army Lieutenant General Ben Hodges predicted on Saturday [January 8, 2023] that Ukraine will retake control of Crimea by the end of August.

Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his "special military operation" on Ukraine on February 24, 2022, hoping for a quick victory. However, the war has exposed weaknesses within the Russian leader's military, such as its difficulties maintaining well-trained troops.

These challenges—coupled with Ukraine's spirited defense effort bolstered by Western military aid—has allowed Ukraine to retake thousands of miles of formerly occupied territory and turn the tide of the war in its favor.

I think Gen Hodges was one of those who'd predicted the capture of Crimea much sooner and was maintaining the happy talk while moving things back to summer. But as of March, Joint Chiefs Chairman Milley had become much more realistic:

“I don't think it's likely to be done in the near term for this year,” Gen. Mark Milley said Friday in an interview with Defense One.

“Zelenskyy has publicly stated many times that the Ukrainian objective is to kick every Russian out of Russian occupied Ukraine. And that is a significant military task. Very, very difficult military task. You're looking at a couple hundred thousand Russians who are still in Russian-occupied Ukraine. I'm not saying it can't be done. I'm just saying it's a very difficult task,” the Joint Chiefs chairman said. “But that is their objective. They certainly have a right to that, that is their country. And they are on the moral high ground here.”

The problem for Ukraine right now is not only are they making little progress on the battlefield, but the chief US cheerleader for continuing the war, Joe Biden, is preoccupied, while Trump's current success in the polls makes the prospects of US support after next year's elections less likely. At the same time, the Comer committee's focus on Ukraine corruption and Joe's role in firing the corruption prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, to protect the Biden family client Burisma puts Ukraine in a less favorable light with the US public.

That is the likely context of this news release:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Thursday praised the effectiveness of long-range weapons after a series of drone attacks damaged multiple facilities deep into the territory of the Russian Federation and a missile strike hit a Russian facility in occupied Crimea.

The Ukrainian government said an indigenously developed long-range missile was used to strike a target 434 miles away.

"Ministry of Strategic Industries reported on own production. Successful use of our long-range weapons: the target was hit at a distance 434 miles," Zelensky posted to Telegram Thursday after meeting with officials.

These drone attacks hundreds of miles behind the front lines are likely insignificant militarily but are intended to produce favorable headlines. This won't work in the face of strategy by the Republican opposition to juxtapose Ukraine aid against US domestic needs:

President Joe Biden is asking Congress to approve $24 billion more in aid for Ukraine, which would bring the total amount of U.S. taxpayer-funded aid to Ukraine since February 2022 to $135 billion.

In contrast, Biden announced Wednesday that he would send $95 million from the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law to aid in rebuilding Maui after the nation’s deadliest fire in over a century, which has claimed more than 115 lives, with hundreds still unaccounted for.

I was convinced last year that short-term expenditures at that level were justified if they brought the promised results, namely, defeat of Russia, defined as complete retreat from Ukraine's pre-2014 boundaries, within the initially expected time, roughly the end of 2023. This clearly isn't going to happen. Instead,

The Biden administration is seeking to hammer out a long-term Ukraine aid agreement with European allies in hopes of both preventing Russia from gaining an edge on the battlefield and hamstringing a future president’s ability to scale back U.S. commitments, The Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

. . . European capitals want to cement support and restrict ways countries could renege on pledges, fearing what might happen during a second Trump administration, according to the WSJ. At present, Western European nations lack the industrial and financial capacity to match the billions in annual military aid provided by the U.S.

The problem is that Western war objectives have never been clearly stated, other than to predict a quick and relatively inexpensive outcome using obsolescent NATO and Warsaw Pact weapons pulled out of NATO reserves. When that didn't work, there was never a clear Plan B, but a consensus default appears to have emerged that NATO countries will continue token support for the war while expecting most of the cost to be borne by the US, its taxpayers, and its contingency supplies of ammunition.

In other words, it's a bait and switch, with the actors more or less hoping the US taxpayers won't notice. But there's been a creeping recognition that a new forever war in Ukraine will include a forever skim of US funding into the pockets of Ukrainian oligarchs -- and how much of that is still being kicked back to the Bidens? (That's a question that so far, nobody has asked.)

Ukraine is under martial law and won't hold elections until that's lifted. On the other hand, both the US and UK will hold elections next year, and Ukraine is likely to figure in both. At the moment, its propaganda war isn't going well.