Why The Continued Silence?

While the Senate bill providing roughly $60 billion in continued Ukraine aid remains stalled in the House, the overall picture for Ukraine continues to deteriorate.

The French paper Marianne has published excerpts by secret military documents that are causing an uproar in Europe and the world, for dealing with the situation on the ground in Ukraine without the disguise of propaganda that pervades almost all reports on the subject.

. . . The greatest takeaway from the documents is that ‘a Ukrainian military victory now seems impossible’. The Russian forces are waging ‘a slow and long, high-intensity war based on the continued attrition of the Ukrainian army’.

The defense reports harshly criticize the ‘disastrous’ planning done by western military and Ukraine:

“‘The planners believed that as soon as the first Russian lines of defense were crossed, the entire front would collapse […] These fundamental preliminary phases were carried out without taking into account the moral strength of the enemy on the defensive’.

"[…] These Ukrainian ‘Year II soldiers’ were launched to attack ‘a Russian fortification line which proved to be impregnable’. Without any air support, with Western equipment that is disparate and less efficient than the old Soviet equipment (‘obsolete, easy to maintain, and capable of being used in degraded mode’), the Ukrainian troops had no hope of breaking through. Let us add ‘Russian arch-domination in the field of electronic jamming penalizing, on the Ukrainian side, the use of drones and command systems’.”

In other news,

Russian President Vladimir Putin won a landslide reelection victory on Sunday, taking 87% of the vote after a three-day election derided by government critics and the West as neither free nor fair.

Going into the vote, the Kremlin was believed to seek not merely victory but a historic turnout: one that showed the country more united than ever behind their leader, more than two years into the full scale invasion of Ukraine.

Russia's Central Elections Commission later issued data showing 77% of the country's eligible 114 million voters had cast ballots — a new post-Soviet record.

Wait a moment. Wasn't Putin not long for this world? As of June 2022,

The US intelligence community believes that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s health is suffering and that he’s being treated for cancer, according to a new report.

The assessment, attributed by Newsweek to high-ranking officials at three separate intelligence agencies, comes after months of speculation that the Russian strongman is suffering from terminal ailments.

“Putin is definitely sick,” an official from the office of the Director of National Intelligence told the outlet, while noting, “whether he’s going to die soon is mere speculation.”

Two other officials — one from the Defense Intelligence Agency and one retired Air Force officer — also claimed to have access to a comprehensive intelligence assessment of Putin’s health, and said the outlook for the Russian leader is bleak, according to the report.

I assume these are among the 51 intellgence officials who signed the letter saying Hunter's laptop was Russian disinformation. Well, but wasn't Putin irreparably damaged by Prigozhin's coup last June?

With a so-called 24-hour coup by Russia’s mercenary boss, Yevgeny Prigozhin, ending in an anticlimactic pullback, Russian President Vladimir Putin was able to avoid a dramatic and bloody standoff with his one-time ally.

Nonetheless, the fact that the outspoken Prigozhin could even mount an armed mutiny with his private military company, the Wagner Group, with little resistance and an apparently muted response is widely seen as a deep political blow for Putin and his regime.

“Prigozhin’s armed rebellion indicates a political crisis within Russia and shatters the myth of Russia’s invincibility and overwhelming power,” Hanna Liubakova, a nonresident fellow with the Atlantic Council’s Eurasia Center, and a journalist and researcher from Belarus, said in a note Sunday.

Except,

A top confidant of Russian President Vladimir Putin approved the plan to kill Wagner Group head Yevgeny Prigozhin earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal reported Friday.

Nikolai Patrushev, secretary of the security council for Russia, set in motion the operation to take out Prigozhin, according to a former Russian intelligence officer, per the Journal. The plans were later seen by Putin, who didn’t push back against them, Western intelligence agencies told the outlet.

Prigozhin died in a plane crash in August only a few months after he and his mercenary group launched a short-lived rebellion with a goal of ousting Russia’s defense minister.

We must infer that Putin never lost the support of the organs of state security (otherwise his own plane would have crashed, right?), which operated with accustomed efficiency, and less than a year later, those organs reestablished him in power with near-Stalin era levels of popular support. Recent photos show Putin in apparent perfect health.

As of May 2023, this was the US scenario for that year's projected Ukraine counteroffensive, via the Atlantic Council:

If a thrust to sever Russia’s land bridge proved successful, two options could then be considered. One would be to wheel westward and isolate Russian troops in the Kherson region. Alternatively, Ukrainian forces could turn to the east and attempt to recover Mariupol, which has been occupied by Russia since May 2022.

In either case, seizing Melitopol would cause a crisis among Russian political and military leaders, as Russian forces in the south and east would be cut off from each other, rendering a coherent defense at the operational level impossible. This would dramatically undermine Russian morale and encourage further international support for Ukraine.

If mounted in June, Ukraine’s counteroffensive could potentially be concluded by summer’s end, leaving the Crimean Bridge as the only remaining option for ground resupply of Russian forces in Crimea. Campaign success, however, would bring Ukrainian long-range missiles within range of the bridge, which would also be vulnerable to drone attacks.

Why have these projections, advanced with the prestige of the US deep state, proven so incorrect? Why is the administration so far doing nothing to telegraph necessary changes in policy and just continuing with "as long as it takes"? So far, all we've had has been Tori Nuland announcing her retirement. How many other intelligence and foreign policy chiefs should be resigning in disgrace?

It's been almost 50 years since the Church Committee. We badly need a new one. Short of that, Trump's outright firing of James Comey should be a precedent for much more decisive action -- change their office locks overnight, revoke their clearances, and publicly fire them the next day.