September
15, 2023
It
has been clear for some time that US corporate news media have explicitly taken
a side on the Ukraine War. This role includes suppressing relevant history of
the lead-up to the war (FAIR.org, 3/4/22), attacking people who bring up that
history as “conspiracy theorists” (FAIR.org, 5/18/22), accepting official
government pronouncements at face value (FAIR.org, 12/2/22) and promoting an
overly rosy picture of the conflict in order to boost morale.
For
most of the war, most of the US coverage has been as pro-Ukrainian as Ukraine’s
own media, now consolidated under the Zelenskyy government (FAIR.org, 5/9/23).
Dire predictions sporadically appeared, but were drowned out by drumbeat
coverage portraying a Ukrainian army on the cusp of victory, and the Russian army
as incompetent and on the verge of collapse.
Triumphalist
rhetoric soared in early 2023, as optimistic talk of a game-changing “spring
offensive” dominated Ukraine coverage. Apparently delayed, the Ukrainian
counteroffensive launched in June. While even US officials did not believe that
it would amount to much, US media papered over these doubts in the runup to the
campaign.
Over
the last three months, it has become clear that the Ukrainian military
operation will not be the game-changer it was sold as; namely, it will not
significantly roll back the Russian occupation and obviate the need for a
negotiated settlement. Only after this became undeniable did media report on
the true costs of war to the Ukrainian people.
Overwhelming
optimism
In
the runup to the counteroffensive, US media were full of excited conversation
about how it would reshape the nature of the conflict. NATO Secretary General
Jens Stoltenberg told Radio Free Europe (4/21/23) he was “confident Ukraine
will be successful.” Sen. Lindsey Graham assured Politico (5/30/23), “In the coming
days, you’re going to see a pretty impressive display of power by the
Ukrainians.” Asked for his predictions about Ukraine’s plans, retired Lt. Gen.
Ben Hodges told NPR (5/12/23), “I actually expect…they will be quite
successful.”
Former
CIA Director David Patraeus, author of the overhyped “surge” strategy in Iraq,
told CNN (5/23/23):
I personally think that this is going to be
really quite successful…. And [the Russians] are going to have to withdraw
under pressure of this Ukrainian offensive, the most difficult possible
tactical maneuver, and I don’t think they’re going to do well at that.
The
Washington Post’s David Ignatius (4/15/23) acknowledged that “hope is not a
strategy,” but still insisted that “Ukraine’s will to win—its determination to
expel Russian invaders from its territory at whatever cost—might be the
X-factor in the decisive season of conflict ahead.”
The
New York Times (6/2/23) ran a story praising recruits who signed up for the
Ukrainian pushback, even though it “promises to be deadly.” Times columnist
Paul Krugman (6/5/23) declared we were witnessing “the moral equivalent of
D-Day.” CNN (5/30/23) reported that Ukrainians were “unfazed” as they “gear up
for a counteroffensive.”
Cable
news was replete with buzz about how the counteroffensive, couched with
modifiers like “long-awaited” or “highly anticipated,” could turn the tide in
the war. Nightly news shows (e.g., NBC, 6/15/23, 6/16/23) presented audiences
with optimistic statements from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and
other figures talking about the imminent success.
Downplaying
reality
Despite
the soaring rhetoric presented to audiences, Western officials understood that
the counteroffensive was all but doomed to fail. This had been known long
before the above comments were reported, but media failed to include that fact
as prominently as the predictions for success.
On
April 10, as part of the Discord leaks story, the Washington Post (4/10/23)
reported that top secret documents showed that Ukraine’s drive would fall “well
short” of its objectives, due to equipment, ammunition and conscription
problems. The document predicted “sustainment shortfalls” and only “modest
territorial gains.”
The
Post additionally cited anonymous officials who claimed that the documents’
conclusions were corroborated by a classified National Intelligence Council
assessment, shown only to a select few in Congress. The Post spoke to a
Ukrainian official who “did not dispute the revelations,” and acknowledged that
it was “partially true.”
While
the Post has yet to publish the documents in full, the leaks and the other
sources clearly painted a picture of a potentially disastrous counteroffensive.
Fear was so palpable that the Biden administration privately worried about how
he could keep up support for the war when the widely hyped offensive sputtered.
In the midst of this, Blinken continued to dismiss the idea of a ceasefire,
opting instead to pursue further escalating the conflict.
Despite
the importance of these facts, they were hardly reported on by the rest of
corporate media, and dropped from subsequent war coverage. When the Post
(6/14/23) published a long article citing Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin’s
cautious optimism about the campaign, it neglected to mention its earlier
reporting about the government’s privately gloomier assessments. The documents
only started appearing again in the press after thousands were dead, and the
campaign’s failure undeniable.
In
an honest press, excited comments from politicians and commentators would be
published alongside reports about how even our highest-level officials did not
believe that the counteroffensive would amount to much. Instead, anticipation
was allowed to build while doubts were set to the side.
Too
‘casualty-averse’?
By
July, Ukrainian casualties were mounting, and it became clearer and clearer
that the counteroffensive would fail to recapture significant amounts of
Ukrainian territory. Reporting grew more realistic, and we were given insights
into conditions on the ground in Ukraine, as well as what was in the minds of
US officials.
According
to the Washington Post (8/17/23), US and Ukrainian militaries had conducted war
games and had anticipated that an advance would be accompanied by heavy losses.
But when the real-world fatalities mounted, the Post reported, “Ukraine chose
to stem the losses on the battlefield.”
This
caused a rift between the Ukrainians and their Western backers, who were
frustrated at Ukrainians’ desire to keep their people alive. A mid-July New
York Times article (7/14/23) reported that US officials were privately
frustrated that Ukraine had become too afraid of dying to fight effectively.
The officials worried that Ukrainian commanders “fear[ed] casualties among
their ranks,” and had “reverted to old habits” rather than “pressing harder.” A
later Times article (8/18/23) repeated Washington’s worries that Ukrainians
were too “casualty-averse.”
Acknowledging
failure
After
it became undeniable that Ukraine’s military action was going nowhere, a Wall
Street Journal report (7/23/23) raised some of the doubts that had been
invisible in the press on the offensive’s eve. The report’s opening lines say
it all:
When Ukraine launched its big
counteroffensive this spring, Western military officials knew Kyiv didn’t have
all the training or weapons—from shells to warplanes—that it needed to dislodge
Russian forces.
The
Journal acknowledged that Western officials simply “hoped Ukrainian courage and
resourcefulness would carry the day.”
One
Post column (7/26/23) asked, “Was Gen. Mark Milley Right Last Year About the
War in Ukraine?” Columnist Jason Willick acknowledged that “Milley’s skepticism
about Ukraine’s ability to achieve total victory appears to have been
widespread within the Biden administration before the counteroffensive began.”
And
when one official told Politico (8/18/23), “Milley had a point,” acknowledging
the former military head’s November suggestion for negotiations. The quote was so telling that Politico made
it the headline of the article.
Even
Rep. Andy Harris (D-Md.), co-chair of the congressional Ukraine Caucus,
publicly questioned whether or not the war was “winnable” (Politico, 8/17/23).
Speaking on the counteroffensive’s status, he said, “I’ll be blunt, it’s
failed.”
Newsweek
(8/16/23) reported on a Ukrainian leadership divided over how to handle the
“underwhelming” counteroffensive. The Washington Post (8/17/23) reported that
the US intelligence community assessed that the offensive would fail to fulfill
its key objective of severing the land bridge between Russian-occupied eastern
Ukraine and Crimea.
As
the triumphalism ebbed, outlets began reporting on scenes that were almost
certainly common before the spring push but had gone unpublished. One piece
from the Post (8/10/23) outlined a “darken[ed] mood in Ukraine,” in which the
nation was “worn out.” The piece acknowledged that “Ukrainian officials and
their Western partners hyped up a coming counteroffensive,” but there was
“little visible progress.”
The
Wall Street Journal (8/1/23) published a devastating piece about the massive
number of amputees returning home from the mine-laden battlefield. They
reported that between 20,000 and 50,000 Ukrainians had lost one or more limbs
as a result of the war—numbers that are comparable to those seen during World
War I.
Rather
than dwelling on the stalled campaign, the New York Times and other outlets
focused on the drone war against Russia, even while acknowledging that the
remote strikes were largely an exercise in public relations. The Times
(8/25/23) declared that the strikes had “little significant damage to Russia’s
overall military might” and were primarily “a message for [Ukraine’s] own
people,” citing US officials who noted that they “intended to demonstrate to
the Ukrainian public that Kyiv can still strike back.” Looking at the quantity
of Times coverage (8/30/23, 8/30/23,
8/23/23, 8/22/23, 8/22/23, 8/21/23, 8/18/23), the drone strikes were
apparently aimed at an increasingly war-weary US public as well.
War
as desirable outcome
The
fact that US officials pushed for a Ukrainian counteroffensive that all but
expected would fail raises an important question: Why would they do this?
Sending thousands of young people to be maimed and killed does nothing to
advance Ukrainian territorial integrity, and actively hinders the war effort.
The
answer has been clear since before the war. Despite the high-minded rhetoric
about support for democracy, this has never been the goal of pushing for war in
Ukraine. Though it often goes unacknowledged in the US press, policymakers saw
a war in Ukraine as a desirable outcome. One 2019 study from the RAND
Corporation—a think tank with close ties to the Pentagon—suggested that an
effective way to overextend and unbalance Russia would be to increase military
support for Ukraine, arguing that this could lead to a Russian invasion.
In
December 2021, as Russian President Vladimir Putin began to mass troops at
Ukraine’s border while demanding negotiations, John Deni of the Atlantic
Council published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (12/22/21) headlined “The
Strategic Case for Risking War in Ukraine,” which laid out the US logic
explicitly: Provoking a war would allow the US to impose sanctions and fight a
proxy war that would grind Russia down. Additionally, the anti-Russian
sentiment that resulted from a war would strengthen NATO’s resolve.
All
of this came to pass as Washington’s stance of non-negotiation successfully
provoked a Russian invasion. Even as Ukraine and Russia sat at the negotiation
table early in the war, the US made it clear that it wanted the war to continue
and escalate. The US’s objective was, in the words of Raytheon
boardmember–turned–Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, “to see Russia weakened.”
Despite stated commitments to Ukrainian democracy, US policies have instead
severely damaged it.
NATO’s
‘strategic windfall’
In
the wake of the stalled counteroffensive, the US interest in sacrificing
Ukraine to bleed Russia was put on display again. In July, the Post‘s Ignatius
declared that the West shouldn’t be so “gloomy” about Ukraine, since the war
had been a “strategic windfall” for NATO and its allies. Echoing two of Deni’s
objectives, Ignatius asserted that “the West’s most reckless antagonist has
been rocked,” and “NATO has grown much stronger with the additions of Sweden
and Finland.”
In
the starkest demonstration of the lack of concern for Ukraine or its people, he
also wrote that these strategic successes came “at relatively low cost,”
adding, in a parenthetical aside, “(other than for the Ukrainians).”
Ignatius
is far from alone. Hawkish Sen. Mitt Romney (R–Utah) explained why US funding
for the proxy war was “about the best national defense spending I think we’ve
ever done”: “We’re losing no lives in Ukraine, and the Ukrainians, they’re
fighting heroically against Russia.”
The
consensus among policymakers in Washington is to push for endless conflict, no
matter how many Ukrainians die in the process. As long as Russia loses men and
material, the effect on Ukraine is irrelevant. Ukrainian victory was never the
goal.
‘Fears
of peace talks’
Polls
show that support for increased US involvement in Ukraine is rapidly declining.
The recent Republican presidential debate demonstrated clear fractures within
the right wing of the US power structure. Politico (8/18/23) reported that some
US officials are regretting potential lost opportunities for negotiations.
Unfortunately, this minority dissent has yet to affect the dominant consensus.
The
failure of the counteroffensive has not caused Washington to rethink its
strategy of attempting to bleed Russia. The flow of US military hardware to
Ukraine is likely to continue so long as this remains the goal. The Hill
(9/5/23) gave the game away about NATO’s commitment to escalation with a piece
titled “Fears of Peace Talks With Putin Rise Amid US Squabbling.”
But
even within the Biden administration, the Pentagon appears to be at odds with
the State Department and National Security Council over the Ukraine
conflict. Contrary to what may be
expected, the civilian officials like Jake Sullivan, Victoria Nuland and Antony
Blinken are taking a harder line on perpetuating this conflict than the
professional soldiers in the Pentagon. The media’s sharp change of tone may
both signify and fuel the doubts gaining traction within the US political
class.
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