"Ukraine's offensive has been seriously blunted".
The Allies took two months and 19 days to get from Normandy to Paris (June 6 to August 25), a distance of 265 km. And they had total air superiority, 10000 planes to the Germans' 500.
Once on the German border they took from October 1944 to March 1945 to cross the Rhine.
The distance from Kherson to Melitopol is 234 km, from Kherson to Berdyansk 351 km. Those jumping to the conclusion that Ukraine can't win need to adjust their expectations to the reality that this will not be the Six Day War of 1967 or the Gulf Wars. Saying to Ukraine, win now or we pull the plug on support because you can't or it costs too much makes you Putin's last hope for a frozen conflict and turns you into a Russian disinformation asset.
Complaining that Ukraine doesn't serve military fast food while applying the political pressure that causes support to be slow-walked is a very dirty game. If Ukraine had had F-16s, long range HIMARS, Storm Shadows and Leopards last summer and autumn to follow up its Kharkiv and Kherson victories, this war would be over already. The war was prolonged by bedwetting Axis of Prudence incrementalism in weapons delivery.
Naturally, Mr. Dunn never, ever mentions in current articles his forecasts of Russian victory of July and September 2022 just before Ukraine's Kharkiv and Kherson victories. Nor does he mention his recommendation of April 2022 that Ukraine would be better off surrendering to Russian genocide, which he advocated AFTER Bucha and Irpin's mass graves were discovered. Of course, as a pacifist, he would have recommended negotiation to the Chinese of Nanjing in 1937 and to the Jews of Warsaw in 1943. After all, a de-escalation skill set learned in customer support is a universal joint applicable everywhere and in all contexts.
Since the Ukrainians don't want anyone else fighting their war of survival for them, the question of western troops is a total non-issue.
The $150bn in aid to Ukraine = less than 2.5% of federal spending of $6.27tn in FY 2022 and 0.6% of US GDP, a simple bit of math Mr. Dunn is as incapable of executing as he is a logical argument. Aid to Ukraine and moving NATO's de facto eastern frontier eastward to Ukraine's northern border with Russia is a screaming bargain in terms of national security and geopolitics vs Vietnam (58000 Americans dead), Iraq (4500), Afghanistan (1500). Ukraine (0).
Multiple countries of the institutional West--Japan, South Korea, for example--that have border disputes or in geopolitical conflict with Russia stand to gain from this war shrinking Russia's empire restoration dream.
Russia's treatment of the Budapest Memorandum of 1994, creation of the Transnistria frozen conflict with Moldova in 1992, invasion of Georgia in 2008, Syria intervention, interference in the Brexit referendum and the US election of 2016 and financing of Marine LePen in 2017 and 2022 and Wagner mining empire show Russia is a fossil-fueled kleptocracy exporting rogue empire whose geopolitical business model is instability export.
In Ukraine Russia is simply a genocidal terror state that will never respect any agreement that includes Ukrainian sovereignty with EU, much less NATO membership.
"Russia crank out arms and weapons"--Russia's tank mfg capacity is 20/month. They're losing 200/month, spending their Soviet inheritance like the Donald spent Fred Trump's inheritance building Atlantic City casinos. Shoigu was just in North Korea begging Kim Jr. for artillery ammo.
"signing a peace agreement in April": Zelenskiy wanted to negotiate in March 2022, but Putin was uninterested. Then came Bucha and Irpin's mass graves, which changed everything. But this writer never mentions these, preferring to quote the Koch-financed Russia war crime denier Mearsheimer and the Swiss war crime denier Jacques Baud. The recent NY Times report on Code Pink getting funded by China and its co-founder supporting China's genocide of the Uighurs tells you all you need to know about lefty genocide apologists like Mr. Dunn and Code Pink (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/05/world/europe/neville-roy-singham-china-propaganda.html).
"why does he want Ukraine to join NATO again?"--Ukraine has never been in NATO. The "again" makes no sense. Ukraine, like all the former Warsaw Pact states and the Baltics knew their history with Russia as a rogue enserfing empire and joined NATO while the window of opportunity was briefly open after the USSR imploded. They knew our honeymoon from history would be brief.
"reality would like to have a word with you": Here's reality. Listen to Russian troops' intercepted phone calls about how f***ked they are: https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=insights+from+ukraine+and+russia
Or just listen to Prigozhin, FSB Colonel Igor Girkin and purged Russian generals Popov, Teplinsky and Seliverstov: https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/more-chaos-theory-russian-style-12f47b86658b
