The US will suffer a humiliation in Ukraine equivalent to the Vietnam War

Russia believes that the US is in danger of having the same outcome in Ukraine as the war in Vietnam or Afghanistan.

According to Russia, the approval by the US House of Representatives of an additional $60.84 billion in aid to Ukraine shows that Washington is moving deeper into a hybrid war with Moscow that will end in humiliation comparable to the Vietnam wars or of Afghanistan.

The full-scale invasion of Ukraine ordered by President Vladimir Putin in 2022 has sparked the worst crisis in Russia’s relations with the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, according to Russian and US diplomats.

The US House of Representatives yesterday approved with broad bipartisan support a $95 billion package providing security assistance to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan.

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said it was clear the United States wanted Ukraine to “fight to the last Ukrainian,” with attacks on Russian soil and Russian civilians among others.

“Washington’s ever-deepening immersion in hybrid warfare against Russia will turn into a resounding and humiliating fiasco for the United States like in Vietnam and Afghanistan,” Zakharova said.

Russia, he said, would give “an absolute and decisive response” to the US move to get more involved in the war in Ukraine.
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director William Burns warned last week that without more US military support, Ukraine may lose on the battlefield, but with support Kiev’s forces could hold out this year.

The United States has repeatedly ruled out sending its own or NATO troops to Ukraine, which is fighting a grueling artillery and drone war with Russia along a heavily fortified 1,000-kilometer front.

The US lost at least 58,000 members of its armed forces in the Vietnam War (1955-75), which ended with the victory of communist North Vietnam and the occupation of the South, while hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed.

In the war in Afghanistan (2001-2021), the US reported 2,459 people killed and at least 20,000 wounded in the conflict, which ended with the withdrawal of US-led coalition forces and the return to power of the Islamist movement Taliban.

The Soviet Union lost 14,453 members of its armed forces in the war in Afghanistan (1979-1989). Civilian casualties in both wars in Afghanistan have been enormous.

The war in Ukraine

Russia now controls around 18% of Ukraine – in the east and south of its neighboring country – and has been steadily gaining ground after a counter-offensive launched by Kiev in 2023 failed to make any significant headway against Russian troops entrenched behind minefields over which patrol drones and with heavy artillery to protect them.

Ukraine has been pleading with the United States for months to release more aid and weapons to help it fight, though Russian officials have said the U.S. aid will not change the eventual course of the war.

Zakharova said that everyday people in Ukraine are being “forced to slaughter as cannon fodder”, but the United States is no longer betting on a Ukrainian victory against Russia. Washington, he said, hopes that Ukraine will be able to hold out until the US presidential election in November.

The package approved by the US House of Representatives includes measures that would allow the US to seize billions of dollars worth of Russian assets that have been frozen due to sanctions against Moscow. This, Zakharova said, is simply “theft”, adding that the real beneficiaries of the whole package are the US defense companies.

Western and Ukrainian leaders have said the war in Ukraine is an imperialist-style land grab that shows post-Soviet Russia is one of the two biggest nation-state threats to global security, along with China.

Putin is portraying the war as part of a much wider battle with the US, which he says ignored Moscow’s interests after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 and then conspired to dismember Russia and grab its natural resources.

The West denies that it wants to destroy Russia, which in turn denies that it intends to invade any NATO member country.