Kuleba says Ukrainians will “fight with shovels” if US aid not approved

(Easy to say when the leaders are far away from the fronts. You`re already doing that, using the shovels to bury the dead!)

By VT - Drago Bosnic - Ahmed Adel - January 17, 2024

Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba warned that “time is running out” for US lawmakers to approve additional military aid to Kiev, falsely claiming that the costs to Western nations will be much higher if Russian forces defeat Ukraine.

Despite the reality of not being able to win the war, Ukraine’s only attempt at peace is to engage in dialogues without Russia and impose ridiculous terms.

Providing more money and weapons to Ukraine will help the US and NATO allies avoid a direct confrontation with Russia, Kuleba said in an interview with ABC News published on January 15.

“Whatever the price of supporting Ukraine is now, the price of fixing the mess in the world if Ukraine loses will be much, much higher,” he added.

Washington, the biggest sponsor of what some US politicians describe as a proxy war in Ukraine, ran out of money for Kiev after spending $113 billion on aid packages approved by Congress. US President Joe Biden’s latest funding request, which includes $61.4 billion in additional military and financial assistance for Ukraine, has been stalled due to growing opposition from Republican lawmakers.

Kuleba claimed that a Russian victory in Ukraine would send a dangerous message to other US adversaries, ignoring that Moscow has repeatedly stressed that it does not seek conflict with NATO.

“If the West is not able to stop Russia in Ukraine, who else is able to stop it in other parts of the world?” he asked. The diplomat promised that the Ukrainians “will fight with shovels” if they are left without weapons.

ABC noted that Russian forces have made territorial gains in recent weeks and taken the lead in terms of firepower. However, Kuleba argued that the gains were “minimal” and delusionally denied that Russian President Vladimir Putin is now in a stronger position.

Asked about drone strikes against Russia, the Ukrainian diplomat justified the terrorism as being important to show that the conflict was having an adverse impact on the Russian people.

“President Putin must explain to his people why all of this is happening,” he said.

Kuleba also dismissed a report last week that showed an internal Pentagon investigation concluded the US had failed to properly track more than $1 billion worth of weapons sent to Ukraine.

“Every attempt by Russia to disinform the world about (the) alleged leak or illicit traffic of U.S. weapons into other parts of the world… turned out to be fake,” he said.

The diplomat insisted that reports of US arms trafficking from Ukraine to other parts of the world were “fakes,” adding: “So don’t believe in fakes, believe in Ukraine.”

Kuleba’s delusions and claims of Russian disinformation demonstrate that in the short term, there will be no peaceful conclusion to the conflict as the Kiev regime would rather see Ukrainians die fighting with shovels than accept the reality that Russia has won the war.

So long as this delusion persists in Kiev, peace initiatives, like the meeting of Western national security officials in Davos on January 14 over Ukraine’s peace proposal, will continue to end without a clear path forward. In fact, the British media reported that the talks’ “main achievement” was a “more diverse family photo than last time,” which included Global South countries, such as Brazil and South Africa.

“There was no progress on an actual peace deal. That would also be impossible without Russia, and Russia wasn’t invited,” the Financial Times highlighted.

The Kiev regime operates out of reality so much so that Zelensky’s peace plan requires Russia to give up Crimea, Donbass, Zaporozhye and Kherson; pay reparations to Ukraine; subject its officials and military to war tribunals; and make other unilateral concessions that look less like a peace agreement of Ukraine, a losing country, and more like demands against a capitulated Russia that has no choice but to submit. Obviously, Moscow rejected the proposal, with Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov recently calling the proposal a “product of a sick imagination.”

In the context of Ukraine refusing to seek a legitimate peace deal with Russia, it makes it even more bizarre that Kuleba is ensuring that Ukrainians will continue to fight with shovels in a futile war effort even if the US stops providing support. Republicans in the US have been blocking aid for Ukraine for several months now, demanding amendments to migration policy and the strengthening of the southern border in the context of illegal migration.

Although the funds for Ukraine will eventually be approved, each passing day only marks a day closer to Russia’s victory, and a new aid package will make no difference to the course of the war. Rather, Kuleba’s outburst has served to give further insight into the detachment from reality that the Kiev regime operates in and how they really do mean fighting until “the last Ukrainian.”

Source: InfoBrics

Drago Bosnic

As a Senior Editor at the now-defunct Fort Russ News, I wrote daily about military technology, global economy and geopolitics, with a special focus on the Middle East, Balkans, Russia, China, United States, Europe and great power rivalry. In 2020, Fort Russ News was hit by a major cyber-attack, so the website has been liquidated, but my articles (nearly 1,500 of them are still available on the Web Archives).


VT Condemns the ETHNIC CLEANSING OF PALESTINIANS by USA/Israel

$ 280 BILLION US TAXPAYER DOLLARS INVESTED since 1948 in US/Israeli Ethnic Cleansing and Occupation Operation; $ 150B direct "aid" and $ 130B in "Offense" contracts
Source: Embassy of Israel, Washington, D.C. and US Department of State.