Dmitry Kuleba has said that Kiev was “lucky” to get the support it did, but now lacks the ability to defeat Russia
Ukraine lacks the means to gain the upper hand against Russia and will “lose the war” if the situation continues as it is, former Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmitry Kuleba has told the Financial Times, adding that US President Joe Biden was too fearful of nuclear war to give Kiev the weapons it would need to win.
”Do we today have the means and tools to turn the tables and change the trajectory of how things are happening? No, we don’t,” Kuleba told the British newspaper in an interview published on Friday, adding: “And if it continues like this, we will lose the war.”
Kuleba’s comments came after the US and France gave Ukraine permission to use their long-range missiles to strike internationally-recognized Russian territory. While extremely escalatory, President Vladimir Putin said that the move “cannot affect the course of combat operations,” and that all of Moscow’s military goals will be achieved.
Kuleba stepped down as Kiev’s chief diplomat in September, amid a large-scale purge of senior officials by Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky. Before his resignation, he had repeatedly insisted that a battlefield victory was possible for Ukraine, as long as the country’s Western backers would hand over sufficient quantities of heavy weaponry.
His demands for weapons and money were often abrasive, as was the case when he told German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock to hand over long-range cruise missiles, as it was “just a matter of time” before she would “do it anyway.”
“We Ukrainians are lucky that Joe Biden was the president of the United States in 2022, because if it was someone else, things would have gone much worse for us,” he told the Financial Times. However, he claimed that the US president had slow-walked the delivery of certain weapons systems, as his “Cold War logic” made him too fearful of provoking nuclear war with Russia.
Under Biden, the US has allocated $131.36 billion for Ukraine, according to figures published by the Pentagon earlier this month. Just under $90 billion of this amount has actually been transferred, according to Germany’s Kiel Institute for the World Economy, which tracks military, economic, and humanitarian aid to Kiev.
With less than two months to go until President-elect Donald Trump takes office, Biden has reportedly asked Congress to authorize an additional $24 billion in Ukraine-related spending, in a bid described by Politico as a “long shot.”
Even if this multibillion-dollar aid tranche is authorized, Ukraine is facing a well-documented manpower shortage. Kiev has lost up to half a million troops since 2022, The Economist reported this week, a claim approaching the Russian Defense Ministry’s official tally.
With desertion reportedly on the rise and Ukrainian recruiters turning to increasingly more brutal methods such as the use of press gangs, the White House has urged Kiev to begin drafting teenagers to fulfil its recruitment goals, the Associated Press reported on Wednesday.
