John Bolton: Biden admin merely delaying Ukraine’s defeat

Hawkish ex-US National Security Advisor John Bolton has slammed the Biden administration’s Ukraine policy as aimed at merely delaying Kiev’s defeat, further calling for imposing harsher sanctions “clandestinely.”

“Ukraine’s offensive failures and Russia’s defensive successes share a common cause: the slow, faltering, nonstrategic supply of military assistance by the West,” Bolton wrote in an article published Sunday by the US-based financial daily The Wall Street Journal, censuring “unwillingness” of the US-led NATO military alliance to “restore Ukraine’s full sovereignty.”

“The serial debates over whether to supply this or that weapons system, the perpetual fear that Russia will escalate to war against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and occasional Kremlin nuclear saber-rattling have instilled a paralyzing caution in Western capitals,” Bolton wrote, pointing out that “NATO has seemed unwilling to fulfill its commitment to restore Ukraine’s full sovereignty and territorial integrity.”

“This hesitancy is a product of successful deterrence by the Kremlin, not American strategic necessity,” he then underlined, insisting: “Far from being inevitable, the Ukrainians’ inability to achieve major advances is the natural result of a US strategy aimed only at staving off Russian conquest.”

The national security adviser to former US president Donald Trump then went on to criticize the Biden administration’s sanctions policies as well, adding: “The West – particularly Washington – also needs to rethink sanctions policy radically… Western sanctions generally remain piecemeal and seriously under-enforced.”

Further insisting on the need for a “massive” upgrade of the US-led sanctions-enforcement measures, Bolton underlined that such “defects” in enforcing bans against targeted countries and individuals “aren’t confined to the Ukraine conflict and should prompt NATO institutionally to review how it conducts enforcement.”

“Proclaiming sanctions is great PR, but enforcement is hard, tedious and necessarily done clandestinely where possible,” he then emphasized, adding: “The US and its allies need a massive overhaul and upgrade of our sanction-enforcement instruments, procedures and personnel.”

Bolton’s assertions came amid recent statements by Russia’s Defense Ministry that the Ukrainian army has been launching futile military operations since June 4, resulting in the loss of nearly 43,000 soldiers and 5,000 weapons and other military hardware, including 26 warplanes and 25 German-made Leopard tanks, in just two months.

This is while the US and its mostly Western allies continue to supply Ukraine with huge amounts of advanced weaponry with the declared objective of prolonging the war against Russian amid reports of some of the weapons falling into the hands of terrorists and drug cartels as well as massive corruption within the ranks of Ukrainian military leaders.