Ukraine may have begun its much-anticipated counteroffensive just in time, as cracks are beginning to show in the Republican and Democrat united front backing Ukraine in its war with Russia.
In a foreshadowing of the counterattack and what its proponents hope it will accomplish, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan told Fareed Zakaria on CNN this weekend, “We do believe that this counteroffensive will allow Ukraine to take strategically significant territory back from Russia.”
Heavy Ukrainian artillery strikes and military maneuvers have been taking place across the Russian front in an effort to make advances where the battle lines have been static for months, reported The New York Times.
The Dallas Express spoke with Douglas Macgregor, retired Army colonel and former senior advisor to the secretary of defense under former President Trump, about his impressions of this latest Ukrainian military activity. Macgregor said that if this is the heralded counteroffensive, it is “a very weak counteroffensive.”
Macgregor speculated that these maneuvers could instead be “probing operations” intended to reveal weak points within the Russian defenses in preparation for a larger offensive. He warned that Russian defensive units have been known to pull back from advancing Ukrainian forces to lure them into “mass precision fire” traps.
In a sign that conservative support for the U.S.’s continued involvement in the conflict may be waning, Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy unveiled a plan last week to end the war to prevent Russia and China from forming an alliance that the tech-entrepreneur-turned-politician believes would “outmatch the U.S. in every area of great power competition.”
A poll taken in May indicates that popular support for U.S. sanctions against Russia fell from 71% a year ago to 58%, which may be caused by the public increasingly associating the economic war with Russia with inflation on the home front, reported PBS News Hour. The poll, conducted by the NORC at the University of Chicago, found Democrats are much more supportive of the U.S. taking a major role in the war than Republicans (38% vs 19%).
According to Ramaswamy’s plan, the U.S. would stop supporting Ukraine with military assistance and would cease efforts to bring the country into NATO. In exchange for the cease-fire and normalized relations, Russia would be expected to withdraw all forces from Ukraine, stop military cooperation with China, and withdraw its nuclear weapons away from areas where they would be a “threat to the U.S. and Europe.”
During a CNN-moderated town hall in May, Republican front-runner former President Donald Trump refused to pledge his steadfast allegiance to a Ukraine victory, unlike other Republican leaders including Senators Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Mitch McConnell (R-KY).
Instead, he made bringing the conflict to an end his focus.
“I don’t think in terms of winning and losing. I think in terms of getting it settled so we stop killing all these people,” Trump told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins.