The war in Israel has pushed the war in Ukraine off the news pages for the most part. Unfortunately, that means that there’s less pressure on Washington to approve Joe Biden’s request for $61 billion in aid to Kyiv.
That pressure is needed because of a lack of significant progress by Ukraine’s armed forces in their much-touted counteroffensive that began last spring. It just hasn’t worked out the way that Kyiv had hoped. The Russian defenses were just too good, too well constructed for Ukraine to achieve any kind of a major breakthrough.
What Ukraine was unable to win on the battlefield, perhaps, it believes, it can win in the propaganda sphere.
Reports of Ukraine gaining a foothold on the left bank of the Dnipro River surprised many observers in the West. And the timing couldn’t have been better.
Ukraine was in desperate need of good news, and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s chief of staff Andriy Yermak supplied it while in Washington last week. He claimed that the Ukrainian advance had established a “sustained presence” on the left bank of the river “against all odds.”
There were several other reports of successful river crossings that made it appear that a significant…
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