Kiev sells victory while eating its own

The sudden firing of a hyped war poster boy exposes the lies, rivalries, and panic behind Ukraine’s triumphalist narrative “Victory,” US president John F. Kennedy once said (paraphrasing the Roman historian Tacitus), “has a hundred fathers, and defeat is an orphan.” To be precise, Kennedy made the comment after a humiliating political and black-ops fiasco, namely the botched attempt to use Cuban exiles to invade and regime-change Fidel Castro’s Cuba, commonly known as the Bay of Pigs disaster. What Kennedy rediscovered so painfully is a sad truth about human nature, that is, our love of taking credit for success even when it’s not really due and aversion to taking responsibility for failure. Sad but not complicated – unless that is you are dealing with Ukrainian politics under the Zelensky regime. There, success is dubious or, at least, greatly exaggerated; failure is concealed; and you can end up punished for either as if there’s no difference in the first place. Consider for instance the “ turmoil ” – so the Financial Times – after the sudden sacking of Defense Minister Mikhail Fedorov. After six months in (this) office, Fedorov was dismissed by president-forever Vladimir Zelensky. So far, so unremarkable: Counting Fedorov, Kiev has had five ministers of defense since the escalation of the war in 2022. What makes the case of the 35-year old unusual is that he has functioned as the popular – and much hyped – poster boy for an important information war campaign that is at odds with firing him. According to that narrative, currently spread with vigor by both the Zelensky regime and the West, Ukraine has recently achieved a major breakthrough in the war against Russia. Indeed, according to some especially eager commentators, Kiev has turned the war around in its favor with its UAV deep strikes on Russian fuel infrastructure, producing, according to the always particularly gung-ho Telegraph a “ tectonic shift .” The only slightly less biased Financial Times felt Ukraine was “ turning the tables ” already at the end of May.

In France, the equally mainstream Le Monde caught up with the euphoria a month later. Read more Zelensky dismisses another defense minister We could multiply examples, but that would be dull. As so often with Western mainstream narratives, there is a conspicuous monotony, as if we were looking not at diverse publications making independent research and analytical efforts but something more akin to a coordinated media campaign. But perish the thought! Indeed, if there are outliers, voices that seem to have missed the memo, they come, intriguingly, from Ukrainians, and very nationalist ones at that: The former commander of the Ukrainian military – and eternal Zelensky rival – Valery Zaluzhny has published an op-ed to warn of exaggerated expectations. Ukrainska Pravda, meanwhile, has featured a long article with multiple quotes from frontline officers and soldiers dismissing the air campaign as making no difference to their experience of the war. In reality, Ukraine’s increased strikes with drones and missiles behind the frontlines ( “mid-range” ) and far into Russia ( “long-range” ) have had effects, as the Russian leadership has acknowledged . But their most likely overall result is not Ukraine winning the war but Russia escalating its counterstrikes, a process that has already started , while also continuing its slow but relentless ground campaign . Fedorov’s role in the information-war hype and hyperbole about the Ukrainian air campaign has been to personify its success, and in particular what is in effect yet another claim to a miracle weapon – remember HIMARS, the Leopard tanks, the F16s? – namely, that Kiev has mobilized the magic of IT and AI to defeat Russia “asymmetrically.”