Speaking with military experts and diplomats, CNBC's Holly Ellyatt reports that there is growing skepticism that Russian President Vladimir Putin will achieve his aim of dominating and controlling Ukraine as his army seems to have stalled out and are now facing counter-offensive attacks from Ukrainian soldiers.
With one former diplomat admitting, "I don't think Russia can win," another said the military incursion is currently at a "stalemate" as Russia's hope of a quick and easy victory slips away.
In an interview with CNBC, former NATO ambassador Kurt Volker, who stated "Russia can't win," made his case by claiming, "They’re bogged down. They’re having trouble with supplies. They are having trouble with ammunition. They are not able to take the major cities. They’re not advancing. They are showing a lot of desperate measures like calling in Syrians or asking the Chinese for help, or threatening to attack the NATO countries’ [weapons] supplies [to Ukraine] and raising the specter of biological or chemical or nuclear use.”
He added, "These are all signs of, I think, desperation.And so time is working against them now.”
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With Ellyatt reporting, "Russia has failed to take the capital Kyiv and to unseat President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s government, with a massive military convoy that snaked toward the city over recent weeks still dispersed on the outskirts," Michal Baranowski, director of the German Marshall Fund’s Warsaw office, bluntly stated, "The war is pretty much at a stalemate," before adding, "Russia was hoping for a quick victory, basically a Blitzkrieg, a quick run to Kyiv with a hope to frankly decapitate the Ukrainian government in the first few days. They failed to do it and so the tactic and strategy has changed into a really grueling, grinding war.”
On Monday, Ukrainian lawmaker Oleksiy Goncharenko stated, "He [Putin] just can’t go further because our army is holding the ground. They [the Russian army] has been around 25 kilometers away from Kyiv for about two and a half weeks now, so they just couldn’t go further and it’s the same situation in other regions of Ukraine.”
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