Benjamin Friedman, policy director at Defense Priorities, said the shift is a reflection of the “irrefutable facts on the ground in the evident failure of Ukrainian forces to retake territory and their grave difficulty holding on to what they have.”
And “it doesn’t take a Ph.D. in political science to see that the political winds are shifting in the United States,” he added, “and they can’t count on the kind of support they’ve been getting, to say the least.”
Friedman, of Defense Priorities, said Ukraine giving up its NATO aspirations is the “price of peace.”
“The United States cannot change Ukraine’s geography and pick them up and move them to a safer part of the world,” he said. “They live next to Russia, which is a much more powerful country, which is always going to have more substantial interest in Ukraine, whether they’re legitimate or not, than the United States.”
“Ukraine is still clinging to the idea that they can escape that, I think, because we’ve been dangling it before them,” he continued. “It will probably take a combination of Western leaders to say, ‘Look, you’re not getting into NATO. Not going to happen. So make your plans accordingly,’ and then I think they’ll probably start to change.”
Featuring
More on Eurasia
Events on Ukraine-Russia
