Citing a U.S. official familiar with current intelligence, U.S. journalist Seymour Hersh said that the U.S. intelligence believes that the Ukrainian forces have become demoralized and have no chance of winning, adding that there currently exists no discussion in Kiev or the White House regarding a ceasefire.
In a new post on his Substack account, Hersh said,
There are significant elements in the American intelligence community, relying on field reports and technical intelligence, who believe that the demoralized Ukraine army has given up on the possibility of overcoming the heavily mined three-tier Russian defense lines and taking the war to Crimea and the four oblasts seized and annexed by Russia. The reality is that Volodymyr Zelensky’s battered army no longer has any chance of a victory.
Hersh also noted there is no interest in peace talks. Quoting the official, Hersh continued that Ukraine’s claims of incremental progress in the offensive constitute of “all lies”.
The renowned investigative journalist reported last month that the CIA informed U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken that the Ukrainian counteroffensive would not likely yield results.
This information, said Hersh, came from a U.S. intelligence official, who stated more specifically, that “the word was getting to him [Blinken] through the Agency [CIA] that the Ukrainian offense was not going to work. It was a show by Zelensky and there were some in the administration who believed his bullshit.”
Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky has been calling on his Western allies for months to provide his military with long-range missiles, arguing that this could drastically improve the outcome of the counteroffensive. But before that, it was the anti-air missiles, the advanced offense tanks, heavily armored troop carriers, and the HIMARS system.
Ukraine is depleting resources at an unsustainable rate, firing 90,000 artillery rounds per month when the Pentagon is only capable of producing a third of that number, while also losing around 20 percent of NATO-provided weapons–that were either destroyed or damaged–within the first two weeks of the counteroffensive, which saw very limited ground gains since it was launched almost three months ago.