MOSCOW, December 7. /TASS/. The chief of Russia's foreign intelligence service, or SVR, believes that Western politicians, due to the impossibility to defeat Russia, will try to prolong the conflict in Ukraine and turn it into "another Afghanistan."

Sergey Naryshkin says that "with regard to the situation in Ukraine, we can expect that Western politicians, due to the objective impossibility of achieving a military victory over our country, will try to prolong the hostilities as much as possible and turn the Ukrainian conflict into ‘another Afghanistan’ with the aim of achieving our gradual exhaustion in a war of attrition," he said.

In an article authored for the SVR's magazine Razvedchik (Intelligence Officer) Naryshkin forecasts that "they will be pressing for this, as before, through a set of economic and military-diplomatic measures, including sanction pressure, which violates the norms of international law, and the continuous supply of arms and military equipment to Kiev".

It is highly probable that further support for the Kiev regime, especially given the increasing "toxicity" of the Ukrainian agenda for transatlantic unity and the Western community as a whole, will accelerate the decline of the West's international authority, Naryshkin added.

"Ukraine itself will turn into a 'black hole' absorbing material and human resources the further it goes," he continued. "In the end, the US risks creating ‘another Vietnam,’ which every new US administration will have to deal with until some sensible person who has the courage and determination to break this vicious circle takes over in Washington."