LONDON, December 28. /TASS/. Retired British Army Colonel Richard Kemp said in an opinion piece for the Daily Telegraph that Russia will continue to advance in Ukraine next year, and Kiev is facing bleak prospects.

The prospects for Ukraine in this conflict "remain bleak" even as it attempts to strike Russian military sites in Crimea, he wrote.

"Kiev’s long-fought counteroffensive has failed. At tremendous cost and despite heroic fighting, it has taken little ground and there is no immediate prospect of further advances," the retired officer said.

He said Russian forces also were on the offensive and pointed to Russia’s recent seizure of the town of Maryinka in the Donetsk People’s Republic.

Kemp called it "the greatest battlefield success on either side since Russia captured Bakhmut in May."

"It provides a pivot point to allow Moscow’s forces to attack Ukrainian defenses further south," he wrote.

According to the retired officer, the liberation of Maryinka "has even greater strategic significance; it is yet another body blow to Ukraine’s international support, which has been flagging for months, with worse to come."

In the US, "it will be difficult for presidential candidates, in an election year, to justify spending more billions on Ukraine while Americans suffer from the legacy of a year of high inflation," Kemp said.

The rising popularity of nationalist parties across Europe also jeopardizes further aid to Ukraine, he said.

"It is only in Britain that we still see clear bipartisan support, with Labor and the Tories mostly reading from the same sheet," he wrote. "But with our armed forces and armaments industries degraded to historically low levels by successive governments, we now have little more to give."

Kemp urged the UK to maintain efforts to prompt other countries to provide increased support to Ukraine.

"If Russia defeats Ukraine, it will be due to half-hearted support from the US and Europe - upon which Kyiv is wholly dependent - largely because of an unfounded fear of [Russian President Vladimir] Putin," the retired colonel said.