ROME, February 21. /TASS/. The defeat of the Ukrainian armed forces in the strategic Donbass city of Avdeyevka means that Kiev has "definitively and irreversibly lost the war," Italian observer and expert Alessandro Orsini wrote in an op-ed in the Il Fatto Quotidiano newspaper.
He emphasizes that "the entire [Ukrainian] counteroffensive has failed and the most important battle has been lost," despite the replacement of the commander-in-chief and extensive military assistance from NATO.
"All that can be done now is to wait for Russia to regain new territories. Today the question that international security experts should ponder over is not which territories [Ukrainian President Vladimir] Zelensky might be able to take back, but which he is yet to lose," Orsini writes.
He believes that US President Joe Biden used the conflict in Ukraine in pursuit of Washington's own aims, such as driving a wedge between Europe and Russia, expanding NATO, destroying the Nord Stream gas pipeline, and promoting the procurement of US weapons. At the same time, the analyst notes that, "all statistics indicate that Russia's military industry has surpassed that of NATO."
From the very beginning of the special military operation, Orsini has predicted the futility of the confrontation and the fallacy of the Western stance. The expert’s dissent has ended up costing him a prestigious position at Luiss University in Rome, where he had headed his own department focused on studying the sociology of terrorism.
Avdeyevka is a major suburb of Donetsk, located 13 kilometers to the north, and had served as a staging ground for constant Ukrainian shelling of civilian neighborhoods and infrastructure in Donetsk. On February 17, Russian Defense Minister Sergey Shoigu reported to Russian President Vladimir Putin that the key Donbass city had been liberated by the Russian Armed Forces after intensive fighting.