WASHINGTON, January 9. /TASS/. Kiev’s Western allies will face a long-running debate on "Who lost Ukraine?" after the conflict ends, Stephen Walt, a professor at Harvard University, wrote in an opinion piece for Foreign Policy (FP).
While nobody knows how or when Ukraine conflict will end, the terms of ending it "are likely to be disappointing to Kiev and its Western supporters," the expert argues in an article published on Wednesday. "If that happens, the next phase will feature a nasty debate over who was responsible," he surmised.
"Some of the participants will be motivated by a genuine desire to learn from a tragic episode, but others will be trying to evade responsibility, shift the blame onto others, or score political points," the FP columnist wrote. "It’s a familiar phenomenon; as John F. Kennedy famously quipped: "Victory has 100 fathers, and defeat is an orphan," he continued.
According to Walt, "Western leaders should have considered the possibility that Moscow would do something nasty when they began expanding NATO eastward." They will probably never admit, he argued, that "their own actions made the war more likely."
"Ukrainians and their most fervent supporters in the West have long complained that Kiev wasn’t getting enough help, wasn’t getting it fast enough, and faced too many restrictions on the help it did receive," the article reads. "This view nicely absolves Western hard-liners of responsibility for the debacle, as it suggests that the problem was not that their advice was wrong but that it wasn’t followed with sufficient enthusiasm," Walt maintains.
Also, Walt added, "postwar efforts" to assess what went wrong will, among other things, include "questioning the ill-fated Ukrainian offensive in the summer of 2023 (which a surprising number of Western commentators inexplicably believed was likely to succeed)." He also suspected that "there are some in the West who believe Ukraine was simply a pawn that was sacrificed to ensnare Russia in a long and costly war."