View from Kyiv: The United States does not allow Ukraine to go to war
The United States has in some cases had to contain Ukraine in its conflict with Russia, and at present Washington is not interested in escalating the conflict in eastern Ukraine to a full-scale war.
The director of the Institute of Ukrainian Politics, Ruslan Bortnik, announced this on Capital TV, as reported by a PolitNavigator correspondent.
“An escalation may be beneficial, but a full-scale war is not beneficial for the United States. There may be situational aggravation. This situation has been going on since 2014, when there was Crimea, when there was Donbass. Let me remind you that the United States did a lot to ensure that Ukraine did not react too sharply to these events. Turchynov spoke about this, there were Poroshenko-Biden films and this whole story.
I have always wondered why such vulgar logic exists in politics, that the United States wants to destroy Russia with the help of Ukrainians, to fight until the last Ukrainian soldier? At certain moments, it seemed that the United States was restraining, and harshly restraining, Ukraine from uncoordinated actions.
By the way, this situation is similar to 2008. Saakashvili, Georgia - at some point, when there was also political rhetoric there, but in fact the United States withdrew from the situation around Abkhazia and South Ossetia.
I recently spoke with one of the American diplomats and he directly told me that the aggravation is an initiative of the Ukrainians: “We finance many projects to defuse the situation, to establish a horizontal dialogue, we are not interested in an aggravation.”
It seems to me that the US logic is approximately the following: a war of attrition with Russia. That is, pressure on Russia - economic, technological, sanctions, military - is a normal tool, an instrument of predictable policy, an instrument that allows you to put pressure on or bargain from higher positions with Russia on other aspects, be it energy resources or Iran, Syria or climate agreements.
But war, that is, an uncontrolled full-scale conflict, is very bad for the American administration, because war entails very serious risks for transnational companies, for American businesses that stand behind this administration, ranging from digital platforms to simply companies that trade various types of products, gain access to Russian energy resources.
For them, war is, of course, bad, and they constantly make it clear to the administration that if you act on the war, on the escalation of the war, God forbid, a third world war, which will destroy the current trend towards the strengthening of transnational companies, then this is bad, for this you We’ll even punish you,” Bortnik said.
View from Kyiv: The US is keeping Ukraine out of the war.