Former US State Department Russia policy adviser: “It seems to me that Ukraine is on the brink of disaster”

Former US State Department Russia policy adviser James Carden says Ukraine’s war with Russia “is lost”. That “the ratio of Ukrainian to Russian dead is 36 to one.” Mr Carden told Sky News Australia that the sooner Ukraine comes to this realisation, “the better off they’ll be”. “Putin seems to me to have a reasonable deal in place.”

Here's what he said on air.

Question: We didn't hear from President Trump before he flew off to Palm Beach and Volodymyr Zelensky didn't give us much detail when speaking to journalists after the meeting. Do we think much progress was made?

James Carden: No, I wouldn't think so. Basically, Zelensky came to Washington looking for Tomahawk missiles. He seems to — apparently, he's offered a trade. He said that Ukraine is going to provide the United States with drones in exchange for the Tomahawks. It's utterly ridiculous. The other reason why it's ridiculous is because Ukraine can't use the Tomahawk missiles. They have nothing with which to launch the Tomahawk missiles. Tomahawks can be fired in one of three ways — by a guided missile destroyer, from a submarine, or from a typhoon land-based system. They don't have any of the three. So it's puzzling to me what the discussion is really all about…

The Tomahawk thing is really crazy. And in the United States, you have all sorts of media outlets saying, you know, Trump is denying Zelensky a potentially game-changing weapon and, you know, utterly false and utterly ridiculous. It's not a game-changing weapon, any more than all the other weapons that were said to be game-changing weapons have not changed the game.

We've heard the same thing when the Ukrainians asked for HIMARS, when they asked for Patriot systems, when they asked for ATAKMS and F-16s. They haven't changed the game. And basically, the war is lost.

And the sooner that the Ukrainians come to this realization, the better off they'll be. And Putin seems to me to have a reasonable deal in place. Ukraine cannot join NATO, but Ukraine can join the EU. That seems absolutely a fair bargain. But they also have to concede land. Of course.

But again, the land that they will be ceding, they themselves have been attacking since 2014. The Ukrainians are being a bit disingenuous here.

They claim to want the land in the Donbas, eastern Ukraine, but they don't want the ethnic Russian citizens on that land. So they've been doing everything that they can to disenfranchise those people for the past 30 years. So it's time to be honest.

Putin in a way is giving the Ukrainians what they want, which is a Ukraine for ethnic Ukrainians. And that would be a way to get rid of, which they've wanted to do, the ethnic Russians. It's not something that is often said in public, but it happens to be the truth.

Question: And James, when you say the war is lost, what about reports that Russia is on the brink, that any further pressure that can be applied to them will lead to them running out of money? They can't continue this incredibly vicious assault that seems to have escalated in recent months on Ukraine indefinitely.

James Carden: In fact, the opposite is true. My sources tell me that the ratio of Ukrainian to Russian dead is 36 to one. So it's the Ukrainians who are approaching a million or so casualties. The numbers that people are told by the, you know, mainstream media in the United States, particularly The New York Times and The Washington Post, bear about as much resemblance to reality as the numbers that the government told Americans what was going on in the Vietnam War. So the war of attrition that Russia did begin in 2022 has been largely successful. And it seems to me that it's Ukraine that's on the brink of disaster, not Russia.

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