Ukraine is at great risk of its front lines collapsing POLITICO

With a history of urging Ukraine to agree to territorial concessions and his opposition to the $60 billion U.S. military aid package snarled on Capitol Hill amid partisan wrangling Musk isn t Ukraine s favorite commentator, to say the least. And his remarks received predictable pushback.

But the billionaire entrepreneur s forecast isn t actually all that different from the dire warnings Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy made in the last few days. According to Zelenskyy, unless the stalled multibillion-dollar package is approved soon, his forces will have to go back, retreat, step by step, in small steps. He also warned that some major cities could be at risk of falling.

Obviously, Zelenskyy s warnings are part of a broad diplomatic effort to free up the military aid his forces so desperately need and have been short of for months everything from 155-millimeter artillery shells to Patriot air-defense systems and drones. But the sad truth is that even if the package is approved by the U.S. Congress, a massive resupply may not be enough to prevent a major battlefield upset.

And such a setback, especially in the middle of election campaigns in America and Europe, could very well revive Western pressure for negotiations that would obviously favor Russia, leaving the Kremlin free to revive the conflict at a future time of its choosing.

Essentially, everything now depends on where Russia will decide to target its strength in an offensive that s expected to launch this summer. In a pre-offensive pummeling stretching from Kharkiv and Sumy in the north to Odesa in the south Russia s missile and drone strikes have widely surged in recent weeks, targeting infrastructure and making it hard to guess where it will mount its major push.

And according to high-ranking Ukrainian military officers who served under General Valery Zaluzhny the commander-in-chief of Ukraine s armed forces until he was replaced in February the military picture is grim.

via www.politico.eu