NEW YORK, June 21. /TASS/. The probability of the Ukrainian armed forces’ significant success on the battlefield remains low, Seymour Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize-winning US journalist, wrote on his Substack portal, citing a US official.
"The official said that the likelihood of significant Ukrainian battlefield success remains low, given Russia’s vast supply of troops and materiel," Hersh wrote, noting that Washington and Kiev reported about the Ukrainian military’s successes near Kharkov, but there was "little word in the Western press" that members of the 92nd assault brigade, one of Ukraine’s most elite units, had recently been surrounded and captured by Russian troops.
Hersh described US President Joe Biden’s foreign policy as a "disaster," as "Biden is continuing to send billions to Ukraine" and urging the US allies in NATO to do the same.
The journalist pointed out that the US president should focus on Russian President Vladimir Putin’s June 14 peace proposals. Hersh claims citing sources that there has been "some informal communications" about concessions between Moscow and the West which both sides could accept to resolve the Ukraine conflict and that Putin’s speech allegedly came "after a series of highly secret backchannel communications between some in the West and Russians whose aim was to spare the pending Russian attack" on Kharkov.
On June 14, at a meeting with the Foreign Ministry’s senior staff, Putin put forward new peace proposals seeking to resolve the conflict in Ukraine. The proposals envisage that the status of Crimea, the Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics as well as the Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions as Russian regions should be recognized, Ukraine’s non-aligned and non-nuclear status should be enshrined as well as its demilitarization and denazification, and the sanctions on Russia will be lifted. However, Ukraine rejected the initiative.