he ‘eyes’ of the Ukrainian defenders. The Armed Forces of Ukraine actively use UAVs for scouting and military actions. Photo By Oleh Palchyk (Courtesy Ukraine foreign ministry)
Washington: After Ukraine’s Defence Minister Oleksii Reznikov last Friday (April 28, 2023) disclosed his country was “globally speaking, to a high percentage ready” to launch a counteroffensive against Russia, the United States Secretary of State Antony J Blinken today confirmed the possibility of Ukraine’s “major counteroffensive” against Russia soon.
“We know that the Ukrainians are contemplating a counteroffensive in the weeks to come. Let’s see what happens with that,” Blinken told Fox News’ correspondent Benjamin Hall, a British journalist who survived the Russian missile attacks with multiple injuries while covering the war in Ukraine and lost his one leg, one foot and an eye in the incident. Hall was back in the State Department’s briefing room after a year and received a standing ovation from the media fraternity at the State Department press briefing as he returned to work today (IST).
The Ukrainian Defence Minister had told an online news briefing on Friday that “As soon as there is God’s will, the weather and a decision by commanders, we will do it”.
Blinken told Hall that ultimately, the success of the Ukrainian counteroffensive on the battlefield “is the best way and probably the quickest way to actually get to a negotiation that produces a just and durable peace”.
When told by Hall that it appeared as if “there is a bit of a stalemate at the moment on the battlefield” after all the US support and international support, Blinken replied by claiming that in Ukraine, “Russia has already failed in the sense that what they were trying to accomplish initially was to erase Ukraine from the map, to subsume it into Russia, to eliminate its existence as an independent state”. He reiterated, “That’s failed and it’s not going to succeed”.
Concerning China’s growing role as a peacemaker in the region, with President Xi Jinping talking to his Ukrainian counterpart Volodymyr Zelenskyy recently, and the Chinese diplomats visiting Ukraine at the moment, Blinken made it clear that any peace agreement has to have Ukraine’s “territorial integrity and sovereignty and independence” at its foundation.
“It’s also very important that anyone who’s engaging in efforts to advance peace be talking directly to the Ukrainians. They’re the aggrieved party,” Blinken added.
Hall highlighted: “When we look at China in general, we look at the spy balloons over the U.S., we look at the incredible amounts of hacking that are going on at the moment, the covert Chinese police stations in the U.S., the supply chain issues that they’re behind, and yet they continue to do it.” He said the problem seemed to be getting worse and asked, “How can you push back? Why won’t you contain China more than you are at the moment?”
Blinken said that the “issue is I think less holding China back and more making sure that we’re able to run faster. And that involves investments in ourselves. It also involves extraordinary convergence with allies and partners around the world in Europe and Asia and other places about how to deal with some of the challenges that China poses”.
Blinken disclosed that over the last couple of years, the US had put itself in a “much stronger position to deal with the competition that we have with China that we fully acknowledge. First, we’ve made historic investments in ourselves to make sure that we can compete effectively – everything from the investments we’re making in infrastructure to semiconductors to climate technology”.
To a pointed question that was it worrying for the US that many countries, who would once have been firmly on the US side are now in the middle and that Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, South Africa and India were not really coming on the side of the US, Blinken said, “what we’re seeing with core partners in Europe and in Asia is much greater convergence than I’ve ever seen”. He asserted that the standing of the United States around the world – in the last few years “is much stronger than it was. And you can see this in survey after survey, and I can feel it in the work that I’m doing every single day”.
– global bihari bureau
