North American society lives the war in suspense but is more concerned about the price of gasoline
On February 18, US President Joe Biden stood before the cameras to make a bold and forceful announcement: “We have reason to believe that Russian forces are planning and intend to attack Ukraine in the coming week.” Six days later, on the morning of February 24, his prophecy was fulfilled. Not even the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky, saw it coming with the clairvoyance of US intelligence.
“If there is one area where I wish we had been more effective, it is in convincing the Ukrainians themselves to mobilize their troops sooner,” Senator Mark Warner, who sits on the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a local interview. “We would not have been able to stop the Russian invasion, but I think they would have put up a better fight.” Zelensky did not mobilize reservists until the day before the invasion. Some sources say that Biden managed to convince him that he knew what was coming two weeks before, but the Ukrainian president feared that any military movement would serve as an excuse for Russia to invade.
How the CIA managed to know Putin’s plans with such precision is a secret that Washington keeps so tightly that if anyone knew it they would have to kill him. Half a century of Cold War and Ukraine’s own collaboration in its penetration of the Kremlin would have served to score this success. The same intelligence agencies that did not see the takeover of Kabul by the Taliban coming have marked the movements of the Russian president and his army with such precision that at this moment they must distrust even his shadow. In fact, Andrei Kortunov, one of the Kremlin’s foreign policy advisers, told Sky News that the president left him and other top officials in the dark. Putin only entrusted his decision to a small circle of military and intelligence advisers on his rope. According to ‘The Intercept’, that would explain the lack of coordination seen on the ground during the invasion.
Washington continues to closely mark. Every day the Pentagon press conferences are the most reliable war report in the hemisphere. US diplomacy maintains the strategy of publicly casting light on Putin’s plans in order to preemptively abort them, and if this has achieved anything, it is gaining credibility in this information war. In part, the CIA owes President Biden this moment of glory, because since he came to power he made the decision to renounce the wars in the Middle East and focus on two great threats: Russia and China.
That decision cost him the disbandment of Afghanistan, which plunged his popularity ratings to a level from which he has not recovered, not even with the majority approval that his handling of the Ukraine crisis now arouses. More than half of those surveyed in a ‘Wall Street Journal’ poll approve of the way in which he has dealt with Russia, despite the fact that only 42% approve of his management of the government.
The explanation of why these successes have not managed to raise their popularity was given by Vince and Kyle, two young people who on Friday queued for lunch at Veselka, the Ukrainian restaurant that is now visited by all New Yorkers who want to support the most important community of citizens. of Ukraine in the world outside their country (150,000 in New York alone). “The Americans care about the Kiev crisis up to a point,” they admitted. “The point will depend on the price that gasoline reaches.”
The increase registered in the two weeks of war already translated into a hundred dollars for each delivery truck that the small Commodities supermarket received, a few blocks from Veselka. According to another ‘Wall Street Journal’ poll, by the time Biden gave his State of the Union address to Congress on March 1, 25% of Americans wanted to hear what he had to say about Ukraine, but 50% he was more interested in inflation, the highest since 1982. And it is on this issue that 62% of citizens suspend Biden.
The North American amalgam, in a country of immigrants, produces a variety of opinions, but the only one in which they all agree is that the price of gasoline is even more violent than the images of a war in which the victims have the blond hair, blue eyes and wear down jackets.
Coalition against Russia
From Conney Island to the East Village, the yellow and blue flag flies from storefronts and flanks businesses. Posters asking for donations hang from every corner, and yet Jason Birchard cannot convince his clients to support a no-fly zone, because the United States and NATO cannot leave Ukraine alone, after urging it in 1994 to resign. to its nuclear arsenal, he argues. “Why can’t they form a global coalition against Russia? This would end immediately, Putin would have to back down », says the owner of Veselka, who continues the business that his grandfather set up in the 1940s.
Among the many donations he receives and channels to his country of origin through the Catholic Church of Saint George, the one that most impressed him was that of a humble Ecuadorian woman, who probably gave him what she had earned in a week of work. “We are all brothers,” she replied. According to the latest census, 50 million people born in other countries live in the United States, many of whom arrived fleeing wars, crises and despotic regimes. With each image they see on television they relive their own dramas. Some have already made plans to leave the country if Putin pushes the nuclear button, and others are convinced that he is a braggart. “Sooner or later we will have to face it,” says Ken Lugo, married to a Ukrainian whom he hears crying in his dreams these days.
A rational and reluctant president to get fully involved in the war
‘Give us wings, let us fly,’ read the banners in Little Ukraine. The Biden government has been blunt in not considering a no-fly zone over Ukraine. Putin draws the limits of US intervention because Washington has a more rational president, fearful of the consequences and whose reluctance to get fully involved in the conflict generates the greatest consensus.
On his ability to control the price of energy and the fatigue produced by the repetition of the images, once Kiev falls into Russian hands, the future of Ukraine and perhaps the world will depend.
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