L’ucraino Dmytro Kuleba: “Se continua così, perderemo la guerra”

> The Christmas wreaths are hanging from the windows of the Corinthia hotel in Whitehall. But there is nothing festive about the news from Ukraine. Scanning the newspaper as I wait for Dmytro Kuleba, I read that Russia has just hit the city of Dnipro with a ballistic missile.
>
> Until a couple of months ago, Kuleba was Ukraine’s foreign minister. I first met him in Kyiv in 2023. There were sandbags and fortifications surrounding his ministry, but he was strikingly relaxed and funny — a living refutation of old clichés about a backward country run by post-Soviet apparatchiks.
>
> In September, Kuleba, who had been foreign minister for four years, resigned from the government. He has not commented publicly on his departure. But the general assumption is that he was pushed out — as strains and tensions mount in the inner circle of President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, under the pressure of a faltering war effort.
>
> Kuleba, who is in London to give a lecture, appears five minutes late for our breakfast meeting at the Northall restaurant. He is a young-looking 43, slightly greying at the temples, and wearing a jacket over a polo shirt. He apologises for the delay and explains that he was arranging for the delivery of a parcel to his home in Kyiv. He used to have staff to look after all that. So, I ask, how is he finding life out of power?
>
> He replies that on the day he left office he received a text message from an old friend. It said: “Dmytro, when you are part of the system that takes care of you and offers you social status, you begin to believe that life outside the system does not exist. But when you actually find yourself outside of the system, you realise that this is the only place where life exists.”
>
> “That’s how I feel,” says Kuleba. “I went to the countryside, I spoke to the people. I drank homemade vodka with them, reconnected with real life.”
>
> It is 10am in London — too early for vodka, homemade or otherwise. So we pause to study the breakfast menu. Our waitress approaches our corner table — a little nervously, I think. It turns out that she is from Ukraine and is called Daria.
>
> “How long have you been in Britain?” I ask her. “Two years,” she replies. Like millions of other Ukrainians, she was forced to leave home when the war broke out. “Well, welcome to London,” I say. And then I add, slightly awkwardly: “I hope you can go back to Ukraine at some point, if you want to . . . ”
>
> “I hope so,” she replies. “My father, right now, is in defence . . . ” The sentence tails off and Kuleba picks up the conversation, chatting to Daria in Ukrainian.
>
> We switch to English to order. I am tempted by the full English breakfast. But, in deference to my arteries and my waistline, I go for the vegetarian breakfast: eggs, mushrooms, tomatoes and a vegetarian sausage. Kuleba orders the Maltese eggs on the grounds that he has no idea what they are and wants to find out. He adds a side order of black pudding, explaining, “I’m a big fan of what we call blood sausage in Ukraine . . . What is the name of that dish in Scotland?” Haggis, I suggest. “Yes, haggis. I love haggis . . . I love blood, I love all the kinds of meat mixed together with spices.” We both order coffees — espresso for him, filter coffee for me.
>
> The order placed, we turn to the inevitable subject. I put it to Kuleba that there is now a widespread perception that Ukraine is losing the war. He agrees that things look bad. “Do we today have the means and tools to turn the tables and change the trajectory of how things are happening? No, we don’t. And if it continues like this, we will lose the war.”
>
> I’m taken aback by his bluntness. There is a pause — before he slightly softens his verdict. “It’s true that things look bad on the battlefield. But things looked even worse in the first months of 2022. What I hate in my conversations with European and American experts — and ‘hate’ is a word I usually don’t use — is that everyone is asking what Ukraine is ready to do, what Ukraine is ready to accept. And I say, guys, first find the answer to the question [of] what Putin is ready to accept. Because this is the place where the war comes from.”
>
> So I ask him to answer his own question. What is Putin ready to accept? “His goal is clear. He has to dismantle the Ukrainian state one way or another . . . His logic is, why should I take part of it if I can eventually take it all?”
>
> Kuleba’s family background equipped him perfectly for the task of explaining his country’s struggle to the world. His father was a diplomat, his mother was a teacher of Ukrainian. As a young man, he rose swiftly through the ranks of the diplomatic service and became a deputy prime minister in 2019 and then the country’s foreign minister in March 2020, almost two years before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
>
> The west’s caution about military aid to Ukraine has been a constant source of frustration for the Zelenskyy government. I ask why Kuleba thinks that Ukraine’s western allies have been so reluctant to supply some of the advanced weaponry that the country is asking for. “The question why the west is not doing something is usually the most difficult one,” he muses — before going on to supply an answer.
>
>
>

Unfortunately, the war has taken a toll that even stronger and wealthier countries would struggle to bear. It’s almost a miracle that Ukraine has held out this long. Even EU countries, with all their resources and intelligence, didn’t believe Ukraine would survive a week of Russia’s invasion. But wow, they’ve resisted bravely, kudos to them.

Also, they are on the frontlines of this threat and have made the greatest sacrifice by far, so we can only be grateful to them.

>But Kuleba thinks that Nato is no longer the cast-iron guarantee that it once was. “The trust of European allies in Nato is not based on Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. In reality it is based on one sentence — ‘the United States will defend every inch of the territory of our allies.’ And this sentence belongs to Biden. What if you have a president who says he’s not going to defend every inch of your territory? . . . If Trump says anything like that, the Nato shield is gone and Putin will feel free to do whatever he wants.”

The US, as a country, greatly benefited from both world wars and they did so by delaying their entry to those wars as much as possible.

It’s naive to believe that this time Americans are going to change the strategy that worked for them so well.

Do not let r/worldnews see this.

This world is a lost cause, just nuke everything.

Well, he the one emigrated to the US as soon as he left his government posiotion.

I’m ashamed to be European. It’s as if we’ve learned nothing from 1938.

I want you all to know that Putin keeping any land is a win, doesn’t matter what state the economy is in, Ukraine isn’t getting that land back.

What a fucking shame on the West.

He does realize Ukraine is not a NATO country right?…He is confusing helping NATO countries versus non NATO countries. He should be thanking Biden giving them a chance to win this war. Right now they done well but Russia has almost unlimitless meat soldiers and Ukraine does not. If Ukraine listen to the warnings Biden gave them 8 months before the invasion Ukraine might have pushed Russia back to the borders.