The U.S. corporate media’s first response to the leaking of secret documents about the war in Ukraine was to throw some mud in the water, declare “nothing to see here,” and cover it as a depoliticized crime story about a twenty-one-year-old Air National Guard member who published secret documents to impress his friends. President Joe Biden dismissed the leaks as revealing nothing of “great consequence.”
What these documents reveal, however, is that the war is going worse for Ukraine than our political leaders have admitted to us. It’s going badly for Russia, too, meaning that neither side is likely to break the stalemate this year and we’ll likely see “a protracted war beyond 2023,” as one of the documents says.
The publication of these assessments should lead to renewed calls for our government to level with the public about what it realistically hopes to achieve by prolonging the bloodshed, and why it continues to reject the resumption of the promising peace negotiations it blocked in April 2022.
We believe that blocking those talks was a dreadful mistake—the Biden Administration capitulated to the warmongering, since-disgraced U.K. Prime Minister Boris
— source progressive.org | Medea Benjamin, Nicolas J. S. Davies | Apr 26, 2023