Ukrainian forces are being offered unsolicited advice on wartime strategies now by The New York Times, apparently, while also being thrown under the bus. On Tuesday the below headline appeared at the top of the NYT’s frontpage…

Mainstream media has very quickly, in a span of two months, gone from euphoric “Ukraine is winning” & “Putin’s demise imminent” statements, to now trying to explain just how it is that Kiev’s counteroffensive is in shambles, despite billions in Western military hardware. Who’s to blame?

Indeed the how did things go wrong in Ukraine script is already being written. The Times, citing US officials, complains that Ukraine commanders just aren’t doing it “right”—and pursuing a failing strategy:

Ukraine’s grinding counteroffensive is struggling to break through entrenched Russian defenses in large part because it has too many troops, including some of its best combat units, in the wrong places, American and other Western officials say.

The main goal of the counteroffensive is to cut off Russian supply lines in southern Ukraine by severing the so-called land bridge between Russia and the occupied Crimean Peninsula. But instead of focusing on that, Ukrainian commanders have divided troops and firepower roughly equally between the east and the south, the U.S. officials said.

In early August, the same publication began setting up what are actually at this point largely untrained Ukrainian frontline forces to take the fall: “Ukraine’s army has for now set aside U.S. fighting methods and reverted to tactics it knows best”… with the implication being that if there are major battlefield losses, it’s not the fault of US advisers.

Months before that, in March, The Washington Post ran the following headline: “Ukraine short of skilled troops and munitions as losses, pessimism grow.”

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