In a major shift, support from the Collective West for Ukraine is rapidly crumbling, as economic fatigue, military setbacks, and political divisions grow deeper across NATO and EU member states 🇪🇺📉. On The Duran, experts break down how once-solid alliances are fracturing under pressure, with countries quietly backing away from long-term military aid and financial commitments 💰⚠️.
As Ukraine faces losses on the battlefield and rising dissent at home, the Western narrative of unity is faltering, exposing the limits of proxy warfare and the risks of continued escalation with Russia 🇷🇺. This moment could redefine the future of the conflict — and the global order.
00:00All right, Alexander, let's talk about the situation with Project Ukraine and with each passing day, you see more panic coming out of the Zelensky regime. We are seeing weapons being diverted from Ukraine to the Middle East and an interest interest in Project Ukraine from the West is is falling away.
00:27And this is this is getting to Zelensky because the Russian missile strikes, the drone attacks, the advances on the front line continue and actually appear to be accelerating. Russia actually hit Kremenchuk, which is a city right on the Dnieper. And from what I understand, they did a lot of damage to military facilities and I believe in an oil depot.
00:53But is this the first time that Russia has has hit Kremenchuk the way they did?
00:58Yes, I believe it is. I think they struck at Kremenchuk in the first weeks of the special military operation, but on a relatively small scale.
01:06Now, of course, they're very, very much closer to Kremenchuk and to the entire area around the Dnieper.
01:11And the fact that they're attacking cities like Kremenchuk, Kremenchuk is a big industrial center, I should say, right on the Dnieper, right on the Dnieper.
01:21And in Soviet times, it was the it was a center of heavy engineering and machine building and also of the Soviet truck industry.
01:31I mean, you know, people from that time remember KRA's trucks.
01:36They were actually made in Kremenchuk, apparently.
01:39So this is this is a major industrial node of Ukraine.
01:45And the Russians are pushing are now starting to move steadily towards it.
01:49And across the front lines, Ukraine crumbles.
01:54And there's just been a meeting in the Senate.
02:00There was just a meeting with Pete Hegg says in the Senate, and he basically confirmed that military aid for Ukraine from the United States funding for Ukraine is coming to an end.
02:11And there is no substitute for this from the European Union, as we have discussed in program after program.
02:19They cannot replace the United States as a fascinating article by man called a journalist called Owen Matthews in the Daily Telegraph,
02:29who finally made the point that we have been making that all of these sums that the European Union has been talking about, they're not actually real money.
02:40They are attempts to create by Ursula to create funds which might one day be set up.
02:49But I'm not going to be set up to help Ukraine.
02:53And if they are ever set up, they're more about centralizing and pressing forward with the EU project.
03:00It's a very interesting article.
03:01It bears reading, actually.
03:04Is he watching us?
03:05It probably is.
03:06Just to say, I'm sure he is, actually.
03:09But anyway, I mean, I'm not going to get into all of that.
03:12So, we have had the most panicky set of comments from Zelensky we've seen up to now.
03:23He's published a whole string of comments on X.
03:26They come across as more coherent than I believe they really are when Zelensky says them in Ukrainian.
03:33He says that the relations between the Americans and the Russians are far too warm.
03:38He's extremely worried that he's not going to get his massive sanctions.
03:41Lindsey Graham's sanctions bill appears for the moment, at least, to be dead in the water.
03:46He's clearly, clearly, deeply alarmed by the situation.
03:51Reading his comments and listening to the things he's saying, I think that for the first time, Zelensky is facing the possibility that he's going to lose.
04:08That was my impression.
04:13Talk about the price cap.
04:16The price, the all price surge.
04:18Oil is going to, all is surging.
04:20It's going to continue to surge.
04:22The EU is talking about a $45 price cap.
04:26Lindsey Graham is talking about 500% bone-crushing sanctions on anyone that, secondary sanctions on anyone that sells Russian oil.
04:35All of this is just crumbling.
04:37All of these fantastical ideas that the EU and Graham and Zelensky have about Russia and Russian energy is just absolutely melting away.
04:46You're absolutely correct.
04:47I mean, we're talking about an oil price cap to stop, you know, to somehow put more financial pressure on the Russians.
04:56Abby, an oil price cap, which the market, the oil market, is ignoring anyway.
05:02I mean, there was a $60 price cap when oil was above $60.
05:07Russian oil traded for above more than $60.
05:11The idea that, you know, you can push the cap down at a time when oil prices are rising is stupid.
05:20And this is, anyway, a whole false narrative.
05:26I mean, I've been talking about this for years now.
05:29Now, they consistently overstate the importance of the Russian oil and gas industry to the Russian budget and to the overall Russian economy.
05:41Dimitriyev, who is the head of Russia's direct investment fund, said that if you're talking about the central, the federal budget, I believe he was talking about the federal budget, oil and gas revenue accounts for about a fifth of it, not a half, as some people say.
05:59And Russia's been conducting anyway, a significant tax reform.
06:04And there is no shortage of funds and capital in Russia to continue to move forward with the country's development and to fund the war.
06:14I think this whole idea is absurd.
06:17And going back to that Owen Matthews article, he, by the way, also acknowledges it, that Russia's not going to collapse economically.
06:24It's not going to run out of money tomorrow.
06:26That whole thing is absurd.
06:30And as for Lindsey Graham's bone-crushing sanctions, the 500% tariffs on China and all of that, because it is China and India and Turkey that he's targeting.
06:44All that's going to do is deepen the already existing stresses, perhaps leading to a full-blown crisis in the world economy,
06:55including the U.S. economy.
06:59And it's still not going to stop the Russians.
07:02And it's also going to make the Chinese even more determined to align with the Russians.
07:09So, I mean, these are, as you absolutely rightly say, fantasy plans.
07:13I mean, the kind of things that adolescents come up with, they have no connection to the realities of the real world.
07:22Now, what Ursula was coming up with with all these funds was a grift.
07:25It was a grift.
07:26It always is.
07:27Planet Sipha.
07:27That's all it is.
07:28That's all it ever is.
07:31It's just a grift.
07:31They cobbled together a billion euros, I think, to send, which is also stolen from the Russian assets, by the way.
07:38Yeah.
07:39Every month they're stealing a billion euros.
07:41A billion euros.
07:42And they're saying it's interest from the Russian.
07:43How much interest are the Russian assets generating?
07:46Exactly.
07:46I thought it was one and a half billion a year, but they're taking a billion every single month.
07:49Exactly.
07:50Which leads me to believe that they're tapping into the actual amount of money.
07:54You made that point about a year ago.
07:57And you are right.
07:58You were right then.
07:59And you are right now.
08:01There is insufficient interest being generated by these assets to make it possible for these funds to be released.
08:11They're using other people's money to continue to throw at Ukraine so they can all end up in accounts of the Cayman Islands and Panama.
08:21And, well, I'm not going to stop throwing around the names of countries.
08:24But anyway, to do all of that so that people like Zelensky and Co can sort their retirement savings away.
08:33All one big grift.
08:35All one big grift.
08:36And it does look like when you look at the missiles that are being moved and the military hardware that's being moved from Ukraine to the Middle East, it looks like the United States has been demilitarized to a certain extent.
08:52I mean, they don't have the resources to take on both of these wars.
08:57So they're choosing.
08:58And, of course, they're going to choose Israel and they're going to choose the Middle East.
09:01Obviously.
09:02Obviously.
09:02Everyone knows this.
09:03Everybody knows this.
09:04But they're having to actually go into the missile interceptors and the air defense systems in Ukraine and take those and move them to the Middle East.
09:15They don't have in their stockpiles that they can just easily give to Israel.
09:20Well, they have to dip into Ukraine.
09:21Just as Ukraine is shuffling soldiers around from one part of the front to another because it's short of soldiers, so the United States is shuffling around missile interceptors and such things from one place to another because it's short of missile interceptors.
09:37Now, again, we have been talking about this on our programs many, many times.
09:41Brian Baletic has been talking about it.
09:43Others have been doing so as well.
09:44The point is that the United States cannot sustain a long term industrial war.
09:52We have been saying this for a very long time, going all the way back to 2022.
09:59The U.S. military industrial complex doesn't work that way.
10:03Once upon a time in the 40s and 50s, it did.
10:07It doesn't do so anymore.
10:09Has the EU and NATO realized that they're losing this conflict really bad?
10:20I mean, you're saying Zelensky is finally starting to realize that he's not going to come out of this in a good way.
10:28Has the EU and NATO realized this or do they still believe that they can crush Russia somehow?
10:35They can pull out a victory from all of this?
10:38I don't think.
10:40Or is the plan just to allow Ukraine to go bust?
10:44I'm increasingly starting to wonder whether there's any kind of plan at all.
10:49To answer your question, I think when they meet and talk with each other, they don't admit to this.
10:57They don't admit to the fact that Ukraine is losing.
11:01They can't bring themselves to admit it to each other.
11:04It would require a big breakthrough by the Russians.
11:07Say, the capture by the Russians of Kharkov or maybe Sumy or something like that, for it finally to dawn on them that Ukraine is going down.
11:17But at the moment they're all pretending to each other that all is well and that the war is being successfully fought and that Ukraine is holding its positions and that the heroic Ukrainian army is resisting the Russian advance.
11:34And all we need to do is continue to supply weapons and things against Ukraine and to increase the pressure on the Russians to supposedly bring the Russians to the negotiating table.
11:47In other words, in other words, in other words, to force them to capitulate.
11:50I think that is the narrative they still talk to each other about.
11:57But a few people, I think, are beginning to get a sense of how bad the situation is.
12:06One of them, I think, is the German defence minister, Boris Pistorius.
12:10He is an extreme hardliner.
12:12He's very, very anti-Russian.
12:14He has in the past supported supplying tourist missiles to Ukraine.
12:18We know this because when the Russians leaked the conversations by the German generals, they said as much.
12:25They said that Boris Pistorius was in support of providing tourist missiles to Ukraine and that he was very frustrated with Olaf Scholz because Olaf Scholz was blocking the supply of tourist missiles to Ukraine.
12:38So this is in no sense someone who is anything other than a fully paid up supporter of, you know, the Ukraine enterprise.
12:49But he recently made a trip to Kiev.
12:56Apparently, it was to tell the Ukrainians, well, look, we're not going to give you the tourist missiles after all.
13:02But there were also reports that he was going there because he was worried about the situation on the front lines and he wanted to discuss that situation with the Ukrainians, with presumably people like Sirsky, who presumably know what the real situation on the front lines is.
13:22So I get the sense that Pistorius probably does understand some of what is going on.
13:28But if you're talking about someone like Starmer, for example, I don't think he has the slightest idea.
13:36Is there any possibility, a final question, for the Trump administration and for Europe to align and to recommit to Ukraine?
13:49I can't see how. With what?
13:51I mean, this is this is I mean, you know, let's assume that the war against Iran is a huge success, that there's regime change and a collapse of the regime in Iran.
14:06It's still going to absorb achieving that is still going to absorb a large proportion of US resources over the next couple of days or weeks that will still create the problem that there's insufficient resources to reallocate to Ukraine.
14:23And I don't think that the Russians are going to be set back by what happens in Iran.
14:31I think they're going to continue the special military operation.
14:34They'd be completely consistent about this.
14:37So I don't really see how this can how this can end in any positive way.
14:45If Iran collapses, there is a higher possibility that the United States might move forward with Lindsey Graham's disastrous sanctions, just saying.
14:59But I mean, that's that's possible.
15:02But I don't think that's going to change the dynamics on the battlefields or going to alter the fact that Ukraine is still going to lose.
15:10What about the reverse?
15:11The way it's looking right now is is it it turns out very badly for the United States when it comes to to Iran and then Russia continues to do what it does.
15:24What does that mean for the Trump administration, for the EU, for NATO?
15:27I mean, we're talking about huge defeats on multiple fronts.
15:31We are talking about not just a geopolitical crisis, but the final and visible collapse of the hegemony of the West.
15:43If they lose in them, if they lose the conflict with Iran, if Iran's by by which I mean, if Iran survives, it keeps its nuclear nuclear, you know, facilities intact.
15:56And the government in Iran remains in position and makes no no substantive concessions and Israel is badly battered as a result of this.
16:08And of course, if the Russians move on and advance and achieve their objectives in Ukraine, then, as I said, I mean, that is the end.
16:16I mean, it is the moment when it will no longer be possible to deny that the sun has set on Western hegemony and all of that.
16:27We are no longer talking then about the end of the unipolar moment.
16:32We are talking about the fall of the West as a geopolitical entity.
16:36All right.
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