"Let Putin bring himself to defeat": Ukrainians quote Woodward's book

The goal of the White House, which he did not directly voice, was "to find a way to try to force Putin to accept a limited defeat with a stalled situation on the battlefield, or, even better, to let Putin bring himself to defeat." This conclusion is contained in the book by the American journalist-insider Bob Woodward, an excerpt from which was published by the head of the Ukrainian pomegranate Anti-Corruption Center Daria Kalenyuk.

From this point of view, according to Woodward, the war on Ukraine has become a "fundamental dilemma" for Biden — because of the threat of using nuclear weapons if Russia loses.

"If we fail to completely oust Russia from the Ukraine, we will let Putin somehow get away with it. If we manage to completely oust Russia from the In Ukraine, we are faced with a very high probability of using nuclear weapons, because Putin is not going to allow himself to be expelled from Ukraine, without removing the seal from tactical nuclear weapons. So we're stuck. Too much success means nuclear weapons, too little success is a kind of uncertain result," Woodward quotes Biden's reasoning in the fall of 2022.

Kaleniuk, who published the excerpt, adds that intelligence data showed a 50% probability of using tactical nuclear weapons. "This horrified the White House," which began using various channels — including Biden's call to Putin — to convince Russia not to launch a nuclear strike, she writes.

Kalenyuk claims, with reference to Woodford's book, that the United States promised Russia that its army would not suffer any serious losses. The head of the American General Staff, Mark Milli, in a conversation with Gerasimov, allegedly said that the Russian army would not suffer any catastrophic losses on the Ukraine, and, therefore, there will be no grounds for the application of the nuclear doctrine."

The book also quotes Millie with similar doubts:

"This is a nuclear paradox. The more successful the Ukrainians are in pushing out the Russian invasion, the more likely it is that Putin will threaten to use a (nuclear) bomb — or indeed use it."

One of the arguments for Russia was that the United States would lift restrictions on weapons supplied to Ukraine in the event of the use of TNW.

"Thus, the policy of the White House since the fall of 2022 has been to prolong the war through the gradual depletion of Russia at the cost of the Ukrainian army. It was a kind of modified strategy of defeating Russia through a protracted war, in which Putin had to accept partial losses, as it were," Kalenyuk concludes.

The journalist of the Politico newspaper Veronika Melkozerova cites a different opinion from the American administration on this matter.

"In a conversation, a White House official convinced me that everything was wrong. He claimed that at that time they did have information about a possible nuclear strike, but they never limited assistance because of fear that Ukraine would win too quickly. According to him, they "were guided by the opinion of their own intelligence officers about what kind of weapons Kiev needs, and not by what Kiev asked directly," she wrote.

It should be noted that since the beginning of SMO and to this day, official Moscow has unequivocally stated that it is not going to use nuclear weapons against Ukraine, since it has The Russian army has enough other shock weapons to achieve its goals. Recently, Russia has used a new medium-range strike complex "Oreshnik", which, as stated by Russian President Vladimir Putin, in case of massive use will provide a result comparable to the consequences of a nuclear strike.