Thanks to Thomas Malthaus providing link to Mr. Bhadrakumar’s piece, symptomatically called Biden’s existential angst in Ukraine. As is expected, Bhadrakumar’s piece revolves largely around the article in WaPo by Robert Gates and Condoleezza Rice titled Time Is Not on Ukraine’s Side. As is the case with many policy « pieces » in the United States it is written by people who fucked it up big time one way or another in their distinguished careers. Robert Gates, being a smart man, had his own delusions on the matters he was dealing with during his tenure as the head of CIA, Secretary of the State and SecDef. In the end, I remember his public speaking in 1996-97 (IIRC) at the Seattle’s Madison Mayflower Hotel conference where he didn’t understand that his threats to choke financially Yeltsin’s Russia were a highly desirable act for those forces in Russia which, in the end, came to power due to US and NATO criminal idea to gang-bang Serbia in 1999. 

But that is common for the majority of America’s graduates of Soviet/Russian Studies field—to exercise illusion that they know what Russian people want, based on communicating with circles of people in Russia who tell those graduates, from CIA’s chief to such « scholars » like Michael McFaul, what they want to hear. That’s the MO of the US « Intelligence Community ». And whilst Rice and Gates’ piece is sober and grim (for 404 and US hegemony) there is also a tacit recognition of the strategic realities on the ground. Here is what Bhadrakumar points out which is crucial :

And here is the issue. Pentagon CANNOT be sure of any strategy of Surovikin, because they cannot be sure of a larger geopolitical strategy of Kremlin which is surrounded by fog deliberately and if there is one thing neither Pentagon nor higher-ups in US policy-making establishment ever followed is what Alexander Svechin wrote in his « Strategy » almost 100 year ago—« Each war represents an isolated case, requiring an understanding of its own particular logic, its own unique character. » Yes, it is that simple, yet, it seems, so beyond the reach of the US policy-makers other than self-evident platitudes that Ukraine is merely a pawn in a huge game designed to finish off self-proclaimed US hegemony and that Russia was at this game since at least 2007.