“Washington’s deeper and deeper immersion in the hybrid war against Russia will turn into a loud and humiliating fiasco for the United States such as Vietnam and Afghanistan,” Maria Zakharova, the spokesperson for the Russian Foreign Ministry said on Sunday, in response to the U.S. House of Representatives passing the long-awaited Ukraine aid package.

On Saturday, the U.S. House of Representatives passed with broad bipartisan support a USD 95 billion legislative package providing security assistance to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, over bitter objections from some Republican hardliners.

The U.S. legislative package includes measures that would allow the U.S. to seize billions of dollars’ worth of Russian assets frozen by sanctions imposed on Moscow. That, said Zakharova, was simply “theft”, adding that the true beneficiaries of the whole package were U.S. defense companies.

Russia, she said, will give “an unconditional and resolute response” to the U.S. move to get more involved in the Ukraine war.

Geopolitics and war

President Vladimir Putin’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine has touched off the worst fall-out in relations between Russia and the West since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, according to Russian and U.S. diplomats.

Almost 26 months since the 2022 invasion, Russia is slowly advancing in eastern Ukraine and has ramped up its bombardments of cities and towns behind the front lines amid a slowdown in Western military assistance.

Putin presents the war as part of a much broader struggle with the U.S., which he says ignored Moscow's interests after the Soviet Union’s 1991 break-up and then plotted to cleave Russia apart and grab its natural resources.

The leaders of the West and Ukraine have cast the war in Ukraine as an imperial-style land-grab showing that post-Soviet Russia is one of the top two biggest nation-state threats to global stability, alongside China.

The West asserts it has no intention to destroy Russia, which in turn claims that it does not intend to invade any NATO member state.

Russia now controls about 18% of Ukraine - in the east and south of its neighbor, and has been incrementally gaining ground since the failure of Kyiv’s 2023 counter-offensive to make any serious inroads against Russian troops dug in behind minefields patrolled by drones and guarded by heavy artillery. Ukraine is now fighting a grinding artillery and drone war with Russia along a heavily fortified 1,000 km front.

Ukraine has for months been begging the United States to release more money and weapons to help it fight, though Russian officials have asserted that U.S. aid will not change the ultimate course of the war.

U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Director William Burns warned last week that without more U.S. military support Ukraine could lose on the battlefield, but that with support Kyiv’s forces could hold their own this year.

The United States has repeatedly ruled out sending its own or other NATO-member troops to Ukraine, which would somehow justify the comparison of U.S. intervention in Vietnam or its venture into Afghanistan.

The United States lost more than 58,000 military personnel in the two-decade-long, 1955-75 Vietnam War, which ended with Communist North Vietnam's victory and takeover of the South, while hundreds of thousands of civilians were killed.

Over the two decades of the 2001-2021 war in Afghanistan, the U.S. reported 2,459 dead and over 20,000 wounded in the conflict which ended with the withdrawal of U.S.-led coalition forces and the return to power of the Islamist Taliban movement.

The Soviet Union lost 14,453 personnel in the 10 years of the 1979-1989 war in Afghanistan. Civilian deaths in both the wars in Afghanistan were vast.

According to Ukrinform, the total combat losses of the Russian army in Ukraine as of February 24, 2022, are about 456,960 people, with no clear distinction made between killed and wounded.

BBC reported earlier this week that it has managed to confirm that at least 50,000 Russian soldiers have been killed since the war broke out two years and two months ago, with the actual numbers possibly being higher. U.S. intelligence determined in mid-December 2023 that the Russian losses stood at about 315,000 killed and wounded.

Zakharova said that ordinary Ukrainians were being “forcibly driven to slaughter as cannon fodder” but that the United States was now no longer betting on a Ukrainian victory against Russia. Washington, she said, was hoping Ukraine could hold on until the U.S. presidential election in November.

She also said “it was clear” that the United States wanted Ukraine “to fight to the last Ukrainian” including with attacks on Russian sovereign territory and civilians.

On the defenders’ side, some 31,000 Ukrainian soldiers have been killed by late February, two years after Russia’s full-scale invasion began, according to President Zelenskyy. U.S. officials have in turn said that the number was closer to 70,000.

Zelenskyy said he could not disclose information regarding the number of wounded, given it would be a piece of information too valuable for Russian war planning.