Russia says US facing humiliation in Ukraine like in Vietnam

By Guy Faulconbridge

MOSCOW (Reuters) -Russia said on Sunday U.S. lawmakers' support for $60.84 billion more in aid for Ukraine showed that Washington was wading much deeper into a hybrid war against Moscow that would end in humiliation on a par with the Vietnam or Afghanistan conflicts.

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.

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

Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova 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.

"Washington's deeper and deeper immersion in the hybrid war against Russia will turn into a loud and humiliating fiasco for United States such as Vietnam and Afghanistan," Zakharova said.

Russia, she said, will give "an unconditional and resolute response" to the U.S. move to get more involved in the Ukraine 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 is fighting a grinding artillery and drone war with Russia along a heavily fortified 1,000-km (600-mile) front.

The United States lost more than 58,000 military personnel in the 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.

In 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 return to power of the Islamist Taliban movement.

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

UKRAINE WAR

Russia now controls about 18% of Ukraine - in the east and south of its neighbour - 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 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.

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.

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. defence companies.

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.

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 West denies that it wants to destroy Russia, which in turn denies that it intends to invade any NATO member state.

(Reporting by Reuters; editing by Mark Heinrich)