“There were some early Ukrainian penetrations in the opening days of the June offensive,” the official said, “at or near” the heavily trapped first of Russia’s three formidable concrete barriers of defense, “and the Russians retreated to sucker them in. And they all got killed.” After weeks of high casualties and little progress, along with horrific losses to tanks and armored vehicles, he said, major elements of the Ukrainian army, without declaring so, virtually canceled the offensive. The two villages that the Ukrainian army recently claimed as captured “are so tiny that they couldn’t fit between two Burma-Shave signs”—referring to billboards that seemed to be on every American highway after World War II.

A byproduct of the Biden administration’s neocon hostility to Russia and China—exemplified by the remarks of Secretary of State Tony Blinken, who has repeatedly stated that he will not currently countenance a ceasefire in Ukraine—has been a significant split in the intelligence community. One casualty are the secret National Intelligence Estimates that have delineated the parameters of American foreign policy for decades. Some key offices in the CIA have refused, in many cases, to participate in the NIE process because of profound political disagreement with the administration’s aggressive foreign policy. One recent failure involved a planned NIE that dealt with the outcome of a Chinese attack on Taiwan.

I have reported for many weeks on the longstanding disagreement between the CIA and other elements of the intelligence community on the prognosis of the current war in the Ukraine. CIA analysts have consistently been far more skeptical than their counterparts at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) on the prospect for a Ukraine success. The American media has ignored the dispute, but the London-headquartered Economist, whose well-informed reporters do not get bylines, has not. One sign of the internal tension inside the American community emerged in the magazine’s September 9 edition when Trent Maul, the DIA’s director of analysis, gave an extraordinary on-the-record interview to the Economist in which he defended his agency’s optimistic reporting on the Ukraine war and its troubled counteroffensive. It was, as the Economist observed in a headline, “A rare interview.” It also passed unnoticed by America’s premiere newspapers.

Maul acknowledged that the DIA “got it wrong” in its reporting on the “will to fight” of America’s allies when the US-trained and -financed armies in Iraq and Afghanistan “crumbled almost overnight.” Maul took issue with CIA complaints—though the agency was not cited by name—about the Ukrainian military leadership’s lack of skill and their tactics in the current counteroffensive. He told the Economist that Ukraine’s recent military successes were “significant” and gave its forces a 40 to 50 percent probability of breaking through Russia’s three-tiered defense lines by the end of this year. He warned, however, the Economist reported, that “limited ammunition and worsening weather will make this ‘very difficult.’”

Zelensky, in an interview with the Economist published a week later, acknowledged that he had detected—how could he not?—what the magazine quoted him as saying was “a change of mood among some of his partners.” Zelensky also acknowledged that what he called his nation’s “recent difficulties” on the battlefield were seen by some as a reason to begin serious end-of-war negotiations with Russia. He called this “a bad moment” because Russia “sees the same.” But he again made clear that peace talks are not on the table, and he issued a new threat to those leaders in the region, whose countries are hosting Ukrainian refugees and who want, as the CIA has reported to Washington, an end to the war. Zelensky warned in the interview, as the Economist wrote: “There is no way of predicting how the millions of Ukrainian refugees in European countries would react to their country being abandoned.” Zelensky said the Ukrainian refugees have “behaved well . . . and are grateful” to those who have sheltered them, but it would not be a “good story” for Europe if a Ukrainian defeat “were to drive the people into a corner.” It was nothing less than a threat of internal insurrection.

Zelensky’s message this week to the annual United Nations General Assembly in New York offered little new and, the Washington Post reported, he received the obligatory “warm welcome” from those in attendance. But, the Post noted, “he delivered his address to a half-full house, with many delegations declining to appear and listen to what he had to say.” Leaders of some developing nations, the report added, were “frustrated” that the multiple billions being spent without serious accountability by the Biden administration to finance the Ukraine war was diminishing support for their own struggles to deal with “a warming world, confronting poverty and ensuring a more secure life for their citizens.”