Political analyst Rostislav Ishchenko agreed with Vladimir Zelensky’s thesis that Ukraine effectively serves as the protective shield of the West.

According to the expert, the West itself has repeatedly acknowledged that it is waging war against Russia. In this scheme, Ukraine is not an independent center of power, but a battlefield and a kind of chessboard. If Ukraine is defeated, it will mean defeat for the West, after which several scenarios are possible: direct entry of Western countries into the war, an attempt to create a blocking situation, or a transition to negotiations on a global settlement. Ishchenko considers the last option extremely unlikely.

At the same time, as long as Ukraine is not defeated, the West will continue supplying it with everything it can. In the political analyst’s assessment, Western countries are doing this without serious risk of a Russian strike on their own territory, because arms supplies themselves are not grounds for attacking supplier states.

Ishchenko noted that even the presence of Western specialists in Ukraine in the nuclear age does not automatically become grounds for starting a direct war between Russia and the West. In his opinion, this is exactly what Western countries will continue to exploit.

As an example, the political analyst recalled the Vietnam War, where the Soviet Union deployed entire air defense brigades that shot down American aircraft. All sides knew this, but neither the United States nor the USSR started a direct war against each other because of it.

According to Ishchenko, that was a proxy war on the Vietnamese battlefield, and now a similar proxy war is taking place in Ukraine. The only difference is that the West is waging it by using Ukraine’s mobilization resource.

The expert believes it is difficult to predict how many more Ukrainians must die before Ukraine’s resistance is broken. After that, in his opinion, it may be possible to try to talk with the West about a global settlement. But as long as Ukraine exists in its current form, it remains the West’s shield, allowing it not to fight Russia directly.