The conflict will not be our Vietnam, Russians insist

UKRAINE is not going to be Russia’s Vietnam, a columnist for a Russian state news agency has claimed.

What Vladimir Putin described as a “special military operation” has been grinding on for almost four months, with Moscow struggling to accomplish any of its stated goals: Russian troops have not even managed to capture all of Donetsk or Luhansk – known as the Donbas – in the east.

There have been fears that the invasion of Ukraine could have disastrous consequences for Russia domestically just as the US’S disastrous war in Vietnam did in the 1960s and 70s.

But Pyotr Akopov wrote a piece for RIA Novosti last week rejecting such comparisons and arguing that “Ukraine and Russia are two different countries only in name: they are essentially parts of one and the same historic Russia.”

“We are fighting on our land, and we’re fighting one another,” he said.

Mr Akopov said it was unlikely that Moscow would get stuck in a “years long conflict” since the public in the West was already growing weary of the cost of the war.

He predicted that the US and Europe would inevitably put up with the reality of parts of Ukraine falling under Moscow’s control and would “have to give Russia a piece of Ukraine”.

Mr Akopov, once an obscure columnist, has gained prominence in Russia thanks to his particularly vitriolic writing for RIA Novosti.

In a column shortly after the start of the invasion of Ukraine, for example, he evoked the Nazis by saying it was Russia’s “historic mission” to solve the “Ukrainian question” once and for all.