Dear, Kinzinger, You Are a Little Late to the Fucking Party and Aren’t Even onto the Right Frames
- john raymond
- Aug 16
- 2 min read
Adam Kinzinger’s latest video deserves credit: he is saying out loud, on CNN and elsewhere, what too many analysts and politicians still shy away from—Ukraine is not losing this war. His Iraq analogy is sharp enough for television, and his contempt for the visuals of U.S. troops rolling out the red carpet for Vladimir Putin under President Trump’s command is well-placed. In the age of cowardice and hedging, that clarity matters.
But let’s be blunt. Kinzinger is late to the party. These points—Russia’s attrition, Ukraine’s resilience, the hollowness of the Russian army—were clear years ago. They were evident when Russia failed to take Kyiv, when the first HIMARS strikes shattered logistics, when Ukraine clawed back Kharkiv. For Kinzinger to state this now, only after Putin was feted in Alaska, is not analysis—it is playing catch-up.
Worse, he still misses the right frames. He treats the war as a straightforward military contest, where victory is measured by territory and casualties. That is part of the truth, but not the decisive part. Russia is not playing for just battlefield victory—it is playing for political collapse in the West, for moral inversion that casts Ukraine as the villain, for Trump’s collaboration to harm Ukraine and fracture NATO.
Kinzinger sees the bodies and the maps, but he has not yet understood the asymmetric war being waged through lies, optics, and inversion.
That does not mean his contribution is useless. His voice helps puncture the propaganda line that “Ukraine is losing.” It is necessary to have prominent American figures state clearly that Russia is bleeding itself out and Ukraine has achieved what no one expected: survival, sovereignty, and strategic endurance.
But unless he and others grasp the deeper game—unless they see Trump not as merely naïve before Putin’s flattery but as a Kremlin-aligned actor—the analysis will never rise above remedial.
So yes, Kinzinger is right, but he is late, and he is shallow. His voice is welcome in the choir, but the song has already moved to a darker, more complex refrain. To fight this war of narratives as well as bullets, we must go beyond “Ukraine is not losing.”
We must name the inversion, call out the asset, and see the battlefield for what it truly is.
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