US Secretary of State Antony Blinken meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in Kiev on September 6, 2023 (AFP)

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced the most recent military package amounting to over $1 billion for Ukraine during an unannounced visit to Kiev and said the US noticed "good progress" in the counteroffensive, but that claim was quite shortlived.

In an interview with Judge Andrew Napolitano on his Judging Freedom podcast, former CIA analyst Larry Johnson expressed his belief that the US is outright lying about the failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive.

“Tony, look at a map,” and just look at the progress that “has not been made by Ukraine,” he said.

During his visit, Blinken took pride in saying that the Ukrainian military has shown “real progress” in its counteroffensive in the “last few weeks," adding that Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky's assessment of the developments “matches our own."

“Russia has been steadily pushing to the [west],” Johnson added, noting that May's conflict of Bakhmut was the “last big conflict” that Ukraine’s military partook in. “They [the US] don’t understand Russian defensive tactics," he added.

The first stage of grief: denial

Former top US intel analyst, Ray McGovern, said, “Americans have been had" after joining the podcast, adding that "billions of money had gone to Ukraine, with a lot of it siphoned off.”

He expressed that the US was “losing” in the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

However, senior members of the US intelligence community keep “delud[ing] themselves, their colleagues, the press, and the public" in regard to the actual developments on the ground, according to Johnson, who said they keep denying the reality that Ukraine was experiencing a “shortage of ammunition, shortage of manpower, trouble recruiting people."

Still, Blinken's comments about the success of the Ukrainian counteroffensive were dismissed as false claims by a senior official of the Zaporizhzhia regional administration, Vladimir Rogov.

This comes after US Ambassador and Alternative Representative for Special Political Affairs to the United Nations, Robert Wood, underscored the dire situation in Ukraine on Friday, emphasizing that it was not improving and calling for sustained pressure on Russia to withdraw its troops from the region.

In the month of July alone, Ukraine lost 20,824 soldiers and 2,227 pieces of military equipment during battles, according to Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu, who added that from July 26-27, Ukraine lost 400 soldiers and 63 pieces of equipment in the Orikhove direction, adding that Kiev's forces failed to break through Russian defense lines.

The military official further pointed out that as a result of the failed counteroffensive, the Kiev regime has been resorting to strategies of terror operations on civilian infrastructure in Russia.