Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, speaking at the National Press Club yesterday, tried to use history as an excuse to explain why the Ukrainian offensive isn’t going anywhere, in this case, the Allied campaign in France following the D-Day landings in June 1944, where the commanders in London predicted that Paris would be liberated in 45 days. “It took us 90 days to get to Paris. It was bloody, hard fighting,” said Milley, reported the Washington Times. “People were dying. War is an extraordinarily violent human exercise.”
“I said this [counteroffensive] is going to take six, eight or ten weeks. It’s going to be very difficult, it’s going to be very long, and it’s going to be very, very bloody,” he said. “No one should have any illusions about any of that. Ukraine is fighting for its life.” He said the U.S. and its NATO allies are providing Ukraine with as much firepower “as is humanly possible.”
But Milley’s Ukrainian counterpart, Gen. Valerii Zaluzhniy, is blaming the slow progress of the offensive on his NATO backers. In an interview with the Washington Post, for which he resurfaced from his weeks-long disappearance, Zaluzhniy claimed that NATO is not providing him with the weapons he needs, and he needs more of every kind of weapon there is. Zaluzhniy expressed frustration that while his biggest Western backers would never launch an offensive without air superiority, Ukraine still has not received modern fighter jets but is expected to rapidly take back territory from the occupying Russians. The Post notes that American-made F-16s, promised only recently, are not likely to arrive until the fall—in a best-case scenario.