The U.S.-led Ukraine Defense Contact Group met for the 14th time yesterday, this time virtually, to discuss further arming of the Kiev regime. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin told reporters at the Pentagon yesterday that the Group discussed the regime’s “urgent needs,” including ammunition, as well as the F-16 training program. No new U.S. military aid package was announced yesterday, but Austin did report that Sweden and France have signed bilateral agreements with Ukraine for defense procurements and more, and that’s going to help Ukraine get even more advanced systems. Otherwise, both Austin and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley engaged in fantasizing about the “miscalculations” that Russian President Vladimir Putin has supposedly made and the “demoralization” of the Russian army.
But reality has a way of imposing itself even on those who otherwise refuse to acknowledge its existence. “And I’ll stay with what we’ve said before, this is going to be long, it’s going to be hard, it’s going to be bloody,” Milley said regarding the stalled Ukrainian offensive. “And at the end of the day, we’ll see where the Ukrainians end up, vis-à-vis the Russians.”
Meanwhile, the London establishment is pressing ahead with its big war plans, perhaps unaware that it lacks the forces to carry them out. The U.K. Ministry of Defense released its “Defense Command Paper Refresh” yesterday, a follow up to the Defense Command Paper of two years ago. “I want MOD to be a campaigning department—adopting a more proactive posture, our forces more forward and present in the world, with a return to campaigning assertively and constantly,” Defense Secretary Ben Wallace asserted yesterday in a statement to the House of Commons. He complained that “For too long Defense was hollowed-out by both Labour and Conservative Governments, that left our forces overstretched and under-equipped,” and this is what he wants reversed.
