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Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley, keeps pushing Washington’s and the media’s narrative that with more advanced weapons of death to keep bloodying the Ukraine killing fields, Russia will be defeated.
Milley spoke with the Financial Times and said that it would be “almost impossible for the Russians to achieve their political objectives by military means” and said it is exceedingly unlikely that its military will be able to “overrun” the country, he said.
“It’s just not going to happen,” he said.
He also said that it will be “very, very difficult for Ukraine this year to kick the Russians out of every inch” of the country it now controls.
TRENDPOST: Milley continues to sell the political line out of Washington. Col. Douglas MacGregor, who The Trends Journal has interviewed, has criticized these kinds of comments from Washington and said they hurt the administration’s credibility.
“General Milley has made it very clear that he’s aligned with the left, he is part of this administration, he’s going to say whatever they want him to say,” MacGregor said, according to RT.
Milley seems to be forgetting that Russia never said it had any intention of running over the entire country. The Kremlin has insisted since the start of the operation that it will achieve its goals, which include deNazification and demilitarizing the country. Russian forces now control about 20 percent of Ukraine since their invasion. Moscow also wants assurances that Ukraine will remain neutral and not join NATO.
(See “UKRAINIAN CITY CHANGES STREET NAME FOR NAZI HEAD” 29 Nov 2022, “PUTIN SENDS STERN WARNING TO THE WEST, VOWS TO KEEP UP FIGHT IN UKRAINE” 27 Sep 2022, and “UKRAINE’S AZOV BATTALION: ‘NAZIS’ OR ‘FAR-RIGHT?’ DON’T CALL A SPADE A SPADE” 22 Mar 2022.)
Zelensky told an audience at the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival last week that Ukraine is “a fortress of the free world. A fortress that has stood for almost a year; a fortress that protects itself, Europe, and the world.”
Zelensky said Ukraine will not trade territory for peace because Putin cannot be trusted.
“Any territorial compromises would make us weaker as a state. It’s not about compromise itself. Why would we be afraid of that? We have millions of compromises in life every day. The question is with whom? With Putin? No. Because there’s no trust,” he said.
As for “trust,” this is especially a two-faced lie, since, as we reported, the West has been lying to Russia ever since the fraudulent Minsk agreements. (See “ZELENSKY SAID HE REFUSED TO HONOR MINSK PEACE ACCORD WITH RUSSIA.”)
More Weapons of Death
Milley told reporters last week that the Ukraine War has shown the importance of conventional munitions and the general said the U.S. is going to reexamine its own stocks.
“We’re trying to do the analysis so that we can then estimate what we think the true requirement would be, and then we have to put that in the budget. Ammunition is very expensive.”
Reuters, citing an unnamed NATO official, reported last week that NATO allies have seen a substantial drop in their own stockpiles and these countries continue to arm Ukraine at a rate that doesn’t match production.
“If Europe were to fight Russia, some countries would run out of ammunition in days,” the official said. The report said NATO will request alliance members to begin increasing weapons production.
TRENDPOST: It is worth noting that Milley also repeated his bullshit claim that Russia has already lost in Ukraine while joining Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin at the Pentagon Tuesday to give an update on the war.
He said Russian President Vladimir Putin thought he could defeat Ukraine quickly and fracture the NATO alliance. But he said Putin’s goals have backfired and NATO, which has still not approved Sweden and Finland, is more unified than ever.
“Russia has lost strategically, operationally, and tactically and they are now paying an enormous price on the battlefield,” Milley said before noting that the U.S. will continue to support Ukraine and its ability to defend itself and liberate their occupied areas.
Milley’s opinion on the Ukraine war has evolved considerably after once suggesting that Kyiv should negotiate for a peaceful settlement because it may not come across a better opportunity.
Milley said in November that Ukraine accomplished everything that it could have hoped against such a larger adversary, and that now may be its last, best chance to negotiate.
“We’ve seen the Ukrainian military fight the Russian military to a standstill. Now, what the future holds is not known with any degree of certainty, but we think there are some possibilities here for some diplomatic solutions,” he said in an interview with CNBC.
His remarks at the time were quickly rebuked by Washington’s War Machine in the State Department that said any decision to negotiate will rest with Kyiv and the Biden administration will do nothing to nudge the effort along.
Milley quickly changed his tune and said Russia “lost strategically, they’ve lost operationally and, I repeat, they’ve lost tactically. What they’ve tried to do, they’ve failed at. The strategic reframing of their objectives, of their illegal invasion, have all failed, every single one of them.”
The Russian Foreign Ministry accused the U.S. of carrying out a “total hybrid war” and putting the two countries on a direct path to a confrontation over its historic support for Ukraine to weaken Russia.
Its Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said the U.S.’s military support for Ukraine has brought on an unprecedented crisis that resulted in no room for diplomacy. The U.S. has provided Ukraine with $196 billion in aid, trains Ukrainian troops, provides Kyiv with live intelligence updates, and has special forces on the ground. (Germany comes in second place and has provided Kyiv with $172 billion.)
Ryabkov told reporters that “we have a very deep and unprecedented crisis in Russia-U.S. relations. The Biden administration has driven them into a deadlock.”