US army secretary briefs ambassadors at ‘nightmare meeting’ in Kyiv on Friday after talks with Ukrainian leader
US officials have told Nato allies they expect to push president Volodymyr Zelenskyy into agreeing to a peace deal in the coming days, under the threat that if Kyiv does not sign, it will face a much worse deal in future.
The US army secretary, Dan Driscoll, briefed ambassadors from Nato nations at a meeting in Kyiv late on Friday, after talks with Zelenskyy and taking a phone call from the White House. “No deal is perfect, but it must be done sooner rather than later,” he told them, according to one person who was present.
The mood in the room was sombre, with several European ambassadors questioning the content of the deal and the way in which the US had conducted the negotiations with Russia without keeping allies informed.
Why is anyone listening to the US anymore? They are turning themselves into North Korea and losing any credibility they might have had. Who gives a shit what they say anymore?
Because Europe has had half a decade to fill the void and they can’t get it done and continue to act like cost efficiency is the name of the game.
Europeans seem to want to rag on about the US being irrelevant while being completely unwilling to put their money where their mouths are.
I am very supportive of Europe, but they need to wake up to that reality and stop bickering about pennies.
They should have been at wartime production years ago, and yet they still don’t even have a 5th let alone 6th gen fighter jet.
The fact that the USA, who is currently chopping its own legs off, is managing to provide just about equally to the Ukrainian war effort to you, who are literally neighbours, should be embarrassing and sobering, but instead people just keep complaining and expecting the US to both shut up, and fix it.
Your claim that US and EU aids are about equal is false.
I agree, but US hardware are still top of the line which are essential for any countries to effectively combat Russian, and potential Chinese, aggression. Even part of the deal of EU and Trump is the former investing in the US military. Many countries also do not have the same military industrial complex that the US have, so many are too reliant for de facto protection. Trump is merely formalising and making money from that unwritten rule.
I mean, top of the line is an overstatement. It’s the quantities and the supply chain behind it that make it worth it, from a technological point of view they are good at best.
There are definitely examples of US military boondoggle projects that didn’t result in high end military equipment getting made, but I think it is safe to say there are quite a few individual military tools and vehicles, supply chain notwithstanding, that are amazing triumphs of technology that have no equal.
You can definitely make the case that the volume and overall scale of our military production are excessive in the extreme, but I think to remain intellectually honest, we must admit that they are good at what they do, even though what they do is not always good.