U.S. Military Leaders Acknowledge Ukraine’s ‘Uncertain,’ ‘Violent’ Future

“I think the Russians have shown us the same five vehicles about 1,000 times from 10 different angles,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin quipped Thursday morning, speaking to reporters from NATO headquarters in Brussels where he convened a meeting of the countries providing military aid to Ukraine.

Austin was mocking imagery the Kremlin has released in recent days that, it says, shows its troops destroying U.S.-issued fighting vehicles and tanks when, on at least one occasion, the footage actually showed a Russian helicopter firing at a stationary farm vehicle in a field.

But the secretary quickly pivoted to the gravity of the situation facing Ukraine’s forces, which have lost several sophisticated fighting vehicles in failed attempts to break through deeply entrenched Russian lines – conspicuous failures to which Russian President Vladimir Putin has attempted to draw international attention in an attempt to break Western public support for Ukraine.

Austin spoke in the wake of several statements Putin has issued in recent days and meetings he has conducted – including with influential military bloggers – in what analysts consider a concerted effort to undermine Ukraine’s limited progress. The Russian leader appears eager to assure his domestic audience of his military’s prospects, despite troubling realities about Russia’s troop strength and the limits of its industrial base to keep up with the military’s needs.

And for the first days of the counteroffensive, his voice was the most prominent, as the government of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy avoided publicly confirming battlefield details – good or bad – and its Western backers deferred questions to Kyiv.

“Putin may be attempting to systematically amplify and misrepresent Ukrainian losses of Western military equipment to portray Ukraine’s counteroffensive as failed and discourage the West from continuing to support Ukraine,” the independent Institute for the Study of War concluded in an analysis note earlier this week. “Former Russian officer and ardent ultranationalist Igor Girkin observed that Putin’s comments indicate that the Russian Ministry of Defense continues to misinform him about the true situation on the battlefield.”

Austin on Thursday acknowledged it is “far too early to make any definitive assessments” of the state of Ukraine’s attempts to break the deadlock and tempered expectations of the near future: “It’s uncertain, it’s violent and, as always, it’s high-cost.”

“This will continue to be a tough fight, as we anticipated,” Austin said, stressing the need for Western countries to remain steadfast in their support for Ukraine – even as some domestic voices begin to question the value of the multibillion-dollar investments.

Army Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who spoke alongside Austin, similarly said it would be “premature” to estimate how long Ukraine’s war will take, noting that hundreds of thousands of Russian troops are dug in at fortified and prepared positions all along the front lines.

“This is a very difficult fight, this is a very violent fight, and it will likely take a considerable amount of time at high cost,” Milley said. “At the end of the day, as Napoleon once said, the moral is to the physical as three is to one.”

And he touted what he considers Ukraine’s advantages: “The Ukrainian morale, their leadership, their skill, their tenacity, their resilience is high.”

“The Russians, on the other hand, their leadership is not necessarily coherent, their troop morale is not high. They’ve been sitting in defensive positions. Many of them don’t even know why they’re there,” he said, concluding, “It’s too early to tell. We’ll see how this plays out.”