US President Joe Biden plans to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky next week around the United Nations General Assembly meetings, according to multiple officials familiar with the plans.
It remained unclear whether the meeting would occur in New York or later in the week at the White House. One source familiar with the matter told CNN that Zelensky is expected to travel to Washington, DC, after his stop in New York.
Biden and Zelensky are both scheduled to address the assembly on Tuesday.
The Thing Ukraine needs most, according to Ukraine, is shells for their artillery.
No one knows where the US spends almost a trillion dollars a year in the military, but it’s apparently not on artillery shell factories, cause we only have 6 of them.
We simply can’t produce the number of shells Ukraine needs a month, and we’re already sending them shells from our stockpiles. The problem is that the military won’t put all their eggs in one basket. We need those shells in reserve too, so the government is only comfortable sending whatever shells we can reasonably replace.
Giving Ukraine training and access to US stockpiles sounds great, but what if they use up those stockpiles and are still at war? Ukraine’s doctrine is very different from US doctrine. Primarily, They’re using far more artillery shells then the US ever thought it would need, and ukraine would rapidly burn through decades of reserves that were intended for shock and awe style wars with air superiority and highly mechanized infantry.
So you need to realize that up until about 18 months ago, the prospect of a peer-power conflict between the US and literally anyone was considered deeply unlikely, and that was the prevailing consensus since the Soviet Union collapsed about 30 years ago. 2014 should have been a wake up call, but for various (imo, very deluded and myopic) reasons, it wasn’t taken as such.