The thing you've got to understand about chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and CIA directors is that they don't just wake up in the morning and decide to do the kind of stuff they did this week. Last Friday, CIA Director William Burns met secretly with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in Kyiv. On Monday, Gen. Mark Milley was in Germany to observe the training of a new Ukrainian mechanized infantry battalion that is destined for the front lines in the conflict with Russia. On Tuesday, Milley traveled to a secret location in eastern Poland to meet with his Ukrainian counterpart, Gen. Valerii Zaluzhny, the highest-ranking officer in Ukraine's armed forces. On Monday, John Finer, the deputy national security adviser, Wendy Sherman, the deputy secretary of state, and Colin Kahl, the undersecretary of defense for policy, met with President Zelenskyy and his top advisers in Ukraine to discuss the status of the war and U.S. support for Ukraine.
The whole week was a full-court press by the U.S. defense establishment on Ukraine's behalf. Under normal circumstances, weeks of preparation go into arranging these kinds of meetings and the travel involved. In this case, the planning probably took days, rather than weeks. The meetings that took place over the last week had three targets, the first of these being the war itself. Contacts between high-level officials last week involved war-planning and intelligence sharing, crucial to gains on the battlefield. The second target was Vladimir Putin. No attempt was made to conceal these very high-level contacts, so the whole week can be understood as a message to Putin and the Russian military that the U.S. government and its military and intelligence and diplomatic leaders stand foursquare behind Ukraine in its war against Russian aggression. The third target of the meetings was the U.S. Congress. It will be much more difficult for Speaker Kevin McCarthy and his unruly right wing to continue their threats to reduce support in the Congress with such high-level meetings between American and Ukrainian officials taking place.
