Ukrainian morale is high and that’s why they’ll win says General Milley

Wars are won off the backs of good leaders and high morale, two things America’s top general recently said will help Ukraine win its life-or-death struggle against Russia.

"Russia continues to pay severely for its war of choice…unlike Ukrainian forces," Milley told a group of officials during a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact in Germany according to press release from the Department of Defense. 

Milley explained that the Ukrainians were “highly motivated to fight for their country, their freedom, their democracy, and their way of life” while Russia lacked leadership and will.

For Milley, the crux of Russia’s problems was twofold. Putin’s soldiers lack the morale to fight and win while his military leaders lack the ability to fight a combined arms war.

"Russia has resorted to tightening conscription laws as they indiscriminately feed their citizens into the chaos of war," Milley said before going on to explain Russia’s failures. 

Military leaders in Russia have been ineffective at coordinating combined arms assaults according to Milley, a fact that’s been exemplified time and again since the war began. 

General Milley specifically pointed to Russia’s inability to capture Kyiv in the early months of the war but you could look at any situation and see that Russia’s military failures stem from their ability to successfully prosecute combined arms warfare. 

America's top general isn’t wrong in his assessment. Russia’s battlefield failures throughout the war have given Kyiv the crucial breathing room needed to counter Putin’s every move. 

Failure to capture Kiyv early in the war emboldened Ukraine’s allies and led to more Western arms shipments, weapons that were used to recapture Ukraine's occupied territories. 

Major swaths of Kharkiv and Kherson were retaken in September, showing that if they were equipped with the right tools, the Ukrainians could hold their own and beat back Russian forces. 

"[Putin] thought he could fracture NATO, as he launched an unprovoked war of aggression with hundreds of thousands of Russian forces crossing the border on multiple avenues of approach,” Milley said to kick off his speech. “He was wrong." 

"Ukraine's spirit remains unbroken," he continued. "There are now 31 members of NATO, and NATO is even stronger than ever—united in the face of Russia's aggression and attack on the rules-based order," the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman added.

General Milley made his comments in front of officials from 50 other countries who had gathered in Germany for the 11th meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group. 

The group is an alliance of fifty-four nations that came together in the wake of Russia’s invasion in order to coordinate the supply of weapons and military aid to Ukraine. 

On April 21st, the group met to hammer out the details of how Ukrainian tanker crews would be trained on their M1 Abrams tanks and penned a deal that created a Polish repair hub where Ukraine's new American tank fleet would be fixed according to Reuters.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Llyod Austin also attended the meeting and echoed General Milley’s sentiments, saying that the equipment agreed upon at the meeting would “put Ukraine's forces in a position to continue to succeed on the battlefield" according to a separate Department of Defense release. 

"Putin made a series of grave miscalculations when he ordered the invasion of Ukraine more than a year ago," Austin said. "He thought that Ukraine wouldn't dare to fight back. But Ukraine is standing strong, with the help of its partners,” Secretary Austin added.