Free Republic

Although Ukrainian forces are being slowly pushed back in some places along the front, the country's overall military strategy is a good one, Gen. Christopher Cavoli, NATO's top general, said during the Aspen Security Forum. “The Ukrainians right now for these past few months have been focused on defending what they have in the east, denying Russia the free use of Crimea and southern Ukraine to attack the rest of Ukraine, preserving their access to the Black Sea and generating force,” the U.S. general said. “I think that they’ve got a great strategy. It is just a matter of prosecuting...

Russia's armed forces have grown larger and not dwindled during its war in Ukraine, a top US general said on Wednesday. "The army is actually now larger — by 15 percent — than it was when it invaded Ukraine," US Army Gen. Christopher Cavoli, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander Europe, told the House Armed Services Committee in a hearing. "Over the past year, Russia increased its front-line troop strength from 360,000 to 470,000," Cavoli continued, adding that the bolstered numbers stemmed from Russia raising its conscription age from 27 to 30. The increase, Cavoli said, meant that Russia was able to...

NATO military chief US Gen Christopher Cavoli and British Admiral Sir Tony Radakin traveled to the Polish-Ukrainian border ten days ago for a crisis meeting with the Ukrainian chief military commander Gen. Valerii Zaluzhnyi, for what was privately billed as “a council of war”, The Guardian reported. The meeting was “no ordinary discussion”, The Guardian writes. “Zaluzhnyi brought his entire command team with him on the roughly 300-mile journey from Kyiv. The aim of the five-hour meeting was to help reset Ukraine’s military strategy – top of the agenda was what to do about the halting progress of Ukraine’s counteroffensive,...