US Army Secretary Dan Driscoll and chief of staff Gen. Randy George became the highest-level Trump Pentagon officials to visit Ukraine when they arrived on an unannounced trip this week, as the U.S. moves to find a way to speed the end of the war,
Politico reports.
The duo are slated to meet with Ukrainian military leaders, lawmakers and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, starting Wednesday. The tour comes at a time when Russia has stepped up its deadly missile and drone campaign against civilian targets in Ukraine and western allies are scrambling to come up with new ways to keep supplying weapons to the embattled nation.
The focus of the trip will be to engage Ukrainian leadership on the stalled peace process with Russia, even though Moscow has rebuffed all previous attempts by the U.S. and Ukraine to bring the fighting to a halt.
The U.S. and Ukraine have also been working on a major deal to exchange drone and autonomous munitions technologies, and this trip in part is meant to bolster that effort. Ukraine has emerged as a leader in developing — and improving — long- and short-range armed drones that have changed the face of the battlefield and struck targets deep inside Russia.
The trip was described by two people familiar with the planning who were granted anonymity to discuss sensitive national security issues.
At first blush it would seem an unusual choice to send Driscoll, the Army secretary, to Kyiv on a sensitive peace mission. But the Army vet and Yale law school friend of Vice President JD Vance has emerged as a major figure in the Pentagon and could now be moving into a more prominent role.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has not traveled to Kyiv.
Spokespeople for Driscoll and George declined to comment.
Driscoll and George have used Ukrainian battlefield innovations as an example the U.S. defense industry and Pentagon should emulate in weapons development.
“When you look at Ukraine, [they] have not accepted the current version of a thing as sufficient, and they have MacGyvered and come up with whatever they have to do to get to an outcome they need,” Driscoll told reporters at the Pentagon this month.
“There are no rules to get to that outcome, and they just achieve the thing,” because they have to, he added. The Army has set a target to buy 1 million drones over the next two to three years, a goal that is far beyond the U.S. defense industry’s current capacity, while Ukraine is already producing more than 1.5 million first-person view drones each year.
