From Foreign Policy:
NATO Is Helping Ukraine to Fight—but Not to Win
The Washington summit was heavy on promises but light on plans.
Russia’s war in Ukraine dominated the NATO summit in Washington this week as the alliance unveiled plans to intensify support for Kyiv and offer an “irreversible” path to eventual membership in the defense pact...
But the summit also highlighted a central tension in Western strategy to support Ukraine: Military aid has played a decisive role in enabling Kyiv to fend off Russian forces, but it has fallen short of enabling it to actually win the war.
“We’re basically propping up Ukraine to stay in the battle and make some advances and not outright win the battle,” said Liana Fix, a fellow for Europe at the Council on Foreign Relations. “There’s not a real strategy for the war.”
Allies along NATO’s eastern flank, most notably the Baltic states and Poland, have long called for a surging of support to Ukraine. But the allies with the deepest pockets and most sophisticated weapons systems—particularly the United States—have taken a more cautious tack in a bid to prevent an escalation spiral with Moscow.
The renewed support comes as Russian airstrikes have pounded Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, leading to sweeping power outages in recent months. On Monday, as heads of state and government departed for Washington, Russia struck a children’s hospital in Kyiv in broad daylight, a shot across the bow at the alliance...
“The Ukrainians need more to win than just what we have set up,” Royal Netherlands Navy Adm. Rob Bauer, the chair of NATO’s Military Committee, told Foreign Policy on the sidelines of the summit on Thursday.
The Russian armed forces have bounced back faster than anticipated following their unexpectedly poor performance in the early months of the war and are quickly learning how to counter high-tech new weapons systems supplied by Ukraine’s Western allies.
U.S. officials believe that Russian President Vladimir Putin’s ultimate goal of subjugating Ukraine remains unchanged more than two years into the war, moving his country’s economy onto a war footing. Nearly a third of the state budget this year is earmarked for defense spending, and shipments of artillery from Iran and North Korea have left Ukraine outgunned on the battlefield.
On Thursday, former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, now deputy chair of the country’s Security Council, posted on X that Moscow sees two acceptable outcomes to the war: “either Ukraine disappears, or NATO does.”...
Although the Biden administration played a pivotal role in warning of Russia’s intentions to attack Ukraine and galvanizing Western support for the country, it has offered little in the way of a vision for a path forward for ending the conflict...
“There is a gaping hole between saying we want to restore Ukraine’s sovereignty and what we’re actually doing,” said Andrea Kendall-Taylor, the director of the trans-Atlantic security program at the Center for a New American Security. “Right now, it just feels like we’re all saying it but people don’t really believe it.”...
Ukrainian officials have expressed their concerns about being pressed into a peace deal on unfavorable terms, and the Biden administration has reiterated that it is for Ukraine to decide how and when to end the war.
In the interim, the strategy appears to be to bolster the country’s defenses and hope that Moscow punches itself out. “We’re not in full control of that timeline,” said a senior Biden administration official, asked about a path to a just end to the war. “There is one person who is in control of that, and that’s Vladimir Putin. If he chose to back away and end it, he could do that tomorrow,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the record.
The problem is that Russia is similarly trying to wait out Ukraine and its Western allies.
“It’s ultimately a big psychological game, and Putin thinks that he can win it—that time is on his side and that he can grind down the Ukrainians and our political will to support” them, Ciaramella said...
No comments:
Post a Comment