After a year of war in Ukraine, NATO remains cautious

Members of the flight deck walk past aircraft aboard the aircraft carrier GW Bush as it sails through the Mediterranean Sea, October 17, 2022. The aircraft carrier and its 90 strike aircraft will pass under the NATO command supporting several combat groups, some of them created in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

BRUSSELS – The day after Russia invaded Ukraine, leaders from all 30 NATO member countries held an urgent summit to address what they described as the most serious security threat Euro-Atlantic for decades: the beginning of what would become the largest war territory in Europe since 1945.

“In this changing and difficult situation, it is difficult to predict what will happen in the future, but the allies are supportive and very determined to continue,” said NATO Secretary General at the time. Jens Stoltenberg. How that support might be was an open question.

In the months that followed, Ukrainian NATO and other allies sent fuel, helmets, medical supplies and other non-lethal aid. Then, after long detours, artillery and air defense systems arrived, hoping that they would not provoke Russian President Vladimir Putin.

NATO, as an organization, did not want to be drawn into an all-out war with Russia, which has nuclear weapons. Technically, NATO still has that fear, but a year later the Ukraine Contact Group held talks this week at NATO headquarters in Brussels, where leaders, ministers and envoys usually sit. of the military alliance.

Ukraine, which had just received the commitment to receive main battle tanks, wanted more: now fighter planes.

“Ukraine must win this war,” said Hanno Pevkur, defense minister of Estonia, a Baltic country that shares a border and a long history with Russia and is highly suspicious of Putin’s intentions. The government has stepped up conscription and NATO has increased its military presence there.

“We had a lot of doubts. Should we send tanks? Now this decision has been made,” Pevkur added. “There has always been the question and the answer. We know that Ukraine needs all kinds of help and that also includes combat aircraft.”

It might seem that only the boots of Allied soldiers on the battlefields are missing. In fact, the public in Europe and the United States could be excused for believing that their tax dollars to fund the most powerful security organization in the world are already spent on a war against Russia.

In the year following the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the United States provided Kiev with more than $27 billion in military aid. Two senior US defense officials this week estimated that other allied nations had contributed more than $19 billion, with more than $1 billion individually coming from Germany, Canada, Britain, the Netherlands , Italy and Poland.

This is on top of the tens of billions of dollars the West is sending to keep Ukraine’s struggling economy afloat.

For the nationalist government of Hungary, a NATO ally, there is no doubt what this means.

“If you send weapons, if you finance the entire annual budget of one of the belligerents, if you promise more and more weapons, more and more modern weapons, then you can say what you want, no matter what you say. You are at war,” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said last month.

This is not the case, argues Stoltenberg. Even as he urged his allies and partners this week to provide Ukraine with more arms and ammunition, the former Norwegian prime minister insisted, in response to a question from The Associated Press, that NATO was not at war with Russia.

“Neither NATO nor individual NATO allies are parties to the conflict. What we do… is support Ukraine. Ukraine is fighting back,” he replied. “The kind of support we provide to Ukraine has evolved as the war has evolved.”

Indeed it is, and it has been difficult to find that support despite the best intentions of the West. Ukraine now fires as many artillery shells daily as a small NATO country orders in a year of peace, and the European military industry simply cannot keep up.

“It has become a war of attrition, and therefore it is also a logistical battle, and it is a huge effort on the part of the allies to obtain the ammunition, fuel and spare parts that they need” , Stoltenberg said.

Perhaps one of the most significant changes wrought by the war was the realization that NATO’s Collective Defense Guarantee – the promise that an attack on any ally will be met by all – no longer looks like an abstract promise.

When he was President of the United States, Donald Trump undermined confidence in this guarantee by threatening to abandon any ally he felt was not spending enough on his military.

At the start of the war in Ukraine, his successor, Joe Biden, promised that NATO would defend “every square inch” of its territory to deter Putin from attacking a member. Finland and Sweden have even given up their traditional position of non-alignment to apply for NATO membership in order to provide this same protection.

A year later, NATO has some 40,000 troops under its command in Eastern Europe, from Estonia to Bulgaria on the Black Sea. About 100,000 American soldiers are stationed in Europe. Some 140 warships crisscross European waters, aerial surveillance is provided 24 hours a day and a total of 130 aircraft are on permanent alert.

These forces are only supposed to remain on allied territory, but several member countries bordering Russia, such as Lithuania, say they are ready to go “all the way” in their support for Ukraine.

These countries believe that Ukraine should be allowed to join NATO whether or not there is a war.

When NATO leaders meet in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital, in July, they will likely consider upping the ante with more high-tech equipment. It’s hard to believe right now that any of the allied countries would consider sending troops to Ukraine, but 18 months ago even NATO didn’t believe Putin would invade Ukraine.