The impasse over aid from the US and Europe has Ukraine’s allies contemplating something they have refused to imagine since the earliest days of Russia’s invasion: that Russian President Vladimir Putin might win.
With more than US$110 billion in assistance mired in political disputes in Washington and Brussels, how long Kyiv will be able to hold back Russian forces and defend Ukraine’s cities, power plants and ports against missile attacks is increasingly in question.
Beyond the potentially catastrophic consequences for Ukraine, some European allies have begun to quietly consider the impact of a NATO failure in the biggest conflict in Europe since World War II. They are reassessing the risks an emboldened Russia would pose to alliance members in the east, said people familiar with the internal conversations who asked for anonymity to discuss matters that are not public.
Illustration: Tania Chou
The ripple effects would be felt around the world, the people said, as US partners and allies questioned just how reliable Washington’s promises of defense would be. The impact of such a strategic setback would be far deeper than that caused by the spectacle of the botched US pullout from Afghanistan in 2021, they said. And that is leaving aside the prospect that former US president Donald Trump might win next year’s presidential election and realize his public pledges to pull back from major alliances, including NATO, and make a deal with Putin over Ukraine.
The growing sense of alarm has slipped into leaders’ public statements. They have taken on an increasingly shrill tone as backers of the aid exhort their opponents not to hold the vital assistance hostage to domestic political priorities, something which rarely happened in previous debates.
“If Ukraine doesn’t have support from the EU and the US, then Putin will win,” Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said last week at the EU summit, where leaders failed to overcome growing opposition to next year’s 50 billion euro (US$55 billion) aid package and only barely managed to approve the largely symbolic gesture of opening the way to membership for Ukraine somtime in the future.
Speaking at a press conference in Kyiv on Tuesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy denied Ukraine is starting to lose the war, pointing to the advances his forces have made since the early days of the invasion and the support he has received from Ukraine’s allies. “We have challenges,” he said, mentioning the delays with foreign aid and shortages of artillery shells.
All the same, US President Joe Biden last week pledged to back Ukraine for “as long as we can,” a rhetorical shift from previous vows to do so for “as long as it takes.” Hardline Republicans in Congress have refused to approve US$61 billion of support for next year until Biden gives in to their demands for tougher policies on the US southern border. So far, efforts to reach a deal have failed.
On Monday, the Pentagon warned that the money for new weapons for Ukraine would run out on Dec. 30 if legislators do not act.
In addition to growing public skepticism about the cost of support for Ukraine, the disappointing results of Kyiv’s counteroffensive this summer — its troops made only modest gains against Russia’s heavily entrenched forces — have fueled questions about whether Ukraine’s publicly declared goal of retaking all the territory occupied by Putin is realistic. Lately, allied officials have sought to highlight Kyiv’s more recent military successes, including its successful strikes on the Russian navy in the Black Sea, rather than the sweeping advances on the ground seen in the first year of war.
“There is increasing concern about lack of movement on aid for Ukraine on both sides of the Atlantic and frustration that there is this stagnation with dire battlefield consequences,” German Marshall Fund managing director Kristine Berzina said. “The possibility of Ukraine losing additional territory and even its sovereignty — that is still on the table.”
Russia is likely to push to take more territory and destroy more infrastructure if Ukraine does not get the weapons it needs to defend itself, European officials said. Unable to defend itself, Ukraine might be forced to accept a ceasefire deal on Russia’s terms, they said.
Ukraine’s backers in both the EU and US contend aid is likely to be approved in some form early next year. However, it is unlikely to yield a major breakthrough on the battlefield, officials said. Beyond that, the outlook is increasingly murky, even as the stalemate on the ground makes it increasingly clear that the fight could go on for years to come.
In the Baltic states, officials are already telling the public to be ready for the next war because Putin’s forces are not going to be destroyed in Ukraine. The discussion has moved from “if” Russia might attack to a focus on concrete preparations for that once-unthinkable prospect. Despite Biden’s public assurances, questions about whether the US and other allies would actually put their troops at risk to defend tiny countries that were once part of the Soviet Union are growing.
“Russia is not scared of NATO,” Commander of the Estonian Defense Forces Martin Herem said in an interview with a local TV station last week, estimating that the Russian military could be ready to attack NATO within a year once the conflict in Ukraine — not a member of the alliance — was over. Other Western officials said it would likely take Putin at least several years to make up for the tremendous losses his military has taken in Ukraine, let alone threaten NATO’s much more capable forces.
However, the earlier confidence that the invasion would be a “strategic defeat” for the Russian leader has faded, replaced in some quarters by a growing sense that Putin’s bet that he can outlast the US and its allies might prove right.
Finland, which joined NATO this year amid the growing threat from Russia, has stepped up its own defense buildup and is seeking to lock in security ties with the US. Putin on Sunday warned that Russia plans to deploy more troops along its border, the longest between Russia and a NATO member.
“There were no problems,” he said. “Now there will be.”
One Western official described how a Russian victory would trigger an outpouring of refugees heading for the EU, piling pressure on services in those countries and exacerbating tensions between members. At the same time, the official said, the Ukrainian resistance would switch to guerrilla tactics meaning that the fighting would continue at a lower lever, perpetuating the instability on the EU’s eastern border.
Some European countries might seek to strengthen their ties with Moscow or Beijing to avoid having to rely too much on an unreliable US, other officials said.
With Russian forces potentially much closer to the borders of Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania, and Crimea giving the Kremlin a dominant position in the Black Sea, the US would need to make a significant investment in its European forces to pose a credible deterrent, the Institute for the Study of War said in a report released last week.
The US would have to deploy a “sizable portion” of its ground forces as well as a “large number” of stealth aircraft. Given the limitations of US manufacturing, that could force the White House to choose between keeping sufficient forces in Asia to defend Taiwan against a potential strike by China or deterring a Russian attack on NATO.
“The entire undertaking will cost a fortune,” analysts led by Frederick W. Kagan said in the report. “The cost will last as long as the Russian threat continues — potentially indefinitely.”
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