The subtext – the one western leaders hope their publics will not notice – is that Ukraine is struggling to hold the line as Russia builds up its troop numbers and pounds Ukrainian defences.
A permanent partition of Ukraine into two opposed blocs – one more pro-Russian, the other more pro-Nato – is looking ever more likely.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, has not been shy in telling the West what he expects next: fighter jets, especially US-made F16s.
Kyiv is keen to break what western media have termed a “taboo” by getting Nato aircraft directly involved in the Ukraine war. There is a good reason for that taboo: the use of such jets would let Ukraine expand the battlefield into Russian skies, and implicate Europe and the US in its offensive.
But why assume the West’s taboo on supplying combat jets is really any stronger than its former taboo on sending Nato battle tanks to Ukraine? As one European official observed in a Politico article: “Fighters are completely unconceivable today, but we might have this discussion in two, three weeks.”
And sure enough, within days, Zelensky’s office said there had been “positive signals” from Poland about supplying Ukraine with F16s. French President Emmanuel Macron also refused to rule out the possibility of contributing combat jets.
There is a logic to how Nato is operating. Step by step, it gets more deeply immersed in the war. It started with sanctions, followed by the supply of defensive arms. Nato then moved to issuing more offensive weapons, in aid so far totalling some $100bn from the US alone. Nato is now supplying the main weapons for a land war. Why should it not join the battle for air supremacy next?
Or as Nato’s head, Jens Stoltenberg, recently observed, echoing George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984: “Weapons are the way to peace.”
But the reverse is more likely to be true. With each additional step they take, the more the parties involved risk losing if they back down. The longer they refuse to sit and talk, the greater the pressure to keep fighting.
That no longer applies just to Russia and Ukraine. Now, Europe and Washington also have plenty of skin directly in the game.
Late last month, in what sounded like a Freudian slip, Germany’s foreign minister, Anna Baerbock, stated at a Council of Europe meeting in Strasbourg: “We are fighting a war against Russia.” Days earlier, Ukraine’s defence minister made much the same point: “We [Ukraine] are carrying out Nato’s mission today, without the loss of their blood.”
According to many analysts, a few dozen Nato tanks are unlikely to be a game changer. And if as seems likely, Russia is able to disable them through drone strikes, the US and its junior partners will face a stark choice: accept humiliation at Moscow’s hands and abandon Ukraine to its fate, or up the ante and move the battle to the skies over Ukraine and Russia.
Where this risks leading was underscored by international scientists last month. They warned that the Doomsday Clock had moved to 90 seconds to midnight, the nearest point humankind has come to global catastrophe since the clock was established in 1947. The primary reason, according to the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, is the threat of the war in Ukraine leading to a nuclear exchange.
The cause for alarm, again unacknowledged by western leaders and western media, is that Russia has very strong reasons – from its perspective – to believe its current struggle is existential. It was never going to allow Ukraine to become a forward military base for Nato on its doorstep, with the fear that western nuclear missiles might be stationed there.
New tidbits of information that emerge of what has been going on behind the scenes tend to reinforce Russia’s narrative, not Nato’s. This week former Israeli prime minister Naftali Bennett said mediation efforts between Moscow and Kyiv he had led at the start of the war, ones apparently making progress, were “blocked” by the US and its Nato allies.
The more weapons the US and Europe send to Ukraine, and the more they refuse to pursue talks, the more Moscow will be convinced it was right to fight and must keep fighting. Ignoring that fact, as the West did in the build-up to Russia’s invasion and continues to do now, does not make it any less true.
Even Boris Johnson, Britain’s former prime minister who has every reason to paint himself in a flattering light in relation to Ukraine, last week implicitly undermined the claim that Nato did nothing to provoke Russia. Recollecting a conversation with Vladimir Putin shortly before the invasion, he framed it in terms of the Russian president’s concerns about Nato expansion.
Johnson told a BBC documentary: “[Putin] said, ‘Boris, you say that Ukraine is not going to join Nato anytime soon… What is anytime soon?’ And I said, ‘Well it’s not going to join Nato for the foreseeable future.’”
Coverage of the exchange has been dominated by Johnson’s suggestion that Putin threatened him with a missile strike – a claim Russia denies. Instead, a Downing Street readout from the time of that conversation only confirms that Johnson did “underscore” Ukraine’s right to membership.
But Ukraine is not the only major player losing control of events. The more Russia is forced to see its fight in Ukraine in existential terms, as Nato weapons and money pour in, the more European leaders should be concerned about existential dangers ahead – and not just because the threat of nuclear war looms ever larger on Europe’s doorstep.
The type of western, especially US, provocations that triggered Russia’s invasion of Ukraine are simmering just below the surface in relation to China – a region Nato now perversely treats as within its “North Atlantic” mission. The Ukraine war looks like it may serve as a prelude to, or dry run for, a confrontation with China.
Worried that fallout from the Ukraine war will suck them in, European states are putting in larger orders than ever for weaponry – much of it from the US, where business is booming for arms manufacturers. “This is certainly the biggest increase in defence spending in Europe since the end of the Cold War,” Ian Bond, director of foreign policy at the Centre for European Reform, toldYahoo News late last year.
Washington’s fear was, and is, that a Europe not entirely dependent militarily and economically on the US – especially the industrial powerhouse of Germany – might stray from a commitment to a unipolar world in which the US reigns supreme.
With European autonomy now sufficiently weakened, Washington appears more confident that it can rally its Nato allies, once Russia is isolated, for another great-power engagement against China.
As the war grinds on, it is not just Ukraine, but Europe that will pay a heavy price for Washington’s hubris.
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