[This article was first published by CEPA]
There is a clear path to stop and repel Putin and his legions. The only issue is whether the West has the will to deliver this outcome.
The lead-up to the second anniversary of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has not presented a pretty picture: continued indecision in the US Congress on support to Ukraine, remarks by former President Trump seemingly encouraging Russia to attack US allies in Europe, and the assassination in jail of the Russian opposition politician Alexey Navalny.
In this agitated atmosphere of threats from without and from within, European NATO allies have sought to demonstrate their resolve — on defense spending and on support to Ukraine.
Last week, using some sleight of hand, NATO published figures projecting that in 2024, European allies would collectively meet the target of spending 2% of GDP on defense, with 17 individual allies spending at least 2%, up from only 10 in 2023. (NATO normally publishes figures that count defense spending by non-US allies, including Canada. This time, Canada, a serial underperformer, was excluded.)
How encouraging really is this news from Europe? A decade on from the original 2% pledge at the 2014 Wales Summit (a pledge renewed last year in Vilnius and upgraded from a target of 2% to a “minimum of 2%”), over a third of NATO members have still failed to reach the magic number.
Amongst these are major countries like Italy and Spain, both still well short of the target, and Canada, which has no intention of reaching it. Seven allies (including Germany and France) hope to crawl across the 2% line this year at the very end of the period of the Wales pledge.
Of those around the 2% mark, many need to spend significantly more than that. Prime examples are France and the UK, which are nuclear powers with global interests. So, despite the progress, this is still very well short of good enough.
How about aid to Ukraine? It can, after all, be argued that support for our eastern ally translates into blasted Russian armor and shredded units.
On February 1, the European Union (EU) agreed on a package of €50bn ($54bn) in aid to Ukraine over the next four years. And on February 16, French President Macron and German Chancellor Scholz signed bilateral security cooperation agreements with Ukraine, following the first such agreement signed in January by British Prime Minister Sunak. The three agreements refer to pledges of military support to Ukraine totaling almost $15bn this year.
These are the first in a series of such agreements with Ukraine, designed as a substitute for NATO membership, at least for the time being. The agreements bear reading, for their silences and their differences as much as anything else.
The ambiguity of purpose was apparent in the first, between the UK and Ukraine. The text, and Sunak’s accompanying words in Kyiv, referred in rapid succession to “security cooperation”, a “security agreement”, “security assurances”, “swift and sustained security assistance” in the event that Russia invades Ukraine again, and “security guarantees.”
At which point the vocabulary options in the thesaurus apparently ran out. Membership of NATO and an Article 5 guarantee would have been better, simpler and much more succinct because they would offer meaningful protection. Prevarication all too often requires an awful lot of words. As we all know from the ill-fated 1994 Budapest Memorandum, Western nations do not go to war based on artfully phrased documents. They might, however, go to war for an Article 5 pledge.
The UK agreement says that one of the newly provided security commitments is “prevention and active deterrence of, and counter-measures against, any military escalation and/or a new aggression by the Russian Federation”. What does that mean? The French version leaves out the language about “any military escalation”. The German version does not include this language at all. Doubtless, Putin is quaking in his boots.
Similarly, while the UK and French versions say that “Ukraine’s future membership of NATO would make an effective contribution to peace and stability in Europe”, the German one omits this language — not surprising since Germany has consistently blocked Ukrainian membership of NATO.