2023-07-11 00:01:41
Not NATO membership, but a “package” with three “elements” to “bring Ukraine closer” to the Alliance. This is what the leaders of the 31 member countries should offer President Volodymyr Zelensky between today and tomorrow, at the summit of heads of state and government held in Vilnius, Lithuania, where Ukrainian flags abound and even buses carry the written “Lithuania loves Ukraine” on the front panel.
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The first element, as Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg explained, will be a “multi-year” assistance program for Kiev, focused on “defense” and “security”, including “military hospitals”, increasingly needed in a war of attrition , which reaps victims and produces injuries at an industrial rate. The program will also help Kiev make the necessary “transition” from Soviet-era equipment to NATO standards. Second, a NATO-Ukraine Council will be created, which will meet on Wednesday for the first time, with the participation of President Zelensky, which will have a strong symbolic meaning. The NATO-Ukraine Council will be “a platform for consultations in times of crisis and for making decisions”. Third, allied leaders will reaffirm that “Ukraine will become a member of NATO” and that they are “united on how to bring Kiev closer to this goal”. On this crucial point, Stoltenberg did not go into detail, but deferred to the conclusions of the summit which will be agreed upon by the leaders. The memory goes back to the Bucharest summit of 2008, with the assurance to Georgia and Ukraine that they would become members of NATO, without specifying when or how, what some scholars have defined as “the worst of both worlds”, because it left two countries in the middle of the ford. So much so that there are those who speak of a Bucharest 2.0.
According to what has been learned in Brussels, despite the different sensitivities among Europeans conditioned by the geographical proximity to Russia, the awareness that Kiev’s place is in the Alliance is increasingly gaining ground among the allies. The arguments for neutrality have been undermined by the Russian invasion, the counter-evidence that keeping Ukraine in the ‘grey zone’ has led to war. Paradoxically, now that Vladimir Putin has attacked, those in the Alliance who were hesitant about further eastward enlargement have fewer arguments to oppose, given that neutrality has led the Russians to invade Ukrainian territory.
On the modalities of entry into the Alliance, the discussion is different but, as long as the war is ongoing, membership cannot take place, because for NATO it would mean entering into conflict with Russia. However, it is too early to make predictions: it will be necessary to see when and above all how the hostilities will end. Everyone, even the Ukrainians who cannot say it openly because they are fighting a war that will decide the destinies of their nation, know that at some point it will be necessary to negotiate, especially since the counter-offensive, even if it has not yet reached its climax, struggles to break through , due to the mines planted by the Russians and the flooding caused by the collapse of the dam on the Dnieper. As adventurous as the first offensive was, so effective is the defensive retreat put in place by the Russians in this phase, observes a source.
The Ukrainian counter-offensive, explained the head of the NATO Military Committee Rob Bauer in a briefing in Brussels, is “difficult”, above all because military operations are “never easy”. Especially since the Russians have created “significant defensive obstacles”: sometimes there are only a “couple of km, other times 30” of “minefields”, after which there are second and third lines. Conquering ground under these conditions is a “difficult” operation for the Ukrainians, as it would be for everyone. “We saw it in Normandy during the Second World War – recalls Bauer – when it took the Allies seven, eight, nine weeks to break through the German defensive lines”.
The end of the conflict and its modalities will be decisive for Ukraine’s international position. If it ends with a ‘Korean-style’ armistice, without a peace treaty, as has been hypothesized for a few months, then the solutions could be different. In any case, the secretary general said he was “confident” that a “unitary” solution would be found on the “language” that will be used in the leaders’ communiqué, but did not mention any dates or deadlines. The leaders of the 31 countries will therefore have to find a formula that combines the positions of the states on the eastern flank, more favorable to Ukraine’s accession, with those further west. What is certain, and all the allies are in agreement on this, is that we need to support Kiev, because if Russia wins, there will be no NATO membership to discuss. In the words of Admiral Bauer, if Russia wins, it will not be “the end of instability,” but “the beginning of more instability,” as the Russians “want to go back to 1997 borders,” which include nations” in which we have eight battalions: the Baltic States, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria. This is unacceptable for us”.
In any case, the war in Ukraine and Russia’s renewed aggressiveness are forcing the Alliance, which in 2019 was given a “brain-dead” state by French President Emmanuel Macron, to rethink its defense plans. The allies, Stoltenberg said, will back “three new regional plans” for defense and deterrence, with the aim of tackling the two biggest threats facing the Alliance: Russia and terrorism. The first plane, which will be commanded in Norfolk, Virginia (USA), will cover “the European Atlantic and Arctic”; the second, which will be headed in Brunssum, Holland, will cover “Central Europe and the Baltic area”; the third, centered in Naples, will defend “the Mediterranean and the Black Sea”. Of course, Admiral Bauer explained, these are not things that can be done “in an instant”. To carry out these plans, and to dissuade Russia from attempting any adventure, NATO “will put 300,000 soldiers in a state of greater readiness” for combat, “including conspicuous naval and air assets”.
NATO countries, explained Bauer, “understand their responsibilities to participate and to ensure that our collective ability to defend ourselves is increasing. But there is work to be done. So you will say ‘they are not exactly 300 thousand’. True, because we will work to get to those numbers. It’s not something you do at the push of a button.” To date, the troops rapidly mobilized by the Allies amount to about 40,000 men. Not only. To remedy the decades-long defense cuts that followed the end of the Cold War in Europe, leaders in Vilnius should also back a defense production action plan aimed at bundling demand, increasing production capacity, increasing the interoperability. A plan that will be supported by the EU ASAP, aimed at supporting the increase in the production of ammunition, on which the Council and Parliament have reached agreement in trilogue and which will be voted on this week first in commission and then in plenary.
Confirming the slow awakening to the harsh realities of the European Union’s geopolitics, President Ursula von der Leyen will also participate in the NATO summit, in the second session: the partnership between the EU and NATO has reached “unprecedented levels”, according to the secretary general . The leaders of Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea will also be there, because security “is global,” as Stoltenberg pointed out. Funding all of these activities, especially NATO’s strategic repositioning and long-term support to Ukraine, will require substantial funds. Eleven out of 31 member countries will spend at least 2% of GDP on defense in 2023, and in 2024 the number of allies above this threshold will increase “substantially”.
The commitment to spend 2% of GDP on defense was made in Wales in 2014, and the deadline is 2024 next year. Some countries are still far below and will hardly reach it in 2024: among these Italy, which will spend 1.46% of GDP in the military sector in 2023. In reality, Italy had reached 1.6%, but then the economy went better than expected, GDP grew and therefore military spending, calculated as a percentage of GDP, decreased. Furthermore, for Italy, the agreed path to reach 2% will expire in 2029 (for Portugal in 2030), therefore the ‘spin’ according to which we would not respect a kind of ‘Nato Maastricht’ is not true. It is true that Italy, having budget constraints dictated by an important public debt and by obsolete or inappropriate EU rules for the times, struggles more than others to increase spending, not only in defence, but it is also true that already with Lorenzo Guerini has introduced a multi-year planning of military spending, which has led to an increase in budgets.
Meanwhile, “good progress” has been made at NATO on a new spending commitment that makes 2% of GDP no longer a target, but a minimum “base” from which to start, Stoltenberg said. Some allies are pushing for 3%, but according to what has been learned in Brussels it is difficult for this new target to pass. There are countries that spend more than 3% (Poland, for obvious reasons, is first, at 3.9%) on defense, but then struggle to find money for anything else. It is one thing for public opinion in the east (Warsaw and Vilnius are covered with yellow and blue Ukrainian flags), another for those in the west. Bringing 2% of GDP to be the basis, Admiral Bauer explained, would certainly be “a change” and would constitute the “recognition of the fact that a number of things have changed: Russia’s attitude has completely changed; there are two new domains, space and cyberspace”. In light of the war in Ukraine “we will also see more investment in air defense”, predicts the admiral.
One thing that is clear to everyone is that military spending in Europe must not only grow but also be rationalised. Now that the EU too, born as a peace project, is starting to deal with arms, we need to avoid spending on both sides, NATO and the EU. It won’t be a simple task and Europe, not being a national state, will always spend more than others, because each country has its general staff, its armed forces, its secret services. But an absolute priority is to get the productive apparatus back on track, weakened by the disinvestments following the end of the USSR and by the wrong predictions about what war in the 21st century would be like: the shortage of ammunition to supply to Ukraine (not only in Europe , also in the USA) is due to the belief, which turned out to be wrong, that they would not have served.
For Bauer, public spending will not be enough: there is also a need “of the private sector. We have to convince people that they have the money: we have the money, there will be enough money to invest in defence. This is not the problem. But we have to convince” investors “that production capacity needs to be increased now. And it’s not something you can order, because we don’t have a state economy, we have a liberal economy. So, we’re going to have to get people to make investments, and that’s going to take time.” NATO is preparing for a long-term challenge, because the return of Russia that reclaims the lost empire may not be destined to end quickly. The Alliance, Bauer explained, continues to view Russia as a “serious threat”, especially “in the air and at sea. And in space, where they are still very, very capable, not to mention nuclear power”. In short, “they are not three meters tall, but not even 60 cm. We should never underestimate the Russians and their ability to recover, as they have demonstrated a couple of times in history”.
NATO has taken the problem of the secretary general off the table, at least for now: Stoltenberg, who seemed destined to leave the scene (he reiterated to the point of exhaustion that he was intending to leave and was seriously intending to return to Norway), was reappointed by the Allies for another year. In the absence of an Italian candidate, who according to what has been learned in Brussels would have brought everyone to agreement, or other figures capable of garnering the support of the 31, the US has preferred to keep Stoltenberg until next October. Whether a successor can be found for him before next summer, with the ordeal of appointing EU posts in full swing, remains to be seen. The candidacy of Admiral Giuseppe Cavo Dragone as head of the NATO Military Committee is a separate issue, which will be decided later.
(by the correspondent Tommaso Gallavotti)
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