The United States and the other countries of the Atlantic Alliance yesterday reiterated their full support for Ukraine and tried to keep morale high about the evolution of the war amid declining public interest as a result of the new outbreak of violence in the Near East. “There is no feeling of fatigue”, assured the Secretary of State of the American country, Antony Blinken, at the end of the NATO-Ukraine Council meeting held in Brussels.
“Some question whether the US and other allies should continue to support Ukraine as we head into Vladimir Putin’s second winter of brutality. But NATO’s response today was clear and indestructible. We must continue to support Ukraine and we continue to do so,” not just to resist, but to “take back territory,” reiterated Blinken, who downplayed the political differences that keep the latest military aid package blocked in Congress. His German colleague, Annalena Baerbock, admitted, however, that “Ukraine is disappearing from the public eye and this could be fatal” for the war.
With the arrival of the so-called mud station – bezdorizhzhia, in Ukrainian –, Kiev’s Western allies do not expect major changes in the battle line for months, not at least until the final reinforcement of the Ukrainian air defenses, the promised F-16 fighter jets, for which the army has been training in European territory for months. “We continue to fight, Ukraine will not give in”, assured them the Ukrainian Foreign Minister, Dmytro Kuleba, who tried to reassure the allies about the military situation and ruled out sitting down to negotiate with Vladimir Putin in the short term, something that he said that no one has raised it directly. “Our strategic objective” to return to the borders of 1991 – which therefore includes the Crimean peninsula, which Russia unilaterally annexed in 2014 – “has not changed”.
The Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, once again insisted on the idea of ??not losing sight of the fact that “Ukraine has prevailed as a sovereign and independent nation” and has inflicted “serious damage” on Russia, which every time “mortgage plus its future in China”. For the first time, Stoltenberg quantified the losses suffered by the Russian armed forces and the economy to emphasize the “big strategic mistake” committed by Putin after invading the neighboring country.
“Hundreds of planes. Thousands of tanks. And more than 300,000 casualties”, assured the head of the Atlantic Alliance before detailing the strong economic pressure to which Moscow is subjected. “Revenues for oil and gas are going down. Russian bank assets are subject to sanctions. More than a thousand international companies have stopped or reduced their operations in the country and 1.3 million people left last year”, emphasized Stoltenberg.
However, he asked not to “underestimate” Russia, assured that “it has made provisions for a large number of missiles for the winter” and reiterated the call to the allies to show “not only with words, but with facts” solidarity with Kyiv. Kuleba, for his part, again asked the allies to strengthen the military industry. The EU, he recalled, has only sent them 300,000 munitions, compared to the million it promised to deliver within a year in March.
