With the war in Ukraine entering its third year, there are more and more voices advising to take a distance and observe with perspective the historical challenge facing Europe. From Estonia, one of the most exposed countries, to Donald Tusk’s Poland via NATO, calls follow one another to shake the conscience of European leaders and public opinion. The tone of the European Council messages next week will be more urgent than ever in this regard to show a united front if, as Brussels fears, in April or May Russia launches an attack that Ukraine is unable to contain.
“We are at a critical moment and it would be a serious historical mistake to allow Putin to prevail. We cannot allow authoritarian leaders to get away with resorting to the use of force, it would be dangerous for all of us”, warned yesterday the Secretary General of the Atlantic Alliance, Jens Stoltenberg, in the presentation of his report annual, which concludes that in 2023 the world became a more dangerous place but the military organization became “stronger”.
Last year, NATO’s European partners increased their defense spending by 11% and by 2024 two-thirds of the organization’s members (18 out of 32) will reach the 2% of GDP target, while that 10 years ago only three reached it, recalled Stoltenberg, who revealed the figure in advance after Donald Trump said he would let Russia do “whatever it wants” with countries that do not reach this threshold. But even though “allies are providing unprecedented assistance to Ukraine to survive as a sovereign and independent country”, they are not doing enough. “Ukrainians are not running out of courage. They’re running out of ammo. Together, we have the ability to give Ukraine what it needs. It’s time to show that there is political will to do it.”
Kusti Salm, number two in the Ministry of Defense of Estonia, goes to the grain when describing the situation in which the conflict is and the urgency for the European Union to adopt a “position of strength” before Vladimir Putin. “Strategically, Ukraine has never been so close to its potential defeat as it is now and that is a terrifying prospect. But things will get worse before they get better. And they will only improve after they have become very ugly”, he says.
“History is full of fleeting episodes, of opportunities that only present themselves once, of weekends in which brave leaders decide to do the right thing, instead of what seems most convenient in the short term”, poses the general secretary of the Ministry of Defense of Estonia. “How will our leaders react? What position will they take and what will the history books say about them? The challenge for us is that when it gets dark, people don’t run away scared but that there is a brave proposal on the table to turn things around”, Salm defended this week in a meeting with journalists in Brussels, where the Estonian Government presented a plan to help Ukraine.
So far, the European Council has limited itself to saying that the EU will support Kyiv as long as necessary to defend itself against Russian aggression, but it has never said that Ukraine “must win” the war and draft conclusions of the next summit, to which La Vanguardia has had access, does not do this either, although it does emphasize that “Russia must not prevail”. Salm insists: “At some point this will have to be articulated. In the Second World War the change took place in 1942. It was then that the British and the Americans said that Germany had to be defeated, three years after the conflict began. And it still took a year and a half to realize that vision.”
Historical flashes follow each other. “The times of blessed calm are over. The post-war era is over. We live in a new, pre-war time, although for some of our brothers it is no longer,” warned the Prime Minister of Poland, Donald Tusk, at the congress of the European People’s Party held in Bucharest last week. “It is not our fault that our daily vocabulary is now full of words like fighting, bombing, missile attacks or genocide,” he said. And he warned: “Either we defend our borders, our territory and our principles or we will sink.”
This is the message that Tusk will take to Berlin today, where he will meet with the German Chancellor, Olaf Scholz, and the French President, Emmanuel Macron, after the interview between the two to discuss Ukraine. Faced with the deliberate ambiguity shown by Macron in the Kremlin – not without controversy – with the suggestion that Europe could send troops to Ukrainian territory, the eternal doubts of Scholz and the vacuum left by the United States, the Polish leader calls on Europe to decide its fate: “Let’s not be delusional. No one will defend our security and our future if we don’t,” says Tusk.
The conclusions of the next European Council dedicate a large section to defense and the need, without saying so, to move to the mode of war economy as other countries, such as Russia or China, have already done, which will involve for example give priority to the defense industry in access to certain critical raw materials. “Now everyone is aware that we are the only ones who have not done it, because we are the only ones who expected the war to end”, explain European diplomatic sources. More than half of the European leaders “are convinced that Putin will not stop in Ukraine”, they add.
Specifically, the leaders will emphasize their commitment to “intensify” the delivery of military equipment to Ukraine, “move forward without delay” in the European Strategy for the Defense Industry presented by the Commission and improve “military readiness and civil”, through actions that involve the whole of society in the face of new threats. “It is necessary to increase the awareness of public opinion about the fact that we are in a new time and it is necessary to invest again in defense, but without spreading panic”, explain the aforementioned sources.
The idea of ??putting on the table “possible sources of additional funding”, which appeared in brackets in previous texts, has completely disappeared from the latest draft of conclusions. Estonia, France and Poland are betting on launching a joint debt issue to have quick capital to make military investments, but the idea is far from generating unanimity. The Estonian Government calculates that it would be enough to launch Eurobonds worth 100,000 million euros (a seventh of what the EU collected to finance the post-pandemic fund). His plan to defeat Russia also involves the EU devoting 0.25% of its GDP to supporting Ukraine and speeding up the delivery of ammunition to the front.
Once again, everything is a matter of perspective: “Ammunition crises are nothing new in the history of wars”, explains Sven Biscop, an analyst at the Egmont Institute, a Belgian think tank specializing in international relations. “In the First World War, after a few months of fighting, in 1915, the great powers realized that they had spent everything they had and were not prepared for a long-term war. The same thing happened as now, it’s not strange at all, it’s just that we should have solved it a year ago and we’re still not very far ahead”.
