The West’s divisions mean long-term support for Ukraine is far from guaranteedĪs for the ‘heavyweight’ United States, a recent article in Newsweek suggests Biden’s emissary, CIA director William Burns, cooked up a deal with Putin at the end of 2021, promising that the US would neither fight directly nor seek regime change provided Russia ‘limit its assault to Ukraine and act in accordance with unstated but well-understood guidelines for secret operations’. But Germany, despite its latest £2.3 billion aid package, has declared itself ready to block Nato membership for Ukraine while Orban in Hungary claims victory against Russia is a ‘fairytale’ given that the country has nuclear weapons (clearly forgetting the US’s defeat in Vietnam and the USSR’s in Afghanistan). Poland has contributed nearly £2 billion of aid and endless support for refugees, while the three Baltic States are donating 1 per cent of GDP to the war-effort, several times more than the average Western country. The UK’s military aid amounts to £3.9 billion, second only to US, and both Denmark and the Netherlands are offering F-16 training for Ukrainians. On the one hand, there is a clearly ‘pro-Ukrainian’ block of countries, a ‘Northern Coalition’ (numbering UK, Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, Poland and the Baltic States in its ranks) and putting muscle behind its words. Ukraine needs a victory and restoration of its 1991 borders – at all costs, even escalation – while the West arguably wants merely to contain the conflict, even at the price of prolonging it.īut is there such an entity as ‘the global West’ at all? Even five hundred days after the war’s outbreak, Western countries still haven’t really united over Ukraine and its future. Commander-in-Chief Valery Zaluzhny has voiced frustration that Ukraine, though expected to claw back territory from the occupying Russians, still hasn’t received modern fighter jets while regarding the possibility of Nato membership, president Zelensky has complained that: ‘If we’re not acknowledged and given a signal in Vilnius, I believe there is no point for Ukraine to be at this summit.’Īnger about the lack of fighter jets and continuing non-membership of Nato is part of a more general disillusionment in Ukraine it’s becoming clear that Kyiv’s objectives aren’t just different from many of those in the West, but sometimes totally opposed. Perhaps all this partly accounts for the level of resentment at the West expressed by some top Ukrainian officials. Is anything for the Ukrainians going right? Come autumn, the weather will be against the Ukrainians too, the muddy season making a counter-offensive more and more beleaguered. Apart from the liberation of a few villages, where are the victories earlier forecast by figures like head of military intelligence Kirill Budanov, who predicted the Ukrainian army would be in Crimea by the end of spring? Hopes of a quick push to the Azov sea, inspired by the retaking of Kharkhiv last September, have hit a sandbar this time round: denser Russian defence lines and widespread use of landmines. As the Nato summit on international security opens this week in Vilnius, one obvious issue will be the success or otherwise of the Ukrainian counter-offensive.
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