Ukraine’s government published a security guarantee plan on Tuesday that provides for Western military aid to the country to be expanded and extended over decades.
The text suggests that NATO countries (a US-led military group) can make bilateral pacts to enter war in the event of a Russian invasion, in practice resuming the policy of continental alliances that engendered the First World War and marked the Cold War.
The document had been commissioned by President Volodymyr Zelensky as an alternative to the idea of NATO membership, one of the reasons Vladimir Putin attacked Ukraine in late February.
It seems infeasible, for economic and diplomatic reasons, but it will be used as a pressure piece as Kiev is raking in its laurels from its first successful counteroffensive of the war to ask for more weapons against the invaders.
The Russian reaction was handled by Dmitri Medvedev, a former president who abandoned his liberal reputation and became a spokesman for the Kremlin-sanctioned hardliners in Putin’s deputy chair on the country’s Security Council.
“The Kiev clique has given birth to a project of security guarantees, which are essentially the prologue to the Third World War. Of course, no one will provide them to the Ukrainian Nazis,” he wrote on his Telegram channel.
He was especially critical of the idea that NATO countries could sign military pacts with Ukraine, pledging to defend it. For Medvedev, that means “applying Article 5 of the NATO Charter to Ukraine”—the instrument calls for all 30 members of the alliance to come to the aid of one who is attacked.
The bellicose former president went further, criticizing the already huge influx of Western weapons into his neighbour. “If these idiots continue to send the most dangerous weapons rampant to the Kiev regime, the military campaign will eventually reach another level,” he threatened.
In the current offensive in the north of the country, the use of American weapons has proved to be important. M777 mortars and Himars rocket launchers destroyed Russian command centers and arsenals behind the front line, and American anti-radar missiles were retrofitted to Ukrainian fighter jets. The US has trained 1,475 Ukrainian soldiers to use these and other weapons.
Bravado aside, Kiev’s plan is provocative. To contain Russia, the country needs capabilities “that require a sustained effort over several decades in Ukraine’s defense industrial base, scaled arms transfer and intelligence support from allies, intensive training missions and joint exercises under the flags of the European Union and NATO”.
The text specifically talks about acquiring effective anti-aircraft capabilities that “close the sky” over the country — a demand that goes back to the beginning of the conflict, even though the Russian air force was not used in large numbers in the war.
Finally, there is the question of financing such an undertaking. The US alone has already committed around US$ 15 billion (R$ 76.3 billion) in military aid to Kiev, but Europe is much more reticent.
Putin’s government is counting on its heavy hand on Russian gas taps to the mainland in winter to further placate European, particularly German, aid – not coincidentally, Berlin was lashed out by the Ukrainian chancellor on Tuesday.
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