On the second day of Vladimir Putin’s military campaign in Ukraine, centered on the pressure on the capital Kiev, some developments inside and outside the theater of war had come to attention.
Outside, NATO (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) kept its line of promise to help the government of Volodymyr Zelensky, but without giving too many details.
At the meeting where it first activated its Reaction Force, the Western military alliance announced that it will supply anti-aircraft systems to Kiev. This is probably one of the priority items on the wish list of the Armed Forces of the country under attack.
On Friday morning (25), the Russian Defense Ministry said it had destroyed 14 anti-aircraft systems, all Russian S-300s, which are an unknown number according to the IISS (International Institute for Strategic Studies, in London). ), and other Soviet Osa.
Thus, only 6 Russian Tor-M1s and an uncertain number of the 75 older Soviet models appear to be available to Kev. The S-300 is one of the most effective systems of its kind in operation in the world.
Without its best air defense and with its planes being hunted by missiles at airports, Ukraine has its skies controlled, or almost, by the Russians. The problem with NATO’s promise is its fluidity: nothing is said, and every hour counts.
Estonia has promised to send American Javelin anti-tank missiles to the allied country, and according to the German tabloid Bild, four other countries in the 30-nation club will do the same. The model stars US aid packages to Kiev since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, which brought $2.5 billion worth of weapons into the country.
It’s little, but a lot compared to the 2021 military budget, just released by the IISS: US$ 4.27 billion, ten times less than what was available to the Russians.
The Reaction Force, created after 2014 for emergency situations in Europe, was an early and empty announcement. It can have up to 40,000 men and aims to coordinate the actions of various alliance members.
Indeed, Zelensky said on Friday that the West had, in the end, abandoned him alone to fend for itself. Afterwards, he presumably heard words of comfort and promises in the 40 minutes he spent on the phone with US President Joe Biden.
Jens Stoltenberg, NATO’s secretary general, said it would not operate at full capacity. That’s right, he said that this war is the worst European security crisis since the second world conflict.
There’s a reason: not to offend the Russians even more. The last thing the US and its NATO allies seem to want, judging by the speeches of the last few days, is to give the impression that they will fight for Ukraine. The reason? The risk of a Third World War, nuclear as Putin himself has already reminded his rivals.
Meanwhile, on the ground in Ukraine, there has been an important development in the south, if the report leaked by the Pentagon to American reporters is true. According to the version, the Russians landed thousands of marines from ships near Mariupol, a city that faced two days of heavy bombardment.
It is a vital port in the connection between the rebel areas of the Donbass and Crimea. In the invasion cartoon in which Putin cuts off a piece of Ukraine and gives it to rebels, the idea of ​​the corridor between the areas now recognized by him as independent from the east and the peninsula that became part of Russia is central.
