On Tuesday, November 29th, NATO allies rallied behind Ukraine once more. With its energy infrastructure degraded by Russian bombardments, the nation is heading into a bitter winter and potential humanitarian disaster. Barring a negotiated peace, without NATO’s continued support, Ukraine’s viability as a functioning state is at stake.
To hold Ukraine together, NATO allies pledged they would help repair its energy infrastructure; NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said that Moscow was using the winter cold as “a weapon of war.” In Ukraine, winter temperatures can dip to -20°C.
Since October, Russia ramped up its pressure on Ukraine by carrying out barrages of missile and drone attacks on Ukraine’s power grid. While Kyiv and its allies say it is a deliberate campaign to harm civilians, Russia deems such targets as valid to discourage an enemy from continuing the fight.
“Russia,” so said Stoltenberg, is using these “to leave Ukraine cold and dark this winter,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said as the military alliance’s foreign ministers concluded what is the first of two days of talks in Romania’s capital of Bucharest.
Stoltenberg added that President Putin is “trying to use winter as a weapon of war to force Ukrainians to freeze or flee. He is trying to break the will of the brave Ukrainian people and to divide all of us who support them,” he added.
To counteract Putin’s fear-mongering, NATO’s foreign ministers pledged to “further step up political and practical support to Ukraine as it continues to defend its sovereignty and territorial integrity and our shared values against Russian aggression,” and “maintain [it] for as long as necessary.”
Aggression from Russia, so their statement reads, “including its persistent and unconscionable attacks on Ukrainian civilian and energy infrastructure, is depriving millions of Ukrainians of basic human services.”
Kyiv has called for more concrete help to address the issue. At first, it urged its Western partners to supply it with air defense systems to counteract Russia’s strikes; seeing the devastation these wrought, it sought to alleviate its pressing energy shortages as well, requesting transformers and generators.
“If we have transformers and generators, we can restore our energy needs. If we have air defense systems, we can protect ourselves from the next Russian missile strikes,” Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kulebasaid said. “In a nutshell: Patriots [the MIM-104 Patriot is a surface-to-air missile system primarily used by the U.S. army] and transformers are what Ukraine needs the most,” he added.
Concerning the latter, allies were careful to not over-promise, as they cautioned that such systems, when delivered, needed to be effective, maintained, and provided with sufficient ammunition, which was a “huge challenge” in itself.
The U.S. could, however, again reach into its purse: it pledged another $53 million to Ukraine for power grid equipment.
“This equipment will be rapidly delivered to Ukraine on an emergency basis to help Ukrainians persevere through the winter,” a State Department statement read, adding that the package would include distribution transformers, circuit breakers, surge arresters, and “other key equipment.”
On Twitter, the Ukrainian foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba expressed his gratitude for the assistance, yet urged, “faster, faster, faster. Faster provision and production of weapons for Ukraine. Faster delivery of assistance to restore our energy system,” he wrote.
Shortly before the summit, foreign minister Kuleba had told Politico that NATO countries urgently need to up their weapons production since without that “we won’t be able to win—as simple as that.”
The problem is indeed an acute one, as NATO’s weapon stockpiles have seen severe depletion since the war’s start in February. To make matters worse, the current level of manufacturing is nowhere near sufficient.
To illustrate, during the summer’s fighting in the Donbas region, the Ukrainians were firing 6,000 to 7,000 artillery rounds each day, while the Russians fired 40,000 to 50,000. The U.S., by far the largest donor of military equipment to Ukraine, manages to produce only 15,000 rounds each month.
Scrambling for more supplies, NATO has therefore pushed arms manufacturers to accelerate production, but doubts remain whether these can meet demand.
Offering his own perspective on the matter, Lithuanian Foreign Minister Gabrielius Landsbergis is under the impression that upping the deliveries of tanks (which Europe has enough of) would act as a silver bullet.
These however, are likely to fare poorly against Russia’s long-range artillery—a central tenet of its military doctrine for over two centuries. In other words: less focus on tanks, more on artillery rounds.
NATO also went ahead to reaffirm its 2008 decision that Ukraine would eventually become a member of the alliance. While no concrete steps towards that goal were proposed to the Kremlin, it is a red line: such a move is viewed not only as an existential threat, but the ultimate betrayal by NATO, which Russia believes had promised not to expand eastwards after the Cold War’s end.
“Russia has no veto,” Stoltenberg was sure to state. He thereby referred to the recent accessions of the former Yugoslav republics of northern Macedonia and Montenegro to the alliance and the imminent entry of Sweden and Finland. After that, the Caucasian republic of Georgia might soon follow suit.
A year ago, NATO briefly appeared prepared to not allow Ukraine to join NATO, so as to assuage Russian concerns, but that has since changed.
For NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, there is no more doubt. “We stated that Ukraine will become a member, [and] I expect allies to reiterate that position,” he had warned at the start of the two-day meeting.
“However, the main focus now is on supporting Ukraine. We are in the midst of a war and therefore we should do nothing that can undermine the unity of allies to provide military, humanitarian, and financial support to Ukraine,” he concluded.
