On the top floor of Literaturhaus in Munich, the Ukrainian veteran Yuliia Paievska was asked to speak to the elite of the transatlantic security and political establishment, including Hillary Clinton and the Estonian prime minister, Kaja Kallas, as they lunched on a three-course meal, served with military precision.
“We are the dogs of war,” Paievska said as she introduced herself, explaining how she had started out as a volunteer and then worked as the chief medic at a hospital on the frontline during the siege of Mariupol. “I had children die in my hands, civilians, elderly. I do not know how you can forgive that. Thousands of soldiers have gone through my hands, thousands of civilians, streams of blood, rivers of suffering.”
She had herself been captured, beaten and tortured, and said every day had been a psychological and physical humiliation. Six operations later, she explained the voraciousness of war. “War, you know, it drinks our blood. It is never satisfied with our blood. It is always hungry. The more you give, the more she wants. But we made a commitment to our people, we swore the oath and we fight.
“In war, I understood to dedicate ourselves to what I love the most. I love my nation. I pray that none of you and your children will be forced to defend your own land just because Russians would decide that they have a right to your land.”
She haltingly ended with an appeal. “To stop the war, we need to kill the war. Give us weapons to murder the war. We will manage, just help us a little bit.”
It was a moment when those at the Munich Security Conference, a meeting of western politicians, defensive officials and academics, sensed what was at stake. It rephrased the question that the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskiy, had put to the conference. In phraseology reminiscent of President John F Kennedy, he had said: “Please don’t ask Ukraine when the war will end. Ask yourself why Putin is still able to wage this war.”
With Alexei Navalny dead, the Ukrainians retreated from Avdiivka, the US Congress deadlocked over supplying a further $60bn in aid and the shadow of Donald Trump’s return to the White House hovering over any discussion, Zelenskiy’s question could not have been more pertinent.
Two historians who followed Paievska, Timothy Synder and Niall Ferguson, also focused on the west’s role in the conflict. “It is a world war in which only one country is fighting,” Snyder said. “It is shocking, given our economic preponderance, how slowly we have mobilised. It is a mistake of the 21st century that economic preponderance leads to military victory. We have not been creative and quick enough. Compare the improvisation of Churchill and Roosevelt.”
Fergusson was even more urgent: “The challenge is to convince certain people and politicians that this is a dire a need as people say. Only a small and dwindling minority of Republican voters think that the US is not doing enough.”
Throughout the weekend, the Ukrainian delegation faced a hard enough job in trying to pitch the fierce urgency of their plight without tipping over into defeatism. One French official noted the dilemma: “A year ago ahead of the counter-offensive we had too much euphoria, and now perhaps too much depression.”
The French talk down suggestions that Ukrainian morale, supply lines and logistics are so stretched there may be a collapse this summer. The most likely future this year is stalemate, and a long war, Paris believes. But not everyone agrees and there are so many variables.
Ukrainian officials, for instance, were reluctant, unlike the Europeans, to speculate about the implications of a Trump victory, or how they could fight on with only European support. “There is no plan B,” the head of the Ukrainian president’s office, Andriy Yermak, insisted, at least in public.
The aim instead was to convince Europeans that Putin posed a threat not just to Ukraine but to their homes, too. Ukraine’s foreign minister, Dmytro Kuleba, said: “Every time the Ukrainian armed forces abandon yet another city that they cannot defend due to a lack of ammunition, don’t just think about it in the context of peace and democracy. Think about the fact that it means Russian soldiers are a few kilometres closer to your homes and your children. And if you look at it from that perspective, you will find the money.”
A debate inside Europe, sometimes angry, is also stirring about its own inertia, symbolised around why it cannot send the munitions needed.
The EU recently conceded it would only be able to deliver half the 1.15m artillery shells it had promised by the March deadline it had set itself. Gustav Gressel, from the European Council on Foreign Relations, estimates that Ukraine needs at least 5,000 standard bullets a day or 1.8m a year for a “minimal defence” against Russia. But Ukraine is due to receive only 3,600 a day or 1.3m a year. If the US supplies dry up, Ukraine could possibly be missing another half a million bullets later this year. For all the talk of a war economy, it has not been created.
Once at the back, Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, is now sending more to Ukraine than any other European leader, and on Friday signed a bilateral deal that committed £1.2bn of additional funding from Berlin for air defence and artillery that Ukraine desperately needs.
He has become irritated by the efforts of some EU contributions. French officials, sometimes in the German chancellor’s sights, say it is not just about billions. “We need greater military clarity. We need to articulate a more operational and coordinated package of support to Ukraine. If you are sending tanks that you cannot put on the battlefield because they are too fragile, manoeuvreable or do not coordinate you are not achieving anything,” one said, pointing to the damage French Scalp missiles have inflicted in Crimea.
France is supporting the idea of Euro defence bonds in which member states could pool what could amount to €600bn (£515bn) over the next 10 years to give Europe’s defence industry certainty to invest in production capabilities. The idea, first raised by Kallas from frugal Estonia, has not yet found favour in Germany. The German finance minister, Christian Lindner, in Munich instead assembled the security industry and credit institutions to see if new defence projects could be financed privately, and not through state debt.
Mette Frederiksen, the Danish prime minister, has become the new articulate hawk of Europe. “We, Denmark, have decided to transfer all our artillery to Ukraine. So, excuse me, but the issue is not just about production. Europe still has military equipment. We have weapons, ammunition, air defence systems that we are not using yet, and we need to transfer them to Ukraine.”
Petr Pavel, the Czech president, said his country had identified about 800,000 artillery shells abroad that could be sent to Ukraine within weeks, if funding was provided from other partners.
The message over and over was to stop obsessing about Trump, and instead for Europe to put its own house in order. “It doesn’t matter what the US comes up with, but we, Europeans, have to defend ourselves,” Frederiksen said. “This is a war on the European continent.” Mark Rutte, the outgoing Dutch prime minister and tipped to be the new head of Nato, adopted a similar tone, urging Europeans to stop “whining, nagging and complaining about Trump”.
But however much Europe manages to shake itself from its torpor, or think outside the box, as Kallas urged, US help is essential. “We are on a knife edge because Europe, even with all the financial resources, is not at the moment capable of producing all the equipment and ammo that is necessary,” said the Polish foreign minister, Radosław Sikorski. “We cannot do this without the US.”
So all the pressure is on the US to pass the package. “If the US does not pass this package, then the US will be seen as an unreliable ally,” Sikorski said. “In other words they encourage you to fight, but for some parochial reason they don’t come through. That will have consequences for US alliances all round the world. Everyone will have to start hedging and that will have consequences for Americans that no one can predict”.
Clinton believes Congress will eventually back the aid package but the few Republicans present in Munich seemed unrepentant. It took an isolated and isolationist US senator, JD Vance, an Ohio Republican, to reflect that part of America. “The problem in Ukraine … is that there’s no clear end point,” he said, adding that the US did not make enough weapons to support wars in eastern Europe, the Middle East and potentially east Asia.
He said he backed “some negotiated peace” in Ukraine, but any reward for Putin remains anathema in Europe. “Yes, we too are democracies,” said a French official. “We are fragile and exposed to public opinion. But we must be crystal clear. There is no scenario when Ukraine loses, and when we win.”
