As the great baseball coach Yogi Berra would have said, the Vilnius Nato summit seems to have been a severe case of “déjà vu, all over again”.
Ukraine had hoped to get a clear starting date for serious negotiations to join the alliance. The Ukrainians also wanted game-changing weapons for a breakthrough in their summer ground offensive.
Though the Nato leadership proffered many fine words of assurance such as “Ukraine’s future is in Nato,” no path to admission was offered.
Support for Ukraine was supposed to be the leading item on the agenda at Vilnius. Yet the language and tone about Ukraine, and much of the rest of the 90-paragraph communique, is a study in contorted diplomatic ambiguity. As Twitter correspondent Bohdan H tweeted just a few hours ago, “they basically had to say something without saying something”.
The war has seen Russia draw a new line of confrontation between the Russian Federation and the West, meaning the EU and Nato. Partners and allies on the frontline, the Baltic states and the Scandinavian quartet, are concerned about a lack of urgency and adroitness at Nato HQ and in the big capitals. There is a sense that the alliance is a bit of a mess, and in need of real reform based on realism rather than outdated diplomatic rhetoric.
This means the present predicament of Ukraine’s war of resistance must be addressed now. The summer offensive is under way with very slow progress, and at a huge cost. The consumption of lives and materiel suggests that Ukraine’s forces may not be able to mount an operation on a similar scale again for a year or two — which may be too late.
Allies such as Britain, the US and France have been training Ukrainian forces to mount a combined arms campaign to regain lost territory. Very few modern armies are fully capable of combined arms operations involving thousands of troops, tanks, artillery and air power. Yet the Ukrainians were expected to succeed after a few weeks of training, and a lack of key arms and weapons systems — rockets and missiles to fire in depth, helicopter gunships, and ground attack fighter aircraft. The British and American trainers must have known of this deficiency. Almost from the off, back in May, commanders such as General Mark Milley, chairman of the US Joint Chiefs at the Pentagon, were briefing the American press on their misgivings about the chances of Ukraine military success this summer.
The Biden administration has been reticent about supplying long-range missiles needed to fight
At Vilnius, it was still unclear whether the US administration would give the go-ahead to deploying F-16 Flying Falcons to the Ukrainian forces — though there was some off-piste briefing that “F-16 training might start”. Britain and the north European allies have been preparing training for F-16s for months. The Biden administration has also been reticent about supplying the ATACM missiles, needed to prosecute the depth battle in the summer campaign. Britain cleared nearly its entire stock of Storm Shadow air-launched missiles two months ago, and now France has pledged its stock of the same missile.
The Vilnius summit gave little appreciation of the ends, ways and means to ensure that Ukraine wins the battle for its security on the ground, and the strategy thence to achieve a lasting peace with Russia. Much is made about the requirement to be able to mobilise 300,000 Nato troops to main the peace in eastern Europe — a figure laid down in previous summits — with little sense of how it can be achieved.
Volodymyr Zelensky has been accused by Defence Secretary Ben Wallace of being ungrateful, according to briefings at Vilnius. It was an odd move, damaging to Ukraine, Nato and Wallace’s reputation.
The Ukrainian president seems justified in his disappointment at the collective display of indecision and abdication of responsibility by Nato this week. He remains the personification of Italian Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci’s pessimism of the intellect and the optimism of the will. And perhaps a word of comfort from another of Yogi Berra’s sayings: “It ain’t all over ’til it’s over.”
