Ukraine’s main allies are starting to come to terms with what will be required to support the government in Kyiv through what they now expect will be a long war.
That realization was fundamental to almost every discussion at the annual Munich Security Conference where senior officials from the trans-Atlantic defense community grappled with how to meet the vastly increased demand for ammunition and weapons that such a war implies.
They also wrestled with how to enforce economic sanctions against Moscow, how to persuade the global south to embrace Ukraine’s cause, and what role China will decide to play in the war.
Russian officials were absent from the Munich event for the first time in decades in a sign of how much has changed since last year’s event, held just days before President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion.
Back then, Volodymyr Zelenskyy had harangued his country’s allies for their “appeasement” of Russia. “Now all this is being corrected,” the Ukrainian president said by video link at the start of the conference on Friday.
Among the more than 45 heads of state and government attending, some expressed astonishment at how the year had confounded expectations since the last meeting, just days before the invasion.
Ukraine was not overrun in a week and the NATO alliance did not split over whether to send weapons to Kyiv, or sanction Moscow. Nor did Putin escalate to non-conventional warfare after his supposed red lines were crossed multiple times, while Russia itself has been exposed as a less powerful military force than had been feared.
Ukraine’s future membership of the European Union and North Atlantic Treaty Organization were both considered distant prospects at best before the war. Now they are taken as givens.
“There can be no more gray areas,” said Estonian Prime Minister Kaja Kallas, arguing that her country would have faced the same fate as Ukraine by now if it hadn’t joined NATO.
Ukraine’s situation remains grim, with Russia pouring newly mobilized troops into the eastern Donbas region as it tries to take back offensive momentum it lost in the fall. So far Russian progress has been slow and has come at a high cost in terms of casualties for both sides.
Zelenskyy and other Ukrainian officials in Munich urged more speed in the delivery of weapons and ammunition, but there was little public tension in Munich. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, once derided for responding to Putin’s invasion with the offer of helmets, even urged others to be quicker in delivering tanks to Ukraine.
Even so, the mood of resolve was underpinned by a deep concern about the future, and not just on the battlefields.
For one thing, a longer war will stretch into the next U.S. presidential election campaign, meaning that decisions on Ukraine by its biggest single military and financial backer will increasingly become complicated by domestic politics.
Kallas, an outspoken Ukraine supporter who faces an election herself next month, worried aloud over the impact of public opinion in Europe as inflation and other worries take hold. “We all have our domestic problems and these will kick in,” she said.
She fretted, too, about the slow response of Europe’s defense companies in ramping up production, particularly of ammunition, as nations deplete their own stocks to supply Ukraine.
Building new capacity will inevitably take two-to-three years, said Francois Heisbourg, a security analyst and former adviser to the French defense ministry, who described a sober mood at the conference. Yet that need not be bad for Ukraine, he said. As soon as governments commit, so will producers, at which point defense ministries can release more stock to Ukraine, secure in the knowledge that it will be replaced.
The bigger shock that dawned on the alliance as a result of the war, Heisbourg said, is that supposedly NATO standard equipment such as 155 millimeter shells are not in fact standard. Manufacturers either tailor ammunition to their own weapons, or accept liability only if their proprietary ammunition is used. That’s going to require a major political intervention to fix, he said.
“Our ammunition is not in fact fungible, it is a huge problem that we didn’t until now realize we had,” Heisbourg said.
As time drags on, the current policy of supporting Ukraine whatever it takes may also become more complicated at an international level.
The U.S. said it has information that China is considering providing weapons to Russia, a development that could dramatically change both the course of the war and its consequences.
China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, arrived in Munich touting a peace plan to end that Beijing plans unveil on Feb. 24, the date Russia launched its invasion a year ago.
“This is clearly a way of helping Russia, because a settlement now would be bad for Ukraine,” said Ivan Krastev, Chairman of the Center for Liberal Strategies, a think tank based in Sofia, Bulgaria. “But if the U.S. and Europe reject the initiative, then for a lot of the world they become the party of war and Putin is the one who wants peace. It’s going to be very difficult.”
David Petraeus, a retired U.S. general and former CIA director, said in mostly upbeat comments on Ukraine’s prospects for victory that it will urgently need more air defenses and precision munitions to get through a tough few months as it fights off a mounting Russian offensive. He also said Ukraine may eventually have to sue for peace before it has regained all of the territory Russia has seized since 2014.
Czech President-elect Petr Pavel worried aloud about a future in which the war continues to grind through Ukrainian lives as one panelist after another acknowledged the war will only truly end for Ukraine once Russia decides the invasion was a mistake. And there are few signs of that happening.
“It’s better to be realistic,” Pavel said.
