(Reuters) - Ukrainian troops are suffering high losses because Western arms are arriving too slowly to equip the armed forces properly, President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told CNN in an interview aired on Sunday.
Russia has been gaining ground in parts of eastern Ukraine including around Pokrovsk. Capture of the transport hub could enable Moscow to open new lines of attack.
Zelenskiy said the situation in the east was “very tough”, adding that half of Ukraine’s brigades there were not equipped.
Sending NATO in fundamentally breaks the treaties upon which the organization was founded. NATO isn’t a joint military force to send to places for freedom and democracy, it’s a defensive organization. Without an explicit article 5 declaration from a current member state against a specific threat for a specific reason, a deployment of NATO would be undermining of the organization’s mission in itself, putting in question whether NATO is there to protect its members or just to be used as a cudgel for potential inconvenient threats because the alternative is a financial strain.
Interventions like this, such as the 2011 intervention on Libya to enforce UN resolution 1973 will fuel arguments that NATO is altering its mission from defending its members to participate in US led (or in this case also French led) interventionism. Upon such a time where threats are no longer direct as is the case of the current Russian invasion of Ukraine, this will have implications on the future of the organization and questions will be made about its purpose, as it has happened before after the fall of the USSR. Ultimately NATO’s mandate must be upheld and strictly followed, for the sake of the treaty. At least that’s the opinion i share.
You have a very good point.
In that case instead of NATO, then maybe the world builds some sort of coalition to take care of the problem. Those countries that want to put an end to this war can. But at the end of the day, it’s up to the Ukraine to allow to happen, but we need to start looking at what exactly it is costing each year and ask if it’s sustainable
That would be possible but it would take a long time and one of the bigger issues that has persisted in this war is, will Ukraine last long enough that when a new coalition is made or even when new equipment is delivered, those efforts will still be there on time to be useful ? I think this has been the crux of the question for all delays we’ve seen on war support on this war.
I think most world leaders didn’t really believe Ukraine would still be fighting today back when the war started and didn’t want to deliver tanks and jets to a soon to be occupied Ukraine. This is why we’re in this hodgepodge of inefficiency. And we still don’t know if Ukraine will still be fighting in 2 years from now, but i feel world leaders are more confident on it than 2 years ago, so things should probably come to a more streamlined solution as time goes by.