US, allies seek long-term military aid for Ukraine to show West’s resolve

The Wall Street Journal writes weapons shortages, domestic political pressures hamper Western efforts. Caliber.Az reprints the article.

The Biden administration and its European allies are laying plans for long-term military assistance to Ukraine to ensure Russia won’t be able to win on the battlefield and persuade the Kremlin that Western support for Kyiv won’t waver.

The effort, building on commitments made at a Group of Seven leaders meeting on the sidelines of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization summit in July in Vilnius, Lithuania, so far involves bilateral negotiations between the US and Ukraine and the UK and Ukraine. About 18 non-G-7 countries have signed up to the group’s pledge to provide long-term assistance to Kyiv, including the Netherlands, Sweden and other European countries.

The goal is to make sure Ukraine will be strong enough in the future to deter Russia from attacking it again. More immediately, Ukraine’s Western allies hope to discourage the Kremlin from thinking it can wait out the Biden administration for a potentially more sympathetic successor in the White House. 

Western officials are looking for ways to lock in pledges of support and limit future governments’ abilities to backtrack, amid fears in European capitals that Donald Trump, if he recaptures the White House, would seek to scale back aid. Trump has a wide lead in early polling in the Republican presidential primary field, but soundly lost the 2020 election to President Biden and has been indicted in four criminal cases in state and federal courts. 

While the initiative shares broad support among G-7 countries, the practicalities are proving complicated, officials say. Among other issues, the Biden administration is limited in its ability to bind future administrations to international agreements—and Trump has already proven willing to reverse his predecessors’ deals with foreign capitals. In addition, European states lack the financial and military capacity to pick up the slack should a future president reduce and terminate US aid to Kyiv.

Among European officials, concern is growing that Russian President Vladimir Putin will keep fighting in Ukraine until after the 2024 US presidential election, hoping that a Republican victory would lead to an end of American military support. So far, the US has sent Ukraine more than $40 billion worth of weapons and equipment. 

While there has been broad bipartisan support of Ukraine, leading Republican presidential candidates have signalled US support should wind down. Trump has said he would put a stop to the war in a day, by threatening both sides that he would support the other if they didn’t come to the negotiating table to make a settlement.

During the first Republican presidential debate last week, other candidates said that, if elected, they wouldn’t sustain the current level of US support for Ukraine.  

At the July summit in Vilnius, the Group of Seven developed democracies pledged to make arrangements on “specific, bilateral, long-term security commitments” for Ukraine.

By setting out what French officials have said should be a four-year period of military-aid commitments, Western capitals hope to persuade the Kremlin that Russia can’t wait for European and US support for Ukraine to drain away.

European officials have warned it will take many months to prepare the plans, with some of the bilateral arrangements expected to come together only next year. There is also no common view on how detailed the pledges should be. They also need to work out with Ukraine—in the midst of the current conflict—what the country’s future military needs might be. They will need to coordinate the bilateral negotiations among Western capitals and ensure allied defence industries can produce the promised military assistance to Ukraine without undercutting the need of Western militaries to restock and expand their own capabilities. 

Protecting future spending

Without credible packages of support, Russia is unlikely to be deterred from continuing the war, Western officials acknowledge.

A basic political problem hovers above all these difficulties: Will current governments be able to effectively carve out and protect military spending for Ukraine in future years when they may no longer be in power?

Nowhere is the answer to the question more uncertain than in Washington. European allies are already bracing for the possibility that the Biden administration’s long-term pledges will be weaker than hoped or too vague to offer credible deterrence against Russia. 

While Biden said during the NATO meeting in Vilnius that the US “will negotiate long-term bilateral security commitments with them to Ukraine,” US officials said they have yet to determine what that agreement would look like. 

One proposal, an administration official said, would be for the US and Ukraine to agree on a memorandum of understanding, stopping short of a treaty-like agreement. An MOU wouldn’t require congressional approval.

On Aug. 3, the State Department said it led the first US meeting on the potential shape of a long-term US agreement. Ukrainian officials, along with representatives from the Pentagon and White House were part of the discussions, it said. 

“Our bilateral security commitments will focus on ensuring Ukraine has a sustainable force capable of defending Ukraine now and deterring Russian aggression in the future,” the State Department said. 

Analysts and some officials argue it would be more effective for the US and its allies to promise delivery dates for weapons that could improve Ukraine’s security in the long term. 

“What the US needs to do is provide specifics for what kind of weapons systems it will provide Ukraine,” said Seth Jones, director of the international security program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “The US could make a commitment today to provide F-16s or other fighter aircraft, for example.”  

Speaking to reporters last week, US national security adviser Jake Sullivan alluded to European concerns about Washington’s future support for Ukraine. He said despite opposition from some House Republicans, strong bipartisan support remained for Kyiv and that he had communicated that to Ukraine and European partners. 

During his first term, Trump withdrew the US from the Paris climate treaty and the Iranian nuclear deal, an unusual break by an American president of US commitments made by predecessors. 

The current administration can’t legally bind a future administration to financial commitments made to Ukraine although Republicans in Congress could press a future GOP administration to maintain the support. 

If Washington were to significantly scale back its support for Ukraine, Europe is unlikely to be financially or militarily capable of stepping in to close the gap. While most European governments remain committed to supporting Ukraine, the continent faces tight fiscal pressures and few countries have defence industries able to match US firepower.

The leading European weapons contributors, the UK and Germany, have earmarked some $7 billion to $8 billion respectively in military support for Ukraine, according to the Kiel Institute for the World Economy, less than one-fifth of US support.

Long-term aims

The UK in mid-August became the second country to start negotiations with Ukraine on the security commitments—a few days after the US meeting that included Kyiv officials. After the discussions, Andriy Yermak, head of the office of the Ukrainian president, who led Kyiv’s delegation, said his government hopes to complete the first agreements by the end of 2023.

A senior French official said Paris expects to start negotiations in the next few weeks. US officials say they hope to hold a second meeting with Ukraine in the coming weeks.

“Security guarantees for Ukraine—the next rounds of talks, as well as the addition of new countries to the common security architecture, are coming soon,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said on social-media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, on Sunday. 

Elsewhere in Europe, negotiations are yet to start but officials in France and Germany are sketching out the kind of support they could provide Ukraine.

In late March, the German parliament’s budget committee approved additional defence funding for Ukraine of 3.2 billion euros (about $3.5 billion) this year and credit lines for the period between 2024 and 2032 amounting to some 8.8 billion euros.

In France in July, the parliament approved the biggest military spending hike in half a century for the 2024-30 period, driven in part by military and defence industry capacities to help Ukraine.

Yet bringing all this together into a credible Western package will be a daunting task, Jones said, until the alliance spells out its long-term aims. 

“What does the broader US and NATO objective look like? They haven’t publicly provided a road map,” he said.