A steady supply of Western military equipment could enable Ukraine to surpass Russian military stockpiles as the war unfolds, thus neutralizing a key advantage for the Kremlin and establishing a substantial military buffer between NATO and Russia.
“We can see that we receive weapons even from those countries who are not that much sure about [Ukraine’s] current application [to join NATO], as they’re afraid to provoke the Russian Federation,” Dr. Hanna Shelest, an Odesa-based nonresident senior fellow for the Center for European Policy Analysis, told the Washington Examiner. “It seems to me that [with respect to] NATO application, we should speak more from the political point of view, while the weapons delivery more from the defense and deterrence point of view.”
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The intended arms deliveries reflect a mix of commercial sales to Ukraine by Western defense companies and aid from the United States, the United Kingdom, and other NATO allies. Ukraine’s private sector arrangements are so substantial that Czech defense companies, one of the largest defense industries in Europe, “in many areas that are most needed, are sold out, only for Ukraine, for the next two years,” according to Czech Deputy Defense Minister Tomas Kopecny. Those supply networks could empower Ukraine, even as U.S. export controls and Western sanctions constrain Russia’s ability to replace the military equipment lost during its ill-starred campaign in Ukraine this year.
“They will get more and more of the military material they need, including heavy weapons,” Kopecny told the Washington Examiner. “Whereas Russia, as of now, does have a very limited stockpile that is currently still superior in quantities to the Ukrainians, but is finite with no significant refills on the horizon.”
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Kopecny and other Czech Republic officials have worked to provide about $160 million of military aid to Ukraine while brokering arms sales to Ukraine worth millions more. That assistance included heavy weapons that Czech officials rushed into Ukraine at a time when President Joe Biden’s team was still debating how to balance Ukraine’s requests for artillery against the fear of Russian retaliation, giving Prague an outsize battlefield impact.
Still, U.S. support has dwarfed all other donors, with $16.9 billion worth of arms deliveries since Feb. 24. That assistance began with the anti-tank and anti-aircraft missiles that allowed Ukrainian forces to win the battle of Kyiv in March and April before expanding to include scores of howitzers, thousands of precision-guided artillery shells, and 32 HIMARS — the multiple launch rocket systems that Ukrainian forces have used to devastating effect in eastern Ukraine.
“There’s some indication that the administration understands that they should be starting now to arm the Ukrainians for the intermediate time for the long, long term, but in the next, say three to five [years],” former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor said. “I think it’s emerging as a policy.”
Those deliveries will be supplemented by continuing U.S. assistance and Western training, as Ukraine’s resistance against Russian President Vladimir Putin’s campaign to conquer the country allows officials in Kyiv and across NATO to think not only of the immediate crisis but also of the long-term strategic outcomes of the war.
“Increasingly, you’re seeing NATO standard systems going to Ukraine to deal with the ongoing Russian aggression,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken told reporters Friday. “I think going forward, what Ukraine wants and needs is a strong defensive and deterrence system that makes it less likely in the future that Russia will act aggressively toward Ukraine and that if it does nonetheless do that, Ukraine is very well prepared.”
Blinken refused “to get into the details of what that involves,” but the trajectory raises the prospect of Ukraine developing the equipment and training to field a NATO-grade military, even if the former Soviet satellite state remains outside of the trans-Atlantic alliance. Those provisions will figure prominently in a wider effort to improve the defenses of 17 other countries “potentially at risk of future Russian aggression,” as Blinken put it while visiting Kyiv last month.
The list of beneficiaries includes not only NATO allies such as Poland and the Baltic states but also countries such as Ukraine and Moldova that aspire to fix their place in the constellation of Euro-Atlantic societies.
“I think that it is, again, trying to separate out the immediate war-fighting from the long term,” former Ambassador Kurt Volker, who represented the U.S. at NATO and worked as special envoy for Ukraine during Donald Trump’s presidency, told the Washington Examiner. “They’d like to establish more of a deterrent capability in these countries so that wars don’t happen and we’re not in this position of, ‘Are we in a war? Are we not in a war? Might there be a nuclear exchange?’ — try to deter all that by investing in these countries’ capabilities.”
Such an initiative could bring the clarity of hard power to Ukraine’s security arrangements, which have existed in an amorphous and vulnerable state throughout the last three decades of Ukrainian independence. Ukraine possessed a vast stockpile of nuclear weapons following the collapse of the Soviet Union, but Kyiv agreed to relinquish that arsenal in exchange for security guarantees from Russia, the U.S., and the U.K.
Ukraine still shared the misgivings that inspired other former Soviet vassals, such as Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, to join NATO, and officials in Kyiv made their own attempt to enter the security bloc. Putin claimed early in his tenure not to have a position on Ukraine’s desire to join NATO — “at the end of the day, the decision is to be taken by NATO and Ukraine,” he said in 2002 — but by 2008, he had persuaded Germany’s then-chancellor, Angela Merkel, to conclude that NATO’s admission of Ukraine to the bloc “would be a declaration of war” with Russia.
So Germany and France blocked Ukraine’s application, although NATO allies at the 2008 Bucharest Summit reserved the right to admit Ukraine at some point in the future. Still, Ukraine’s application has remained dead in the water — as recently as the 2021 NATO summit, Biden and the other leaders refused to give Ukraine the “yes or no” answer that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky requested — although Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of eastern Ukraine in 2014 galvanized additional cooperation between Kyiv and the West.
“We’ll continue to send weaponry, and I would say, mainly where Canada’s expertise is, is training of Ukrainian officers,” Canadian Foreign Minister Melanie Joly said Friday during an appearance alongside Blinken. “We have done that since 2014. Before the war, we had trained already 30,000 Ukrainian soldiers. And so we are partnering with the U.K. on this, and we are training out of the U.K. many of the Ukrainian officers.”
Such training initiatives are seeding Ukrainian forces with an officer corps that has “much better [training] in terms of logistics, management, leadership when your mid-rank officers can make decisions,” as Shelest put it, than their Russian adversaries.
“We are training, immediately, as much as possible, our soldiers; we’re already talking about 10,000 people at least,” Shelest said. “But at the same time, we’re training the narrow specialists, as we call them, the specialists in the new types of the weapons that we are receiving.”
Those training programs, in conjunction with Rep. Adam Kinzinger’s proposed legislation to authorize the training of Ukrainian pilots and crews to operate U.S.-made fighter jets such as F-15s and F-16s, have raised Shelest’s hope that Ukraine eventually will be outfitted with those platforms. “It seems to me that we cracked the ice,” she said.
That assessment adds an optimistic tone to a subject that has frustrated Ukrainian officials throughout the war.
“If we would start training Ukrainian pilots in March, we would have, you know, 200-300 pilots ready to fly F-16s, F-15s, A-10s, and other, you know, Western platforms you have,” a senior Ukrainian official said. “You don’t even need them, actually, because you don’t use them anymore. And that would change the conflict significantly.”
Putin is also growing desperate for a change to the conflict, as evidenced by his “partial mobilization” of available Russian conscripts in recent weeks. Yet neither that announcement nor the putative annexation of occupied territory has stemmed the advance of Ukrainian forces, who are conducting a counteroffensive across eastern Ukraine. Those developments, along with the continuance of Western equipment and training, raise the potential for Ukraine to emerge from the war as a serious military power, whether inside of NATO or without.
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“Its demonstrated performance to have the most capable military on the European continent able to fight the Russians to a standstill and indeed push them back … that’s a capability and a confidence and a reassurance that NATO would value,” said Taylor, the former ambassador and a decorated Vietnam War veteran. “The Ukrainians now have a very capable, battle-hardened, and increasingly, increasingly lethal [military].”
