Support for Ukraine was a major consensus between allies on the second day of the NATO Summit in Washington, as partners agreed to shift their focus to providing long-term support.
Ukraine will finally get several new air defence systems, including five Patriot systems, which Kyiv says are desperately needed to protect Ukrainian civilians and crucial civilian infrastructure.
NATO allies made a plethora of commitments to Ukraine at the alliance’s 75th anniversary in Washington.
The military support announcements — which included a timeline on the delivery of F-16 fighter jets — were made with major gusto around the hype at the summit.
However, the equipment is deemed as the bare minimum necessary in order to stave off Russia’s resurgent attacks on Ukraine in recent months.
Allies also committed to €43 billion of military spending for Ukraine for next year, as a strong consensus emerged that the group would do “whatever it takes” to defeat Russian President Vladimir Putin.
“Getting the Patriot systems are pretty important in terms of the fact they’re able to intercept hypersonic missiles which are the things that are most damaging Ukrainian civilian and critical national infrastructure”, Ed Arnold, Senior Research Fellow for European Security at RUSI told Euronews.
“It’s not just about the launchers. It’s about the number of interceptors. It’s about the ammunition as well. And that’s going to have to be a continuous requirement for the Ukrainians,” he said.
Many military experts, including NATO officials, have noted that the Russian economy has been transformed into a war economy, which will likely last for several years.
Complete concentration on manufacturing weapons and developing the defence industry is of huge concern to the alliance.
Elsewhere, members of the alliance pointed fingers at China for ‘enabling’ Russia’s war in Ukraine by supplying it with vital components otherwise shut off to Russia due to Western sanctions.
As a result, NATO said it had pivoted its strategy on Ukraine to one of long-term, predictable commitments of military aid.
“On the F-16s, again, they’ll be they’ll be very, very valuable to the Ukrainians, but they’re not going to be a game changer. They’re not going to enable Ukrainians to take back much territory anytime soon”, Arnold told Euronews.
In recent months, Ukraine has been forced to fight for strategically important territory to the north and northeast of Kharkiv, its second city.
On Monday, the summit attended by the 32 NATO allies was punctuated by several major Russian attacks, including one on a children’s hospital in Kyiv that killed 27 civilians — including four children.
Several NATO sources said the attack on the hospital was a macabre message of strength from Putin ahead of the meeting.
It was a “pretty much deliberate policy by the Kremlin to strike on Monday ahead of the summit to try and get onto the news cycle and show those within Europe who were more timid towards Ukraine and Ukrainian membership and a greater role for NATO’s within the war”.
“To say, this is what escalation might look like in your own countries,” Arnold told Euronews.
