At the end of January, when more than 150,000 Russian troops were already massed on the Ukrainian border, the German government, hostile to arms deliveries, had drawn ridicule from its opposition by announcing the supply of 5,000… Military helmets in Kyiv.
“The question for us is not to deliver arms or not to deliver arms, it is to deliver what is necessary to preserve Ukrainian security and sovereignty”, spoke at the same time Emmanuel Bonne, the diplomatic adviser to President Macron.
Three days after the Russian invasion, the consensus seems to have changed. “The anti-war coalition is working,” rejoiced Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a long-time critic of Western wait-and-see attitude, on Saturday. “Weapons and equipment from our partners are on their way to Ukraine,” he said on Twitter.
On Saturday, Belgium announced to provide 2,000 machine guns and 3,800 tons of fuel to the Ukrainian army. The Dutch Ministry of Defense said it had “shipped some of the already promised goods on Saturday, including sniper rifles and helmets”.
Break in Germany
In a letter to the Dutch Parliament, he further wrote that he would supply “as soon as possible 200 Stinger anti-aircraft missiles to Ukraine”.
The German government has even decided to authorize the delivery to Ukraine of 400 anti-tank rocket launchers, thus breaking its policy followed in recent years of banning all exports of lethal weapons in conflict zones.
France also “acted” on deliveries of defensive weapons to Kiev, according to its army staff, when Ukraine had, according to its ambassador in Paris, notably requested “means of anti-aircraft protection” and digital.
A good European pupil, the Czech Republic, which had already approved a donation to Kiev of 4,000 artillery shells worth 1.5 million euros, still to be delivered, announced on Saturday that it would send “within hours coming” to Ukraine a small arsenal worth 7.6 million euros: 30,000 pistols, 7,000 assault rifles, 3,000 machine guns and several dozen sniper rifles as well as a million cartridges.
Poland, whose Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki denounced on Thursday “the concrete selfishness” of certain Western countries, guilty according to him of not imposing sufficiently crushing sanctions on Moscow, for its part sent tens of thousands of ammunition to the neighbor Ukrainian.
“The difficulty of this affair is that no one believed” in a Russian invasion of all Ukrainian territory, “not even Zelensky”, affirms General Vincent Desportes, former director of the prestigious French War School, interviewed by AFP.
“Poor Armies”
Now, “everyone does what he can” and “nobody has billions of armaments too many. All the European armies are under-equipped”, he continues, when 200,000 Russians assisted by ballistic missiles besiege Ukraine.
“When you send 2,000 machine guns, you take them from your own stock. […] European armies are poor armies. We have no equipment, no money,” notes Mr. Desportes.
Better equipped militarily, the United States could make a bigger difference, they who announced on Saturday new military aid to Ukraine in the amount of 350 million dollars, to reach a total of “more than a billion aid dollars […] over the past year,” their head of diplomacy Antony Blinken announced on Saturday.
But “the roads are completely blocked, the airports bombarded. When you have weapons in Baltimore, they are not exactly in Kiev,” remarks General Desportes.
Asked about the subject, a Western diplomat based in Brussels wanted to be more optimistic on Friday, “many allied leaders” within NATO being eager according to him to provide military equipment “as much as possible” to Ukraine.