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This Monday, US foreign policy experts published a report saying the government should provide Ukraine military assistance for $1bn yearly in 2015–2017. They are talking radars, drones, communications, medical equipment, as well as lethal arms assistance such as light missiles to repel enemy armoured vehicles.
The document is serious, authored by eight foreign policy heavyweights including former US Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott – a man well-known in Estonia – , former permanent US representative at NATO Ivo Daalder, former supreme NATO commander in Europe James Stavridis, and Michèle Flournoy repeatedly mentioned as future secretary of defence of USA. As the report «Preserving Ukraine’s Independence, Resisting Russian Aggression» was in preparation during January the authors met dozens of NATO and Ukrainian officials and military staff. According to New York Times, the Obama administration is also pondering military help to Ukraine at the moment.
The authors observe helping Ukraine is urgent – the Russia-supported units operating in Eastern Ukraine have vital advantages before Ukrainian forces in controlling air-space, intelligence, electronic war equipment, management, artillery, rockets and logistics. Meaning: the Ukrainian side will obviously not be able to avoid or hinder a probable major springtime separatist offensive to grab new territory in Donetsk and Lugansk region, or seize the land connection to Crimea via Mariupol.
Mr Talbott and the other experts warn that if Russian success against Ukraine be permitted, the latter’s stability will be undermined and Kremlin emboldened to take further steps. «It might tempt President Putin to use his doctrine of protecting ethnic Russians and Russian speakers in seeking territorial changes elsewhere in the neighborhood, including in the Baltic States, provoking a direct challenge to NATO,» they write.
A main argument against supplying arms to Ukraine has been that, by doing that, the West might be pulled into war waged against Russia via intermediaries. The authors of the report find, however, that even in the absence of immediate help by the West, Russia has constantly escalated the Ukrainian crisis and supplying arms would be the very help needed to boost Kiev in avoiding further build-up of tensions.
In the Saturday issue of Postimees, a roundtable of future Ukrainian diplomats studying in Tallinn underlined that the state of war in Ukraine is shaping to be a kind of «new normal». In today’s newspaper, straight from the front lines, our Jaanus Piirsalu reports on a situation rather dark. Surely, a final solution to the conflict in Ukraine can’t be military, but, regrettably, one cannot but agree to words by President Ilves in a public debate yesterday: «If one is attacked and one does not fight, one loses.»