Twee artikelen in de New York Times maken wat meer duidelijk hoe door de ogen van de Oekraïners, maar ook door de ogen van de Amerikanen, gekeken wordt naar de (West-)Europeanen. Het kan geen kwaad om te kijken hoe naar Europa wordt gekeken.
In het eerste artikel worden vooral de pijlen op Macron, Scholz en Draghi gericht. Dit is natuurlijk maar "een" artikel in "een" krant, maar we kunnen er wel rekening meer houden dat deze opvatting door de Amerikanen wordt gedeeld.
An outgunned Ukraine is adding to the pressure on Europe.BRUSSELS — With Ukraine pressing Western allies for more arms to keep up its battle against Russia, European leaders are under mounting pressure to forge a cohesive strategy on what might constitute Ukrainian victory or Russian defeat, and when realistic negotiations might begin to end this brutal war on Europe’s edge.
All have said it is up to the democratically elected leaders of Ukraine to decide how and when to enter such negotiations, and all have provided significant financial and military support to Kyiv.
But some allies are increasingly nervous about a long war that might end up bringing NATO into direct conflict with Russia or leading President Vladimir V. Putin to escalate to using nuclear or chemical weapons.
On Monday, word emerged that the leaders of three of Europe’s largest countries, — France, Germany and Italy, are planning their own trip to Kyiv before the Group of 7 summit meeting later this month — and perhaps as early as this week, European officials say.
While confirmation was being kept secret for security reasons, such a visit would be the first there since the war began for President Emmanuel Macron of France, Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany and Prime Minister Mario Draghi of Italy. Each has raised questions about how to bring the warring sides into serious negotiations.
With Russian forces poised to take the battered city of Sievierodonetsk and closing in on Lysychansk, they are close to completing their slow and bloody occupation of the Luhansk region, one of the two provinces of the Donbas in eastern Ukraine.
Ukrainian officials, running out of Soviet-era ammunition in the east and losing more soldiers to Russian shelling, have repeatedly called for more and faster delivery of more modern NATO-country artillery and weapons systems. As Western leaders consider further military aid, the war in the east will largely depend on how fast and in what quantities these heavy weapons arrive, and how quickly Ukrainian soldiers can be taught how best to use them.
But the competing concerns of their Western allies have raised hackles in Kyiv and in the capitals of Central and Eastern Europe about how committed these countries truly are to beating back Russia.
Mr. Macron in particular has twice said that it was important not to “humiliate Russia,” which has angered Ukrainians and his European colleagues in Central and Eastern Europe. They believe that this war is about more than Ukraine, and that Russia’s ambitions to overthrow the European security order must be met with defeat, not a cease-fire.
Under questioning, a spokesman for Mr. Macron said anonymously that France wants Ukraine to be victorious — but Mr. Macron has himself never said those words. And while Mr. Scholz, who is criticized for not supplying more arms to Ukraine and faster, says that Russia must not win, he has never said Ukraine must achieve victory.
Mr. Draghi, for his part, has broken with an Italian tradition of closeness to Moscow by strongly supporting Ukraine, even for membership in the European Union, a subject Mr. Macron has said is unrealistic for decades.
Het volgende artikel gaat over de aantallen wapens waar Oekraïne vandaag om heeft gevraagd. Later in het artikel is ook aandacht voor de frustratie, van Oekraïne, over de trage en minimale reactie van bepaalde Europese landen, en wordt gespeculeerd over de reden waarom. Nederland is hierbij ook nog genoemd. Even los van de inhoudelijkheid is de frustratie erover duidelijk merkbaar.
How many more weapons does Ukraine need to win? This many, a top Ukrainian official saysKYIV, Ukraine — For weeks, Ukrainian officials have pleaded for powerful Western weapons as a way to stave off battlefield defeats. A senior adviser to President Volodymyr Zelensky shifted this messaging on weapons on Monday by laying out for the first time the total number of howitzers, rocket launchers and tanks Ukraine thinks it would need to win the war against Russia.
At the same time, the adviser, Mykhailo Podolyak, accused Western leaders of being reluctant to seriously address Ukraine’s gigantic disadvantage in long-range weaponry, and the scale of what will be needed to even the odds. He suggested Western nations lacked a sense of urgency even as Ukraine’s army, low on ammunition and taking heavy casualties, is being battered in fighting in the East.
And he suggested that some Western European countries, including France and Germany, were “hiding from the war.’’
“If you think we should lose, just tell us directly: ‘We want you to lose.’ Then we will understand why you give us weapons at this level,” Mr. Podolyak said in an interview in the presidential office compound in Kyiv.
The United States and its allies have provided about 100 howitzers and several dozen self-propelled artillery guns. The Biden administration earlier this month promised multiple-launch rocket systems.
Mr. Podolyak said the scope of that support is far from sufficient to combat the firepower the Russian army’s heavy, mechanized units have brought to bear. Russian forces are now firing about 70,000 projectiles per day in combat in the eastern region known as Donbas, he said, about 10 times as much as Ukrainian artillery teams can fire.
For Ukraine to achieve parity with the Russian army in the east, Mr. Podolyak said, Western nations will need to provide it with 1,000 howitzers, 300 multiple-launch rocket systems, 500 tanks, 2,000 armored vehicles and 1,000 drones.
Lacking that level of firepower, the Ukrainian military command has resorted to a risky strategy of seeking to engage the Russian military in street fighting in the city of Sievierodonetsk to at least inflict casualties on Russian units that would not be possible in the open fields.
Mr. Podolyak, who is also a negotiator in now-stalled settlement talks with Russia, offered his assessment ahead of a meeting of Western defense ministers to discuss military aid for Ukraine, scheduled for Wednesday in Brussels.
He speculated that Western governments were slow-walking military aid in hopes that Russia and Ukraine would negotiate a cease-fire, thus helping ease the global economic woes the war has caused.
But any settlement that cedes Ukrainian territory would leave a war in Europe in abeyance, not resolved, he said. Hostilities, he said, would be bound to restart later because President Vladimir V. Putin’s aggression will have been rewarded.
“Why do the Western elites not feel that this is a war?” Mr. Podolyak asked. He offered his own assessment: that Western leaders are reluctant to concede that previous, conciliatory policies toward Russia were mistaken.
He said “core European countries,” meaning countries like the Netherlands, France and Germany, also fear Russian aggression if they commit to higher levels of military aid.
Mr. Podolyak also asserted that many leaders harbored intentions to restore prewar business ties, and that Western elites were susceptible to a pro-Russia lobby financed by Russian oil money.
“A problem is a problem,” he said. “There is reluctance of the elite, for example, the French, to make this a top topic for themselves. They are hiding from the war.”
He said any deal allowing Mr. Putin to “save face,” as President Emmanuel Macron of France has suggested, would result in “a permanent war,” with Russia gaining territorial concessions and using them to encroach further on Ukrainian territory toward the west.
Mr. Podolyak defined victory for Ukraine as enabling its military to inflict enough battlefield defeats on Russia to force political change in Moscow away from expansionist policies, at least long enough for neighboring countries to strengthen their defenses.
“With the proper end of the war, using the right quantity of weapons we should receive, we should inflict several military defeats on them,” he said. The battlefield losses, he said, would “lead to a transformation of the political system of the Russian Federation.”
Most Russians appear to support the war, polls show, and Mr. Putin has not faced any serious backlash domestically.
But Mr. Podolyak asserted that a period of political turmoil in Russia would allow Ukraine breathing room to establish control over its borders and form defensive alliances to prevent a resumption of the war.
For now, Russia’s artillery superiority in the battle for Donbas has forced Ukrainian commanders to fight where the infantry stands a chance: in urban combat in the cities. Asked about Ukraine’s persistence in defending the city of Sievierodonetsk, the site of fierce street fighting, rather than pull back and reduce casualties, Mr. Podolyak pointed to the success Ukraine has had in cities and suburbs.
“The Russians fight poorly in the cities,” Mr. Podolyak said. “In the cities, it is possible to maneuver, and find cover, and you minimize losses; you can resist a longer time and inflict significant casualties on the Russians.”
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Nu hebben beide landen al maanden een strijd met veel schade en doden/gewonden met sowieso zeer waarschijnlijk het resultaat dat iedereen al had kunnen uittekenen toen het begon.
Want heel realistisch is het niet dat nu wel ineens een land (RU) echt gaat betalen uiteindelijk.
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