The summit of the foreign ministers of the countries of the Atlantic Alliance will be held today and tomorrow in Brussels, the last with Joe Biden as US president but the first in which the possibility of organizing peace talks between Russia and Ukraine is openly discussed. With a fact that no one wants to admit: Putin almost won. All presided over by the Secretary General of NATO, the former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, while Vladimir Putin wants to gain every meter of territory possible, possibly to conquer the whole of Donbass before sitting down at a table, and Zelensky is looking for a way to join NATO quicklyeven if the Alliance can no longer give Kiev any certainty. In fact, Ukraine launched an appeal for full membership of the Alliance as the only guarantee of security in the face of the Russian invasion, in view of the meeting, a statement which was immediately followed by a Russian response from Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov to the Ria Novosti agency: “Ukraine’s entry into NATO would be unacceptable and a threatening event, this would be absolutely in contrast with our thesis on the indivisibility of security, the security of a country cannot be guaranteed at the expense of security of another nation, therefore such a decision is unacceptable because it would be an event that would threaten us. And that wouldn’t eliminate the root causes of what’s happening. The causes of why we began the special military operation”. For Secretary Rutte, “military support” matters more than membership, as he himself declared in an interview with the Financial Times, reporting that he had warned US President-elect Donald Trump about the “serious threat” to Europe and the USA which could arise with a rapprochement between China, Iran and North Korea if Ukraine were pushed to sign a peace agreement on conditions favorable only to Russia.
But Kiev will not receive the formal invitation to join the Alliance anytime soon, Germany and the USA have always supported him. For Rutte it is important to increase military support for Kiev in view of possible peace talks to “ensure that when Zelensky decides to participate in the peace talks, he can do so from a position of strength, because” he added, “Kiev needs less ideas on how to organize the peace process and more military aid and in these two days we will focus on this.” However, the narrative that a defeat of Ukraine, i.e. the loss of territories that it did not completely control even before February 2022, as well as the definitive farewell to Crimea, would put Europe at risk, now creaks for everyone except for the countries which directly border Russia.
Two situations weigh on the top. The first: the new European Commission which will take office in a few days is less rigid on the pre-conditions necessary to encourage mediation. The second: Germany and France have serious internal problems, but while Paris is aiming to compete with the USA for future arms supplies (it has already started by training Ukrainian pilots and deciding to supply the Mirage 2000-5), in Berlin on 6 November it fell the Scholz government and we remain stuck on the supplies agreed months ago, so Germany can only give Zelensky light weapons (previously agreed), but no more new tanks. Certainly the Ukrainian president will make every effort to be invited to join NATO, but the conditions for this to happen are not yet there, and probably not even the political opportunities. Indeed, one can swear that given Trump’s imminent return to the White House, there will be a competition within the Alliance to specify that NATO is not at war together with Kiev, and that the weapons are supplied by all the countries with direct agreements when not within the European Community. And less than two months after the new move from Miralago to Washington, the promise made by Biden last week for new military aid, including anti-personnel mines, is of little value, a decision that the Tycoon could quickly cancel, given that he promised to end the war and also to save American citizens money. Then there is the objective situation of the Ukrainian population, with over 40,000 investigation files opened for desertion and 20,000 for failure to return to the front, with people exhausted by bombings and a nation to be rebuilt with Western promises, which will not be free. With a government to be renewed, the proposal of losing the territories perhaps combined with that of being able to join the European Union within 5 years would become plausible conditions. Furthermore, for months Kiev has been asking Berlin to force the young people destined for conscription to return to Ukraine, it is estimated that there are over 200,000 people, but with the fall of the government everything will stop again and who knows for how long. Trump’s arrival brings a clear purpose: increase the military spending of allied nations beyond 2%, a statement he made the day after his re-election and which he reiterated this afternoon. The equivalent of 2% of the national GDP in armaments is the minimum that was considered necessary in the first mandate and that the former Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni assured that Italy would also reach, something which has not yet happened and which still implies a lot time to be realized. Something that affects us closely, since in 2024 the countries that exceed this threshold are 23, in a ranking that sees Poland first (at 4.13%), all the other nations above except Italy (1, 68%) and Spain (1.3%).
Given the ongoing French government crises and the full-blown German one, Italy appears to have an ace up its sleeve: playing a fundamental role in relations in view of the peace talks, having always maintained the same position and having imposed limits on sending of weapons (even anti-aircraft missiles) which we apparently respected, unlike other nations which ended up sending medium-range missiles, airplanes and howitzers from defense materials such as helmets and bulletproof vests.
