Ukraine came out worse, not better, from the three big events of the week — the G7 summit in the United Kingdom, the NATO summit in Brussels and the Joe Biden-Vladimir Putin summit in Geneva.
Sure, Ukraine won a declaration from the G7 that Russia is a party to the war in Ukraine and that the Kremlin should get its armed forces out of the Donbas and illegally occupied Crimea. But that is merely stating the obvious.
The fact that the G7 has no serious plan for getting Russia out of Ukraine, and has no interest in imposing tough enough sanctions to do so, is more evidence that the West is not willing to sacrifice for Ukraine, democratic values or international law. They will hide behind the fiction that the Normandy format and the Minsk agreements are working. They aren’t and they never will.
Then came the NATO summit in Brussels on June 14. The 30-nation political and military alliance merely copy/pasted its 2008 Bucharest declaration that someday Ukraine will join the alliance and someday will get a clear Membership Action Plan, or MAP. No dates or commitments, of course, were attached.
Then U.S. President Joseph R. Biden, ostensibly a friend of Ukraine, missed his chance to really help the nation when a journalist asked him for a yes or no answer on whether he supported a NATO MAP for Ukraine.
He showed what was on his mind: “The fact is they still have to clean up corruption…it will depend on the alliance and how they vote.”
Nobody is tougher on Ukraine’s corruption than the Kyiv Post. But, as London-based analyst Timothy Ash wisely pointed out and we agree, Ukraine has lost 14,000 lives and 7 percent of its territory in the Kremlin’s endless war. Ukraine spends 7 percent of its meager national budget on defending itself. It deserved a better defense from Biden and, yes, a MAP from NATO — which, in and of itself, is not a guarantee of membership.
Biden has committed other sins, in our view, including reports that he scuttled a more robust military aid program for Ukraine to placate Putin. He, of course, is letting the Russian-German Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline go ahead, with dire consequences for Ukraine’s security, a concession for which he apparently got nothing in return.
“We’re going to put Ukraine in a position to be able to maintain their physical security,” Biden promised at the NATO press conference. Let’s hope so, but Ukraine needs to see more.
And then there’s the Biden-Putin summit. The Russian dictator wasted no time in showing the world that he has no intention of contributing to a more stable and predictable world, ending his war crimes, his military occupation of three nations, his targeting of political opponents for assassination and imprisonment, his support of cyber-attacks from Russian territory, his assault on democratic institutions and elections.
He made that clear and more during his post-summit press conference.
It’s no wonder that President Volodymyr Zelensky, who will get his face time with Biden in late July, was feeling aggrieved in an interview with three international news agencies on June 14.
“I feel that everyone is afraid of solving the most difficult issues,” Zelensky said. “We need to get security guarantees, I think that’s fair. And the most important thing in security guarantees is the return of our territories.”
