Editor’s Note: This feature separates Ukraine’s friends from its enemies. The Order of Yaroslav the Wise has been given since 1995 for distinguished service to the nation. It is named after the Kyivan Rus leader from 1019-1054, when the medieval empire reached its zenith. The Order of Lenin was the highest decoration bestowed by the Soviet Union, whose demise Russian President Vladimir Putin mourns. It is named after Vladimir Lenin, whose corpse still rots on the Kremlin’s Red Square, 100 years after the October Revolution he led.
Ukraine’s Friend of the Week: Jens Stoltenberg
Pity Jens Stoltenberg: the current secretary general of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization NATO came to the job in October 2014, not long after the Kremlin had launched a brazen challenge to the global security order by invading and occupying the Ukrainian territory of Crimea. The Kremlin had also launched a war in Europe in the Donbas, the worst fighting in which (at Donetsk airport and the key strategic town of Debaltsevo) was yet to come.
Moreover, with the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president, NATO as an organization has come under attack as never before. Trump was initially reluctant even to endorse Article 5 of the NATO treaty – on collective defense – which is the keystone of the entire alliance. (Note that Article 5 has only ever been invoked once – by the United States in 2001.) Trump has since complained that NATO allies aren’t pulling their weight by spending 2 percent of GDP on defense, which is somewhat unfair, but true, and complained that NATO was “as bad as NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement),” which is absurd, and false.
Stoltenberg, Ukraine’s Friend of the Week and a winner of the Order of Yaroslav the Wise, has indeed had a hard job as secretary general – perhaps the hardest since any holder since 1991. And there are still lots of problems to solve.
The worst fears of NATO officials about Trump’s behavior at the July 11-12 NATO Summit in Brussels were realized on the very first morning, when the U.S. president startled his hosts and, it seemed, his own officials, by ranting at a breakfast that Germany was a “captive” of Russia because of its reliance on imports of Russian gas.
Later, Trump called a special session of the summit to discuss defense spending by NATO countries. According to some reports, Trump warned other NATO leaders of the “gravest consequences” if the allies did not increase their spending on defense. Some interpreted this as a threat that Trump would try to take the United States out of the alliance, which left some of the leaders “in panic,” according to one report.
By the end of the summit Stoltenberg looked haggard and tired.
Yet for all Trump’s complaints, on defense spending at least, Stoltenberg’s leadership has produced some results.
When he took over as NATO chief, only four of the 29 NATO member states met the 2 percent of GDP defense spending guideline: the United States, the United Kingdom, Greece and Estonia. In 2018, that should rise to eight in 2018, and to at least 15 in 2024, according to Stoltenberg.
But the United States still accounts for around 51 percent of overall NATO spending, which hands the ignorant and populist Trump a hammer with which to beat the alliance.
Average defense spending by European countries had fallen from 3 percent of GDP in 1989 (when communism started to collapse in Eastern Europe) to just 1.95 percent in 2017 (in the United States it fell from 6 percent to 3.54 percent over the same time). This was the so-called “peace dividend” that was supposed to have been earned by the alliance’s victory in the Cold War.
NATO’s current problems stem largely from the fact that that “victory” was an illusion. With the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO’s main foe, the alliance struggled to redefine itself – first as a military policeman during the collapse of Yugoslavia and the Balkan wars, and then as an anti-terrorism force following the 9-11 attacks on the United States.
But NATO’s chief enemy and reason to be, Russia, was not dead but sleeping. Following the rebuilding of its military under Russian dictator Vladimir Putin it is back to threaten European security again, attacking its neighbors and stealing their territory.
The Kremlin has also opened up a new front in its hostilities against the West – the internet and social media, which it uses to demoralize and disinform the Western publics, undermining their faith in their media and democratic institutions. In combination with that, it has used money from its oil and gas wealth to corrupt Western politicians and fund extremist, populist parties on the right and left.
These are areas of modern inter-state hostilities that a conventional military alliance like NATO is not yet equipped to address. The Kremlin was able to manufacture a fake “civil war” on Ukrainian territory with a special forces group of only around 50 men (admittedly the Ukrainian state was weak and in chaos at the time, having just lost Crimea and in the throes of post-revolutionary political turmoil.)
Still, the Baltic states, which the Kremlin has never accepted as being independent and which have large Russian-speaking minorities, are at particular danger of similar interventions, and cannot be defended by conventional military means.
NATO needs to do much more in this area – too often NATO simply reacts to information attacks by the Kremlin, such as false news stories, ludicrous conspiracy theories and rumors. But defending the alliance in the information sphere requires more than just responding when attacked.
A Russian language information campaign, based on facts and truth to counter the Kremlin’s lies and distortions, would be a good start, and here Ukraine could be of great help to the alliance. Ukraine not only has lots of native Russian speakers, it also has years of experience in countering Kremlin information attacks.
Stoltenberg has been a good and supportive friend to Ukraine since the Kremlin launched its aggression against the country. He should now let Ukraine help the alliance in return by bolstering its information defenses.
Ukraine’s Foe of the Week: Maria Zakharova
While European NATO states might grumble about the brash way U.S. President Donald Trump calls for them to up spending on defense (he sent letters to them ahead of NATO summit in Brussels on July 11-12; the one to Germany was reported to have been particularly blunt) at least it makes the Kremlin unhappy.
Russian Foreign Ministry Spokeswoman Maria Zakharova said on July 5, referring to the letter Trump sent to UK Defense Minister Gavin Williamson, that Moscow was worried over the trend for an increase in defense spending by NATO countries.
“If we are talking about the trend, then in the face of it, it cannot but worry us,” Zakharova said, according to state news agency RIA Novosti.
But this trend has actually been evident since 2014, a full two years before Trump was elected. It coincides with the start of open Russian aggression against Ukraine – its invasion and occupation of the Ukrainian territory of Crimea and the launch of its covert military intervention in the Donbas.
In truth, the Kremlin is more responsible than the White House for the rise in military spending by NATO countries (at least 15 out of 29 are expected to hit or exceed the defense spending guideline of 2 percent of GDP by 2024, according to NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.) If the Kremlin had not sent its soldiers into Ukraine, it is unlikely we would now be seeing as much of an increase in NATO spending at all.
Tellingly, the states that have now joined the United States, the United Kingdom, Greece and Estonia in meeting their spending commitments are some of those most at risk from the Kremlin’s revanchism: Latvia, Lithuania, Poland and Romania.
Although NATO military spending dwarfs that of Russia – the defense budget of France alone in 2017 ($56.3 billion) was greater than that of Russia ($55.3 billion) – the alliance would struggle to defend the Baltic states. The Rand Corporation, a U.S. think tank, in a report issued in October 2016, said NATO would have to increase its forces in the Baltics to “about seven brigades, including three heavy armored brigades — adequately supported by airpower, land-based fires, and other enablers on the ground and ready to fight at the onset of hostilities… to prevent the rapid overrun of the Baltic states (by Russia).”
Supporting such a force would cost NATO a total of about $2.7 billion every year, Rand reckons. That’s the bare minimum required for a deterring force in the Baltics. If NATO was actually intending to threaten Russia, it would require a vastly bigger military force and commensurately greater spending, and it’s obvious to anyone that that’s not happening.
So when Zakharova, Ukraine’s Foe of the Week and winner of the Order of Lenin, complains about the increase in NATO’s military budget, she’s not concerned that the alliance might present a threat to Russia. She’s concerned that these spending increases threaten the Kremlin’s ability to bully and intimidate its former imperial possessions.
Zakharova is a master of articulating the Kremlin’s typical propaganda tactic of turning the truth on its head: A popular revolution in Ukraine is mischaracterized as a “fascist coup.” Russia’s invasion and occupation of Ukraine’s Crimea is rebranded as “an expression of the will of the people,” protected by the United Nation’s charter. Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad’s murderous chemical weapons attacks on his own people become “false flag” operations by “terrorists.”
The only good thing about the liar Zakharov’s Pavlovian responses, carefully conditioned by Kremlin training, is that more often than not it is still possible to derive some truth from them: Take what she says, make it its opposite, and something of the real state of affairs emerges.
