Yesterday’s Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting at Ramstein Air Base in Germany aimed to increase pressure on President-elect Donald Trump to keep the war against Russia going. “We’ve come such a long way that it would honestly be crazy to drop the ball now and not keep building on the defense coalitions we’ve created,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said, reported AP. “No matter what’s going on in the world, everyone wants to feel sure that their country will not just be erased off the map.”
AP noted that the $500 million package for Ukraine that the DoD announced yesterday leaves about $3.85 billion in funding to provide future arms shipments to Ukraine, which is another obvious pressure point on Trump.
And then there’s the “Putin will attack Europe if he’s not stopped in Ukraine” narrative. “If Putin swallows Ukraine, his appetite will only grow,” Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin claimed. “If autocrats conclude that democracies will lose their nerve, surrender their interests, and forget their principles, we will only see more land grabs. If tyrants learn that aggression pays, we will only invite even more aggression, chaos, and war.”
But there are also questions as to whether there will be a future meeting of the 50-member Ukraine Defense Contact Group, or whether it will assume a new shape under one of its major European contributors, such as Germany, the AP report continues. A plan to put the contact group under NATO control never received much support, and allies are still apprehensive about the idea, a senior U.S. defense official said ahead of Austin’s visit. “I don’t think anyone has found a useful and fully adequate substitute for U.S. leadership,” a separate defense official told reporters.
Bill LaPlante, Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, told a group of reporters traveling with Austin that it took four to six months for Kyiv’s supply of weapons to dwindle last year. He expects the supplies to last longer this time, given the Biden team’s rush to send as much aid as it could before leaving office, alongside support from European partners. “They’ve got a pretty good tranche of things,” LaPlante said of the Ukrainians. “It’s not going to be [gone] like that. It’s just you might lose momentum.”
But Zelensky isn’t just demanding more weapons. He also wants NATO troops. He reportedly said that Trump’s return to the White House would open “a new chapter” and reiterated a call for Western allies to send troops to help “force Russia to peace.”
