The impasse over aid from the US and Europe has Ukraine’s allies contemplating something they’ve refused to imagine since the earliest days of Russia’s invasion: that Vladimir Putin may win.
With more than $110 billion in assistance mired in political disputes in Washington and Brussels, how long Kyiv will be able to hold back Russian forces and defend Ukraine’s cities, power plants and ports against missile attacks is increasingly in question.
Beyond the potentially catastrophic consequences for Ukraine, some European allies have begun to quietly consider the impact of a failure for North Atlantic Treaty Organization in the biggest conflict in Europe since World War II. They’re reassessing the risks an emboldened Russia would pose to alliance members in the east, according to people familiar with the internal conversations who asked for anonymity to discuss matters that aren’t public.
The ripple effects would be felt around the world, the people said, as US partners and allies questioned just how reliable Washington’s promises of defense would be. The impact of such a strategic setback would be far deeper than that caused by the spectacle of the botched US pullout from Afghanistan in 2021, they said. And that’s leaving aside the prospect that Donald Trump might win next year’s presidential election and realize his public pledges to pull back from major alliances, including NATO, and make a deal with Putin over Ukraine.
The growing sense of alarm has slipped into leaders’ public statements. They’ve taken on an increasingly shrill tone as backers of the aid exhort their opponents not to hold the vital assistance hostage to domestic political priorities, something which rarely happened in previous debates.
“If Ukraine doesn’t have support from the EU and the US, then Putin will win,” Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said last week at the European Union summit, where leaders failed to overcome growing opposition to next year’s €50 billion ($55 billion) aid package and only barely managed to approve the largely symbolic gesture of opening the way to membership for Ukraine sometime in the future.
