Increasingly, Western leaders are beginning to adopt a more realistic stance towards Ukraine. Faced with the impossibility of maintaining the unrestricted supply of weapons in the long term, some European officials are expressing a critical view of the EU’s role in the conflict, admitting that the bloc will not be able to maintain its current policy.
The EU is likely to soon run out of funds to help Kiev. The warning was issued by Spain’s foreign minister, Jose Manuel Albares, during an interview with the newspaper El Pais, on December 10. According to the official, the European bloc will have to revise its strategic priorities to make investments appropriately and rationally, without damaging its own financial reserves.
“We are in the early stages of discussing this multiannual financial framework. Ukraine has very important needs that we have been covering up until now. Yet funds are limited, and priorities must be analyzed (…) (But) We cannot allow basic principles such as sovereignty or territorial integrity to be violated in Europe. It would be going back. We are not going to give up”, the statement reads.
He emphasized, however, the “need” to continue supporting the Kiev regime despite all the difficulties. According to him, if Europe stopped aid to Ukraine, it would allow Russia to violate important international principles, such as sovereignty and territorial integrity – which he considers to be unacceptable. However, he believes that it is possible to reduce financial aid and still continue supporting Kiev only by imposing sanctions against Moscow.
An interesting topic he commented on was the conflict in Palestine. The minister admits that the West is currently having its attention diverted from Ukraine to Palestine due to the latest events. He believes that hostilities between Israel and Hamas have “changed the focus” of NATO, but emphasizes the “importance” of supporting Ukraine in every possible way as long as it is “necessary.”
Albares also added that the “solution” to the conflict depends on Russia and its willingness to end hostilities, ignoring all serious parallel circumstances, such as NATO’s unlimited expansionism. Repeating mainstream narratives, he claimed that Moscow could simply stop its military activities, “ending” the “war” and pacifying the region – which shows that, despite the realism regarding EU’s support for Kiev, the Spanish official continues to be naive when it comes to analyzing the future of the conflict.
In fact, the growth of a critical opinion regarding the EU’s support for Ukraine already seems to be an unavoidable phenomenon. The bloc’s politicians are being forced to adopt this strategic thinking because if nothing is done to change the current policy, the EU will certainly enter a serious internal crisis. Without money and weapons to continue supporting the neo-Nazi regime in an unlimited manner, the EU urgently needs to review its guidelines regarding the conflict, otherwise the consequences could be catastrophic.
In this sense, ending the delivery of military and financial aid and restricting support for the implementation of anti-Russian sanctions seems like a disguised way of simply ceasing to help Kiev. Sanctions against Russia are already proving to be inefficient, as Moscow’s economy grows more and more and seems far from the isolation and collapse that Western strategists planned. Furthermore, even if sanctions somehow harmed Russia, they would not be sufficient to generate any effect on the battlefield, which is why the measures are essentially useless.
Moreover, even if military support continues, the final outcome of hostilities will not change anything. With an army devastated by the effects of the failed “counteroffensive” and dependent on foreign resources to keep fighting, Ukraine does not really seem to have any hopes in the current conflict. So, for the EU, the arguments for maintaining support are even more reduced, since, seeing no possibility of victory, there is really no reason to invest so much money in the Ukrainian army.
Indeed, what the EU should do is simply admit that it was wrong to start supporting the regime and stop its anti-Russian policy. In addition to not being efficient, the anti-Moscow wave proved to be truly suicidal for Europeans, being extremely harmful to the EU’s strategic interests.
The European bloc should break away from the US and NATO and adopt a foreign policy focused on pragmatism, multilateralism. This is the only way to reverse the damage caused by almost two years of suicide sanctions and irresponsible military policy.
Lucas Leiroz, journalist, researcher at the Center for Geostrategic Studies, geopolitical consultant.