Kremlin officials on Monday warned that further supplies of Western weaponry to Ukraine would only lead to the escalation of the conflict.
Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov also said that even as NATO becomes more involved in the conflict, it won’t change the course of events.
“Ukraine demands more and more weapons,” Peskov said in a press briefing. “The West is encouraging these demands, and professes its readiness to provide such weapons. It’s a dead-end situation: it leads to significant escalation, it leads to NATO countries more and more becoming directly involved in the conflict – but it doesn’t have the potential to change the course of events and will not do so.”
Peskov’s comments come as NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg urged South Korea to reconsider its rule on not exporting weapons to countries in conflict.
“I urge the Republic of Korea to continue and to step up the specific issue of military support,” the NATO chief said during a speech to the Chey Institute for Advanced Studies in Seoul. “Several NATO allies who had as a policy never to export weapons to countries in conflict have changed that policy now.”
Stoltenberg noted how Germany, Norway, and NATO applicant Sweden have all changed their arms export policies to aid Ukraine.
“After the brutal invasion of Ukraine, these countries changed their policy because they realized that when you are facing a brutal invasion where a big power – Russia – invades another one in a blatant way as we have seen in Ukraine, if we believe in freedom, if we believe in democracy, if we don’t want autocracy and tyranny to win, then they need weapons,” Stoltenberg added.
Ukraine Calls for More Aid
Even as the United States and Germany announced last week that they would provide main battle tanks (MBTs) and other weapons to aid Ukraine, the government in Kyiv has continued to call for additional aid as it faces renewed Russian attacks on positions across the frontlines in the Eastern Donbas regions, notably near the cities of Bakhmut and Donetsk.
“Russia wants the war to drag on and exhaust our forces So we have to make time our weapon,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said in his nightly address. “We must speed up events, speed up the supply and opening of new necessary weaponry options for Ukraine.”
His comments came after a missile hit a residential building in Kharkiv, Ukraine’s second-largest city. At least one person was killed in the attack.
Piecemeal Flow Not Working
On Sunday, the Institute for the Study of War (ISW) warned that Western aid – which has been arriving in a piecemeal fashion – would help Ukraine’s defenses, but wouldn’t be enough for Kyiv to truly turn the tide, and it increasingly could result in a stalemate.
“Delays in the provision to Ukraine of Western long-range fires systems, advanced air defense systems, and tanks have limited Ukraine’s ability to take advantage of opportunities for larger counter-offensive operations presented by flaws and failures in Russian military operations,” a report from ISW noted.
“Western discussions of supposed ‘stalemate’ conditions and the difficulty or impossibility of Ukraine regaining significant portions of the territory Russia seized in 2022 insufficiently account for how Western delays in providing necessary military equipment have exacerbated those problems,” ISW’s authors added.
The slow authorization and arrival of aid have been among the factors limiting Ukraine’s ability to launch a continued large-scale counter-offensive. In other words, the aid is helping but the Kremlin could be correct that it won’t be enough to change the outcome.
Simply put, Ukraine needs more weapons and it needs those weapons as soon as possible.
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Author Experience and Expertise: A Senior Editor for 19FortyFive, Peter Suciu is a Michigan-based writer. He has contributed to more than four dozen magazines, newspapers, and websites with over 3,200 published pieces over a twenty-year career in journalism. He regularly writes about military hardware, firearms history, cybersecurity, politics, and international affairs. Peter is also a Contributing Writer for Forbes and Clearance Jobs. You can follow him on Twitter: @PeterSuciu.
