Ramstein Summit Showed Lack of Unity, Unclear Goals & No Post-War Ukraine Plan, Military Experts Say
17:43 GMT 21.01.2023 (Updated: 17:06 GMT 20.04.2023)
© AFP 2023 / ANDRE PAIN
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The so-called Ukraine Contact Group, a grouping of arms providers led by Pentagon chief Lloyd Austin, held a meeting at Ramstein Air Base in Germany on January 20 to discuss the delivery of heavy vehicles to Ukraine.
"The recent meeting of the Ukraine Contact Group and arms dealers, American and European military officers, and the American State Department, Intelligence, and military industrial complex that occurred at Ramstein Air Force Base, Germany, is a sign of extreme desperation and inevitable admission of failure by the United States and its allies. It is a last ditch effort of the West as a whole to put on a brave face – or perhaps an insane one – and try and delude themselves into believing that the tides of war are somehow going to shift in Ukraine’s favor," Scott Bennett, a veteran of the 11th Psychological Operations Battalion of the US Army and former State Department counterterrorism analyst, told Sputnik.
The Ramstein gathering brought together more than 50 defense leaders. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg claimed that Russia was preparing for a long war and urged his Western peers to urgently provide more weapons to Kiev to ensure its victory.
"Like most wars, this is likely to end at the negotiating table," Stoltenberg said, “but what happens in negotiations is directly linked to what happens on the battlefield, so we need to deliver more weapons to Ukraine now."
The summit came at a time when the Russian military managed to liberate Soledar and a number of other settlements in the Donbass region and kicked off an offensive in the Zaporozhye region. Washington reportedly recommended that Kiev not cling to defending the town of Bakhmut (Artemovsk) in Donbass and instead focus on undertaking a major counteroffensive against advancing Russian forces.
Battle Tank Dilemma Exposes Cracks in Alliance
The NATO chief praised member states' willingness to provide air defenses, infantry fighting vehicles, and armored vehicles to the Kiev regime and stressed that they need to ramp up the production of weapons and ammunition to rapidly replenish stockpiles. However, Germany's reluctance to provide its Leopard 2 main battle tanks to Kiev popped up as an unpleasant surprise for Kiev and NATO leaders.
The ability to form a consensus in the West has been seriously weakened by domestic problems, economic recession, and very poor intelligence being provided to Western politicians about what has been and is happening in Ukraine and in Russia, according to retired Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski, a former analyst for the US Department of Defense.
"I think Germany will withstand the increasingly militant and ridiculous [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky, in part because many agree with attempting to resolve rather than escalate the conflict," she told Sputnik. "However, even if a variety of tanks, including German Leopards (which are not state of the art) are shipped in from various countries, the training, maintenance and logistical challenges of quickly coordinating and operating them with battlefield effectiveness is necessarily limited. As hard as it is to believe, even shipments of MBTs to Ukraine at this point constitute more virtue signaling, and of course justification for more defense spending at home."
For his part, Bennett noted that Berlin's cautious stance stems from the fact that Germany has suffered the most from the US-UK sanctions war against Russia. The US security expert suggested that "most likely Germany sees its own population rising up in rejection of the endless Ukraine war and suicide that is occurring within the Germany energy and other sectors of its economy."
"Germany’s businesses are shutting down for lack of heat and energy, and this will result in the collapse of the German government, which may then translate into other similar movements in France, Italy, and the United Kingdom," Bennett noted. "I think we’re on the verge of seeing Germany finally collapse in its support for the American-Ukrainian war against Russia, for Germany has suffered more than any other European nation, with tremendous loss in its energy sector because of the United States' destruction of the Nord Stream pipeline and the shutting down of Russian-German industry because of the lack of energy and the desperation and outrage that is increasing among German citizens, which is also replicating in other parts of Europe."
20 January 2023, 00:57 GMT
What's the West's Endgame in Ukraine?
One might wonder what Kiev and the West are trying to achieve in the ongoing conflict and what their endgame is, according to retired Lt. Col. Kwiatkowski.
"If one is cynical, we might suspect that the tanks, as with the Patriot air defense batteries, need Western operators in Ukraine or in Poland to be effective, and this means Germans, Brits, Frenchmen, and Americans on the ground fighting directly with Russia. Certainly a direct battlefield conflict of 20th century great powers reminds us of the political stupidity and uncertainty and arrogance that led to the First World War," she said.
"If one is less cynical, perhaps the US is simply extremely poorly led, both militarily, intelligence agency-wise, and politically, and is seeking an external war to divert domestic attention from larger economic problems and pump the domestic arms industry," the retired lieutenant colonel continued.
She referred to multiple reports saying that the US and European manufacturers are not "able and will not be able for several years to produce the ammo and equipment and systems at the rate the Ukrainian 'blood pump' is consuming those resources."
20 January 2023, 17:31 GMT
US media and think tanks revealed last year that while Washington was generously giving Ukraine dozens of different munitions and weapon systems, some US inventories have already reached the minimum levels needed for war plans and training. In particular, some sources cited concerns about US stockpiles of 155 mm artillery ammunition, HARM anti-radiation missiles, GMLRS surface-to-surface missiles, and the portable Javelin anti-tank missiles, to name but a few.
Earlier this month, Navy Secretary Carlos Del Toro was cited as saying that it may soon become challenging for the US to continue to arm itself and provide weapons to Kiev at one and the same time, if military production doesn't increase. What's worse, the "burn rate" of weapons in Ukraine exceeds replacement capacities, the US media notes.
Likewise, EU foreign policy chief Josep Borrell admitted in September 2022 that "the military stocks of most [EU] member states has been, I wouldn't say exhausted, but depleted in a high proportion, because we have been providing a lot of capacity to the Ukrainians."
"A case has not been made to the American people that exhausting our defensive capability, even if only for a few years, is a price worth paying for endless war in an already largely defeated Eastern European country," Kwiatkowski noted.
"What we also see is the West pouring military industrial complex weapons and tanks into Ukraine in pure futility that will accomplish nothing but the loss of American taxpayer funds for nothing but waste, fraud, and other abuses that Zelensky and his crew of criminals are trying to advance," echoed Bennett.
Post-War Ukraine & Ukrainians
Yet another problem overlooked by the participants of the Ramstein gathering is their failure to formulate a post-war Ukraine strategy, according to retired Lt. Col. Kwiatkowski.
"What’s missing is a plan for the post-war Ukraine, and without such a plan, Ukraine as a country may disappear entirely," she said. "Perhaps this was the expectation of the Washington neocons and their British and Polish allies. To create a large military training facility for NATO where a wide variety of otherwise unacceptable activities could be conducted at will. The array of biological warfare labs in Ukraine revealed early on in the conflict speaks to how the Western ideologues were already using Ukraine without the consent of the people living there."
According to the US military experts, the coming months may see Moscow take control over the parts of formerly eastern Ukraine which have pledged allegiance to Russia. However, it's completely unclear what Western powers will do in western Ukraine and how they will address the needs of Ukrainians.
"The hard truth is no one is actually working for Ukrainians, to resolve the security situation, and to restore peace," retired Lt. Col. Kwiatkowski said. "Russians stepped up in the east, and addressed a longstanding security situation that was designed and encouraged by US and German politicians since before 2014. But who stands up for western Ukraine? Certainly not Zelensky, a Western puppet. Not the progressive global left in Davos. Not Washington."
